Gallow (72 page)

‘Marroc!’ he shouted. ‘Cithjan is dead! The Marroc attack! To arms! The Marroc have come up the mountain! The Marroc of the Crackmarsh!’ Anything to add to the confusion. The Lhosir were stirring anyway, woken by the sounds of fighting and the shouts and now the horns blowing from the centre of the camp. The more they milled around the better. With a spurt of speed he caught the last Lhosir and pulled alongside. ‘Hello!’ he said.

The Lhosir glanced at him, face set and determined. A flicker of confusion crossed his eyes before Tolvis elbowed him hard in the ribs and, as the Lhosir stumbled, stuck out his leg and sent him sprawling in the snow. The Marroc was at the front now, running with purpose up the slope through the fringe of the Lhosir camp and towards the silhouette of Witches’ Reach. Tolvis caught up with Gallow and Arda and took her other hand. ‘Truesword, when I said I’d create a distraction, what I meant . . . Oh, never mind.’ He kept his breath for running.

Gallow pulled Arda after him. For all Loudmouth’s shouts about the Marroc and Cithjan being dead, the Lhosir weren’t stupid. Some of them would give chase if only to see what the chase was for. And he and Tolvis might outrun Lhosir soldiers freshly roused from their beds but neither Arda nor Oribas had legs for the long chase. Although at least whoever was running ahead – and who else could it be if it wasn’t the Aulian? – looked as though he knew where he was going, fast and full of purpose.

‘Truesword, when I said I’d create a distraction . . .’ Tolvis took Arda’s other hand and for a moment the three of them were running abreast, Gallow and Tolvis almost pulling Arda through the air. Behind them more Lhosir gave chase. Gallow had no idea why they were heading for Witches’ Reach but it was maybe half a mile away and up a steady slope from the camp. The Lhosir would catch them first.

‘Tolvis, look after Arda!’ he said. He let go of her hand and fell back. He wouldn’t have to slow the Lhosir too long for Arda to make it to the tower. What Oribas meant to do when he got there Gallow had no idea, but he was Oribas and he always had a plan, and Gallow trusted him for that.

As the first Lhosir caught up, he slowed, coming at Gallow cautiously, peering past at the fleeing figures.

‘And who are you?’ Gallow asked.

The Lhosir’s eye snapped back. He saw where Gallow’s beard was missing and his stare hardened. ‘
Nioingr
.’ He nodded. ‘Hrek Sharpfoot. And I mean to kill you, Foxbeard.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’ Gallow charged and Hrek Sharpfoot charged him back, but Gallow had the slope in his favour and he was the heavier. They smashed into one another and Gallow kept on going, bull-rushing Sharpfoot back down the slope until he stumbled and fell and almost took Gallow with him. The next two Lhosir were on them now, slowing. Gallow bellowed a battle cry and waved his axe and then turned and ran again. A few dozen heartbeats, that was all he’d given Tolvis and Arda. It wasn’t enough, not this time, but he’d do it again and again until it was. Until Arda was safe.

Tolvis ran in the wake of the Marroc, who didn’t seem interested in waiting for anyone. Arda pulled her hand away. When he glanced sideways at her, she was looking back at him. ‘Don’t let him die,’ she gasped. ‘Not now. Not again.’

Tolvis nodded. He turned at once, mostly so she wouldn’t see the pain her words caused him. That answered that then.

‘Go, Gallow,’ he cried as Gallow reached him. ‘Be with her.’ But Gallow only slowed. Tolvis swore at him. ‘I said be with her, you wooden-skull!’ But Gallow shook his head.

‘There’s no door to hold shut, Loudmouth. This time we face our enemies together.’

Arda glanced back once and only once and her heart beat hard and fast because they were both as stupid as each other and yet she loved them both in their own very different ways, one as the father of her children and the most fierce and unexpected soulmate, the other as a kind and tender friend and sometimes more, and now they were both going to get killed because a part of each of them was the same stubborn pig-headed idiot. She might have cried, but life was a hard thing and she’d seen her share of horror, and so she’d save her tears for later when she was somewhere she could spare some time for them. She ran after the stranger in front of her, abandoned to him by the men she knew, but she’d seen him kill forkbeards and so she took him for a friend. Shouts reached her from behind. The clash of swords. She didn’t dare look back. Didn’t dare because she owed it to them to run as hard and fast as she could. They were buying her seconds. Buying them with their lives.

