Chapter Text
There are no heroes at the end of the world.
He hears the screams before he sees the smoke. A handful of cottages at the bottom of the valley, dark plumes from a pyre billowing past their stone roofs.
The screams echo up the barren slopes, funneling up to where he’s crouched on the hilltop. He ignores them, and instead squints at the patchwork of fields neighboring the village. Dry and bare, like every other field he’s passed for the last three seasons. His stomach turns in disappointment. He’s had nothing but roots and weeds for the last week.
The screams increase in intensity, but he turns away. He’s seen the funeral pyre. The plague is already there, and if the plague is there, so are the undead.
No one will be alive by sunset.
On the fourth day from the village, he sees a castle. It juts out from the empty horizon like a tombstone cut from obsidian, and he pitches toward it in desperation. By the time he realizes he’s in the middle of a field, a field filled with gaunt, hollow-eyed farmers, he’s cornered by a group of mounted soldiers.
They strip him then and there. When they’re satisfied that he’s bereft of rotting lesions or open wounds, they put a canvas bag over his head and drag him into the castle.
The captain of the guard is called Irons, and he’s looking for new recruits. Even starving, Christopher is larger than most men, so when he expresses a willingness to work for food, they throw him into the training yard to test his strength.
His opponents have full bellies, but he has a knight’s training. He sidesteps their clumsy swings like a southern fighter playing with bulls, and knocks both men to the ground with a single blow.
Irons scowls, but tosses him a stained tunic with an arrow hole through its breast. There’s an emblem on the back: two interlocked Greek crosses, one red, one white.
“Report to the guardhouse at dawn,” Irons says. He turns to the defeated men standing morosely to his side, their shirts still caked with dust. “As for you two…night watch on the east tower for a week hence.”
One man groans. The other, a boy no more than fifteen, turns a sickly shade of gray.
“E-east tower?” he stammers, eyes wide.
“What’s wrong?” one guard calls out.
“Scared of a little ghost?” Another one snickers.
The young man stares at his feet while the others laugh.
Later, when Christopher is in the mess hall, he overhears the boy speaking with his friends. He only catches it because he’s finished his bowl of grease and potato skins in two great gulps, and has nothing to do but stare at the bottom of the container while he waits to be assigned a cot.
“Don’t worry,” one says. “Even the kitchen boys know the ghost isn’t real.”
“But I heard it, that one night. I heard it screaming…”
“It’s just the wind whistling through the arrow slits.”
The boy continues to pick anxiously at the pock marks on his chin, unconvinced.
“Rodric says it’s just a tall tale,” adds another. “To keep people away from the alchemy lab underneath the tower. It’s why you see the Lord’s physicians coming in and out all the time.”
“Don’t be stupid. If the Lord’s physicians knew alchemy, why would he still be sick?”
“He’s been getting better.”
“Did you see him on the keep last week? He looked more shriveled than the undead.”
They continue to bicker across the table, while their friend stares gloomily into his soup bowl. Christopher leaves before they finish their conversation.
He doesn’t care for the petty sorcery of charlatans. As for ghosts…he has enough haunting him already.
He has food in his belly and a bed to sleep on, which is more than he’s had for many seasons. But there’s still a shadow of unease when he’s ordered to collect taxes from a line of thin, shambling farmers.
“It’s not easy protecting these lands from the plague,” Irons tells him. “Those who shelter under Lord Spencer’s wing must follow his laws and render his dues.”
Christopher nods, silent as always, and begins to unload several bags of apples from a wagon. His mouth waters instinctively at the sight—he hasn’t seen so much food in ages. The apples are shriveled and spotted, but they’re still apples.
Irons sees the look on his face. “Take a few, if you want,” he says. “We keep the peace around here, and deserve to be rewarded.” His eyes follow a wiry young woman, a farmer’s daughter, guiding a donkey through the line. He smiles.
“Not just in food, but in other ways too.”
He takes a step forward and Christopher feels something lurch in his stomach. But then there’s a commotion from behind the crowd and the courtyard falls silent. A man is pushing his way up the line. He’s tall and ruddy, even larger than Christopher, and his bushy red beard reminds him so much of Bartholomew that he can’t help but look away.
“I come here with a grievance!” the man bellows. Several guards move to stop him, but Irons waves them away.
“Let him pass,” he says.
The man points a trembling finger at the captain of the guard. “Last week, your guards accused my son of having the sickness. He had not a single wound or lesion in sight, yet they still took him. Then they came and took the cows, the chickens, the harvest…even my granddaughter’s toys.”
His eyes move from one guard to the next as he speaks, sharp, blazing, and full of that desperate gleam Christopher had seen so much of since the end of the world.
“I fail to see how this is a complaint. Any sign of the blight—”
“He was tending the fields when they came.” The man’s voice is increasing in volume, nearing a shout. “He was healthy through and through. What have you done with him?”
“What, exactly, are you implying?” There is a cutting edge to Irons’ voice that chills the air.
“I’m implying that you kidnapped my son. Where is he? What have you brutes done to him?”
“You insolent fool.” Iron's face has turned a dark red, like blood gushing from an old wound. “After all we do, after all the sacrifices we make for you peasants....and you have the gall to stand here and call us liars?” He waves his arm at the men standing by. “Guards! Take him.”
Several men close in and tackle the red-bearded man to the ground, even as he screams and kicks. He’s larger than all of them, but when the guards pull out their swords, his struggles slow.
Christopher can’t look. It reminds him too much of that field by Badger’s Mount, when Bartholomew had turned to him one last time with a tight, trembling grin on his face. Grinning, even as the sword shook in his hands, even as he watched the hordes swarm over the hilltops—
“Please, sir.” The wiry young woman, the farmer’s daughter, has come up to him. Behind her, the guards tie up the man under Irons’ watchful eye.
“I know you’re new here. Please help him, he’s a good father, a good man. You…you have a kind look in your eyes. You’re a good man too, I can see it…”
Christopher ignores the heaviness gathering in his chest.
“I’m not a good man,” he says. He thinks of Bartholomew and the others, their bodies torn and trampled at the feet of the undead.
The town they tried to protect burned to ash.
“All the good men are already dead.”