Gallow (64 page)

‘Fat Jonnic got names out of the forkbeards, Valaric.’

‘I hope he doesn’t imagine I care. Unless one of them happens to be called Forkbeard Ghuldog-food, which I suppose would be funny.’

‘No.’ Shuffle shuffle.

‘Oh what, Sarvic,
what
?’

‘One of them said his name was Gallow. Gallow Truesword.’

Valaric shook his head. ‘That Gallow’s gone. Died in Andhun. But we can have some extra fun with whoever this forkbeard really is for that.’

‘Thing is, Mournful, Fat Jonnic says the Marroc family say the same. They say they’re
his
family. From Middislet.’

A numbness crept out from the inside of Valaric’s head and crawled across his face. He nodded. ‘Then, Sarvic, I think you’d better come too.’ He watched Sarvic go and slowly shook his head.
Gallow Truesword? Back from the dead?

T
he first Lhosir to come to Witches’ Reach didn’t come up the track from the Varyxhun Road the next morning, but the one after. There were twenty of them from the garrison at Issetbridge below the mouth of the valley. Oribas and Achista watched together as the Lhosir crossed the bridge and rode up the Varyxhun Road, long before they turned onto the track up to the Reach. Achista smiled and took his hand. ‘They’re coming for us. They’re coming to see.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just know.’

The Marroc moved quickly. By the time the Lhosir reached the fort the gates hung open, the fire pits were stamped out and the Marroc were hidden away, the tower seemingly abandoned, all to lure the Lhosir inside. And they came, but they walked into the trap with their eyes wide open, with two men on horses outside the gates and two more further down the trail, and when the Marroc surged out of their hiding places and cut the Lhosir down with their arrows and their axes, the riders on the trail both got away. Oribas found himself busy again, stitching up more holes in the Marroc who’d been hurt. That night he heard the gates open and he knew that Achista was taking Lhosir bodies down to the bridge again to leave them where they couldn’t be missed.

‘Perhaps we’ll have a day or two more before they come again,’ she said, but they didn’t.

By the middle of the next day, Addic had joined them from wherever he’d been with news that the forkbeards of Varyxhun were on the move. He’d watched them as long as he dared and then he’d ridden like the wind. They’d be at Witches’ Reach the next morning, some fifty or sixty of them and perhaps more coming on behind. More still once Cithjan heard what had happened to the forkbeards from Issetbridge. Addic wandered the fortress with Achista, along the walls and in and out of the sheds and the forge and the halls inside the tower to the kitchens and the cellars and the old Aulian tomb below. Oribas left them to it. He stared at the mountains, up the Isset gorge to the snow-covered peaks around Varyxhun and beyond to the old Aulian Way. It didn’t seem all that long ago that he’d thought Gallow dead and all he could think about was the spring and crossing back the way he’d come, away from all this cursed cold. Now? Now the thought simply wasn’t there any more. When he looked for it, he found it didn’t even make sense. There wasn’t anything waiting for him back in old Aulia. No family, no friends, no people. The Rakshasa had taken those years ago. He could name three people on the other side of the mountains that he might have called friends in a pinch, the other survivors of the great hunt; and when he’d left them behind to cross the mountains with Gallow it had seemed impossible that he wouldn’t come back, that they wouldn’t be a band together for ever, fearless and unstoppable, hunting down shadewalkers and things far worse and sending them to their rest. Now he saw all that for the illusion it was. He couldn’t imagine going back. He couldn’t even imagine seeing the spring. He’d bound himself to these Marroc without seeing it happen, and now all of them were doomed. Perhaps it was as much an illusion as the one he’d left behind but that didn’t matter. From where he was, it felt the most real thing in the world.

‘I think my sister is in love with you,’ said Addic quietly. The words were so in tune with his own thoughts that the Marroc’s silent arrival didn’t even make him flinch.

‘And I think I am in love with her,’ Oribas replied.

