Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) (54 page)

“A scrape,” replied Aadore without flinching. “From rubble.”

She could not tell whether his face expressed disbelief behind the foggy windowpane of his mask. But apparently her explanation had been convincing enough, for the soldiers lowered their arms, and the Iron marshal waved the company ahead.

“You were scratched,” whispered Sean, as soon as they were a safe distance behind the soldiers who marched them through the camp. Although she’d made no mention of the injury, they’d all spied it after the fire had left her naked—but their breathless escape had left no time for questions. Sean realized that in her desperate push to reach civilization, she’d been trying to outrun the shadow of death. “How long ago?”

“Does it matter?” she muttered. “It’s healed. Let us not speak of it here.”

“You could have endangered us,” hissed Sean. Quickly his anger lost its battle with reason. As a prisoner, many times, he’d contemplated and accepted death, but on his own terms. Perhaps Aadore had only wished
the same freedom of choice in an untenable situation.
We shall speak of this elsewhere
, he decided.

One of the soldiers who escorted them proved more talkative than the others, and they began questioning him eagerly, curious about how it was that so many had survived. It turned out that some people, including a number of Ironguards, had been caught along the Iron Road when calamity befell Menos, and managed to flee. They had then spent some time wandering through the fog of death, which had spilled well past the Iron Wall, extending for spans and spans across the Fields of Canterbury and beyond. For a time, the land had heaved, spouting walls of fire and dribbling molten spit. But eventually, they, like the company, had caught sight of the white flicker of a flag and arrived at a makeshift camp established by advance guards from Eod. There, they were informed that an alliance had been forged between Eod and Menos. The Iron Queen had consented to overlook past wrongs in exchange for an offer of military might: together, Eod and Menos would confront the mad king. Silver watchmen and Ironguards were to be allies now, it seemed. The laws and conventions that had governed this land for centuries had fallen along with Menos.

Still trying to absorb the magnitude of these developments, they absent-mindedly bade farewell to their escort, which left them outside an empty tent. Inside, they collapsed with weary gasps onto four damp cots, content merely to sit for a sand without speaking.

“So…” Curtis sat up on one elbow, and gazed at Aadore in wonder, although there was a spark in his eyes that might have been something deeper. “How are you not dead? I thought it only took a scratch, and yours looked deep. Why have you not risen? Is there still a chance that you might…” A look of pain crossed his weary face; he couldn’t finish the question. “How could you not tell us and just allow yourself to suffer like that?”

Curtis’s eyes watered, as did Sean’s and Skar’s. Aadore had been selfish in her silence. She’d nearly left these men without saying goodbye. “I’m so sorry.” Aadore hurried to each man’s bedside, kissing him and apologizing. Ian, too, received a word and a caress. The men were all crying when she’d finished, but laughed at their soppiness a moment later.

“You’re in the clear then?” Curtis grinned. “I’d hate to bash in such a pretty skull.”

Aadore wandered over, intending to lightly slap the cheeky man. Instead, she held out her hand, and Curtis knew to kiss it. “We have unfinished business, you and I,” she said, and her half-smile summoned from the young man the deepest blush.

“Unfinished business,” muttered Sean.

Aadore didn’t attach any importance to her brother’s mumbling. Not until she, Curtis, Skar, and the baby had filled the tent with raucous mirth and her brother remained apart, watching them, frowning, and rubbing his stump did she notice his gaze—so distant and dark that the light feared it. Now witnessing his grim mood, Aadore went to her brother. “What are you thinking about, Sean?”

“Unfinished business. Secrets. I’m angry that you kept yours from me.”

Aadore waited, for she saw it then: the hungry shadow in his heart, his own secret. It veiled his thin, handsome face; it shadowed his gaze. Seizing the moment, she said, “We could all be in the grave tomorrow, Sean. If there is something you would say or do, tell me now or you might lose the chance, through fate or pride, to make peace.”

Sean snarled. “I don’t want peace. I want him dead. Murdered by my own fuking hands.”

Everyone froze and hung on the moment, waiting for Sean to continue. Sean’s face twisted like a frenzied animal’s. After some of the violence left him, Aadore whispered, “Who?”

Sean took her hand. “I’ll tell you everything. That way, if I am to fail in this life, you will know of my enemy beforehand and thus be able to avenge me. Swear that you will.” His grip became crushing. “Swear to me!”

