Page 39 of Brimstone

That shut him up. Ialmostwished I hadn’t mentioned it. But there was a tension hanging between us still, despite his playful teasing over Saeris, and one of us had to bring it up eventually. The sooner we cleared the air, the better.

My brother hung his head, thinking hard as we trudged up the slope. It had snowed in the night, and a fresh blanket of powder hid the frozen mud and the black scorch marks that scarred the ground below.

“I know I have a blind spot when it comes to him,” he said after a while. “I know it’s not as easy for you to hate him as it is for me.”

“Nothing is ever easy here,” I muttered. “And no matter how badly we might want things to be black and white, most situations never are.Youtaught me that.”

“I know, I know.” His breath plumed around him as he kicked a pathway through the loose snow. “The atrocities he committed at Malcolm’s behest, though . . .” He shook his head, unable to make his peace with it.

“You know what I’m going to say.”

“I do,” he agreed quietly. “And Idounderstand. He didn’t have a choice. If Malcolm commanded him to do something, he had to obey. But he should never have found himself in that position in the first place, should he?”

And this was what it all boiled down to: the night when Taladaius should have joined our brotherhood and foolishlychose death instead. I chewed on the pain of that memory, uncomfortable to find myself thrown back into the past.

“You’ve never made a mistake, then?” I asked softly. “I know I have. Too many to count.”

My brother made an unhappy sound, clearing his throat. He held his tongue, but I already knew the answer to the question. There were scores of decisions that he would have changed if he could have. Plenty of harsh words he would have taken back. A thousand instances where he would have altered the course of his actions, knowing the consequences they would have after the fact. But it was useless, glancing over a shoulder and wishing to change the past. That was the pastime of fools and politicians. A warrior couldn’t afford such luxuries.

“Let me ask you this,” I said. “Aside from the decision he made to join Malcolm, what would you have done in his shoes? That night outside the gates of Ajun. Foley was his friend, too, once. If you’d found me there, lying in the snow, my neck broken, dying . . . what would you have done?”

He stewed for a moment, but not long enough to convince me that he’d really thought about it. “I would have let you go. We are Proelia, Fisher. Our sole mission is to fight the horde, not join its fucking ranks.”

I let him fume as we summited the hill. Then, quietly I asked, “Are yousureabout that?”

A sharp wind cut through my leathers, tossing my hair. I looked to Ren, expecting to find him annoyed by my probing, but I found that his mouth was parted in surprise instead. He was looking down the other side of the slope, at the camp . . .

. . . and the utter destruction that lay before us.

Irrín wasn’t a city. It was a living organism. Moveable. It grew and shifted. Where there were no tents one day, a whole new section of the camp was liable to have sprung up by the next. But now there were no tents at all. The encampment wasin ruins. Where Irrín had once stood, buttressed against the banks of the Darn, a scorched black crater now stretched for as far as the eye could see. Smoke rose from smoldering patches of ground where the embers of a fire still glowed red hot amid the debris.

Charred wood.

Scraps of cloth.

Swords abandoned and blackened in the dirt.

We hadn’t smelled the smoke. It was too cold to smell anything at all, and we hadn’t been paying attention besides.

We hadn’t noticed the quiet.

The camp was destroyed. The tavern was gone. The armory. Everything. Only black ash and bones remained.

“What in all the holy gods’ fucking names?” Ren whispered.

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

Eleven thousand warriors had been camped here. More, probably. And now there was no sign of them. There were dead, yes. But not enough bones to account for all who had called Irrín home. It wasn’tpossible.

The sparse vegetation that had grown along the riverside was all cinder now. Only the huge oak remained—the very same tree we had tied the feeders to yesterday, before I’d gone to Ammontraíeth to show Saeris and Tal the heads of the feeders we’d fought to put down.

Their bodies were still strapped to the tree, but something had changed. The feeders’ limbs were fused with the rough trunk, flesh melting into bark. Their skin was gray and sallow, covered in a thin network of black vines that wrapped around the oak, strangling it. From the base of the tree, blackened roots as thick as a warrior’s arm burst out of the ground, snaking over the exposed dirt for thirty feet before plunging back below. The roots bore deep gashes, as if someone had taken an ax to them but hadn’t managed to cleave them through.

“Whatisthat?” I asked, squinting down at the destruction. My stomach clenched like a fist around my breakfast. “Down there? Coming out of those roots?”

My brother peered down at the nightmare scene, his face drained of color. “It looks like blood,” he answered. “Black blood, pouring from the gashes as if they’re wounds. Look.” He pointed down at an area of ground by the river that hadn’t been touched by fire. “It’s contaminating the ground.”

And sure enough, it was.