Free Cold Redemption by Nathan Hawke Page B

they’d be sleepy. Might be as many as a dozen living here but only a handful would be fighting men. If it came to that then it would be bloody and short and swift, and the women and children
would answer his questions, not the men. The women always knew all the secrets; and they always talked when you held their children over a fire for long enough. And once they’d talked, Beyard
let them go. Lhosir didn’t make war on women and children.
    They were almost at the house, creeping through the snow, voices dropped to whispers, swords already out of their scabbards. The Lhosir at the front were creeping around the wall towards the
door, peeking in through the cracks in the shutters when Gallow turned. ‘If the Aulian is here, he’s done nothing wrong, Beyard.’ He stopped.
    Beyard pushed him on. ‘There was an Aulian. Arithas threw him into the ravine.’
    ‘Two men came down the Varyxhun Road. There was only one Marroc that day. Oribas knows Solace for what it is. He’d know to take it and hide it.’ The Foxbeard didn’t
believe in his own words though. It was hope without conviction.
    ‘Your Aulian is a witch, is he? A man who can fly?’ But Beyard frowned under his mask as he spoke. No way to know who made the tracks he was following, but it
was
a long way
to climb just to go back for a sword unless you knew exactly what it was you were looking for. And how would some Marroc know the Comforter when he saw it? ‘Did you truly bring it
back?’ He didn’t need to ask, not really. In the snow where Gallow had said to look, he’d felt the residue of something that wasn’t a man. The remains of a strand of fate
that belonged to something other.
    ‘I did.’
    ‘Why?’
    The Foxbeard looked at him as though the question had never crossed his mind. ‘What else would I do with it, old friend? Who else should carry its curse?’
    The Lhosir were at the farmhouse doors now, waiting for his signal. ‘Kneel.’ Beyard pressed Gallow down into the snow. He took another piece of rope and bound Gallow’s wrists
to his ankles. ‘I have your oath that you won’t run.’
    ‘You do.’
    ‘What does your Aulian look like?’
    ‘Like an Aulian. Short and dark to our eyes.’
    Beyard looked up and down the valley. Even if Gallow broke his oath there was nowhere for him to go. Hobbled as he was he’d never get back to the horses, and out here at night a man would
freeze to death and Gallow wasn’t strong, not now, not after crossing the mountains. ‘If I don’t find you here when I come back then I will hunt out your family. If they’re
still alive, I’ll give them to Hrothin.’
    He left Gallow there and headed for the farmhouse, waving at the Lhosir to break in. Dressed in all his clanking iron, a Fateguard was never good for stealth. Being noticed was what they were
for after all; and so he left the other Lhosir to smash in the door to the Marroc farm and start the shouting and the screaming and, even though he ran after them, by the time Beyard crashed in,
they were almost done. Three Marroc men lay dead or dying. Women wailed. One of them ran for a window and hurled herself at it, bursting through the shutters. A big man with an axe threw himself at
the Lhosir going after her and got himself skewered for his troubles. The last man went down a moment later and Beyard was left with a couple of Marroc women huddled quivering in a corner together
and four children. The dead men scattered around the farmhouse floor were armed too well to be mere farmers.
    ‘Bordas, Torjik, go and get the woman back. She can’t have gone far. Niflas, go with them. Bring the Foxbeard in here before he freezes.’ He turned to the cowering women and
children and crouched in front of them, the iron mask of the Fateguard looming in their faces. They were terrified and they were right to be. ‘Listen well, Marroc. Tell me what I want to know
and I’ll leave you be. Deny me and I will turn my back and let my soldiers do