He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 14 (Patreon)

The start of what I am calling A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms style adventure arc.

XIV

South of Crakehall

The woods south of Crakehall were a tangle of old oak and sentinel pine, the kind of forest that swallowed light and sound and men who wandered off the path. The canopy was thick enough that the moonlight barely touched the forest floor, casting the world in shades of grey and black and the deep, impenetrable green of things that grew without the sun's blessing. The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the trees still wept, heavy drops falling from leaf to leaf until they struck the damp earth with a soft, rhythmic patience.

Dobbs hated the woods at night. He hated the way the darkness seemed to press against his eyes, the way the shadows moved when he wasn't looking directly at them. He had grown up in  Flea Bottom, where night was never truly dark-fires and torches and the endless, restless movement of people packed into streets narrower than a man's arm span. Darkness there was a blanket. Suffocating, but familiar. Darkness here was a void, and the void had teeth.

"You're jumpy," Malk said from beside him.

Malk was a big man, broad and thick, with a neck like a bull and a face that had been broken so many times it had given up trying to heal properly. He walked with the rolling gait of a sailor on dry land, his boots finding purchase on roots and stones with a surety Dobbs envied. Malk wasn't afraid of the dark. Malk wasn't afraid of much, which was why he was walking the perimeter tonight while the rest of the men slept off the merchant's wine.

"I'm not jumpy," Dobbs said. 

Malk spat a wad of phlegm into the underbrush. "From where I'm standing, you look like a rabbit that's heard a hound."

"Jory killed a man today. A merchant, aye, but a man with guards. Guards who fought and bled. Guards who might have had friends in the next village, kin who'd come looking."

"Let them look." Malk grinned, his teeth a white slash in the dark. "We'll be gone by morning. South, toward Old Oak. By the time anyone finds that cart, we'll be fifty miles away, spending the fat merchant's gold on fat whores and thin wine."

"Gold's heavy. Slows you down."

"Then we'll spend it fast." Malk stopped at the base of a massive oak, unbuttoned his breeches, and began to piss against the trunk with a sound like water on stone. "You think too much, Dobbs. That's your trouble. Always worrying. It's bad for the digestion."

Dobbs didn't answer. He was staring into the trees, his hand resting on the hilt of the short sword at his hip. A poor weapon-the blade notched, the grip worn smooth-but sharp enough to open a man's throat, and that was all that mattered. He had taken it off a dead hedge knight two weeks past, a man foolish enough to sleep in the wrong inn. The knight had been wearing mail, which fetched a decent price, and carrying a purse heavy enough to feed Dobbs for a month. The sword he had kept, because a man without a sword was a man waiting to die.

The forest was quiet. Too quiet, perhaps. No owls. No night birds. Just the drip of water and the distant sound of Malk making water and the thunder of Dobbs' own heart.

He turned to say something to Malk-some crack about the noise, or the smell, or the fact that pissing in the dark was a good way to attract a wolf-and stopped.

Malk was gone.

The oak tree stood alone in the darkness, its bark wet and gleaming. The patch of mud at its base was dark with fresh urine, the steam still rising in the cool night air. But Malk was gone. No sound of retreating footsteps. No rustle of underbrush. No snap of twig or crunch of leaf. Just absence. As if the big man had simply ceased to exist between one heartbeat and the next.

Dobbs' mouth went dry.

He drew his sword. The scrape of steel on leather was impossibly loud, a sound that seemed to hang in the air like a shout in an empty hall. He held the blade before him, the point wavering.

"Malk?" His voice came out wrong-thin and small. He cleared his throat. "Malk, this isn't funny. Come out."

The trees gave nothing back. The shadows stayed still. The water dripped.

He took a step forward. Then another. His eyes scanned the darkness, searching for the bull neck, the broken face, the white grin. Nothing. Just trees and the growing certainty that something had gone badly wrong.

Then came the screaming.

It erupted from the camp-a hundred yards back through the trees-not one voice but many, rising and tangling and cutting each other short in a way that lasted less time than it took to draw a breath. Then silence. A silence heavier than the one before, the kind that follows sudden violence and asks what comes next.

Dobbs ran.

