Heroes And Fools

The Road Home
Nancy Varian Berberick

Listen, I don’t care how many people you ask-you’re not going to get the truth of the matter of Griff Rees from anyone but me. Griff Raven Friend, some call him; others say Griff Red Hand. In the army of the Dark Queen, in the days before the Second Cataclysm, he was known simply as Killer Griff. Those are the names others gave him. He himself took the name Unsouled, but it was a private name, and I only heard him speak it once, a time ago when we were down around Tarsis, when he was very drunk and thought himself alone.

A wild night at the end of the Falling starts this story. On that night Griff was right here in the Swan and Dagger. Long legs stretched out, he sat picking his teeth with a bone-handled dirk, listening to the wind outside and the roar of the tavern around him, maybe to the dark ebb and flow of voices only he could hear. A newly filled jug of ale sat frothing at his elbow. The remains of his supper lay all over the table, the greasy carcass of a whole duck and all the good things that go with it.

The Swan and Dagger was thunderous that night, howling back at the wind. The air hung thick with the smoke of poorly trimmed candles and fumes from the fireplace. Filled to the walls it was, with the usual clientele Baird Taverner gets in the Swan-ne’er-do-wells of all stripes, goblins, humans, hill dwarfs, and even a few mountain dwarfs like me. Everyone there came of the same dangerous tribe: narrow-eyed vengeance-seekers, quick-fingered thieves, and reckless ramblers who’d hire their swords for a good weight of steel coin, no matter whether they were hired for a border skirmish, a private raid, or a swift assassination.

I’m one of those hirelings, only it’s not a sword I let out. It’s Reaper, my hard-headed warhammer. Griff was one, too, and none better in this part of Abanasinia than Killer Griff.

It was wind that blew me into the Swan and Dagger, wind and the breath of winter coming. Griff was looking right at me when I came in. His eyes narrowed a bit and his lip curled in the sneer that was his smile. When he lifted his hand, a lazy wave, I went to join him.

“Sit,” he said as easily as if it had been five days since he’d seen me last and not five months.

I took the warhammer off my hip and set it on the table. When I sat, Griff poured out some ale from the jug and shoved the tankard my way. I drank long and slow, then looked around to see whether anything remaining from his meal seemed worth picking over. Nothing did; Griff had done that duck to the bone.

“Hungry, are you, Broc?”

“Not so much,” I said, looking past him to the bar where Baird Taverner stood listening to a whip-thin goblin whine and wheeze over his woes. He was a shabby thing, that goblin, his clothing naught but patches and rags, and he’d lately been in a fight with someone or something mean enough to rip off half the flesh of his pointy left ear.

“Sniveling about the price of dwarf spirits,” Griff said, squinting into the thick air and looking where I did. “It’s gone up some since last you were here. Baird’s getting twenty-five coppers for it now.”

Twenty-five. You could drown yourself in ale for twenty-five coppers, and I had nothing like that much in my pocket. Still, I might have figured the cost would rise. You don’t get dwarf spirits easily these days, what with Thorbardin shut up tight against the world and my dear mountain kin hoarding most of it for themselves. What Baird got he paid hard for, so he charged a steep price to tap a keg.

“I’ll stand you a drink,” Griff said, leaning back and gesturing to the taverner.

I stopped him. “Don’t. I can’t afford to be in your debt.”

He shrugged, as if to say I must please myself. “Where have you been, Broc? Someone told me you were dead, killed out there in the hills of Darken Wood.”

I’d heard the same tale told of me in several versions. “Did you mourn me, Griff?”

In the uneasy light of candle and hearth the scars on his face shone like cruel silver as he leaned back in his chair and yawned.

“My heart broke,” said the man whose heart sat like a stone in his chest, beating but never moved. “Good to see you again,” he added roughly as he lifted the jug and filled the tankard for me again.

I drank his health with a silent gesture, drained the tankard, and filled it a third time as he leaned across the table. That close to him, most people look away, from the scars and from his eyes. I never looked away, though sometimes when I met his eyes I saw ghosts there, peering out at me. That night, as on other nights, I thought Griff’s eyes held the ghosts of all the people he’d killed.

“Listen,” he said, the word falling heavily between us to let me know he had something to say worth hearing. He tapped Reaper’s head. “Broc, are you looking for work?”

“I’m here,” I said simply. “Me and the season. It’s not a good place when the snow falls, that wild wood yon. I’d rather be under roof.”

He took a long pull of ale and banged the tankard onto the table. “So says the Dwarf of Darken Wood. Well, I can give you work to make sure you can buy yourself the finest house in Long Ridge and stock it with dwarf spirits all the year through.”

I leaned forward, wiping ale foam from my mouth. If I had any money, I’d not be wasting it on a fine and fancy house. A room over the Swan and Dagger was enough for me, with some coin left over to buy enough dwarf spirits to warm away the winter.

“It’s a sweet job,” Griff said, hitching his chair closer to the table. He glanced right and left, then dropped his voice low. “We’ll be in and out before anyone knows what happened.”

The job was a vengeance killing down in Elm High, one of the big towns on the Whiterage River. The details were not unusual: a ruined daughter, a son murdered trying to defend his sister, and a father too old to do what needed to be done and rich enough to offer Griff one hundred in steel coin to fund the expedition, two hundred more when we came back with the proof of our success.

“That proof,” I said, “what would it be?”

Griff slashed his thumb across his neck. A head. Well, that’s easy enough.

“How much for me?”

“The usual.”

One-third. Over at the bar, the goblin whined some more and shoved enough coins at Baird to see his cup refilled. One-third of three hundred — a fine payday.

“Done,” I said.

In the moment I said it, Baird Taverner pointed across the smoky room to us. Griff cocked his head as the crowd at the bar shifted, then parted. A young woman stood revealed, gray eyes wide and slender hands clasped modestly before her.

Dove among the wolves, I thought.

She took a timid step forward, then clasped her hands tighter and made her step firmer. She had a gauntlet to pass of gropers and grabbers, but she managed that well enough. She had a sharp elbow, that one, and she looked as if she knew how to use her knee if she had to. Right to us she came and stood at the table. This close to her, I saw it wasn’t her hands she clasped but a small green velvet pouch kept close. By the look of it, a good deal of coin nestled in there. By the look of her, lips pressed tight and eyes anxious, that was all the coin she had.

“I’ve come to find Griff Rees,” she said, “and they tell me he is here.”

Griff said nothing, only eyed her, cool and quiet, so that she must look at one or the other of us. She did that but once, then stood in silence until at last I said, “It’s not me you’re wanting, girl. It’s that lout across the table from me.”

Her glance thanked me, and she turned to Griff. She flinched a little to see his scars, and she could not hold his eye; no shame to her for it.

“I’ve come,” she said, “to hire you, Griff Rees, for a job of work.”

“Have you now?” Griff said, drawling lazy and low. “Well, you’ve come late, mistress. I’ve just taken”-he smiled to mock-”a job of work.” He leaned back in his chair, shouted to Baird for more ale, and seemed surprised to find the young woman still there. “Did you not hear me?”

She stood tall and straight, her black hair glinting in the firelight. She said she had heard him, and she said she hoped he would give her as good a hearing. “For I’ve got the steel to pay you well.”

Griff’s dark eyes lighted. He wasn’t one for sentiment, and so the sad tale of the ruined daughter and the murdered son wouldn’t move him to dismiss this young woman if her purse proved deeper than that of the old man who couldn’t take his own revenge. He threw out his leg and hooked a chair with his foot, dragging it over to the table. She sat, looking around her uneasily, her pouch and her hands in her lap.

