The Bloody North (The Fallen Crown) Read online

  "What is?"

  "That you're so pleasing to the eye," he admits. "And you've no taste for men."

  She shrugs. "I find you men far too smelly. Too rough."

  "I've known women like that, too," he corrects her. "Some with more hair on their chin than a man."

  "Fair point," she says. "But there's no getting around the fact a man can only come once. What use is that to me? You can't . . . what's the fucking word . . ."

  He thinks. "Reciprocate?"

  Muriel snaps her fingers, a wide grin on her face. "That's it!"

  "Reciprocate me arse," Rowan says, shaking his head as she laughs.

  * * *

  Hands worked all over his body, fingers pressing here and there, tugging his skin. He was on his front, soft sheets beneath him. His eyes fluttered open; he looked to the side and could discern the fuzzy outline of someone standing by him. "Lay still."

  He closed his eyes again, did as instructed, and fell back to a confused, jumbled sleep . . .

  * * *

  Sara looks about at the abandoned farmhouse, the tatty barn, the overgrown weeds and plants everywhere over what had once been farmland.

  "What is it?" She looks at him.

  He squeezes her hand in his. "Ours."

  "I don't understand."

  "I bought it. Today. Got it at a good price, seeing as how run down it is."

  She says nothing, just swallows and looks about once more, as if with renewed vision, as if she'd not seen it properly before. "Right."

  "You're not happy?" he asks, wondering if he's made a mistake.

  He brought a small fortune with him from his years roaming the country, going from one job to the next. Most of it he has hidden, but he kept a little back to buy a place, to tide them over while they made it all work. To get them set.

  "If you think we can make a go of it . . ." she says doubtfully.

  "I know we can," he insists. "We'll do it together."

  "Okay," Sara says, turning to look at him, a smile on her thin lips. She plants a tender kiss on his cheek and Rowan closes his eyes, savouring her feather-like touch. "Together."

  * * *

  Rowan opened his eyes. He was still on his front. The bed creaked like the rigging of a ship as he turned onto his back, wincing from the pain.

  Twilight lit the curtains from behind with a blue-grey hue. He struggled breathlessly to sit, gave up, and flopped back. The muscles alongside his spine were on fire from where Quayle had cut him with the sword.

  Rowan looked about at his lodgings. A dim little place, with a jug and basin on a nightstand, a chest on the floor, what he recognised as his clothes in a pile on the floor, cleaner than when last he'd worn them.

  He couldn't shake what had happened. If only he'd not had that last drink with Tarl. He would have been home when the men arrived. Maybe he could've fought them off. Done something . . . stopped his son and daughter from dying in the fire.

  Stopped my wife from being raped and murdered.

  Rowan bit back the tears, didn't want to give the grief any further purchase than it already had. Sometimes it could be akin to an unwanted tree, working its roots deep down inside his skull till it got so far he couldn't pull it back out without damaging everything around it. Rowan finally managed a sitting position, his whole back aching.

  Where am I?

  The door opened to his right and a portly woman hobbled in. Rosy cheeks from too many glasses of port, red hair going grey. Apron smeared with grease. Ceeli. Now it made sense. He was in one of the rooms she kept available upstairs at the tavern.

  "Ah, Sleeping Beauty wakes."

  Rowan grimaced from the way his back sang out, being in a sitting position after what had happened. The wound hurt, a line of fire beneath his skin. "How long have I been here?"

  "Three days. You caught a fever for a time, took me all night long but I drove it out," she said grimly. "Stitching on your back's my best work, I can tell ya. What with the poultice I've had on it, you've not done too bad. Stitches are holding up to muster."

  "I'm not counting on it healing up any day soon," Rowan said bitterly. He remembered the cut, the pain across his whole back. Almost as hot as the burning house behind him in which his children perished . . . "Bastard cut me up good."

  "Well, I've seen worse," Ceeli said. "You're going to be just fine, in ya body . . . but the rest, well, only you can know that."

