A Warrior's Burden: Book One of Saga of the Known Lands Read online

  It was cold inside. He had not bothered to set a fire when he returned, knowing that he would not be staying. Fifteen years he had lived here, yet now, looking around the small room with the simple, coarse mattress, and a table at which sat a single chair, the chest in the corner, it looked like a stranger’s home. It could have belonged to anyone or no one, a place that might have been abandoned years ago, the only proof of life a tin bowl sitting on the table where he’d yet to clean it. It would go uncleaned, that bowl, and he thought that was a shame. A small shame, really, in a day of great ones, but a shame nonetheless.

  He realized, gazing at that emptiness, that he was not even sure why he had come back. There was nothing here for him, not in this house and not in this village. There never had been. Nothing in life, either, as far as that went. Just emptiness and more of the same. But he could escape that emptiness easily enough. He could walk to the chair, could sit, perhaps clean the bowl. He could not fix the things he had done in his past, but the bowl he could fix. It was tempting, that thought, to sit and be at ease, to wait for the fate which had stalked him for fifteen years, the fate which he had earned many times over, to find him.

  Tempting, yes, but it, like the knife, was no more than a game. For as much as he might like the idea of having it all over, of letting it end, he knew he would not. There was still one reason to carry on, to fight. The boy. The same reason which had kept the knife’s edge at bay for the last fifteen years. Cutter let out a heavy sigh and moved toward the chest, kneeling before it. He reached for the latch then hesitated.

  He had reached for the latch many times over the years, had hesitated many times. But each time, he had taken his hand away, deciding that what secrets the chest held were best left locked away, hoping that by remaining so, they would also keep, hidden in the confines of the chest, the past from which they came. They hadn’t, though. Some pasts, some scars, never healed, not truly. But if he did not open it this time, there would be no other. For whatever happened, he knew that he would never see Brighton again. If, that was, it existed at all after the night’s work was done, and he doubted that very much.

  With a slowness borne not out of reverence but of nervousness, he removed the key he kept on a leather thong around his neck, fitting it into the lock. As he did, he entertained a brief hope that, after so many years, it would not fit, that the key or the lock or both would have degraded, rendering them unusable. But they had not, and the key fit as smoothly as it had when he’d purchased it and the chest so many years before. The key seemed to turn of its own accord, and soon—too soon, for he could feel his heart hammering in his chest now—the clasp fell away, and the lock tumbled onto the ground, the echo of its falling seeming to thunder through the small house.

  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 than the boy. “Join what?”

  “Why, the army, of course,” the boy said, nearly panting with his eagerness like a dog going for a bone, too caught up in the moment to realize what it took for a treat was actually a pale snake bathing in the sun, ready to bring the poison within it out into the world.

  Cutter realized he should have seen this coming. The boy had been talk
ing about being a soldier since he was old enough to swing a stick and yell “En guarde!” Not that anybody in battle ever yelled “En guarde.” It had been stupid then and it was stupid now. Cutter had learned long ago that sometimes children could get away with stupidity, but men rarely could. “Those soldiers aren’t coming to recruit, boy. They’re coming to kill and that only.”

  The boy was shaking his head before he was finished. “You’re wrong, Cutter. Felmer’s dad used to serve in the military during the Fey Wars, and he says that back before we won, there were times the king got desperate, sent troops as far out as Brighton to recruit.”

  “Felmer’s dad is a damned fool that couldn’t swing a sword if his life depended on it. The closest he ever came to a battlefield is the lies soldiers tell when they’re in their cups. Use your head, boy. Even if the king was recruiting—which he ain’t—what in the fuck would he worry about Brighton for? He’d make the trip for what, four boys too stupid to know they’re stupid, is that it?”

  The boy winced, clearly hurt by his words, but that was alright. Cutter had seen his fair share of wounds, had taken far more than his share. They always hurt, sure, and sometimes they killed but then, sometimes, they saved.

  “But Felmer’s dad said that we’re going to go to battle with the Fey again, that since we won the last war, they’ve been trying to—”

  “Won?” Cutter said. “Look around yourself, boy, used your damned eyes.” He gestured widely with a gloved hand at the village of Brighton in the distance. Even the word “village” seemed too fine a thing for such a place. A few thrown-together houses, covered in snow, the inhabitants milling about on the outside looking one bad day away from starving. “Does this look like winning to you?”

  But the boy wasn’t ready to give it up. Like so many of the young—like Cutter had once been himself—he believed he knew more about the world than anyone else, never mind that the only bit of it he’d ever seen, at least to remember, was this snowy, wasted landscape. “But we pushed them back, to the Black Wood, I mean. They say the Fey are too scared to come out now, and even you have to admit we haven’t seen any in years.”

  Cutter shook his head slowly, remembering something a friend of his had told him once, long ago. Sometimes, she’d said, walls built of ignorance prove the strongest. Until they don’t. Of course, he hadn’t listened then, and the boy didn’t seem ready to listen now. How could you explain to a child, only a year removed from chasing his friends around the village and throwing snow balls at each other, that the Fey didn’t feel fear, not the way men did? They didn’t think like men at all, and Cutter had seen more than a few men die for making the mistake of believing they did. “Listen, lad,” he said slowly, “do you trust me?”

  The boy hesitated then nodded. “Of course, Cutter, but—”

  “Then listen to what I’m tellin’ you and listen closely, ‘cause neither of us has the time for me to say it twice. Those men who are comin’, they aren’t comin’ to recruit anybody. They’re coming to burn, that’s all. To burn and to kill.”

  “But…why?” the boy said, his voice quiet now, losing some of his sureness, and that was good. Confidence could serve a man well, could be a shield against the world, but more often than not, it could also get him killed. “Why would they want to hurt us? We haven’t ever done anything to anybody.”

