Chapter 20 The Last Redoubt #2
At first, he wasn’t sure if he was one of them.
The sky swam above him in blurs of grey and ash.
He tried to breathe, coughed, and blood filled his mouth.
His ribs screamed. His thigh was fire. The hand still clutching his sword refused to let go, cramped tight around the hilt even as his strength bled out of him.
Somewhere close, a crow cawed. Pecked. Flapped away.
He pushed himself onto an elbow, gasped, and collapsed into the mud again. His chest convulsed, the taste of iron flooding his tongue. But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.
Not here. Not yet.
Aerion’s name was still carved into the wood of the broken post, a few paces above him. He saw it through the blur, smeared with gore, and it pulled him forward like a hand at his collar.
Clyde clawed his way through bodies. Slid in entrails. His fingers dug into mud, his knees buckled, but he dragged himself inch by inch until his back found the post. He leaned against it, head tipped back, breath shuddering.
Alive. Barely. But alive.
He forced his fingers open at last, dropping the sword into the muck beside him. His other hand touched his chestplate, where Aerion’s ribbon still lay tucked inside. Stiff with sweat and blood now, worn thin as silk spun to threads—but still there. Still over his heart.
He pressed it hard, hissed against the pain, and laughed—a broken, ragged sound.
“Still here,” he whispered to no one. To Aerion. To the gods. To himself.
His vision swam. His body begged for sleep. He let his head fall back against the post and shut his eyes.
If he woke again, it would be a miracle.
But for now, for this moment, he had survived.
Dawn crept back over Hollow Ridge like a thief ashamed of the night before.
The mist hung low, veiling the dead. Frost silvered armour where men would never rise again. The wind carried no songs of triumph—only the stink of blood and smoke, a silence too vast to be anything but defeat.
Bootsteps crunched through the carnage. Voices—low, uncertain—moved among the corpses. Survivors picking through the ruin, searching for their own.
“Commander?” one called, too quietly, as if afraid of the answer. “Sir Clyde?”
No reply. Only the caw of a crow.
Then Torren’s voice, hoarse, broken: “Look—there!”
They ran. Stumbled over bodies. Fell to their knees when they reached him.
Clyde sat slumped against the shattered post, his armour drenched and torn, blood blackening every seam. His sword lay in the mud at his side, his hand empty for once. But his chest still moved. Barely. Shallow, ragged, every breath a knife.
“Alive,” Torren gasped, tears streaking through the grime on his face. He pressed two fingers to Clyde’s throat. “Alive!”
The men rallied like they had not all night. Rough hands steadied Clyde’s head, lifted his arms across shoulders, hauled him up from the mire. He groaned once, low, but did not wake.
As they bore him down the hill, one soldier murmured, “What’s this?” and reached inside his armour where the leather had split. He pulled free a strip of cloth—faded red, stained near brown, but still soft, still tied.
A ribbon.
Aerion’s ribbon.
Torren snatched it back before anyone else could see. Pressed it into Clyde’s palm, curling the knight’s fingers tight around it.
“He keeps it close,” Torren said roughly, daring anyone to question it. “It’s his charm. His shield. Don’t speak of it.”
No one did.
They carried their commander through the valley of the dead, his weight dragging, his breath faltering—but alive. Against the ruin of Hollow Ridge, it felt like a victory.
Aerion was in the solar, tea gone cold in a porcelain cup, Isolde scribbling by the window, when the hawk landed like a small, tired thunder on the sill.
Heston’s hand was steady as ever as he crossed the room, but Aerion watched him with the kind of attention that has teeth in it; every step toward the Archduke’s desk felt like a drumbeat.
The seal was corroded from travel, the edges of the parchment softened and dark where rain had soaked through. Aerion broke it with fingers that did not tremble until the moment the paper came free. Then he froze, as though the letter might burn him.
He read it once. Slowly at first, tasting each short line.
My lord,
I lived.
They said we wouldn’t. They said we’d all fall. Maybe we did. I’m not sure I’m still standing.
The hill took everything. My horse. My shield. My name, maybe. But not your ribbon.
I tied it to my wrist before we charged. I kissed it like a holy thing.
My heart is a war drum. It only quiets when I think of you.
You. At the hearth. Laughing at the state of me. Telling me my hair’s a disgrace. Shoving tea into my hands like it could make me whole.
You.
You.
You.
You keep me alive.
—C
He read it a second time and then again aloud, the cadence of the words striking the room like blows.
The repetition—those fragmentary “You. You. You.” stacked like stones—unroofed him.
Aerion’s throat closed; for a breath he could not feel the air.
The cup in front of him clinked as Isolde set her pencil down.
He did not cry at once. He sat very still, the paper trembling in his hand, the small room full of evening light and the smell of pipe smoke from the servant below.
Then something in the chest where he kept his fury and his tenderness broke loose.
The sound that came from him wasn’t a sob so much as the release of several held-at-their-teeth things at once: grief, relief, fury, and a need so old it startled him.
Isolde was in his lap before he realized she’d moved. She smoothed his sleeve with a pale, chubby hand and looked up at him with an expression too grave for her years.
“Papa?” she asked as if naming the obvious.
He drew her closer until her head tucked beneath his chin, breath warm against the damp of his face. He pressed the letter to his lips, as if to meet Clyde in the inked strokes, and when he folded it, he took care not to crease those lines that had saved him.
He let the words settle in the small, private hollows of his body. Then, steadied by the child sleeping against his chest and the bizarre, simple fact of the letter in his hand, he did what he had always done when a decision pressed against him: he wrote.
The quill shook at first, his handwriting cramped. Isolde watched from his shoulder, small fingers tracing his wrist.
My love,
I have watched the horizon for years and thought every bird that crossed the horizon might be you.
You lived. You wrote. You kept your ribbon. You are a fool and a god.
Come home. Live long enough to be punished for it. Let me see you staggering in the hall, smell of smoke and mud, swearing at the roses. Let me tell you how useless you make me and mean it. Let me be the one to scold you for leaving me.
Isolde tuckered herself into my lap to hear my answer before I wrote it. She says the war must stop because princes need to come home to tea. I agree. So come. Come back to me.
—A
He did not seal that note immediately. He folded it once, then twice, and pressed it between the pages of the small devotional book he kept in his desk.
He pressed his thumb to the ink where Clyde had written “You,” and for a long minute let the smell of the road—ash and dirt and sweat—rise faint and intimate from the page.
It was not much; a small proof that the man who had been broken on Hollow Ridge still carried the same private, ridiculous habits that had first made Aerion both laugh and wound.
At last he summoned Heston. The butler’s face was polite but taut with the worry of a man who has watched a lord change and cannot mend what’s cracked at the bone. “Send this on the first hawk,” Aerion said, voice steady now. “See that it flies fast.”
Heston inclined his head and moved with the efficiency of a man who had learned to carry other people’s heartbreaks.
Aerion returned to the window, Isolde curled in his arms, and for the first time in months the sea beyond the cliffs looked less like a threat and more like a path—toward a man who had carved a name into wood with a blooded hand and then, impossibly, lived to tell it.