‘She’s not had eyes for a man for a while. There was a farmhand a couple of years back. A good man, I thought. They might have been married but the forkbeards killed him. After that I think she wedded her bow instead.’ Addic shook his head and then pulled a satchel off his shoulder. ‘I have something for you, Aulian.’ Oribas stared and then smiled. His satchel.
His
satchel. The one he thought he’d lost when the Lhosir had thrown him over the edge of the gorge back on the snowbound Aulian Way. ‘One of Brawlic’s men went and got it before the forkbeards killed him. I don’t know how he knew it was there. He must have overheard some talk, I suppose. He was probably in Varyxhun to sell it but I got to him first.’ He handed the satchel to Oribas, who looked inside. Someone had been through it, that was obvious, but everything that mattered was still there.

‘Thank you.’

Addic leaned over the tower walls and stared out at the gorge. ‘My sister wants to close the Aulian door so the forkbeards can’t come in as we did. She’d seal us in here.’

‘With me on the outside to open the door when she asks.’

‘But she won’t ask. And nor will I. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘What I mean to say, Aulian, is that we should make the very most of the days we have left, all of us. Make her happy. Make both of you happy. You have my blessing.’ He put an awkward hand on Oribas’s shoulder and walked away.

‘I had a thought. About the shaft and the way in through the caves . . .’ Oribas began, but Addic was already gone and his own thoughts were in too much turmoil. It was slowly dawning on him what Addic had meant. He stood and looked out over the river a while longer. The steep craggy sides of the gorge struck him as stern and majestic now instead of forbidding. The Aulian Bridge gleamed and the water sparkled in the bright winter sun. The Isset falls were a mile away and out of sight, but from the walls of Witches’ Reach Oribas could see beyond the sudden end of the mountains to the flat brownish haze that the Marroc said was the Crackmarsh, and to the shapes of the dales beyond and around it. He tried to imagine the hills and the mountains covered in lavish green and dappled with the colours of spring flowers. Strip away all this snow and he could see that the Varyxhun valley would be beautiful. Still too cold, though. He climbed down from the walls. The Marroc were none too keen on opening the gates to let him out and made no promises about letting him back in again, but there was always the cave and the old Aulian tomb for that.

It took him a while to walk down to the forest and the old forest camp and find what he was looking for. By the time he got back to Witches’ Reach, the sun was sinking. He found Achista among the wounded, bright-eyed as ever and listening to their stories, bringing them water and soup from the kitchen below. He watched her a while, marvelling at how she seemed to lift each one of them. It seemed a shame to ask her to stop and so he waited, simply looking at her until the sun kissed the hills outside. Then he touched her on the shoulder. ‘I have something important to show you,’ he said, and when she turned to smile at him, he led her away to the very top of the tower and its open roof. He pointed to the orange sun as it straddled the western mountains across the gorge.

‘I’m a stranger from a strange land.’ He took her hands in his. ‘It makes me sad that I know so little of the customs of your people. Where I come from there is a proper way to this. I have no doubt there is a proper way among your people too, one that’s different. I hope you understand. This is the Aulian way. One day you’ll teach me the Marroc way. I have three gifts for you.’ He let her hands go and forced himself to look at the sun and not at her. ‘The first is this sunset and the memory of it, for the sun is always the most radiant thing bar one in any life, and that one thing that eclipses it in mine is you. When the sun sinks beneath the horizon, I will remain bathed in the light of knowing you, of being beside you, of remembering you and of the possibilities you bring.’ He swallowed hard, knowing those possibilities were likely few and short, and knowing too that it no longer mattered. He reached into his satchel and drew out three of the blue flowers from the forest. ‘The second are these flowers.’ With delicate fingers he lifted off her helm and slipped one stalk over each ear and twined the last into her hair. ‘The left is for the past we shared. The right is for the future. The third is for what matters most of all, for the now.’ Last of all he offered her his gloves. He smiled and laughed. ‘In my own land I would have offered you the most exquisite silk, woven with patterns of gold and silver thread. All I have here are these, which I have worn for months and are old and battered. They have served me well. They’re a part of me. I offer them now to be a part of you. As I offer myself.’

He held out the gloves. Achista stared at them and then at him. Her eyes shone in the sunset. ‘I don’t understand, Oribas.’ She cocked her head.

