The Steel Remains

“Listen, Sherin, he isn’t going to hurt you. He’s . . .” Ringil weighed it up. “A friend. He’s going to let me take you home. Really. There’s no trick here, no sorcery. I really am your cousin. Your mother and Ishil asked me to come. Been looking for you for . . . for a while. Don’t you remember me from Lanatray? I never wanted to play with you in the gardens, remember, even when Ishil made me.”

That seemed to do it. Inch by inch, her face came around. The keening broke up, caught on shards of breath, then soaked away into the quiet like water into parched earth. She looked at him out of one eye, shivering, both hands still clasped at her neck. Her voice creaked like a rusty hinge.

“Ri-ringil?”

He put together something resembling a smile. “Yeah.”

“It’s really you?”

“Yeah. Ishil sent me.” He tried the smile again. “You know what that means. Ishil. What she’s like. I fucking had to find you, didn’t I?”

“Ringil. Ringil.”

And then she threw herself onto him, collapsed over his neck and shoulders, weeping and clutching and screaming as if a thousand possessing demons were trapped inside her and had decided now, finally, that they’d been there too long, they wanted out, and it was time to let go.

He held her while it lasted, rocking her gently, murmuring platitudes and stroking her rat’s-nest hair. The screams ran down to sobbing, then to shuddering breaths and quiet. He peered at her face, cleaned it of tears as best he could with his shirtsleeve, and then he picked her up and carried her out, bits of straw from the stall’s floor still clinging to the simple swamp-stained shift she wore.

Happy now, Mother? Have I done enough?

Outside, the sky was moving, thick cloud boiling past overhead at menacing speed. The light had changed, thickening and staining toward a day’s-end dimness, and the air reeked of a coming storm. There were no sounds from the other stables or the other stalls in this one; if their occupants were awake, terror or apathy was keeping them quiet. Ringil found himself glad—it was easier to pretend there was no one else kept prisoner here but the woman he now held in his arms.

Seethlaw stood with his back to the wall of the stable and his arms folded, looking at nothing at all. Ringil walked past him without a word, stopped a couple of steps past with Sherin in his arms. She buried her face in his neck and moaned.

“So,” the dwenda said at his back. “Satisfied? You have everything you want now?”

Ringil did not look around. “You put us both on a good horse, you point me to the Trelayne road, and you let me get a full day’s ride away from this shit-hole. Then we can maybe talk about promises kept.”

“Sure.” He heard the sound of Seethlaw levering himself off the wall, straightening up and gliding in behind him. His voice fell drab and cold, lifted hairs on the nape of Ringil’s neck. “Why not. After all, there’s nothing more for you here, is there?”

“You said it.”

He walked toward the gate in the stormlight, bracing his steps a little because Sherin was heavier to carry than he’d expected when he first picked her up. Some forever insouciant part of him remembered a time when he could fight all day in plate armor and still stand as night fell, find the energy to go among the conscripted men at camp and build their spirits for the next day’s slaughter, talk up victory he did not believe in and share their brutally crude jokes about spending and fucking and hurting as if he found them funny.

Were you a better man then, Gil? Or just a better liar?

Your arse cheeks and belly were tighter, anyway. Your shoulders were bigger and harder.

Perhaps that was enough, for them and for you.

He cleared the gate, working grimly to keep his eyes away from the heads in the water beyond. He almost succeeded. One slippery, sliding glance as he walked out, the corner of his eye grabbed by the despairing muddied features of the woman nearest the gate. He jerked his gaze away before he could glimpse more than one tear-soiled cheek and the mumbling desperate mouth. He never met her eyes.

On through the swamp and the failing light, with Sherin weighing ever heavier in his arms and Seethlaw cold and remotely beautiful at his side, all three of them like symbolic characters from some irritatingly pompous morality-tale play whose original moral had somehow been scrambled and compromised and lost and was now, to audience and participants alike, anybody’s fucking guess.