  His past threatened to rise up in his mind then, but Cutter pushed it back down. He’d had a lot of practice at it, after all. It never went down completely, not all the way, but it was enough. “Doesn’t matter why, only that they’re coming, and they’ll kill anyone they find here. Now, come on. We’ve got to go.”

  “Go?” the boy said, as if Cutter had just told him they needed to sprout wings and fly in the air like a bird. “Go where?”

  “West.”

  “You mean…toward the Black Wood? But…they say the Fey kill anyone that comes close.”

  That was true enough, but Cutter didn’t feel the need to say so. “You’ll die if you stay, boy,” he said simply. “We both will.”

  He could see the thoughts running through the boy’s mind, could see him thinking it over. Scared, yes, but excited too, the poor fool, excited by the prospect of venturing past the bounds of the village, of seeing the Black Wood and living to tell the tale. Of course, that last was almost always the problem, particularly when dealing with the Fey. “Okay,” the boy said finally, breathless. “Okay. But I’ve got to go get Momma, she—”

  “There’s no time,” Cutter said. “Besides, boy, you and I both know your mother wasn’t gonna make it the year whether these men came or not—it’s time to go. Now.”

  The boy looked at him shocked, as if seeing him for the first time, then he shook his head. “No, I won’t leave her. Look, we’ll…we’ll catch up to you, alright?”

  He turned to go, putting his back to Cutter, and that made it easy enough to withdraw the pan from his traveling sack—a heavy, dented thing, scarred with use, much like Cutter himself—and hit the boy in the head with it. Cutter might have spent nearly the last twenty years of his life living in the village, but the body remembers what it will, and it was a clean strike. The boy collapsed soundlessly on the snow.

  Cutter replaced the pan. He glanced once more at the direction the men would be coming from and imagined he could make out the faintest flicker of torches in the distance. Then he knelt and picked the boy up, throwing him over one shoulder and starting west, away from the village. He did not look back. After all, there was nothing to look back for, nothing behind him except pain, except blood and death, and he’d had his fill long ago.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What do I remember most about him?

  Hmm…maybe his strong jaw-line?

  Fine, fine, you’re serious but fire and salt what a question.

  Very well, what do I remember most?

  I remember that he did not stop. Not ever.

  Not for fear or mercy, not for pleas or pleasure.

  He never stopped.

  —Challadius “The Charmer” regarding Prince Bernard, commonly known as “The Crimson Prince” in interview with Exiled Historian to the Crown, Petran Quinn

  He walked for several hours, his unconscious burden held over one shoulder, watching the sun slowly lower over the horizon, watching the night approaching with all its dark promise. Then, he stopped, deciding that it would be good to get some rest. After all, they had a long way to go yet, the road stretched out before them, its twists and turns beyond sight, yet its destination in plain view as it was for all men who lived and breathed and one day would not.

  He set the boy down, then knelt in the blanket of snow and removed his pack from where it hung on his shoulder. He withdrew his bedroll and laid it on the snow that crunched beneath his feet. Then he put the boy on it, covering him as much as he could against the falling snow. He wanted to make a fire, but though they were hours from Brighton now, such a thing would have been foolish. And, more than that, it would have been impossible. There were no trees, not here, the miles between the village and the Black Wood nothing but a snow-blasted, featureless landscape stretching on as far as the eye could see.

  Instead, he withdrew the blankets from his pack and laid them across the boy’s unconscious form, save one which he laid out for himself. Then he sat, waiting, the snow falling around him in a soft curtain, no sound except that of his and the boy’s breaths pluming in the frigid air. And there was the wind, of course. The wind which swept drifts of snow across him, across the boy, like some mischievous child who finds enjoyment in cruelty, in adding despair to despair, stacking it on top of what was already there the same way the snow stacked itself around them, until there was nothing but the snow. Nothing but the despair.

  The boy roused himself after another hour, coming fully awake. It was a slow thing, the gentle stirring beneath the blankets, a soft, breathless yawn. Cutter watched him, that gentle moment of content confusion that so often follows a long, much needed sleep, watched the
contentment leave his face a moment later as his eyes opened and his memory returned.

  The boy jerked up, staring around at the featureless landscape. “W-where are we? Where’s Brighton?”

  “Gone, boy,” he said, and the tears which gathered in the youth’s eyes showed that he understood the full meaning of that all too well.

  “B-but, my mother,” the boy said, “I have to go save her—”

  He started up, and Cutter rose, catching his arm in a grip that could crush a man’s throat. A grip that had. “If you go back, you will die.”

  The boy’s eyes were filling with tears, and his face twisted with rage. “Let me go! I have to protect my mother, have to—”

  “She isn’t your mother.” The words were not said in anger, were not shouted in cruelty as they might have been, but they seemed to strike the boy hard for all that, and he stumbled, his eyes going wide.

  “What? What are you talking about, of course she’s my mo—”

  “Did you never wonder,” Cutter said, keeping his voice low and soft, the way a man might when dealing with a scared beast, “why her hair is dark and yours fair? Why she is short of stature and you tall?”

  “My father—” the boy began, but Cutter interrupted.

  “Was dark-haired too, and as short as your mother, if not more than. No, the woman who raised you is not your mother; she never was.”

  “You’re lying,” the boy said, but Cutter could hear the uncertainty in his voice. It wasn’t that the truth was often hard to know, when a man saw it—it was simply that more often than not, he didn’t want to. Still, whatever he was, the boy was no fool, at least no more than others his age, and as he sat there, frowning, thinking, Cutter saw the realization suddenly come to him. But when the youth looked at him once more, there was an angry expression on his face. “W-what do you know of it, anyway?”