The Execution (48 page)

“
He took some grain from
the stables, some meat and turnips from the smoke-shed, then
disappeared out behind, into the trees.” The Innkeeper waved his
only hand towards the back of the Inn, cradling his bandage-wrapped
stump close to his chest. He spoke with his voice trembling and
without looking up. Then he started, once more, to rub the mark on
the bar with a towel.

There was an age on the Innkeeper now,
a look the mercenaries had seen before. It was the look an enemy
had after meeting Ravan and surviving to tell of it.

The five took to the back of the Inn.
Looking up at the small dormer window, two roof ledges up; they
remembered the small footsteps which marked the snow the night
they'd taken after the boy.

Several of these five men had been
part of the chase that fateful eve and had seen what the boy had
been capable of, even at that tender age. Tonight, they saw the
prints of the stallion disappearing into the trees at exactly the
same spot where the boy disappeared years ago.

This was what they told Duval. That
Ravan had gone back to the cliffs...

* * *

The stallion walked slower, calmer, as
though it sensed the same finality as did its riders. On through
the dense, shadowy forest of pine, along the creek, deeper and
deeper into the woods they went. It was long about noon, but the
sun barely penetrated the density of the boughs
overhead.

The woodland floor was familiar to the
man who sat the horse, and he chose his path easily from memory.
Now, however, the child’s footsteps were long ago erased, replaced
by the heavy and sure steps of the war-horse.

It was peculiar to ride in this place,
to recall when he’d walked here before. It seemed so long ago, so
hard to think of the boy as himself. He remembered how he used to
groom the horses that came to the Inn. He’d thought about how one
fine day he might be so privileged as to ride a horse of his very
own into these woods; how wonderful he’d thought that might
be.

He reached down to pat the stallion on
the neck. It had been loyal to him and true to all he asked of it.
He’d recently pressed the horse very hard and it performed
magnificently, without protest. One dream had come true—he owned a
very fine horse to ride in this very familiar forest. “There’s a
good fellow—we are almost done,” he murmured to the animal. Its
ears flitted back and forth in response to its master’s
voice.

Ravan closed his eyes at intervals,
remembering that fateful night. How his lungs had hurt, how his
body ached, the burn of the cold in the stream, and—of when he
fell.

They passed a very old snare, one set
by much smaller hands. It had sprung a long time ago; the one that
lamed the soldier. He paused, thinking briefly about the man, how
Duval had simply tossed him aside as disposable.

Everything finally seemed so
clear.

Ravan was on the right path, but this
time he did nothing to hide his trail. The woods spoke to him of
that cold and dark night, when as a boy he'd given them the run of
their lives. The breeze blew softly and chilly as it invited his
memories. The tree boughs waved gently to him as though to say,
‘Here we are, just as before. We remember you.’

He looked back on it strangely, as
though he'd not been that boy. He thought, in a sad way, how
unfortunate it was for that child to fight so hard, to lose so
much.

Where had God been? Why did that boy
have to sacrifice?

Just as quickly he answered himself.
God had not been with his hand here. Divinity had simply watched.
It was the fate of humanity. Nicolette was right, fate had been
unkind to toss a child about so, but fate did not care.

How long would it be before Duval and
his men found them, he wondered. This time, he would give them
chase again. It would not be a run of their lives, it would be a
run to their deaths. He was strangely at peace with this and sighed
deeply, comforted, breathing in the familiarity of the woods to the
depths of his soul. It whispered back to him, sincere and
melancholy, full of poignant memory.

Nicolette leaned her head against his
back and squeezed her arms more tightly around him. He turned and
saw her looking up at him with that eternally curious and baffling
mystery that was Nicolette. She questioned nothing, accepted
nothing, and was so sure of her space in the present. He was
immensely gratified to have her with him. “You never ask me where
we are going,” he offered.

She held his gaze, kindly but firmly.
“I know where we are going,” she spoke softly, resolutely, and
reached to rest her pale hand, so frail, upon his arm.

He nodded, strangely comforted by her
certainty. “You never asked me what happened at the Inn,” he
pressed.

“
I know what happened at
the Inn.”

He thought about this for a moment,
believing her, but not sure why. “How can you know what happened at
the Inn?” he asked softly, curious, quite sure that she really did
know.

“
Because, when you came
from it, something was gone from you—something you have been
meaning to cast off.” She offered no more, seemed content with her
explanation, as though he should also be.

“
I killed him, you
know.”

“
I know—but why is it
significant that you tell this to me now?” There was little
hesitation from her. “You have killed many, have you not?” She
asked this as though she knew the answer.

“
I have, but this one
was...” he hesitated, struggling to finish the thought.

“
Paramount?” she finished
for him.

“
Yes—yes it was,” he
gestured with his hand out, as though to someone out there in the
wildness of the woods, “to a boy.”

She sat quietly, satisfied that he had
processed the murder reasonably. “And the boy?” she asked
softly.

Ravan thought for a very long time.
After a long and comfortable while, he answered, “The boy was ill,
but is better these days. I think he will be well soon.”

“
Then, you have done a
good thing.” She leaned her head against his back again.

He thought about this for another
spell before replying, “Nicolette?”

“
Yes?”

He breathed in the crisp, earthen and
mossy forest air and sighed deeply. “Thank you.”

Her silence was all the confirmation
he needed. She accepted him, knew his heart, the light and the dark
of it, and passed no judgment upon him.

