The Last Banner

Chapter 2: What the Fire Draws

Bren Ostler came over the forge wall an hour past midnight with a boar spear in both fists and a plan to be a coward.

Leon was awake. He had been awake most of every night since the horn, and the sword lay on the table, and he had been trying to learn its weight like a stranger's name. He looked at Bren. Bren looked at the sword. Neither of them found anything clever to say.

"The fells," Bren said at last. "Shepherd's bothy above Grey Tarn. Hay's still sweet — I checked it in June. There's a spring, and past the snowline nothing lives but a man who's decided to." The laugh came out of him sideways, wrong-shaped. "Nobody's firstborn up there but the sheep."

Leon set the sword down instead of answering, and that was answer enough, and Bren's jaw started going the way it did before the slaughtering shed, when the first pig fought.

Then the stair creaked, once, twice — a one-armed man comes down stairs honestly — and Garrick Varis filled the doorway with a lamp he hadn't bothered to light.

"At Salt Ford they never chased a deserter," he said. "Not once in two years. No dogs, no posse. The reeve just reads the household over again and takes the next name down."

Bren went still. "Tomas is twelve."

"That's the custom of it."

The spear point drifted until it touched the floorstones, and Bren sat on the quench barrel like something unloaded. "I walked to Grey Tarn to practice," he said, to nobody. "Twice."

Leon crossed the yard, took the spear out of his hands, and leaned it against the wall where it couldn't whisper to him anymore.

"How do you carry it?" Bren asked. His voice was small and he was too big for it.

"I haven't picked it up yet. Ask me on the road."

They didn't speak after that. Leon banked the coals and put iron back in them, and Bren held the tongs, and the two of them made spearheads by lamplight — socketed, barbed, plain — because fear with nowhere to go will kill a man faster than any enemy, and fear with a hammer in it is called work.

---

By the second morning there was a line outside the forge.

They came with billhooks and scythes and their fathers' knives, and Leon took every one of them, and his father worked the bellows with the handle cradled in the crook of his missing arm's elbow, and neither of them discussed the price. The reeve came with the constable's book and a bill for twelve spearheads owed to the parish, and Leon made fourteen. Someone left a hen on the windowsill. Widow Maren left bread and took nothing, and her eyes stayed dry, and that was worse than weeping.

Willem Fen stood first in line, holding a billhook and the good sacrificial knife, the one his family used at winter killing, and Leon understood without asking that the Fens had sent their best steel, because that was the kind of thing a household said when it had stopped hoping.

Dace came at noon, not for iron. He pressed something into Leon's palm and closed Leon's fingers over it. A bead, halved lengthwise, drilled through old shell.

"We split it when we were six," he said. "Wore the halves on cords so we'd match." His thumb worried the cord at his own throat, the half that was left. "Give Willem mine. So he knows I'm whole."

Leon carried it in his cheek-pocket after that, the way some men carry a coin for luck and some men carry a debt.

The reeve lingered at the end, awkward. "You're on no list I carry, Garrick," he said. "It didn't sit right with me, saying nothing."

"The crown kept half my arm as a receipt," Garrick said. "It says paid."

---

Lord Cambres came up from the Hall on the fourth day with five riders and a smell of rosemary water, in a village that smelled of pig.

He wanted the horses shod, he said, and his son's harness seen to, and then he wanted a word with the smith, privately, and the word was thirty crowns.

"A name on a parish roll is ink, boy. Ink can be re-dipped. A word to your reeve — his hand shakes anyway —"

"The reeve's pages went east with the writ," Leon said. "Two days ahead of any word of mine. You'd be buying a confession, my lord, and I'd be selling you the rope."

Cambres looked at him for a long breath, and there was something in the look that wasn't anger — something more like an appraiser finding a flaw in a piece he'd already paid for.

"Half the march bought grace on those rolls," he said. "Men older than this kingdom's debts. My family, three generations of grace, honestly bought — and then one night in Eastvale a candle fell, and fifty years of paper went up, and with it every bargain my grandfather ever cut." He drew his gloves through his fist, once, hard. "Ask yourself sometime, smith, who was standing close to that candle. Someone spent good silver to make this war hungry."

He turned for his horse. "Mind my son's armor. It's worth more than you."

Tam Cambres was seventeen and had his mother's mouth and none of his father's posture. He held out his sword silently, and when Leon turned the grip he found it wrapped in silk cord, pretty as a festival booth.

"The steward does that," Tam said. "It slips."

