As Feathers Fall Read online

  Table of Contents

  THE HOLLOW MARCH

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  THE HOLLOW MARCH

  Book One of The Haunted Shadows

  Chris Galford

  The complete Haunted Shadows series, by Chris Galford:

  The Hollow March (2011)

  At Faith's End (2013)

  As Feathers Fall (March 2015)

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Chris Galford. All rights reserved.

  Edited by Edward Ramon

  Cover Illustration by Matthew Watts

  First Edition: March 2015

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form--except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles, broadcasts, or reviews--without written permission from its author, Chris Galford.

  For Nancy,

  Day by day

  you teach me what it is to hope.

  “No man is greater than his heart.” ~Ravonnen Proverb

  Prologue

  In the long night, the girl beheld a crossroads. The dividing line was nailed through a familiar prophet, his limbs splayed to each of the four cardinal directions.

  Slow, steadying breath. Ice clawed at the corpse of her insides, but there was no purchase. Nothing. Just her and the shards of a memory, wandering.

  She groped for the cloying ache that split the southern road. It bristled and bestirred, shifting beneath her bloodied feet. A roar quaked the earth and stirred in her belly, but she dug deep and dragged herself down the road the rigor mortised finger pointed out.

  Deserts, father told her, were like beaches that never ended. The sand swallowed her, not quickly, but as a serpent swallows a mouse: slow, tender, insidious. It clogged her lungs and burned her pores until the whole of her struggles for breath, for purchase, wading through a sea without water—to nothing. And no one. No one but a notion.

  In this place, her magic was nothing. Elphame—the faeries’ land of grey hills, where all was consumed. Darkness ate at her as the sand sucked the last shred of her away.

  Then: the Specters.

  A headless man sat along a table of bone. Ash settled like a layer of psice over a course of rotted fish, pecked at by a drowned man, a burned man, and a swollen man, as a gargling one tried to swallow his wine, only to purple his face further. Then she was there, seated on the table like a course of meat. Naked. Vulnerable.

  “The gryphon once gorged on men’s blood,” the burned man observed, his blackened holes of eyes sucking at her greedily.

  “Pity,” gargled the drowned man, “now they only feast on children.”

  Their heads swiveled to the gargling man, for in his lap bounced a child of scarlet. This one she did not know. Yet it looked at her with a family’s eyes, and her tears reflected a shadow men had cast, long and utter and terrible, which stretched over fields and forests in that infinite manner of dreams.

  Then the headless man spread his palms against the table. “Matter, it is said, can neither be created nor destroyed. Yet each here lies dead, and in every passing, a piece of your own besides.” The voice echoed, near and rasping, and she looked down in horror to find his time-worn features nestled in her lap.

  “My son is not like his father. He loses his head easily. Tell, sweetling, what is flesh before prophecy? And words before truth?”

  “Truth!” the others rattled in unison—a jolting cry that thundered through the table.

  As though she or any other living soul might answer and claim it for honesty. Does one hear oneself answer in dreams? She could not say she ever had—and the head receded with her silence, until another voice filled it.

  “Knowledge. It guides action, but it is never the same as action, is it? Words teach, but the man acts—and for it, any man that calls himself a prophet stands a liar, and a liar deserves to die.”

  Royalty came to the head of the table, auspiciously eclipsed and clad in the flayed skin of the man at the crossroads. He sat as a king, though he wore no crown. A baby gryphon lay nestled in his lap, but for all of this, it was another quality that made him: the blood flowing in his lips, rather than on it. A living man at the table of the damned.

  He stroked the child once. “You did not have to say. He did. But you—you chose it. He killed himself with those words, but you came to a choice. I hate this country.” He turned aside, his frown casting the room deeper into gloom. “But I came here for family. And you wonder: which is better? Which is right?

  “If you can’t kill me, who will it be? Someone always dies. Some of us fly. Some of us roar. But someone. Always. Dies.” His hand snared the gryphon by the scruff of its neck, and she shared its cry as it began to strangle. Veins purpled along the man’s forehead as he snapped its writhing neck, but he would not release it. “You may not choose death, but in the end, you will choose where it falls.”

  The skin cloak draped along his back stretched toward her as she wept bloody tears, every inch swarmed with dead men’s eyes. From the very pores of her own flesh, its voice seemed to coil over her, wisping: “Gold sunrise on a green descent. The blood shall relent when the song laments—heart, child, take heart. You will yet find your art.”

  She woke from this nightmare with the solemn repose of one accustomed to disaster.

  What could not be bound by rope or chain was bound by flesh. That which was cradled in her arm. That whispering to her from the darkest corners of need. That charred and ashen figure left to break along the rocks and fade into the ether-black. Flesh. It bound them all, whether they saw it or no.

  As she looked down on the golden sea, Usuri pondered the true nature of insanity. Some people thought they ruled themselves. She stroked her hand through it. Ruled the world. The sea rippled with a contented murmur. Flesh ruled all. It would topple them as surely as it toppled nations. Only the earth itself was stronger.

