Cutter replaced the pan. He glanced once more at the direction the men would be coming from and imagined he could make out the faintest flicker of torches in the distance. Then he knelt and picked the boy up, throwing him over one shoulder and starting west, away from the village. He did not look back. After all, there was nothing to look back for, nothing behind him except pain, except blood and death, and he’d had his fill long ago.
CHAPTER FOUR
What do I remember most about him?
Hmm…maybe his strong jaw-line?
Fine, fine, you’re serious but fire and salt what a question.
Very well, what do I remember most?
I remember that he did not stop. Not ever.
Not for fear or mercy, not for pleas or pleasure.
He never stopped.
—Challadius “The Charmer” regarding Prince Bernard, commonly known as “The Crimson Prince” in interview with Exiled Historian to the Crown, Petran Quinn
He walked for several hours, his unconscious burden held over one shoulder, watching the sun slowly lower over the horizon, watching the night approaching with all its dark promise. Then, he stopped, deciding that it would be good to get some rest. After all, they had a long way to go yet, the road stretched out before them, its twists and turns beyond sight, yet its destination in plain view as it was for all men who lived and breathed and one day would not.
He set the boy down, then knelt in the blanket of snow and removed his pack from where it hung on his shoulder. He withdrew his bedroll and laid it on the snow that crunched beneath his feet. Then he put the boy on it, covering him as much as he could against the falling snow. He wanted to make a fire, but though they were hours from Brighton now, such a thing would have been foolish. And, more than that, it would have been impossible. There were no trees, not here, the miles between the village and the Black Wood nothing but a snow-blasted, featureless landscape stretching on as far as the eye could see.
Instead, he withdrew the blankets from his pack and laid them across the boy’s unconscious form, save one which he laid out for himself. Then he sat, waiting, the snow falling around him in a soft curtain, no sound except that of his and the boy’s breaths pluming in the frigid air. And there was the wind, of course. The wind which swept drifts of snow across him, across the boy, like some mischievous child who finds enjoyment in cruelty, in adding despair to despair, stacking it on top of what was already there the same way the snow stacked itself around them, until there was nothing but the snow. Nothing but the despair.
The boy roused himself after another hour, coming fully awake. It was a slow thing, the gentle stirring beneath the blankets, a soft, breathless yawn. Cutter watched him, that gentle moment of content confusion that so often follows a long, much needed sleep, watched the contentment leave his face a moment later as his eyes opened and his memory returned.
The boy jerked up, staring around at the featureless landscape. “W-where are we? Where’s Brighton?”
“Gone, boy,” he said, and the tears which gathered in the youth’s eyes showed that he understood the full meaning of that all too well.
“B-but, my mother,” the boy said, “I have to go save her—”
He started up, and Cutter rose, catching his arm in a grip that could crush a man’s throat. A grip that had. “If you go back, you will die.”
The boy’s eyes were filling with tears, and his face twisted with rage. “Let me go! I have to protect my mother, have to—”
“She isn’t your mother.” The words were not said in anger, were not shouted in cruelty as they might have been, but they seemed to strike the boy hard for all that, and he stumbled, his eyes going wide.
“What? What are you talking about, of course she’s my mo—”
“Did you never wonder,” Cutter said, keeping his voice low and soft, the way a man might when dealing with a scared beast, “why her hair is dark and yours fair? Why she is short of stature and you tall?”
“My father—” the boy began, but Cutter interrupted.
“Was dark-haired too, and as short as your mother, if not more than. No, the woman who raised you is not your mother; she never was.”
“You’re lying,” the boy said, but Cutter could hear the uncertainty in his voice. It wasn’t that the truth was often hard to know, when a man saw it—it was simply that more often than not, he didn’t want to. Still, whatever he was, the boy was no fool, at least no more than others his age, and as he sat there, frowning, thinking, Cutter saw the realization suddenly come to him. But when the youth looked at him once more, there was an angry expression on his face. “W-what do you know of it, anyway?”
Cutter shrugged, shifting his massive shoulders. “Some. I was the one who gave you to her.”
The boy swallowed hard at that. “Gave me,” he repeated, the tears rolling their way down his cheeks now. “Like I’m a dog.”
“Yes,” Cutter said. “And I paid her to take you in, to raise you.”
The boy recoiled at that, wounded and hurt. Cutter did not like telling it, especially since that last part was a lie, but if he was to have any hope of saving the boy they had to get moving soon, and he couldn’t afford to knock him out or chase him down every time he took it in mind to play at being a hero. A lie, yes, but it would make the boy hate the woman who’d served as his mother, the woman who’d taken him in gladly, her husband too, not to be paid but