‘Achista!’ screamed the Marroc in front. He was a good way ahead of her now, racing for the tower of Witches’ Reach. She remembered seeing that tower for the first time, looking over the Varyxhun Road not far past the heights of the Aulian Bridge over the Isset. Fenaric the carter had brought her here. She tried not to think about that too much. Maybe she’d never know whether what she’d done had been stupid or right, taking the blame for Nadric’s moment of madness. It had probably saved Nadric’s life and maybe Fenaric’s too, but it had driven Gallow away and in time she’d regretted that more than anything. ‘Achista! Marroc! Lower the ladders!’ Last she’d heard, Witches’ Reach had been full of forkbeards.

Torches appeared on the walls. She was tiring. The Lhosir behind her were getting closer despite Gallow and Tolvis. She heard their shouts, both of them. They felt sharp inside her.

The gates to the Reach didn’t open but a ladder came over the wall. The Marroc in front of her reached it and started to climb. Arda couldn’t help herself: she let out a low wail. A ladder! Someone would have to stand at the bottom and hold the forkbeards off while the others climbed. Whoever did that would have no chance to climb it themselves.
No. No no.
Not Gallow, not after he’d come back after so many years, yet she couldn’t bring herself to want it to be Tolvis either.
Do I have to choose?
But no, she didn’t. She didn’t ever get to choose. The men would do the choosing. And most likely, since they were cut from the same idiot cloth, they’d choose to stand together and she’d lose them both.

She reached the ladder and started up. The Marroc was standing at the top. As he reached to haul her up, he stared at her in horror. ‘Who are you? You’re not Oribas!’ He looked aghast.

Arda grabbed his shirt and pointed at Tolvis and Gallow running towards the wall with a dozen Lhosir behind them. ‘Help them!’

Another Marroc woman pushed along the wall. ‘Addic! Where’s Oribas?’ A look went between the two. The woman’s face turned ashen and then a tight mask of fury settled on it. ‘Archers! Kill the forkbeards.’

A rain of arrows flew from the wall at the Lhosir, at Gallow and Tolvis and the forkbeards chasing them alike. Arda screamed at the archers, ‘Not the two at the front! Not the two at the front!’ The forkbeards kept on coming though, all of them, right up to the walls. Gallow was first. He dropped his broken shield and threw himself at the ladder, pulling with his arms. The Marroc on the walls kept loosing arrows, mostly at the chasing forkbeards but not all. One arrow hit Gallow on the head, bouncing off his helm and almost knocking him off the ladder. Two or three flashed past Tolvis.

Gallow screamed up at them, ‘Friend! Friend!’ and the Marroc who’d led them here roared at the archers to let him climb. More arrows flew into the onrushing forkbeards below. One fell and then another and the rest slowed, crouching behind their shields. Gallow reached the top. Arda wanted to rush to him but Tolvis was at the ladder now and Gallow was leaning over, urging him on.

Another forkbeard fell. The edge of panic had gone from the Marroc on the wall and now they took their time, picking their targets carefully. As the first forkbeards ran at Tolvis to haul him off the ladder, a dozen shafts hit them, cutting down two and staggering the rest, making them cower behind their shields again; and then Tolvis was out of their reach and Gallow was pulling him over the wall and they were grinning at each other and grinning at Arda and she wanted to run over to embrace them both and bash their stupid heads together but she just couldn’t.

Instead she walked up to Gallow and brought her fist like a hammer down on his chest. ‘Where were you?’ There was a catch in her voice. She hit him again. ‘Where were you? Where? What were you thinking! That you could leave us for year after year and then just come back again?’ She had tears in her eyes and there was nothing she wanted more than to hold him and cry and laugh and perhaps hit him a few more times, but there was a wall inside her that wouldn’t let her, a wall that had never let her show him how she really felt. She stepped away and looked at Tolvis instead. Did what she always did when she was angry, turned away to someone else.

Tolvis had an arrow sticking out of his side. A Marroc arrow. His face was pale and gleamed with sweat in the starlight. Arda jumped. ‘Modris and Diaran!’

Loudmouth grimaced. ‘It’s going to hurt,’ he said, ‘but it’s not going to kill me.’ He turned her around and pushed her at Gallow. He took her hands and put them on Gallow’s shoulders. Panic started to burn inside her and she didn’t know what to do. Then Tolvis cracked his hand sharply across her buttocks and walked away, laughing. The shock paralysed her and for a moment the wall had a crack in it. Gallow wrapped his arms around her and she reached for him and they held each other close for a very long time, not saying a word.

‘Where’s Oribas?’ he asked as they finally pulled apart.