“I am Olwynn Haugh,” she said, “and I am a widow. My husband-” Her voice faltered. “My husband was a farmer, below in the valley. He is lately dead. I have a child, Cae, she’s but a month old, and I want to take her and go home to my father. I want to be with him before winter sets in and-”

Griff laughed, the sound like a bear shouting in the hills. “Mistress Haugh, someone has misinformed you. I don’t hire out to escort young ladies home to their fathers.” He leaned across the table, giving her full sight of his scarred face, his dark and dangerous eyes. “I travel harder roads than that.”

“And crueler,” she said, her eyes on the table, on me, on anything but his face. “I know who you are. That’s why I want to hire you to protect me on my way. My father lives in Haven, and the best road to there passes around Darken Wood.”

Well, Olwynn Haugh was no fool, that much we now knew. We’ve a long history around here in Abanasinia, one full of dark threads and some bright. In these after-days many of the doings are grim, and much of that grim work goes on in Darken Wood, home to cutthroats and thieves and people like me who aren’t so delicate about whom they kill or why as long as the pay is good.

Olwynn lifted her pouch and put it on the table. It didn’t seem as fat as it would need to be to tempt Griff away from a job promising one hundred steel to start and two hundred to finish.

“Look,” Griff said, wearying of this conversation, “take your money and go hire a half-dozen strong men to guide you home. Say some prayers to gods along the way, if you still believe in them. I’ve other work to do, and it’s time for me to be at it.”

He turned from her. In his mind, the matter was finished. Olwynn took up her green velvet pouch and opened it.

“See,” she said, presenting all her wealth, “I do have the steel to pay you. Here is a ring my father gave me, as well as a necklace of emeralds and rubies that belonged to my mother and my grandmother before her.”

The ring was of good enough make. You might get a few steel for it from a generous man. The necklace, though-that looked like something out of Thorbardin, and a lot older than this girl’s grandmother. Each jewel was perfectly cut and enchained. It was worth a good deal more than a few steel if you showed it to the right person.

Across the room the skinny goblin leaned his back against the bar and made sure he had a clear view of us. I drew Reaper closer to me. Griff saw that, but he never moved. A look had come on him, white and terrible. I swear by Reorx himself or whichever of the vanished gods you’d like me to name, I swear his hand trembled and the ale slopped over the brim of his tankard.

Firelight glinted off the little heap of steel coins, a pile much too small to outweigh the three hundred promised Griff for that simple killing down in Elm High, but he wasn’t doing that kind of reckoning. He wasn’t doing any reckoning at all. He stared, like a man come suddenly upon an adder, and what held his eye was that ring sitting atop the little pile of steel, a long narrow oval of gold upon which was embossed a double eagle, a fierce raptor with two heads, each in opposition to the other.

The farmer’s pretty widow smiled and grew easy, believing she’d shown just what was needed to hire her man: good coin and, if the sum weren’t enough, a golden ring and some jewelry to make up the difference.

“Will you do it, then?” she asked, gathering up the pouch and cinching it tight.

“Done,” Griff said. From the sound, his mouth must have been drier than ash. He reached for his ale and drank the tankard down. “Be ready for us in the morning.”

“So soon? But-”

“Tomorrow, or not at all,” he growled. “Meet me outside of here at first light.”

She made no other protest and left us. Me, though, I had a thing or two to say. I poured myself some ale, then said it.

“Have you lost your mind? You just passed up the best job I’ve heard of in months. For what? Maybe a third of what that old man in Elm High is promising to pay?”

Griff looked at me long, all the ghosts in his eyes staring out at me. “What’s it to you?”

“One hundred steel,” I said, and never mind that his look raised the hair on the back of my neck. It was money we were talking, ghosts be damned.

“One hundred steel. .” He traced the figure in the ale-slop on the table. “So what? You can have all we make on this little trip to Haven. I don’t care.”

Out the corner of my eye I saw the rag-eared goblin was gone from the bar. That could mean something, or it could mean nothing. I wasn’t of a mind to chew it over now. “And you? What will you make? Are you doing it for free?” I snorted derisively. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of Killer Griff giving it away.”

“So what?” He said it just as if he didn’t care. He leaned forward again, elbows on the table, spilled ale wetting his shirt where his arms rested. He didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the table and said, “Broc, did I ever tell you how I joined the Dark Queen’s army?”

I frowned, not knowing where this offer of history came from and not much wanting to hear it. “No, and-”

“Well, listen.”

I listened, but he said nothing, while all around us in the tavern the smoke hung and voices rose in shouts and dropped low in growls.

“Listen,” he said again, finally lifting up his eyes, those deep wells all full of ghosts. “I’ll tell you about a boy, skinny brat, living on his father’s farm, away up on the plains of Estwilde. He wasn’t nearly grown, that boy, and not a day older than he had to be to take what was handed him. . ”

The boy, said Griff to me on that windy, wild night in the Swan and Dagger, the boy stood at the well, winding the crank to pull up the bucket from the dark deeps. Water, in those days just before the Second Cataclysm, was scarce. Rain never fell anymore. The well stream, which had always run swift under the ground, had months before choked to a trickle. The boy became used to letting that bucket of his tumble far down and cranking it back up again, turn and turn, until his arms ached with the work.

As he stood cranking, the boy looked out across the brown and dying fields, at the crops burned to ruin, the dust swirling in the ever-blowing wind. He cocked his head, listening to the sounds of the farm, his mother murmuring to his sister, his baby brother cooing in the cradle under the shade of the roof, his father talking to someone behind the barn. He looked up high, the back of his neck prickling. It seemed to him that he heard thunder or felt it rumbling, but the sky was hard and empty.

Like some great beast waking, the ground beneath his feet shuddered faintly. Dark, a cloud rose, up over the hill, past which lay the town. The wind turned, and the thick smell of burning came to him.

“Fire!” the boy shouted, abandoning the well. “Ma! Da! Fire! Fire in the town!”

Halfway to the house, he saw his mother pointing toward the hill, her eyes wide, her mouth open. The boy stopped to look where his mother pointed. All the blood in him went cold. It was smoke, aye, rising over the hill, but there was more-a great cloud of golden dust roiled and rolled before the darkness of smoke.

“Gods preserve us!” his mother cried. “Paladine save us!”

The boy’s belly cramped with fear as that golden cloud became an army, dark and solid and gleaming in the sun. Swords and war axes shone, and the sunlight glinted like bright little spears from the black armor of a troop of Dark Knights riding at the head.

Knights of Takhisis!

The boy didn’t think that. Well, he hadn’t the wit for thinking, had he? Terror ran in him, sweeping away all thought. No matter, that. He knew who came riding. Who hadn’t heard tales of what those merciless Knights had done in Kalaman? Everyone knew how they’d swept south from there into Estwilde on a bloody tide of rapine and killing.

The dark troop moved fast, horses’ hooves chewing up the road. Their voices came like the sound of a river at flood. The Knights kept to their course, thinking the little farm unworthy of their notice. Some of the foot soldiers didn’t hold so true a line. Roaring, they plunged across the field between the road and the farmyard. The boy saw faces contorted with the blood-chilling rage of men who’d lately been at a killing and lusted for more. He bolted to the house for his mother, and he ran right into the arms of his father.

“Cellar!” his father shouted, his infant son in his arms. He thrust the boy into the house, herding his wife and weeping daughter before him. Down under the center room lay a root cellar, cool and dark, a place to hide and pray these rampagers would satisfy themselves with looting. “Hurry, boy! Hurry!”

They had the hatch up from the floor. The boy tumbled in, shoved by his father. The infant wailed. Outside pigs squealed, cows bawled, and the army’s thunder shook the little house to the walls. The boy reached up to take the shrieking infant. Reaching, he heard his father cry out. His sister’s horrified scream echoed in his bones. The hatch crashed down, hitting the boy in the head and plunging him into stilling darkness.