Leon cut it off and rewound it in bootlace, the way his father's sword was wound, the way veterans wound them — flat, tight, ugly. Tam took it back and worked his hand around it and something in his shoulders came down half an inch.

"I didn't buy anything," he said. "For what that's worth."

"It's worth something."

"Don't call me my lord at Eastvale. They're making me a cornet, and every man in the company will know by the second day that I've never—" He stopped. Mounted. "It isn't," he said quietly, to his father's last remark, and rode out of the yard with his jaw set like a man riding to a place he'd already left.

---

Elena took over the Ostler slaughter shed on the fifth day, and made Leon come.

A pig's belly, cold on the trestle. Boiled linen. A needle boiling with it. She sewed four stitches while he watched, then handed him the needle and stood back.

"Three rules. One — press. Your weight, not your nerves. A wound wants a wall, not a wish. Two — clean beats clever. Boil the linen, boil the needle, boil your hands if you have soap and the time. Dirt kills slower than steel and just as sure. Three—" she took his chin and turned his face to hers— "the wounded lie. They'll tell you they're fine so you'll pass them by. Believe the blood, not the mouth."

He ruined the first three stitches. The fourth held. By the eighth his hands had stopped asking her permission.

"Letters," she said, while he worked. "They go by priest, priests go by commissariat cart, carts go slow. Write short. A long letter is a long time in a wet sack."

"And short letters?"

"Are the ones I'll read forty times." She looked at his hands on the needle, and something crossed her face that she didn't let arrive. "You'll be nearer the dying than I ever was. That's going to be your job before it's anyone else's."

"That was your job."

"It was."

The ring showed at her collarbone where the cord had slipped, and neither of them mentioned it, because it had already been said once, and things that are true don't need saying twice.

---

They came up the mill road at dusk on the ninth day, and the dog found them first.

Two men. One walking, one being half-carried, and the one doing the carrying was younger and greyer than either of them should have been. Father Ansel met them at the chapel with a bench already cleared, because in nine days Harrowden had learned what shape trouble takes on that road.

The walker sat down against the wall and didn't get up again. The wounded one — a serjeant's ragged chevron still on a sleeve gone to rags — had a leg wrapped in once-red cloth and a face floating somewhere above the room.

"Pontoneers," the younger one said, when Elena asked. "Both of us. Causine Ford. I'm Cole. He's my brother." He said the words like a man reciting things that had to stay in order or the world would tip.

Elena's hands went to the leg. Leon's hands went where she'd taught them — pressure, his weight, not his nerves — and the serjeant came up out of the fever far enough to look at who was holding him down.

"The water was down at the Ford," he said. "Weeks down. Their scouts knew our river better than our marshals did." A breath that cost him. "And the bridge train — our train — went north on the king's road nine days before, crown-sealed, under escort. Never came. Ten thousand pikes stood at a river with nothing to cross and nothing to eat, and then both hosts came down at once and—"

He stopped. Elena had done something to the leg.

"I carried him eleven days," Cole said. "He carried me the first five." Nobody corrected the arithmetic, and there wasn't a face in the chapel that could have.

It was when Elena shifted the lamp that the serjeant saw the forge through the window — the banked glow of it, the coals kept alive the way a smith keeps them, always — and his hand shot out and caught Leon's wrist with a strength that had no business surviving in that body.

"Put that out."

"It's a forge."

"I know what it is." His eyes had gone clear and terrible. "They count smokes at night. Marle's fire burned four nights — a master smith, wouldn't drown his hearth for anybody. They came with silver on the fifth day and left with him in chains, and they hanged the farrier who swore he was one when he wasn't." The grip tightened, and his thumb moved across Leon's palm, over the burns there, reading them the way Elena had read a stranger's hands a week ago. "Burns like these crossed a river for me once and built my brother out of the far side of it. So you listen. They pay for smiths. Real ones. An army that can't mend is an army that has to stop — and they are not stopping."

He pulled Leon down until the fever and the sense in him were too close together to tell apart.

"Whatever name you muster under, boy — keep the trade out of it."

His hand dropped. Elena bent back to the leg. Father Ansel started the quiet prayer, the short one, the one for men still breathing.

Leon stood in the chapel doorway with his brother-in-arms' bead in his cheek and the serjeant's words in his ears, and behind him the forge glowed on the dark hillside the way it had glowed his whole life, and for the first time he saw it the way an enemy would see it — a mark, a count, a claim staked on the map.

Down the south road, at the edge of where the lantern-light gave up, something moved with the rhythm of hooves.

Nobody in the yard said anything at all.