Only the Valiant. Морган Райс

did you three ever think that you could fight against the duke?” the driver demanded. “Duke Altfor has said that you’ll pay for what your brother did, and you will. Wait, and contemplate that, and suffer. We’ll be back.”

      Without another word, he turned the cart and started to drive away, leaving Raymond and his brothers dangling there.

      “If I can just…” Garet said, obviously trying to reach the lock on his gibbet.

      “You don’t know how to open a lock,” Lofen said.

      “I can try, can’t I?” Garet shot back. “We have to try something. We have to—”

      “There’s nothing to try,” Lofen said. “Maybe we can kill the guards when they come back, but we can’t get through those locks.”

      Raymond shook his head. “Enough,” he said. “This isn’t the time for us to argue. There’s nowhere for us to go, and nothing for us to do, so the least we can do is not fight with each other.”

      He knew what a place like this meant, and that there were no real chances of escape.

      “Soon,” he said, “there will be animals coming, or worse. Maybe I won’t be able to talk after. Maybe I’ll… maybe we’ll all be dead.”

      “No,” Garet said, shaking his head. “No, no, no.”

      “Yes,” Raymond said. “We can’t control that, but we can face our deaths bravely. We can show them how well honest people die. We can refuse to give them the fear they want.”

      He saw Garet pale, and then nod.

      “Okay,” his brother said. “Okay, I can do that.”

      “I know you can,” Raymond said. “You can do anything, both of you. I want to say…” How could he say all of it? “I love you both, and I’m so grateful that I got to be your brother. If I have to die, I’m glad that I at least get to do it with the best people I know in the world.”

      “If,” Lofen said. “It’s not done yet.”

      “If,” Raymond agreed, “but in case it happens, I wanted you to know.”

      “Yes,” Lofen said. “I feel the same.”

      “Me too,” Garet said.

      Raymond sat there in his cage, trying to look brave for his brothers, and for anyone watching, because he was sure that there must be something or someone watching from the ruins of the tower. All the time, he tried to not to think of the truth:

      There was no “if” to this. Already, Raymond could see the first flickers of carrion birds gathering in the trees. They were going to die. It was just a question of how quickly, and how horribly.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Royce knelt among the ashes of his parents’ house, charred fragments of wood falling from the frame in a way that matched the tears scouring their way down his cheeks. They scythed tracks through the soot and dirt that now covered his face, leaving him streaked and strange looking, but Royce didn’t care.

      All that mattered right then was that his parents were dead.

      Grief filled Royce as he looked down on his parents’ bodies, set out on the floor in surprisingly quiet repose, in spite of the effects of the flames. He felt as though he wanted to tear at the world the way his fingers sought out the increasingly ashen tangles of his hair. He wanted to find a way to make this right, but there was no way to make this right, and so Royce screamed out his anger and his grief to the heavens.

      He’d seen the man who had done this to them. Royce had seen him out on the road, returning from this as calmly as if nothing had happened. The man had even warned him, unknowing, about the soldiers about to come down on the village. What kind of murderer did that? What kind of murderer killed and then set out his victims as if they were getting them ready for an honored grave?

      This wasn’t a grave though, so Royce went around to the back of the farm, finding an adze and a shovel, working at the dirt there, not wanting to leave his parents’ flesh for the first scavengers that came by. Some of the ground was hard packed and charred, so that his muscles ached with the work, but right then, Royce felt as though he deserved that ache, and that pain. Old Lori had been right… all of this was because of him.

      He dug the grave as deep as he could and then lifted his parents’ charred bodies into it. He stood on the edge, trying to think of words to say, but he couldn’t think of anything that made sense to send them up to the heavens with. He wasn’t a priest to know the ways of the gods. He wasn’t some traveling tale spinner, with all the right words for everything from a wild feast to a death.

      “I love you both so much,” he said instead. “I… I wish I could say more, but anything I could say would come down to that.”

      He buried them as carefully as he could, each shovelful of dirt feeling like a hammer blow when it landed. Above him, Royce could hear the shriek of a hawk, and he shooed it away, not caring if there were crows and jackdaws spread across the rest of the village. These were his parents.

      Even as he thought it, Royce knew that it wasn’t enough to bury just them. The duke’s men had been there because of him; he couldn’t just leave everyone they had killed for scavengers. He also knew that there was no chance of him digging a pit deep enough for all of the bodies alone.

      The best he could hope to do was to build a pyre to finish what the burning buildings had started, so Royce began to work his way through the village, collecting wood, pulling it from winter stores, dragging it from the remains of buildings. The beams were the heaviest parts, but his strength was enough to drag them at least, letting him build them into great cross members for the pyre he was building.

      By the time Royce was done, it was fully dark, but there was no way he wanted to sleep in a village of the dead like this. Instead, he searched until he found a lantern outside one of the buildings, only a little twisted by the heat of the fire that had wracked it. He lit it and, by that lantern light, he started to gather up the dead.

      He collected them all, even though it broke his heart to do it. Young and old, man and woman, he collected them. He dragged the heaviest and carried the lightest, setting them in their places among the pyre and hoping that somehow it would mean they would get to be together in whatever came after this world.

      He was almost ready to set his lantern to it when he remembered Old Lori; he hadn’t collected her yet in his grim harvest, even though he’d been past the wall she had been leaning against a dozen times or more. Perhaps she hadn’t been quite dead when he’d left her after all. Perhaps she had crawled further back to die on her own terms, or perhaps Royce had just missed her. It seemed wrong to leave her apart from the others, so Royce went in search of her fallen form, returning to the spot where she had lain and searching the ground around by lamplight.

      “Are you looking for someone?” a voice asked, and Royce spun, his hand going to his sword in the second before he recognized that voice.

      It was Lori’s, and not. There was something less cracked and papery about this voice, less ancient and wearied by time. When she stepped into the circle of his lamplight, Royce saw that was true of the rest of her too. Before, there had been an ancient, timeworn old woman. Now, the woman in front of him seemed almost young again, her hair lustrous, her eyes piercing, and her skin smooth.

      “What are you?” Royce asked, his hand straying to his sword again.

      “I am what I always was,” Lori said. “Someone who watches, and someone who learns.” Royce saw her look down at herself. “I told you not to touch me, boy, to just leave me be to die in peace. Couldn’t you just listen? Why do all the men of your line never listen?”

      “You think I did this?” Royce asked. Did this woman—he still had trouble thinking of her as Lori—think that he was some kind of sorcerer?

      “No, stupid boy,” Lori said. “I did this, with a body that won’t let me die. Your touch, one of the Blood, was just enough to catalyze it. I should have known that something like this