He crashed through the underbrush, sword in hand, branches whipping at his face. He didn't think. Thinking was for daylight, for walls and company and the reassuring weight of numbers. Right now there was only the camp.

He burst through the tree line and staggered to a halt.

The campfire still burned, its flames casting dancing light across the clearing. The merchant's cart was there, tilted on a broken wheel, contents scattered across the muddy ground-wine casks, a bolt of silk, the iron-bound chest Jory had prized open.

The men were there too. All of them. Jory and Rafe and Pudding and Little Tom and Silent Edd and the others-eleven men who had been drinking and laughing and counting their coin when Dobbs had left them.

They were heaped in the center of the clearing, limbs tangled, heads lolling, mouths slack. Not dead-Dobbs could see chests rising and falling, fingers twitching-but unconscious, every last one. Laid out like sacks of grain, arranged with an efficiency that spoke not of malice but of speed. There was no blood. No wounds that Dobbs could see. Just stillness, and the fire crackling merrily as if nothing at all had happened.

And standing on the far side of the fire, small and utterly calm, was a boy.

He looked perhaps nine years old, perhaps ten, though it was hard to judge in the firelight. He wore the clothes of a squire-padded doublet, leather breeches, boots too large for him-all of it damp and muddy and worn with the unselfconscious ease of a child who did not think about what he wore. His hair was dark and damp. 

His eyes were red. The color of forge-coals, of the deep heart of a flame. They glowed in the dark, casting a faint crimson light onto the boy's cheeks, pulsing with a slow and steady rhythm that had nothing to do with the fire.

"Drop your sword," the boy said.

His voice was quiet. 

Dobbs didn't drop the sword. He couldn't. His hand was locked around the hilt, knuckles white, tendons standing out like rope. He stared at the boy-at the glowing eyes, at the heap of unconscious men, at the impossible ordinariness of grey robes and dark wet hair-and something inside him came apart.

He screamed.The raw, animal sound of a man whose world had stopped making sense, born from that place where fear and rage meet and fuse into something hotter than either. And he attacked.

He lunged across the fire, sword extended, point aimed at the boy's chest. A killing thrust, driven by desperation and the frantic hope that if he could just end this-make the boy stop existing the world would kneel back into order.

The boy's eyes flared.

Two narrow beams of red erupted. They struck Dobbs' sword hand with a precision that seemed almost careful, and the pain was immediate and total.

The hilt became a brand. The metal didn't glow, didn't melt, but the heat pouring through it was enough to blister, enough to sear, enough to make Dobbs' fingers spasm open against his will. The blade hit the ground with a clang, and Dobbs stumbled back, clutching his burned hand to his chest, the smell of his own scorched flesh filling his throat.

The boy's eyes faded to blue. Ordinary blue, the color of a summer sky, as if nothing had happened.

Dobbs' legs buckled. He sat down hard in the mud. He could feel the spreading warmth through his breeches, and he couldn't bring himself to care. There was no room for shame in the vast, howling emptiness that had opened in his chest.

"What are you?" The words came out as a whisper.

The boy didn't answer. He looked at Dobbs with those blue eyes and there was something in his expression that might have been pity.

A voice came from the darkness behind the boy.

"I told you to wait."

The speaker stepped into the firelight. He was young with a broad face and a nose that had been broken and healed off-center. He wore the mismatched armor of a hedge knight. His hair was brown and damp from the night air, his jaw dark with several days' growth, and his expression was that of a man who was not surprised but had nonetheless been hoping for better.

The boy turned to face him. "Why? They couldn't harm me."

"It's not about whether they could harm you." The knight crossed his arms, something tired in his stance, the posture of an argument visited before. "We work together. That means you don't go wading into a nest of cutthroats on your own."

"You'd have done the same thing I did."

"I might have. But I'd have done it slower, and with you at my back." The knight shook his head. "One day your gifts won't be enough, and on that day it will matter whether there's someone beside you."

The boy was quiet. Something in his face shifted-not quite agreement, but the shadow of it.

The knight stepped past him and looked down at Dobbs. His eyes moved over the burned hand, the wet breeches, the naked terror.

"Why did you kill the merchant?" he asked.

Dobbs stared. The question was so ordinary, so disconnected from the last several minutes, that it took him a moment to find his tongue.

