Chapter 37: At the Mercy of Others
Tch.
This fucking bastard.
This bastard had a sly tongue. A snake’s tongue. No, worse. A thief’s tongue. A survivor’s tongue — the kind that had talked its way out of a hundred punishments, a hundred locked cells, a hundred times it should have died.
No matter what the grey-haired man said, no matter how logical or moral or strong or simple his words were, the thin prisoner always found a way to twist the situation, to turn it inside out, to make it sound like mercy was stupidity and cruelty was wisdom, like wrong was right if you said it with enough confidence.
Danny stared at him, at that thin face that could look so pitiful when begging for help on a cliff and so cruel and self-righteous when safe on flat ground. The same mouth that had screamed "Don’t let go!" could now say "Put him to good use" without even flinching.
I can try to reason with him... I can tell him he’s lying, that he was never a hunter, that the mark thing is made up to scare us. I can prove the village was burned by bandits, not curses.
His eyes shifted toward the grey-haired man, who stood with his back to him, broad shoulders tense, his rusted sword pointed down the snowy path toward the dark between the pines.
But the grey-haired man is the problem. Not because he’s bad. Because he’s good. Too good to see a lie until it’s too late. Because he wants to believe people can be reasoned with, that people can be good if you just talk long enough.
Danny swallowed, his throat raw from cold air, from shouting. He looked at the grey-haired man’s broad back, his scarred hands that had carried him when he couldn’t walk, his sword that had killed wolves for them.
Could he win against him if it came to a fight? If the old man decided to agree with the thin prisoner? If they both turned?
No.
There was no way. Absolutely no way. Not in a hundred tries, not in a thousand. It wasn’t even a question worth asking.
The man was stronger, twice his weight, twenty years of experience fighting men and monsters, armed with a sword even if it was rusted and chipped. Danny had seen him kill a snow hare with a thrown stone from twenty meters away. He had seen the faint glow around his arms when he got angry — his Echo, his real power.
Danny didn’t even have an Echo. At least, not one he knew how to use, not one that would come when he called. Just these eyes that everyone hated, these dark eyes that his mother said were a gift but everyone else called cursed, the eyes that marked him as DoD the moment they saw him.
Damn it. I’m useless again. After all that climbing, I’m back to being useless, standing behind someone’s back.
His hands slowly tightened around the cold rock he had picked up from the path, the only weapon he had, pathetic and small against a sword and against a monster and against words. A child holding a rock while two men decided if he lived.
So, in the end...
His life was in the hands of this old soldier. This old man who had been kind to him, who had shared his water, who had called him "lad" instead of "curse."
After everything he had done to survive. After escaping the monsters in the lower forest when the caravan burned and the horses screamed. After surviving the worm in the valley that ate the horses whole and nearly ate him, that left that scar on his leg. After surviving the first eyeless wolf that scratched him across the chest and should have killed him, that gave him this fever.
After climbing this damned death mountain with bleeding fingers, with no gloves, pulling this very bastard up the cliff inch by inch while his own shoulders were coming out of their sockets.
After everything... all that pain, all that climbing, all that not giving up when it would have been easier to just let go and fall...
He could still die here on a pretty, snowy old road, in the morning light, because someone else decided with words that he wasn’t worth saving, that his life was cheaper than theirs, that he was bad luck.
Damn it again. Is that what the DoD clan is? Cheap lives? Is that all my mother left me? A name that makes it okay to throw me away?
The thin prisoner continued speaking, seeing that Danny had gone quiet, seeing that silence as victory, his confidence growing with every second the wolf in the trees didn’t attack, with every second the grey-haired man didn’t shout at him to shut up.
"But you should understand something, old man. Something important you are forgetting because you’re trying to be a hero, because you think this is a story."
He pointed toward the path ahead, toward the imperial road they could almost see through the gap in the mountains, a faint line of smoke, and then behind, toward the monster that was listening.
"There are three of us, and there is one monster. That’s bad math. Three slow people can’t outrun one fast thing on this narrow path. You know it. I know it."
The grey-haired man remained silent, but he was listening, his sword still pointed down the path, his head slightly tilted. That silence was dangerous. That silence meant he was thinking about it.