R. Salvatore - The Bear

Bransen turned to stare at her incredulously.

"This is your fight," she said. "This is our fight, as surely as any we have ever known."

"I am done with fighting!" he shouted back, and many around them quieted at that, several monks gasping in shock and obvious dismay. This was the Highwayman standing among them, after all, one of the great champions of their desperate cause.

"It doesn't matter," Bransen said. "None of it matters."

"Ye cannot be thinking that Queen Gwydre'll be as ill-tempered as King Yeslnik," remarked Callen, coming over and sounding every bit the peasant woman from Pryd Town. "What fool's got ye, boy?"

"Don't you see?" Bransen asked, pulling away from Cadayle and addressing all of those around him, most of whom were staring at him with open shock, and some with open contempt. "Even should we seat Gwydre on Delaval's own throne, it would be but a temporary reprieve, a short pause of misery."

"Bransen!" Cadayle pleaded.

"It's the truth," he said to her, coming close again and taking her hands in his own. "I've come to know that, and it pains me greatly. The road men walk is a roundabout. There is no better way to be found."

"How can you say such things?"

"Too many who believed otherwise have died in vain. My father and mother…"

"In vain, ye say, but yer ma saved that girl ye hold," Callen reminded from behind him.

"Garibond and Jameston," Bransen went on, trying to ignore her. "All dead, and to what end?"

"And what would you have us do?" Cadayle asked.

"Run away to the north. To the forest, once home to Jameston Sequin, and far from this madness."

"To live as hermits in the woods, then?"

"Free of lairds, free of church, free of war," Bransen insisted.

Cadayle stepped back and pulled her hands free, one of them coming up to cover her mouth.

"Dame Gwydre will honor the terms, and will sail us to…" Bransen started to say, but he stopped abruptly when Cadayle hit him with a stinging slap across the face.

"You would do that to our child?"

"Cadayle," Bransen whispered.

"Hit him again," said Callen dryly.

Cadayle glanced at her mother for that comment, but only briefly. "Why did you ever get up?" she asked Bransen.

He looked at her perplexed.

"When they knocked the Stork into the mud," Cadayle explained. "Why did you get back up?"

"What nonsense-"

"No nonsense," Cadayle interrupted. "If it all means nothing, then why'd the Stork ever climb out of the mud? If there's nothing to be gained, then why didn't you just lay there and die in the soft black muck of nothing?"

Bransen looked at her dumbfounded and glanced around to meet the hard stares of everyone in the area.

"It's a roundabout!" he declared. "A walk in a circle to the same awful places again and again."

"More of an egg," said Callen, and all eyes turned to her. "And a rolling one, at that. Oh, the road's going back sometimes-too oftentimes-but it's rolling forward so long as men and women of heart and cause are moving it so. The world's a better place than it was when Callen went into the Samhaist's sack o' snakes, don't ya doubt! And 'twas a better place then than when Callen's ma was a girl and half o' Pryd starved to death."

Cadayle grabbed Bransen by the front of his shirt and pulled him to face her directly. "We've a chance now, right now, and it's one worth taking. You go push the road, the roundabout, whatever you may call it, forward! For me and for our baby that's in my womb. And for yourself, my love." She tenderly stroked his face, and though he initially tried to pull away, he didn't fight her touch for long.

"You'll not forgive yourself if you run away."

"Or you'll not forgive me," he said dryly.

Cadayle took pause at that and looked at him with clear love and sympathy and gently stroked his face once more. "I could never not love you, my Stork," she said. "But don't you wallow there in the mud. You get up. This is our fight, all of us, and I only wish I could go with you, weapon in hand and a song on my lips. Dame Gwydre deserves your sword."

"I have no sword," Bransen reminded.

"Get the Highwayman a sword, ye damn fools!" Callen shouted, and several men on the wall rushed away.

Bransen looked at his mother-in-law, and Callen shrugged. Bransen couldn't help but chuckle against the unrelenting woman.

"Father Artolivan's church stood against Yeslnik," Cadayle went on. "They stood for mercy and justice and at great cost. Would you abandon them now?"

The young monk rushed up and thrust a sword into Bransen's hand, nodding hopefully. Bransen turned from the eager young man to Cadayle, who reached up, holding a thin black strip of cloth.

She tied his mask on his face and whispered, "Go." And then she offered him her hand, as she had when he had lain in the mud on that long-ago day.

Bransen took her hand and kissed it softly. Then he nodded to the others, offered a self-deprecating snort, and jumped over the wall.

Many gasped at that, but not Cadayle. She moved to the crenellation and looked at her husband, the Highwayman, as he descended the high wall with spiderlike speed. All about her, the cheering began anew. Get up, ye damned child!" Laird Panlamaris said, his voice uneven. He tried to kick at the soldier, who huddled upon the ground, but the desperate laird staggered as he did and nearly fell.

The soldier scrambled away, crying and begging for mercy.

Panlamaris spat at him, though that, too, fell far short. The large, old laird spun about, inadvertently drawing a circle in the bloody dirt with his low-hanging sword. He looked for his men, he called for his men, but, alas, there were none about-none who would answer that call, at least.

He had been routed, his army driven from the field around him. Old Ethelbert knew the truth of it. So many times he had seen his enemies in this very predicament.

Not far to the east, the sun now raised above them, Dame Gwydre and her line re-formed. Grim-faced, their banners high, to a man and woman they stared at the Laird of Palmaristown.

"Come on, then!" Panlamaris howled, lifting his sword awkwardly, the movement nearly throwing him from his feet. The blood on the ground about him was his own. Garish wounds crisscrossed his arms and chest, and so bloody was one side of his face that he couldn't see out of that eye. The stump of a broken spear stuck out from his side, waving with his every breath.

"You are defeated, Laird Panlamaris," the Dame of Vanguard replied, and she and those around her advanced to within a few strides of the man. Flanking her left and right, brothers Pinower and Giavno each lifted a hand, presenting graphite-the stone of lightning-Panlamaris's way.

"Ah, ye witch!" the old laird roared, and he reached back his sword arm as if to throw.

Twin bolts of lightning shot out from Gwydre's escort, jolting him, slamming him, knocking him back several strides.

The stubborn old man did not fall over, though. He held his balance, spat some more blood. He looked hatefully at Gwydre and lifted his sword arm yet again.

A black form rushed across in front of him before the monks could even loose their second volley, and the Laird of Palmaristown staggered back again, a look of sheer surprise on his weathered face-surprise rooted more in the realization that he was dead than by the appearance of the Highwayman on the field.

For in his passing, the Highwayman had spun a tight circle, his elbow flying high behind him to score a perfect strike against the threatening old laird's windpipe.

Panlamaris looked at him curiously for a few moments, his arm dropping, his sword falling free of his grasp.

He fell facedown in the bloody dirt, dead at last.

"Welcome home, Highwayman," Dame Gwydre said.

Bransen glanced back at the distant St. Mere Abelle, where Cadayle, he knew, was watching. He was on Jameston Sequin's third road now, the path that had led Jameston to his death.