The Valiant (The Valiant #1)(18)

The Varini girl and I stared at each other for a long, tense moment. Then I let out my breath and lowered my battered blade.

“Come on,” I said. “I’m in no mood to kill you, and if Charon and his slavers come after us, rusty swords aren’t going to be much help if we’re still tethered together like a pair of oxen.”

She thought about it for a moment, then shoved her own rusted weapon through the rope belt tied around her waist and gestured me forward. When we finally reached the ruins of the hilltop town, the night’s cloud cover had grown heavier. By the little moonlight that managed to break through, we could barely make out the ragged breaches in the high stone wall. We clambered through one of the gaps, the chain between us hissing over the tumbled stones like a warning whisper.

Once inside, I could see the peak of a large thatch-roofed building rising up out of the center of the town, higher than all the rest. It reminded me with a sharp pang of homesickness of my father’s great hall, only much larger, and the outline of the roof was irregular, as if half of it had fallen in. Most of the buildings were nothing more than skeletal remains. Here and there, darkened windows set in the shells of mud and wicker walls stared vacantly at us like the eye sockets of empty skulls. In places, torn door curtains and scraps of leather awnings flapped listlessly in the chill breeze.

The place was utterly deserted.

“There.” The Varini pointed with her blade. “There’s a well.”

Dragging the slave chain between us, we stumbled toward the low, round wall that surrounded the well. But as we approached, the small hairs on the back of my neck rose. I saw the remains of a smashed water bucket that lay next to a frayed coil of rope. When we were close enough to peer over the low wall, the Varini girl gasped and covered her mouth.

The well was filled more than halfway to the top with pale, tangled bones. Skulls and long bones, cages made of ribs, the smaller bones of arms and legs. Bodies once, thrown into the well until they stacked up, one on top of the other, now bleached and arid where they piled higher than the water level. A lingering waft of decay hung in the air over the well.

That’s your imagination, I chided myself, even as I felt the bile rising in my throat. Those people have been dead for years.

“They fouled the well,” the Varini girl said, her voice gone guttural, as if she was also on the verge of retching. “Stuffed it full of corpses to make the water undrinkable.”

“The Romans must have done it.” I shook my head in disgust, unable to keep my feet from carrying me backward. “After they broke the siege. So the Arverni wouldn’t come back here.”

“Or the Arverni did it,” my companion said. “So the Romans couldn’t use the town for themselves after they won.”

“That’s horrible,” I said. “They wouldn’t do that to their own dead. It’s a dishonor.”

“It’s smart,” she countered. “It’s war. Don’t leave anything behind for your enemy to use. Scorch the earth, kill the cattle, foul the water.”

I looked at her. “And what do you know of war?”

She shrugged. “My people have been at war with each other since Askr and Almr first grew out of the ground as trees,” she said, “and the gods uprooted them and made of them the first man and woman. Real war. Not your island cattle raids, but war. The kind of war where you can stand on a hillside and look down on a valley and not see the grass for all the men fighting.”

I tried to imagine just what that would look like.

“Then?” the Varini girl continued. “There is no thing called dishonor. No thing called honor. There is only winning. Only losing. And if you lose, you don’t leave a freshly made bed behind for your enemy to sleep in.”

“Your people sound particularly unforgiving.”

“Ja. Only we call it practical. Where I come from, when one tribe wants to move—to live somewhere else, somewhere better—they burn their houses before they leave.”

“What?” I frowned at her. “That’s not practical. It’s ridiculous. Why would they do that?”

“So they can’t change their minds.” She pointed straight out into the darkness ahead of her with her sword. “There is only forward. Only tomorrow. No yesterday, no going back. And nothing of value is left behind, so nothing is truly lost.”

I thought about the idea of feeding the past to the flames.

Wasn’t that what I had done? And had I left anything behind of value?

Father . . .

. . . who was willing to give me to a husband I didn’t want and couldn’t love.

Maelgwyn . . .

I blinked back the tears that suddenly rimmed my eyes and saw, in my mind, the flames of my own hearth. The fire that I’d fed with my torc and my dagger. I might as well have burned my house down. I’d certainly set fire to my yesterdays. And I’d left, intending never to return.

“What happens when you come upon another tribe that doesn’t feel like moving on?” I asked.

She grinned wolfishly. “Then . . . you fight.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Ja. I was born in a place that should have been called Hel, because that is what it was. The land was harsh, the winds bitter, the herds scarce, and the food scarcer. Why anyone would live there in the first place is, to me, a”—she struggled for the Latin word—“a mystery.” Her expression grew rueful. “Our thane must have grown more brains than his fathers before him, though, because he decided that we would go to other lands. Warmer, more plentiful, but already taken by another tribe. Still, we went. And then, when we got there . . . the Suevi had more swords and better food. So, stronger fighters.”