Chapter 9 – Small Blessings #4
“It’ll be better for him here,” said Tounot, as he and Remin heaved a heavy bedframe into position in Huber’s new bedchamber. “Gen says there’s no risk of further infection, and lying in that closet all day isn’t doing him any good. His color’s poor. He needs sunlight.”
“There will be plenty of it here,” Remin replied, shoving the bed further under the window.
The deep copper in Huber’s skin and hair always seemed to gleam brighter when he’d had some sunshine, as if he needed a regular burnishing.
“You might tell him about those horses Miche brought back. How’s he been doing otherwise? ”
Tounot shrugged, raking a distracted hand through his curly hair.
“Juste sits with him often,” he said. “And Miche comes by to stir him up every day. But he won’t talk to any of us, and he won’t let us bring Nicco and Lege to see him. His pages need him, Rem. They’re still grieving for Rollon, too.”
“Then moving him here will be the best thing for all of them,” Remin said firmly.
They did the best they could for him. The new rooms faced south to let the sunlight pour in, and Huber’s treasures glittered on the deep windowsills: the stones he collected, books worn from his saddlebags, the strange carvings he had made beside so many lonely campfires.
His healing would not be swift. To be maimed in this way was almost a form of death, for a knight. Some men shrugged and got on with things; others brooded on the loss, and never got over it. If anything would call Huber back to himself, it would be his boys.
Remin had cause to think of Huber again a few days later, when he and his knights gathered in the council room of the barracks. There was one more village that needed rescuing.
“We need to fetch the people of Ferrede back to Tresingale,” he began. “I won’t risk leaving them to the devils when the snow begins to melt. Or when the devils start bursting out from under it,” he added grimly. Ophele had voiced this unsettling possibility.
“They might need persuading, Your Grace,” said Ortaire, who had gone to that village with Huber last summer. “We thought about bringing them back with us while we were there, but all of them refused.”
“Tell them what happened in Nandre,” said Auber, frowning. “If those houses couldn’t keep the devils out, nothing in Ferrede will.”
“I will tell them myself.” Ortaire looked at Remin. “Let me go, my lord. They know me. It might mean something if I tell them that the thing that killed Rollon is coming. They…thought highly of him.”
This was how it happened. Over and over, this spiral of self-sacrifice, from Rollon’s guilt for the dead of Ferrede to Ortaire’s grief for his friend Rollon.
They wanted honor, and they wanted redemption, and so these good men kept saying, I will go.
And over and over, Remin sent them, knowing they might come back maimed, or never come back at all.
Under the table, his fingers found the owlbug in his sleeve.
“Very well,” he said. “You’ll take a large force with you. Fortify your camps. We can’t count on anything with the devils this year.”
“You’ll want to get the men practicing with snowshoes now,” said Miche, Master of Snow. His face was unusually somber. “It’s no joke, traveling with commonfolk in this weather. They’re not used to marching. You’ll do better to put them in sledges.”
“There’s time, I don’t mean for you to leave straightaway,” Remin agreed. “Provision well. We’ll need to have more cottages built before they arrive.”
“Nore Ffloce is going to have a fit,” remarked Tounot, with some amusement.
But that was only one of the secondary effects of this migration.
Remin had never expected Tresingale to support so many over the winter.
They needed food, firewood, medicine in the event there were sick or wounded, and all the infrastructure of fledgling Tresingale was already straining.
And every additional person was another person to evacuate, if the devils had any more surprises, come spring. If they came over or through the walls of Tresingale, then maybe the Brede would devour them all, in the end.
“Let me see the town map,” Remin said, to groans of complaint.
He ignored them. He had been outside town digging trenches right alongside them, sharpening pikes and other defensive objects, but it still didn’t feel like enough.
They had never had so many noncombatants to protect, and once the people of Ferrede arrived, he would have emptied the valley of every other man-thing, to use Ophele’s words.
When the devils re-emerged in a few months, all of them would be coming for Tresingale.
“I begin to be persuaded of Her Grace’s arguments,” Juste told him after the meeting, as they walked together toward the harbor.
The road was steep and winding, too treacherous for horses in winter, and Remin wanted to evaluate the harbor for evacuation potential.
