Torsten Gunn sat atop his courser and looked out over the rolling hill country. Slashed with craggy gullies and broken rock formations, the lush green grass rose to meet slopes of yellow gorse. Heather swayed like crowds of drunks in places; dusky purple and pigeon wing grey. Mist hung in dreamy swathes in the hollows. Never ceased to stir awe in him, the tribeland of Aldinfang, the place he used to call home. Wondered if that awe would ever leave him. Maybe when he died, but not before.

He looked over all these things, recalling the secret names he had concocted for them when he’d been a small boy. In the days when he ran wild over this heathland like a scrawny, pale ghost. Long before he’d met his beautiful wife, been blessed with his daughter, cursed by having had Cameron Gray cross his path, or taught himself the fine old Fallaros traditions of fighting, blackmailing and cattle-thieving.

From his vantage point, hidden in the dark green lee of a boulder as big as a crofter’s hovel, Gunn could make out the road below; a discarded brown ribbon in all the greenish grey. His horse moved nervously under him. Jogged the hand that held a stub of charcoal. Sent a meandering black line across the tight verse of script already jotted down on the scrap of parchment in his other hand.

Gunn clicked his tongue in annoyance.

It was a fine-looking horse; dark as sin, with rear haunches that looked capable of stoving in a barn door. He’d taken it from a Aldinfang guard captain, who’d been leading a company of green-coated soldiery along a river gully that Gunn and his men had been hiding out by. Took it from the man after he'd had Boniface Woe gouge out all his fingernails and some of his teeth with a paring knife so that he’d tell them where and when the next tax caravan was coming through. The slobbering, crying captain had obliged––with some difficulty after the teeth. Gunn had rewarded him by sticking his sword slowly up under the man's sternum and twisting it, seeking for his rotten heart. Boni Woe had laughed and had thrown the teeth into the stream to lie with the other stones.

Gunn sighed gently through his nose, rubbing at his scrubby brown beard. He watched the white water of a different river running like molten light down the tor to his right. Jotted down another thoughtful line on the parchment.

The courser shifted again. As fine as the beast looked, Gunn had begun to think it had not the temperament for the outlaw life. It did not belong here, and things that did not belong could not be expected to survive.

Since Mai had gone on, Torsten had not felt like he really belonged anywhere. He wondered whether that meant he was long to persist in this world. He found he didn’t much care.

He was a different man now. Lived a faster existence. Didn’t dwell on whether any hour he spent now was better than any hour he could recall, because all the hours before he had last seen Mai were dead. All those memories that he had shared with her were gone too, because he no longer had her to share them with.

He heard hooves thudding on the springy turf, approaching.

“What you doin’, boss?”

It was the new boy. The young lad that Gunn and his band had picked up after waylaying and raiding a bunch of unfortunate cattle drovers. They’d happened to spy the men and kine traversing a long brae a few miles east of an old Fangfolk garrison stronghold. Money and meat.

He was a nice-looking lad. Pale skin, with eyes the colour of dying milkwort flowers. His brows were drawn down in a scowl that didn’t come close to disguising how wet behind the ears he was. He’d sued Gunn’s band for mercy when they’d surrounded the kine and the drovers. Had begged and cried to be allowed to join up when he saw the older men choose to fight and die.

This was still an adventure to him. He hadn’t figured that it was his life now. He still believed that Gunn had given him a gift when he had let him live and ride with the company. Hadn’t deduced that what he might currently perceive to be a temporary mistake forced upon him would most likely turn into a lifelong regret.

“Writing, Euan,” Gunn said.

“A poem?”

Gunn grunted his assent. Hoped the lad would take that as a sign to piss off. He didn’t.

“What’s it about?”

Gunn gazed over the savage beauty of the landscape before him, as the capricious wind whipped his long brown tresses, shot with more than a little silver now, around his face.

“That,” he said, nodding.

Euan’s voice, speaking from over his right shoulder, was nonplussed.

“That’s just the land, boss,” he said.

High overhead, a buzzard rode the thermals, looking for something to fall on.

“Just land. Just everything. As fine an everything as a man ever laid an eye on, I’d wager. Beautiful and unforgiving. The sort of place that’ll kill you even as you stand admirin’ it.”

He held the finished poem above his head and let it go. The wind snatched the ten lines of words away, to deliver them to only the gods knew where.

