She gave a sharp intake of breath and jerked away, studying him. Looking to see if he was lying, maybe. Not joking, for there were some names a man wouldn’t say, even in jest. He only watched her, expressionless, leaning back himself and letting her take her time. She rubbed a hand across her mouth, and her skin was pale, ashen. “I…thank you. For tellin’ me.”
But she didn’t, not really. He could see the truth of that in her eyes as he had seen it in others long ago. She wished she didn’t know, and he understood. He wished he didn’t, too.
He turned to go then, opening the door, the frigid wind striking him almost like a physical blow. It might have been the roar of that wind which made her voice sound so small, so afraid, but he didn’t think so. “Cutter?”
He glanced back at her. She had risen from the table. It should have made her look bigger, but it did not. She looked smaller. Afraid. “Good luck.”
He thought that some might have known the words to say then, words to set her at ease about what was coming, about what would happen, to lend her some strength she might use in the following hours. But if such words existed, he did not know them. He never had. For his had never been a way of peace but of war, and the only strength he knew was in the swinging of the axe, the only ease he’d ever felt that of victory, when his enemies lay low beneath him. He didn’t wish her luck. Luck didn’t factor into it, not anymore. They were coming, that was all, and with no doubt of what they would do once they arrived. Nothing to say then, so he said nothing at all, walking out into the heavy snow and shutting the door behind him. She did not follow.
CHAPTER THREE
I’ve heard the stories, the ones painting my brother as some…some psychopath.
Some mindless killer who bathes in the blood of his victims.
Lies, one and all. My brother is a warrior. A soldier.
And he does what he does not because he enjoys it.
He does it because he must.
—Prince Feledias in interview with Exiled Historian to the Crown, Petran Quinn
The village was busier, more alive than he’d ever seen it. He had seen similar from soldiers who, fearing their deaths in a battle, drank and laughed and lived as hard as they could for as long as they could. There was always an undercurrent to that laughter, one that made it seem as if it might turn into a scream at any moment, and there was always a desperation to the way they drank, the way they lived, as if life were a wash cloth that might be squeezed dry before its time.
But here, at least, there was no laughter, desperate or otherwise. Men and women rushed to and fro, all in a hurry—but some, it seemed to Cutter, having no idea what, exactly, they were in a hurry to do. Thinking only that they should be doing something, anything. He could have told them that it did not matter, that whatever they did, they would all be dead before the coming night gave way once more to the sun, but he did not. When death was certain, when one had nothing to look forward to but pain and loss, even vain hope was better than no hope at all.
Mothers and fathers fought each other to load their children onto the few carts the town had, hitching them up to the healthiest of horses. Which, Brighton being a snow village on the edges of civilization, weren’t particularly healthy. Life in the frozen wastes was hard for anyone, man or beast. Each year in the village stripped a little more of them away. At first, the stripping took only the dross—fat from the body, fat from the mind. All of it extra weight a man or woman dragged behind them through life, often not even aware of it. What was left, then, after a time, was no more than survival, muscle and sinew and bone. That was all.
But the stripping was never truly done. The world was not so kind that it ever stopped taking just because there was so little left to take. Like a greedy miser, it continued to rip and pull and tear, never satisfied with what it had taken, forgetting it, in truth, thinking only of what was left, of what else it might catch in its grip.
The horses, like the people around them, were products of such a stripping. Thin, poor things, as meager as the meals which sustained them. Beasts who may have journeyed to the freezing north fine and full of life, but ones that, over time, became pack animals and, when even such menial labor was beyond them, they were rewarded by being slaughtered and used for food, for in such a place as Brighton, when any wasting might lead to death, there was little room for sentiment.
Still, Cutter told himself that, perhaps, the children might make it away. A false hope, maybe, a vain one, but sometimes that was the only kind a man had. Besides, even those who came, cold and heartless as they were, were not animals. Or so he told himself.
A few of the villagers waved at him as he passed on his way back to his home, but not many. Fifteen years he had lived in this place—if living was the word, existing felt closer to the truth—and while he knew all their names, he did not know them.