There he crouched, half-conscious and bleeding. Just like in your worst nightmare, he heard his mother wail, he heard his father plead for mercy-not for himself, but for his wife and children. He heard the weeping and the sobbing and then the sudden silences like gaping holes never to be mended, unhealing wounds. All the while he shoved his thin shoulders up against the hatch, furious, raging, and trying to get out.

What did he think he’d do if he got out? Well, well, he was a boy, you remember, and full of mind-clouding fury. He thought he’d kill them, every one of those raiders.

When all the silences had fallen above, when all the deaths were died, the boy’s cursing was the loudest thing in the world to hear. He fell still, heart racing, terrified and knowing his own silence came too late. The hatch opened, and a hand reached down and grabbed his arm, dragging him up into the day. Light glinted off a deeply embossed golden ring, bitterly bright and stabbing the boy’s eyes.

Ach! It was a slaughter-field the boy found up there, red-running with blood. Bodies lay around the floor of the front room, his fair sister’s, his father’s twisted and broken, his mother’s covered in blood. The infant lay dead upon her breast. Shivering, belly-sick and cramping, the boy vomited, falling to his knees, and got kicked hard for doing that. A big man-that one with the big hand and the booted foot-yanked him to his feet. Fire crackled outside, smoke curled all around inside the house. The big man pulled the boy close so they were eye to eye. He stank of blood and sweat and murder.

“Mine,” he growled in Common Speech. “Mine!” He dragged the boy outside, where Griff’s wrists were bound, then tied on a long lead to the saddle horn of a pale horse.

That simply did the boy become a slave. The big man mounted his horse and rode away at the head of his murdering mob. The boy followed-well, he had to, didn’t he? — and he went in stunned silence until, atop a rise, his master stopped to look for sign of the army he’d left and must catch up again. The man looked ahead, but the boy looked behind him and saw his home, the little farmhouse, the barns and outbuildings. They sat like ashes on the land, and in the sky ravens circled, lowering for a meal.

In that moment the boy screamed his rage for the deaths of his family. Thus flew his first, fledgling war cry.

“That’s how I joined the army of Takhisis,” Griff Rees told me, still leaning on his elbows, soaking up the spilled ale.

I said nothing, because I had nothing to say. I’ve been told sad tales and sorrowful in my time, and this was one, but I’ve never known it to help a man to hear me say, ah, the shame of it; oh, the pity.

I looked long at him through the haze of low-hanging smoke from Baird Taverner’s badly drafting hearth, thinking about how he’d joined the Dark Queen’s army with a war cry in his throat and his heart turning to stone.

He said to me, there in the Swan and Dagger, that he would like to have killed the big man who enslaved him, but though he plotted and planned, he had no chance.

“Instead, I survived, fighting with the army, becoming as strong and ruthless as any soldier.”

I poured out the last of the ale, sharing it between us, all the while thinking that the killing you do in war is hard work for a man, worse work for a boy. He did it, though, that skinny boy who saw his family die on the plains of Estwilde, for among the slave’s duties was the obligation to defend his master in battle. He did that war-work well, learning the art of killing in hopes he’d get to use it in a better cause, to kill the man who’d murdered his family. He was an apt student. Soon they began to name him Killer Griff. Maybe it was then he thought he’d lost his soul, killed it in the killing, all the while yearning to work a particular murder. His yearning was never sated. In time he and his master parted, swept away from each other by the terrible tide of war that overwhelmed the High Clerist’s Tower in those rending days at the end of the Summer of Chaos.

“Ash Guth was his name,” Griff said. “He must have changed it, after. I’ve searched hard and never heard so much as a word about him since the war ended. Not from that day till this have I seen sign of him.” He looked down at the table, then up at me. “Not outside of nightmare.”

There must have been a lot of those, I thought as he turned his dark eyes on me and I heard his ghosts howling. Ah, not the ghosts of all those he’d killed in his time. Never them. I knew it now, I saw it: These were his ghosts, his phantom kin peering out from his eyes.

“I’ve got him now,” Griff said, tracing death runes in the spilled ale. “Got him sweet and sure, and there’s no way I’ll lose him again.”

Like a cold finger at the back of my neck came the memory of the nickname I’d heard only once: Griff Unsouled. He looked like that, sitting there, his arms in the ale-slop, like something animate but with no spirit. I thought, once, for only a moment, that it was too bad for Mistress Haugh to be leading her father’s death right to him, but then I decided that was no matter to concern me. There isn’t a killing I do or help at that isn’t worked for gain. This one would serve that end just fine. Besides, would you deny that Griff Rees had this killing coming to him?

If anyone had asked me, I’d have picked a different horse for Olwynn to ride than her dancy little red mare. For that matter, I’d have advised she ride no horse at all but that she and Griff take the Haven Road walking, as I did. It’s a good road in good seasons, broad enough for three riders to go abreast, but lately storm rains had washed away the sides, leaving it narrow and soft at the edges. The red mare hated those soft sides, and she always found herself slopping around there. Olwynn, riding with Cae in a sling and close to her breast, did her best to keep the mare going straight down the firm middle, but the mare was contrary-minded as any mule, veering right and left and shying each time she felt the yielding edge of the road. Two hours out of Long Ridge, the mare had slipped three times and twice threatened to throw her rider- infant and all-into the road. Whatever hopeful idea we’d had of how far we’d get that day lay in ruins.

“Slit the damned horse’s throat,” Griff growled the fourth time the mare went slipping off the road. It was the first thing he’d said since we took to the Haven Road, and he didn’t say more than that. He rode ahead, dark and quiet. Me, I was left with the mare and the girl, trying to get them back onto the road again, dodging hooves and teeth all the way while Cae set up a long, howling wail.

The Dwarf of Darken Wood, that’s what Griff names me, and maybe you wonder why I spend so much time in that place. There are many reasons. One is the silence.

Olwynn held the child close, whispering soft sounds that were not words, when the mare clucked her head to start kicking. I moved fast and punched the beast hard between the eyes just as her head came down. I did some harm to my fist and none to the mare, but I got her attention. She let me lead her up out of the mud and onto the road again.

“Thank you,” Olwynn said, her voice low and shaking as she took the reins from me. “I–I’m not so good with horses. My husband, though. .” She let the thought go, rocking her baby. “Well, thank your for your help, Broc.” She said it sweetly, no smile upon her lips but the light of one in her quiet eyes.

“Come on!” Griff called, his pied gelding restless. “We’d like to get at least a mile up the road before nightfall, eh?”

We made good time after that. The mare seemed be weary of contrariness now and enjoyed the chance to trot in the brisk morning. I ran ahead of the riders, jogging along the road, checking right and left, my pack a comfortable weight on my back, Reaper on my hip, near to hand.

It’s not a good place to be, Darken Wood on the Haven Road. All the pretty stories you hear of dryads singing in the glades, the tragic tales of the ghosts in Spirit Forest, even the brave legends of centaurs over in the western part of the wood-these are true. When you’re going into Darken Wood from the Haven Road round near Solace and Long Ridge, though, you’d be a fool to worry about specters and dryads and centaurs. What you find there are bandits and outlaws hiding in the aspen woods, men exiled from home and kin by law or, like me, by choice. You’d be a witling to go in there without weapons and the skill to use them.

Behind me, Olwynn’s little daughter cooed and sighed, the tiny sound drifting on the wind. Birds flitted over Solace Stream, kingfishers dived for a meal, finches and warblers came out from the wood to drink. A doe, wide-eyed and startled, leaped across the road and plunged into the darkness of trees. I stopped, listening to her run, and to the following silence as smaller creatures, fearing predators, swiftly ducked for cover. I waited until I heard the wood return to normal, heard the song of birds and the sigh of cold wind from the north, then went on.

