Page 80 of Oath
As the bird vanished into the pale sky, Clyde pressed his palm flat against the ribbon inside his chestplate, over the beat of his heart, and whispered:
“Not another five years. Not another five days, if I can help it.”
The hawk had barely vanished into the clouds when Clyde returned to the campfire. He sat down on a rough log, stretching his shoulders as though the weight of mail had doubled. But there was something different in his face.
A curve at the corner of his mouth. A faint softening around his eyes. It wasn’t much. But for Clyde, it was more than the men had seen in years.
“Gods,” muttered Sir Torren, squinting across the flames, “the Hound’s gone and grown teeth for grinning. Mark the day.”
A few of the younger soldiers laughed. One whistled. “Careful—he’ll bite them off if you stare too long.”
“Or,” Renn piped up, his voice lighter than his eyes, “maybe he’s found a sweetheart in the next regiment. Explains why he’s always lurking off with parchment.”
That drew a chorus of good-natured jeers. Sir Waldon—older, grizzled, a scar curling across his temple—threw a crust of bread into the fire. “Sweetheart? Ha. If the Hound’s writing love letters, I’ll shave my beard.”
The men roared.
Clyde shook his head, but he didn’t snarl, didn’t snap, didn’t bark them into silence. Instead, he let the smile linger, faint and private, like something he couldn’t quite cage.
“Not a sweetheart,” he said at last, voice quiet but firm. “Something worth holding onto.”
That shut them up for a breath. The fire popped, throwing sparks into the cold night.
Then Torren slapped his knee. “Hells, he admits it! The Hound’s got a lover. Saints save us all.”
The laughter rolled again, echoing out into the dark, but Clyde only reached into his chestplate, touched the faded ribbon hidden there, and stared into the fire.
The teasing washed over him, harmless noise. Let them think what they liked. He’d earned their jests, their camaraderie. They’d never know what it meant—that somewhere beyond the battlefield, a man with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue had written his name with love.
And that was enough.
Chapter nineteen
Ashes in the Ink
The earth drank too much blood that week.
Rain came in a grey curtain for three days, as if the sky itself were trying to wash the world clean and only managed to turn everything into mud. Trenches filled and overflowed, footfalls slurped in the churned clay, and the roads became rivers that swallowed wagons whole. Horses stood with their flanks heaving, eyes wild with hunger and cold, and when they sank their hooves into the mud they did not always rise again. Men slipped and were lost between breaths; some were simplynever found. Steel went dull in the drizzle. Smoke clung to everything like a second, sour skin.
Clyde had stopped naming the dead months ago. Names cost too much, and grief too much more. He made a habit of memorizing faces and then letting them go, a private sacrament to keep the tally small. Most of the time that was enough. Most of the time the war rolled over him like a gray tide and he rode through it and returned.
This one he could not let slip.
The boy was maybe seventeen. Brown hair clung to his forehead in wet tangles. A blade too long for his hands weighed heavy in his grip; he looked younger than his armour made him. He charged as boys did—wide-eyed, lungs burning, certain that this was the moment the world would take notice and anoint him hero. He screamed as he ran. Clyde didn’t hear the word; rain and steel and a dozen other screams braided into one sound. Maybe the boy called a name. Maybe a god. Maybe nothing at all.
Clyde’s blade met him because that was what the battlefield asked of him. It drove home in a clean arc that left no room for theatrics. The wound bloomed a bright, obscene red in the gray wet, the boy’s mouth opening in a line that was not fear so much as surprise—as if the world had betrayed him, as if Clyde himself had betrayed some private assumption the boy held. He gurgled once, a brief, horrid sound, then he fell, and the mire took him like a mouth closing.
The line of men moved on, boots splashing through the puddled gore, the war indifferent as ever.
That night Clyde did not sleep. He sat on a low stone near the dying fire, rain still beading in his hair, the worst of the storm only a sullen whisper now. The men around him muttered and tried to sleep anyway, faces turned toward the embers. A boy two tents over coughed himself into silence. The candle in Clyde’s small lantern flickered and the ink in the inkwell chilled.
He drew his hands up from where they had stopped washing, looked at the black that had dried beneath his nails, and let the words come. They came slow and hard, each one a scraped thing. He warmed the ink between his palms like a holy object and let the quill find the page.
A,
Today I killed a boy who looked like you.
Not exactly. Softer mouth. lighter hair. But he screamed like a prince who thought the world owed him something.
