The Heroes

Bremer, may I?’
    You may crush my eyes out with your heels. Only say my name again.
‘Of course. I am …’
Ill in mind and body, ruined in fortune and reputation, hating of the world and everything in it, but none of that matters, as long as you are with me.
‘Well.’
    She held out her hand and he bent to kiss it like a village priest who had been permitted to touch the hem of the Prophet’s robe—
    There was a golden ring on her finger with a small, sparkling blue stone.
    Gorst’s guts twisted so hard he nearly lost control of them entirely. It was only by a supreme effort that he stayed standing. He could scarcely whisper the words. ‘Is that …’
    ‘A marriage band, yes!’ Could she know he would rather she had dangled a butchered head in his face?
    He gripped to his smile like a drowning man to the last stick of wood. He felt his mouth move, and heard his own squeak. His repugnant, womanly, pathetic little squeak. ‘Who is the gentleman?’
    ‘Colonel Harod dan Brock.’ A hint of pride in her voice. Of love.
What would I give to hear her say my name like that? All I have. Which is nothing but other men’s scorn.
    ‘Harod dan Brock,’ he whispered, and the name was sand in his mouth. He knew the man, of course. They were distantly related, fourth cousins or some such. They had sometimes spoken years ago, when Gorst had served with the guard of his father, Lord Brock. Then Lord Brock had made his bid for the crown, and failed, and been exiled for the worst of treasons. His eldest son had been granted the king’s mercy, though. Stripped of his manylands, and his lofty titles, but left with his life. How Gorst wished the king was less merciful now.
    ‘He is serving on Lord Governor Meed’s staff.’
    ‘Yes.’ Brock was nauseatingly handsome, with an easy smile and a winning manner.
The bastard.
Well-spoken of and well-liked, in spite of his father’s disgrace.
The snake.
Had earned his place by bravery and bonhomie.
The fucker.
He was everything Gorst was not.
    He clenched his right fist trembling hard, and imagined it ripping the easy-smiling jaw out of Harod dan Brock’s handsome head. ‘Yes.’
    ‘We are very happy,’ said Finree.
    Good for you. I want to kill myself.
She could not have given him sharper pain if she had crushed his cock in a vice. Could she be such a fool as to not see through him? Some part of her must have known, must have delighted in his humiliation.
Oh, how I love you. Oh, how I hate you. Oh, how I want you.
    ‘My congratulations to you both,’ he murmured.
    ‘I will tell my husband.’
    ‘Yes.’
Yes, yes, tell him to die, tell him to burn, and soon.
Gorst kept the rictus smile clinging to his face while vomit tickled at his throat. ‘Yes.’
    ‘I must go to my father. Perhaps we will see each other again, soon?’
    Oh, yes. Very soon. Tonight, in fact, while I lie awake with my cock in my hand, pretending it’s your mouth
…‘I hope so.’
    She was already walking past.
For her, a forgettable encounter with an old acquaintance.
For him, as she turned away it was as if night fell.
The soil is heaped upon me, the grit of burial in my mouth.
He watched the door rattle shut behind her, and stood there for a long moment, in the rain. He wanted to weep, and weep, and weep for all his ruined hopes. He wanted to kneel in the mud and tear out the hair he still had. He wanted to murder someone, and hardly cared who.
Myself, perhaps?
    Instead he took a sharp breath, squeaking slightly in one nostril, and squelched away through the mud, into the gathering dusk.
    He had a message to carry, after all. With no heroics.

Black Dow

    T he stable doors shut with a bang like a headsman’s axe, and it took all of Calder’s famous arrogance not to jump clean in the air. War meetings had never been his favourite style of gathering, especially ones full of his enemies. Three of Dow’s five War Chiefs were in attendance and, as Calder’s ever-worsening luck would have it, they were the three that liked him least.
    Glama Golden looked the hero from his scalp to his toes, big-knuckle brawny and heavy-jaw handsome, his long hair, his bristling moustache, his eyelashes to their tips all the colour of pale gold. He wore more yellow metal than a princess on her wedding day – golden torc around his thick neck, bracelets at his thick wrists and fistfuls of rings on his thick fingers, every part of him buffed to a pretty shine with bluster and self-love.
    Cairm Ironhead was a