It was a romantic idea. One she herself often warned against. He remembers her sitting at a window in a checkpoint outside Jukoshtan—thirty years ago, probably, working a dull assignment—blowing steam off her teacup and saying softly: We are neither of us essential, you and I. To what we do, who we work for…She turned to look at him, her dark eyes wide yet hard.…Or to each other. If I am forced to choose between you or the operation, I will choose the operation—and I expect you to do the same for me. Our work asks us to make terrible choices. But make them we shall.
He smirked then, for at the time he’d always thought as such, resigned to brutal pragmatism; but as the years went by he found himself softened, perhaps by her.
He looks at the moonlight reflected in the black blade. Now what am I waiting for? Whose call do I wait for now?
He returns to the box. Hesitates.
I do not wish to see this, he thinks miserably. Not this.
But he knows he must.
He pulls out the last remaining artifact: a cutting from a newspaper, brown with age. It is a photograph, depicting a young woman standing on the deck of a ship, looking at the photographer with a mixture of amusement and measured disdain. Though the photograph is in black and white, it’s clear the woman’s hair is bright blond, and her eyes a pale blue behind the strange pair of glasses fixed on her nose. On her breast is a company crest with the letters “SDC.”
The caption reads: SIGNE HARKVALDSSON, NEWLY APPOINTED CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER OF THE SOUTHERN DREYLING COMPANY.
His one eye grows wide as Sigrud takes in the face of his daughter, rendered in the crude stippling of newspaper print.
He remembers the way she looked when he last saw her, thirteen years ago: cold and pale and still, her face frozen in a look of slight dissatisfaction, as if the exit wound in her chest were a source of only minor discomfort.
He remembers her. Her, and what he did to the soldiers afterward in a fit of wild rage.
I was not there to save you, he says to the photograph. I was not there to save Shara. I was never there for any of it.
He stows the newspaper clipping away in his pocket, then gives the pocket a reassuring pat, as if ushering the memory back to sleep.
He grips his knife in his other hand. His grip is tight, his knuckles a bright white.
Sigrud lunges forward and stabs the dead pine, his knife sinking in almost to the hilt. A sob nearly escapes his mouth, but he retains the sense to strangle it before it can give away his position.
Wretched is the creature, he thinks, that is not even allowed to weep!
He flexes his entire body, trying to push the knife in deeper and deeper, his fingers crying out in pain. Then he relents and hangs there, gripping the tree, breathing deep.
His instincts take over. It was bad, what you did back there in the camp, he tells himself. Cover blown. Again. What a stupid creature he is, driven by rage and emotion.
Focus. Nothing to do but move on. Move on and keep moving.
He pulls his knife out, sheathes it, and picks up his pack. Then he starts up the hill into the darkness.
Hours of silent stalking, of careful movement through the midnight darkness of the deep forest. When the trees break he looks up, measures the stars, adjusts his course, and moves on.
Somewhere close to daybreak he remembers.
It was in Jukoshtan, he thinks, back in 1712. Someone in the Ministry had been blown and blown quite badly, all of their assets and networks thoroughly compromised by Continental agents, and no one could gauge just how bad it was.
He and Shara were forced to part, for the Ministry suspected a mole within their ranks—and Sigrud, as a foreigner, was high on the list of suspects. I’ve made all your arrangements for transportation out of the city, Shara told him on the last day together during that rocky stretch, and from there on out you’ll be left to your own devices. Which I think should be quite sufficient.
He grunted.
I’ll go back and tell them it wasn’t you, Sigrud, she said. I’ll go back and tell them everything they want to know. I don’t know if they’ll listen, but I’ll try. And I’ll find you and reach out to you the second everything’s clear.
He listened to this coldly, for he assumed she thought of him as little more than a tool in her armory. And if that does not work, he said, and if they lock you up or cut you down?
Then a rare gleam of passion flared in her eyes. If that happens…Then, Sigrud, I want you to walk away. I want you to run away from all of this, run away from this life and go live your own. Go find your family if you can, go start all over again if you wish, but just…Go. You’ve paid enough, you’ve done enough. Forget about me and just go.
This surprised him. They had spent so much time together, two lonely people waging a solitary, lonely war, and he assumed she never thought about a life beyond tradecraft—especially for him, her grim enforcer, the one down in the weeds with a knife clutched in his teeth. Yet she was not content to let him go on being her thug.
She cared for you even then, he thinks, standing still in the darkness. She wanted you to be something better.
He looks down at his hands. Rough and scarred and filthy. Most of those scars came not from lumber work, but from nasty, brutal battles in the dark.
He thinks of Shara. His daughter. His family. All of them lost, all of them separated or dead.
He stares at his scarred hands. What an ugly thing I am, he thinks. Why did I ever believe I could wreak anything but ugliness in this world? Why did I ever think that those near me would meet anything but pain and death?
He stands alone in the forest, then looks up at the pale moon above.
What else is there to be? What else is there to do?
He bows his head, and knows what is left.
The fawn is easily tracked, easily caught, easily killed with a single bolt from his bolt-shot. Sigrud was not sure his hunting skills would hold up, but these deer are truly wild creatures up here in the Tarsils, unaware of men or their tricks and traps.
He carries it over his shoulder to the hilltop. He will not eat this creature, for to eat it would be to make use of it. The point of this ritual—one he has not performed himself in over forty years—is desecration and violation, the creation of a terrible wrong.
In the dawning light Sigrud strips to the waist. Then he carefully beheads the fawn, disembowels it, and props its carcass upright so that it appears to be pleading to the sky, begging the heavens for…something. Perhaps mercy, perhaps vengeance. His hands are strong and ruthless, breaking open the delicate bones, tearing the tendons, the ligaments. He places the fawn’s organs in a pile before its open body cavity with its tiny, beautiful heart on the top.
Then he places twigs and sticks around the organs and body. He lights the kindling with a match and watches as flames slowly crawl across the bloodstained earth around the grotesque scene, the heat scorching the bloody hide of the once-beautiful, fragile creature.
He thinks back to when he last did this, when his father was murdered. The Oath of Ashes. Do they even know such a thing in the Dreyling Shores anymore? Or am I such a relic of the cruel, ancient days that only I remember?
The flames begin to die as the sun dawns. The remnants of the fawn are black, twisted fragments. Sigrud leans forward and pierces the moist, hot soil with his fingertips. He takes a clump of the earth there, soaked with blood and hot with cinder, and smears it on his face, on his chest, on his shoulders and arms.