“That mountaintop concerns me, my lord. It does not seem so great a leap to think that somehow the devils are coming from inside it, and perhaps it was only the size of the entrance that restrained them before.”
“If there’s one new devil, I don’t see why there couldn’t be more,” Remin agreed.
Flying devils, for all he knew; didn’t they tell stories of such creatures in Daitia?
He cared less about where they were coming from than where they might be headed.
His jaw tightened as he looked at the distant walls. “Those walls don’t look so sturdy now.”
“We cannot prepare for every conceivable disast—”
It happened even as he said it, in the cruel irony of the universe. The guide rope yanked loose and Juste cursed as he twisted, grabbing for the nearest tree. It was already too late. He was falling.
“Juste!”
Swearing, Remin floundered after him, the crust of snow giving way beneath his weight.
He had to drag himself forward from tree to tree and it felt as if there was all the time in the world to see Juste sliding ahead of him, twisting fruitlessly as he shot down the icy slope.
His body spun sideways, and the trees rushed up.
There was a sickening crunch.
A moment of silence.
Then Juste yanked the muffler off his face and turned the air blue with profanity.
“Don’t move!” Remin cursed as the snow broke under him again. Snowshoes. He would have given anything for snowshoes. At least Juste wasn’t hurt too badly to swear. “Did you break something?”
“My shoulder,” Juste said tightly, and as Remin waded toward him, he could see Juste’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “I distinctly recall telling those simpletons to mind how they secured the ropes. I will tie the lines to their boll—”
“Hold still,” Remin replied, pulling out his belt knife to cut off Juste’s shirt. It was so cold, the air had fangs, but it was too risky to try to move him without a clear idea of what was injured.
“It’s dislocated,” Juste said through his teeth.
Both of them had seen this injury often enough to identify it.
His right shoulder was misshapen, his arm hanging loose from the joint, and Remin plunged his knife into the snow to make a rapid survey of the rest of him.
He hardly needed to speak; Juste knew the routine as well as he did, a check of bones and joints to make sure nothing was broken before he dealt with the shoulder.
Their eyes met, and Juste’s lips pressed together.
“Do i—” The order ended in a howl as Remin took his hand, braced his back, and yanked.
Another crunch. Juste unleashed a second volley of insults, the cords of his neck standing out.
Remin was glad he couldn’t understand more than a third of it.
“Sorry,” he said, making a sling to bind Juste’s arm to his chest. Juste had a very slow temper, but when he lost it, it was cataclysmic. “Looks like we’ll have to check out the harbor another day.”
“Not for some weeks, unless I am much mistaken.” Juste’s cold, flat voice promised a terrible vengeance, and he grunted in pain as Remin carefully hauled him over his shoulders. “My lord. This is unnecessary.”
“I suppose you might still break the other arm, or just go straight into the Brede if you fall again,” Remin retorted, using Juste’s uninjured arm to settle him into place. “Quit whining.”
This kind of thing had happened during the war, too.
Sometimes Valleth hardly needed to be clever when there was sheer, stupid mischance to bungle a plan: a lamed horse, a broken wagon, a dislocated shoulder.
They were silent as Remin trudged back up the hillside, testing every foothold before he committed his weight.
There was no need to speak. They were both doing the same thing.
Counting the weeks that remained until they left for the capital, and wondering if Remin would be able to count on Juste’s sword.
* * *
Until recently, Ophele would have never dared to think it.
It was disrespectful. He was a national hero. A Knight of the Brede. A teacher, a scholar, a man of cool and rational judgment whose opinion she trusted absolutely. It was the last thing she had ever expected to see, and mentally she tiptoed around the idea, poking it to see what happened.
Sir Justenin was cranky.
“But they all just want to help,” she protested. “I don’t think everyone is…plotting every time they come to visit.”
“They may not be, but you must consider that they are,” he replied shortly.
Sitting together at the table in the solar, his right arm was all but bound to his side.
She had heard both Genon and Remin telling him it was not to come off for any reason whatever, and every time he looked the least bit tempted, Leonin and Davi stiffened to attention, as if they might swoop down on him like hawks.
It was very inconvenient that Justenin was right-handed.
“Did any of them ask you for anything?” His lips tightened as he scribbled laboriously with his left. Even from the other side of the table, she could see that his handwriting was worse than hers.