One For Sorrow - Benjicot Blackwood

6- Gods of War

"God, bless this strange bread. I accept
the dough I've been given.
I am the caretaker of good and bad
and I loosen their reins."
- Domenica Martinello

The following days pass in a slurry, like wine poured from chalice to chalice, until the provision has grown too small for drinking. Time feels borrowed so I thieve it from others. I steal Jalen's ear to listen to my curses; Karrin's afternoons to allow her to hit me with her sword until my bodice has almost cracked. I take time to hear the river storm down the crags, and when that simply will not do, I sit in the meeting tent and put my boots on the table where the Lords draw on for hours about battle plans. My fear is so great that I cannot form wit, even when Benjicot Blackwood spits snide remarks onto the lamb's wool rugs.

I suppose I must be a coward. So much so that I allowed him to have the last word on multiple occasions.

Sleep evades me, so dreams come in the waking hours.

The march toward the burning mill starts at dawn; men shoulder their pikes and swords, sabers, and shields. They move in a phalanx down the river, leaving the encampment abandoned like a great body devoid of soul. As I stare into the ashen fires of their hearths and scattered clothing left on the lines, I swear I can see each and every soldier's face; their eye sockets plucked clean, a vulture on each chest of armor holding the ocular veins between their beaks like a freshly plucked oysters pearl. When I shake my head awake, nobody is dead; they are simply not here.

Jalen tightens the armor at my waist with a tug so hard I lose air from it. He has fashioned me a pair of arm cuffs with steel black wings that crawl down my forearm. They are beautiful and delicate, made in the image of Staunton's banner. I do not tell him that looking at it makes my stomach turn.

"House of The Black Wings," he muses in my ear, "just as fearsome as the Dragon."

"This, I pray, is true," I return.

"Are you frightened?" he asks, turning my shoulders to face him as he finishes off the last straps. "I am."

"No," I lie because if I say it with enough conviction, I can almost believe it.

The generals, lords, and dragonriders hang back at the camp, mounting their steeds. Karrin finds trouble wrangling the Cannibal at first, but once he is in her close proximity, he melts into her hand like a slick black kitten.
The beat of war drums echoes off in the distance. I follow it with my ears pinned, chin high. The sound is a racket, the beat of blood pounding in my chest. As Jalen mounts Silverwing, my attention is drawn to the hillside and the waters that separate them. A fast, chastising undercurrent grows in the center of the river. It begs me to step into it. The break of stone. Weight of my armor. Cry of horses running wild down the plains.

It is too much to bear.

Hands reach out of the waters. Tens of pallid pairs, fingers interlocked in a sort of sigil. They sing a siren hum, beckoning me, mocking me and my wide open mouth. Their pallid elbows rise above the surface, melding into a singular entity. The witch of High Heart stands in the flood line, legs of thin birch wood that snap as she crawls toward the bank. Her hair is black, then green; it is white and crimson as a blood-red moon. She wears my face, my mother's eyes, and nose. Lydia's brow.

I cannot scream. Suddenly, I find myself lacking a mouth as I trail a finger over my face—flesh where there should be teeth; nothing where the bow of my lips should reside.

The witch is out of the river, and she has my mouth- open wide and cracking at the corners. She shrieks as her skin rips from ear to ear. Ligaments fall like ribbons down her throat, but it does not nothing to ease her agony. She cannot die, and so the muscles of her face constrict and tear until she resembles a viper eating its own tongue, forever lost in the despair of being. She taunts me because she knows I cannot help her. Because she knows it hurts to watch.

"Do not look at her," a voice whispers in my ear. Only then do I feel the weight of a hand crash down on my back.

I slip in an attempt to evade another hit. My back meets the grass below me, only long enough for Benjicot Blackwood to thrust a hand forward and grab me by the hem of my waist plate.

"You didn't see her," he commands, voice steady but low. He cranes his head to ensure the others are not looking before leaning in closer. "Don't ever look at her again, do you understand me?"

"What in seven hells is that fucking thing?" I spit back.

"It doesn't matter," he admonishes.

Scoffing, I lean forward and use him to steady myself. My hand graces the circular cloak pin at his chest, the sharpest edge leaving a knick on my palm. "How do I avoid it if I do not know what it is?"

"The less you sleep, the more you know," his tone changes as if he is speaking with the tongue of another. It sounds like the hymn of a nursery rhyme. A proverb spoken in a circle of fishwives. "I suggest you have the maesters brew you a drought to get through the nights."

I turn toward the river, polished rocks now vacant of blood and muscle. "I thought I saw her at High Heart as well. The witch."

"That is no witch," he bites back.

"Then what? A spirit? A prophecy?"

Benjicot Blackwood's lips are so close to my ear that when his teeth chatter, I can smell the salt on his skin and the tinctures on his breath. He closes a fist around the cusp of my armor, my only security rattling beneath his touch. "War is a God. One that existed long before men. She has waited for us for far too long, growing impatient with every pass of day. You do not want to anger her by standing idly by."

With this, he thrust his hand against me, nearly knocking me back to the ground. As he storms away, I follow, as there is absolutely no chance that I am going to stand alone in wait for the war God of the river to snap my limbs like twigs.

"I don't suppose I have garnered any favor with her," I call out, brushing blades of water grass from my arms. "Should I not toss a coin in the water to please her? Or cut my palm? I don't know what you offer up your Gods here. They are foreign to me."

Benjicot laughs, dry and sharp as a prick, "Do not fret. We are about to give her exactly what she wants. As for favor, you'd be wise to stay in the sky today. I don't venture to know why she has made herself known to you, but like the rest of us, I am sure she sees you as an outsider."

At the cusp of the makeshift stables where the war horses sway in anticipation, I grip him by the arm. "Where do you go at night when you trail down to the river? I see you. Don't lie to me."

Lord Blackwood shakes me off, pats a white steed on the nuzzle, and drags his long legs over the saddle. He is born for this- I would not be surprised to hear that his mother birthed him on a battlefield. Or to find that he was not born at all but rather slashed from the clay of the fields and raised from the corpses of lesser men.

A ping of jealousy rings in my ears. My dragon roars over the encampment as the others wait on the mountain high. Yet, I am so small below him. So lithe in comparison to the flood of fury that threatens to wage around me. A mere dagger compared to the long Blackwood sword sat on a horse two feet above my head.

I hate him for it.

"Sleep when the fighting is done, Lucera Waters," he says, "Until then, do not die. Otherwise, your journey was for nothing, and nobody has the time to dredge you out of the mud for a proper burial."

As he rides away, I examine the cut on my palm from his cloak pin—droplets of red form down my hand and clot between the lines. I am wounded before it has even begun. Yet, it does not sting. My life fluid ground down the ivory at my wrist, pulsing out of purple veins, allowing me to see that I am still alive. This is the only injury I will sustain today.

War has existed long before man.
The perfect storm awaiting the ideal horizon to settle upon.

I know the words of the hymn now, but I cannot decipher from where. They seem entrenched in the annals of my memories in a voice that I do not recognize as either Benji's or my own.

They sound true.

I wring my hand out and let the blood soak into the ground beneath my feet.