Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Abel
The sun is just creeping over the horizon when a fellow guardsman comes to take my place.
“Morning, Abel,” he says with a nod of his head.
“Morning, Carl,” I reply.
There is a poorly disguised smirk on his face. “Busy night?” he asks.
“Don’t fucking go there,” I mutter. “You know there wasn’t a bit of trouble.”
“Well,” he says, not even bothering to hide his smirk now. “It wasn’t a raider kind of busy I was talking about. And you know as much.”
I grunt and gather up my cloak.
“Funny thing,” he continues, leaning against the battlement and settling in like a man with all morning to waste. “Tomos swears he heard a wail coming off this west tower around midnight. Reckoned it was a ghost. Wanted to fetch the priest.”
“Wind,” I say.
“Aye, that’s what I told him.” He scratches his beard thoughtfully. “Powerful gusty, this tower. Strange how it’s only gusty on the nights you stand the watch.”
“Are you wanting to relieve me, or are you wanting my fist in your mouth?”
“Now, now. No call for that.” He holds up both hands, the picture of innocence.
“I’m only saying, if a certain lass from a certain cottage by the stables should come wandering up a certain stair of a night, that’s no business of mine.
A guard minds the wall, not the steps behind him. That’s the code.”
The code. Unwritten, but held to more faithfully than half the King’s laws. A lass on the steps means a guard finds somewhere else to patrol, and nothing is seen, and nothing is said. It has served every man on this wall at one time or another, so no man breaks it.
Carl, naturally, treats the nothing is said part as more of a suggestion.
“Anyway,” he says. “You’d best get home. I hear a man’s wife likes to know he’s thinking of her.” A pause. “Though I’d wager she knows already. Half the estate knows. Rosa in the bakehouse had it before the bread proved.”
Gods preserve me.
“There a point coming, Carl? Or is this you courting a transfer to the midden watch?”
“No point at all.” He grins, wide and shameless, and takes up his post with his back to the wall. “Give Bea my regards.”
I give him the two-fingered gesture and take the stairs.
But there’s no heat in it, and the bastard knows as much. His laughter follows me all the way down—and truth be told, my own smile lasts longer than it has any right to.
Home. To my mate—wife as she sometimes taunts me to get a rise—and my son and, if the gods are good, a bit of breakfast.