  Freedom lurked not in struggling against, but in knowledge. Working with and working through. Even an insane person could tell a fool that. As readily as she could name the dawn, or the sea whispering songs at her feet.

  She rose. But for the light and the wind and the sheen of her own sweet sweat, naked. For the first time in a long time, she felt herself truly breathe.

  “They will talk,” Charlotte whispered.

  The noblewoman bunched her clothes against the swell of her breast, hiding that which Usuri had spent the better part of the witching hours discovering. It stirred an odd tingle inside to which she was not yet accustomed.

  A hint of pride rolled Usuri’s shoulders. “To say nothing with an air of sound and yet contract around the notion of nothing left unsaid—words, and words, they come and go.”

  “They will not understand.”

  Usuri began to suspect the woman was speaking more for her own benefit, than for the pride of conversation.

  “What matters?”

  Even scrunched into a disbelieving scowl, that one’s face could not contort into mere mortality. “Appearances are all we have. You should know this well.” Despite herself, Charlotte swept her li
the legs beneath her and pulled her porcelain body proud against the light. There was the fire to which Usuri had grown accustomed. “Not all of us possess the ability to decide. Little victories, it’s all we gain. We cannot run, as you might.”

  The laughter that bundled in Usuri’s chest took her by surprise. “If I could run, bird, why should I remain in chains?”

  “Appearances. Always appearances. You could burn us all. But you play for something—you must remain. It is so.”

  It struck her, to see the woman so forward. It seemed that her nakedness extended to more than a mere shedding of clothes. Stripped even of the playful Jurti. Something had changed. Shifted.

  “It is so,” Usuri agreed.

  “My only question, thus: are you truly mad? Or is this, too, a piece of the act?”

  At that, she felt her pulse accelerate as she shifted her weight down and stroked a hand against Charlotte’s flawless skin. She was not turned away. Usuri went soundless, suddenly flush, mouth bone dry, chewing on her lip. She did not know how to phrase it. It seemed Charlotte was fishing for something that she could not deny. Madness, true madness—it made for the greatest of actors. Actors so pure they lost themselves in the role.

  The certainty washed from Charlotte’s face like a feather in the river. Her hand caught Usuri’s and squeezed it tight. Fleetingly, then flitted away. It was more human a gesture than any Usuri had previously expected. Words were not necessary. She saw the truth.

  Not all that was uttered was a lie.

  Yet she could have been alone with madness. The rest of it was a choice. At times, it felt as though one beyond her hands—as though her father had set her on this path without consulting, instead hoping, knowing something deeper than her in his own demise. Prophecy was naught but words, in the end, but somewhere in them, the listener was forced to make them so. She had heard, she had consumed, and she dreaded the alternative of silence.

  Every action had a catalyst. Grief hindered, but changed nothing. If she wished to see the world as he envisioned, she had to be the one to enact it. Brute force could not do it. It was a thing as subtle as the wind.

  And for the first time in a long time, she could honestly say she moved. Beneath the light of the sun, with the grass tickling her toes, Usuri felt the whole of her dwelling beneath her own flesh and the lines of the world intersecting the veins that beat within. In her breath was the wind. In her motion was the earth. In her heart was the dance of flames. And on her lips: the salty taste of oceans lost.

  I am not ready, father.

  She could wield it as a mantra but it would change nothing. Life was not something for which one readied themselves. It was something they embraced. Prophecy had been spoken, and be it man’s or god’s, it was her duty to see it through.

  In the city below, people stirred toward the dawn. A bell tolled and crowds took the streets. In the whisper of their steps, an age old question: what was a life, weighed before the shadows of the whole? While in the rustle of the wind’s song, she heard the answer so few might dare to hear.

  Too much. It was always too much.

  “I must return,” Charlotte said.

  As Usuri turned, she found flesh bound up once more, the lioness restored. Usuri held her hands to her, to resume her own place in the act of a father’s dying. Every creature had their parts to play. Yet in some ways, one simply had to hope time would impart the lines.

  Chapter 1

  It was bitterly damp wherever they seemed to move him. In his dreams—though he could no longer tell the difference between the real and ethereal—all smelled of urine and feces, and where his head rolled through the effort of drugged observation, they rustled through endless leagues of muck and thorny branch. Every turn enflamed the wounds that ate at his flesh. Every stumble through trails unknown and unpaved drew another whimper and threatened darkness.

  In flashes, the world came to Rurik. They were less than visions, more like shades of shades—a flash of color here, a brush of wool there. There were hands on him even when he slept, and sometimes he came awake shouting, but another hand was always there to silence him. Sometimes he kicked, in his most violent moments, but they pressed him down and whispered his name until he had no more fight left in him.

  Voren had hurt him with his blade. Bound and stuck him like a pig, until the blood had run hot across his skin. There were times, in his more lively moments, in which he felt the stickiness creeping along his sides and his hands and he told himself: more blood. There was always more. At least, for now. Eventually, he would run out. Men were lakes, dammed up by flesh. Without it to hold them back, they all ran out.