The road no longer ran straight, for it had been cut out of the wood to parallel the wandering stream, and it became more narrow. I glanced back, then signaled to Griff that I was heading out of his sight, around the bend to see the way ahead. He gestured assent, and Olwynn spoke to him, her voice low. If she had asked after something, he gave no answer.

A dove among wolves, so I’d thought her the night before in the Swan and Dagger. Well, she was that, wasn’t she? A little dove homing with a deadly message for her father, aye. He could make a neat plan, Griff could.

I rounded the bend where, off to the east Solace Stream runs chattering and laughing out of Crystalmir Lake, and there I stopped, cursing to see a tangle of aspens fallen across the road. The rains of days before had filled up the lake so that the runoff swelled the racing stream past its banks. We’d have to leave the road and thread the verge of the wood where trees grew close together, their roots weaving snares for our feet. That red mare was going to enjoy this. I went closer to the pile, still cursing, trying to think how best to get the mare off the road and into the wood. The crisp sound of hooves at jog fell upon the silence. As if to protest, a jay cried in the wood, another echoed, and a third joined the racket. Some small creature rustled within the tangle of fallen trees, drawing my eye.

My heart lurched hard against my ribs as I saw a thing hidden from the casual glance. Every one of those trees had been taken with a wood axe, and every one of those raw new wounds told me the trees had been cut down in the night.

“Griff!” I shouted, running back, “heads up!”

The jays fell silent. The wind turned, carrying the near scent of sweat and horses. I rounded the bend and saw them, two riders abreast. Griff had his sword out, the steel shining in a fall of sunlight. Behind him, like a trap closing, came ten ragged figures, some human, some goblin. They made a half-circle across the road, catching us between them and the fallen trees.

“Back!” I shouted. “Behind you!”

An arrow hissed past my ear, and a second flashed past the eye of the red mare. The beast bolted. Olwynn screamed, flung over the mare’s back, Cae clutched to her breast as she fell onto the road. She lay there, helpless, the breath blasted from her as her child shrieked. Griff was off his horse and over her at once. To see him, you’d have thought he was protecting his own dear daughter, so fierce and fiery were his eyes now. He was protecting, all right. Not Olwynn, no, but something more-his road to revenge.

I leaped past Griff, swinging Reaper hard, and took out the knees of a tall, thin goblin who fell screaming. He struggled, trying to gain his feet, and I saw that here was the rag-eared fellow who’d gone suddenly missing from the Swan. Reaper harvested, smashing that goblin’s skull to bloody bits.

Olwynn shouted, “Broc! Behind!”

I turned on my heel, Reaper already swinging. Bone crunched, someone howled in agony, and a stocky human fell to the ground.

Olwynn cried out again in wordless terror, and I jerked around in time to see her hunched over her wailing child, trying desperately to protect herself and her baby as two goblins rushed her. With her, they must be certain, lay the pouch full of steel coins their fellow had seen in the tavern.

With his wild, terrible war cry-ah, that cry the same as the first one he ever shouted-Griff leaped over Olwynn’s huddled body. His sword glinted as he plunged it into the gut of a goblin, the gleam quenched in red, red blood. Yet seven remained, five humans and two goblins, all of them certain of their skills, certain of the treasure they had come for.

I grabbed the mare’s reins as she dashed past and grabbed Olwynn’s pack from the saddle horn. Griff snatched his pied gelding and his own pack. One swift glance passed between us. With slaps and cries we sent the horses plunging into the knot of ambushers.

“Run!” I shouted, flinging Olwynn’s pack at her as Griff grabbed her wrist and yanked her to her feet. “No! Not ahead! The way is blocked! Into the wood!”

We scrambled off the side of the road, into Darken Wood, and none of us wasted time looking over our shoulders.

We ran, but not for long. The wood was sparse along the verge, but we soon found that beyond there it grew thick and close. Trees leaned together, brush clogged what clear spaces might have been, while roots reached up from the ground to trip us. Olwynn’s breathing came in gasps and sobs, ragged with effort and fear. Cae wailed constantly, her cries muffled against her mother’s breast but still loud enough to be followed. Shouts and curses echoed behind us as the bandits untangled themselves from the horses and plunged into the wood. One long keening cry rose up, someone discovering his dead.

“Faster,” I said to Griff as I ducked past him, looking for the slender trails I knew.

He grabbed Olwynn’s wrist again, dragging her stumbling behind. The girl and her screaming child in tow, we splashed across a swollen stream. Once up the other side Griff stopped, still gripping Olwynn by the arm.

“Shut the brat up!” he growled, head up, ears keen for sound of pursuit.

We heard enough of that. Behind us, bodies crashed heavily through the brush, harsh voices shouting oaths and threats. All round us, though, lay silence. No creature of the wood made a sound. In that silence Olwynn shrugged from under Griff’s hand, drawing herself away from him. Sweating in the cold air, her arms trembling as she held the infant to her, she said, “Cae is hungry and cold and frightened. Find me a quiet place, and I will quiet her.”

Cae wailed louder. Griff put his hand on the grip of his sword, a slow, considered motion. The pulse leaped in Olwynn’s throat. She didn’t back away, though, and softly she said, “I have hired you, Griff Rees, to protect me. Surely you don’t threaten me now because my child is hungry and tired?”

She held her ground. Griff smiled the way you’d think Winter itself would smile, heartless and icy. “Am I not keeping your father’s precious treasure well enough, Mistress Haugh? You’re still here and standing, aren’t you?”

Back behind us a rough voice raised up, and another answered. In silence, I cursed. I’d taken this job for easy money, and it seemed to me the money was getting harder all the time.

“Griff,” I said, “let’s get going.”

Snarling, he said, “Broc, take us to some place quiet so Mistress Haugh can tend her child.”

Well enough, I knew where to go-who better than the Dwarf of Darken Wood? — and so I went, thrusting through the low growth, leaving Griff to shoulder through the tall with Olwynn, her child in full voice, behind.

Closer now, the rough voice shouted, “Hear ‘em? Up ahead!” The bandits came crashing along our trail, led by Cae’s wails. We heard one of them howl with glee in the very moment I found the two crossing trails I sought, one broad and clear, the other narrow and twisting. I smelled the stink of goblin on the wind. Maybe Olwynn did, too, for she closed her eyes and breathed softly, as if she were praying.

“All right, then,” I said, pointing to the narrow trail winding out like a snake. “That’s our path, Griff. At the end the ground rises. You’ll find three caves. You want the middle one. It’s deepest, and a spring wells up in the back. Go there, and don’t leave the path, or you’ll be lost before I miss you.”

Behind us a deer leaped, crashing through the brush. Pursuit came closer.

“And you?” Griff said.

I gave him my pack, then pointed to the ground. “Covering the marks of your big boots.”

He laughed grimly and got Olwynn moving again. They took the winding path, Griff ducking low, once or twice holding a whipping branch back for Olwynn when he thought to. I waited until they were gone up the path, then swiftly covered the marks of their passing. That done, I made a trail for the pursuit, my own clear boot prints, indeterminate marks off to the side, and some scuffing that looked as if someone had fallen a time or two and scrabbled up again. A spring bubbled up on the left of the trail not far ahead. I crossed it and left wet prints on the stony ground beyond.

Standing still off the path, I listened. A gravelly voice drifted to me on the wind, a goblin speaking in his own coarse language. Satisfied, I ducked into cover, making myself invisible in thickets as the bandits came closer, my rusty clothing fading into the rusty bracken. Eyes on the trail, ears straining for the sound of wailing Cae, I waited, breath held. Breath held, and Reaper held, just in case.

