Only the Valiant. Морган Райс

was trying to convince himself. Royce shook his head and kept going through the forest, trying to orient himself. He felt as though he wouldn’t be able to do anything until he got home. He would get there, and then, once he was safe again, he would be able to make a plan about what to do next. He would be able to decide whether to run, or try to find Mark, or somehow magic up an army with which to take on the duke’s men.

      “And maybe I’ll pull it out of thin air,” Royce said, and kept moving. He moved with the speed of a hunted animal now, keeping low, ducking under foliage and picking his way over the leaf litter without slowing down.

      He knew the forest. He knew the routes through it as well as anyone, because he’d spent more than enough time here with his brothers. They’d chased one another through it, and hunted small creatures. Now he was the one being chased, and hunted, and trying to find a way clear of it all. He was fairly sure that there was a hunting track not far from where he stood, that would lead down to a small brook, past a charcoal burner’s hut, and then down toward the village.

      Royce headed for it, picking his way through the forest, and was dragged from his thoughts by a sound in the distance. It was soft, but it was there: the sound of feet moving lightly over broken ground. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t spent so much time with his brothers in these forests, or if he hadn’t learned on the Red Isle that there could be threats anywhere.

      “Do I wait, or do I hide?” he asked himself. It would be easy to step out onto the track, because he could only hear a single person coming, and they didn’t even sound like a soldier. Soldiers’ steps had the crisp click of boots, the jangle of armor, and the scrape of spear hafts against the ground. These steps were different. Probably, it was just a crofter or a woodsman.

      Even so, Royce hung back, crouching in the shadow of a tree, in a spot where its roots arched up to form a kind of natural enclosure that probably played host to animals when the light faded. Some of the branches nearby were low enough that Royce could pull them down in front of him to block sight there, but still be able to look out over the path. He crouched in place, staying still, his hand never straying far from his sword.

      When Royce saw the single figure approaching along the track, he almost stepped out. The man there appeared to be unarmed and unarmored, wearing only loose-fitting gray silk clothing that seemed dark and shapeless. His feet were encased in slippers of equally gray hide, with wraps reaching up over his ankles. Something stopped him though, and as the man got closer, Royce could see that his skin was just as gray, marked by tattoos in purple and red that formed swirls and symbols, as though someone had used him as the only available surface to write some mad text on.

      Royce wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but there was something about this man that felt dangerous in a way he couldn’t place. Suddenly he was grateful that he’d stayed where he was. He had the feeling that if he were standing on the track right then, conflict wouldn’t be far behind.

      He felt his hand tighten on his sword hilt, the urge to leap out there unbidden in his mind. Royce forced his hand to relax, remembering the field of deadfalls and tripwires on the Red Isle. The boys who had rushed in without thinking there had died before Royce could even begin to lead them across safely. This had the same feel. He wasn’t afraid, exactly, but at the same time he could feel that this man was anything other than harmless.

      For now, the sensible thing to do seemed to be to stay still; to not even breathe.

      Even so, the man on the track stopped, cocking his head to one side as if listening to something. Royce saw the stranger crouch, frowning as he took a selection of objects from a pocket and cast them on the ground.

      “You are fortunate,” the stranger said, without looking up. “I only kill those the fates send me to kill, and the runes say that we are not to fight yet, stranger.”

      Royce didn’t answer as one by one, the stranger picked up his stones.

      “There is a boy who needs to die because the fates decree it,” the man said. “But you should still know my name and know that eventually, fate comes for us all. I am Dust, an angarthim of the dead places. You should leave. The runes say that much death will follow in your wake. Oh, and do not head in the direction of the village that way,” he added, as if it were an afterthought. “A large body of soldiers was heading for it when I left.”

      He stood and padded off, leaving Royce crouched there, breathing harder than he would have thought, given that all he had done was hide. There was something about that stranger’s presence that had seemed to almost crawl over his skin, something wrong about him in ways that Royce couldn’t begin to articulate.

      If there had been more time, Royce might have kept crouching there, suspecting more danger from the man. Instead, the only things that mattered were his words. If soldiers were heading for the village, that could only mean one thing…

      He started running again, faster than ever. On the right, he saw a charcoal burner’s hut, smoke behind it suggesting that the owner was at work. A horse that looked as though it was more accustomed to drawing a cart than to being ridden stood in front of it, hitched to a post. The house seemed quiet, and on another day maybe Royce might have wondered about that, or shouted for the owner to try to persuade them to let him borrow the horse.

      As it was, he merely cut it free from the hitching post, leaping onto its back and heeling it forward. Almost miraculously, the creature seemed to know what was expected of it, galloping forward while Royce clung to its back, hoping that he would be in time.

***

      It was sunset when Royce emerged from the forest, the red of the sky closing in on the world like a bloody hand. For a moment, the glare of the setting sun was enough that Royce couldn’t see past the redness to the ground below, as the whole world appeared to be on fire.

      Then he saw, and he realized that the flame red was no trick of the sunset. His village was on fire.

      Parts of it burned brightly, thatched roofs turned into bonfires by the flames, so that the whole skyline seemed filled with it. More of it was blackened and smoking, soot-colored timbers standing like the skeletons of the lost buildings. One toppled over even as Royce watched, creaking and then falling, tumbling to the ground with a crash.

      “No,” he murmured, dismounting and leading his stolen horse forward. “No, I can’t be too late.”

      He was though. The fires that burned were old ones, holding a grip now only on the largest buildings, where there was the most to burn. The rest of his village was a thing of charcoal and acrid smoke, so long from the point where the fire caught that Royce could never have hoped to get there. The man he’d passed on the road had said that soldiers were arriving as he left, but Royce had reckoned without the distance, and the time it would take to cover it.

      Finally, he couldn’t avoid it any longer, and looked down to where the bodies lay. There were so many of them: men and women, young and old, all killed indiscriminately, and clearly no mercy shown. Some of the bodies lay among the ruins, as blackened as the wood around them; others lay in the streets, with gaping wounds that told the story of how they had died. Royce saw some cut down from the front where they had tried to fight, some hacked down from behind when they had tried to run. He saw a cluster of the younger women, killed off to one side. Had they thought that this was just another raid for the nobles to take what they wanted from them all, right up to the moment when someone had cut their throats?

      Pain flowed through Royce, and anger, and a hundred other things, all balled up into a knot that felt as though it might tear his heart in two. He staggered through the village, looking at death after death, barely able to believe that even the duke’s men would do something like this.

      They had, though, and there was no undoing it.

      “Mother!” Royce called out. “Father!”

      He dared to hope, in spite of the horrors around him. Some of the village’s inhabitants must have made it to safety. Marauding soldiers were sloppy, and people could escape, couldn’t they?

      Royce saw another knot of bodies on the ground, and this one looked different, because there were no sword wounds on the bodies. Instead, they looked as though they had simply… died,