Chương 15

Hilmar Pyke After four days of grey drizzle that turned the hillside paths to sucking mud and soaked through every layer of wool and leather a man owned, the sky had broken open and the light was sharp and clean across the valley below. Hilmar Pyke tilted his face up toward it for a moment, feeling the warmth on his cheeks, and thought that this was a fine day to become a warrior. He shifted in the saddle and immediately regretted it.

The horse flicked an ear back at him as if it could feel his discomfort and found it irritating. Hilmar had named the animal Krakenfist in his head, because it sounded strong, but in truth the horse was a bad-tempered grey gelding that smelled like wet rope and seemed to regard him with something close to contempt. He could not decide which was worse, the animal's rolling gait or the hard wooden seat beneath him.

His father's fishing boat had pitched and rolled in ways that would have put any landlubber on his knees, and Hilmar had never once lost his footing. Yet somehow this creature managed to find every stone and rut on Harlaw's rocky ground and hit them all directly. Still. A horse was a horse, and men on horses killed men on foot. That was the point of it. Around him the others waited in the shadow of the ridge, two dozen riders with their mail hanging quiet and the horses stamping softly in place.

Maron Myres sat at the front of the group, a compact, weathered man who said little but who held the ear of Ser Harras. Further down the line, Gundor Halfeye sat with his one good eye fixed on the crest of the ridge where the scout had gone up. Hilmar had been the one to spot the column. That mattered. He had gone out from camp hours before dawn, ordered to look out for any force approaching them from the south.

More to get a good view of the sun rising than anything, he had climbed the ridge in the early grey light, and there they were, men and wagons coming up north, small as beetles in the distance, heading toward the valley floor below. He had scrambled back to camp so fast he'd torn his knee open on a rock and not even noticed until he was already talking. Ser Harras had not been there to hear it. Off harassing the landings by Harlaw Hall with most of the cavalry.

But Maron had listened, and Maron had nodded, and now here they were. Last night, they had left him behind for the farmhouse raid. He was an runner, he knew, pressed into service and not meant for fighting like this. Too young, they said, too green. He had argued and been ignored. But this was different. He had brought the information himself. He had climbed the ridge himself. They could not cut him out of this one. Let them try, he thought, righteous anger burning at his chest.

Footsteps came down the rocky slope, and the scout appeared from behind a shelf of stone, dressed in grey leathers the same color as the hillside.

"They're coming," the scout panted, looking up at Maron.

"Just like the boy said." Someone leaned over from the next horse and slapped Hilmar hard across the shoulders. He sat up straighter, spine stiffening, trying to look like the warrior he felt he was becoming. No more stupid errands around the village. No more gutting fish. No more tying nets.

"How many?" Maron asked.

"Four wagons, no more than twenty men walking beside them." The scout scratched at his chin.

"Ragged lot. The wounded from last night, I'd say. Saw some knights in the wagons. Dead, methinks." Maron grunted.

"Aye. Heading west to their flower lord at Ten Towers. Ser Harras said the boys killed the lordlings in the farmhouse. Important men. Men whose families will want a body to bury in the green grass." A scoff came from the back of the group.

"Not much to loot from dead and dying men," Vickon muttered, spitting into the dirt.

"Aye," another ironman added, casting a sidelong glance at Hilmar.

"Thought the boy had found us a supply column. I've a hunger for something other than dried fish and rain." Hilmar felt his face flush with heat. He shot a burning glare at Vickon, but the older man merely shrugged, unimpressed by his posturing.

"We're here to kill Reachmen," Maron said, his voice flat and final.

"Don't matter if they've got gold and food up their bums or nothing but rotting linen on their backs. We kill them anyway. Kill enough of them, mathaps they start thinking Harlaw isn't worth that much blood." Gundor Halfeye made a low sound of agreement from down the line. The veteran had a face like a piece of dried salt fish and had been raiding since before Hilmar was born.

"Only place in the islands where they haven't had it easy," he said.

"Not a bad thing to be remembered for." The men nodded, a grim pride settling over the company. Hilmar felt his chest swell. The only ones to stand. It was a fine thought. He could see it. Songs about the men of Harlaw, the last house to bend. His name in them, maybe. Hilmar Pyke, who spotted the column and rode with Maron Myres and Gundor Halfeye. They didn't sing songs about fishermen.

He thought about that as the scout climbed back up the ridge, and thought about it still when the man came sliding back down five minutes later and swung up into his saddle without a word. Maron raised his hand and moved forward, and they all moved with him. xxx The pass was narrow enough that the horses had to go single file, their hooves muffled by the strips of cloth wrapped around them. The walls of rock rose close on either side, the shadow between them cool after the open sun.

Hilmar watched the back of Maron's horse ahead of him and listened to the creak of leather and the occasional soft clink of a mail ring. No one spoke. The pass bent north and then widened gradually, the walls pulling back, and Hilmar could see daylight opening ahead where the valley spread out below. Maron raised his hand again, and the column split, half behind him, half peeling away behind Gundor to circle down toward the far end of the column.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. They picked up speed. The trot became a canter and the canter built toward a gallop, and the valley opened fully in front of him, wide and bright in the noon sun, and there was the column below, just as the scout had described. They were a sorry sight, four wagons moving in a loose line along the valley floor, men limping alongside them, heads down, bandages showing white against dark clothing. Some used their spears as walking sticks.

One man near the front had his arm in a rough sling, his head wrapped in cloth stained rust-brown. Beaten men. Broken men. Heading home to lick their wounds. Someone in the column looked up. A shout went out. Heads turned, hands pointed, and the column ground to a halt in confusion, men clutching at weapons, a few trying to cluster together in loose groups that would not have slowed a charge much more than open air would.

