Blood For Wages

13: The Widower & the Lady

They looked across the tumbled tundra. Eyes jumping from one craggy outcrop to the next, with heather and gorse and ten different kinds of grass filling the spaces between them.

"The rocks remind me of whales," Cleric Vass said abruptly. His deep, reassuring voice broke across the grasslands and filled the hollows like slow thunder. "When they come up to breathe."

"You ain't ever seen whales, cleric," Lenix said. "What would a god-talker be doing sailin'?"

"I've done much the likes of you could not imagine or understand, Lenix," Cleric Vass said. "That doesn't make it any less true."

The sun was setting. Long shadows stretched out across the dry grassland. The country was coloured in oranges and reds, the grass turned into a sea of fire. Black shadows lay like holes cut from the world.

Fia had forgotten how much colder and how much drier it was on this side of the Foldwood. She'd not returned here, not since she'd fled all those years ago, running out across the windswept moors at the urging of none other than Redmond Marr himself.

They had travelled some ten miles inland from the Foldwood, leaving the body of Cameron Gray and those of his company to rot down and be claimed by the forest. They hadn't even cut Gray down, just left what remained of him tied to the tree.

"I'd not do a blade the disservice of dulling its sharpness by cutting through the ropes holding that son of a bitch," Gunn had said, when Darach Lees asked him about it.

And so the man had been left, along with the other soldiers, along with Lorna Forbes, whose story, and reason for accepting Fia's gold and the task of escorting Gunn, would never be known.

Fia picked her way back up the slope to where the others were crouched in the scooped out hollow of the hills they had elected to pass the night in. The depression they were sheltering in was at the top of a rock-strewn tor, facing north, on the opposite side of the hill to the Foldwood. It was large enough that both horses and riders could hide there, and was ringed with great boulders that screened the light of the small fire they'd kindled from the road below. Fia knew this, because she had just traversed the slope to make certain.

Her crew had taken what supplies they needed from Gray's small camp and then turned the horses loose. The animals had taken to the untamed meadows without so much as a backward glance. Free. Wild. Creatures made to roam the space between the storm-tossed sky and tall grass that grew high in the dry, cold air.

She had envied them as she'd watched them gallop over the meadowland, wished with every sinew of her body and fragment of her soul that she could just burst apart and be whisked away by some wild gale so that she didn't have to bother herself with whatever future was coming down the race.

Fia's legs brushed through the pink flowers of the cross-leaved heath that carpeted the hillside, the sweet scent of the blooms rising incongruously to mingle with the coppery tang of dried blood on her coat and shirt. The road in the valley below was silent. No sign or sound of pursuit. She paused in her climb, not really wanting to face the group; the curious and accusatory stares from some, the unsettlingly studious looks from others––as if they were appraising how much someone with her name might be worth.

"You gonna tell me, then?"

Fia spun, hand flying to the handle of her flintlock, cursing herself for getting so lost in her own head that she hadn't even noticed she was being watched.

"Easy there, killer," Gunn said, raising his hands. He was sitting placidly, half in and half out of the shadow cast by the light of the weak moon falling across a boulder. He'd a scrap of parchment in his hand and a stick of charcoal in the other. As Fia's fingers uncurled from around the pistol butt, Gunn stuck out his tongue and looked up at the nail paring moon, jotted down a final word and slipped the piece of parchment into a crack in the huge rock beside him.