The Last Banner

The first horn blast rolled up the valley while Leon Varis stood at the forge with a scrap of silver heating in the coals.

One note, long and low. Post rider, that meant. Letters, the assessor's schedule, news that could wait for supper. His father didn't look up from the horseshoe he was shaping one-handed, tongs braced against his knee the way he'd learned to after the arm.

The second blast came too fast behind the first.

Leon's hammer stopped mid-swing. Across the anvil, his father's hammer slowed, then stopped, and for three breaths the only sounds were the creak of the bellows and the silver going soft in the fire.

"There's no second blast," Leon said. "There's never been a second."

The third caught the second's note and held it — a sound like the valley itself had been struck — and it went on until the miller's boy on the road below began shouting for his father in a voice that cracked on the second word.

Garrick Varis pulled the silver out with the tongs and set it on the anvil to cool. It had been his wife's: a buckle off her Sunday dress, the one thing of hers the priest hadn't buried with her. Leon had been drawing it into a band all week, thin and plain, a wedding ring for a girl who owned two dresses and a satchel of dried herbs. The wedding was six weeks off, at the harvest moon. Elena had promised to wear it bare, no stone, and she'd laughed and said gold was for women who needed convincing.

Three blasts meant the levy.

"Stay here," his father said, and reached for the big hammer out of habit, then hung it back up, because there was nothing in a forge to fight.

They walked down to the village together.

The king's rider sat his horse in the shade of the old oak by the well, and the horse was the most telling thing about him. A post animal, lathered grey, lame in the near forefoot — and by the fresh shoes and the raw girth marks, not his first mount since the last waystation. Three horses. Maybe four.

The rider himself wore the king's grey with the black chevron of the highways service. He was young, not much past Leon's own age, with sunburn peeling off his nose and a look like a man reading the same bad letter over and over.

Half of Harrowden had crowded into the square. Reeve Aldous stood at the well with the household list shaking in his hand. Father Ansel had come down from the chapel, and Bren Ostler shouldered through the press to stand at Leon's elbow, big and red-faced, still in his apron from the slaughtering shed.

"Post rider," Bren said. "It's post. It's nothing. Caravan men said the Vessians were too busy fighting each other to fight anybody else."

The rider didn't dismount. He unrolled a parchment sealed in red wax with the crown of Aurel and read it in a flat, road-worn voice, the way a man reads words he has read thirty times already.

"By the hand of Aldric, second of that name, King in Aurel, Warden of the Eastern March, Shield of the Faith: the Banner Law stands, as it has stood for five hundred years. Every firstborn son of the realm between seventeen and fifty years is called to the king's service. All grants of grace, deferral, and redemption are void from the day of this seal. Let them assemble at Eastvale garrison within ten days. So it is written. So it is owed."

Nobody moved. A dog trotted through the crowd with a chicken bone. Somewhere a shutter banged twice in the wind.

"Redemption's void?" Old Hessel the thatcher called out. "There's men in this village paid redemption twice. Lord Cambres buys his boy out of every levy like a horse at fair—"

"Void," the rider said. "Every grant. Every pardon. The deferral rolls were burned in Eastvale a week ago."

Then the reeve began reading names, household by household, and Leon heard his own among them the way a man hears a nail driven into a coffin. Ostler, Bren. Fen, Willem. Varis, Leon.

Dace Fen stepped forward with his twin, and the reeve had to stop and tell him to sit down. It was Willem. Only Willem. That was the law — firstborn, always firstborn, five hundred years of it. Dace sat on the well step and put his face in his hands like a boy half his age.

Widow Maren didn't cry out when her son's name was read. She kept shelling peas into her lap, slower and slower, until the bowl tipped and rolled into the dust, and nobody stooped to pick it up.

"That's it, though?" Bren said, too loud. "Two years — that's the law. Two years of walls and wells and boot-mending, then home with a soldier's pay. My da did it. Everyone's da did it." He looked around at the faces and found no comfort in any of them. "Right?"

The rider wound the parchment shut and gave him nothing.

Leon had kept the forge ledger in his head since he was twelve, and his eyes went where his mind went. "Let me see the writ."

"It's sealed."

"The seal's at the bottom. The date's above it." He didn't reach. He just stood there, and eventually the rider turned the parchment so the clerk's neat hand faced out.

*Sealed at Eastvale, the third of Reaping.*

Today was the twenty-first.

"Eighteen days," Leon said. "The king's post does Eastvale to Harrowden in six, road weather or none. If the realm wanted us ready, this order travels at post speed. It didn't." He looked up. "Why did it walk?"

The square went very quiet. Even the shutter stopped.

"What's your name, boy?"

"Varis. Leon Varis."

"Keep that arithmetic in your pocket, smith's son." Something in the rider's voice was almost kind. "Not everywhere is the kind of place where being clever keeps you breathing."

