The Heroes

aside, two corpses underneath, neither one an officer. She shook her head, biting her lip, put one hand on his shoulder. He had to stop himself smiling. Could she know the thrill that touch sent through him? He was wanted. Needed. And by her.
    Finree picked her way from one ruined shell to another, coughing, eyes watering, tearing at rubbish with her fingernails, turning over bodies, and he followed. Searching every bit as feverishly as she did. More, even. But for different reasons.
I will drag aside some fallen trash and there will be his ruined, gaping corpse, not half so fucking handsome now, and she will see it. Oh no! Oh yes. Cruel, vicious, lovely fate. And she will turn to me in her misery, and weep upon my uniform and perhaps thump my chest lightly with her fist, and I will hold her, and whisper insipid consolations, and be the rock for her to founder upon, and we will be together, as we should have been, and would have been had I had the courage to ask her.
    Gorst grinned to himself, teeth bared as he rolled over another body. Another dead officer, arm so broken it was wrapped right around his back.
Taken too soon with all his young life ahead of him and blah, blah, blah. Where is Brock? Show me Brock.
    A few splinters of stone and a great crater, flooded by churning river water, were all that remained to show where Osrung’s bridge once stood. Most of the buildings around it were little more than heaps of rubbish, but one stone-built was largely intact, its roof stripped off and some of the bare rafters aflame. Gorst struggled towards it while Finree picked at some bodies, one arm over her face. A doorway with a heavy lintel, and in thedoorway a thick door twisted from its hinges, and just showing beneath the door, a boot. Gorst reached down and heaved the door up like the lid of a coffin.
    And there was Brock. He did not seem badly injured at a first glance. His face was streaked with blood, but not smashed to pulp as Gorst might have hoped. One leg was folded underneath him at an unnatural angle, but his limbs were all attached.
    Gorst bent over him, placed a hand over his mouth. Breath.
Still alive.
He felt a surge of disappointment so strong that his knees nearly buckled, closely followed by a sobering rage.
Cheated. Gorst, the king’s squeaking clown, why should he have what he wants? What he needs? What he deserves? Dangle it in his fat face and laugh! Cheated. Just as I was in Sipani. Just as I was at the Heroes. Just as I always am.
    Gorst raised one brow, and he blew out a long, soft breath, and he shifted his hand down, down to Brock’s neck. He slid his thumb and his middle finger around it, feeling out the narrowest point, then gently, firmly squeezed.
    What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?
    He squeezed a little harder, impatient to be done. Brock did not complain. Did not so much as twitch. He was so nearly dead anyway.
Nothing more than nudging fate in the right direction.
    So much easier than all the others. No steel and screams and mess, just a little pressure and a little time. So much more point than all the others. They had nothing I needed, they simply faced the other way. I should be ashamed of their deaths. But this? This is justice. This is righteous. This is—
    ‘Have you found anything?’
    Gorst’s hand sprang open and he shifted it slightly so two fingers were pressed up under Brock’s jaw, as if feeling for a pulse. ‘He’s alive,’ he croaked.
    Finree leaned down beside him, touched Brock’s face with a trembling hand, the other pressed to her mouth, gave a gasp of relief that might as well have been a dagger in Gorst’s face. He slid one arm under Brock’s knees, the other under his back, and scooped him up.
I have failed even at killing a man. It seems my only choice is to save him.
    A surgeon’s tent stood near the south gate, canvas turned muddy grey by the falling ash. Wounded waited outside for attention, clutching at assorted injuries, moaning, or whimpering, or silent, eyes empty. Gorst stomped through them and up to the tent.
We can jump the queue, because
I
am the king’s observer, and she is the marshal’s daughter, and the wounded man is a colonel of the most noble blood, and so it is only fitting that any number of the rank and file can die before bastards