Chapter 68: The Grey Ford

The soldiers told him the first part without even knowing it.

They didn’t talk about the Imperial captain because they cared about her. They talked about her simply because there was nothing else to talk about, since the Summit hadn’t started yet and the lords hadn’t arrived. Three thousand men sat in a valley with their boots off and their swords clean, and every rumor that came over the wall went around the cook fires twice before supper.

"She’s the Emperor’s." A cavalryman held out his cup on the second morning while Aren filled it silently. "Everyone on their side knows it. The old man had a soldier for a mistress twenty years ago. Gave the girl her mother’s name so the court wouldn’t choke on it."

"Then why’s she out here on a wall?"

"Because they don’t want her in there." The cavalryman jerked his chin north, toward the Empire. "They’ve got a law, the Imperials. Some old blood thing. You’re the Emperor’s child, you’ve got to be tempered by twenty or you’re out. Name, house, the lot." He drank. "I heard she’s close to the line. Twenty, I mean. Soon."

"How soon?"

"How should I know? Soon." He held out the cup again. "Fill it, boy, don’t stand there with your mouth open."

Aren filled it.

He carried water patiently up and down the slope all day, and by sunset he had the rest from a dozen different mouths, none of which knew what the others had said. The Crown Prince himself was coming to sign for the Empire. He was the captain’s half-brother, a cold man, everyone agreed, but not a cruel one, and he kept the law the way other men kept a horse, carefully and every day. And there had been bells on the Imperial side two nights ago, and the captain hadn’t been seen at the Pools since.

Eleven days, she had said in the cistern. Now it was ten. On the day of the treaty, she would be twenty.

He put it together on an upturned barrel behind the cook tent, the way he used to put together a set of accounts someone had tried to hide. It wasn’t hard, only ugly.

He hadn’t just taken four months from her. He had taken everything after that too.

’Her name. Her house. Her whole life! For nine percent of Blood Tempering. That’s the worst trade I’ve ever made, and I once bought shares in a shipping company the week its ships sank.’

Varro knocked him down twenty-three times that night.

The old man had moved on from hips to feet. He made Aren stand in the dirt behind the woodpile with his feet a shoulder apart, then walked around him in a slow circle with his stick and pushed. He pushed at the chest, the shoulder, the small of the back, never hard, just enough.

Aren fell over every single time.

"You stand like a man waiting for a carriage. Weight on your heels. Ready to step back. Every single time." He pushed again, and Aren went down again. "A man who’s ready to step back will always step back. Get up."

He got up.

"You’ve been running from things your whole life, haven’t you?" The stick tapped his shoulder. "It’s in your legs. You can’t hide it from me. Get your weight forward. Not much. A finger’s width. Just enough that going back costs you something."

He tried. The stick touched his chest, and he rocked, and stayed up.

Varro grunted approvingly. It was the closest thing to praise Aren had heard from him.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct. Mastery: 65% → 66%.]

Afterward they sat on the woodpile in the dark while the old man ate cold bread from his apron pocket and didn’t offer any. The cook fires were burning down across the valley, and far off, on the iron half of the wall, lanterns moved.

"Sergeant. The Grey Ford."

Varro stopped chewing abruptly.

"You said you fought her brother there."

"I said it to make you stop asking questions." Varro swallowed. "Didn’t work, did it?"

"What happened?"

The old man was silent long enough that Aren thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he set the bread down on his knee.

"We held the ford for two days. Four hundred of us, against the Emperor’s eldest boy and a thousand men. Second day, he came across himself. Didn’t send anyone. Came across in the water with his lance and his guard behind him and went through our line like it was made of reeds." He looked at the dark. "I was the one in front of him when he reached the bank."

"You beat him."

"I hit him first. That’s not the same." Varro touched his empty sleeve. "I put my sword into his chest, through the armor, right where a man’s heart is. Clean. I’ve never struck a better blow in my life." He paused. "And he didn’t fall."

