The dream, though, could not be left so easily, and despite the people staring at him as he walked—including a guardsman who frowned suspiciously at his lack of trousers—Chall found himself remembering it, found the vision replaying over and over in his mind. Dead men stepping into dead fields—couldn’t be much more of an obvious omen than that. The other men crouching in the tall dry grass, waiting for them, their blades ready.
He had seen the big man overcome incredible odds—impossible odds—but taking on fifty men, all of whom were armed and had the advantage of surprise? Even calling such odds impossible would have been far too optimistic. He told himself that it didn’t matter. The man’s problems were his own, had ceased to be Chall’s many years ago, and it would be the height of stupidity to make them his again. After all, what was the point of a man faking his own death and creating a new life for himself if he was wound up making the same mistakes he had the first time around? Better to make all new mistakes, better for the worst danger he faced to be an innkeeper’s hired tough instead of soldiers and Fey creatures with murder on their minds.
Besides, it wasn’t exactly as if it were a surprise that the man had people looking to kill him. It seemed he always did, certainly, he had in the past. Live a life like he had, and the only people you knew ended up being ghosts and those who wanted to make you one. Only made sense that, sooner or later—sooner, if the urgency the vision had made him feel were any clue—he’d be joining them. A city of the dead, one which he had populated himself with each swipe of his axe.
No, Chall told himself that the man’s fate was his own, that he didn’t care, just as he told himself that who the boy was and why he traveled with him made no difference. The problem, though, was that while Chall had always been good at lying, he—like a chef who despises his own cooking—had never been able to swallow his own lies. He had tried, of course, had tried for years and years so that, until the dream, he had been able to entertain the fantasy that he had even succeeded. But like the light shining on the innkeeper’s flesh—and his own, for that matter—there was one truth that could not be denied. Close scrutiny often reveals ugly truths.
“Shit,” he said for the third time since waking. Then he saw the guards—four of them now—approaching, and he sighed, holding up hands which had moments before been busy trying to wrangle and conceal his dangling bits. “Hi there,” Chall said as they walked up. “I’m looking for a place to rest. Tell me, do you know if the dungeons have any spare rooms?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The guests were eating and drinking, celebrating the treaty with the Fey.
That was when the Crimson Prince walked into the dining hall.
But it was not he—not even his blood-spattered clothes—which drew the gaze of everyone present.
Instead, it was the macabre bundle he carried before him.
A bloody, severed head. But not just any head. No, this was the head of the Fey king, Yeladrian.
The same Fey king which had granted us a place to stay here, in the Known Lands.
The same Yeladrian with whom Princes Bernard and Feledias had so recently signed a treaty.
That was how the Fey Wars began. With a bloody head in a dining hall.
—Exiled Historian to the Crown Petran Quinn
His hand ached. It was a strange feeling, that ache. Perhaps he had felt it before, surely he must have, but he didn’t remember it. And as he walked, the boy trudging along silently—though not so silently as to make his misery and disapproval unclear—Cutter realized that the ache wasn’t just in his hand but all the way up his arm. An uncomfortable ache. And there was something else, too, something that wasn’t just physical, something that the old him would have mocked. It was a stirring in his chest that he hadn’t been able to define at first and that, after some consideration, he thought must be guilt. Guilt and maybe shame at what he had done to the Fey creature.
He had thought he had left the man he had once been—the man whose rage had sought blood unending—behind him. He had thought himself scoured of any such feelings as anger or hate, joy or love, but then he had seen the creature changing behind the boy, showing its true self. He had known what it had intended, what it had meant to do, and the rage had come rushing back as if it had never left. And now he realized that perhaps it had not, had only been sleeping the way a bear might in the winter, waiting for when it would be roused to wakefulness once more.
He told himself that he had saved the boy’s life—which was true—told himself, also, that he had not enjoyed doing it, had done what he’d done only out of necessity, not for any sort of perverse pleasure. On that second part, though, he was uncertain, and it was that uncertainty which plagued his footsteps as he walked, which made him feel the boy’s sullen stare on him as an uncomfortable pressure when the him from the past would have laughed such a thing away as if of no consequence.
Foolish, he knew, to start caring about what people thought of him now. He was what he was. Perhaps he had been born to it or perhaps he had molded himself into the shape he now was over
