The Steel Remains

“You’re probably right,” he said.

“Probably am, sir.” Darby squared his shoulders. “Well, I’ll be going then. It was a real pleasure talking to someone who understands. Only sorry you find me in such straitened circumstances. I wasn’t always this way, sir.”

“No, I don’t suppose you were.”

“It’s just the memories, sir. Things I saw, things I had to do. Feels like they’re branded in my head, sir. Hard to let it go sometimes. The drinking helps, and the flandrijn, when I can get it.” He fiddled awkwardly with his cudgel, wouldn’t meet Ringil’s eye. “I’m not what I once was, sir, that’s the plain truth of it.”

“We’re none of us what we once were.” Ringil staved off his own brooding with an effort, looked for something good to say. Something Flaradnam might have approved. “Seems to me you gave a pretty good account of yourself, all things considered. One of those watchmen has smashed ribs for sure, and the other one can’t focus on anything. I’d say you gave him a solid brain fuck with Lurlin there.”

The veteran looked up again. “Well, I’m sorry for that, sir. They’re not bad men, I had an uncle in the Watch myself years ago. It’s a tough job. But they meant to have me, sir. You saw that.”

“Yes, I did. And like I said, you gave a fine account of yourself.”

It got a smile. “Ah, but you should have seen me at Rajal, sir. They had to drag me onto that evacuation barge.”

“I’m sure they did.”

They stood there for a couple of moments. The martial anthem went on, muffled by the tavern walls, but swelling. Darby shouldered the cudgel, thumped his hand to his chest in salute.

“Right sir, I’ll be going.”

Ringil dug in his purse again. “Listen.”

“No, sir. I won’t impose on your kindness any further.” He kept his free hand clenched and at his chest. “Absolutely not.”

“It’s not much. Just to get yourself, I don’t know, some hot food, a hot bath. A place to stay.”

“It’s a kind thought, sir. But we both know that’s not what I’d spend it on.”

“Well.” Ringil gestured helplessly, dug out the coin regardless. “Look, spend it on fucking wine and flandrijn, then. If that’s what you need.”

The fist came halfway uncurled. Something moved in the veteran’s face, and this time Ringil couldn’t identify what it was. He pressed the handful of money forward.

“Come on, one old soldier to another. It’s just a favor in hard times. You’d do the same for me.”

Darby took the coin.

It was a sudden, convulsive move. His hand was rough with accumulated dirt and grit, and a little hot, as if from fever. He looked away as he stowed the money somewhere in his rags.

“Much obliged to you, sir, like I already said.”

But his tone was not the same as before, and he would no longer look Ringil in the eye. And when they’d said their farewell and Darby walked away up the street, there was a slump to his stance that had not been there before. Ringil watched him go, and belatedly he made sense of the change he’d seen in the veteran’s face, could suddenly name the emotion behind it.

Shame.

Shame, and a kind of disappointment. In some way Ringil could not pin down, it seemed he’d failed the man after all.

He stood in the gloom and stared after Darby for a moment more, then shrugged irritably and turned away. Not like he’d just stood by and let the Watch work the guy over, for Hoiran’s sake. Not like he hadn’t tried. He rapped curtly on the shop door at his back for entry, listened while Shalak bustled audibly across from the window and unlatched to let him in.

“All right?” the shopkeeper asked as he closed the door again.

“Yeah, sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

But later, helping Shalak close up the shop, he looked at his hand by lamplight and saw that Darby had left a grubby smear across the palm.

It proved surprisingly hard to wash off.

HE GOT BACK TO THE GLADES LATER THAN HE’D PLANNED, WITH VERY little to show for the day’s excursion beyond a couple of scrapes on his hands and face, and a largely empty purse. The ferryman who brought him upriver had no conversation, which Ringil counted a blessing. He sat in the stern of the boat while the man bent to the oars, huddled against the river damp and brooding over Shalak’s vague hints and pointers.

They come to us in ghost form, striking snake-swift out of phantasmal mist, and when we strike back they return to mist and they laugh, low and mocking in the wind.

Great.

Eskiath House was ablaze with lanterns when he came up the drive, and there was a carriage standing outside the main doors, horses quiescent in the traces, coachman sharing a flask of something with another attendant. Ringil eyed them up and down, didn’t recognize their livery or the crest painted on the sides of the coach. Something colorful, a stylized wave on a background of marsh daisies. He shrugged and went in through the door, which stood slightly ajar as was customary this early in the evening. One of the house’s own attendants met him inside.

“Who’s the visitor?” Ringil asked, as he handed over cap, Ravensfriend, and cloak.

“The Lord Administrator of Tidal Watch, sir.” The attendant piled up the sword and clothing in his arms with practiced ease. “He has been waiting in the riverside library for two hours.”

“Sounds like a fucking sinecure post if I ever heard one,” Ringil said grumpily. “Who’s he waiting for?”

“For you, my lord.”

Ringil shot the man a sidelong glance. “Really?”

“Here he comes now, sir.”

Ringil followed the direction of the attendant’s nod and saw a richly dressed young man storming toward him out of the library doorway. He had time to take in russet tunic and cream breeches, sea-stained leather boots and a court rapier rigged at one hip, features that looked vaguely familiar under the flush of rage and a neatly trimmed beard.

“Eskiath,” he bellowed.

Ringil looked elaborately around the entry hall. “Are you talking to me?”

The Lord Administrator of Tidal Watch reached him and lashed out with his left hand. The move caught Ringil by surprise; it was unlooked for, there was no weapon apparent, just a pair of gloves. The rough-patterned leather stropped his cheek, and stung.

“I demand satisfaction, Eskiath.”

Ringil punched him in the face. The Lord Administrator went reeling backward, hit the floor, and floundered there, bloodied at the nose. He touched his upper lip, looked wonderingly at the blood for a moment, then clapped a hand to his rapier hilt.

“You show that steel in my house,” Ringil told him grimly. “I’ll take it off you and shove it down your fucking throat.”

He hadn’t moved forward, but the Lord Administrator let go of the weapon anyway, got rapidly back to his feet instead. It was smoothly done, too, an athletic levering motion that Ringil recognized as blade-salon drilled. He readied himself to step in and block the rapier’s draw if necessary. But the younger man just drew himself up and spat on the floor at Ringil’s feet.

“What I’d expect from a degenerate like you. Street brawling in place of any real sense of honor.” He wiped at the blood from his nose again, dripped some on the floor. He looked down at it and nodded, smiled hard and tight. “But you won’t avoid the reckoning that way, Eskiath. I call you out. Before witnesses. Brillin Hill Fields, day after tomorrow at dawn. Unarmored, unshielded, light blade standards. We will settle this with clean steel, whether you like it or not.”

By now a small crowd was gathering in the hall. Nearby servants drawn from their duties by the sound of raised voices, and behind the Lord Administrator another liveried attendant, who now quietly proffered his master a handkerchief.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what this is about?” Ringil asked. “Why you’re in such a hurry to get yourself killed, I mean.”