Margaret Weis - Heroes And Fools

I fell, the breath blasted from my lungs, gasping like a drowning man. The stone-fisted man snatched a sword from the ground, laughing and lunging for Griff. Olwynn screamed again, but not in terror or pain. Here was rage, tearing up the night, tearing up the inside of my skull. In one smooth motion she set down her child among the packs near the wall and grabbed the stone the bandit let fall.

I heard it, then, that sound I’m used to hearing, the cracking of bone, as Olwynn’s stone smashed down on the man’s shouldet I laughed — I actually did as the breath came rushing back to me. The laughter died on my lips as the bandit turned. He shifted his sword to his left hand. Silver and red moonlight ran down the length of the blade, gleaming on honed steel edges. Then there was no light, there was only blood, black in the moonlight, as Olwynn fell to her knees.

She turned up her face to the sky and the stars, just as if she were praying. Cae’s wailing fell to whimpering where she lay shoved among the packs, then to silence. In the first moment of that silence, Olwynn closed her hands round the blade. Her blood poured over her hands, pulsing with the same rhythm of her breath. She opened her lips. Some word trembled there as her eyes met Griff’s. The word fell away unspoken as she collapsed.

The little dove lay dead among the wolves, killed upon the road home.

“Son of a bitch!” Griff shouted.

He kicked the body of the tall, thick-shouldered bandit, tumbling it down the hill to lie with the others. Wolves and ravens would feed well here. We’d picked over the corpses of all the bandits, rummaging for what seemed worth taking, flints and strikers, a small leather pouch of coin, and two good dirks. We’d have taken their swords, too, but those needed carrying, and we didn’t want the burden. I hid them deep inside the cave, a weapons cache.

Only one other body remained, that of Olwynn Haugh. She lay inside the cave, and I’d wrapped her in her cloak and folded her hands upon her cold breast. Now I stood with her green velvet pouch, tossing it gently from one hand to the other.

“Son of a bitch,” Griff whispered, looking at dead Olwynn.

I’ve said it-you could look into the eyes of Killer Griff and see the flames of a long-ago burning. You could see the very place a boy once crouched, bleeding and stunned, a dark and suffocating hold where smoke and terror and grief made knotty fingers to tear the soul from the body. You could hear the voices of that nightmare, a father’s desperate plea for the lives of his family, a mother screaming as her baby died. He was in that place, that dark place of his nightmares, even as the new sun rose behind him and threw his dark shadow over the body of Olwynn Haugh, over her child.

He stood looking down at the child, eyes cold and narrow. She’d wailed the last hours of the night through while we rolled corpses down the hill, hungry and frightened, until at last exhaustion took and stilled her. She stirred now, as if she knew he was looking at her. One little fist waving in sleep, she sighed. Griff looked past her to Olwynn dead, then reached out and scooped up Cae. So small was she that her head fit into one of his big scarred hands. With the other he could have snuffed the life from her, smothering. For a moment I thought he would do that and leave her dead here with her mother. We’d hie us back to Long Ridge, and maybe he’d have the satisfaction of knowing he’d seen his foeman’s kin dead.

But that wouldn’t get me paid.

“Griff,” I said, “we’d better get going if we’re going to make Haven tomorrow.”

He looked at me from those nightmare eyes of his, and he laughed bitterly. “Then what? How do I find the bastard now? I don’t even know what name he’s using.”

I shrugged as if the problem was nothing to worry about, steering him back to where I wanted him to be-in that place where I’d get my money.

“We know he’s somewhere in Haven. You still want to find him, so we’ll find him.” I cocked a thumb at Olwynn’s child. “When we do, she’ll get us into his house just like her mother would. How happy will they be to let in the man who saved the grandchild from murder?”

He grunted, thinking.

“Could work,” I said, still tossing the green velvet pouch from hand to hand. The coins made lovely music clinking together, the sound of my warm winter. “We don’t know his name, but we know his daughter’s. We can find him.”

Griff, he still had his eyes on the child, and a coldness stole over his face, ice creeping on a still pond. Yet when he looked up at me again it seemed to me that the coldness wasn’t there anymore, that it had been my imagination painting the expression.

He grabbed the pouch in midtoss and bent to pick up the baby. “Broc, what’s the best way to Haven from here without going back to the road?”

Well and good, I thought.

Cae sighed, and her lips moved in one of those unwitting smiles of babies, sleeping in the arms of the man who planned her kinsman’s death.

“The best way is down through the Centaur Reaches,” I said, easy again and ready to finish what we’d started. “The centaurs and I, though, we don’t get along. I can take you across the wood and around the Reaches to where the Elfstream runs. We can follow it right to Haven.”

All his ghosts peering out at me from his eyes, Griff said that route was good enough for him, and so we left the cave, Olwynn Haugh’s cold tomb, and went away again into Darken Wood.

Ah, my feet like the old stamping grounds! They find their way almost without my eyes, knowing the game trails and the clear runs beside little streams the way townfolk know their streets and roads. So my feet and I led Griff west and south through the golden wood while wind blew chill through the shimmering aspens and bracken rustled under foot. High in the sky, geese went winging in spearhead formation, their calls sounding year’s end. All the world smelled sweet and sad in its last glory. It wouldn’t have been such a bad walk south in the gold and the quiet, but we weren’t long gone from the hill before Cae awoke in full voice and hungry.

Squalling, she writhed in Griff’s arms, waving her fists. Jays flew up from the trees, fleeing her storm. The child’s wailing echoed all around us, and nothing Griff did to calm her made a difference. He walked for a while with her in his arms, then for a while holding her against his shoulder. Nothing stilled her, though her cries, at first piercing, eventually became weaker, more piteous than those first demanding yells.

“We’re going to have to feed her soon, Griff.”

“Feed her what?” He said that the way most men do when a child is on hand and the mother isn’t, surprised to have to bustle around looking for food. He shifted the child from his right shoulder to his left, scowling. “I don’t see any goats or cows around here.”

“Water, maybe.” I took the leather bottle from my belt. “It’ll fill her belly anyway.”

We tried to trickle some into her mouth. That didn’t work. Griff wet his finger for her to suck. That didn’t work either. Then I soaked a twist of cloth, and she took it with a gleeful cry. The wind picked up a little, blowing chill. Griff hunched over the child, lending body warmth.

His scarred face close to hers, he whispered, “Ah, now, ah, now, there, that’s all right. Take some more. That’s right-”

It was strange to see him at that work, to watch those hands I’d known only as killer’s hands holding Cae so tenderly. As I watched, ghosts stared out at me from his dark eyes. One of those ghosts in life, I remembered, had been a young brother, a boy still in the cradle that day the Dark Queen’s army fell upon a lone little farmhouse out there in Esrwilde. They say in Thorbardin that lessons learned early linger long. Well, perhaps that’s true, and the boy Griff must have learned one or two gentle lessons before the hard schooling came rampaging.