F
or most of the first hour after Gallow fled, Beyard stayed where he was, crouched beside the Lhosir campfire. He had no idea what it was that had burned him, nor who had thrown it in his face, but he wasn’t surprised when three Lhosir showed up dragging the Aulian between them. He had Cithjan’s men tie Oribas up and put him in a tent and watch him, constantly. He also had them empty his pockets and take away anything they didn’t understand and lock it up in Cithjan’s strongbox. For most of the morning that followed he contented himself dealing with Cithjan’s murder.

A message would go to King Medrin Sixfingers to say Cithjan had been killed while putting down a Marroc insurrection and that he, Beyard, had assumed command. He thought long and hard about what to say about how it had happened and what had led up to it but there was no pretending now. He’d been protecting Gallow ever since his old friend had returned. Not in any useful, meaningful way, but little things. Not telling Cithjan about Gallow when he’d taken Solace. Not calling him by his name outside the Devil’s Caves. Going alone to Middislet. Most of all, letting him go. A life for a life had seemed fair and due and fated to be, but Sixfingers would never see it that way and nor would Cithjan if he’d lived to hear of it. Even in Hrodicslet, not giving chase: time after time he’d held his hand but last night he’d meant it. A good fight, a fair fight, a fight to be remembered. A better end than Sixfingers would have given him. Last night he would have killed Gallow, and Gallow had understood and so he’d named himself in front of a thousand Lhosir.

And despite the pain that still burned his face, he was smiling because Truesword had escaped anyway and there was a part of him that was glad. Truesword. Now there was a thing. In Beyard’s thoughts Gallow had changed from being Gallow the Foxbeard to being Gallow Truesword again. He tried to remember where and how it had happened. In the bottom of the ravine.
I will not forget
. . .

He looked at the messenger he meant to send to Sixfingers. ‘Ask him on my behalf for a new governor. Tell him . . .’ Even now he hesitated. ‘Tell him that Gallow Truesword has returned with the red sword the Aulians call the Edge of Sorrows and the Marroc call Solace and the Comforter. I will send both to him together.’ Not that Gallow would be taken alive. He’d see to that.

After the messenger there was the matter of command. Beyard dealt with that by telling the Lhosir that he would be in charge until the Marroc of Witches’ Reach were crushed and responding to all objections with a malevolent silence. Cithjan had already sent half his force down to the Aulian Bridge to guard it against the outlaws and rebels in the Crackmarsh. He’d hoped the pleas from Witches’ Reach might lure them out to where he could slaughter them. Beyard supposed it was a good enough plan to follow, and it left him with five or six hundred Lhosir against a few score Marroc. Good enough. He told everyone to go and make ladders and a ram and whatever else they usually made when they were attacking a walled fortress, and then at last he went back to the Aulian. He’d put it off because it was the part of the day he was most looking forward to and also the part that made him afraid. He couldn’t remember being afraid since the Eyes of Time had given him his iron skin.

The Aulian was awake. Droopy-eyed and with a great lump on his temple, bruised and bloodied but awake.

‘Again, Aulian.’ Beyard sent the other Lhosir away, and when he and the Aulian were alone he took off his mask and his crown. He saw the Aulian’s eyes widen for a moment. ‘You were never meant to be sent to the Devil’s Caves.’ His voice was as dry as desert sand. ‘Cithjan should have let you go. Or kept you in the castle as his guest until the pass opened in the spring. I dare say there’s a great deal we could have learned from a man like you. How many Marroc are there in Witches’ Reach, Aulian?’

‘Sixty. Seventy. I didn’t count them exactly.’ The Aulian was terrified and was right to be. A Fateguard stood before him, an iron-made man, and the Lhosir were not known for kindness to their prisoners.

‘Food? Water?’

‘Whatever you Lhosir once stored there. I saw enough to know they have food for two or three months. Water? They have the snow. You won’t starve them out in a hurry.’

‘I never thought I would, Aulian. But I have to ask. What have they done to the gates?’

‘Piled up snow behind them and packed it tight. It is as good as placing a block of stone behind the doors.’

Beyard nodded. He tried to smile, a thing he was never very good at since the Eyes of Time had made him into what he was. ‘I would have let you go still, even after the Devil’s Caves. I suppose it was your doing to bring an avalanche down on us.’ The Aulian lowered his head, which was enough of an answer. ‘Cithjan underestimated how many Marroc were in the Reach. He sent a smaller force first. Not all of them died but I would like you to tell me, in your own words, how most of them did. I know you were there.’