“Don’t weigh much do they?” Gunn said, watching the poem vanish beyond his knowing.

“Boss?”

“Words. Don’t have much substance for things that can lie so heavy on a soul.”

“They’re just words, boss," the lad said.

“Words can sustain you when you’ve got naught else, boy, so long as they burn hot enough,” Gunn said, glancing at the buzzard that hung in the sky. “Keep you going like hope. Fill you up like bread.”

He turned his fidgeting horse. Saw Euan looking at the mackerel-skin sky, where the poem had vanished.

“What did the poem say?” the boy asked.

Torsten Gunn clicked his tongue at his horse and began to ride back to camp.

“Them words weren’t meant for you,” he said. “But if you stop with your bloody chin-wagging and follow me, I’ll give you some that are. We’ve a task needs doin’.”

* * *

The caravan of half a dozen riders and the single tax carriage rumbled along the rutted road with as much speed as the whip in the hand of the carriage driver could eke out of the horses. There were four in the traces and, as of yet, they had not been pushed too hard. They were strong, they had run the road before, and they were less than a day from the township where they were scheduled to pass the night. Now though, as the sun, running veiled above the dolorous clouds, dipped towards the westward horizon, the procession entered the floor of a winding valley which leant itself wonderfully to ambush. Their pace quickened to a gallop.

The faces of the men sitting atop the horses were set and fierce, their eyes roving across the steep valley sides, moving from rock to rock. They were experienced troopers and had quieted those thoughts concerned with their immediate futures. They thought of the pay they were due, of the whisky and mutton that awaited them that evening, of the warm hearths of their homes beyond that.

Like something dying, the tense caravan took the path of least resistance. The wheels of the carriage shattered the still puddles of the potholed road. All eyes were forward. Teeth ached in clenched jaws. There was the undeniable shared sense that they were running down the dark side of some mean street.

“Be steadfast, my lads,” the coachman whispered to his horses.

The thunder of the footfalls of the ten horses reverberated off the hills and the rocks and the underside of the dirty sky. Fingers lay lightly on sword hilts and on the butts of the pistols that a few of the guards had wedged into their belts. The sign of the Count of Aldinfang, a curving eyetooth, was painted in green on the side of the lurching tax wagon. It was a shield, a ward.

It was an invitation.

The first couple of arrows dropped out of the grey sky and thudded into the carriage roof. A third hissed and twittered, like a grouse breaking cover from the heather, as it passed by the first of the rearguard riders and hit the second under the armpit. He squeezed the flanks of his mount as his hold on the reins loosened and the horse plunged forward with a shrill squeal. The injured rider was kicked out the back door, tumbled off the rear of his horse and landed hard in the muddy road.

He screamed briefly for his mother and the gods, none of whom appeared. Then, he was ridden down by the first of the four bandits that had issued from out behind a pile of enormous lichen-covered boulders that concealed a skinny ravine that ran between a couple of craggy hills.

The sable mare that Torsten Gunn rode trampled the fallen caravan guard into the hard, stony mud of the road. Iron-shod hooves snapped bones and opened wounds in soft flesh and then passed onwards. The animal might not have been made for the wilds, but it had been bred for war.

Gunn spurred the mare on. He held the reins with one hand, guiding the beast with his legs, urging it on with hissing breath.

He could hear the dull tattoo of the three horses coming behind him. Knew that the four bowmen he’d stationed behind a rise would be following on as fast as they could. The rich scent of churned earth and torn grass filled his nose. A bitter rashness, liberating and intoxicating, thrilled through his head and frosted his blood and bones.

One of the fleeing guardsmen turned in his saddle, a flintlock pistol in his hand. The weapons could be good from one-hundred paces. They could be bad from fifteen. Gunn smiled into the barrel of the gun. He’d learned that it wasn’t heroic good fortune that delivered a man out of the hands of one fate and into another, it was twisted chance. He would have been more worried if the guard had been aiming for the man behind him.

The pistol went off with a roar that cracked the air. Sparks. Smoke left swirling in the wake of the fleeing horse.

The man over Gunn’s left shoulder fell. Jaw ripped clean away from his head. Blood sprayed joyously out across the wet grass and dock leaves that bordered the road, doing a fair imitation of the berries of the cowberry bush that it liberally speckled. His tongue hung from his ruined maw like a bloody eel.