‘I’m telling you, Achista of the Marroc, that I belong with you. And I’m asking whether you will belong with me, for the rest of our lives, however long or short they may be, whatever the dawn may bring. I’m asking you to become one with me, that we may both be the wings that the other may fly, that we might do together what neither of us could do alone, that, gods willing, we shall live long and bring great happiness to one another, that we shall raise sons and daughters together and watch them make us proud, that we shall herd our animals and grow our crops and work hard, side by side under the burning sun, and that we shall sleep softly in the same tent and hold one another in the cool hours of dark until we are old and grey and the gods call us away.’

Tears marked her cheeks. She looked away. ‘Oribas, no. Whatever the dawn may bring? You know the answer to that. Forkbeards. You’re not Marroc. I can’t ask you to stay. I don’t want you to stay.’ She looked back at him. ‘I want you to go. You have to close the seal and wait for—’

Oribas put a finger to her lips. ‘For the signal you’ll never give.’ He smiled and nodded. ‘I know. And I’ve thought about this long and hard today. I’ve watched you move among your kin. You bring a spark of hope to each and every one. I could never do that. Except for you. I’m not a fool, Achista. I know what awaits us. I’ve looked at the future. I’m a wizard, after all!’ He laughed but not for long. ‘If I leave, perhaps I will have a long life or perhaps not, but it will be one that is forever tarnished with regret. If my choice is between long dull empty years or one more day here with you then I will stay, and so I
will
stay, however you answer, and you cannot stop me. I will find means to make this tower impossible to enter, no matter how many forkbeards come, if that is what I must do to keep you. I would call down gods and raise up demons and fling fire from the sky if only I could find a way.’

He offered her the gloves a second time. ‘I have felt this fire once before. A demon destroyed my world. I gave my life to bringing about its end. The gods sent to me what I needed, and now they have sent me to you. My fire then was vengeance but now I have another that burns with a kinder flame. My heart is yours, Achista of the Marroc, and you cannot change that, for my heart belongs always to me and so is always mine to give as I choose.’

She closed her eyes and bowed her head. Her voice broke to a whisper. ‘I cannot ask you to stay, Oribas. I cannot.’

‘You can ask me to stay or you can ask me to leave or you can say nothing at all, but it will make no difference. I will stand with you to the end either way.’

‘You can’t even hold a sword!’ She shook her head, sobbing and laughing, smiling in a ring of tears.

Oribas reached a hand and lifted her chin so she was looking at him again. ‘But I can hold you.’

She fell into his arms and crushed him and he held her back, long and tight. He lifted her head and kissed her, and for a long time the sunset and the glory of the Isset gorge and the mountains around them faded into nothing. Oribas thought he saw Addic poke his head up onto the roof, but he vanished again, and suddenly it was dark and cold and the sun was long gone and stars speckled the sky, and Addic really was there this time.

‘Brother. I . . .’ Oribas watched her smile, and he was right: it was every bit as warm as the sun itself.

‘Diaran and Modris watch over both of you.’ Addic smiled back and beckoned them away, out of the cold, down through the belly of the tower, past the kitchens and the cellars to the old Aulian tomb where a brazier now burned beside a huge pile of furs that hadn’t been there before. ‘There’s little enough joy for us Marroc,’ he said, and he hugged Achista and then Oribas as well. ‘No one will trouble you here before sunrise.’

And no one did, though neither of them got much sleep that night, and it was well into the next morning before they were finally awoken after they fell asleep in each other’s arms amid a cocoon of fur. When Addic came down to them again, this time there was no sign of a smile on his face.

‘The forkbeards have come,’ he said.

G
allow opened his eyes. He was in a cave. Three Marroc stood looking at him. ‘Well,’ said the one who’d given him the worst of the kicking. The other two stared. The torchlight behind them made them into silhouettes. They were soldiers and that was all he could see.

‘That’s him.’ He didn’t know the second voice but he knew the one that came after it.

‘Gallow.’

Valaric.
Gallow hauled himself up to his hands and knees. ‘Need your horse shod or a new blade for your scythe, do you?’