One goblin came, then another, and several humans followed.

“I’ll wear their skins for breeches,” the first goblin said. He had a look about him that reminded me of the rag-eared fellow I’d killed on the road. Kin, doubtless.

To the west, a crow cried again. Something fainter, smaller, seemed to answer. Cae! The goblin who was looking for new breeches stopped, obliging the others to do the same. He cocked his head, his pointed ears swivel-ing, just like a cat’s.

“Ar, it’s nothin”‘ growled a tall human. “Just a rabbit caught outside its hole.”

The goblin hung on his heel, listening. No other cry sounded. He took his companion’s word and went on. One by one, they passed me, all of them looking as if they’d had a hard time with thorny thickets. Smiling, I watched them. They kept their eyes on the trail and their noses to the wind. I heard them splash in the spring, heard them go on, and congratulated myself on work well done.

With luck, they’d follow the stony trail right back to the road again, though they wouldn’t know that till they’d come in sight of Gardar’s Tower five miles or more away. By then, I thought, slipping silently into the wood, that goblin would be minded to find himself a new pair of breeches somewhere else.

They aren’t long days, those of the Falling, and we’d wasted much of the first day of our journey to Haven on the dancy red mare and the bandits. By the time I reached the three caves, light lay old on the ground, and shadows were long. We’d be going nowhere until morning. Griff knew it as well as I. The middle cave had a settled look about it when I came walking up, packs against the wall inside, Olwynn sitting in the thin sunlight outside, her babe asleep in her arms. She huddled close in her cloak. The wind blew colder up here than down below, and stronger. Few trees grew to break it.

They greeted me variously, Griff with a curt nod and Olwynn with a smile and a glad word.

“I worried for you,” she said, settling Cae more comfortably. “You were a long time gone.”

“As long as it took,” I said. I scooped up a newly filled water bottle and drained it dry.

“Will we have a fire?” Olwynn asked, looking from one to the other of us.

I snorted. “Sure. I’ll build it while you go stand on the hill and shout to every bandit and outlaw in Darken Wood that we’re here.” I reached into my pack and pulled out some jerked venison. “Eat that,” I said, tossing it to her.

The little dove didn’t flinch from that growl of mine. She only tucked her child closer to her body and moved inside the cave, out of the reach of the waking wind. I turned to walk away, thinking I’d take the first watch and thereby gain a night’s uninterrupted sleep. Turning, I saw Griff shrug out of his own cloak, the thick green wool, and pass it over to Olwynn.

Softly she murmured her thanks.

“Never mind that,” he said roughly. “Get some sleep now. We’ll be early up.”

Never mind that, eh? Perhaps she didn’t, but I took it up the hill with me, laughing. What a tender guide he was! Or so she might think. Me, I recalled words of Griff’s spoken harshly in the wood: Am I not keeping your father’s precious treasure well enough, Mistress Haugh? Precious treasure, all right, and more like Griff’s than her father’s, for she was his way into his enemy’s house.

I forgot all that when Griff came up the hill much too soon to relieve my watch. He came walking in the light of the red and silver moons, and something about the look on him, bone-white and skullish, sent a spider-footed chill up my neck.

He said, “What?” when I looked hard at him, and he scowled and spat.

“You,” I said. “You look like. .”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. It was hard to explain. He looked like Death walking, hollow-eyed and unstoppable, and no surprise there. For Olwynn Haugh’s father, Death is what he was. But he looked like one caught by Death, too; like a man gnawed and chewed over and not much left on the bone. Wind cut across the top of the hill, whining a little. It had grown colder since the sun’s setting. Griff put his back to it, hunching his shoulders. Eyes on the cave, that yawning dark mouth, he nodded, almost absently.

“Go on down,” he said, “ and see if you can get a fire going.”

“What?” I almost laughed. “Are you crazy? Every bandit-”

He rounded on me, snarling, “Do it! You hide out in these hills all the time, and no one knows you’re here till you walk up on ‘em. Are you going to tell me you never build a fire?”

I wasn’t going to tell him that. No one makes a quicker or cleaner fire than I do. Still, it seemed too risky now. As quickly as he’d roused to snarl, however, that easily did Griff calm again.

“Those bandits are long gone,” he said. “We won’t see them again. The girl’s my passage into her father’s house. I’ve got to keep her and her child safe and well till we get where we’re going.”

Well, she was my passport too, to a fine fat fee, one that would keep me warm and fed and in dwarf spirits all the winter through. I thought about where the bandits would be now and reckoned they were either back in Long Ridge or cursing me up one side of Gardar Tower and down the other. The wind ran from the direction of that old pile of stone, and nothing in the sky or the scent of the chill air spoke of a storm to change the sky’s mind.

“All right, then,” I said, shaking my head. “A fire it is.”

Griff said nothing, only sat down in the lee of the hill where the wind wouldn’t bite and took out his bone-handled dirk and a small whetstone. Plying one against the other, he watched the blade bleed small sparks while I scuffed around a bit to see if we had more to say to each other. We didn’t, and so I left him to watch.

When I returned to the cave, Olwynn smiled to see my arms full of wood and tinder. She set her child upon the ground, snug among the packs, and rose to help me at the fire-building. One breath she drew to speak, that small smile still on her lips, when all the silent night ripped apart, torn by Griff’s wild war cry.

Seven men fell upon us with howling and steel, seven bandits who didn’t know when the game was over. Moonlight ran like spilling silver along the keen edges of swords. Olwynn cried out, “Broc!” and Cae woke shrieking and screaming.

“Into the cave!” I shouted. “All the way back!” She didn’t wait to argue or ask a question. She ran with her child wailing, hunched over and seeking the safety of deeper darkness. The bandits laughed, thinking they’d have no trouble getting past me. Well, there were seven of them, and maybe they’d have been right. We never learned about that, though. No sooner did I smash the knees out from under one of the goblins than the other one died screaming. Griff’s blade slipped between his ribs from behind. The thick coppery stink of blood filled the air as I finished my man, relieving his skull of his brains, and spun on my heel, Reaper’s weight carrying me, to shatter the ribs, then the whole chest, of another.

We were good, Griff and I, workmanlike at our killing. It took less time than the telling to dispatch two more with sword and hammer, and now there were but two bandits left. One was a tall, thick-shouldered fellow, the other thin with a poxy face. Each had a fine bright blade. The tall bandit lunged for Griff, the other feinted toward me, sword tip circling tightly, taunting just beyond Reaper’s range. Griff’s man lunged again, then sidestepped Griff’s return. In that stepping, he moved toward the cave’s mouth. Cae’s bawling echoed far back in the darkness. Laughing, the bandit vanished, swallowed into the darkness, trusting Cae’s howling to lead him.

“Damn!” Griff shouted, leaping too late to stop him. “Damn and damn!” and he flung himself into the cave, leaving me standing, eyes locked with the pox-faced bandit.

He grinned, that bandit, a baleful light in his eyes. Just a little light flickered, and I spied his intent. I stepped back and to the side just as he lunged. Stumbling, he turned to find me. Reaper, whistling in the air, took him in the back of the neck and shattered his spine. With his own sword I put him out of his pain.

Steel clanged on stone inside the cave, then one blade belled against another. Closer than I’d thought to hear, those sounds, and closer still Olwynn’s sudden cry of dread. In the instant, one sword fell clattering to the stony ground, and then the other. Olwynn bolted past me, child in arms. Like demons, two men followed, the last bandit weaponless, Griff on his heels.

Blood dripped from the bandit’s sword arm, and his other hand clenched tight. I leaped over the corpse at my feet, Reaper ready, but I moved too late. The bandit turned, hitting me hard between the shoulders.

