Page 78 of Traitor Son

“A small party to each village is a large party removed from Tresingale,” noted Tounot.

All of them understood the problem. Every morning, after he took the numbers of dead and wounded, Remin went out himself to examine the lines of defenses. The blood on the ground, the toppled barriers, the trampled places in the grass where men had stood, fought, and fallen. Every day he examined and improved his own defenses, searching for weaknesses, noting the places where men had died.

Those lines were being pushed back.

“We’ll start someplace closer,” he said. “Ferrede. There’s no cover for the devils in the Iron Hills, and we need to know if Rollon made it.”

It was cowardly to wait for someone to volunteer. Remin made the decision.

“Jinmin,” he said, turning to the big man. In his armor, Jinmin could withstand a horde of devils, as obdurate as oak. “You will go. Take three others with you.”

“Rather go alone, m’lord,” said Jinmin, after only a moment’s pause. “If there’s enough devils to kill me, there’s enough to kill anyone with me.”

And Jinmin would fight better if he wasn’t having to defend his companions. Remin nodded. He had made the offer only as a sop to his own conscience.

Men were not so different from devils. Everyone liked to tell stories about Remin Grimjaw, about Lomonde, about the Charge of the Gresein,but there was no single act of heroism that won the war, and no single act of heroism was going to save his people. Just as the devils threw themselves at the barricades of Tresingale, it was the nature of men to throw themselves at the world, each one spending their lives to move just a little further than the last. Not every man died a hero. Many men died to be planks in a bridge, or stones in a wall.

Only the stars could see where it would end.

The stars were fading in the sky when he finally went home, still arguing with himself. He knew he was doing the right thing, the prudent thing, but he had visited all those villages, too. He knew his people. If they needed help, they needed it now.

Ducking through the low door of the cottage, he quietly shut it and went to wash away the blood. It wasn’t his. The devils’ blood got everywhere, even drying in stiff flakes in his hair, and it was hard to tell the princess not to be afraid when he came in the door crimson to his elbows.

Setting a kettle over the fire, he dragged his sweat-soaked shirt off and ducked his head into a bucket of cold water, scrubbing.

“…Grace?” said a soft voice behind him, so quiet it was almost lost in the splashing of water. Remin glanced back to find the princess was already awake, sitting up in bed with a pillow clutched in front of her like a shield.

“You can sleep a little longer,” he said, resuming scrubbing. It just figured that she would wake up early today.

“I was already awake,” she said. “Is…is everything all right? I heard…”

“Everything is fine.” It came out sharper than he meant, and he huffed to himself. This situation was in no way her fault. “You are safe, Princess,” he said, snapping a towel over his shoulder. “If all the valley sank into the sea, every man here would be carrying you to a boat.”

* * *

Under the circumstances, it was incredible to think anyone would be trying to breakintoTresingale.

The first survivor of the Brede crossing arrived in the beginning of June, and Ophele heard the commotion at the south wall as she wasrefilling Eugene’s water barrels. Now that there were three wells dug in places that did not interfere with Master Ffloce’s plans for the artisan quarter, she made three long loops along the length of the wall over the course of the day, rather than multiple trips to and from the same well. The people on the southern end of the wall were doing the finishing work of building tower houses and stairs, since twenty-foot ladders were not something anyone wanted to climb multiple times per day, and certainly not with packs of ghouls running around the base of the wall.

It was incredible to think someone had actually swum across the Brede for the privilege of hearing the devils personally.

“What happened? Is someone hurt?” she asked anxiously as a couple men raced up the hill from the bridge construction site. She was still forbidden to go near it herself, but Sir Miche had taken her to see the massive walls of the caissons stretching all the way to the bottom of a very deep river, so deep in places that men became ill if they ascended too quickly. It was a monumental undertaking, more impressive than a dozen walls.

“No, lady, for a wonder,” said one of the engineers. “Lad just dragged himself up on the bank, he swam the width of the river. He’s fine, but tired, as you might expect. Says he’s come to be a page for the Knights of the Brede.”

“I can go get Sir Miche,” she said, wide-eyed at the feat. She couldn’t swim a stroke herself, and she had seen exactly how deep the river was.

“Would you? That’d be kind of you, lady.”

Sir Miche was just as happy to have an excuse to abandon his digging.

“I suppose our first successful swimmer deserves some notice,” he said when Ophele hurried to the other end of the wall to tell him. Normally pages were the business of squires, but the shortage of pages made any prospect worth considering. “Of course, it’ll be up to Rem as to whether he gets rewarded or punished.”

“Why would he get punished?”

“Don’t want to encourage this kind of thing,” Sir Miche said bluntly. “He’s lucky he survived. The river’s not just wide. The current is fast and uncertain, you never know when it might yank you under. We tried it ourselves, believe me, before Rem finally decided to charge the Gresein.”

Remin Grimjaw, hero of the Gresein Bridge, had become so separate in her mind from the duke her husband that it was always a shock when someone reminded her they were the same person.

---