"The merchant," the knight repeated. Patient. Hard.

"We only wanted the goods." The words spilled out thin and desperate. "That's all. The guards fought, and-"

"They fought because they were being robbed." The knight's voice was flat. "You could have taken the cart without killing. You chose otherwise." He looked at the boy. "Tie him with the rest."

Dobbs opened his mouth and then the boy moved.

Or rather: the boy was there, and then the boy was here. There was a sensation of displaced air, of rope drawn taut, and then Dobbs was on the ground with his wrists bound behind his back and his ankles lashed together, the knots tight and sure and utterly beyond him.

It had taken less than a breath. Less than the blink of an eye. One moment the boy was across the fire; the next he was kneeling beside Dobbs, securing the last knot with small, efficient hands, and the space between those two moments was simply blank-a gap in Dobbs' memory where something impossible had occurred and his mind had declined to record it.

The boy straightened. He looked down with those blue eyes, and the calm in them was harder to bear than the red had been. The red was power, at least-power that could be named and feared. The blue was simply looking. Weighing. Measuring in a balance Dobbs could not see and would not have understood even if he could.

The knight hauled Dobbs upright and propped him against the cart wheel beside the heap of bandits. "Now we wait," he said.

"For what?"

"The men from Crakehall. We sent word yesterday, before we came looking for you." He settled on a log near the fire, sword across his knees, eyes on the tree line. 

Dobbs did not sleep. He sat propped against the cart wheel, his burned hand throbbing steadily, his breeches growing cold and clammy, and he watched the boy.

The boy sat by the fire. He didn't try to sleep either. He sat with his legs folded beneath him, hands on his knees, eyes on the flames-and the flames, Dobbs was certain, danced for him. They leaned toward the boy as if drawn, stretching and reaching as if they recognized something in him that called to them. The light turned his features angular in a way that went beyond shadow.

Dobbs had heard stories. Whispers in taverns, warnings from septons, tales of creatures that walked among men wearing their faces. He thought of them now, sitting in the mud with his hands bound, and found they didn't quite fit. The stories never mentioned a creature that tied men up and waited patiently for the law to arrive. They never mentioned a thing with red eyes that burned the sword out of a man's hand rather than burning the man. They never mentioned whatever it was that moved behind a child's face and had chosen, again and again tonight, not to use all that it was.

The night stretched. The fire burned low. The unconscious men shifted and groaned. The boy watched the flames.

Toward dawn, the boy's name surfaced when the women in red arrived with the Crakehall riders. She spoke it quietly-almost under her breath, like a word of thanks-before she had even fully cleared the tree line. Kallen. The way a person says the name of something they had feared, for a moment, to have lost. The knight's name came later: Tomlyn. Small things to know about men who had undone you.

She came through the trees like a ship through still water, the Crakehall men-at-arms parting around her as if they had agreed to it without discussion. "Here they are, Ser Rolph," she said, without turning, and went straight to the boy. She was tall, her hair a deep crimson that seemed to hold the dawn light rather than merely reflect it, her eyes the color of garnet in firelight. 

"You are safe." She cupped his face and her eyes searched his with an intensity that had nothing of a guardian's scolding in it and everything of something older, something closer to devotion. "The Lord of Light kept you. As He always does."

The boy bore it with the patience of someone long accustomed to being regarded this way. "I'm fine, Melisandre."

"You went in alone."

"I waited for Tomlyn. Mostly."

She made a soft sound and pressed her forehead briefly to his. Then she straightened, smoothed his hair back from his face with both hands, and adjusted the collar of his doublet with the careful attention of someone handling something consecrated.

Dobbs watched this from the mud. There was something wrong with it. The woman was not young, not exactly, and she was clearly no fool. She carried herself like someone accustomed to being obeyed. And she was fussing over a muddy boy the way a septon fusses over a sacred flame: not with affection, precisely, but with reverence. As if the mud on his doublet were an affront to something holy. As if she had been afraid-genuinely, deeply afraid-not for him, but of what the world might have lost.

She held his gaze, then released him and stood, smoothing her red gown. Her eyes swept the clearing with professional calm-the cart, the scattered goods, the bandits in their heap. When her gaze passed over Dobbs it paused.

