Merrick had taught him almost everything he knew-reading, writing, numbers, the stars-but if he’d been on that tower with him, Merrick would have let him die.
“You realize the moment you dropped that book, we stopped being partners,” Royce said.
“Oh yeah-you’re right. Huh. I should have left you for dead after all.”
“What’s the real reason? Just before we started up, you said that you were going to kill me after the job. You were going to show me how you use that big sword.”
“I did. Weren’t you watching?”
“Yes, I was, but you were going to use it to kill me.”
“Damn it-you’re right. I forgot.” Hadrian reached up weakly to touch the pommel of his sword. “Can we do that later? I’m pretty comfortable right now.” He let his arm slap back on the grass.
“Why’d you come back? Why didn’t you just leave?”
“This really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, it does.”
Hadrian shifted his legs and grunted, then took a breath and let out a long sigh. “I came back because that’s who I am.” He paused, then added, “You probably can’t understand that, can you?”
“It’s not a reason.”
“Okay, look, try this-I ran away from home, ran away from Avryn, ran away from Calis. And all I ever did was kill. I’m tired of it.”
“Killing?”
“Everything-you name it-I’m tired of it. Right now I’m even tired of breathing. Call it frustration if you want. I just got tired of running away. Mostly I’m tired of leaving people to die.”
“That kid? Pickles? The one I got killed?”
“You didn’t get him killed. Maybe I didn’t either, but it just seems whenever I run away, people I leave behind die. So if you’re looking for a reason, maybe it’s that simple. I was just too tired to run again.”
They both lay for a moment, panting against the hillside; then Royce shifted and grunted with the pain. “You realize we can’t go back to Sheridan.”
“I know.”
“Have to keep heading southwest now, and I don’t know anything about the area. We’ll probably get lost or walk into a road and a patrol.”
“Well”-Hadrian looked down at Royce’s side-“you’re bleeding again, and I think I am, too, so the good news is we’ll likely die before morning. Still, I suppose it could be worse.”
“How?”
“They could have caught us at the tavern, or we could have drowned in that river.”
“Either way we’d be dead. At this point I’m inclined to see that as better off.”
“Anything can always be worse,” Hadrian assured him.
They lay staring up at the sky and watching clouds blot out the stars. Royce heard it before he felt it. A distant patter on the blades of grass along the hillside. He turned once more to Hadrian. “I’m really starting to hate you.”
Burrowed into his cloak, Royce woke to the same roar and drumming of rain that he’d fallen asleep to, but the cold and wet had forced him to abandon any further efforts at sleep. With a shiver and grunt, he carefully inched himself up to his elbows and peered out of his hood. A thick curtain of rain muted everything, leaving the world as colorless as a corpse. Water flushed down the hillside, and because he was in a cleft, a rivulet had formed beneath him. His body acting like a dam left Royce sitting in a patch of water.
They were on the slope of a grassy hill scarred with rock and littered with bristling thistle and juniper bushes, everything prickly, a sea of burrs and nettles. Below, like rows of teeth, were stone walls bleached white and overgrown with moss and ivy. The mountains of Trent-if they were there-were lost to the rain. Royce had no idea where they were. He remembered little from their flight the night before and the opaque sky made it impossible to tell direction. He could see roads-nothing familiar, but the thin gray lines slicing through the hills below them were alive with riders. Men in pairs raced with cloaks flapping. There were larger groups, men on foot walking in formal lines. He also heard bells. At first he thought it might be a trick of the rain or his own tortured mind, but the sound came from every direction. It wasn’t until he managed to separate out different rates and pitches that he understood. Every village and town for miles was ringing the alarm.
Hadrian had bent himself upright as well. Pale and gray as the day, they both appeared as risen cadavers bewildered and surprised to find themselves still tethered to the world.
“What do we have for food?” Now that his stomach had settled, Royce was famished.
Hadrian looked about the slope. “Some of these look like berry bushes.”
“I meant, what did you get from the tavern?”
“I didn’t get anything. I never had time to ask Dougan for any.”
“Ask?” Royce was in the treacherous process of hoisting himself out of his tiny lake when he paused. “Why didn’t you just grab something? I thought that’s what you were doing behind the bar.”
“I was grabbing our clothes. I had them drying there.”
Royce looked down at himself. “Thank Maribor you dried the clothes.”
“What did you want me to do, steal from Dougan?”
Royce nodded dramatically.
“I’m not a thief.”
“Yes, you are, and you’d better get used to it.”
“You have to steal something to be a thief. I put the book back.”
“Tell them that when they catch us. I’m sure it will help.”
Royce flinched and winced his way to higher ground. Muscles stiff and sore, his abdomen burned, and he suffered bolts of pain when moving. He felt worse than before, not surprising after spending the night soaked in a cold puddle. Shaking with the chill and his waterlogged skin, just lifting his arms was exhausting.
“Do you hear bells?” Hadrian asked.
“Yes.”
“Those can’t be the ones from Ervanon still.”
“They aren’t.”
“You think it might be a religious holiday?”
“Nope.”
“This is bad.” Hadrian turned his head left and right, peering out through the rain.
His hair plastered to his head, his face pasty white, he looked beaten. Royce knew that stare; he knew those eyes. He’d seen them every day on the streets where he grew up. They were like the windows along Herald Street after the Sickness.
The fevers came every year to the city of Ratibor where Royce grew up, usually in winter, but once when Royce was young the Sickness invaded the city in midsummer. Unprecedented, they called it an ill omen. Everyone knew that was bad-it turned out to be worse than bad. Herald Street was one of the nice neighborhoods, one of the few in Ratibor. Royce liked to walk there when he was troubled, just to look at the pretty homes. It was how he dreamed, when he couldn’t anymore. That summer the houses looked different. It was hot and dry. The windows should all have been open trying to catch any breeze, but they were all shut, the curtains drawn. Pale lace that behind the dirty glass took on a particular color of gray-the washed-out hue of hopelessness, a sort of pallid vacancy that came with having time to dwell on tragedy. Hadrian’s eyes looked like the windows of Herald Street. They had the same color, the same closed-off emptiness, the same look of surrender.
“How’s your side?” There was hesitancy in Hadrian’s voice, a tinge of fear.
“A little better than yesterday,” Royce lied. He wasn’t sure why. What difference did it make? “So are those berries edible?”
Hadrian hesitated a moment, then turned to the bushes as if it had taken that long for the words to reach him. He stood up, slow like an old man, and Royce heard a sharp intake of breath when he put weight on his left leg. Walking over to the bushes, Hadrian stood there as if he’d forgotten what he was doing.
Royce watched. If it was going to happen, it would happen now.
Having lived through worse, Royce knew it could be done. He had never felt the gods had singled him out for punishment. That would presume he was important enough to be noticed. He was just one more overlooked life that should have ended early. He was just too stubborn to lie still and over the years had grown too mean to give in. But he knew nothing about Hadrian. He was a soldier, but what did that mean? Had he spent his few adult years riding on a fine horse with plenty of food, slaughtering unarmored footmen while he remained safe in a steel suit? Had he ever been alone, abandoned, and facing death?