He swung his legs out of bed, pulled on his boots, and stood up. He felt the aches in his back, the pull of his shoulders, and grimaced. He had seen his own father stretch and wince in a similar way in the mornings, but that had been because he had been an old man. Stephen was barely thirty, although he could no longer claim with a straight face that he felt his age. He felt tired, and worn out.
He felt used up.
The physical hardships of the war had been severe, but he understood instinctively that this was something deeper. He had no learning of medicines and ailments, but he felt that a malaise had settled into his bones during his time in the west. Perhaps the old men and women of the village had been right when they proclaimed that there was a price to be paid for taking a life. If so, Stephen owed the kind of debt that would give even a king pause for thought.
He slid the bolt on his door – there had been much scoffing when he had hammered the metal plates into place, but then the farmers and blacksmiths and tailors who called the village home had never hacked a foreign king’s nephew’s head from his neck while his limbs still twitched and his body was still warm – and stepped out of his house.
Spread out ahead of him to the east were the fields that he had worked as a boy, first for his father and then under the unfailingly critical eye of his mother. The small stone church, abandoned since the dawn of the Age of Reason, stood at the north-west corner of the largest field. For three winters now the villagers had waited for its roof to fall in, but still it held.
To the north, the valley sloped down to the river and the rich lands beyond. It would never cease to feel strange to Stephen that when he looked in these two directions, everything he could see now belonged to him. He had protested the King’s decision to make him the Lord of these lands, but only once: the King appreciated humility but did not appreciate argument, especially if the topic under discussion was a gift that was – by anyone’s standards – extremely generous.
Perhaps gift was the wrong word. The lands that had always been known as Wrong Side were a reward, earned a thousand times over on the battlefield in the protection of the Realm. And had they been any other parcel of lands of equal size and value, Stephen would not have protested even once. He knew what he had done, and what it was worth. It was only the men and women who lived on and worked these lands that had given him reason to be uneasy. He had grown up amongst them, a boy no better than any other, and now he was their Lord, by order of the King.
It was fair to say that there had been varied reactions to the news.
The small village square was busy, as it almost always was.
A small queue had formed in front of the well; the hard women who worked the land with a stubborn determination that was at least the equal of their husbands, waited patiently with wooden buckets in their hands. He could not hear their voices across the distance between them and him, but Stephen was extremely confident that gossip would be flowing between them as rapidly as the water being drawn from the cool rocks below.
Down by the river, he could see clothes being washed and children playing happily along the water’s edge. Arthur Allen, who would turn fifteen in a month’s time and was making the most of his last summer as a boy before the duties and responsibilities of adulthood made themselves known to him, was leading a group of smaller boys and girls in a circle along the riverbanks, orchestrating a game the rules of which Stephen could not even begin to fathom. There were sticks involved, and the covering of one eye with a hand, and an intricate series of loops and whirls had been scratched into the dust. It was beyond his understanding, but the children appeared to have no such problem.
Watching the game from a tree stump at the edge of the clearing was Mary Cooper. She was already fifteen, and was now usually to be found in the Cooper fields up near the edge of the forest, turning out plough-splitting rocks and dragging twisting vine-weed up by the roots. Hard work, as Stephen knew as well as anyone. The kind of work that aged you, that added lines to the face and a stoop to the back. He was sure that would eventually be Mary Cooper’s fate, unless a gentleman from the castle happened to ride down into the valley and sweep her up onto his horse and take her away to be his wife.
Mary Cooper was by no means fully grown – even though he disagreed with it, Stephen was not minded to challenge the village’s assumption that fifteen was the threshold between childhood and adulthood, not when there were other matters more pressing that would cause less consternation amongst his neighbors – but the beauty she would become was already extremely apparent. Mary Cooper was a good girl, kind and decent and hardworking. Her father had died when she was young, and she and her mother lived together in a small cottage at the point where their two small fields met. She was a quiet girl, although Stephen suspected there was a hard streak in her that she could draw upon when needed: she was no fool, and she did not appreciate being taken for one, although exactly that assumption is often made about girls as beautiful as Mary Cooper.
Her hair was the color of a wheat field in afternoon sun, the lines of her face soft and pleasing to the eye, the curves beneath her dress long and smooth. Stephen had noticed the village men allowing their gaze to linger on her longer than was necessary, an occurrence that was becoming regular enough that he feared the time would come when he would no longer be able to hold his tongue.
But whereas they tried – half-heartedly in some cases – to disguise their lechery, Arthur Allen looked at Mary with the open adoration of the young, his eyes wide, his mouth almost always hanging slightly open, as though he could not truly believe the vision before him. His very open infatuation was the subject of gossip around the village, and some mocking. It was mostly gentle though, for, despite all their hard edges, the men and women of Wrong Side could – mostly – still remember what it was to be young and in love.
As he led the children in their game, Stephen saw Arthur cast stolen glances in Mary Cooper’s direction. She gave no indication that she noticed – her gaze remained fixed on the slowly running river – but there was the faintest curve at the corners of her mouth, the tiniest hint of something that might – with appropriate encouragement – turn into a smile, that made him think that not only did she notice Arthur looking at her, but was content for him to do so.
Stephen watched for a little while longer, savouring the quiet contentment that had settled momentarily over the village. It wouldn’t last, he knew. It never did. By mid-afternoon, when the temperature rose and so did tempers, there would be arguments that needed settling, disputes that needed resolving, and the good mood that was currently filling him would be a distant memory.
But in this moment, Stephen was content. In this moment, a thought – one that was exceptionally rare – occurred to him. He considered it, and allowed it to lodge in his mind, warming him from the inside.
This is why we went to the Borderlands, and why we waded through blood to come home.
This is what we fought for.
Stephen’s first instinct, as always, was to reach for his sword.
The banging was loud, and insistent, and coming from somewhere close by. His eyes flew open, and he instantly registered that it was still dark. Not the deep night – the shutters that sealed the windows were edged in deep, velvet purple rather than rendered invisible by black – but still some hours before anyone ought to be knocking on his door.
He swung his legs out of bed and picked up his sword. It never lay out of reach, even when he was asleep, and he felt the familiar sadness at how neatly the weapon’s handle fit into his hand. It had been rewrapped in leather half a dozen times, but within a few days it had always taken on some essential shape that was now part of the weapon itself. His fingers fit into faint grooves, his thumb rested against a worn blister of leather. It was an extension of himself, and even now – many months since he had last swung it in anger – he felt incomplete without it in his hand.
He crossed the small room of his dwelling in his night-shirt, his bare feet padding silently across the rolled earth. Some of the village houses had floorboards, and the grand homes that surrounded the castle had intricate tiles and even