Chapter 8 – The Watching Stars #3
“It was v-very hard, Your G-Grace,” he said, blinking. He had introduced himself as Siyoun Arpelle, a fisherman from idyllic little Isigne. “There were so many d-devils, it was barely May when we s-saw the f-first…”
What was wrong with him? Ophele tried not to stare.
He wasn’t stuttering because he was cold; his teeth weren’t chattering at all.
Every few words he ducked his head and blinked hard, and then his eyes opened wide and he clutched Ylinor to him, his arms around her as if he thought someone might snatch her away.
“S-so many d-devils,” he repeated, his eyes enormous. “So many d-devils, Your G-Grace. I don’t know…”
“There were a lot this year,” Remin agreed, angling his head to make the man look at him. “But you got here, didn’t you? You brought your girl all this way, just as you ought. Did you see the walls when you came through the gate? Those walls are twenty feet high.”
“I-I saw. Yes. Yes, Your G-Grace.” The man blinked. Gulped. Ducked.
“Nothing will harm you now. I’m very glad you’ve come,” Remin said firmly, and Ophele started as she felt his foot nudge hers.
“Yes. Yes, we have baths waiting for you, if you like,” she said, checking his cot for the white ribbon. “You can take Ylinor with you, so both of you will be clean and warm, and there will be new clothes for you. Would you like that?”
“I’d l-like that. She’s been so cold. Ylinor,” he repeated. “I promised, I p-promised my wife I’d protect her, I did, but she’s been c-cold and hungry—”
“Then you must certainly take her to the baths. Bilaki,” Ophele said, waving over the nearby Benkki Desan woman. “Bilaki will take you to get warm. You did so well, to bring Ylinor all this way. You’re safe now, don’t worry about a thing.”
That was what Amise had told the people from Meinhem, over and over again, repeating it as many times as it took to make them believe it. Ophele stepped back to let Bilaki gently usher him toward the doors, where a sledge and thick furs were waiting to bundle him up for the short trip.
“He’s in shock,” Remin explained under his breath. “Let’s see about putting a green ribbon on his cot. Such folk are unpredictable, they need watching. Were the ribbons your idea?”
“Yes,” said Ophele, too unhappy to be pleased with this small cleverness.
There was just no end of horrible things to learn, was there?
Her heart was wrung with pity for that poor man and what he must have endured, and his little girl, and Ophele repeated his name to herself as she followed Remin to the next cot, wishing she had paper and ink.
Siyoun Arpelle, a fisherman. Ylinor, his daughter.
It was something she could do, even if it was only remembering their names.
So many names. She saw Brother Oleare moving between the cots, listening, blessing, his head bowed as he prayed with them and over them.
Ophele had feared the devils, and she had been fascinated by them, but she was learning to hate them as she moved with Remin from one cot to the next, witnessing the miseries the creatures had caused.
They were not like a wolf or a bear at all.
Wolves and bears did not seek people out to hurt them and destroy their homes and tear their babies to pieces.
Before each new family, Remin bent down so he wouldn’t tower over everyone, and if there was a child, he crouched to greet them too, determined to win them over, trying to gentle his face.
And then he listened. He listened to their losses, and the names of their dead, and then he told them he was glad they had come.
He told them they were safe, and that he was sorry for what they had suffered.
“You will have it back,” he said to another small family, who spoke brokenly of the home they had left behind. “It may take some years, but if the day comes when you want to go home, I’ll see that you do. Until then, you’re safe and welcome here.”
How did he know exactly what to say? He was normally stiff and abrupt, and as the suffering mounted and they listened to awful story after awful story, Ophele lost her own words completely.
It was just too horrible. She couldn’t listen to them and not cry, and if she started crying, who knew when she would stop.
Twenty-three people had died of the valley fever, and Azelma had nearly died, and Remin had been so sick, and she hadn’t even figured out how to deal with that and now here was this fresh tragedy, orders of magnitude worse than anything that had come before.
But…no. This wasn’t a fresh tragedy, she thought, looking at all these starved people, their faces so gaunt as to show all their teeth.
This had been happening for months. While she was cowering under blankets in her cottage, devils had been smashing down their doors.
