Chapter 1437: A chance for peace(1)

The midday sun was a warm hand that pressed between his shoulder blades as Vilon squared his stance and raised the heavy iron hoe. He exhaled through his teeth and let the iron bite into the loam, letting gravity and hard muscle do the work.

Like a rough finger hooked into wet sand, the dark earth tore open and curled beneath his boots. Reaching into the hemp sack cinched at his hips, he pinched three pale seeds and dropped them into the furrows of the dirt.

He leaned on the ash handle, wiping the sting of sweat from his brow, and cast a eye over the morning’s toil.

Slow, he judged himself with a grunt.

Three hours under a climbing sun, and he had barely turned half the plot.

He always had some lingering curiosity about village’s life. A life spent on the road hardly accomodated thought about a sedantary lyfestile.

Being born, living and loving on the same plot of land. Living well if the season was bountiful and starving if it was not, without the usual option of simply packing up and go away if things were not to their liking.

Still now,a knight with his squire, he had made an idea of how it was. Plowing the field may have hardly been a knight’s toil, and yet there was still beauty to be found in something that did not require the sharp edge of steel or for blood to be shed.

The village shared an old swaybacked gelding, but pushing the beast was a fool’s errand. A horse that plowed deeper than a man was a blessing; a horse that turned two plots in an afternoon was a miracle; but a dead gelding that plowed nothing was a tragedy no peasant could afford to feed to the crows.

Leaving the hoe sticking upright in the mud, he trudged to the edge of the patch and collapsed onto a sun-warmed boulder.

When Owen had asked him on the road if he ever thought they’d return to the farm, Vilon had merely shrugged and muttered that only the Five Gods could peer through the fog of tomorrow.

And by the Weaver, not a soul alive could have predicted he’d be back in this farm so soon.

Just as no sensible tavern singer would ever believe that an unwashed hedge knight and his battered squire had played a pivotal part in the great hunt for the Vulture Lord.

Most of the gashes and punctures had scabbed over into pale, jagged lines, but whenever the wind turned damp, his left flank gave a sharp, thrumming twinge that reminded him he was still made of meat and bone.

He could scarcely fathom the madness of the past moons,and even less that he had dragged his breath out of it alive. With any luck, the great tourney in Yarzat would draw plenty of highborn leeches and herbalists who could look over his ribs before he had to hoist a lance again.

He certainly had the silver to pay for it now.

A crisp mountain breeze rolled down from the crags, cooling the sweat plastered against his temple.

Vilon tilted his head back, staring into the endless blue, his mind drifting back to that slurring drunkard in the taproom. It hadn’t been the first time madness had knocked on his door, and he doubted it would be the last.

His life had become a parade of bizarre omens: first that blind crone who rattled and prattled about kings, and then that sodden drunk sot who had shoved him toward the damn creek

That cursed creek. That was where the whole bloody nightmare had sprung to life.Twice he had brushed with death, and twice he was rescued right at the edge before the gods would have judged his soul.

More than once he wondered about that. Just why?

Back at the creek when he rescued Martha, he thought it a test that the gods had brought him.

It was the duty of a knight, sworn to protect those who are weaker than him or die by the attempt. Yet he did not die. He did not know if the thought warmed him or not.

Death would have atoned him for his sins, if sacrificing his life in service of what was good would not have been enough for redemption, than could it even have been possible?

I was ready to die.I was ready to give my life. To give up on my dreams.

He was surprised, now that he could look back on the safety of his sorroundings, how doubtless he had been in his choice.

The thought etched him with pride,but bigger than that worry. What else was expected of him?

He had not flinched when the cold water ran red around his knees, nor when the brigand’s iron scraped against his ribs. In that desperate, gasping heartbeat beneath the willow branches, he had let go of the tourney glory, the silverii, and the whispered songs, he had embraced death like a long waited friend. He had laid his neck upon the block for a whore he barely knew, ready to let the Five weigh his battered soul against the mud.