Gunn’s courser charged through the pistol smoke, nostrils flaring, as a couple more shots rang out and thudded into the turf nearby. He pulled his own pistol from his belt and levelled it in one smooth motion, squeezed the trigger and felt it buck in his hand. The guard, whose head he had been aiming at, lurched in his saddle as the ball hit him in the small of the back, but didn’t go down. Gunn let the spent pistol drop.

The tax wagon swayed and bounced through the ruts and puddles as the coachman urged his four horses on with wordless threats and calls of encouragement. Pleading. Cajoling. Warning. It rounded a bend, following the line of the beautiful hills that trapped it. A tentative rain spotted the surging flanks of the horses. Mingled with the nervous sweat on the brow of the coachman. A rising wind hissed through the heath bedstraw and set the wood sage to bending.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

There were only two options available to the caravan: to pull up and stand and fight, or to ride on and hope they came across help of some kind. The four horses pulling the carriage could make the township. They’d be lathered and blown and dying of thirst, but they’d probably make it. Horses were smart beasts in many ways, but they feared the whip above all else—even death.

An arrow looped over Gunn’s head from behind and struck one of the guard’s horses in the arse. It screamed, eyes rolling, and leapt forward, but not before another arrow had smacked wetly into its gaskin. Gunn felt a twinge of guilt at the sight of the blood running down the animal’s leg. The innocent always paid the heaviest price when terrible men went to work.

The lamed horse and its rider fell back a few paces, slowing inexorably. The guardsman, long grey hair blowing free behind him, cast a glance back over his shoulder. He looked scared and stubborn in equal measure. Scared at the fact that he was standing on the precipice of the dark from which they’d all come and would all go back to. Stubborn in the face of the fact that his death was here.

One of Gunn’s men––Meiklejohn––pulled his horse to the right and hit the guard in the spine with the wood axe he carried. Made a noise like a rack of ribs being chopped into with a cleaver on a butcher’s block. Meiklejohn cursed as the axe was wrenched from his hand, pulled by the lifeless man being thrown from his injured mount.

Gunn could see that the other guards were wavering. Only four of them left now, one of them wounded, and he had close on a dozen men seething up the roadways behind him. He gave his mare his heels, came up alongside the rider he’d already shot.

A loud report and a cloud of pistol smoke issued from the carriage and Gunn ducked instinctively, hunkering down alongside his horse’s flank. The world churned by beneath him, streaks of brown and green and grey. He was sure he could hear the pounding of the courser’s great heart.

He pulled himself upright just in time to catch sight of the weasel-faced man that his company referred to as the Stoat raise his hand to strike at one of the other guardsmen. His cruel face was contorted with a vile anticipation.

That expectation turned to horror as the guard whipped around and cut at the Stoat with a thin sword that went through the side of his neck like a hot wire through lard. Crimson misted the damp air and the Stoat toppled sideways, pulping his skull against a rock and spreading his brains like pink porridge across the dirt.

Gunn turned his attention back to the injured man. He could see the guard’s blood running down the side of his horse. Could see the mess of cloth and flesh where his bullet had struck, and the pallor of the man’s face underneath a beard in which a pine marten could’ve hidden. Gunn drew his broadsword and urged his horse alongside and, with care, pushed it into the guard’s side. Pushed and pushed, leaning forward to inch the blade further into the man’s vitals, feeling the change in resistance as the steel slid through, skin, muscle and organs. The guard roared like an animal, spraying spittle. His horse suddenly slowed and reared. Gunn’s blade slid free and the guard vanished from his view to be hacked down by Breck, an enormous man with shoulders as wide as two axe handles, who came behind.

The carriage rounded a long bend and entered the fringes of a damp fir forest; a belt of trees only a mile or so wide, through which the road cut, following a low ridge of moss-covered rock.

Another fleeing rider slipped quietly from his saddle with an arrow in between his shoulder blades, crashing and rolling through the bracken while his horse ran on.

There was another sharp explosion as a pistol was fired from the carriage. It missed the grizzled Kerr, who was riding just ahead of Gunn now, and ricocheted off the natural rock wall with a harsh, irregular sound, causing his mount to shy away.

