The man looked back to the eldest as if for support, but she stared at him impassively before turning back. “Our scouts have just returned. You were right—there’s a significant force coming to Brighton.”
She waited, as if she expected him to say something. When he did not speak, she went on. “They will be here in half a day, no more.”
He glanced up at the hole in the roof, made to allow the smoke of the fires out—a job at which it only partially succeeded—and saw the morning sky. “They will come at night,” he said.
“Is that so?” the sneering man said. “And just what do you know of it?”
Cutter glanced at him, saying nothing, letting the silence speak for him, for while he had his talents, words had never been one of them. After a time, he turned back to the eldest. “Their job will be easier at night. When everyone’s tired.”
The woman nodded slowly. “Perhaps, they don’t mean to hurt us,” she said, and although she controlled her features carefully, he heard the hope in her voice. “Perhaps they only come to ask questions.”
“Such men as this do not ask questions.”
She winced. “Then to recruit some of our young men, perhaps. After all, they have come before.”
He didn’t answer, didn’t bother telling her that they would not send so many, if they intended only to recruit. He did not tell her that those times of recruitment had been during the Fey War, a war which was—at least on the surface—now over. He did not tell her because she—like those others in the common house, with their pale faces and restless, fidgeting hands—knew the truth already.
Finally, she sighed. It was a weak, weary gesture, a world of meaning hidden within it. “Listen, Cutter…” She hesitated, as if unsure. Then, “We in Brighton are many things. We are resourceful, brave, and, I think, able to scrape out a living where few others would—or could. But we are not warriors. We are not soldiers.”
“No.”
She rubbed at her temples with a liver-spotted hand as if she felt a headache coming on. And, the man thought that was a damned shame. After all, a headache wasn’t the only—or anywhere near the worst—thing coming.
“What I mean…” she tried again, shaking her head as if annoyed at herself. “Look, I’ll be straight with you, Cutter. I don’t know your real name, and I’ve never asked. Since the day you showed up, I figured you wanted your privacy, and I did everything I could to make sure you had it. So when you killed that boar that attacked one of the younglings, and folks started callin’ you Cutter, I figured that’d do fine for me. Shit, it still does. But only…what I mean is that it’s clear you know somethin’ of fightin’. More’n the rest of us anyway. Stones and starlight, a body only has to look at those damned arms and shoulders of yours to know as much. So, I thought I’d ask if—”
“I’m not that man anymore.”
The woman opened her mouth as if to speak, as if to argue, but finally closed it again and gave a single nod.
“Not that man,” the sneering elder hissed from the other side of the table. “I doubt you ever were. Folks walkin’ around actin’ like you’re some demon on account of you got a lucky swing in with an axe and split a pig in two. Well, you might have them fooled, but some of us ain’t as easy as others. You ask me, they ought to call you coward.”
There had been a time when the man he’d been would never have stood to be called such things, where he would have settled the matter in blood. But that had been a long time ago, and he was that man no longer, so he only gave a slight shrug of his fur-covered shoulders.
“Cutter, indeed,” the man hissed.
“That’s enough, Telster,” one of the other elders, a stick-thin man with long, stringy gray hair and a quaver in his voice said. “There’s no call—”
“You ask me there’s more than enough call,” Telster spat. “We been plenty good to this coward here,” he went on, throwing the word at him again as if the second might wound where the first had not, “gave him a place to stay, ain’t asked nothin’ of him, and now—”
“Enough.” This from the eldest, and Telster scowled but relented, scrunching his shoulders and glaring at the man called Cutter with eyes that said he wished for nothing more but to see him dead. The problem, though, that Cutter could have told him had he asked, was that wishing accomplished nothing. He knew that better than most.
“Everyone out,” the eldest said.
All the elders turned to look at her with surprise, each beginning to protest, each cutting off when she raised one of her frail, liver-spotted hands. “Out,” she said again. “I need a moment alone with Cutter.”
They filed out, Telster sneering as if he’d like to see him killed, the rest hopeful as if they thought he might save them. They would all be disappointed. Many had tried to kill him in his life—human and Fey and worse—and none had succeeded so far, no matter how much he might have wished they had. And as for helping…well, he was not that man, had never been, and even if he had it would have made no difference. What was coming was far too much for any one man to stand against.
Eventually, they were all gone, the last closing the door behind them, and he was left alone with the leader of Brighton. She still sat at the center of the table, watching him. Finally, she spoke. “You are sure that there’s no way to get the villagers to safety?”
He shook his head. “They’d catch you. Once you’ve seen them, it’s too late.”
“Yet you will run anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Will you take the boy with you?”
He felt his eyebrow twitch at
