His Own Good Sword (The Cymeriad #1) (18 page)

“Are you able to help, sir?”

“I can help.”

“If you can hold the wound, sir, I’ll cauterize it, try
to stop the bleeding.”

He went to the table wordlessly, turning up the sleeves of his tunic.
He put his hands against the unconscious man’s belly for
pressure, clenching his jaw, not looking at the wound. He looked at
the man’s face. His own fault, all of this—his own fault
if this man died. He might have prevented it easily enough. He might
have dealt with Mægo, as duty required, and prevented this. But
this was the choice he’d made, and these were the consequences.
He’d known it would be like this.

Let him live, he thought. Please, God, let him live—let him
live, let this war be finished for all of us. Let the Cesini have
this place, even, I don’t care. Does it really matter? Does it
matter to Berion in Choiro? Some farmers’ huts and wet black
earth. I think it’s just pride. I think it’s just the
Berioni still remember how they lost this land to Anien Varro four
hundred years ago. Stung pride, nothing more. Let the Cesini have the
place. Let them have this place, let this war be finished.

But most likely it’ll never be finished. You can run from it,
or you can ignore it like they do in Rien and Vessy and Choiro, but
it’ll never be finished. It’s gone on too long and it’s
part of us now.

The surgeon was heating his cautery over the fire kindled on the
small brick hearth at the far end of the room, and when the round,
flattened end of the rod was glowing red-hot he brought it over and
applied it quickly to the wound. Tyren didn’t watch. He kept
his eyes on the man’s face, his stomach knotting a little at
the smell of burning flesh. Then it was done and he took his hands
away and looked down at the freshly sealed tissue of the wound. The
bleeding had stopped. But the surgeon swore under his breath and
dropped the cautery and pressed the fingers of his right hand into
the side of the guardsman’s neck, under the jaw, bending down
his ear to listen for the heartbeat.

There was silence a little while.

“Dead?” Tyren said, at length, though he knew the answer
already.

The surgeon straightened, slowly. He looked up. His voice was flat
with exhaustion. “He’d bled too long. I’m sorry,
sir.”

Tyren nodded. He didn’t say anything else. There was a sickness
inside him. He pushed it down, turned away from the table. He washed
the blood from his hands and went back out into the yard.

Aino’s men were still working to save the storehouses. It was a
useless endeavor. The blaze had eaten its way into the grain stores
now, had grown suddenly stronger, and the fierce heat of it was
spreading out in oily waves across the yard. There was a ripping
sound all at once and Tyren watched, with a kind of numb fascination,
while the face of one of the storerooms broke away and fell forward
into the yard, the flames leaping out through the opening when it had
gone. He saw Aino heading back towards the gate with an empty pail in
his hands. He went over to him through the smoke and the hot drifting
ash.

“Aino,” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

“Let it go. No use wasting any more effort there. All we can do
now is make sure it doesn’t spread.”

“Yes, sir,” said Aino.

So they let the storehouses burn. He stood against the corner of the
infirmary, his arms folded against his ribs, and he watched the
burning with the sickness settled deep in his heart, an aching
tightness sunk between his shoulder-blades. You might have sent some
word, Muryn, he thought, suddenly bitter. You might have sent and
given some warning. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask. At the
least you might have done that.

But the bitterness died quickly as it had come. The thing was his own
doing—his fault, his responsibility, the weight of the guilt
his alone to bear. No good lashing out at the priest. He’d
known it would be this way. It was going to be this way from the
moment he’d seen Mægo Sarre lying there senseless on the
ground and had chosen not to raise a hand against him. Cowardice to
disown that now.

X

It rained in the early morning, long and steady and soaking, washing
away any chance they might have had to track the rebels up into the
hills. The dawn came late and it was cold, gray, comfortless. He
stood with Verio and Aino, the rest of the men standing in rank,
while they buried the three guardsmen in the wet black earth behind
the fort—the same ground where, earlier, they’d buried
Sælo and the man they’d lost in the Outland. Afterward,
while the men got to work under Aino’s supervision clearing
away the smoldering ruins of the storehouses and repairing that
stretch of the south-facing wall, he sat at his desk and wrote the
letters to the families—brief, cold, empty, meaningless
letters. They couldn’t know the truth, that he’d let this
happen when he might have prevented it, because how are you supposed
to explain that? There was no way to explain it sufficiently, no way
to justify it to them, even if he could justify it in his own
head—and suddenly he wasn’t even sure he could do that.
It had seemed simple enough before. With his men dead in the ground
it became harder.