  Rurik wished he were a braver man. He told himself he was dying and the very thought set him to whimpering. All the rest: an act. Face to face with the bowel-shaking notion of what the light would bring—if he could trust the light at all—he knew it to be so. He feared the dark that stalked him.

  Somewhere between the boughs of the trees, pale fingers of warmth stroked against the shadows. He saw the forest. He remembered Verdan. Somewhere above him, eyes of green watched and waited, and he was not certain they would weep for his passing.

  From the fragments of daylight, he sought some semblance of the madness around him, but what came to him was a fevered inability to reason. Thoughts jumbled and broke apart on contact. Yet he knew the pain was worse than the flesh. He felt as if his heart had sundered, pricking him by jagged pieces from within. This, he knew the baker had no ability to render. Those bloodied hands had never once laid the faintest touch upon his heart.

  It was the needle that jarred him back. He screamed, but they were already half done before he came awake. Hands jerked against him and the weight of a swordsman forced him down, crying, “Easy, easy,” with Rowan’s voice. Still he thrashed, for the body fought against its pain with a single-minded will, and as the man’s cousin stitched together the serrated lines of his flesh, Rurik tried to retreat. Into himself. Away.

  Breaths came in gulping, writhing waves. He whimpered, turning his head, and there, beside the dying embers of a small fire, he beheld the true reason for the pain.

  Curses rode the wheezing figure of his guardian, wan beyond his years, nearly still amidst the forest weeds. His eyes were closed, the paleness spread even into the splits of his lips, so that Chigenda, set beside him, was as a great and terrible shadow over him. Nothing seemed large enough to encompass the madness of that vision.

  He could not keep the sounds from coming. They burbled in his throat and warbled out with the dying of the light. Blood moved in him and he was cold, and fired in the same instant, and everything twisted up inside. His oldest friend. His guardian. Another father gone before.

  They moved to let him retch his pain into the dust.

  The sun had changed position again when he returned once more. For the first time in nearest memory, the pain within was a dulled thing—a constant, throbbing ache, but deprived the edge with which Voren Bäcker had carved him.

  They had pulled him away, patched him up, saved his life, twofold salvations from the course of a day he never should have ended alive. Vaguely, he pulled at the memory of cannon and his brother’s eyes. These, too, had meant to be his end. Somehow, he had stepped along the path of the final circle, only to grow lost along the way. It was a boon he did not deserve.

  Assal is not without his whims. What he offers to one must surely be taken from another.

  All men had their paths, but all paths intersected, and all were equal. There was always an exchange when something so great as death became involved.

  It took a long time for his shaking hands to press against his stomach. A blanket had been draped across him, but he shoved at its weight to reveal himself. What remained was more like a maze of thread than a body. Lines connected across his sides, his chest, and along the length of one arm—the very arm that had been broken, not so many moons ago. Every inch of him screamed against his rising, but he struggled, huffing, into the most terrible pounding
he had ever known, and sat upright beneath the trees.

  “Assal be damned. The idiots rise. Get you back down before you hurt yourself, child.”

  Rowan spoke the words, but they did not still him. Fear was nothing before stubbornness. Before the need to know. He began to crawl before Essa cleared the gap and thrust her arms against him. She was stronger than she looked, and he, so much the weaker. Rurik sputtered and staggered, but she pressed him back, saying, “Stay, stay.”

  But he would not stay. “I need to know,” he repeated. Their eyes met, dark and heavy as the double eclipse, and her hands faltered, but did not loose him.

  “Your own wounds are not healed, Rurik. If you press them, they will bleed.”

  The words rent him bitter. “And whom do we have to thank for that?”

  The hurt was reflected in Essa’s eyes. They shuddered once, knowing, and the image sank away into their depths—devoured, accepted, with the weight of so much more.

  “That was undeserved, Rurik,” Rowan chided him from across the clearing. He could not see Essa’s cousin, but the distasteful look was in his words. “There was not a one of us could have foreseen this day’s events. We’ll chalk up that talk now to pain, shock, and too little alcohol to numb it all up. But if you persist, I’m not above swatting a bloody man.”

  The words bit. He retreated into himself, a lectured child, and felt all the more spiteful for his own bitterness. It was not his choice, merely bodily reaction—so he told himself, but so had Voren no doubt told himself, when his crazed mind propelled him to “defend Essa.”

  Voren. Fire spread from his wounds deep into his heart and kindled there, surging against the merely mortal bonds that held him down. I will kill you for what you’ve done. You cannot run far enough. Nor fast enough.

  The look Essa spared him suggested she peered into at least some aspect of his rage. She winced deeper, and wilted, but the rough touch did not leave him—it held him and even began to pick him up, to help him along toward their guardian. Whatever her own feelings, she was not above what needed to be done. She never had been. What fear lay in her was a different sort of fear altogether. Not a thing bred of weakness; a dread of what she knew would come to pass.