“I do. I swear. Please, Sean, tell me, tell us, who we must end.”

“A doctor. A madman.” Sean paused, panting. The door in his head creaked open, revealing the darkness, and he spoke, low and with a sneer. “I should start at the beginning. I’d been stationed in Conway…”

Conway. A small hamlet, one not marked on many maps, in the far northern reaches of Ebon Vale. He’d been as green as spring grass, one of the few gay Ironguards who greeted locals with a smile rather than with the shove of a shoulder or cold words; his parents had raised him to be better than that. It was his first assignment since graduating from
the Iron College, and it would prove to be his last. A lode of truefire had been discovered, he explained, and once the earthspeakers had completed their excavation, it had lain there, throbbing, a vein of pure elemental fire. The last thing he recalled of his time in Conway was standing upon the heights of the dig site like a man at the rim of a volcano, his face warm and tingling with crimson magik. Then some fool tripped or kicked a stone, igniting the truefire, which detonated with an incredible blast. Conway, already obscure, was obliterated. Sean had been the only survivor. He’d been dragged from the ruinous inferno, or most of him had: his leg had had to be amputated so that he could be pulled from the rubble. “We’ll take you somewhere safe,” a phantom solider had promised amid muttered exclamations of amazement that anyone had survived. That man had lied.

“I didn’t wake up in a hospice,” spat Sean.

He’d groggily stirred in a sterile steel room, strapped to a table. In a drugged stupor, it had taken him a few sands to realize he had tubes running out of his body, and that the distorted faces looming over him weren’t denizens of the afterlife. But they acted as though they were arbiters of eternal damnation, for they cut him, carried out technostatic treatments, inserted cold objects into his rectum, throat, and ears. The potent narcotics subduing him ultimately proved unequal to the task, and he screamed himself unconscious.

Between treatments, they’d fed him—force-feeding him when he was too weak to eat. One kind, hefty soldier with the countenance of a sheepdog, whom Sean thought of as a “Horace” as he had no idea of his real name, would move his leg and arms and massage away the tremors caused by the experiments and the botched technomagik that wreaked havoc on his nervous system. Sean angered the doctors, especially that pig-in-an-apron Dr. Hex, the chief madman and torturer in the sick laboratory in which Sean had been sequestered. Hex had to develop ever more creative tortures to test Sean’s uncanny resistance to magik.

“I never broke,” said Sean, his expression wild. “I learned how not to crumble from the pain. I became the strongest soldier in all Geadhain. A good soldier saves his strength and chooses his battles. I saved my strength. I learned how to restore it by increments, in the short sands I was given when Horace left me, after the treatments, alone and in my
quiet prison, assuming I’d rest. But I didn’t rest. I practiced my balance. I stumbled about my cell like a drunk trying to do ballet until I had enough strength in my leg to hop. I strained my scrawny arms against the shivering metal of my cell until I could push my nose away from the wall. Most of the time, my arms weren’t as strong as my will, and I ended up with a bloody nose. I didn’t care. I had to be strong. I would have to be strong if I were going to kill him.”

“Hex?” whispered Aadore.

“Yes.” The tension Sean held inside him suddenly collapsed. He’d jittered on the edge of his bed throughout his tale, and now his head fell between peaked shoulders; he looked all bones and weakness. “And then one day, I was free. Madness. There’s no reason in the world, I see that now. Horace simply let me out. I believe he was weeping. I don’t remember what he said. He’d brought me clothes, though, and I had to remember how to put them on. Like an animal that had been caged, castrated, declawed, and then suddenly set loose, I wandered through the empty, flickering bunker. Horace was with me, of course. I do wish I knew what happened to him, where he went afterward. There had been some kind of terrible violence: blood was everywhere. I searched and searched, hoping to find the doctor among the heaped bodies in lab coats, but I only ended up covered in gore. We walked up steps toward a gleam of light…I remember how the sun blinded me as I emerged onto a roaring shore belonging to no place I’d ever seen: frost and ice everywhere. I was so used to the cold by then that it barely tickled. There was a crowe on the beach, guarded by soldiers of the Iron City, and Horace took me to it. I assumed they were shuttling me somewhere else, somewhere more terrible even than this place, and I began to resist, to draw upon the terrible fury I’d been forced to repress.