  "I'm grateful for everything you've done," Rowan assured her. Afraid of sounding insincere. Under her care, he'd survived. "Truly."

  Ceeli stood with her hands shoved inside her apron. "It's a tragedy what happened out at your place. We're all in shock. I remember helping Sara birth those kiddies," she said, shaking her head, eyes wet. "Can't believe they've been taken like that."

  Rowan didn't say anything. He lay back down on the bed with a groan, the urge to do anything but just stay there diminished.

  "Any idea who they were?" she asked him.

  He shook his head. "No. Just soldiers."

  "The men from the village went running toward the smoke. Time they got there, well . . . ya know . . ."

  Rowan swallowed. "Yeah."

  "It was Tarl brought you back here. Lucky I had a room free," Ceeli said.

  "Not sure I can pay you for it right now," Rowan said. "Might have to wait a few days."

  She waved him off. "No. Wish I could've done more."

  Rowan looked away, to the corner of the room. Anything not to have to look her in the eye. "None of it's gonna bring them back."

  Ceeli fetched his clothes from the floor and cleared her throat. "I washed your things for you," she said, setting them on the end of the bed. "Got most of the blood out."

  "Thanks."

  "Probably best if you get up and about soon as you can. Scar like that, sometimes it can turn into a knot. Cripple ya," she said. "End up with a stick and everything. If you get up and moving, maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be just as it was before."

  "Yeah," Rowan said. He thought: Nothing will ever be the same again.

  Ceeli took her leave and shut the door behind her. When she was gone, Rowan let the grief out for some air. Let the tears roll free down his cheeks. Let the sobs heave inside his chest like an accordion played fast and loose. Let all the pain, and the hurt, and the misery come bleeding out from the raw, open wound inside of him, next to his heart. He'd never been one for allowing his emotions to run riot, free from restraint. But in that moment, he would not have cared if Ceeli had come walking back in and seen him in such a state.

  When the grief subsided, he fell back to a broken, tortured sleep . . .

  * * *

  Cabril burns, even in the rain.

  "A good day's work," Muriel says as she surveys the carnage that has been left in the campaign's wake. More often than not, they were sought out for smaller jobs. Collecting bounties, that kind of thing. But every now and then something like a siege – commanding an entire army against a stronghold or city – fell in their laps. Such a job can be worth an unthinkable amount.

  Rowan watches the roof of a hospital burn, the former patients gathered outside of it as they peer up at the tower of smoke filling the darkening sky.

  "If you say so."

  She reaches out, turnes his face so she can see the cut better. Rowan's trophy for defeating the infamous Butcher of Clement. "Doesn't seem too bad."

  "Yeah? Say that if you're on the receiving end."

  "I'm just telling you. It's not that bad. It actually turns me on," Muriel says with a cheeky wink. "Makes you look more rugged."

  "You giving me a complement?"

  "Be whatever you want to believe it is," she says, studying the rest of his face. "Better than saying you look like something a dog threw up."

  "Thanks."

  * * *

  Hours later, he woke to find Ceeli at the foot of his bed. "Not managed it yet, then," she said.

  Rowan sat up, cleared his throat. "No."

  "I know it's hard, I
know you just want to lay there and forget about everything, but it'll all be easier on you if you don't. If you get up, start walking."

  "You're right," he said. "Of course. I will do."

  "Good," she said with one curt nod of her head.

  Rowan slowly leaned forward for the clothes at the end of the bed, back crying out in agony as he did so. Ceeli watched him struggle, didn't attempt to help. But she did smile when his fingers grasped the neatly folded clothing. "Any word on the bastards who did this? Any news?" he asked, his voice weak with exertion.

  Ceeli shook her head. "None. Only that they were Regiment men, like you said. They didn't do any more damage, not here at least. Don't know if they hit the other villages down the road. Far as I know, they just finished up at yours and rode off. Who knows the reason behind it, eh? By the time the men got themselves together, they were gone on their way. It's all this upset, is what it is. Whole country's lost its mind."

  The civil war, Rowan thought. Government against Monarchy. Upset's an understatement.