While Remin and his men had been bringing in the harvest, these people had been starving, trapped on the other side of ten thousand devils.
While she was marveling at her first blizzard, they were walking through it on frozen feet.
And leaving a trail of dead from here to Isigne, according to Miche.
The thought was overwhelming. It made her angry and ashamed and so sad and she didn’t know what to do with these feelings.
“How do you always know what to say to them?” she asked Remin as they walked out of the cookhouse. Snow was falling thickly outside, and the first groups of bathers were coming back, scrubbed pink and warm and well-wrapped for the short journey back to their cots.
“I’ve said it all before.” Remin swung up onto Lancer’s back and extended a hand to lift her before him in the saddle. “More times than I can count.”
“During the war?”
For a while, she thought he might not answer. There were many things he didn’t like to talk about. Lancer moved beneath them, his satiny black hide covered in a thick wool blanket, and Remin was warm behind her as he wrapped his cloak about them both.
“I never knew what to say, when my men came back,” he said finally, and she looked up to find his face was remote.
“After a battle. I was the one that sent them. And they came back hurt, or didn’t come back at all, and I didn’t know what to tell them.
They didn’t want to hear, I’m sorry. Why had I sent them, if I was going to be sorry about it?
So I told them they did well, and they were safe, and to get better.
And I told them when the war was over, we would have a good place, where they would never want for anything again. ”
“Siyoun Arpelle is a fisherman,” she remembered, looking toward the river. “That first man. The stuttering one. There are a lot of fish in the Brede, I bet.”
Lancer’s hooves clopped onto the cobblestones of Eugene Street. The snow drifted, soft and silent.
“Then we’ll build boats,” said Remin.
* * *
Thirty miles north of the caverns system of the Aven Bede, there was a trail that Remin’s men called the goat track.
High, narrow, and precarious, it vanished a dozen times on the way up the mountain, so cold and windy that it seemed only the wooliest creature could survive.
In some places, the gaps between rocks were so narrow, a man had to crawl to get through, and the summit of the mountain was almost always a blinding storm, capped with snow year-round.
If Valleth knew of it, they almost certainly had dismissed it as a strategic vulnerability. Only a madman would attempt it.
But one September night, Remin Grimjaw did exactly that.
The fourth year of the war was a low point.
He and his army had smashed into the Berlawes like the sea against the Cliffs of Marren, and Valleth had been defending their mountain fortresses for nearly a year.
Remin was never defeated, but that year saw a string of increasingly bloody victories at Marcke and Lunbren, culminating in the horror of Sanghin.
For Juste, that was the winter of Iverlach, the starving place, which he took and held through seven months of siege. When Remin broke through the following spring, Juste was so starved, he had to be carried out.
Everything depended on breaking this line in the mountains.
Valleth hardly needed to build walls in the Berlawes, much less defend them; the sheer granite of the mountains was impassable, and Remin had had scouts out for months, searching for the slightest weakness.
The goat track was the key to the impervious gates of Valleth.
Once he broke the doors down, he would roll up the other mountain forts like a carpet.
To that end, Tounot was marching north with a substantial force to Kernne, though unless Remin got over the goat track in time, all he was going to be able to do when he got there was yell insults at the men in the gate tower.
And fifteen miles south, Victorin and his much smaller group of men were moving into position to intercept any Vallethi reinforcements.
He just had to hold them off long enough for Remin and Tounot to take the fort.
“You could lose everyone.” Huber had come to Remin’s tent the night before all these pieces were to move into place, gaunt and grim and hollow-eyed. “You don’t even know if you can get over the mountain.”
“If we don’t take these mountains, we don’t take the valley,” Remin had replied, rummaging through the gear that would take him up and over the mountain. “You had a chance to propose an alternative an hour ago. Do you have one now?”
“At least give Victorin more men,” Huber argued. “Give him a chance. That’s not a small force to the south, if they push him out onto the flat—”
“Every extra man I give him is another man who might be spotted by a Vallethi scout. Victorin just needs to hold out long enough.” Remin sent a black look over one shoulder. “He’s not arguing, so why are you?”
“Of course he’s not going to argue, he’ll do whatever he thinks you need him to do,” Huber snapped. “That’s why you picked him, you bloody bastard.”