Whatever I might have said in my own defence would have made no difference. Wrongs had been done, ugly, evil things, and the citizens of Gettys were determined that someone had to pay for them. Gettys was a rough place to live, a settlement half military outpost and half penal colony on the easternmost boundary of the Kingdom of Gernia. Its citizens were no strangers to rape and murder. But the crimes I was accused of went beyond the spectrum of passion and violence into something darker, too dark even for Gettys to tolerate. Someone had to wear the villain’s black cape and pay the toll for such transgressions, and who better than the solitary fat man who lived in the graveyard and was rumoured to have doings with the Specks?
So I was convicted. The cavalla officers who sat in judgment on me sentenced me to hang, and I accepted that. I had shamed my regiment. At that moment, my execution seemed the simplest escape from a life that had become the antithesis of every dream I’d ever had. I’d die and be done with disappointment and failure. Hearing my sentence was almost a relief.
But the magic that had poisoned my life was not about to let me go so easily.
Killing me was not enough for my accusers. Evil would be punished with as cruel and vicious a vengeance as they could imagine. Darkness would be balanced with darkness. When the second half of my sentence was pronounced, horror froze me. Before I ascended the gallows to make that final drop, I’d receive one thousand lashes.
I will always recall that stunned moment. The sentence went beyond execution, beyond punishment, to total destruction. As it stripped the flesh from my bones, it would strip away all dignity as well. No man, no matter what his courage, could grit his teeth and keep silent through a thousand lashes. They would mock and cheer me as I shrieked and begged. I would go to my death hating them and myself.
I’d been born to be a soldier. As the second son of a nobleman, the good god had decreed that I should be a soldier. Despite all that had befallen me, despite the foreign magic that had infected and poisoned me, despite my ejection from the King’s Cavalla Academy, despite my father’s disowning of me and the scorn of my fellows, I had done my best to serve my king as a soldier. This was what it had earned me. I would scream and weep and plead for mercy before folk who saw me only as a monster. The lash would strip my body naked of both clothing and flesh, exposing the sagging layers of fat that had been their first excuse to hate me. I would faint and be revived with a dash of vinegar on my back. I’d piss myself and dangle helplessly from my manacled wrists. I’d be a corpse long before they hanged my remains. They knew it and so did I.
Even my corrupted and maimed life seemed a better choice than that death. The magic had sought to take me from my own people and use me as a tool against them. I’d fought it. But that final night in my cell, I knew the magic of the Speck folk offered me my only opportunity to save myself. When the magic tore down the walls of my prison, I took the opportunity. I escaped.
But neither the magic nor the good folk of Gettys were done with me. I think the magic knew that I’d given only lip service to my surrender to it. But it demanded all of me, my entire life, with no ties left to bind me to this place and this people, and what I had never given willingly, it now took from me.
As I fled from the fort, I encountered a troop of returning cavalla soldiers. I knew it was not my bad luck that put Captain Thayer in charge of the troop. It was the magic that put me in the hands of the man whose dead wife I had apparently despoiled. It had ended predictably. The tired frustrated men he led had rapidly degenerated into a mob. They had killed me in the streets, his soldiers holding me for him while he beat me to death. Justice and vengeance were sated on that dusty street in the small hours of the morning. Then, slaked with violence, they had dispersed to their homes and beds. They did not speak to one another of what they had done.
And in the hour before dawn broke over Gettys, a dead man fled the town.
The huge hooves of my big horse made a steady drumming as we fled. As we passed the last outlying farms of the scattered town that surrounded the King’s fort at Gettys, I glanced back over my shoulder. The town was silent and still. The flames on the burning walls of the prison had subsided, but a dark smear of smoke still smudged the greying sky. The men who had fought Epiny’s sabotage all night would be trudging home to their beds now. I kept my gaze fixed on the road before me and rode grimly on. Gettys had never been my home, but it was hard to leave it.
Ahead of me, light began to spill over the mountaintops. The sun would soon be up. I had to reach the shelter of the forest before men began to stir. There would be some early risers today, people anxious to secure good vantage points to watch my flogging and execution. My mouth twisted, imagining their disappointment when they heard of my death.
The King’s Road, that ambitious undertaking of King Troven of Gernia, unfurled before me, dusty, rutted, pot-holed but arrow straight. I followed it. It led east, ever east. In the King’s vision, it threaded through and over the Barrier Mountains and on, until it reached the far sea. In my king’s dreams, the road would be a lifeline of trade for land-locked Gernia. In reality, his road ended only a few miles past Gettys, its growth foundered at the edge of the vale where the Specks’ ancestor trees grew. For years, the indigenous Specks had used their magic to incite fear and desolation in the road workers and halt the road’s march. The spell the Specks cast varied from a deep terror that made men crawling cowards to a deep despair that sapped them of all will to work. Beyond the end of the road, the forest awaited me.
On the road ahead of me, I saw what I’d been dreading. A horseman was coming towards me at a weary walk. The rider sat tall in his saddle, and that as much as the brave green of his jacket labelled him a cavalla soldier. I wondered where he was coming from and why he rode alone and if I’d have to kill him. As I drew closer, the rakish angle of his hat and the bright yellow scarf at his throat betrayed what he was; one of our scouts. My heart lifted a trifle. There was a chance he’d know nothing about the charges against me and my trial. The scouts were often out for weeks at a time. He showed no interest in me as our horses approached one another, and as I passed him, he did not even lift a hand in greeting.
I felt a pang of sharp regret as I went by. But for the magic, that could have been me. I recognized Tiber from the Cavalla Academy, but he did not know me. The magic had changed me from the slim and fit cadet I’d been. The fat, dishevelled trooper lolloping along on his ungainly mount was beneath the lieutenant’s notice. At his current pace, it would be hours before he got to the town and heard of the mob that had killed me in the streets. I wondered if he’d think he had seen a ghost.
Clove cantered laboriously on. The cross-breed draught horse was no one’s idea of a mount built for either speed or endurance. But he was big, and for a man of my height and bulk, he was the only possible steed that could carry me comfortably. It came to me that this would be the last time I’d ride him; I couldn’t take him into the forest with me. Pain gouged me again; he’d be one more beloved thing that I’d have to leave behind. He was running heavily now, nearly spent by our mad flight from Gettys.
Well outside Gettys, a wagon trail diverged from the King’s Road and led up to the cemetery. Clove slowed as we approached it, and I abruptly changed my plans. The cabin I had called home for the past year was up that trail. Was there anything left there that I’d want to carry forward into my new life? Spink had removed my soldier-son journal and taken it to his home. I was grateful for that. My journal held the full tale of how the magic had entered my life and slowly taken it away from me. There might still be letters in my cabin, papers that could connect me to a past and a family that I needed to abandon. I would let nothing tie me to either Lord Burvelle; let my death shame no one except myself.
Clove slipped into his ponderous trot as he laboured up the hill. It had only been a couple of weeks since I’d last been here, but it felt like years. Grass was already sprouting on the many graves we had dug for the summer victims of the plague. The trench graves were still bare soil; they had been the last graves to be covered,