Chapter 65 — A Place for the Children

The slum did not erupt into cheers the moment Graeme fled, and people waited. They had lived too long under men who returned with more guards after losing an argument, and doors stayed half closed, faces remained behind shutters, and mothers kept children near walls until the last Caron rider vanished around the far end of the lane. Then the silence broke.

Not with celebration at first, but with movement. Refugees came toward the damaged shack carrying what they had been too frightened to bring during the fight: water, strips of cloth, a loaf of dark bread, a cracked pot, and two blankets. Nobody seemed to own enough to give anything away comfortably.

Bor ignored all of it until he had checked the children, and he wiped blood from one hand before touching the first girl's face. "Where are you hurt?" She shook her head and grabbed his wrist.

"Mara?"

"Here."

"Tomm?" A boy emerged from behind the broken door. Bor called every name, and more than a dozen children answered, ranging from small enough to need carrying to old enough to pretend they had not been crying. Several held bundles salvaged from the shack; one little boy had rescued a wooden horse with only three legs.

Only after the last child answered did Bor's own knees begin to shake, and Brienne caught his arm.

"Sit."

"Children first."

"They are standing; you are not going to be for much longer." Rodrick arrived with his medicine roll and looked at the broken shaft in Bor's back.

"If you have been fighting with that still inside you, I am going to assume your intelligence is stored somewhere other than your skull." Bor blinked at him.

"Sit."

He sat. Rodrick cut away cloth around the wound, cleaned the skin with Red Sun Flame, and examined the angle, and the arrowhead had gone into muscle without reaching the chest cavity, but Bor's fighting had enlarged the wound around it. Removing it required opening the track enough that the barbs would not tear more flesh on the way out. "This will hurt," Rodrick said.

"Already hurts."

"Then you are prepared."

Bor gripped a piece of wood while Rodrick worked, and his fingers left dents in it; the arrowhead came free red and ugly. Rodrick packed the wound, wrapped Bor's torso with clean linen, and ordered him to avoid heavy lifting; Bor looked toward the children and said nothing. "That includes children," Rodrick added.

"What if one needs carrying?"

"Then someone whose back does not have a hole in it carries them." Brienne's mouth twitched.

While Rodrick worked, the boy who had fetched Arlan finally supplied the pieces Bor was too busy to tell, and Bor had grown up in these same alleys with no known family and no trade except strength. He began carrying sacks at the docks while still young, then timber, barrels, and stone as his size made heavier work possible, and the nickname came after he killed a boar with his hands during a dockside hunt and later crushed a bandit's skull in a fight.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

None of that explained the children. They had accumulated one at a time: a girl whose mother died of fever, two brothers left behind when a caravan vanished, a dock boy beaten until Bor intervened. He never called the shack an orphanage and never claimed charity. He simply worked more shifts, bought more meal, and made the older ones learn to watch the younger.

"He says if you can lift a sack, you can lift one for someone smaller," the boy explained.

Bor pretended not to hear him. The refugees around them had their own stories about Graeme: goods taken without payment, men beaten for speaking back, women avoiding certain streets when his party rode through. None of those complaints had become a formal charge because filing one meant handing the complaint to officials who served the same power being complained about.

Arlan listened and did not promise justice for every past injury. He could not investigate a district he did not rule, and promises made for applause were still lies; what he could do was preserve witnesses, keys, and the tally Wayne had taken from Graeme. Bor stood more carefully this time and walked to Arlan, and he dropped to one knee with enough weight that mud splashed his trousers.

"You saved them."

"We stopped Graeme."

"You saved them," Bor repeated. "I have no silver, no house. No letters; I can work and I can fight. My life is mine; I give it to you."

Arlan looked beyond him. The children clustered together at the edge of the shack, and the oldest girl had already divided the bread someone brought so the smaller children received pieces first, and whatever Bor had lacked in money, he had managed to build a household out of people no one else wanted. "Where do they sleep tonight?" Arlan asked, and Bor's jaw tightened.

"Here, if the roof holds." The roof did not look as though it intended to make promises.

"Then all of you come to FireStorm." Bor looked up sharply.

"All?"

"All; there are repaired houses near the east wall. Food is accounted for; work is expected from adults and older children according to ability. The small ones remain children." Bor stared as though Arlan had changed languages.

"I can work for all of them."

"That is not how the holding works; people who can work do. People who cannot yet do not starve because they failed to be born useful."

The giant bowed his head, and he did not repeat the dramatic oath. He simply pressed one fist into the mud and said, "Then I follow you." That was enough.

Wayne cleared one wagon, and the refugees helped gather the children's belongings, and an old woman brought a sack with two measures of meal and refused to take it back when Bor told her she needed it herself. "They need it today," she said. "I will need it tomorrow; we can argue tomorrow."

The older children climbed into the wagon around Bor, and Brienne took the smallest girl up herself when the child hesitated at the wheel. Rodrick inspected Bor's bandage once more and threatened consequences if he lifted anything heavier than a cup, and they were nearly ready to leave when ordered hoofbeats filled the street. The mood changed instantly around them, and this was not Graeme returning with another handful of household men.

Rainwood's garrison entered from both ends of the road. Spearmen formed in three ranks, enough bodies to close the entire lane, while archers waited behind them with bows lowered but strung; Wayne counted roughly two hundred before the movement stopped. Their commander rode to the front carrying a token marked with House Caron's black nightingales, and Bor started to rise from the wagon, and Arlan pushed him back by one shoulder.

"You have demonstrated bleeding already."

"My lord—"

"Sit." Brienne mounted beside Arlan, and Wayne moved his ten guards between the garrison and the wagons, shields ready but not raised, and the commander lifted Elton's token.

"By order of Lord Elton Caron, all persons responsible for murder, assault, and disturbance in Rainwood are to lay down their weapons and surrender for judgment." His gaze settled on Arlan.

"Anyone who resists will be taken by force before the light fails tonight."