“Then Horace, who kindly endured my punches and thrashing and asked the Ironguards not to fire—all while trying to keep me upright, no less—repeated a question until I had heard it: ‘Where can we take you?’” Sean paused, and the black vomit summoned by these dreaded memories receded back down his throat, returning to the dark place that was home to all his terrors. “And I said
Home
.”

The word shattered him.

“You’re here, brother. I’m here.” Aadore held him. She asked nothing more. Surrounding the siblings in their tense embrace was their family of survivors. Aadore crawled into Sean’s cot, laid him down, and snuggled into him as she’d done when they were children, when he’d just been scared of the dark, and not faced it, eaten it, and become it. Perhaps he remembered that innocence, too, for after trembling and wetting his cheeks with tears for a while, he slept—as he always did after his big sister came to comfort him.

VI

They emerged only to acquire new clothing and a pair of crutches; there was no woodworker around able to make Sean a new prosthetic. The four adults and little Ian mostly kept to themselves, holing up in the drafty tent they’d claimed and scaring off new would-be inhabitants with curses and scowls. Winter had come, bringing with it a cold deeper than any this region had ever known. An astonished Skar told them that as there were no longer any mountains to act as bastions against the wind, the Northland’s fury was now free to travel wherever it wanted. While they huddled indoors, Skar occasionally ventured forth in search of information and food. Sometimes they peeked through the tent’s flaps and imagined they could see Heathsholme’s humpbacked white fields in the distance, though nothing could really be glimpsed beyond the fog of death. There was nothing to see, nothing to do. But why bother going anywhere now that they were finally comfortable? Geadhain, her warring kings, whatever entity was responsible for the destruction of Menos—none of these problems were going to be solved, at least not immediately. They had survived a nightmare. They would rest, recoup, and heal their bodies if not their souls, which might never be free of scars.

One day, Curtis snuck out, and from somewhere in the camp he borrowed or stole a pack of cards. They spent the second morning playing Crowns and Fates. Aadore and Sean seemed to win every match. Brother and sister both had devious minds and knew exactly what decisions needed to be made in moments of crisis, whom to sacrifice, whom to send to safety. Whenever the two were paired together against Curtis and Skar, their triumph was assured. Watching the siblings play each other,
therefore, was far more entertaining for the fellows who’d lost their proverbial shirts, shoes, and underwear after a couple of rounds.

“A draw…” said Aadore.

“Hmm…” grumbled Sean. Aadore was as unhappy as Sean with the outcome of their game. Wrinkling their faces, they stared at the cards, as if trying to force a result, to divine a strategy that hadn’t yet been played—or that had been played incorrectly by the other and so would lead to defeat. Sadly, the Everfair King and his glossy counterpart, the Wildman, were the only two cards still in play on the floor of their hovel. The rest of the deck had been discarded in the graveyard pile. Neither card could trump the other. The game had ended.

Curtis applauded from his bedroll. He’d been lying on his side and watching the match with tired eyes, concentrating mostly on Aadore’s charming frowns and pouts. “Well done. I’ve never seen a draw before.”

“Keep it down,” hissed Skar.

Little Ian slumbered in the arms of the snarling ogre. Most of Ian’s hourglasses were spent in this position and activity. Ian was surely as fatigued as the rest of his new family and did little but sleep. When they’d wandered around earlier, gathering supplies, the soldiers at the encampment had asked them who the child belonged to and whether they could be of any help. Skar told them to
fuk off
in a tone that no one wanted to challenge. Later, Skar and his company had briefly discussed who among them would shoulder responsibility for the parentless child: Skar announced he was prepared to be Ian’s primary caregiver, and the others made no objection. Damn whatever complications might arise from four rather mercenary folks rearing an infant. They’d make it work.

“My apologies,” said Curtis.

He yawned, stretched, and left the grumpy nanny to sit down cross-legged with the others in the dirt. As the siblings remained focused on their impasse and would not speak to him, Curtis plucked up the Everfair King and began to examine it. Regardless of the age or manufacturer of the deck, Magnus’s depiction was always one of glory and beauty. In this instance, the king was pictured standing atop a white rock amid a crashing sea. Green lightning wreathed him, running from earth to sky—not the natural direction of such currents. It was as if Magnus had birthed the elements himself.