“Can you help her?”
When he turned to face Sal the Cacophony, her stare was no longer so distant, nor quite so cold. It was soft. Wet. It didn’t belong on a monster. It didn’t belong in a place like this.
“Tell me what happened here,” he said, “and maybe.”
Those eyes hardened. Cold and thin as scalpels in a corpse’s body. She spoke in the voice of someone who was used to speaking once and did not repeat herself without steel to accompany it.
“You don’t need to know that,” she said, as slow and calm as a sword pulled out of a ten-days-dead body. “Help her. Help yourself.”
Despite the flames, he froze. His legs turned to jelly. His breath left him and was replaced by something weak and rotten in his lungs. He hadn’t felt that wind, that cold, since the day he had come to the Valley and seen the bodies.
He hadn’t turned away then, either.
“N-no,” he said.
“What?”
“No.” He forced his voice hard, his spine straight, his eyes on hers. “Whatever happened here, it concerns this town. And if it concerns this town, it concerns me.” He swallowed lead. “I’ll help her. But you have to tell me.”
She stared at him. Did the stories say she never blinked or had he just made that up?
She raised a hand. He forced himself not to look away.
Her hand shot out toward his waist. He felt ice in his belly, terrified that he’d look down and see a blade jutting out of him. His breath left him as she slowly drew her hand back.
In it, she held the bottle of whiskey he packed.
“Avonin.” Her eyes widened a little. “Damn, kid. What do you use this for?”
“Disinfecting wounds,” he replied.
She looked at him like he had just insulted her mother, then gestured at the unconscious woman with her chin.
“How much of this do you need to treat her?”
“I… I don’t know. Half, I think?”
“You sure?”
“No.”
“Get sure.”
He looked over the woman on the ground, nodded. “Half.”
Sal the Cacophony nodded back. Then she pried the cork out with her teeth, spat it out, and upended the bottle into her mouth and did not stop to breathe until she had drained exactly half the bottle.
She handed it back to him, licked her lips, and spat on the ground.
“I’ll tell you,” she said, “but you have to promise me something.”
He stared at her as she looked over the wreckage. “All right.”
“I won’t ask you to promise to forgive me,” she said. “But when I’m done…”
She closed her eyes, sheathed her weapon, and let a black breeze blow over her.
“Promise me you’ll try.”
TWO
THE VALLEY
Anyway, what was I talking about?
Oh, right.
The massacre.
It took me a second to notice through the blood weeping down into my eye, but his guard had dropped. Weary arms could no longer hold his blade quite so high, the tip of it dragging in the earth as he charged toward me, a scream tearing out of his throat, dust rising in a cloud behind him.
“DIE, CACOPHONY!”
He roared, swinging his sword up as he came within spitting distance. I stepped around the blade, into his path, bringing my own blade up. Steel flashed. A splash of red stained the air. His sword rushed past me, biting into my cheek and drawing blood.
As for my sword…
His body stiffened on my blade. His eyes were frozen in unblinking horror, yet he couldn’t look down to see the four inches of steel thrust into his belly. His lips trembled, struggling to find his last words, to make them meaningful. I have no idea if they were or not. When he spoke them, they came out on a bubbling river of blood that spilled out of his mouth and onto the dirt.
Where he fell, three seconds later, after I pulled my weapon free.
And there he lay, unmoving. Another dark stain on another patch of dark earth.
Just like the other four.
Once the air stopped ringing with steel and screams, I let my blade lower. My breath came out hot and my saliva came out red. My spittle fell and lay on the cheek of a woman’s body, but I didn’t think she’d mind—after all, it wasn’t the worst thing I had done to her. To any of them.
I’d given them every opportunity. I came wandering into their valley, my blade naked in my hand and my arms open and waiting. I came screaming my own name and cursing theirs. I came with no surprises, no stealth, no subtlety—just a sword and harsh language. And they were dead.
And I was still alive.
Assholes.
Credit where it’s due, they’d given it their best shot. My body was littered with cuts—grazes, a few gashes, one good gouge that I thought might have ended it—but the blood drying in the cold mountain air on my chest was mostly not my own. My breath was coming harsh in my lungs. My scars ached, my bones ached, my body ached. But it wasn’t ready to quit.
Which meant I still had a mage to kill.
I heard the click of a trigger, the thrum of a crossbow string, and the shriek of a bolt. I glanced up. A bolt as long as my arm flew past my head, jamming itself into a dead tree ten feet away.
I stared down a long stretch of dark earth. The young man holding an empty arbalest far too big for him stared back at me, dumbfounded. I sniffed, wiped blood from my cheek.
“Shit, kid,” I said. “I was standing still. I didn’t even see you. And you still missed.” I gestured to my body, spattered with the drying life of his comrades. “Do you need me to get closer?”
I started walking toward him, my sword hanging heavy in my hand. Then I started jogging. Only once I saw him grab a bolt did I start running.
He ceased to be a person and became a series of fumbles—fumbling lips struggling to find a word, fumbling hands struggling to load the arbalest. If I had waited long enough, he might have killed me.
But I wasn’t going to have it said that Sal the Cacophony was killed by some shithead who couldn’t even shoot straight.
The sound of dry earth cracking under my boots filled my ears. My sword sang in the air as I raised it high. All my aches and cuts were lost in the feel of my legs pumping, my heart beating, and the weapon in my hands screaming for more.
He fired again. The shot went even wider than before. He gave up, dropping the arbalest and reaching with shaking hands for his belt. I thought he was going to pull out that sword that was too big for him at his hip. Instead he pulled out a dented brass bugle and pressed it to his lips.
He let out two and a half blasts that echoed across the valley. The last half fell flat, just as the bugle fell from his hands as I brought the sword down across his chest. His life spattered the sky. He crumpled to his knees, along with his bugle and his crossbow, just another useless thing that hadn’t been able to kill me.
I watched him collapse, facedown, in the dirt. I felt a passing urge to flip him over, to give him the dignity of dying with his face up. But I couldn’t.
I didn’t want to know how young he was.
He’d died too quickly for me to get a good look at him, but I could tell from how he had fought that he wasn’t cut out for bandit life. Probably some peasant shithead, terrified of settling down and dying in whatever backwater township he’d been recruited from. I didn’t have to kill him, I knew. I could have disarmed him, broken his wrist, beat him savagely enough that he would have to crawl back to whatever life he’d had before.