But he’d the practical things to think about now: the food
stores, most urgently, and materials for rebuilding. And so, when
he’d finished with the letters and his report, and had
dispatched a rider to Rien, he went again with Verio to the hall of
the Magryni.

The young Magryn was silent and sullen this day as he’d been
the last and Tyren directed his words mainly to the woman.

“I’ve written out the agreement already, Lady Magryn. You
can see you’ll be well-compensated.”

She toyed with the silver bracelets on her arms, pretending
carelessness, while she looked over the papyrus sheet he’d put
down on the table in front of her. “Yes, it’s
satisfactory,” she said.

“Does the lord Magryn find it satisfactory?” said Tyren.

The young Magryn looked up to him quickly, as though startled. Then
he looked to his mother. She bowed her head to him, cheeks reddening
a little. She took her hands away from the papyrus and leaned back in
her chair. He reached for the papyrus slowly, pulling it over with
his fingertips until it was directly before him. He read it for
himself, his gray eyes moving steadily back and forth as he read, his
face blank.

“It’s satisfactory,” he said, finally. He pushed it
away and didn’t look at it again.

“You’ll sign it, then?” said Tyren.

The boy made no move for a moment. There was an odd, twisted look in
his face suddenly, as if he’d just swallowed something vile.
The muscles in his jaw twitched. He lifted his shoulders in a quick,
stiff shrug.

“Your people will take the grain whether I sign your agreement
or not, Commander. I don’t see my signature makes a
difference.”

Verio half rose from his chair, looking quickly to Tyren, but Tyren
shook his head once, tightly. Lady Magryn said, in a low, urgent
voice, “Ryn.”

The boy stood all at once, pushing back his chair with such force it
squealed on the flag-stone floor. He went out from the room without
another word, stumbling in his haste, steadying himself with a hand
on the wall. There was silence for a little while after he’d
gone. Then the woman spoke to Tyren hurriedly, stammering.

“Forgive him, Commander Risto. I’m sure—if I speak
with him—I’m sure he’ll agree to sign it. Let me
speak with him.”

“I’ll wait,” said Tyren. He said it in a bored
voice, to show it didn’t much matter to him, but his thoughts
were racing. So Magryn’s son wasn’t eager to pledge
himself to the Empire. Mægo had made an impression there.

When they were alone Verio took his seat again very slowly. “You’ll
do nothing about that, sir?”

“He’s been Lord Magryn less than a month, and he saw his
father murdered before his eyes, murdered for collaborating with us.
I’m willing to show him some patience, Lieutenant.”

“The woman would be easier to deal with, sir—less of a
risk.”

“She means nothing. She has no real authority here.”

Verio lifted his shoulders.

“If the boy were out of the way—” he said.

“No,” said Tyren.

“We can’t count on his loyalty, sir.”

“And if we kill him, Lieutenant, we’ll have the village
rising against us. They’ll remember their loyalty to the
Magryni quickly enough if we make a martyr of him. We can’t
afford that now.”

Lady Magryn came back into the room with her son behind her. The
young Magryn’s face was flushed with anger and humiliation, his
gray eyes burning. There were bright red finger-marks on the skin of
his left cheek. He took care not to look at Tyren. He sat down
wordlessly at the table and pulled the papyrus to him again. Verio
set out a quill and an ink jar before him and he took the quill and
dipped it in the ink and signed his name at the bottom of the sheet,
very stiffly. Beside the signature Lady Magryn poured out a few drops
of blood-red wax from the clay bottle that had been warming on the
hearth, and Magryn put down the quill and stamped the wax with his
seal ring. Then he sat back in his chair, the fingers of his right
hand, which had held the quill, curling up and clenching into a fist,
his jaw tight.

Tyren took the papyrus and rolled it up and gave it to Verio.

“The Empire will remember your loyalty, Lord Magryn,” he
said.