I fell, the breath blasted from my lungs, gasping like a drowning man. The stone-fisted man snatched a sword from the ground, laughing and lunging for Griff. Olwynn screamed again, but not in terror or pain. Here was rage, tearing up the night, tearing up the inside of my skull. In one smooth motion she set down her child among the packs near the wall and grabbed the stone the bandit let fall.

I heard it, then, that sound I’m used to hearing, the cracking of bone, as Olwynn’s stone smashed down on the man’s shouldet I laughed — I actually did as the breath came rushing back to me. The laughter died on my lips as the bandit turned. He shifted his sword to his left hand. Silver and red moonlight ran down the length of the blade, gleaming on honed steel edges. Then there was no light, there was only blood, black in the moonlight, as Olwynn fell to her knees.

She turned up her face to the sky and the stars, just as if she were praying. Cae’s wailing fell to whimpering where she lay shoved among the packs, then to silence. In the first moment of that silence, Olwynn closed her hands round the blade. Her blood poured over her hands, pulsing with the same rhythm of her breath. She opened her lips. Some word trembled there as her eyes met Griff’s. The word fell away unspoken as she collapsed.

The little dove lay dead among the wolves, killed upon the road home.

“Son of a bitch!” Griff shouted.

He kicked the body of the tall, thick-shouldered bandit, tumbling it down the hill to lie with the others. Wolves and ravens would feed well here. We’d picked over the corpses of all the bandits, rummaging for what seemed worth taking, flints and strikers, a small leather pouch of coin, and two good dirks. We’d have taken their swords, too, but those needed carrying, and we didn’t want the burden. I hid them deep inside the cave, a weapons cache.

Only one other body remained, that of Olwynn Haugh. She lay inside the cave, and I’d wrapped her in her cloak and folded her hands upon her cold breast. Now I stood with her green velvet pouch, tossing it gently from one hand to the other.

“Son of a bitch,” Griff whispered, looking at dead Olwynn.

I’ve said it-you could look into the eyes of Killer Griff and see the flames of a long-ago burning. You could see the very place a boy once crouched, bleeding and stunned, a dark and suffocating hold where smoke and terror and grief made knotty fingers to tear the soul from the body. You could hear the voices of that nightmare, a father’s desperate plea for the lives of his family, a mother screaming as her baby died. He was in that place, that dark place of his nightmares, even as the new sun rose behind him and threw his dark shadow over the body of Olwynn Haugh, over her child.

He stood looking down at the child, eyes cold and narrow. She’d wailed the last hours of the night through while we rolled corpses down the hill, hungry and frightened, until at last exhaustion took and stilled her. She stirred now, as if she knew he was looking at her. One little fist waving in sleep, she sighed. Griff looked past her to Olwynn dead, then reached out and scooped up Cae. So small was she that her head fit into one of his big scarred hands. With the other he could have snuffed the life from her, smothering. For a moment I thought he would do that and leave her dead here with her mother. We’d hie us back to Long Ridge, and maybe he’d have the satisfaction of knowing he’d seen his foeman’s kin dead.

But that wouldn’t get me paid.

“Griff,” I said, “we’d better get going if we’re going to make Haven tomorrow.”

He looked at me from those nightmare eyes of his, and he laughed bitterly. “Then what? How do I find the bastard now? I don’t even know what name he’s using.”

I shrugged as if the problem was nothing to worry about, steering him back to where I wanted him to be-in that place where I’d get my money.

“We know he’s somewhere in Haven. You still want to find him, so we’ll find him.” I cocked a thumb at Olwynn’s child. “When we do, she’ll get us into his house just like her mother would. How happy will they be to let in the man who saved the grandchild from murder?”

He grunted, thinking.

“Could work,” I said, still tossing the green velvet pouch from hand to hand. The coins made lovely music clinking together, the sound of my warm winter. “We don’t know his name, but we know his daughter’s. We can find him.”

Griff, he still had his eyes on the child, and a coldness stole over his face, ice creeping on a still pond. Yet when he looked up at me again it seemed to me that the coldness wasn’t there anymore, that it had been my imagination painting the expression.

He grabbed the pouch in midtoss and bent to pick up the baby. “Broc, what’s the best way to Haven from here without going back to the road?”

Well and good, I thought.

Cae sighed, and her lips moved in one of those unwitting smiles of babies, sleeping in the arms of the man who planned her kinsman’s death.

“The best way is down through the Centaur Reaches,” I said, easy again and ready to finish what we’d started. “The centaurs and I, though, we don’t get along. I can take you across the wood and around the Reaches to where the Elfstream runs. We can follow it right to Haven.”

All his ghosts peering out at me from his eyes, Griff said that route was good enough for him, and so we left the cave, Olwynn Haugh’s cold tomb, and went away again into Darken Wood.

Ah, my feet like the old stamping grounds! They find their way almost without my eyes, knowing the game trails and the clear runs beside little streams the way townfolk know their streets and roads. So my feet and I led Griff west and south through the golden wood while wind blew chill through the shimmering aspens and bracken rustled under foot. High in the sky, geese went winging in spearhead formation, their calls sounding year’s end. All the world smelled sweet and sad in its last glory. It wouldn’t have been such a bad walk south in the gold and the quiet, but we weren’t long gone from the hill before Cae awoke in full voice and hungry.

Squalling, she writhed in Griff’s arms, waving her fists. Jays flew up from the trees, fleeing her storm. The child’s wailing echoed all around us, and nothing Griff did to calm her made a difference. He walked for a while with her in his arms, then for a while holding her against his shoulder. Nothing stilled her, though her cries, at first piercing, eventually became weaker, more piteous than those first demanding yells.

“We’re going to have to feed her soon, Griff.”

“Feed her what?” He said that the way most men do when a child is on hand and the mother isn’t, surprised to have to bustle around looking for food. He shifted the child from his right shoulder to his left, scowling. “I don’t see any goats or cows around here.”

“Water, maybe.” I took the leather bottle from my belt. “It’ll fill her belly anyway.”

We tried to trickle some into her mouth. That didn’t work. Griff wet his finger for her to suck. That didn’t work either. Then I soaked a twist of cloth, and she took it with a gleeful cry. The wind picked up a little, blowing chill. Griff hunched over the child, lending body warmth.

His scarred face close to hers, he whispered, “Ah, now, ah, now, there, that’s all right. Take some more. That’s right-”

It was strange to see him at that work, to watch those hands I’d known only as killer’s hands holding Cae so tenderly. As I watched, ghosts stared out at me from his dark eyes. One of those ghosts in life, I remembered, had been a young brother, a boy still in the cradle that day the Dark Queen’s army fell upon a lone little farmhouse out there in Esrwilde. They say in Thorbardin that lessons learned early linger long. Well, perhaps that’s true, and the boy Griff must have learned one or two gentle lessons before the hard schooling came rampaging.

“Come on,” I said when it seemed Cae had taken all she would. “We have some ground to cover before night.”

We made good time after that, but a darker silence attended us now as we went down through the aspen wood. The sky grew heavy overhead, and clouds moved in from the east, changing the sun’s gold disk to dull silver. The trees, the earth, the strengthening wind itself smelled of rain. All this I saw, and none of it, it seemed, did Griff note. Up hill and down, across streams and on trails thin as shadows, he listened to ghosts whose rest was a long time coming. His gentle mother, his father, his sister, and his baby brother — all these cried their deaths to Griff as he went walking with the grandchild of their murderer in his arms.

They did something to him, those voices, and they had more power over him now than they used to have. Through the darkening day I saw it: They changed him, they hollowed him, and it seemed to me, as I led him along the secret paths of Darken Wood, that Griff was actually losing flesh, growing white and stark and starved. Griff Unsouled, spirit-killed and animate, he went like Death, walking down to Haven with ghosts shouting in his head and an infant resting trustfully in his arms.