One of the remaining guards was gamely attempting to refill his pistol while he rode. As he poured powder down the barrel from the small powder horn around his neck, Boniface Woe swung her stallion around behind him and lunged at the distracted man with her spear. The blade raked across the back of his head and ripped his ear off. The man howled, dropping powder and pistol. Boni, snarling like some delirious thing, rammed the spear at him again and this time caught him under the jaw. The blade pierced his throat and Boni, wedging the butt of the spear against her bony shoulder, turned her roan stallion in towards him, pushing the spear into the rider’s head and forcing him off his mount. The man fell into the mud, taking the spear with him, and the auburn-haired Woe howled with delight.

The last guard spurred his horse around the side of the carriage as Gunn and his company moved in to close the net. Gunn eased back, motioning for the others to do so, as they passed a lightning-struck tree.

The carriage and guard pulled ahead.

There was a rolling crack from up ahead, followed by another.

The coachman lurched in his seat, scrabbling at his belly, the reins suddenly lax in his hand as he endeavoured to hold his guts in. The final surviving guardsman was plucked from his saddle and thrown unceremoniously into the road in a bloom of arterial spray.

Gunn’s courser trampled over him, followed by Breck. Boniface Woe pulled viciously on the reins of her stallion, bringing him to a sliding stop, leapt from the saddle and pounced on the wheezing, broken man. A couple of savage slashes with her dirk and he was done.

Gunn rode on with Breck and the others. The carriage was slowing as the blowing horses, no longer being goaded on by the dying coachman, relaxed in the traces. They galloped past Winnie and Rule, crouching in the brush with their spent muskets. Gunn nodded at the two female sharpshooters.

Eventually, at the edge of the belt of fir trees, the horses slowed to a walk and then came to a stop. The lead pair nickered and ambled over to the lush grass and began to graze, seemingly heedless of the recent terror that had consumed them.

Gunn reined in twenty yards away and sat considering the carriage. The rest of his band fell in behind him.

“We lost Morgan and the Stoat, Torsten,” Breck said, coming up to stand his horse next to Gunn’s mare. He spat mud from his mouth and wiped it from his face. His calm, avaricious eyes were locked on the stationary tax carriage.

Gunn grunted, dismounted and handed his reins to Breck. “If those two rotten bastards had’ve had a copper coin strung about each o’ their throats I might’ve said we lost somethin’,” he said. “Tell Meiklejohn to go back and strip their bodies and pick up my pistol and any of our other gear. You make sure the rest of our lot are ready to ride out sharpish. Tell them to keep their eyes on stalks, unless they fancy me clouding up and raining all over ‘em.”

Breck nodded and led Gunn’s mare away.

“Euan, lad!” Gunn called to the newest member of his band. “Euan, get your arse over here and open up this here carriage for me, will you?”

Euan was flushed when he came to stand next to Gunn. Eyes shining with fear at what they had just done and with fear at what they might yet do.

“Go on now,” Gunn said.

Euan opened his mouth, saw Gunn’s face and then shut it again. He approached the carriage, holding his sword awkwardly. Gunn followed just behind, his head cocked to one side.

The coachman was coughing out his ghost on the top of the carriage. Dying quiet and with dignity wasn’t one of those things that anyone ever got taught, Gunn mused, as Euan walked carefully to the carriage’s rear door. Like no one got taught how to leave a skirt when the love ran out, or how to kill a man tenderly, or how to summon the courage to change your lot.

Euan touched the door handle.

The door burst open and a seventh guard crashed out, diving on top of the unsuspecting lad. Both men thudded into the damp dirt of the road, Euan’s sword falling from his hand. The guard was bigger, older and pissing himself with terror. Eyes filled with fury and futile desperation.

Behind Gunn, Boniface Woe cackled.

The guard struck Euan with an elbow, got a hand on his throat and pulled him to his feet, a knife wedged under the lad’s ear. Pressed there tight enough to draw a line of blood on the smooth skin.

“Alright now, you bastards!” the man said in a scratchy voice, tight with panic. “Give me one of those horses and let me ride out of here and you can take what we’re carryin’! You have my word, I’ll not stop you! Have it all! Just give me a bloody horse now, or the boy dies with me.”

The guard blinked sweat out of his eyes. Sweat and tears, Gunn realised.

