Chapter 24 — "Edwyn Flowers"
I have been trying to organise what I remember into something that makes sense as a sequence and I keep finding that it doesn't organise that way. It comes back in pieces. Specific moments without clean . The specific quality of silence after a negotiation ended and both sides understood what had been agreed and what it had cost to get there.
Some of it I don't think about directly.
Some of it I think about whether I want to or not.
The Stone Crow elder came under a truce flag after the second engagement.
I want to describe what a second engagement looks like when the first one didn't finish it. The first engagement was clean by comparison — we hit their position, they hit back, men on both sides went down, we pulled back to assess.
The second engagement didn't have a shape.
It happened over two days on ground that seemed designed to prevent anything from having a shape — narrow approaches, sight lines that opened and closed every fifty yards, clansmen who appeared from rock faces that should have been empty and disappeared before the men chasing them arrived at where they had been. We lost four men in two days to an enemy we could not pin to a fixed position. Not in battle. In the specific grinding that bleeds you slowly instead.
On the second night I was posted on the eastern watch with a veteran named Orro who had been at the Gate for eight years and had the specific quality of calm that eight years in the passes either built or destroyed and in Orro's case had built.
We heard something on the rocks above us for about an hour.
Not movement exactly. Just the awareness of something present that wasn't wind and wasn't animal and wasn't going away.
Orro said nothing the whole hour.
I said nothing either.
In the morning there was nothing on the rocks above us and two men from the western watch were dead and we had not heard anything from that direction at all.
I think about that sometimes. About how quiet they were. About what it means to be that quiet in the dark on rock face above men who are listening for you.
After the elder came and the terms were agreed and the Stone Crows began their movement toward the settlement land I watched Commander Alaric's face during the final handshake.
I have seen that expression many times since. I have learned that it means the same thing every time — whatever just happened has already been filed. It's already behind him. He is already somewhere else.
I find it the most frightening thing about him and also the most reassuring depending entirely on which side of it I am on.
The Moon Brothers were three weeks of a different kind of bad.
Not the Stone Crow kind — not the grinding invisible attrition of an enemy that refused to engage properly. The Moon Brothers engaged. They engaged constantly and from every direction and at every hour including hours that soldiers consider non-negotiable in terms of being left alone. They were not trying to inflict casualties specifically. They were trying to make the campaign so exhausting that it stopped being worth continuing.
They nearly succeeded.
The third week was the week I understood what had lead Commander Alaric to built in the two hundred and fifty men around him.
We had been running on short sleep and shorter rations for six days. The supply line had been hit twice — not badly, not catastrophically, but enough that the comfortable margin of a well-supplied operation had been reduced to the uncomfortable margin of an operation that was managing. Men were tired in the specific deep way that went past physical into something more fundamental. The jokes had stopped. The conversations had stopped. Men moved and did their work and stopped moving and did not speak and started moving again.
On the fifth night Alaric moved through the camp.
I have described this before — the way he did it, present without performing, just visible. Moving through the camp at hours when commanders were supposed to be asleep.
What I did not describe was what I saw on his face when he passed close enough to the fire for me to see it clearly.
He was exhausted.
Not more than the rest of us. The same. The same grey quality around the eyes, the same economy of movement that came not from discipline but from conservation. He was running on the same depleted reserves as every other man in that camp.
He moved through it anyway.
I watched him stop at a man named Balt — a ranger, good fighter, someone who had been on the Painted Dog campaign and come back and signed on for this one — who was sitting with his back against a rock and his eyes at the ground and the specific posture of a man who had gone somewhere internal that was not a good place.
Alaric crouched beside him.
Said something I couldn't hear.
Balt looked at him.
Whatever passed between them took less than a minute. At the end of it Balt straightened. Not dramatically. Just the small physical adjustment of a man who has been reminded of something he temporarily forgot.
Alaric moved on.
I asked Balt later what he had said.
Balt looked at me for a moment.
"He told me the Moon Brothers were going to settle," he said. "Said they'd already decided and were just making it expensive. Said we just had to be more expensive than they'd planned for."
He paused.
"Then he told me he needed me sharp tomorrow. Specifically me." He looked at the ground. "Said my name."
That was it.
He knew the name. After six months of a thousand men across of mountain terrain — he knew the name, and the specific thing that man needed to hear, and he said it at the right moment in the right camp on the right exhausted night.
I have been thinking about that for months.
The three smaller clans were handled by Harys and Ser Aldric while Alaric coordinated from the central position.
One of the three clans refused terms.
I will not describe in detail what happened to them. Partly because I was not present for all of it and partly because the parts I was present for are the parts I said earlier that I don't think about directly.
What I will say is this.
The decision to destroy rather than settle was made in less than ten minutes. There was no extended deliberation. No visible weight to it beyond the specific weight of any decision that has consequences that can't be reversed. Alaric made it the way he made everything — assessed, decided, moved.
The clan in question numbered perhaps three hundred sixty fighters.
They do not number anything now.
I think about the elder from the Stone Crows sometimes. About the choice that was available to him and that he took after two engagements and the specific pragmatism of that choice.
I think about what it means that the offer was genuine — that settlement was real, that the terms were kept, that the Painted Dogs and the Stone Crows are settled on Vale land and their children are growing up on lower ground than any of their parents ever expected to stand on.
And I think about the clan that said no.
The offer was the same offer.
The campaign ended in a year
The last clan — small, northern, remote — came in without fighting. Just appeared at the column's perimeter one morning with their weapons down and their people behind them.
Alaric accepted the surrender in four sentences.
We came back through the Bloody Gate on a morning in late autumn. The Blackfish was at the inner gate. He looked at Alaric for a long moment and nodded once.
It was a brutal campaign. Not many people would survive it or had a capacity to even see or go through what we have been.
The force has been disassembled now after the campaign. But also a new force has emerged of 250 privately under Commander Alacric.
The two fifty are the ones who stayed without being asked to stay.
I am one of them.
I have thought about why.
The honest answer is not a comfortable one. It is not that I admire him, though I do. It is not that I trust him, though I do that too. It is something more specific and more difficult to name.
I think the honest answer is that being beside him shows me what I am capable of. Not what he is capable of — what I am. The gap between the soldier I was on that ridge at seventeen and the soldier I am now at eighteen is not a gap I crossed on my own. It is a gap I crossed because of what I was beside while I crossed it.
I don't know where he's going next.
I know I'm going with him.
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