  There'd been rumblings of it for months, though he'd not paid it much attention. Now he wished he had. Maybe he could've read the signs and got his wife and children out of harm's way. As it was, Starkgard had gone to war with itself, and the death of his loved ones was but a small consequence.

  "Folk say those Breakers are causing strife all over," Ceeli said. "And all sorts of mad ones riding with them, too."

  He knew the bare bones of what was happening throughout Starkgard. In truth, there'd always been unrest, in one form or the other. But never all-out war. The Prime Minister – a man called Levine Wagstaff – had called for the powers of the monarchy to be reviewed and revised by vote. King Francis the Second had attempted to dissolve Parliament but had not counted on an open rebellion from his own Parliament. Francis fled the capital city and sought refuge with allies. Meanwhile Wagstaff gathered his own accomplices.

  Rowan didn't know who'd sided with whom, or if there'd been any major battles anywhere. He knew only that Starkgard grappled with itself for power, and his life had been torn away from him in the ensuing scuffle.

  Not bad for a man working his land, minding his own business.

  "War attracts all the wrong kinds," Rowan said.

  "Never a truer word said. Anyway, I'll let you get dressed. I saw enough of your bits when I had to bathe ya."

  She went to walk past and Rowan caught her fat, puffy hand. "Ceeli. Thanks. For everything."

  "Don't mention it. Your Sara was a lovely woman. The best. Told me once you had a shady past you were trying hard to put behind you. I get it. We've all got something we're trying to forget."

  "She was the love of my life," Rowan said, and meant it. "I don't know what I'll do without her. She made me . . . better, I suppose."

  "You'll do what has to be done. You'll remember their faces, their names, the way you felt for them and the way they felt for you, and you'll fight. You can start now. Get your arse out of bed. Go outside and breathe the air. You've got unfinished business," she said regretfully. "The dearly departed don't bury themselves."

  Three

  The remains of the house smouldered, a pile of blackened timbers wet with rain. No sign of his children, his beautiful son and daughter.

  Nothing but damp ash.

  Sara's tortured body had been cleaned, wrapped in a shroud back at the village. Tarl had offered to transfer her to the farm to be buried, carrying her body carefully in the back of his wagon. Villagers lowered their heads as they passed, by way of respect, and it was all Rowan could do to stare dead ahead, face slack.

  It was only when he saw Sara's tidy form he realised how little she had been. How petite. Standing at the back of the wagon, with her small body wrapped up in front of him, he remembered her small hands with nimble fingers, small feet with delicate toes. Her soft touch when she'd held his face as they made love. Tarl climbed up in the wagon, lifted her top end while Rowan took her feet, and they slowly lowered her to the ground.

  Tarl's hand rested on his shoulder. "If you want some time, you know . . . I'll come back later. If you need to be alone."

  Rowan looked about at the ruin of his life. The burned-out house. His wife at his feet. He shook his head slowly. "No. Help me find the shovels. Help me to dig."

  * * *

  The sharp edges of the shovels bit into the hard earth, their boots pushing them in before levering them up. They'd been digging the hole for more than an hour before Tarl cleared his throat to speak. "Rowan."

  "Huh?"

  He pointed at his shirt. "You're bleeding."

  Rowan reached behind him, put a hand there. Blood on his fingertips, right where the wound was. "It's the stitches stretching a bit is all," he said through gritted teeth.

  "D'you want to stop? Me and some of the men from the village can finish–"

  "No."

  Tarl went to say something, thought better of it and just nodded.

  "If it rips my back wide open, I swear I'm digging this fucking hole," Rowan growled. "I couldn't save her life. I failed her then. I'm not failing her now."

  * * *

  Hot and sweaty despite the chill air, Rowan stood to the side of the grave, looked down at Sara's body and wondered what there was to say. What could he possibly put into words that would have any true meaning, let alone make sense? How did you express pain? Tarl stood silently next to him, hands clasped behind his back, head down, eyes shut.

