Chapter 4: The Knight at the Pass

Chapter 4: Chapter 4: The Knight at the Pass

The Pass of Carrow was nine paces wide at its narrowest point, and Dame Aveline Rosier had been holding it since dawn.

Snow blew sideways off the peaks. Below her, the switchback road ran down into a valley full of smoke, and up that road came the Ashen Legion: rank on rank of grey shields, grey spears, grey faces that did not tire and did not bleed the way men should. Behind her, somewhere past the ridge, King Oswin’s wagons were crawling toward the coast with the last of the realm packed inside them. The children. The records. The crown, for whatever a crown was worth now.

Nine paces. One knight.

She had started the morning with forty. The last of them, old Sir Brannic, had fallen an hour ago with his hand on her shoulder, telling her to hold.

She held.

Her sword, Vigil, had been her mother’s, and her grandmother’s before that, and it had never felt so heavy. Her shield was split down the middle. Three spears were in her: one through the thigh, one under the ribs where the mail had torn, and one through the meat of her shoulder, its haft snapped off where she’d broken it with her own hand so she could keep swinging.

The Legion’s line closed again, grey shields locked edge to edge, pressing forward over their own dead.

Aveline lifted Vigil one more time.

Far behind her, a horn sounded. Three long notes, rising.

The wagons were through.

She laughed. It came out wet and red, and it hurt more than the spears. Good, she thought. Good. Then I’m finished.

She had one breath left. She decided to spend it on the next man through.

Then the light took her.

It didn’t feel like dying. She had imagined dying often enough to know.

It felt like falling upward. The snow vanished. The cold vanished. The weight of the spears vanished, and then she was dropping feet-first into water, black and knee-deep, and the silence closed around her like a cathedral door.

She stood in a round chamber of skulls.

Thousands of them filled carved niches, each with a green candle burning in its eye. Smoke hung in the air, thick and bruise-colored, stinking of incense and scorched flesh. She looked down. Her mail was whole. Her thigh was whole. She touched her side where the spear had gone in and found smooth, unbroken steel. Vigil was still in her hand, clean, as if it had never touched a Legion throat.

She should have been dead. She was very sure of that.

There was no enemy army here. There was no pass. There was a boy.

He lay in the water at her feet, flat on his back, and he was dying. She knew what that looked like better than she knew her own face. He was thin, maybe twenty, in a strange patched jacket with its left side burned black and smoking. His ribs sat wrong beneath the cloth. His lips were turning blue. His eyes were open, staring past her at something above them both.

Aveline looked up.

A king of bones stood over them, three meters tall, crowned in fingers and crusted in barnacles. It held a chain in both hands, and at the chain’s end, a censer the size of a barrel was already falling, trailing smoke, straight down at the boy’s chest.

She didn’t know this place. She didn’t know this boy. She didn’t know what she was now, or whose war this was.

She knew exactly one thing. She was a knight, and someone was dying in front of her.

Aveline moved.

She threw herself between them, and the words came out before she chose them, the way prayers did, the way oaths always had:

"You will not die while I stand."

The world answered.

A window of pale light snapped open at the edge of her vision, sharp as a herald’s cry.

[Oath sworn.]

[Class awakened: Paladin.]

[Origin Skill awakened: Oathbearer.]

Then the censer hit her.

She caught it on the ruin of her shield. The steel glowed orange at once, and she braced for it to melt the way she had seen iron melt in the Legion’s forges. It didn’t. The heat went through the shield instead, into her arm, into her chest, and every bit of the blow that had been meant for the boy poured into her like molten lead.

It hurt more than all three spears together.

And then the pain turned.

It didn’t fade. It changed, the way iron changes in a forge, and it came roaring out of her chest, down her arm, and into Vigil. Fire ran along the blade, white as a winter sun, so bright that the candle flames in a thousand skulls bent away from it.

Aveline looked at her sword. Then she looked at the King.

"Oh," she said softly. "I see."

She stepped into the slack of the chain.

Her first cut took a hand’s width of bone off the King’s forearm. Her second split the barnacled plate over its knee, where cracks already showed from some earlier blow. The King staggered back a step, then another, swinging the censer in a wide, hissing arc. She met it with her shield, felt the heat pour in and turn to fire again, and her third cut blazed brighter than the first two combined.

She drove it back across the chamber. Up the altar steps. Over the altar itself, the King’s heel catching on the stone and its crown of fingers tilting. Smoke boiled around them and water sprayed with every step. Vigil hissed whenever it moved, trailing white light behind it like the tail of a comet.

The King slammed into the far wall, skulls cascading from their niches, and for one moment Aveline thought it might simply fall.

Then the floor moved.

Bone hands broke the surface of the water all around the chamber. Arms followed, then helmets, then whole skeletons in rusted mail, dragging halberds up out of the black. Ten. Twenty. More, clawing up between the pillars, candle-eyes flickering to life one after another until the chamber was ringed with them.

Aveline backed down the altar steps until her heel touched the boy’s shoulder. He was still breathing. Barely, but breathing.

She raised her shield and lifted Vigil, still burning white.

Bone knights closing from every side. One knight holding the line, with a dying soul at her back.

Fewer than at Carrow, she noted.

"Stay down," she told the boy, without looking back. "I’m not finished."