Chapter 21 The Long Walk
Chapter twenty-one
The Long Walk
The war was over.
The words felt strange in Aerion’s mouth, even when he spoke them aloud at council. They tasted unreal, like fruit out of season—sweet, but fragile, as though one hard frost might undo it all.
The council chamber hummed with cautious relief. Maps were cleared from the tables, quills dipped now into ledgers for grain shipments instead of casualty counts. Yet where one burden lifted, another settled.
“We must prepare to receive them,” Lord Baedwin said, his quill tapping against his ledger. “The knights will march home soon, and Valemont must greet them with the honours they are due.”
Aerion lounged in his chair, fingers drumming against the carved armrest. He wore black, still—mourning his father, mourning too many things to name. But his eyes were sharp, and when they lifted, the lords fell silent.
“A banquet,” he said, voice slow, deliberate. “Large enough to rival the king’s own halls. Let the walls ring with it, let the wine flow red, let every widow and child eat their fill. No one who bled for Valemont will return to an empty table.”
There were murmurs of approval, scribbling quills.
“And a cemetery,” Aerion continued. His tone was colder now, his gaze fixed on the far wall where old Valemont Archdukes stared down from painted canvas. “Not a mass grave in a muddy field. A true cemetery. With names. With stones. With a wall that will outlast us all. They will not be forgotten.”
The chamberlain shifted. “The expense will be—”
Aerion cut him off with a glance so sharp the man fell silent. “The expense,” he said softly, “is the price of war. And it has already been paid in blood. See that the stones are quarried.”
The matter closed there.
When the council adjourned, Aerion lingered alone in the echoing hall, his hand pressed against the cold oak of his father’s chair. The mask of command felt heavy on his face, but inside—beneath the velvet and the venom—something restless clawed at him.
That night, the hawk came.
Its wings beat against the dusk air as it landed on the sill, feathers ragged from long flight. Heston took the letter and brought it to Aerion’s desk without a word.
The seal was crude, dark wax pressed by a soldier’s hand. Aerion’s pulse quickened.
He broke it.
A,
It is done. The banners burn. The field is ours.
The men are tired, but alive. The dead will be honored.
We begin the journey home at first thaw. Two months, if the roads hold.
I will see Valemont again. I will see you.
—C
Aerion read it three times before he could breathe again. He pressed the page to his lips, eyes closing.
Two months.
Two months was nothing. Two months was forever.
He set the letter down with trembling hands and laughed once, softly, the sound cracking into something too sharp. Then he rose, pacing the room like a caged thing, words already spilling from his mouth as though Clyde stood before him.
“You had better come back whole, you bastard,” he whispered. “Or I’ll drag you from the grave myself.”
The fire in the hearth roared high, and for the first time in years, Aerion allowed himself to imagine it: Clyde, not in letters, not in dreams, but standing in the hall again—breathing, scarred, alive.
Two months.
The number circled Aerion’s mind like a hawk over prey. It would not leave him.
So he turned it into work.
By the next council session, the plans had doubled.
Not just a banquet, but a feast for every soul in Valemont; tables stretching the length of the square, casks of wine rolled up from the southern cellars, musicians enough to drown out memory itself.
He demanded not only the building of a cemetery, but a monument of stone, carved with names and ringed with roses.
“Every fallen knight will be named,” he ordered. “Every squire, every bannerman, every boy who carried a sword too heavy for his arm. If they bled for Valemont, their names will outlive us all.”
The chamberlain bowed, though his hands twitched around his quill. The vassals shifted uneasily, murmuring of costs, of supply lines, of timetables. Aerion silenced them with one raised hand, jewelled rings glinting in the firelight.
“Do it,” he said simply. “If I must spend every last coin in the treasury, it will be done.”
And when he was alone, he spread maps across his desk, but not maps of war.
Maps of kitchens, of storerooms, of the cemetery plots he marked with precise strokes.
He sat up late into the night with Heston at his side, dictating menus, arguing over stonecutters, insisting on roses and rosemary sprigs for remembrance, insisting that every widow and child be seated at the head tables, not hidden in the shadows.
It became an obsession.
When Isolde tugged on his sleeve one morning, asking why he hadn’t walked in the garden with her in a week, Aerion blinked as though waking from a dream.
He bent, kissed her pale hair, and promised they’d walk tomorrow.
He kept the promise. But even then, as she pointed at new green shoots pushing up from the thawed soil, his mind was elsewhere—seeing Clyde’s boots on that path, hearing Clyde’s voice cutting through the still air.
He began measuring days not in sunrises, but in distance. Two months. Eight weeks. Sixty days.
In the evenings, when the keep fell quiet, he returned to Clyde’s cloak—still folded at the foot of his bed, still carrying the faint scent of smoke and leather.
Sometimes he wore it. Sometimes he pressed the new letter—the one with Clyde’s blunt, soldier’s script—against his lips before tucking it into his robe.
Heston saw the change, though he never spoke of it.
The butler only made sure the Archduke’s goblet was never empty, his cloak never missing, his quills always sharp.
Once, Aerion caught him watching from the doorway as he stared too long at Clyde’s letter.
Their eyes met. Heston bowed and left without a word.
The days bled forward. The banquet was planned, replanned, perfected. The cemetery was marked, stonemasons summoned from three counties. Musicians were hired. Carpenters set to work on long trestle tables.