Trustfully, aye, and she grew quieter by degrees, sleeping sometimes, more often simply lying still, exhausted. When she did rouse, her hungry cries were but whimpers. By the middle of the afternoon the whimpering turned to silence. For the first time I wondered, would the child survive the trip to Haven? Griff wondered, too. I saw him check on her often. No gentle word did he speak now, no soft, whispered comfort remembered from another time. He looked at her with hard eyes and cold, assuring himself that his little passport to vengeance still lived.

Wind picked up, whirling leaves down from the trees, rattling in the brush. Leaden clouds hung lower till you could see them clinging round the hills like ragged shawls on the shoulders of old ladies.

“Keep going,” Griff said, shifting Cae in his arms, tucking her warmly beneath his cloak.

He said that as the first fat drops of rain pattered on fragile leaves.

“No.” I made my voice hard enough to tell him I wouldn’t be gainsaid. “Now we stop. Haven isn’t going anywhere before tomorrow.”

I led him and the baby and all the ghosts aside from the trail, across a small stream, and round the back of a small hill. There the wind broke, whining around the rising ground, and there I found an overhang of stone, lone outrider of the hills we’d left behind. Griff put the infant down on a clear patch beneath the overhang. She stirred a little, but there wasn’t much strength in her for crying.

I peered out into the darkening day. “I’m going to find us some supper. See if you can find enough dry wood to get a fire started.”

I had a pocketful of snares and the notion that a warm broth of whatever I caught and killed might go down Cae’s throat easier than water. When I looked behind me, I saw Griff standing over her, the child a little bit of life at his feet. His eyes were almost gone in blackness, the planes of his face carved away by shadows.

He was sitting before a hot, high fire when I returned, Cae in his arms. He had nothing to say when I showed him the rabbits I’d snared, and he didn’t eat what I skinned and cooked. Not until we had a good broth of the leavings did he unbend and rouse himself. The child must be fed, and he went at that work as he had before, soaking a twist of cloth and tempting her to take it.

For all he tried, Cae didn’t take the food. She’d been a day and a night without her mother, without the rich milk she needed. I knew it looking at her: Nothing we’d concoct would help her. I knew it, but Griff didn’t, or he wouldn’t admit it. He kept at her, teasing the cloth to her lips. No word did he speak, though, and not the smallest bit of tenderness did I see from him. All that, it seemed, he’d spent in the afternoon. He had only the single-minded need to see her fed, and she wouldn’t feed.

I believed, as I rolled myself in my cloak to sleep, that Olwynn Haugh’s little daughter would soon join her mother in whatever land of the dead folk travel to when all the warring and striving is done. She’d go and leave Griff with no way to his revenge and me no path to those steel coins that would keep me warm and in dwarf spirit through winter.

Damn, I thought, falling asleep. Damn me if easy money isn’t the hardest to earn.

Cae didn’t go to join anyone, though; she held tight to her little strand of life. I saw it was so when the night had flown and gray morning hung low in mist. Griff stood just beneath the stony overhang, and he turned when he heard me up. Cae lay in his arms, covered in folds of his green wool cloak. Killer Griff, Griff Unsouled, looked around at me, empty-eyed, his scarred pale face written in lines of hatred sharp as knives.

“How’s the child?”

He shifted the baby in his arms, and if I didn’t know better I’d have thought it was a sack of rags he held, so limp was the child now. Coldly, he said, “I’ll have my vengeance. Let’s go.”

We went, and no other word did he say all the way down to Haven.

You find a man in a city the same way you find a man in the wood. You track him. In Haven, Olwynn Haugh’s father wasn’t so hard to track. We found his trail all over the city, that double-eagle stamped on ale kegs and wine barrels and on the flanks of barges. He was a rich man, a well-known importer, and only one question, dropped in the right tavern at the right moment, found him for us. His name was Egil Adare, and he lived on the hill, his house overlooking the city and the harbor where his barges brought in goods from all over Abanasinia, even from beyond. Sight of his ring opened the door of that fine house for us. Sight of his grandchild sent the servant scurrying, an old woman looking over her shoulder and clucking like a hen as she led us through the grand house, up winding stairs and down breezy corridors.

They live well, the merchants of Haven, and I saw in every room I glimpsed that this one, this Egil Adare, lived like a king. Griff saw it too, his eye alighting on golden statuary, silken hangings, rich velvet draperies. He saw, and he said nothing, only followed the servant, Cae in his arms. Like grim Death he went stalking, and like Death, white and hollow, he stood outside the door of his enemy, waiting as the servant knocked, then entered.

“Griff,” I said, “I’ll wait-”

— outside to guard the door, to find a way out of this mazy mansion once the killing was done. He gave me no chance to say so.

“Come with me,” he said. To me, but looking at Cae all the while.

The door, shut by the servant, opened again. Griff lifted Cae to his shoulder. Her little head lolled, her thumb fell from her mouth. She whimpered faintly, then stilled.

Griff stepped before me into the chamber, a counting room where the largest piece of furniture was a broad desk upon which ink wells gleamed like jewels and quills marched in perfect alignment, the merchant’s little soldiers. No sign of the merchant himself did we see, but his double-eagle, those two heads in opposition, glared at us from every panel, from the hanging behind his desk, even from the thick blue and gold carpet underfoot. Griff’s shoulders twitched, just a little, to see those sigils, but he never lost his stride. Boots tracking mud across the richly woven carpet, he made a little thing of the distance between him and the desk.

I shut the door, paneled oak and heavy, firmly behind us and stood with my back to it. Cradled in Griff’s arms lay Cae, unseen beneath the green cloak, hidden. Cradled in mine lay Reaper, not hidden. The tapestry behind the desk stirred. A hand pushed it aside, and Egil Adare stepped into his counting room.

He looked more like a vulture than an eagle, that merchant, his hooked nose a beak, his ropy neck long, and his hooded eyes restless and watching everything, judging whether he saw predator or prey. I could see that he had been a big man, that his hands, now gnarled and swollen in the joints of every finger, had once been broad and strong. Where I come from they’d say those hands had been hammer-fisted.

Griff kept still as a breathless night, head up, eyes cold. Thus he stood, straight and proud before the man who had murdered his kin. In him his ghosts howled, keening their death agonies, then falling-suddenly! — silent. So it had been in every nightmare that owned him, waking and sleeping. Now he stood before the shaper of those nightmares, waiting to be recognized. He wanted to see shock in those muddy, brown eyes, surprise and then fear. The old man gave him nothing.

“I am Egil Adare,” the merchant said, shifting his glance so he looked at neither Griff or me, but at some point in the distance between us. He put a hand beneath his desk, sliding open a drawer. A small leather pouch sat in there, fat and full. We were meant to see it, as beggars are meant to see a hand reach into a pocket, withdrawing the few coppers that will send them on their way. “I am told you have news of my daughter.”

Griff’s heart must have pounded like drums in him, but no one could know it by looking at him. He stepped forward, letting his cloak fall open. Cae never moved, not when the green wool, sliding, brushed her pale cheek, not when Griff set her gently upon the broad desk and placed her exactly between Egil and himself. She whimpered a little then, moving her hands, turning her head. She was looking for Griff, the source of all the warmth and care she’d known these two days past, but he wasn’t paying any attention to her now.

“Here is the news,” he said to Egil Adare, his voice rough and hard. “Your daughter is dead. This,” he indicated Cae, “this is all that is left of her.”

The merchant’s face went ashen. He stepped to the desk, eyes on the child lying so still and silent.

