I hope I lie / And I never come back to this town again

Halt kept his cowl low over his face all the way to Gallica, trying not to see the water taking Will on a wolfship, trying not to see Will drowning the way Halt had done when he had been barely eighteen – and Will was younger than that, so much younger, only a boy – and in a lake, not an ocean.

He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the water of a bucket, the ship’s deck sliding backwards, when their crossing was almost done. The bruises and cuts around his face had not left. He kept his cowl low when he and Horace rode onto the docks, too.

He missed the weight of the oakleaf around his neck; he felt too light, dangerously so; ungrounded. Pritchard had taught him without an oakleaf, though; surely he could finish Will’s training, too, back in Araulen – or elsewhere, if that was what Will wanted, since Halt did not know what he’d do if the country that had welcomed him refused to give him back his token of that welcome.

If Will wasn’t dead, of course. If Will was dead, then he would make sure Horace had a way back to Araluen, or at least a safe place with an honourable landlord, and avenge him. He wasn’t a King’s Ranger, now, he could kill as many and high-ranking Skandians as he wanted to –

But, of course, there was Cassandra, too. Halt had never trusted kings, and every time he recalled Duncan acting as if he knew what Halt felt like when Duncan wasn’t the one kneeling in chains, he recalled his own royal father, everything he had spent so many years in a new country working to forget, to never have to remember again.

He had saved Araulen. He didn’t like it to be pointed out, but the injustice of it now stung him thoroughly – had he not earned the leave to save the boy he had promised to protect? He had fought Morgarath in two wars, he had rejected that foul man’s near-assured victory in favour of that wet-behind-the-ears, self-important knight and prince, defeated Morgarath for him, killed a Kalkara – and now he could not be spared, had to give more, always give more, and he wouldn’t mind the drudgery or the service if only Will were to be safe, but no, Morgarath captures him and taunts Halt about it but ‘Halt, No,’ and Will is in slavery and ‘Halt, No,’ and then he finally throws away his own home, gambling with death, to be allowed to save him, and then ‘Halt, why?’

And if Duncan wasn’t enough – Crowley. Crowley. Crowley Meratyn, that silly, flash-tempered, smiling boy, who had told Halt ‘please stay and help Araluen’ for twenty years, and hadn’t Halt listened for nineteen of them? Why wasn’t he allowed to go this once?

Halt hadn’t protected his head when the guards had leaped on him, so that his arms would be spared the worst of the battery. He could draw a bow, and throw a knife, and use a saxe or a striker. The cut on his head had reopened, and a spearman’s face laughed in front of him, a sergeant with a baby at home, a handsome young man who had been a father.

“Halt?” asked Horace. Halt ignored him, and put his right hand back on Abelard’s rein, withdrawing from stroking Tug’s neck. “Halt, are you okay?”

Halt stood in his stirrups to frown at him from something closer to the same level, then he sat back down again.

“I want my bloody apprentice back,” he said, growling the words, which was as close at he would come to saying ‘no, I’m not’.

Horace bit his lip. “I want Will back, too. That’s why we – I mean – I just asked because your head’s bleeding.”

Halt brought his hand up to his face, and felt the texture of drying blood, cloying and clotted and smelling like iron. He’d felt it run down his forehead, and then take the drop onto his cheek, but he’d thought it was rain. Absurd; it was cloudy, and the winds promised a rainstorm, but it wasn’t yet actually raining. “Never become a king’s guard, boy,” he said. “They’re thugs.” he left the phrasing open, so he could have been saying that kings’ guards were thugs, or that kings were.

After a long pause, Horace said, “..Right.”

Halt nudged Ablelard into a trot.