It is, Clay agreed, but didn’t bother saying so. He was still fuming about the sword. The sooner Gabe said whatever it was he’d come here to say, the sooner Clay could tell his oldest, dearest friend to get the hell out of his house and never come back.
“She even got her own band going,” Gabe went on. “They managed to clear out a few nests around town: giant spiders, some old carrion wyrm down in the sewer that everyone forgot was still alive. But I hoped—” he bit his lip “—I still hoped, even then, that she might choose another path. A better path. Instead of following mine.” He looked up. “Until the summons came from the Republic of Castia, asking every able sword to march against the Heartwyld Horde.”
For a heartbeat Clay wondered at the significance of that. Until he remembered the news he’d heard earlier that evening. An army of twenty thousand, routed by a vastly more numerous host; the survivors surrounded in Castia, doubtless wishing they had died on the battlefield rather than endure the atrocities of a city under siege.
Which meant that Gabriel’s daughter was dead. Or she would be, when the city fell.
Clay opened his mouth to speak, to try to keep the heartbreak from his voice as he did so. “Gabe, I—”
“I’m going after her, Clay. And I need you with me.” Gabriel leaned forward in his chair, the flame of a father’s fear and anger alight in his eyes. “It’s time to get the band back together.”
Chapter Three
A Good Man
“Absolutely not.”
It was not, apparently, the answer his friend was expecting. Or at least not as emphatically as Clay put it. Gabriel blinked, the fire inside him snuffed out as quickly as it appeared. He looked confused more than anything. Disbelieving. “But Clay—”
“I said no. I’m not leaving town to go running off west with you. I’m not leaving Ginny behind, or Tally. I’m not going to track down Moog or Matrick or Ganelon—who very probably still hates us all, by the way—and go traipsing across the Heartwyld! Tits of Glif, Gabe, there’s more than a thousand miles between here and Castia, and it ain’t paved with stone, you know.”
“I know that,” said Gabriel, but Clay spoke over him.
“Do you? Do you, Gabe? Remember the mountains? Remember the giants in those mountains? Remember the birds—the fucking birds, Gabriel—that could snatch those giants up like they were children?”
His friend grimaced at the recollection; the shadow of wings that spanned the sky. “The rocs are all gone,” said Gabriel, without conviction.
“Sure, maybe,” Clay allowed. “But are the rasks gone? The yethiks? The ogre clans? How about the thousand-mile-wide forest? Is that still there? Do you remember the Wyld, Gabe? Trees that can walk, wolves that can talk—and hey, do you know if the centaur tribes are still trapping people and eating them? Because I do, and they are! And that’s not even mentioning the bloody rot! And you’re asking me to go there? To go through it?”
“We did before,” Gabriel reminded him. “They used to call us the Kings of the Wyld, remember?”
“Yeah, they did. When we were twenty years younger. When our backs didn’t ache every morning and we didn’t wake up five times a night to piss. But time did what it does best, didn’t it? It beat us up. It broke us down. We got old, Gabriel. Too old to do the things we used to, no matter how good we were at doin’ ’em. Too old to cross the Wyld, and too old to make any difference at all if we did.”
He left the rest unsaid: That even if they managed to reach Castia, somehow evaded the encircling Horde, and made it into the city itself, there was every chance in the world that Rose was already dead.
Gabriel leaned in. “She’s alive, Clay.” His eyes were steel again, but his assurance was belied by the threat of tears. “I know she is. I taught her to fight, remember? She’s as good as I ever was. Maybe better. She killed a cyclops by herself!” he said, but sounded as though he were trying to convince himself as much as he was Clay. “They say four thousand survived that battle and made it back to Castia. Four thousand! Rosie made it. Of course she made it.”
“Maybe, yeah,” said Clay, mostly because there was nothing else to say.
“I have to go,” Gabriel said. “I have to try and save her, if I can. And I know I’m old. I know I ain’t what I used to be. Not even a shadow,” he admitted sadly. “I guess none of us are. But I am her father—a shitty one, yeah, to have let her go off in the first place, but not so shitty I’ll sit here moaning about my sore back while she’s trapped and probably starving in a city half the world away. But I can’t do it alone.” He laughed sourly. “And even if I could afford to hire mercs, I doubt I could find any willing to go.”
He has that part right, thought Clay.
“You’re my only hope,” Gabriel said. “Without you—without the band—I’m lost. And so is Rose.” There was a silence after he spoke, weighted with expectation. And then he added, quite unfairly, “What if it were Tally?”
Clay said nothing for a long while. He listened to the creaking boards of his house. He stared at the empty bowls, the wooden spoons resting against the rim of each. He gazed at the tabletop. He looked across at Gabriel and Gabriel looked back. He could see the other man’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, his heart hammering as Clay’s own thumped quietly on, and he wondered if so simple an organ (just a fist-sized, blood-slick muscle) might not have some premonition of what the mind, perhaps, did not yet know.
“I’m sorry, Gabe.”
His friend just sat there. Frowning at first, and then smiling that strange, withered smile.
“I am sorry,” Clay said again.
Another while passed, and Gabriel … Gabriel just looked at him, tilted his head ever so slightly, and said, after what seemed like forever, “I know you are.”
He stood. The sound of his chair scraping back was as loud as a falcon’s screech after the long silence between them.
“You can stay,” Clay offered, but Gabriel shook his head.
“I’ll go. I left my bag on the step. There’s an inn in town?”
Clay nodded. “Gabriel,” he began, intending to explain … he didn’t know what, exactly. That he was sorry (again). That he couldn’t risk losing Ginny, or leave Tally without a father if he went off west and the worst should happen (and it would happen, he was sure of it). That he was comfortable here in Coverdale. Content, after so many restless years. And that deep down the thought of crossing the Heartwyld, of going anywhere near Castia and the Horde that surrounded it, scared him shitless.
I’m afraid, he wanted to say, but could not.
Gabriel, mercifully, cut him short. “Tell Ginny the stew was delicious,” he said. “And tell your daughter Uncle Gabe says hello. Or good-bye, whichever.”
Offer him boots, some part of Clay’s mind insisted. A cloak, at least. Water, or wine, for the road. He said nothing instead, just sat there as Gabriel opened the door. Cool air. The wind rustling in the trees outside. The chorus of a hundred thousand crickets in the tall grass.
Griff looked up from his mat, saw that Gabe was leaving, and promptly fell back asleep.
Gabriel stalled on the threshold, looking back. Here it comes, thought Clay. The final plea. The scathing remark about how if it were the other way round he would do it for me. Vellichor notwithstanding, words had always been Gabe’s most potent weapon. He’d been their leader, back when. The voice of the band. All he said, though, before walking out and tugging the door closed behind him, was “You’re a good man, Clay Cooper.”
Simple words. Kind ones, even. Not the knife he’d been expecting. Not the piercing sword.
They still hurt, though.
His daughter insisted on showing him the frogs the moment she came in the door. She spilled them out on the table before her mother could stop her. One of the four, a big yellow bugger with the nubs of wings not yet grown, made a break for freedom. He leapt off onto the floor, but froze when Griff came at him barking. Tally scooped him up and gave him an admonishing smack on the head before setting him back down with the others. He stayed put this time, too dazed or afraid to move.