Joel Shepherd - Sasha

On the other side of the gate, also against the big wall, the stables and adjoining barn still stood. Some soldiers had gathered there, standing about some limp things on the ground. Daryd's soldier escort led him that way. Some of the other soldiers saw, and stood aside for him.

They were bodies, Daryd saw. Mostly naked, dirty and bloody. He stood over the nearest, barely recognising it as a person. It had tattoos and dirty, long hair. Suddenly he recognised the grass-spirit tattoo spiralling up the right arm. It was Farmer Tangryn. Or rather, it had been Farmer Tangryn. Farmer Tangryn had been a strong man, but the corpse's ribs were showing. And he didn't smell. There were scars on his wrists where they'd bound him. And a stab wound through the ribs. Probably they'd killed all the prisoners as soon as the attack began.

Daryd was amazed at how calm he was. Everything seemed surreal. All the soldiers were looking at him with grim expectation. They knew what this was. Well, Daryd thought, so did he. He'd heard the stories of the Catastrophe, since as far back as he could remember. He knew what the Hadryn did to Udalyn prisoners.

There were five other bodies. Three he could not recognise. Two were Mrs Castyl, who lived nearer the upper slope, and old Yuan Angy, who still liked to spear fish in the river shallows on a warm day, despite his years. No more, it seemed.

Daryd turned back toward the pile of ashes that had been the training hall. Men were sifting through the rubble, poking with swords. Even now, a man found something metal and examined it-a ring, Daryd thought. He stepped across to a comrade and dropped the ring in an upturned helmet that man carried. Soon another man found something else and did the same. Then another man found a further object and picked it up, reverently. He carried it from the ashes, as his fellow searchers made spirit signs or holy signs, and placed it on the ground, where it formed the latest in a long line of similar objects. Human skulls. There were at least twenty. The northerners hadn't just burned the training hall, they'd put people in it first.

Still… Ymoth and its surrounding region had close to two thousand. This here was just twenty-five people, maybe thirty. Surely most of them had escaped. Surely these were just the unlucky few who had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. His gaze shifted back to the big tree. He knew what the scars were now-whip marks. His people would have been chained to that tree, tortured and mutilated, until… until what? What could they have told their torturers? There was no great wealth hidden around Ymoth. As for the valley's defences, well… they hadn't changed much since the last time the Hadryn attacked a hundred years ago. What could the northerners possibly have gained by doing such things to his people?

Soldiers pushed a man forward, arms twisted behind his back. The prisoner had the blond hair of many northerners-a man in his thirties, but no company soldier. He wore good, arm-length chainmail, heavy boots and hard leather leggings, but his surcoat bore the crest of a noble house. A nobleman. Daryd had heard of them, too. Strange ways, the Verenthanes had, to place one man above another by birth. Master Jaryd was a nobleman too, he'd gathered. But Master Jaryd would never give the orders that this man had given.

The soldiers yelled questions at the nobleman and hit him, pointing to the bodies. The northerner snarled in contempt. Said something, shortly, and spat near the bodies. One of the soldiers raised his weapon in fury, but another stopped him. Took his own sword and offered it to Daryd. Daryd looked at the sword. At the cold, hateful northern face. At the bodies on the ground and the ashpile by the wall.

Then he strode forward, ignoring the offered sword, and drew his knife instead. Soldiers forced the northerner to his knees. Daryd stepped to one side, as he'd once seen Udalyn warriors do to a captured Hadryn raider. Then he cut the man's throat with a single, hard slash. Blood spurted and flowed. Soldiers held the man up, then let him collapse. He kicked and spluttered, then went limp.

Daryd stared down at the corpse. It had been so easy. He'd always imagined it would be harder than that. He felt no elation, no surge of satisfied revenge. Yet he felt no regret, either. If there were more northerners present, he'd have killed them too. He'd seen what they'd done to his people, and he now knew for certain what it would mean, in this battle, for his people to lose. Killing was easy. Living, it seemed, was the hard part.

He wiped his knife on the back of his victim, and sheathed it. Men regarded him with hard, thoughtful eyes. When he walked to the ashpile, to view the remains of villagers he'd once known, no man moved to accompany him, or guide him, or pat him on the head. His Wakening remained many years away, yet his blade had tasted the blood of enemies. He was not yet a man, but today, Daryd Yuvenar was no longer a child.

Captain Tyrun was dead. Sasha stood in the central courtyard of Ymoth. Tyrun's body lay upon a low stone dais, hands folded on his breast, wrapped in his cloak to hide the drenching blood. A crowd of men had gathered and a light, misting rain fell from a bleak and weary sky. From the surrounding town, there carried the yells and instructions of men searching from house to house. But here, there was silence.

A Verenthane corporal from the Falcon Guard, who was learned in the ways of the temple, performed the Verenthane rites. Tyrun had been carried directly to this place from before the Ymoth wall, and this assembly had gathered fast, lacking any time for delay. He had been killed, men said, in the opening moments of the charge, when the formation he had been leading had plowed into the Banneryd flank. Tyrun had cut down one man, fended a second, then been struck by a third. It had happened so fast, a stunned sergeant had said. Northern cavalry were superbly skilled, even in such dire circumstances. Many men of those forward ranks had been lost before the Banneryd had been driven back.

At Sasha's side, Jaryd stood impassive and pale. Men of the Falcon Guard, in particular, appeared shocked. Sasha worried for them. And worried for the entire campaign, to have lost its true commander so early. She was the figurehead, perhaps, but this victory was surely Tyrun's. Without him keeping things together, and offering sage advice, she'd have been hopelessly lost from the first. But she dared not suggest such a thing, lest the men lose hope. She dared not shed a tear, lest the men recall that she was, after all, just a girl, whoever her absent uman might be.

The Verenthane corporal completed his rites, and stepped back. Then from the crowd came Jaegar-still alive, Sasha had discovered to her immense relief, as were all her Baerlyn friends. They had been in the rear half of Captain Akryd's attack and had escaped the initial casualties with barely a scratch. The luck of it all stunned her. Some villages had lost numerous men by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others were unscathed. It was outrageously unfair. And she recalled, suddenly, Kessligh's tired derision of her occasional statements of moral certitude. "Nothing's fair," he'd told her. "Fairness is an invention of ours. One day, you'll understand that."

Jaegar was stripped to the waist. Tattoos spiralled down his enormous chest and made rippling patterns upon the six outstanding segments of his stomach. He swaggered to stand behind Tyrun's body, a sword in his right hand, a knife in his left. His hair hung free of its braid, flowing loose upon massive shoulders. The right side of his face-the side clear of tattoos-was streaked with three red lines, beside which his tri-braid hung. Not only Chieftain of Baerlyn, Jaegar was Umchyl-spirit talker-for the town and its regions.

Now, Jaegar extended his arms, surveying the crowd with the stern, wide eyes of power. "Umchyl!" the Goeren-yai chanted. "Umchyl! Umchyl!" The arms extended out, then back, and Jaegar thumped himself on the shoulders, wrists crossed at the heart, with the hilts of his blades. Once, twice, and fortunate-three times.