Aren waited.

"There was something under his armor, on a chain. I felt my blade go into it instead of him. Iron. Heavy, like a heart. It cracked right through, and the blow went into it and not into him, and he looked at me over the top of my own sword as if I had only knocked politely on a door." The old man’s voice was very even. "Then he took my arm off at the shoulder."

Neither of them spoke for a while.

"My men killed him a few minutes later. Three of them, from behind, while he was looking at me. Not much honor in it. But that thing on his chain had already taken one blow for him. It had nothing left for a second."

"What was it?"

"The Imperials call it a Guard. The Emperor’s children all wear one. Forged in the father’s blood, they say." He shrugged. "I don’t know about that. I know it stopped the best blow I ever struck."

"What happened to it?"

"I buried it." Varro picked up his bread again calmly. "Him and it together. After the battle both sides were too busy counting their dead to go looking for anyone. I couldn’t hold a shovel, so I made two boys from my company dig. Under the lone pine on the far bank. A man should be buried with what he died wearing." He chewed slowly. "Never told anyone. Never seemed like anyone’s business. He was a good fighter. Better than me. That should be enough to be left alone."

Aren sat very still on the woodpile.

An iron heart on a chain that took one blow for the one who wore it. Under a lone pine at the Grey Ford, in a valley both armies watched and neither was allowed to enter until the treaty was signed. And a captain with raw hands in a cistern, counting down the days.

"Why are you asking me about this, boy?"

"I heard the soldiers talk about the ford."

"No you didn’t." The pale eyes turned toward him in the dark. "But I already told you. I’ve stopped needing to know things." He stood, brushed the crumbs off his apron, and looked down at Aren. "Whatever you’re thinking about doing, don’t get caught doing it. I’ve only just started on your feet."

He walked off slowly toward his tent.

Aren went back up to the ridge after midnight. Roderick was awake, sitting at the edge of the hollow under his black cloak, watching the valley.

"There’s a pine tree on the far bank of a river, in the valley east of here. Between the two camps."

Roderick didn’t even turn his head. "The Grey Ford. I’ve been looking at it for two days. Nobody goes near it. They’ve got patrols on both sides watching each other watch it. Why?"

"Because there’s a dead prince under it, wearing something that might keep his sister alive."

Roderick turned and looked at him properly then.

"You know, most people who feel guilty just say sorry."

"I tried that once. Mira wasn’t impressed."

The trumpets started at dawn.

Aren was halfway up the slope with his first two buckets of the day when he heard them, a long bright call from the road that came up the valley from Aldermere. Every head in the camp turned instantly. Men came out of their tents half dressed, and on the walls above the central gate the soldiers straightened.

The lords had begun to arrive.

They came up the road in a long column, banner after banner. The King’s own grey and gold at the front, then the great houses, each with its own colors and riders and wagons of servants and armor and silk. Aren stood at the side of the road with the other water boys, his pole on his shoulders and his eyes down, and watched them pass.

He knew the banner long before it reached him. He would have known it in the dark.

A silver crescent on a black field.

House Ashgrave rode at the center of the column, fifty riders in black and silver, and in the middle of them, on a tall grey horse, sat a man with silver hair and a hard, closed face that Aren had last seen in the gallery of the Great Hall. The Duke was here.

Beside him, on a smaller horse, in a dark grey riding cloak with the hood thrown back, rode his daughter.

She didn’t look at the crowd. She never really did. She rode with her back straight and her eyes ahead, and her silver braid lay over her shoulder exactly as it had lain in the white sand of the arena on the night of the Festival, when he had last seen her, from below, getting smaller as he fell into the dark.

At her horse’s heels, silently, trotted a hound made of moonlight.

[Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary). Hostility: 64%.]

’Sixty-four. And she still has no idea I’m alive. Keep your head down. Keep your head down!’

Aren kept his eyes firmly on the road.

He didn’t breathe until the crescent banner had gone past.