The wind hit Hilmar's face as the gallop took hold, his horse's hooves drumming on the valley floor, and he felt something lift free in his chest, something that had been coiled tight for weeks. This. The ground blurring past. The distance closing. The men ahead getting larger. His hand found the haft of his axe. His first real battle. It would make it all worth it.

"For the Reaper!" Maron bellowed. The men answered with more cries. Hilmar was grinning. He could feel it on his face and couldn't help it and didn't want to. He wanted to kill someone. Needed to kill someone. The tarps on the wagons flew back. He had a single moment of confusion, of thinking—the corpses were moving, before his mind caught up with what his eyes were seeing. The bodies in the wagons were rising. Not dead men.

Men who had been lying still, men in armor, unfolding themselves from the wagon beds with spears already in hand, dropping over the sides and forming up in tight lines on the valley floor. Others stayed in the wagon beds. They already had bows drawn. The first volley came before Hilmar had fully understood what was happening. The man to his left went down, horse and rider together. Another rider ahead of him pitched sideways from his saddle with an arrow through his neck, his horse veering wild.

Maron bellowed something, but the second volley was already in the air, and then the men on the ground released what Hilmar had taken for spears, and they weren't spears at all. They flew. Javelins. The Reachmen threw javelins. One buried itself in the chest of Maron's horse and the animal screamed and went down so suddenly that Maron barely cleared the stirrups, and then Maron hit the ground so hard it sounded like a woodsman splitting logs, and he did not get up.

"Break! Break away!" someone was screaming. Hilmar yanked the reins. His horse needed no convincing, already trying to veer off, whites showing around its eyes. An arrow hissed past his ear, so close he felt the air of it. Another struck the earth a yard to his left. He bent low over the horse's neck and rode, not daring to look behind him, just riding, the animal's panic matching his own perfectly. Two other riders were with him, he could hear them besides him.

They swept past the front of the column, too fast for the archers to track properly, arrows falling short or wide. The end of the valley was ahead. Open ground. The hills pulling back. He could see the pass that led west and safety and he rode straight for it. I'm out, Hilmar thought, a sob of relief rising in his throat. I'm safe. The horse stumbled. It happened without warning. One moment the ground was solid and the next the world turned sideways. Hilmar had no time to do anything useful.

He left the saddle at speed, hit the rocky ground shoulder first, rolled hard, and came to a stop with his face against the earth and his ears full of a sound like the inside of a bell. He lay still. The bell faded slowly. He could hear voices. He tried to push himself up and his arms did not work properly. He tried again, got his cheek off the dirt, and managed to turn his head. Boots on rock. Several pairs, coming toward him from the hillside above. He blinked at them, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

Men coming out from cracks and shelves in the hillside, from behind boulders, from under overhangs. They had been there the whole time. He thought, with distant clarity, that he should try to stand. He needed to prove his father wrong. Warriors died on their feet, no? His legs did not respond to the thought. Strong hands took him under the arms. The sky swung overhead.

Someone said something in the soft, rounded accent of the Reach, and another voice answered, and then he was being carried, and the darkness at the edges of his vision thickened and closed. xxx Light. The smell of canvas and blood and unwashed men. Hilmar blinked. He was lying on his back in a wagon, the tarp pulled over the ribs of the wagon frame arching above. His shoulder was fire. His head felt stuffed with wet wool. On either side of him, other bodies lay still.

Ironmen, he thought, though he couldn't be certain. One of them was breathing in short, shallow pulls. Through the opening at the wagon's rear, the valley light came in bright and white. A shadow crossed it. Then a man stepped in front of the opening and blocked the sun. Hilmar squinted up at him. Dark hair. Tall. A face that gave nothing away, hard as the stones in the valley.

And eyes that caught the light wrong, pale and violet, the color of deep water or a storm cloud as the sunset or something Hilmar had no good word for. The man looked at him for a moment, unhurried, the way a man looks at something he is still deciding about. Then he turned his head and said to someone outside, "Him." Hands took Hilmar by the arms and dragged him out of the wagon to the ground, and the pain in his shoulder made him bite down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted iron.

The violet-eyed man crouched in front of him, elbows on his knees, and waited until Hilmar's vision steadied.

"How many men do you have at Grey Garden?" he asked. His voice was even. No heat in it. Not a hint of a threat. Just a question asked by someone who fully expected it to be answered. Hilmar meant to say nothing. He had a vague idea of himself staying silent, jaw locked, staring the greenlander down. A proper Ironborn warrior, giving nothing away.

But his head was ringing, and Maron was dead, and the ambush had turned him inside out in about thirty seconds, and when the man asked again, the same way, same tone, patient as tide, Hilmar found his mouth opening before he had decided to let it. He told him what he knew, which wasn't much. Told him about the camp an hour's ride north. About the passes Ser Harras used.

About the garrison at the castle and how they'd stripped all the land for food, his village included, and how they'd killed his father when he refused to give his fish, his foolish, weak father who never wanted his son to be a warrior. He told him all of it. Until something loosened in his chest and his eyes stung with hot, angry tears. The violet-eyed man listened without interrupting, nodding occasionally, and when Hilmar finally stopped talking he looked at him for a moment longer.

"Thank you," he said, which was not at all what Hilmar had expected. Then he stood and walked away, and Hilmar sat in the wagon in the bright noon sun and felt, for the first time since his father died, very much like a fisherman's son.