He felt those eyes on him like a hand pressed flat on his chest. They did not glow-nothing like the boy's-but they were old eyes, deep in a young face, and they saw something in him that made her look away with a faint, unconscious distaste, the way a person looks away from a wound.

The boy glanced at Dobbs too. Brief, still, considering. And Dobbs saw it again-not the red light, not the impossible speed, but the thing behind the blue. The thing that was not a boy, that had moved through a camp of eleven armed men like wind through grass, and had brought all of them to ground without a drop of blood shed, and had sat by the fire and waited for morning because it had decided to.

Then Ser Rolph was barking orders, and the thing was a boy again, and Melisandre was brushing mud from his robes, and the world went back to grinding along as it always did.

Ser Rolph was built for authority. He wore the Crakehall colors, brown and brindled, the black boar on his shield. He swung down from his saddle and surveyed the clearing: the cart, the scattered goods, the heap of unconscious bandits, the hedge knight by the fire.

"Ser Tomlyn." His voice was the bass rumble of stones finding their resting place. "Didn't expect you'd have the matter quite so... settled."

"They're yours," Tomlyn said. "Eleven, all breathing. The leader's Jory-he's on top."

Ser Rolph walked over and nudged the pile with his boot, received a groan, and nodded. "Eleven men, alive and answerable. Good." He looked up. "Your doing?"

Tomlyn glanced at the boy. Ser Rolph followed his gaze, and his expression moved through surprise to amusement.

"He tie the knots?" Ser Rolph asked finally.

"Among other things."

Ser Rolph looked at the boy a moment longer, then let it pass. He turned back to his men and began directing the work of rousing the bandits. One by one they surfaced from their stupor - groggy, blinking, confused in the particular way of men who had been drinking and found themselves in custody without a clear memory of the intervening hours. Most submitted without much fight. There wasn't the spirit for it, in the grey morning.

"He's no boy." Dobbs hadn't meant to speak. The words surfaced on their own, urgent past his better judgment. "Whatever he's told you-whatever you think you're seeing-there's something else in him. His eyes went red. He burned my hand without touching it. He was across the fire and then he was here without-"

"Right." Ser Rolph's tone was neither cruel nor kind. He looked at Dobbs the way a man looks at a cart stuck in mud-something to be dealt with, not argued with. 

"You know what you think you saw, on a dark night after drinking." Ser Rolph's gaze flicked to the burned hand, to the mud on Dobbs' breeches, then back to his face. "You fell. Or you grabbed a torch to light your way and were careless with it. Or you saw a lad with dark eyes and your fear put coals in them." He shrugged. "You'll have your say at the trial. Until then, keep the ghost stories for someone who's in the mood."

He turned away. Dobbs looked to Tomlyn, who had the decency to meet his eyes, though he said nothing. And Dobbs looked to the boy, who stood a little apart, watching the prisoner line form with an expression that was patient and serious and gave away nothing at all.

The cart was a wooden cage on wheels-thick bars, good lock-built for moving men who needed moving. They were packed into it a few at a time, the still-groggy ones first, then the ones who'd recovered enough to resist, and by the time they were all inside it was close and smelled of sour wine and sour fear.

Dobbs sat in the corner with his burned hand wrapped in a strip of cloth a man-at-arms had thrown at him. The pain had settled to a dull, constant throb, manageable as long as he didn't touch the edges of it.

"He's not a boy," Dobbs said, when they'd been rolling long enough that the clearing had vanished behind the trees.

"Shut your mouth, Dobbs," Rafe said.

"I'm telling you what I saw. His eyes-"

"Went red," Jory said, from the front of the cage. He said it flatly, without looking back. "And he moved faster than sight. And he burned your hand." He turned. His eyes were cold and very tired. "I know what you'll keep telling anyone who'll listen." He paused. "We were all unconscious. Not one of us saw what you saw. And you were alone in the dark after a long night's drinking, shaking before you'd seen anything at all by your own account." He said it without contempt, almost gently. "I'm not saying you're lying. I'm saying what your own eyes and your fear made together, in the dark, may not be what was there."

Dobbs opened his mouth and closed it.