  Rowan looked up at the sky. He remembered the shaft of light in the barn coming down strong from a gap in the roof above. As if it were a sign of some kind. There was no such light now. Just a grey blanket of rain clouds smothering the drab heavens and not so much as a bird to disturb it.

  Why them? Rowan asked whoever or whatever up there has a say in how such events unfold. My wife. My son. My daughter. Why'd you take them and not me? After all I've done in the past, after all the blood I've had run over these hands . . .

  He closed his eyes. Breathed deep of the cool air. Damp, ready for more rain.

  No amount of water can wash away the blood on these hands. This has proved it. A man tries to make a change, make amends for what he's done in the past, and this is all he gets in return. Good life in return for the bad. No life in return for the good. There's poetic justice for you.

  Rowan opened his eyes. Looked down at his hands where he'd clenched them tight into fists. His nails had cut deep into his palms.

  Tarl handed Rowan a shovel. "Are you ready?"

  "Aye," Rowan said, chucking in a shovelful of wet dirt. It thudded against her shrouded corpse down there in the hole and for a crazy moment he felt the urge to get her back out. The thought of the cold, wet mud taking her from him was almost too much to bear. But he carried on anyway.

  His back was on fire after all the digging. The wound Ceeli had stitched threatened to rip apart, but it held. He was sure his shirt would be soaked red all the way up the back by now if he cared to look. Rowan got on his knees, took a handful of the dirt, ground it between his fingers, felt the cold grit of it.

  "You okay?" Tarl asked him.

  "Aye," he said, standing again. "Let's finish up."

  * * *

  "I don't want to put on you like this," Rowan said back at the tavern. He lay on his front, Ceeli tending to his wound despite his objections.

  "Stop saying that or I'll change my mind," she said tersely. "The good news is the stitches haven't come out. I'll do another poultice for tonight. It should take the swelling out, stop it getting infected."

  "Thanks."

  "You could have had people there, you know. At the burial I mean. Tarl says it was a pretty quiet affair," Ceeli said.

  "Didn't know what to say," Rowan admitted. "I just wanted to put her to rest. It was all I could think of."

  "It's all any of us can do, when it comes. At some point, everyone has to bury someone else who means something to them. It's the way of things I guess," Ceeli said. "I don't quite know what you say at time
s like that."

  "Me neither."

  Ceeli walked to the door, stopped before opening it. "What will you do now? Continue with the farm?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Then what?" she asked him. Outside, it had started to rain.

  Rowan sighed. "Wake up tomorrow, I suppose."

  * * *

  A fine mist of rain had swept through overnight. It made the heavy stones of the church glisten, masonry polished smooth by years of weather beating upon it. Rowan had come alone. No need for Tarl's help with this chore.

  He shoved the creaking doors open and walked in, the air thick and musty. A few candles flickered here and there offering scant illumination. Father Tasker emerged from a side door, hastily tying his robe.

  "Late is the hour for confession, my son," the old man said with a smile. "Though for you I would make an exception. That would be a tale worth the telling."

  "As I've always said, Father. It'd take too long," Rowan told him.

  "That you have. Many times," Tasker said. "But I'll keep trying. Listen, I heard what went on at your place. I'm sorry. A tragedy. Sure as day. I've been praying for them since I heard. And for you."

  "Me?"

  "God welcomes them into his warm embrace, my son. As he will all of us, when the time comes." Tasker regarded him with glassy eyes. "Including you. So what is it that brings you to the house of our maker so late in the day, Rowan?"

  "I left something here once. Something I need back. Got any recollection of that?"

  Tasker sighed. He sat on the edge of one of the pews. "I was afraid this might happen. You plan on finding these people, correct? Enacting vengeance? Listen to reason. Violence is not the answer, Rowan. Prayer and forgiveness are key . . ."

  "Well, Father, I'm afraid violence is the only answer I've got left. I buried my wife yesterday. I couldn't do the same for my kids 'cause there was nothing left to bury. So are you gonna try and talk me out of it? You gonna try and make a man see sense, when sense don't come into it no more? Blood lets blood."