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Painting ties once more, Gwindor feels old. He is too far afield to see the rumored forge. The sun blazes up, turning the landscape flat and featureless. Thus, the mountain hulks like a breaching head rising from a sea of dry land. He cannot even see the twinkle of Bauglir’s windows, high above.
Ten days without working have made him soft. His protesting shoulder is stiff and ungainly. He stoops again, bites his tongue.
Only a half day—but he didn’t even want this. He wanted to keep his post at Russandol’s side, not only because his life was tethered to Russandol’s, but because Gwindor is, as it turns out, rather a fool.
Soft. Ten days. Ten days with that rascal, talking and not talking, cringing and courageous by turns, staring off into nothing and looking Gwindor hard in the eye. The children and Belle, their collective trust and tenderness, only hastened his decline.
Gwindor knows many things, from these ten days, but not how he shall survive the morrow.
Fool.
He knows that Russandol is like nothing so much as a flame—one that must be coaxed and guarded. One that beams fierce light. (Gwindor is afraid of the light.)
He knows that Russandol sleeps as if he has been bound to his bed.
Yet it is easier, somehow, to watch the boy as he sleeps. Easier because his searching eyes, grey as a winter morning, are shuttered. Gwindor can look at his young face and delicate bones without pretending as if what he sees does not shake him.
Young. Gwindor knows, now, that the boy is very young.
(Twenty-four, he answered, hesitant, when Gwindor asked. Gwindor had—before that—stubbornly and groundlessly thought him nearer thirty.
He is now about the age that Gelmir would have been.)
Five years, stilled and silenced by abiding hatred and what, with less horror, would have been called grief. In all of this, in all his waiting, the Soldier denied his fear.
Russandol is afraid too—damn terrified, most moments—but he fights.
Knox is at one end of the field-flat, Harris at the other. Gwindor straightens up, stretching his spine. He will return at noon, to find that thin face, all over freckles, turned to the barracks door.
Does he speak to you? Belle asked, as the lines mingled this morning.
A bit. Fair amount of cheek.
He has seen Belle’s poor face for enough years to know what it looks like when she smiles.
(It’s foul bread, Red, but it’ll do you good. Lord, he has to wheedle him like a child.
Russandol ceases crumbling it into his lap. Flushes. Apologizes.
This is not what Gwindor wants.)
There are other things to think of. Choose among them, Soldier—the snake-eyed commands of the night before, still chilling his blood; the white-lipped fury that he saw, for only a moment, in his charge; Lem.
Lem, sneering, not an hour ago. “Found him as pleasing as Bauglir did?”
Gwindor put that taunt in Lem’s mouth. Gwindor must own that, bear that, side-by-side with the memory of a thin, weary voice saying, perhaps it would be easier if it was.
Perhaps it would be easier to be a crass and ugly man, as Gothmog and Bauglir can be, as Lem wants to be, were his luck not that of a slave.
Lem was taken the same way Gwindor was; a skirmish at a village border gone wrong. Lem is too dull to escape, too canny to make much trouble, at least not until he is well and truly roused. He made a heap of trouble in his first few months; Gwindor helped him out of it.
Gwindor, on the other side of this friendship, did not answer the sneer.
He shouldered on, and up the hill, and they do not now work side-by-side.
Lem arrived after him. Seemed bent on liking him at once. Didn’t shy away from Gwindor’s stone-face, his simmering rage. Kept pace with him. When they were sent further south for punishing farm labor along the muddy flats around the Rio Grande, they kept close, chained together morning and night. Bauglir didn’t know what he wanted, yet; only that he wanted slaves to till the land he bought and bartered in the west.
So. Nowhere to go; a hundred ways to die. Gwindor didn’t want death, then, because he wasn’t calling fear by its name.
We’ll get out of here someday, Lem promised, when the lash was fresh on both of them, when their rations were cut.
Gwindor wonders, now, if he ever really meant it.
(I’ll kill him for you. Lem’s voice falling from the bunk above him, as Gwindor tried to find some semblance of comfort. A few stripes weren’t much, and some part of him knew it. But the humiliation of it—I’ll kill that whore.
Don’t kill him, he muttered, through his teeth. Not yet.)
He glances down the aisles of creosote and pale, unpainted wood. Lem was there a moment ago, or at least, a quarter of an hour ago. Lem was—Lem is nowhere to be seen.
What can I do?
You can help me destroy him.
