Cutter was not a man known for being afraid. Any who had known him long ago would have said he feared nothing. That wasn’t true, though. He wasn’t afraid of dying as some men were, wasn’t afraid of pain, of swords or the Fey. What the man was afraid of wasn’t, had never been death—it was life.
The top of the chest was heavier than it should have been, heavier than it could have been, and it seemed to take all of his prodigious—once legendary—strength to lift it. A small creak of a dirty hinge. That was the only sound to announce his past as it came rushing back at him, rushing and rushing, him running from it, knowing that he could not outrun it, that it would catch him in the end, for there was nowhere to run to. Then, when it caught him, realizing that it had had him all along, and the freedom he might have imagined he felt no more than the feel of the wind whistling in a mouse’s ear as the cat tosses it in the air before inevitably closing its jaws around its prize.
Letters lay piled in the box. Dozens, hundreds of letters. A few—those crumpled and stained, the text faded from so much handling—written by others. A man, mostly, one who no longer existed. A man who, in his darker moments, Cutter thought might never have existed at all, had been no more real than a mask one might don one moment only to remove the next. The others, those freshly rolled, untouched, were written in his own hand. A hand that had sought to come to grips with the truth, to try to explain the unexplainable, one which had possessed the courage his own voice lacked, to write his answer to the many questions of his past, an answer he could not speak. In the end though, his hand, like his voice—like he himself—had failed.
He reached a tentative hand toward the letters, hesitating in this where, in the rest of his life and often to his great shame, he had never hesitated before. “No.” The words grated out of him, not consciously, but pulled out from a place he had tried to bury deep long ago. A place of blood and pain and memory. He jerked his hand away from the chest and its contents as if they were poison—and they were, of course. The problem was that the poison was already in him, had come even before the letters, and they were not the cause of that poisoning, merely a symptom of it. Sometimes—most times, in truth—he thought it had been with him upon his birth. Eating at him, not making him worse, really, but making him what he was, what he always had been.
He rose, turning away from the letters and moving toward where his thick fur cloak hung on the wall, one he had made himself. It, like everything else in his life, his past the greatest, he had gained from killing, had made from the deaths of others. He reached into one of the pockets lining the inside, pockets he himself had sewn, and withdrew the flint he found there. Then, before he could think better of it, before he could question his course, he strode back to the chest and knelt, striking the flint. In seconds, the contents of the chest were burning, the letters, the truths of his past, raging in their burning, filling the room with smoke.
If only a man’s past could be dealt with so easily. But a man does not burn his past—it burns him. Of all the truths the man knew, of all those his life had taught him, that was the greatest. He moved back to the fur cloak, pulled it on, and then turned away from the chest, from his home, stepping out into the heaving snow. He did not look back, for there was nothing to look back for. He carried it with him. Always.
***
He'd barely been walking for five minutes—could still see his house on the hill behind him, the great billowing plume of smoke rising from it—when he caught sight of the boy on the path. Thin and gangly, the way many young boys are when on the cusp of becoming men, but tall, nearly as tall as Cutter himself, and still with plenty of growing left in him.
“Cutter!” the boy yelled, his voice high with an excitement that told the flush in his cheeks was from more than just the biting cold.
Cutter came to a slow stop as the boy ran up to him. “Hey, did you hea—” The boy cut off, looking past him, frowning at the smoke. “Cutter, your house,” he said, stunned. “It’s on fire.”
“Sure,” Cutter agreed. All the houses of the village would be before long and what the difference?
“But…” the boy said, confused, but obviously trying for a calm to match Cutter’s own, a boy nearly a man but not quite, only playing at being one. “Well, what happened?”
Cutter met his eyes. “I set my house on fire.”
The boy nodded slowly, his expression serious, fighting to hold back his emotions but finally failing as all men must, a wide grin spreading on his face. “Did you hear? About the troops?”
“I heard.”
The boy was nodding again, excited. “I talked to a few of the other men—Bardic, Felmer, and Ned. We’re going to join up.”
Men. The word said with such ease, such pride, but the village of Brighton was small, and Cutter knew the names of all those who lived there, knew the three to be no more than children themselves, no older
