At the forge, Tycho finds my crutches, which are in pieces, and he sighs. “I’m sorry.”
As if this is the worst thing to happen today. I shake my head. “I have tools. Just leave them.”
Tycho nods. His demeanor is cool and detached, the only sign that everything that happened here affected him, too. “This will take us a while,” he says. “But I’ll be back when I can.”
“What does that mean?” I say to him. “ ‘Strip and drag’?”
“We’ll pull the weapons and armor,” he says. “Anything worth salvaging. And we’ll identify who we can.” He hesitates. “Then we’ll drag the bodies into the clearing at the end of the lane to burn them.”
I stare at him as if I don’t comprehend.
But I do.
The actual soldiering, not so much.
I want to pull him into the house and lock the door, as if I could somehow trap all this horror out here and that would erase the bleak look from his expression.
But he wouldn’t want that. Of all I’ve learned about Tycho, he’s not one to sidestep duty and obligation.
I’ve been quiet too long, and Tycho speaks as if I need a better explanation. “It’s late spring. Dead bodies get a lot worse before they get any better. Prince Rhen’s soldiers won’t be here for days.”
“No. Yeah.” I have to shake myself, because I don’t want to think about that too closely. “Go. I’m fine.”
He squeezes my hand, then moves away.
There’s a part of me that wants to go into the house and pretend none of this is happening—but a bigger part doesn’t want to feel like a coward. I need my crutches, so I set to repairing them while Tycho and the king go about their task.
It’s slow work, with what must be hundreds—thousands?—of buckles. Quiet work, too, because they say little aside from the occasional comment that they call to each other in Emberish. The king is favoring the leg that took an arrow, and when I look more closely, I notice that Tycho is favoring his injured shoulder. But they begin to make a pile of weapons and armor—keeping the Iishellasan steel separate, from what I can see—and they carry on.
I wonder what all the gossip-hungry travelers would make of this version of King Grey and Lord Tycho: injured men who should be taking respite in the palace, but are instead kneeling beside fallen soldiers to do what needs to be done.
Lord Alek might be a skilled fighter, and he might claim he’s loyal to the queen, but I could never, for one minute, imagine him doingthis.
I swing my hammer to bolt my crutches back together, then slip them under my arms to support my weight.
Then, before I can think too closely about what I’m doing, I step out of the workshop to help.
I underestimated. There seem to bemillionsof buckles. I remember Tycho disarming in the lantern light, his fingers quick and deft. I’m slower,lacking practice. When I first began, I expected Tycho and the king to exchange a glance and send me back to the forge, to leave this work to the real warriors. Instead, they acknowledged my presence in the lane and switched to Syssalah for their sparse conversation, admitting me into their company. The sun beats down as the day goes on, and I see exactly what Tycho meant about dead bodies getting a lot worse before they get better.
When I struggle with unfamiliar equipment, they call instructions.Unbuckle those greaves from the bottom. It’ll loosen the other straps.Or,There’s a hidden hook under that pauldron so you don’t need to unbuckle it.
Sometime around midday, I’ve grown a bit numb to what we’re doing, and I drop to a knee beside a man’s facedown body, then absently grab hold of his shoulder to lay him out on his back.
He’s not dead. He growls with rage and swings a hand with a dagger. “Magic sympathizer!”
I cry out in surprise and fall back, but I’m not quick enough. His dagger slices a gash right across my ribs. I gasp and try to scramble backward, but he’s coming after me.
Before he gets far, a knife hilt appears in his neck. Then another. Pain and shock flare in his eyes, but then nothing else. He collapses back to the ground. Truly dead this time.
My heart is hammering against my rib cage. I can hear my breathing rattle in my chest.
Tycho is at my side almost instantly. I don’t know if he threw those blades or if the king did, but I press a hand to my waist and I’m stunned at how much blood I find on my fingers.
“Was it just a regular dagger?” Tycho is saying. “Jax. Jax, let me see.” He drops to a knee beside me. Before I’m ready, his fingers press into the wound, and I flinch—but then it’s healed.
“Are you all right?” he says.
I nod, then run a wrist across my damp forehead. My heart is still pounding. “He just took me by surprise.”
