Vail the limper went down first. Gabriel rushed him, caught his wrist when he tried to swing, grasped a handful of greasy hair, and pulled the man’s face into a rising knee.
Clown-face, eager to revenge himself upon Clay, yelled and rushed forward. The ground between them was a hazard of coiling reptiles; every stick and fallen branch was now slithering underfoot. The merc stumbled over a rising cobra and went down. The offended serpent flared its hood, staring the prone man in the face, and if he’d remained still the merc might have emerged unscathed. Instead, Clown-face began shouting, triggering a series of rapid-fire attacks that left him bloody faced and gasping for air.
Clay moved gingerly around his fallen aggressor, careful to avoid stepping on serpentine backs. He scanned the ground for a weapon, but the giant had collapsed on his nail-studded club, and Clown-face’s sword was still clutched in his flailing hand.
Sensing an opening, Raff raised his cutlass overhead and charged.
Clay acted on instinct. Afterward he would curse himself for a fool—and worse—but for the time being he stooped and snatched up the nearest weapon to hand. When his enemy’s sword came down Clay brought his shield across to knock it aside, then lunged in and thrust his arm forward. The snake in his fist lashed out, sinking venomous fangs into Raff Lackey’s exposed throat.
For a moment he and Raff were face-to-face. The reptile’s sinuous body was coiled tightly around Clay’s arm, and he could feel its jaws working, pumping deadly poison directly into Raff’s neck, which was already swelling, darkening from pink, to red, to sickening purple. Clay’s ears were filled with an awful clatter, produced, he realized numbly, by the rattle quivering on the serpent’s tail.
Raff gasped for a final breath, and used it to utter words that floated across the abysmal inches between him and Clay. “I’ll be waiting for ya, Cooper,” he gurgled, “along with all the rest.”
Chapter Seventeen
Fivecourt
Of Raff’s motley crew there were but two survivors: not-Glif and the man with the wood-brown teeth whom Gabe had knocked out earlier. The woman was deathly pale and delirious; Clay figured it was an even wager on whether the venomous snakebite on her leg or the festering wound in her gut killed her first, though he’d have put his money (had Jain left him any) on the bite. The man was in slightly better shape, though half his teeth were missing and he would no doubt walk with a limp for the rest of his life. The two of them staggered off in the direction of Fivecourt while Clay and the others saw to the corpses of their companions.
They cleared away the snakes—an arduous task, since Moog had turned every stick suitable for doing so into a snake—and then set about burying the dead. Raff, despite having made himself their enemy, had been a good man once, and deserved a proper rest. Moog performed the Rites of Glif, sprinkling water over each of the graves and invoking the Spring Maiden’s Mercy. Matrick spoke a few words as well, commending the souls of the fallen to the Summer Lord.
“Judge them for what they wished to be,” he begged the Father of Gods, “not what the world made of them.”
The afternoon sun had burned away the lingering clouds by then, punching through the forest canopy in bright, shifting spears, but Matrick’s words cast a cold shadow over Clay’s thoughts.
He was remembering the man he’d been upon returning to Coverdale after Saga disbanded—a man not altogether different from the boy who’d struck out with Gabriel a decade earlier, except that he was moderately rich and much more famous.
The money went fast, but the fame lasted a fair bit longer.
Mostly it got him into fights. There were plenty of wannabe mercs eager to test their mettle against the notorious Slowhand, and Clay had been more than happy to show them just how meagre their mettle was by breaking a chair over their heads, or dragging them face-first down the length of the bar. After ten years of fighting he’d found himself restless, constantly seeking provocation to upend the stew of his simmering rage over some fool’s head.
He’d done many a good deed during the years he’d toured with Saga, but he’d done bad things, too, and had seen too many bards die in too many ways to sleep well at night. He was tormented by his dreams, and even awake he was haunted by his violent past. He mistook every galloping horse for a charging centaur, every ring of a blacksmith’s hammer for a distant clash of arms. Wherever there was smoke, Clay Cooper saw fire.
And then he’d met Ginny. She was the daughter of Giles Locke, chief groomsman of the stables behind the King’s Head, and Clay fell for her like an anchor tossed overboard. It wasn’t just that she’d been beautiful (though she was), or dauntingly intelligent (she was that, too), but because she perceived in him what few others did—the quiet kindness beneath the warrior’s fa?ade—and she evoked in Clay something he hadn’t felt since quitting the band and parting ways with the only friends he’d ever known: the need, fierce and bone deep, to protect someone.
Clay Cooper had seen a dragon roused in anger. He’d faced down a legion of shrieking grimlocks and matched gazes with the cold fury of undead kings. Despite all this, asking Ginny to marry him had been the most harrowing moment of his life. She’d said yes, and soon after they moved into their place near the marsh. Things had been good for a time, but one evening, shortly before the wedding, he came limping through the tavern door after a skirmish with Whitewood poachers, and someone made the terrible mistake of remarking how much Clay resembled his father.
The man who’d said so was taken by wagon to the clinic in Oddsford, where he slept for three months before waking up unable to recognize his own children.
Ginny called off the wedding, and Clay began seriously contemplating a standing offer from Kallorek to embark on a solo career. He’d gone to the house to gather his things, but Ginny stopped him at the door and gave voice to the question he’d been asking himself ever since returning to Coverdale.
Which are you, the monster or the man?
It wasn’t the words that had moved him. It was the look in her eyes, green as the sunlit sea. She was offering him absolution, the defining choice of a lifetime balanced on a blade’s edge. The truth, he knew, was that the world needed his kind of monster. It was a brutal place. It was unfair. And Clay Cooper, such as he was, was quite simply the right kind of wrong.
But Ginny wanted the man. The man, Clay knew, that his mother had been trying to raise—not the monster her killer had made of him.
The man, he’d said.
Yeah? she’d asked, looking hopeful.
Yeah. The world has enough monsters, I think.
His answer had made her smile, and so he’d known it was right. But this morning, with the lives of his friends at stake, Clay had felt that old anger resurface inside him like blood fouling a clear spring. He’d seen, reflected in Raff’s dying gaze, the monster staring back at him.
They cleared the forest shortly before nightfall. On the plain below, the uncountable lights of Grandual’s greatest city glowed beneath the darkening sky like a bed of windblown embers.
Moog raised his arms in triumph. “Fivecourt at last! The beating heart of civilization! It’s been far too long, gentlemen! Far too long!”
Gabriel, whose sullen mood had returned over the past few hours, gazed down at the immensity of the circle-shaped city, while Matrick raked a hand through his thinning hair and sighed.
“I sure could use a drink,” he said. “And a hot meal. And a warm bath. And a soft bed.” He rolled his shoulders, wincing at some nagging ache. “Gods, a woman might be nice. Do you think if I tell them I’m a king …?”