Magryn flinched at the words. He stayed in his chair, staring across
the table at nothing, while Tyren and Verio went out from the room,
but Lady Magryn came quickly after them and said, “Commander
Risto, forget the boy’s foolishness. He’s still troubled
by what happened—by my husband’s death, lord. It made him
thoughtless a moment, that’s all. The Magryni will always be
loyal to the Empire.”

“I’m sure of that, Lady Magryn,” said Tyren.

But he didn’t think, in truth, the young Magryn was nearly so
weak-minded or thoughtless as the woman thought he was, or said he
was. No, he thought—no, the boy had known the meaning of his
words well enough, surely had known what the consequences might be,
and had spoken anyway. Foolish, maybe. Foolish in the way Mægo
Sarre was foolish. But not weak. A grave mistake to think him weak.

* * *

He unsaddled Risun himself when they got back to the fort. Afterward
he went to his office and sat down at his desk and took out the
inventory and the report Aino had made of the damage done to the
storehouses, but the surgeon interrupted him almost immediately.

“Sir, it’s the corporal.”

“Regaro?”

“I think the wound’s poisoned, sir.”

He repeated the word, stupidly. “Poisoned.”

“It’s an old Cesino practice to poison their blades,
their arrowheads—”

“The wound is poisoned, doctor, and you’re telling me
only now?”

The surgeon made a tight, helpless gesture with his hands. “The
poison—it must act only slowly, sir. Makes it harder to treat,
that way, maybe—I don’t know. There was no sign of it
until this morning.”

He went out to the infirmary, the surgeon coming quickly behind him.
Regaro lay in a feverish delirium on a woven-reed mat on the
infirmary floor, his eyes glazed, unseeing, his breath rattling in
his throat. The skin of the left shoulder, round the wound, was
mottled angrily red and white, puffy with infection.

Tyren looked down at him in silence a while.

He said, at length, between shut teeth, “It’ll kill him?”

The surgeon spoke impatiently. “I don’t know the cure,
sir. Maybe there is no cure. I don’t know. I’m an army
surgeon, Commander, not a physician. This is beyond my knowledge.”

Tyren said nothing. There was hot, senseless anger inside him all at
once, thick in his throat—anger at the surgeon, his stupidity,
his helplessness, anger the fool hadn’t seen this earlier, that
he’d let Regaro die as he’d let the guardsman die.

He turned on his heel and went out into the yard without another word
to the surgeon. Aino was still in the yard, overseeing the work on
the wall. Tyren went to him and took him roughly aside by one elbow.

“The Nyri, Corporal. Do you know them?”

Aino didn’t answer right away. Tyren could tell he was taken
aback; there was uncertainty in his face, a startled sharpness in his
gray eyes. But he said, finally, in a quiet voice, “Yes, sir, I
know them.”

“I want you to bring the girl here. The healer. Maryna. I want
you to bring her to me, do you understand?”

Aino looked him over quickly, carefully. But he asked no questions.
He bowed his head, after another moment’s hesitation, and said
“Yes, sir,” and went at a run to take a horse from the
stable.

He waited in his office for Aino to return, and the keen edge of his
anger dulled a little while he waited. A rash thing to do, sending
for her, bringing her here. Too rash, maybe; the men would ask
questions, spread rumors. But what else could he do? He couldn’t
sit here idly and let Regaro die. It wouldn’t be the surgeon’s
fault if Regaro died.

Aino was back within the hour. He came to the open doorway of the
office and saluted and stood wordlessly aside so the girl could come
in.

She stood stiffly just inside the doorway, waiting, saying nothing,
watching him with flat eyes, her arms at her sides, her bony chin up,
her sun-browned face hard as stone, her lips pale and tight. She’d
been in the fields; there were stray stalks of grass still clinging
to her skirt, black Cesino earth staining her hands and her slim
brown sandaled feet.

Tyren stood up from his chair and went round the desk to her. “Come
with me,” he said.

Inside the infirmary he ordered the surgeon to leave them and then he
crouched down on his heels beside the mat where Regaro lay.

He said, over his shoulder, “Can you cure him?”

She came over slowly and he heard her let out her breath in a cold
little laugh. “This is what you wanted, Vareno?”