‘Town needs a smith-’
‘I’m going to my wife.’
Snarling something Gurren couldn’t make out, Witch Hale went back into the house.
Gurren found he was wiping his hands over and over again, but all he managed was to smear them evenly with sweaty coal dust. With his mind he felt inside his body for the places of sickness. They sat like empty absences in his chest, things that felt nothing even as they sickened everything around them. He saw them as lumps of coal, and the blood he coughed up showed the black from those lumps. Those numb gifts were carrying him to Shellas. He loved them dearly.
Renarr would grieve. That had been the worst part in all of this. Grieving and alone, their little girl. He looked over at all the soldiers, wondering why they had all come down just to deliver a pair of healers. He saw how they had ranged out, watchful — but not watching Gurren or the house; instead, they faced outwards, and something about them made him shiver.
They would take care of their little girl, and might be Shellas would be happy with that, with them being Legion and all. She could rest easy and look kindly on him, and might be she’d step forward after watching him crawling towards her for so long, long enough to confirm that his love for her had never died — she’d step forward and lift him up, and reach into his chest, and pull out those black lumps of grief. He’d watch her throw them away, so that he could breathe again, without coughing, without feeling the horrible tightness.
Heal me, my love, as only you can.
Another two riders were coming down from the keep. Gurren squinted. The Lord himself, and at his side that woman from the morning. They cantered through the Tithe Gate, pausing there for the Lord to issue some orders, and then rode on to draw up within the rough semicircle made by the soldiers.
Urusander’s grey-blue eyes were fixed on Gurren, and the old man saw in them raw pain which was what he always saw in them, which was why he could never meet them for long. And he remembered how sick that weakness had made him feel. Urusander could not have loved Shellas the way Gurren did. Urusander had no right to weep for her death; he had no right to take from Gurren his own pain.
The Lord dismounted and walked straight to him. ‘Gurren-’
But Gurren pointed at Serap. ‘She made a Legion vow.’
‘I know,’ Urusander replied.
‘I bless your son,’ Gurren said, feeling his face set stubbornly — and all at once he could meet Urusander’s eyes, and feel nothing. ‘I bless him, sir, and nothing you ever say will change that.’
If there was anguish in the commander’s eyes before, it was as nothing to what Gurren saw in them now. But still he felt nothing, and was astonished when it was Urusander who broke the gaze.
‘She will be taken care of,’ the Lord said then.
‘I know. It was promised.’
‘Will you come to the keep, Gurren?’
‘What? What for?’
‘I want you both under my roof. I want your daughter to find you there, with her, when she mends.’
‘I got work to do here.’
‘I will release one of the smiths to stand in your stead.’
‘For how long?’
‘For as long as needed.’
‘Until I die? Has to be until I die, sir, and afterwards, too. Town needs a smith, more than you do.’
‘If you would keep an eye on the work going on at the keep, Gurren, then we have a deal.’
‘I can do that. Until I get too sick. And don’t say nothing about your healers working on me.’
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ was Urusander’s soft reply.
Gurren jerked a nod.
‘We will send a wagon down for you and your daughter.’
‘Want some of my tools, too. The best ones.’
‘Of course. As many trips as needed.’
‘When I’m gone then, sir, what of my girl? Back to this empty house?’
‘If you would permit it, Gurren, I would formally adopt her.’
‘You would, would you?’ Gurren glanced away, studied the small crowd of townsfolk who’d been drawn to the commotion. ‘She’s not a girl any more, though. She’s a woman and that’s how she needs to be treated. You don’t call her “daughter” or nothing either. She’s our daughter — me and Shellas made her.’
‘I know,’ replied Urusander.
Gurren nodded.
‘Gurren,’ said Urusander, louder, more formal, ‘how is the water between us?’
Gurren met the man’s eyes and was surprised to see the anguish gone, the eyes now filling with warmth. He nodded again. ‘The water is clear, Lord.’
Serap held back. She saw Lord Urusander transformed; she saw the commander she had always known. All indecisiveness had vanished. There were things to be done and, at last, orders to be issued. Her only regret was Osserc’s absence. She imagined that he had fled after murdering Millick; fled thinking he was now an outlaw and almost certainly disowned by his father for the crime. The boy did not understand his father at all. But then, that baffled regard was mutual.
How could it be otherwise, with so much mud in the water between them? Mud and swirling currents, the endless, helpless stirring of silts so that nothing could ever come to rest.
But on this day, she had seen a dying old man and a heartbroken, guilt-ridden commander stand face to face, and make peace with each other.
They walked now, as would old friends, up to the house, and then disappeared inside.
Mother Dark, you have found a worthy husband here. A most worthy husband.
When she swung round to return to her horse, she looked up and saw, whipping hard in the breeze, the Legion’s banner, high above the gatehouse.
It was done.
Urusander’s Legion had returned to Kurald Galain.
Against the bright blue, cloudless sky, the banner was like a golden blade, torn from the sun itself. She squinted at it. Painters called that colour liossan.
In the wake of terrible fever, in a strange, warm stillness that filled her being, Renarr opened her eyes. She saw her father, and with him strangers. The twisted, damaged vision that had claimed her left eye was gone now, and everything seemed impossibly clear. Even the pain of her swollen face was fast fading.
Her father leaned closer. ‘Little girl,’ he said, his eyes wet. ‘Do you see who’s here? It’s Lord Urusander himself.’
Her gaze slipped past her father, to the man standing near, and in the Lord’s face she saw the son. Renarr looked away.
‘Changes, little girl,’ said Gurren, in a tone she’d never before heard from him. ‘In your whole world, Renarr. Changes, blessed changes.’
There was no denying that. Millick was dead. The man she loved was dead, murdered by the Lord’s son. And now here stood the Lord, and her father babbling about how they were going to live in the Great House, and how she would be taken care of from now on, and the Lord was smiling and nodding, and all she could think about was Millick, to whom she had told everything because he saw that she wasn’t the same any more — Millick, weeping and drunk and feebly trying to put her face back together, on his knees beside her telling her how his cousins had got the story of her confession out of him after a cask of ale, and how they laughed at him and called her a whore to his face, until he was driven to madness. Blind rage, he kept saying, trying to explain himself, how his fists just lashed out unseeing when she came upon him beating Eldin and Orult behind the house, how he punched not knowing whom he punched.
And how Witch Hale got her story all wrong, because Millick had gone in hiding from his cousins and their friends, and Renarr got fevered and had to crawl home in the middle of the night, and Renarr’s jaw was too swollen and she couldn’t get the right words past her broken mouth.