"A boy tied us all up," Little Tom said. He was sixteen, round-faced, not quite steady. "That part's strange enough, isn't it? You don't need magic for it to be strange."

Dobbs said nothing. He looked down at his burned hand. He thought about Malk, who had been standing pissing against a tree and then simply wasn't there anymore. He thought about the screaming from the camp that had lasted half a breath and then stopped. He thought about the way the boy had looked at him-not like prey, not like an obstacle-but like something to be assessed, weighed, decided about. And the decision had been: not dead. Not even badly hurt. Just stopped.

He didn't say any of this. What was the point. He folded the thought away and watched the trees go past and listened to the wheels.

Crakehall Castle rose from the landscape like a clenched fist. The cart rattled through the gates. The prisoners were unloaded, lined against the wall in the outer yard.

Lord Crakehall came out himself. He was a big man-big as a bull, big as the castle he lived in-with a red face and a bristling beard and eyes that missed nothing. He walked the line of prisoners with his hands clasped behind his back, reading faces the way a man reads land.

He stopped at Jory.

"You're the leader."

Jory didn't deny it.

"You killed a merchant traveling under my protection. A man who paid his toll. Who trusted my word." Lord Crakehall's voice was quiet in a way that was worse than shouting. "And you made my word a lie."

He turned away.

"Hang the leader," he said.

Two men took Jory by the arms. He didn't struggle. He walked with his head up, as if he'd already made some private peace, and the noose went around his neck, and that was the end of Jory, who had seemed so certain that morning and certain for a good while before it.

The rest of them watched. Some looked away. Some stared at the ground. Pudding made a sound that wasn't quite a word.

Lord Crakehall turned back to face the line.

"The rest of you," he said. "The rope, or the black."

"The black," Dobbs said.

He said it before the rest, before he'd thought it through. He said it because his burned hand was throbbing and his breeches were still damp with cold and because the boy was somewhere in this castle or on the road, and Dobbs wanted to put as much distance as the world allowed between himself and whatever the boy was. The Wall was north. Hundreds of miles north, through kingdoms and cold and open country, and the demons there were supposed to be the other kind-old demons, snow and darkness and dead things that the stories kept conveniently far away.

One by one, the others chose the same. Little Tom. Rafe. Pudding. Silent Edd, who nodded when Lord Crakehall's eyes found him and had nothing else to offer.

The carts came. Dobbs climbed up into the cart bed and sat with his back against the boards and let the castle fall behind.

He didn't understand it. That was the thing that stayed with him, past the fear, past the shame, past the image of Jory turning slowly in the morning air. He didn't understand why a thing with that kind of power had chosen to do so little with it. Power was for using. Power was the only lesson Flea Bottom had ever really taught-take what you can reach, hold what you take, trust nothing you can't see. The boy could have killed them all. Could have scattered them, burned them, done with them whatever such a thing did with men who were in its way. Instead: a heap of sleeping bodies, one burned hand, knots tied fast, and then sitting quietly by the fire until the proper people arrived.

What are you? he'd asked.

The boy hadn't answered. Perhaps there was no answer, or perhaps it was the kind of answer that required a different sort of man to understand-something about choosing what to do with what you were, about putting the judgment of men above your own just because you could afford not to.

Or perhaps he was still wrong about it. Perhaps Jory was right, and fear and dark and wine had built something out of a serious child and a skilled hedge knight and one unlucky trip across the fire, and Dobbs had been making it larger ever since.

He looked at his burned hand.

When the gates of Crakehall had finally disappeared behind the curve of the road, he had looked back once-he hadn't meant to-and seen Tomlyn and the woman in red standing at the gate, watching the wagons go. The boy was between them. He had raised one hand.

Not a wave. More like acknowledgment. The brief, serious recognition of something shared between two people who had faced each other across a fire in the dark and seen something in each other that neither could quite name.

Dobbs had turned away. He'd fixed his eyes on the road ahead and kept them there. There was no answer he could give to a thing like that, and no name for the feeling it left behind- something between gratitude and grief and the faint, unsettling possibility that being spared by a creature of impossible power was not the strangest part of what had happened to him.

The strangest part was that it had felt, for just a moment, almost like being seen.