Boniface Woe’s laughter rose an octave, like she’d never heard such a rib-tickler before.

“He ain’t good lookin’,” she said in her deceptively girlish voice, “but he sure is stupid!”

Some of the others chuckled darkly. Gunn took a few steps towards the pair of entwined men.

“Stop your fucking moving!” the guard screeched. Euan made a gentle noise as the little apple-peeler at his neck pressed closer.

Gunn took one more step and halted. The wind blew his hair across his face. He pushed it away.

“You, woman!” the guardsman yelled, pointing at where Boniface Woe sat atop her stallion. “Gimme your horse!”

Boniface Woe’s laughter faded away. Faded like the grey light in the grey sky, as the evening encroached.

Gunn watched Euan. Stared at him. Watched the realisation bloom in eyes that might only have seen sixteen summers, dispersing like ink through water. Watched the naivety drain away.

“Gods,” Euan croaked.

“See ‘em already do you?” Gunn said.

The knife dropped out of Gunn’s sleeve, into his hand, and left it with the speed of a swallow.

It hit Euan in the throat with a dull thud. Metal on meat. A butcher’s sound. Blood spewed from the lad’s mouth, over his good white teeth and down his chin. He sagged, eyes bulging. Disbelief welling from them with his tears. He slid out of the arms of the guard trying to hold him up.

The guard was left standing alone. He goggled at Gunn. Looked down at Euan trying to breathe through his own blood. Back up at Gunn.

“Wait, I—” he said.

Gunn had already crossed the half dozen paces that separated them with ferocious speed. His sword hit the guard in the side of the face, splitting him through the temple, pulverising his right eye to jelly. Obliterating a fine, strong cheekbone. The blade got caught in the man’s eye socket and Gunn let it go. The guard fell into the grass at the side of the road, twitching and making soft little whimpering sounds. A deep purple stickiness oozed from the awful wound in his head, ran along the fuller of the bright blade and dribbled into the grass.

Gunn stepped over the dying men, walked to the stationary carriage and pulled open the door. There was a middle-aged man inside wearing a plum-coloured robe. He had a pair of small, mean eyes, which blinked up at Gunn, as he stopped pulling glinting items out of an open chest and stuffing them hastily into the depths of his modest gown. He made a noise like a calf stuck in a bog when he saw Gunn’s long hair, unshaven countenance, and the glitter of a metal in his hand.

“Well met, father,” Gunn said sardonically. “You holy men really are stuffed to the gills with charity, aren’t you? Polishin’ up the best of the pretty things with your robe for me, is that it?”

Gunn extended his hand and the priest recoiled, jingling faintly.

“Stay back, faithless! Touch me and you lay hands on the Count himself!”

“Calm yourself, father, and you shall live longer. I’ve no desire to lay hands upon that sack of wine you call a count. I’ve somethin’ I want you to read for me.”

The outlaw tossed another scrap of parchment covered in tight script at the cowering priest.

With a shaky hand, the clergyman fumbled it up. He glanced at Gunn, then cleared his throat and read;

“‘And he stood upon the precipice,

Upon the edge of green,

And he gazed and saw as far as man can see,

Across the foam etched grey.

He felt the hunger and felt the fear,

Having gnawed at hope and on dreams.

The wretched man, he was afeared to die,

As he had been afeared to take his chance to live.’”

“Do you like it, father?” Gunn asked, his dark eyes narrowed with genuine attentiveness. “Does it speak to you?”

“What… What do they mean, these words?” the priest asked.

“Only you can answer that question, father. I wrote them for you.”

The priest swallowed. He tried to look at Gunn’s face, but his eyes kept sliding away, like fat off a hot skillet.

“You did not write these words,” the priest said. “That much I know.”

Gunn sighed. “There’s much we don’t know, priest,” he said. “But there’re some things we do. For instance, we will never be here again, in this place and at this time. That’s a certitude.”

He made to reach for the chest, but the priest struck weakly at his outstretched hand, spat at him and blurted, “Take from the Count and it is certain you’ll meet whatever bitch mother spawned you in the pit!”

Torsten Gunn’s face went as cool and blank as slate. His grey eyes dulled. A soft rain started to patter down on the roof of the carriage.

“Ah, father," the outlaw said, "even those who have fallen into sin love their mothers."

And he reached for the priest instead.