There were shouts from nearby. Close. Likely, they’d heard their comrade’s shout and would be coming to investigate. It was enough to pull him from his dark imaginings, enough to bring him back to the present. He would die here, that much he knew, but each moment these men spent chasing him was a moment they would not spend hurting Matt or the others. Another moment where his companions, his friends might make it away.
And so, he took a brief moment to pause and wipe the blade of his axe clean on the young man’s jerkin. No time for sentiment in war, no place for it even if there had been, and the blood would dull the edge of the blade, an edge he’d be using again before he was through.
With that done, he replaced the axe in the sling at his back, and then he was moving again, not away from those men who approached, not this time. There was no hope in running, and he had never been a good runner anyway. He would buy his companions the time he could, but he would do it by doing the thing he was best at, perhaps the only thing he had ever been good at.
He would kill. As many of them as he could. And then, in time, he would die. And with the course his life had taken, he found that the thought was not a very bad one.
***
They were all whispering in hushed, frightened tones, huddled in little frightened groups making scared, frightened faces. Hundreds of people—the entire village, Netty supposed—or at least that part of it that had not been killed in the Fey assault. Hundreds of faces all of which she knew, the actors in her small, rural life. Small, rural, but, until the last few days, one she had never regretted.
Berden had been a large part of that. She had not been born to this way of life, this living on the fringes of things. Neither had he, of course, but he had always seemed a natural at it anyway, had, in fact, seemed a natural at anything he ever did. He had never boasted or bragged, her husband, but had simply gone about his life—and what seemed to her to be his inevitable successes—with a quiet dignity that spoke not of arrogance but of confidence in himself, in the world, too.
Berden, had he been here, would have known what to do with all of these people, looking so scared and so desperate. He’d always known what to do. Oh, sure, she’d given him grief enough, but then that was a wife’s job, just as it was a husband’s to try his level best to drive that wife insane. But she’d loved him, loved him even after more than thirty years. And in the end, when he was gone, after some creature that should never have existed in a right world—though only a fool might claim it as such—had taken him from her, she had realized that he had not just been her husband. Or, at least, that was the least of what he had been. He had been her rock. Her proof that the world was not so terrible after all. He had been her world.
And now that he was gone, she felt empty, scoured out and used up. Useless. Oh, come off it, Netty, she told herself. What would Berden say, he could see you now, whining and bemoaning your lot? After all, you ain’t the one got killed in the night before you even managed to get out of bed. And the thing was, that if he were here, Berden would not have said anything. Or at least, what he would have said would not come from a place of anger or disgust, nor even annoyance. He would speak softly, kindly, truthfully, and she would, inevitably, find herself comforted and annoyed all at once. That was Berden. It was why so many of the people in the village had come to the inn so often. They had come for the ale, of course, and for the companionship with their fellow villagers. But they had also come for Berden.
But she was not Berden, and while he might have been chock full of wisdom—she’d always joked he was chock full of shit, but she could tell the truth now, if only to herself—she thought her own life had largely been a succession of one confusing situation after another, all of which she had no damned idea what to do with. And this, with the crying children and their silently sobbing parents, was no exception. She was not the person to lead them, to comfort them. In fact, she figured there were probably thousands of people in the world better suited to the task, just so long as they had a heartbeat.
But no one was stepping forward to take up the task, that much was sure, and yet it was still a task that needed doing. Maybe she wasn’t Berden, but she’d known him long enough to know what he would say to that—when a thing needs doin’, there’s no greater comfort than gettin’ started. She was not Berden, but what she was,