And still Aerion was restless.
Every night ended the same: him sprawled on his bed, Clyde’s letter pressed to his chest, whispering into the dark as if the knight might hear across the distance, across the silence.
“Come home,” he murmured. “Come home to me.”
The road west wound like an old scar through the land—muddy, uneven, littered with broken wagons and graves dug shallow where the earth was too frozen to yield.
The war was over.
That was what they’d been told. What the king’s herald had shouted from a blood-stained dais. What Clyde himself had ordered his men to believe.
But war never ended so cleanly.
The march home was slower than the march to battle. Horses stumbled from exhaustion. Men limped, leaning on one another, arm or hanging loose on thinner frames. The air was raw with spring thaw—wet earth and rot and smoke from villages burned months ago.
Clyde rode at the head. His shield was gone, his horse a ragged bay that had already carried him too far, but he held himself tall. He had to. The men followed his back now, not the banners.
Renn should have been at his side. So should Merrick. So should fifty others whose names Clyde would never stop carrying. Instead, he had a hundred hollow-eyed survivors, boys too young and men too old, looking to him as if he could conjure safety from mud.
He didn’t speak much. But when the youngest faltered, Clyde was there to steady him. When the food dwindled, he gave up his share. At night, he walked the lines of the campfires, speaking a quiet word here, a hand on a shoulder there. It wasn’t much. But it kept them moving.
What kept him moving was smaller still.
A ribbon, worn soft with years, tied around his wrist beneath his gauntlet. Aerion’s colours, faded to brown, but his all the same. Clyde touched it when no one was looking, thumb brushing the frayed knot, and thought of the letter folded close to his chest.
He read it in his head more often than he breathed.
Come home. Live long enough to be punished for it.
The words made him smile, faint and private. They made his step surer when the mud clung too heavy. They made the nights less cold.
Aerion was waiting. Aerion and the girl. A hearth, a home, a future that felt almost possible.
Almost.
Because on the twelfth day of the march, when the road narrowed through a stretch of black pine, Clyde’s instincts caught fire.
The silence was wrong. No birds. No wind. Only the creak of leather, the squelch of mud, the uneven rhythm of too many tired boots.
He raised a hand. The column slowed.
And then the arrows came.
Screaming from the trees.
Men fell before they could cry out. Horses shrieked. Steel rang.
Clyde’s sword was in his hand before the first shaft struck. He bellowed for the men to form ranks, though his voice was nearly drowned in chaos. Blood spattered his cheek, hot and fresh.
The war was not over.
Not yet.
The arrows were only the beginning.
The trees themselves seemed to split apart, bark shredding into splinters as something bigger moved behind them. The air reeked of sulfur, of rot and burning metal. Then came the sound—low, guttural, more beast than man.
The first creature leapt from the shadows.
It was the size of two horses, skin blackened and slick like tar, eyes burning with an inner fire that seared as it looked. Its mouth unhinged too wide, jagged teeth glinting wet. It hit the ground on all fours and tore through three men before they had time to raise shields.
And then there were more.
They came in a tide—demonic beasts with claws like hooked blades, horns curling from skulls, their howls a sound born of nightmares. The forest erupted with them, and the weary, broken column of men found themselves swallowed whole.
“Hold ranks!” Clyde roared, his voice a battle-drum. “Shields forward! Spears high!”
But fear splintered discipline. Some men turned and ran, vanishing into the trees. Others screamed prayers. The younger ones froze until the claws reached them.
Clyde was everywhere at once—dragging men into formation, cutting beasts down with brutal efficiency. His sword hacked through blackened sinew, his arm never stopping, his shield arm braced though it was bare now of oak and steel.
“Stay with me!” he shouted, voice raw. “Stay together!”
A claw caught his thigh, fresh blood spilling hot down his leg. He staggered, drove his blade through the creature’s skull, shoved it off. Another leapt. He ducked, felt its fetid breath scorch past his face.
Renn would have been at his side, Clyde thought. Merrick too. For a heartbeat, ghosts fought with him. He saw their faces in every flash of fire and steel.
The beasts did not tire. They came in waves, snarling, shrieking. For every one that fell, two more appeared. The forest floor slicked with blood; man and monster alike.
Clyde fought until his arms were numb, until his breath tore ragged in his throat, until his men’s screams blurred into a single, endless howl.
Then the ground shook.
A shadow loomed.
From between the pines, a massive figure forced its way into the clearing, towering above the others, its body a grotesque fusion of bone and sinew. One claw alone was longer than Clyde’s sword, glistening with fresh gore.
The men faltered. Some dropped weapons.
Clyde stepped forward.
He raised his blade, bloodied and trembling but still unbroken. “With me!” he roared.
The creature struck.
A claw swept like a scythe through the chaos, catching Clyde square in the chest. He felt the impact before the pain, the breath torn from him, ribs cracking, armour tearing as the claw punched clean through.
For a heartbeat, the world went silent.
Clyde looked down, saw the beast’s talon buried in his chest, blood spilling hot across the ribbon still tied to his wrist.
And he thought—of a hearth. Of roses. Of a little girl’s laugh. Of Aerion’s voice calling him dog with venom and love.
Then the darkness surged.