Gwindor’s mind—now, then, maybe always—racing. What does the boy…no, the man in front of him ask? What does he command? All raw bones and ageless eyes and a body beaten of its strength, flayed of its beauty—
You can help me destroy him.
Choose among them, Soldier. Gothmog, words as lazy and lethal as a well-oiled gun.
Choose among them. Lem, full of nothing but hate.
Choose. The boy in the bed who says he will not die.
Fool, fool, you’re a damned fool—it is Gelmir’s scream in his ears, Gelmir’s pulse in his heart, and he drops his broad brush, nearly topples his bucket,
Runs.
“Where d’you think you’re off to?”
It is Knox, thankfully. Not Harris. Knox is less cruel. Younger than Goodley. Older than Larsen. Hard to see a man in any of their faces, but there you are.
“I’m under orders,” Gwindor huffs. “Red. I’m to report to guarding Red. I l-lost track of the sun. I—he’ll have my hide.”
Not lying, if Knox assumes he means Gothmog, and doesn’t make him say it outright.
It is about as certain as a hope, but the odds are despair. Lem could have snuck away for a breather. Gwindor could be blinded stupid by the sun. But Gwindor has seen death, and seen the slipping stones that begin its avalanche. Lem angry, Lem gone: these are the stones.
“Go,” Knox says, his brow furrowing.
If Gwindor had a moment to spare, he’d think the man looked guilty.
(When Russandol sleeps by day, Gwindor minds his nightmares. They are not the cruel visions of a sane man; they are like a dog’s dreams, marked by faint jolts and jerks, run through with sharper spasms when he upsets his bad leg or his harshest wounds.
Gwindor does not have to imagine what it looks like, to have a knife mock you in the way it carves through flesh, filets skin and grinds against bone. Because of Belle, he does not even have to imagine what it is to live beyond that knife.
Why, then, is there any of his heart left to betray him?
Russandol unlocks his limbs, once. Falls almost limp, but for one reaching hand. Reaches until Gwindor, stupid and shy, places his own blunt fingers in the slim, steel grip.
Cano, Russandol whispers, thick with sleep. Please. I shall be good.)
(Gwindor will never tell anyone of this.)
His shoulder—he does not notice his shoulder. He does not notice the shortness of his breath, except for how damnably it slows him. The compound is a blur, the distance stretched interminably. He never believed he would long to pound that dusty earth beneath his feet. Never believed that he would welcome the sight of the whipping posts.
The yard is abandoned. No sign of Gothmog, but smoke rises from the guardhouse chimney, even though it must be unbearably hot within.
Gwindor skids to a halt, veers left. Throws his full weight against the nearest door of the men’s barracks, but it does not budge.
(Those graceful fingers, locked. Gwindor’s own voice, whispering, Alright, lad. Alright. The sunlight on lips still trembling, for it was afternoon.)
The second door is also barricaded. He was not the last out, this morning. Lem was. Lem must have—planned.
Might even have been sanctioned in his planning.
Gwindor has no time to work out the snarls of treachery. He retraces his steps, still running, back to the door that is nearest Russandol’s cot.
“Open the fucking door!” Gwindor yells, and inside, there is a shout, as of someone struck or stabbed, in a moment of surprise.
Both living, then. He thinks the shout was Lem’s.
He is using his good shoulder, of course, but it does not matter. The contact ripples through him, sends him wheezing, stumbling. He picks himself up and tries again.
You are not a soldier. You were a brother. There is nothing left.
The door gives way.
Here is all that Gwindor can see: Russandol, face like death, his leg splintered at a horribly wrong angle beneath him, and a knife in his hand. No—not a knife.
Gwindor and Belle have given him a pair of trousers (too large); an overshirt that nearly swallows him; bread he will not eat. Belle also gave him a comb for his hair. Where she found it, and why she gave it, Gwindor knows not. A shard of it is grasped in Russandol’s right hand, now, and the shard is stained red.
Lem looms over him, bleeding from a slash across his cheek. He must have knocked or dragged Russandol to the floor. Must have—
Crippled. He crippled him.
“Lay off!” Gwindor roars. “In God’s name, what are you doing? I told you, he’s no threat—”
“None of your business, Soldier,” Lem spits. “Forget what you saw. Forget—”
Gwindor charges him.
Lem fights him nastily, going for his shoulder and his eyes. Gwindor buries his face in Lem’s chest, thumps him, hard. Thumps him again.
Russandol is half-mad behind them, his death-silence gone but his panic rising. “Gwindor, don’t, don’t—”
It doesn’t matter.