In the instant, Griff’s sword flashed out. “Hold,” he said. “Ash Guth, you hold right there.”

Ash Guth, Griff said, speaking the name he’d known so long ago. Like a man turned to stone, the merchant held. His thin lips parted. In his eyes sprang a light, recognition. Soft, unbelieving, he said, “You? Is it you?” His eyes narrowed, and he drew himself up, all his thin bones. “How did you find me? I thought you were-”

Griff’s laughter rang like blades, one against another. “You thought I was dead? Did you think you were the only one to survive the Dark Queen’s assault on the High Clerist’s Tower? Well, you see you’re not the only one, and if you have forgotten me, I haven’t forgotten you.” He lifted his sword so the light coming in through the window glinted all along the edges. “Or the debt you owe me.”

The old man shuddered, understanding at once what I had yet a moment to grasp. “You-you killed my Olwynn?” He looked at me, then swiftly back to Griff. “You killed her?”

Griff smiled, as a wolf smiles. He said neither yes or no, but he knew which conclusion the old man would draw.

Tears sprang in the merchant’s eyes. “Olwynn,” he whispered, imagining every horror. “Oh, my child. . ”

Upon the desk Cae stirred again. Her lips parted, trembling with hunger and great weariness. She saw Griff standing above her, and she knew him. She lifted her hand, just a little, and touched the edge of the blade. Blood sprang, one drop, from her finger. In Griff’s eyes a wan light gleamed, pale like the phosphorous you see over swamps where dead things lie rotting.

My blood ran cold in me as I understood how deep was the vengeance he planned, a deeper one than I’d reckoned on. He was going to make Egil pay his debt with more than his own death. Your father’s precious treasure, so he’d named Olwynn and her child. In bloody coin would he extract his debt, doing to Egil what had been done to him, for if others had killed Olwynn before he could, still he had her child. This dark a deed even he hadn’t done in all his long years of killing. Still, it wasn’t my vengeance, and not my place to trim it. I do what I’m paid to do.

Outside in the hallway voices murmured, one servant to another. I tightened my grip on Reaper’s haft. Any moment a servant could knock at the door, the old man could cry out.

“Griff, if you’re going to do this-”

He turned, snarling, “Shut up!”

Just as he moved, the merchant reached for the child on the desk. He stopped still in his tracks as the tip of Griff’s sword touched his breast, then traveled higher to his throat, the drop of Cae’s blood glittering on the steel like a tiny ruby. Swiftly, the tip dropped again, resting at the infant’s throat.

“You killed.my mother,” Griff said to Ash Guth who’d renamed himself Egil Adare. He leaped, like a panther pouncing, and snatched the old man by the shirtfront, dragging him around to the front of the desk. “Her name was Murran. You killed my sister, and her name was Bezel. My father’s name was Calan, and you killed him even as he kneeled to beg for the life of his infant son. That infant’s name was Jareth, and he screamed all the killings through until at last-” his eyes never leaving the old man’s. Griff lifted his sword, the tip dancing over Cae’s throat “-until at last there was only silence.”

Egil Adare fell to his knees, cowering. “My grandchild,” he sobbed. He reached a trembling hand to Griff, then let it fall. “Oh, Olwynn’s daughter. .”

Cae whimpered, and then she wailed, crying with more strength than I thought she had in her hungry little body. Her eyes, blue as springtime skies, turned to Griff, widening as she recognized him.

Him, though, he stood there, his steel like silver in the failing light of the day. He looked down at the child, she his weapon of vengeance, her death to be put against those of his kin in a dark healing. He smiled like rictus.

“Please,” the old man sobbed, as surely Calan Rees must once have begged. Tears poured down, and it looked as if his face were melting. “Please, oh, gods, please don’t kill the child. .” He bent down, he did, and pressed his forehead to Griff’s dusty boots, wetting them with weeping. “My grandchild. Oh, my grandchild. .”

“My brother,” Griff snarled. Rage ran like fire now burning everywhere through him. “My mother, and my sister, and my father-my soul! You stole them all from me, you bastard!”

My soul, he said, catching all his dead in those two words, all his grief, all the years of nightmare, and all the killing he had himself done, one death after another, each in some way meant to echo those first deaths or to still the echoes of them.

Griff’s hand tightened on the sword grip. His knuckles whitened as Cae smiled up at him. She lifted her hand, touching the steel again. She found her voice, and she made that cooing sound babies make. I hadn’t heard it from her since last she lay against her mother’s breast.

“Spare the child,” Egil moaned.

Griff kicked him away. Like a beaten dog, he came crawling back. Whispering, wheedling, the most powerful merchant in Haven abased himself like a beggar. “You want to kill me. I know it. I see it. Do it! Do it, but spare the child!”

He rose to his knees, he tore the shirt from his breast, baring himself to the sword, pale skin tight over protruding ribs.

Griff stood still as stone, barely breathing. The old man’s sobbing sounded like the pulse of a faraway sea.

Then it too fell still. Once again I heard footsteps pass the door, voices murmuring. Whispered one woman to another, “He’ll be wanting his supper soon. D’ye think those two’ll be staying?”

“Griff,” I said, warning. “Are you going to do this, or aren’t you?”

Like fire, his eyes, and he spat, “Take it easy. You’ll get your pay.”

Egil Adare, cringing on the blue and gold carpet, looked up at me, his eyes overflowing with tears. Ah, but he’d heard something, that canny merchant, he’d heard talk of pay.

“Listen,” he said, only to me. “I can pay you anything you want. Stop him!”

I laughed, and I turned from him. I didn’t get to be this old by double-dealing. All I wanted was for this dark work to be done. It seemed to me I could hear every voice in the house now, all of them creeping closer.

In the light from the window Griff’s sword shone, bright and clear. He lifted it high, glinting over the tiny body of the child he’d carried out of Darken Wood. Were the ghosts howling? Oh, aye, they were screaming in him.

The old man flung himself forward, clinging to Griff’s legs, his forehead pressed to the knees of the man whose family he’d destroyed. “Don’t, please. I’ll give you everything I have!” He pulled back, his arms flung wide. “Take anything you see here!”

The sword hung, unmoving, over the silent child.

“Take anything!” Egil Adare cried, the wheedling whine back in his voice. “I’m a rich man! Spare my grandchild and I’ll give you jewels, I’ll give you all the steel you want!”

So he said, but the dearest thing Griff wanted this old man had long ago destroyed.

Griff’s hands tightened on the sword grip. His eyes grew strange and still when he saw his own scarred reflection in the polished blade. All his ghosts stared back at him, howling, the mother, the father, the sister. Ah, the infant brother screaming all the deaths.

“Anything,” Egil sobbed, his face white and dirty, running at the nose. “Anything, take everything. . ”

In the instant he said it, moaning his last plea, Griff did just that. He looked Egil Adare straight in the eye, and he took everything.

Now you have heard the truth of Griff Rees, who was stolen from his home in the days before the Second Cataclysm. He’d been a long time gone, on hard roads and cruel, by the time Olwynn Haugh came into the Swan and Dagger to open her little green velvet pouch and show him how much she could pay him for the safety of his company on her road home.

If Olwynn’s road didn’t bring her all the way home, it did lead Griff there. Soon after winter he took the north-running ways to Estwilde. I haven’t heard that he’s farming there, but they do say he’s settled near where his father’s farm used to be. That was a time ago, maybe eight years, or nine.

I haven’t seen him a day since then, but news travels, and the word that comes to me is good. Some of it says Killer Griff has found himself some peace, maybe even his soul.

Well, it’s always “maybe” when you’re talking about that kind of thing, peace and souls, but true enough it is they say that the little girl he’s raising up as his own, that one with the springtime blue eyes, is the smile on his lips and the light in his heart.