Chapter 10 — "What Men Know"
The tent smelled of torch smoke and wet canvas and the particular sourness of men who had been afraid for several hours and had nowhere to put it.
I stood at the back with my arms folded and let Harys start.
The two veterans were on their knees — wrists bound behind and above them, tied high to the tent poles so the weight sat in their shoulders rather than their legs. Not cruelty. Positioning. A man whose shoulders are burning after twenty minutes is a man whose body is already working against him before anything else begins.
Eddon was the older of the two. Forty-something. Mountain-built — the kind of lean that wasn't thinness but the complete absence of anything the mountains had decided wasn't necessary. Old breaks catalogued across his face. A scar along the chin from something that had nearly reached the throat a long time ago and hadn't quite. He looked at me with the flat professional hatred of a man who had been in bad situations before and intended to treat this as another one.
The second man hadn't given a name. Late thirties. Pale eyes the color of high mountain water. A stillness about him that wasn't calm — it was a decision, made somewhere in the ford before we took him, and he was simply waiting for the night to confirm it. Men like that were the interesting ones. Men who had already made their peace were either the easiest or the hardest depending entirely on what the peace had cost them.
Harys picked up the torch.
He held it to the back of Eddon's hand.
Not a flash. A hold. Patient and deliberate, the flame pressed close, and the smell that came off it was the specific smell of burnt skin that got into the back of your throat and sat there. A smell the mountain clans knew well. They used fire the same way — on captured Vale scouts, on supply runners, on anyone who stumbled into their territory and couldn't run fast enough. I had seen the evidence of it twice in the last eighteen months. Once on a ranger who had survived it and once on one who hadn't.
Eddon locked his teeth. A sound came out of him anyway — short, involuntary, something his body produced before his mind could stop it. He strangled it fast. His jaw set. His eyes went to the tent wall.
Harys pulled the torch back.
"Painted Dogs," he said. "Ridgeline position. How many."
Nothing.
Harys put the torch back.
Longer this time.
The sound Eddon made this time was not short. It came up from somewhere below control and it took him several seconds to drag it back. By the time he managed it the smell in the tent had gotten considerably worse and the back of his hand was a color it had no business being.
I watched his face.
I pushed off the tent pole.
Crouched in front of Eddon.
Close. Near enough that looking away from my face was a choice he had to make rather than a default.
"You're going to tell us what we need," I said. No edge in it. Just the flat certainty of a thing that was true. "The only question is how much of tonight you carry afterward." I held his eyes. "Give me the Painted Dogs and this ends. Otherwise I will give you a pain that you could have never imagined in your life."
He looked at me. Took the measure of my face the way experienced men took the measure of things.
"Your mothers raised cowards," he said. His Westerosi was accented but clear — the hill dialect underneath it but the words precise. "We are mountain men. We aren't afraid of anything."
"My mother raised nothing," I said and stood. "Harys."
Harys worked the better part of an hour.
Torch. Then the knife — shallow cuts along the backs of the hands, the forearms, the kind that screamed at the body rather than damaged it, that kept a man firing at full noise rather than shutting down into the dull distant signal of serious wounds. When Eddon began to go somewhere else in his head Harys poured cold water from the stream over him. The cold snapped him back. Reset him. Forced him present for the next thing rather than the distance that would have made it bearable.
I watched all of it.
I didn't look away. Not once. Looking away was for men who needed to believe they weren't responsible for what was happening in front of them. I had made the decision. I was responsible for everything in this tent. Looking away changed nothing except my own comfort and my own comfort was not something I had much patience for.
The pale-eyed man kept his eyes on the tent ceiling.
Listening to every second of it.
I crossed to him. Crouched down. Waited until the pale eyes came down to mine.
"Your turn will come," I said. "Or it won't, depending on him." I glanced at Eddon. "Either way you're here for the whole night."
The pale eyes looked at me with the expression of a man who had decided how this ended and found my timeline irrelevant to that decision.
"What's your name," I said.
Nothing.
"Clan."
Nothing.
"How long have the Painted Dogs been coordinating with the Moon Brothers."
Something moved in the pale eyes at that. Not a flinch. A registration. The specific reaction of a man hearing something that costs him to hear.
"Longer than three months," I said. "The timing of the supply train attacks tells me that. The withdrawal patterns tell me the coordination is practiced not improvised. So how long."
Still nothing.
I stood and went back to watching Harys work.
Eddon broke in the second hour.
The way stone broke — not suddenly, but the pressure finding the same point until the internal structure gave and the cracks ran outward. His breathing changed first. Then his face changed. Then the words came stripped and compressed in the flat voice of a man who had found the bottom of himself.
Around 180 men on the primary ridgeline above the Redwater Fork approach. Twenty in reserve two hundred yards back — runners mostly, there to carry word if the primary position was hit, not meant to fight. The ridgeline sealed three seasons ago — the single viable western approach buried under a deliberate rockfall, anyone coming that way walking blind into a kill zone before they saw a single Painted Dog.
"How old is the rockfall," I said.
He looked at me.
"The approach the maps show. How old is the collapse."
"Three seasons. Maybe four." He stopped. Breathed. Started again. "Goryn ordered it after a Vale scouting party got within two hundred yards of the upper camp. Brought the overhang down with wedges and ropes. Twenty men working two days."
I thought about that. About how a ridgeline position fortified three seasons ago would have been noted somewhere if anyone in the Vale garrison had seen it happen. Which meant either nobody had seen it or somebody had seen it and not reported it or somebody had reported it and it had gone nowhere.
None of those options was comfortable.
"Goryn," I said. "Where does he position during an engagement."
A pause that cost him.
"Primary line. Front third of the ridgeline. He doesn't use the reserve." Eddon stopped. Started again. "He says a chief who stands behind his men is no chief."
I filed that. It would matter when the time came.
I looked at him. At his burned hands and the cuts along his forearms still seeping slowly into the cold air of the tent.
"The Moon Brothers," I said. "How did Goryn bring them in. They've been raiding Painted Dog territory for two generations. There's no peace between those clans that anyone in the Vale knows of."
Eddon was quiet for a moment.
"There isn't peace," he said finally. "There's a shared enemy. "
"What changed."
He looked at the ground between his knees.
"The supply routes," he said. "Three years ago the Vale started pushing patrols further into the upper passes. Ranges that hadn't been touched in twenty years. Stone Crow territory. Moon Brother territory. Painted Dog territory." He paused. "When the lowlands start taking your high ground you stop fighting your neighbor and start fighting the lowlands."
That was the most words he'd said consecutively and they landed differently than the tactical information had. Not because they were surprising — they weren't — but because they were true in the way things were true when men said them without intending to say anything at all.
The Vale's expansion into the upper passes had been Lord Edwyn's policy. Systematic. Intended to push the clan harassment further from the supply routes. It had worked for two years and then it had produced this.
I said nothing.
"Anything else," I said.
"That's all I have."
I believed him.
"Kill both of them . Cut thier heads off and save the heads we may find a use for it."
--
Donate your power Stones if you like the story. Please Comment and Share your thoughts about the story