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The sounds from behind the storeroom door are rough and sick and unpleasant, nothing like Amras has ever heard. He seizes the handle and drags it outward, his only companion the pulse thudding in his head.
“Son of a—” cries Crowley, stumbling to his feet.
On the floor beneath him, Mollie groans.
Amras did not really know anger until Celegorm told him...told him. Everything before was childish folly. After, well. Then, between the howl of fear and the dark cliff leap of hurt, he felt raw rage climbing his skin for hours at a time.
“Get gone, you brat,” Crowley snarls, and Amras roars and kicks him, so hard and sudden that the man’s knees buckle under him.
“Run,” Amras says to Mollie, as gallantly as he can, if not as gallantly as Mae—
His vision blurs, for just a moment, and that is enough for Crowley to attack again. Amras is bowled over by a blow to the stomach, and he...
“Leave him alone,” Mollie shrieks. She must not be terribly hurt, as Amras feared she was, for she drags at Crowley’s leg with both her thin arms.
“You damned bitch!”
“What,” growls Celegorm, from the door, “in all fucking hell is this?”
(His gun is in his hand.)
Amras does the explaining, Mollie pleads, and Crowley swears he’s done no wrong.
Celegorm says only to Amras, “He hurt you?” with coldly flaming eyes.
Amras’s stomach hurts along the outline of Crowley’s boot. Amras’s breath is held like a trigger. “No.”
“Come on, then.”
He isn’t going to help Mollie. Amras shakes his head. “Mollie is. She’s hurt.”
“I’ve only one cure for her,” Celegorm says, his voice still queerly strained. “You’ll not like it. Come on.”
Amras follows him.
Mollie sleeps in the stables. Amras waits until his brothers are at supper, and then slips out with a hunk of bread in hand.
The huffing of the horses is a good, gentle sound. He pauses before Alexander’s stall with more reverence than he ever reserved for altars. His brother’s horse looks just the same.
In the stable eaves—deep broad eaves a man could crawl through—there is rustling, and then a gasp of surprise.
Amras did not know Mollie slept there.
“What are you doing?”
“Please,” she says, very pale in the shadowy dusk. She has olive skin and deep dark eyes. Her hair is dark, too, and curling. All the Mollies Amras ever knew were Irish.
“I came to bring you supper,” he says. “Have they been—been giving you supper?”
She stoops as she sits on the low rafter-edge, her booted feet dangling. “Nothing but what I pay for.”
Amras hates what he knows. Hates it with the same rage and the same—
Grief, Amrod says, grey and solemn. Mamaí would call it—grief.
“Were you paying him, then? Crowley?”
“No. He just—” Mollie pauses. “It doesn’t matter.” She swallows so that her slim brown throat works nervously, then leaps down into the empty stall.
It seems to hurt her.
“Are you—did he—” Amras knows, but he doesn’t know the words.
“No.” She doesn’t turn her back on him. She reaches up behind, awkwardly, tugging at a small bundle. Then she takes the bread from Amras’s outstretched hand. “Thank you.”
The bundle. The boots. Amras is sick all the way down to his knees. “You’re leaving?”
“If you’ll help me,” she murmurs. “Amras, isn’t it? You saved me this day. Will you again?”
His voice is halting, in return. “You were leaving before I came in.”
She looks at him shrewdly, but it is Amrod’s shrewdness, trying only to understand what is best. “Yes,” she says. “I tried to run once before, but—he would not let me.”
“Crowley?”
She shakes her head and says nothing.
“Don’t go.”
“I don’t want to stay here.”
“But where will you be safe?”
Nowhere. Mollie will be safe exactly nowhere. She lost her finger at fourteen, she tells Amras, though he doesn’t ask—she needs protection, and the chance to earn her wages, and she needs to be far, far away from Fort Mithrim.
Amras cannot hear Amrod or Maedhros or any of his brothers. The stable sounds are the stable sounds; all there is.
“I’ll protect you,” he says. “Don’t run, there’s no good in running.”
“You’re just a boy.”
Just one. “I’m not. I can kill at man at twenty pages or a hundred paces or—”
“I understand.”
They share the bread in near silence. Amras does not need it, is not hungry, but it seems to calm Mollie’s nerves, eating together. Amras wishes he could give her one of their lonely rooms, but that isn’t his to offer.
She is a trembling leaf, frightened as anyone who has seen death circle round them is frightened.
She didn’t know Maedhros, but she saw Amrod. She saw—
You can’t protect her, Amrod says. You don’t know everything she’s done.
“Seventeen. I think.”
“So is Caranthir.”
“One of your brothers?”
“Yes.”
Don’t go, if you go, you will not come back, no one who leaves this place ever comes back, maybe you don’t want to come back but you are him, you are the last—
The last.
“Who is it,” Amras asks in a whisper, “Who forbids you to go where you will?”
Mollie is unlacing her boots, with her face shielded from him. “No one.”