They are like men, then, and, like men, one thing, above all else, might be said of them—
Whatever else they are, they are deadly.
—Exiled Historian to the Crown Petran Quinn
Matt dreamed of fire. Fire and blood and smoke rising in great, dark churning pillars all around him. He dreamed of the sound of metal striking flesh. And the screams, of course. At first, he had no idea where he was, some hellish inferno where the attackers screeched like demons, swooping in on the villagers who ran and cried and begged. But no matter what they did, the men came for them, the sword came for them, and the answer to their pleas, to their cries of “Why? Why?” was always the same—blood.
All of it taking place around him but none of it touching him, so that he felt like a man who had bought a ticket to some demented show. And looking around, he began to see things he recognized. There, on the wall of a half-burned home, was a deep groove in the stone where he remembered himself and some friends trying to carve their initials but giving it up after seeing how long it would take. On his left, he could see the village’s single well, one his father, before he’d died, had helped repair and maintain. Countless other small, trivial things, enough to let him know where exactly he was, and that knowledge immediately brought regret.
Better to not know, better to think he had been cast headlong into some violent, terrible city of the damned and that those poor souls who suffered and died were strangers than to know them by name, to know the village—or what was left of it—by name. Better to be dead, he thought, than to witness Brighton burn.
He ran then, with no idea where he was going, only meaning to go away, to get away as quickly as possible, but his feet refused this simple command and, in time, he was standing twenty feet away from his own home, the home he had lived in his entire life. Standing there, looking at it—or, at least, what was left of it—fear gripped his heart in an icy fist. The door had been stoved in, but, perhaps kindly, the inside of the house was obscured by thick, roiling clouds of smoke and shattered debris. Was his mother in there somewhere? Was she lying in bed, weak and feeble as she had for the last year? If he walked inside, would she smile at him, the smile that lately seemed to cost so much? Or was she dead already? If he walked inside, would he find her body lying there, mutilated as the villagers’ had been? Broken and cast aside, the best thing in his world—perhaps the only really good thing—destroyed by the village’s attackers with no more thought than a man might give to swatting a mosquito?
He thought that maybe he would, was terrified that he would, and he decided he did not want to go into that house, dared not go. But again, his feet betrayed him, acting of their own accord, and the next thing he knew he found himself slowly walking toward the broken, burned shell that had once been his home but was that no longer. Walking and moaning at the same time, “No, no, please gods no,” over and over in a litany that offered no comfort, in a plea that went unanswered.
He thought that things could get no worse, was sinking into a pit of despair, one from which he thought he would never emerge, one from which he thought he would never want to.
Then he heard the voice.
A child’s voice, a girl’s by the sound, screaming for help. Not so uncommon, not in that hellish place, for there were many screams, many pleas, but somehow this one was clearer than the rest, cutting through the din the way the brutal winter winds sometimes whistled through the village, sounding almost alive. Or at least had whistled, for they would whistle through Brighton no more, and anyone happening by a week from now would find no more than the broken remnants of a place where people had once been born and lived their lives. Any such traveler, a year hence, might wonder what had happened to this place, might wonder at its name, but that name, along with the lives of those who had once lived there, would be lost to time, covered in it the way shrubs and stones might lie covered deep beneath a winter snowfall.
“Please, help me,” the voice called again, and finally Matt seemed to regain some semblance of control over his own body. He turned in the direction from which the voice had come, grateful for any reason, any means of avoiding what lay in his home, of what he might find there. He feared for a moment that his feet would turn back to the house again, but they did not, and soon he was walking, rushing past villager and attacker alike, all of whom ignored him, as he made his way toward that voice.
He climbed out of the cutout from where the great tree had fallen. Cutter, sat with his back propped against the trunk of a great tree, his eyes on the cutout and on Matt. Or, at least, they would have been had the man not been sleeping, his head sunk low on his chest. Even asleep, Matt was surprised by how intimidating the man seemed. That menace was not lessened by the fact that he was covered in snow and frost, frost which clung to his dark beard, his eyebrows and eyelashes, but was somehow instead enhanced by it. He was like some ancient warrior frozen in time but waiting for a moment when he would be woken once more to reap a bloody harvest.
The chill that went through Matt’s spine at that thought wasn’t just from the cold. He had once thought this man his friend,