Elena Hart came through the crowd with her satchel and asked nobody's leave. She caught the rider's bridle and looked at his hands.

"Show me."

"They're nothing."

"They're blistered through the glove and the left one's turning bad. Show me, or I tell the reeve you're too sick to ride, and Harrowden keeps you abed for a week."

He gave her his hands like a scolded boy. While she worked — honey, clean linen, her fingers quick and her mouth set — Leon saw what he'd missed from across the square. The hem of the rider's cloak was scorched. Not fresh. The cloth had burned days ago and gone grey and crumbly, the way cloth comes out of a hearth.

Cloaks didn't scorch on roads. Cloaks scorched near fires. Big ones.

She bandaged him and moved off, and Leon followed her past the barley stacks to the shade of her drying shed, where the yarrow hung in bundles from the beams and the whole world smelled of bitter green.

"How long is the service?" she said. Not how bad. Not why. How long.

"Ten days to Eastvale."

"That's not what I asked."

"The writ doesn't say. They'll tell you two years. Garrison rotation — walls, wells, boot-heels." He turned the words over like clipped coins. "I believed that this morning."

"And now?"

"Now I believe his cloak."

She took it the way she took everything, quietly, with both hands, no wasted motion. She had sat with his mother through nine days of fever when Leon was fourteen, and he had learned more about her from hands that never shook than any amount of courting could have taught him.

He took the ring from his pocket. It wasn't finished. The seam wanted soldering, the band unpolished — a plain grey circle of his mother's silver, fire scale still in the grain.

"It needs work. I was going to finish it before I asked."

"You're asking now, then."

"Elena—"

"Give it here." She held out her palm, and he set the ring in it, unfinished, and she threaded it onto the cord at her neck where she kept her lancet and tucked it down against her skin. "You'll finish it when you come home. That's the deal."

"That's the deal."

"Say the rest."

"Harvest moon. The year I come home. Bare, no stone." His voice caught on the last of it, and he let it, because she had never once lied to him and he wasn't going to answer her with pretty words.

"I've sat with forty people dying," Elena said. "I know what my hands are for. There'll be wounded coming west, and they'll need me here and you there, and both of us too busy to be brave." She pressed his knuckles once, hard, and let go. "Ten days, Leon. Don't waste them being solemn."

His father was waiting at the forge with a lamp lit and a bundle of oiled cloth laid out across the anvil. Leon had lived his whole life under that bundle hanging above the door lintel and had never once seen it unwrapped.

Garrick unwrapped it now. A service sword. Issue pattern, straight and plain, the guard notched, the grip rewrapped twice with bootlace.

"Salt Ford," his father said. "Border squabble the year before you were born. Two years and a summer, and I came home with this and the arm." He turned the blade so the lamplight ran along it. There was a hollow bitten into the edge near the point that no whetstone had made. "You'll want iron you can trust, and you can't afford any."

"I'll reforge her. New edge, new grip. She'll come back better than she was."

"No." His father wrapped the blade again and held it out across the anvil. "She'll come back what she is. That's what's kept her and me both alive. The kingdom has plenty of swords, boy. What it runs short of is men who know what iron will bear." He looked at his one good hand, then at his son's two. "Take it."

They walked the rider out at dusk, because he was going on up the valley to the next villages and wouldn't wait for morning. Elena had forced broth into him. Leon carried a barley loaf and their last skin of small beer, and Garrick carried the silence of a man doing arithmetic he didn't like.

At the crossroads below the mill the rider reined in and looked back at the village — the lamplit windows, the thread of forge smoke, the oak where the names had been read.

"How bad?" Garrick asked, plain as a man asking the price of nails.

"Bad the way it's always bad."

"The writ was sealed on the third," Leon said. "It's the twenty-first. Post speed is six days. Somebody wanted this paper to walk."

The rider looked at him a long time. Whatever he found there — the forge heat still on the boy's arms, the ring at the girl's neck, a village reading out its sons by lamplight — it decided him.

"The Vessians crossed the Redwater with two hosts, and a third came down out of the passes a week behind. Marshal Duren met them at Causine Ford with every standing company in the east. That was five weeks ago." He said it the way Leon's father described bad steel: flat, factual, finished. "There is no eastern army now, smith's son. What gathers at Eastvale is what's left of Aurel. You're not being called up to stand a wall for two years. You're being spent."

The word sat in the road between them like a dropped hammer.

"The invasion isn't coming, Leon Varis," the rider said. "It came five weeks ago. Everything you're mourning tonight, you're mourning late." He gathered the reins, and the lame horse turned willing enough toward the dark. "Pray the roads east stay open. There's no law that says the war must wait for you to arrive."

Hoofbeats faded up the valley. The first star came out over the barley stacks.

Leon stood with his father's sword under his arm and Elena's deal warm against his chest, and far up the valley, thin with distance, another village's horn began to blow.

One blast. Two.

Three