“Call for help!” Gwindor roars, trying to shove Lem off. “Call for fucking—”
Through the open door, the overseers are shouting. Lem goes boneless, less of a fish and more of a whale. Gwindor gasps, heaves. Lem rolls over of his own accord, scrambles to his feet, and runs for the back door. He kicks the wedge aside that jammed it, and slips out. The door slams shut behind him just as Goodley and a few of the others rush in.
Gwindor, panting, ribs and shoulder ringing, sees Harris.
But how…?
“What in all hell,” demands Goodley coldly, “Are you doing?”
Gwindor’s ears ring, too. He has been here before, but he came late. A fight that ought not have been a fight, and damn Red raising his voice, raising his head, saying, choose me.
(Choose.)
He turns his head. He looks at the boy’s face, twisted with anguish. It is not a comfort, but Gwindor wants to see it, once more, before he says what he must.
He smiles. Stupid and shy, at Russandol.
Then he turns to Goodley, turns to all of them. Manages to stand.
“Someone fetch Bauglir,” he says, as loudly as he dares. “Bauglir’s slave is hurt, to the point of death, and he’ll kill any man who sees him die.”
The stillness of the room stretches out forever. Russandol makes no sound, speaks no word. Gwindor can think of no one else, yet he must. Must find his way back out of this terrible betrayal, to accomplish its only goal.
Save him.
And then—
Harris, who ought to be in the fields, steps forward. Harris must have followed him down.
“He’s right,” Harris says, level and firm. “I’ll go at once. Master Bauglir’ll want a proper doctor brought.”
“Will he now?” Goodley demands. The rest of the men shuffle in place.
“There were no orders to rough him,” Harris says. “I ain’t risk it. You seen what they done.”
Goodley stands down.
It’s only a broken leg.
That won’t matter to Gothmog.
Gwindor knows the small stones, and knows them well. Mostly, he knows them too late.
Harris fairly springs through the far door, the same as Lem.
“Snapped you like a twig,” Goodley says, striding past Gwindor and striking his shoulder as he does. “You a glutton for punishment, ain’t you, Red?”
Gwindor clenches his fists. He does not turn.
He hears the bitten-off cry of pain behind him.
“Useless dog,” Goodley says, his voice low. “And lucky man, as got it in—”
“Which one of you am I shooting today?”
Goodley stops talking. No one else was talking. Gothmog disperses the knot of his men without so much as a waved hand.
Gwindor flattens out his fists. Gothmog has his gun, has his finger on the trigger. He’s not a man for idle jest. Russandol’s back and Haldar’s grave are testaments to that.
“Someone attacked Red,” Gwindor says. Not a bullet, please God almighty, but he’ll take the lashing. He’ll take a lashing worse than Russandol’s. “Master Bauglir asked for news of him. Harris has gone to bring word.”
Harris is probably scarcely out of the compound, but with each second, they gain time. With each second…and no, Bauglir did not give that exact order, but only Bauglir will know that. If he only comes—
Gothmog strides forward. Plants his feet. With the fingers of his left hand, gestures down. Gwindor has been a slave long enough to understand.
He kneels.
Not a word, Red, not a fucking word, God, keep your mouth shut.
Gothmog presses the cool ring of the barrel against Gwindor’s forehead.
“Why don’t you oblige me and repeat all that, slowly now.”
“Someone attacked Red,” Gwindor says. He’s afraid of many things, but he wasn’t afraid of—he wasn’t afraid of dying, until now. He can see that, even as all he’s staring down is Gothmog’s brass belt-buckle. “Broke his leg. Master Bauglir assigned me to guard him. Wagered my skin on it. When I reported, Harris went to fetch him.”
Gothmog isn’t looking at him, because Gwindor is looking up, now, and does not meet his eyes. Gothmog is looking at Russandol; silent, broken Russandol.
Gwindor begs that he is not angered by what he sees.
Keep your head down, lad.
Proud, stern, almost beautiful—
You can help me destroy him.
The boy is a man, and the man is a weapon.
Gothmog says, “Is that true?”
“Far as we know,” says one of the overseers. Not Goodley. “Far as we know, sir, that’s what happened.”
“Alright, then.” Gothmog rolls the word on his tongue. “Alright. We’ll wait for the mountain man, lads. Maybe he’ll rid us of this crippled slut.”
He waits for the laughter, hears the laughter.
Then he strikes Gwindor so hard across the face, with the butt of the gun, that the room goes to black, and white, and nothing.