It was late in the evening when they
reached the cliffs. Ravan slid from the horse and helped Nicolette
down. He loosed the girth, so that the horse might rest a bit and
glanced up, only to see her standing at the edge of a very steep
precipice, looking down.

She seemed to float out over nothing,
and it startled him. He thought for an instance she might fall.
Dropping the reins, he hurried to where she stood. She seemed to
step back onto solid ground and continued to stare. Her expression
was—sad.

It wasn’t until he was standing by her
that he realized where she was looking. It was a very long ways
down, almost vertical, very sharp and treacherous. There were
jagged scrub trees and sharp rock along a drop of almost a hundred
paces. He took a sharp breath in. To his dismay, it was the very
spot where he'd fallen so long ago. Ravan hadn’t believed that he
might have recognized the spot. He thought to have certainly
forgotten it, but this was not the case.

So long ago, when he stepped from this
ledge, he'd been beaten and broken at the end of a long and
terrible night. As a boy he believed that he would step to his
death, and now he found it hard to believe that he had not.
Standing on the cliff’s edge, gazing down with her, he knew without
a doubt this was the spot. He was unable to take his eyes from the
vast and perilous emptiness which fell away in front of him. “How
did you know?”

She continued to stare off and down
into the terrible face of what had happened here. Just when he
thought she hadn’t heard him, she looked up at him, dark eyes
burning into him and reached a pale hand up to touch his
cheek.

He took her hand in his and held it
tightly. “How did you know?”

“
It speaks of you—it
endures the memory of your fall,” she said solemnly, as though she
suddenly recognized that time was short and Ravan would face
difficult decisions very soon. “It is a tragic spot—this is a good
place for what is to come,” she murmured while looking back down at
the nothingness beyond the abyss.

Ravan swallowed again, thickly, as he
gazed back down the cliff edge and across the ravine. The wind
whistled, and he agreed. “Yes, you are right. It is a good place
for what is to come.”

They walked for a long time, leading
the stallion down the ravine, switching back and forth across the
terrain until they were finally at the bottom. The river was
shallow and wide, but the footing was solid. They drank deeply,
then splashed across the river and started slowly up the other
side. It was late afternoon before they stopped.

Dusk was no longer young when Ravan
started the fire and spitted the grouse he'd taken earlier on their
ride.

Nicolette sat quietly, the ground hard
and cold. She perched upon her cloak and pulled it up closely
around her shoulders as she watched Ravan bent at his
task.

Stoking the fire, he pushed the coals
beneath the grouse and prodded the burning logs towards Nicolette
to better warm her.

His expression was very far away and
she tilted her head, studying the dark man whose expression was so
intent and far away. His sword and bow lay nearby and, despite his
preoccupation, it appeared that he carried a weight on his
shoulders. She tilted her head curiously to the side, like a
fragile bird, and said, “We wait for them here?”

Satisfied with the blaze of the fire,
he came to sit next to her and put his arms around her. “Yes, we
wait for them here.”

The sun had been down for a bit and
they watched the purple and pink clouds of dusk give way to the
velvet, black blanket of night. They had the cliffs to their back,
steep and unyielding with a ledge very far above. They were
safe—for the moment.

The only way to approach them was from
the West, and this was an advantage to Ravan. He could see a long
way down. Not only did he have the benefit of superior elevation,
he had the good fortune of distance. An enemy would be visible from
very far away and he had many arrows with which to reach them. In
the morning, he would temper more in anticipation of the battle to
come. His strategy was sound and all that was left was to
wait.

The grouse hissed and browned to honey
gold on the spit. Ravan sat close to Nicolette, enjoying the
comfort of her beside him. She rested a hand on his knee and it
felt warm through his trousers.

He'd thought of a moment like this
before. There had been times when he’d wondered what it might be
like to have someone sit next to him every day. Someone who knew
him and accepted him, a partner to grow old with. He wondered what
it might have been like if things had been different.

Briefly, his memories took him back to
the time when the Fat Wife had cut his hair in the warmth of a
kitchen, very long ago. Memories like these seemed seldom, and he
collected them like the treasures that adorned the spaces of each
child at the orphanage, precious and irreplaceable.

There was no need to state the
obvious, that Ravan was terribly outmatched. He stood no chance
against Duval and his men, or even Adorno’s army for that
matter.

Nicolette didn’t waste her time with
thoughts like these. Instead, she looked up into the eyes of her
lover with a mystical curiosity and asked, “How old were you when
you were last here?”

Looking at her, he was enraptured by
her inquisitiveness, again overwhelmed with her effortless
fascination with the world about her. Resting his hand gently on
hers, he reached to pull her closer to him, to smell her hair, to
feel her lean against his chest.

He studied the fire, as humans are
compelled to do. “I was fourteen the last time I was here, but that
was on foot, and it seems like such a long time ago.” He glanced
towards the horse, tied and content to work its way through the
dried grass thrown before it. “I did not have such a fine horse
back then—did not have a horse at all, but I am no stranger to this
land.”

“
Hmm,” she murmured. “It
must be reassuring, to have the familiarity of such a
place.”

It occurred to him that Nicolette
could stand within the devil’s pyre and if fancy struck her, she
would be untroubled and ask of him what she would.

The grouse would wait. Ravan laid
Nicolette down and they made love by the fire. It was at that
moment that something new stirred within his heart. It was as
simple and perfect as anything could be. It transcended the
desperation of the here and now and cast him far away, into his
past. He was, once again, a child, wild and free in the woods
behind the orphanage. Only, this time, another child ran beside
him—and he loved her.