And yet the Bringer of Mercy had turned the blade aside.And yet the Warrior gave him strength to life his blade , and yet the Father judged him unworthy yet of his judgement.

The gods had pulled him back from the precipice by his greasy collar, dumping him right back into the dirt with an aching flank and an empty coin purse. Why spare a broken hedge knight whose only true skill was taking a beating and swinging dull iron?

Because the debt isn’t paid, the thought settled in his gut.Of course it wasn’t. Atonement isn’t bought in a single, glorious splash of blood.

They wanted him breathing. They wanted him walking the hard miles, sweating over common soil, and hauling his battered mail all the way to the capital.To do good service, to be a good knight.

They are very few of them if there are any at all.That blind crone had said. And looking back she was right. There were very few willing to do what was right, simply for the sake of it.

He looked down at his calloused palms, flecked with black earth and scarred by sword hilts. Dying well was easy,any fool with three drinks in his belly could throw himself onto a spear for a pretty principle.

Still, for the first time in his wandering, battered life, the fog had lifted. He wasn’t merely a stray dog drifting wherever the mud was dry; he had a path, an aching flank, and an iron road leading straight into the heart of Yarzat.That was where he was set, he knew that, deep in the marrow of his bone, that was where he had to go.

Something was lying in wait for him in Yarzat. He could feel it in the thrum of his healing marrow: something that would demand his dull broadsword, his dented plate, and every ounce of grit in New Chestnut’s thick legs.

And yet, as he looked out across the rolling green valley, the quiet thought that had struck him when he first trotted into the hamlet came roaring back like a siren’s song.

It was a beautiful life, this.

"Ser?"

A small, timid voice broke his reverie. Vilon turned to see a small girl.

Josephine.

She begun picking her way carefully across the freshly turned furrows. The lass belonged to the hearth that had taken him in, offering an unwashed hedge knight a straw mattress and hot pottage. He had paid for every crumb in hard silver and honest sweat, but he harbored no complaints about the labor. Being still set his teeth on edge and these few days with Owen and the folk of the village had been a balm he hadn’t known he craved.

"Owen meant to bring you this, but he left it by the hearth," she said, holding up a scuffed leather waterskin. "I figured your throat would be dry."

Josephine was a bright scrap of a girl, with a mop of unruly brown curls and eyes that hadn’t yet learned to look for brigands in the treeline. Vilon prayed to the gods she would never have.

He popped the wooden stopper and took a hearty swig. Warm cow’s milk coated his tongue, thick and lightly sweet. On a sweltering afternoon, a mug of well-water chilled in the deep shade would have done his thirst more justice, but remembering how Owen had cheered like a madman when the village headman came back with that animal, the drink tasted sweeter than royal mead.

"My thanks, little one," Vilon rumbled, wiping a white mustache from his whiskers with the back of his forearm. "Did you have a cup yourself?"

She nodded solemnly, but the usual gap-toothed grin that usually lit up her freckled face was nowhere to be found.

"Owen filled a whole wooden pail for our kitchen," she murmured, scuffing her bare toes against a clod of dark loam.

Vilon let out a low chuckle. It sounded just like the lad. Owen carried a gentle heart beneath his squire’s tunic, and the village seemed carved from the very same honest timber.

Perhaps it was the gentle southern sun, the rich, black soil that actually yielded barley when you asked it, or simply the blessed isolation from the marching routes of great lords. These folk looked after one another with a fierce, quiet decency that made Vilon feel like a creature from another, uglier world.

To lay down the rusted iron, put down roots in the black dirt, and belong to something gentler than a war-band... it was a dangerously sweet notion. The warmth and hearth his own father had denied him was resting right here, ripe for the taking.

Yet even as the warm milk settled in his belly, Vilon looked past the girl toward the road winding away over the ridge.

A stray dog could linger by the cookfire for an evening, lap the spilled grease, and sleep out of the rain. But sooner or later, the horn sounded, and the road came calling for its own.

This was not to be his life.