Published at 29th of December 2023 9:45 am

Chapter 36: Wedding day

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The cave lay blind dark and silent although it held close on a hundred men.

The last rumbles of the avalanche stilled. In my fall I had bruised my arse on an unforgiving rock and my curse was the first sound.

“Shitdarn!” I’d learned that one from Brother Elban and felt a duty to roll it out from time to time since no one else ever used it.

Still no noise, as if a gang of trolls had ripped the head from each man as he entered.

“There’s lanterns at the back, and tinder,” I called.

Scuffling now.

More scuffling, the scritch of flint on steel and then a glow cutting dozens of men from the darkness.

I looked at the silver watch on my wrist for the first time in an age. A quarter past twelve. The arm for counting seconds tick tick ticked its way in yet another circle.

“I know my spade made it in here,” I said, standing, careful not to brain myself on the low ceiling. “Find some more and dig us out.”

“We should take a roll-call,” Hobbs said, moving to the front. More lanterns were lit and the wall of snow behind him glistened.

“We could,” I said. I knew his wasn’t just a bureaucratic interest. He had lost friends, protégés, the sons of friends, and he wanted to know what remained of the Watch, of his Watch. “We could, but it’s not the snow that kills men in an avalanche,” I said. “None of those soldiers out there are dead.”

I had their attention now.

“They’re all busy suffocating whilst the snow has them trapped. And that, my friends, is exactly what’s happening to us. Whilst I explain it to you I’m using up the strictly limited supply of air in this cave. Whilst you’re listening to me you are breathing in the good air and breathing out the bad. Each of those lanterns that lets you see me, is eating up the air.” Silent thanks to Tutor Lundist and his lessons in alchemy—I might not outlive my wedding day but I had no desire to exit by snuffing out like the candle in the bell-jar.

They took my point. Three men who had found spades hurried to the snow, others searched for more. Soon all the space at the exit was occupied. I could have just told them to dig, but better they know the reason, better they not think I didn’t share Hobbs’s interest in the Watch’s sacrifice.

I saw Captain Keppen leaning against a boulder, clutching his side. Makin had set himself against the rear wall of the cave on his backside with his knees drawn up to his forehead.

“Get the wounded seen to,” I told Hobbs. I clapped a hand to his shoulder. Kings are supposed to make such gestures.

I found my way to Makin’s side. The cave floor lay strewn with men but whether they had been felled by exhaustion or injury I couldn’t tell. I slid my back down the icy wall and sat beside him. We watched the diggers dig and tried to breathe shallow. He smelled of clove-spice and sweat.

A strange path I had followed to end trapped in a snow-locked cave, buried in the highest of places. From the Tall Castle to the road, from the road to Renar’s throne, a year and more roaming the empire until at last the Highlands called me back. And in the Highlands finding the prize less rewarding than the chase, growing into manhood on a copper crown throne, wrestling with the mundane from plague to famine, building an economy like a swordsman builds muscle, recruiting, training, and for what? To have some preordained emperor trample it beneath his heel on his march to the Gilden Gate.

I closed my eyes and listened as my aches and pains announced themselves into the first pause since Father Gomst married me to Miana that morning. The weight of the day settled on me, squeezing words out.

“There’s men dead out there because I spent too long talking with Coddin,” I said. “Renar men and Ancrath men.”

“Yes.” Makin didn’t lift his head.

“Well, here we are, both dying in a cave like Coddin is. Got anything you need to unburden, Sir Makin? Or do we need more extreme circumstances and even less time?”

“Nope,” Makin looked up, his face in shadow with just the curve of a cheekbone and the tip of his nose catching the lamplight. “Those men chose to follow you, Jorg. And they’d all be dead if it weren’t for your tricks.”

“And why did they choose to follow me? Why do you?” I asked.

I could hear rather than see him lick his teeth before answering. “There are no simple answers in the world, Jorg. Every question has sides. Too many of them. Everything is knotted. But you make the questions simple and somehow it works. For other men the world is not like that. Maybe I could have found a way to drag you back to your father years before you took yourself back—but I wanted to see you do what you promised to. I wondered if you really could win it all.”

“It seemed simple when I had Count Renar to hate,” I said.

“You were…” He smiled. “Focused.”

“It’s about being young too. I hardly recognize myself in that boy.”

“You’re not so different,” Makin said.

The snow around the diggers had a glow of its own now, the daylight reaching down through what remained to clear.

“I was consumed by me, by what I wanted. Nothing else mattered. Not my life, not anyone’s life. All of it was a price worth paying. All of it was worth staking on long odds just for the chance to win.”

Makin snorted. “That’s a place everyone visits on their way from child to man. You just went native.”

I reached into the pouch on my hip and slid my fingers around the box. “I have…regrets.”

“We’re all built of those.” Makin watched the diggers. A spear of daylight struck through into the cave.

“Gelleth I am sorry for…My father would think me weak. But if it were now—I would find another way.”

“There was no other way,” Makin said. “Even the way you took was impossible.”

“Tell me about your child,” I said. “A girl?”

“Cerys.” He spoke her name like a kiss, blinking as the daylight found us. “She would be older than you, Jorg. She was three when they killed her.”

We could see the sky now, a circle of blue, away to the east beyond the snow clouds.

“I follow you because I’m tired of war. I would see it stopped. One empire. One law. It doesn’t matter so much how or who, just being united would stop the madness,” Makin said.

“Heh, I can feel the loyalty!” I pushed up and stood, stretching. “Wouldn’t the Prince of Arrow make a better emperor?” I set off toward the exit.

“I don’t think he’ll win,” said Makin, and he followed.

In the long ago, in the gentle days, Brother Grumlow carved wood, worked with saw and chisel. When hard times come carpenters are apt to get nailed to crosses. Grumlow took up the knife and learned to carve men. He looks soft, my brother of the blade, slight in build, light in colour, weak chin, sad eyes, all of him drooping like the moustache that hangs off his lip. Yet he has fast hands and no fear of a sharp edge. Come against him with just a dagger for company and he will cut you a new opinion.

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