What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier, #2)

by T. Kingfisher

A poet once wrote that the woods of Gallacia are as deep and dark as God’s sorrow, and while I am usually skeptical of poets, I feel this one may have been onto something. Certainly the stretch of my homeland that I found myself riding through was as deep and dark as something out of a fairy tale.

If this was a fairy tale, it was the kind where everyone gets eaten as a cautionary tale about straying into the woods, not the sentimental kind that ends with a wedding and the words, “And if they have not since died, they are living there still.”

Paris, when we left, had been in full glory. Much is made of springtime there, but for my money, a warm autumn is just as spectacular and you don’t trip over nearly as many poets. The window boxes of red geraniums glow like embers, and if it rains, it only makes the sunlight glitter more beautifully off the windowpanes.

(The greatest city in Gallacia is fine, I suppose, but I didn’t feel the need to linger. Imagine if an architect wanted to re-create Budapest, but on a shoestring budget and without any of the convenient flat bits. While fighting wolves.)

The smell of woodsmoke usually preceded a small village built in the Gallacian style, the houses clay-plastered wattle, all sporting weathered wooden shingles. Since our local clays are mostly gray, this means that our villages are mostly gray as well. (For a short period after the war, we had lost so many young men that our male population was also gray, which led to the popular tragic song “Silver, Clay, and Frost” that every musician played for about a decade, until we were all heartily sick of it.)

reason. There was wood stacked by the fireplace. Angus knelt on the hearth and built the kind of cautious, tiny fire that you make when you aren’t sure if the chimney is full of bird nests.

No Codrin. I felt, I confess, a pang of relief at that. I would much rather that he had left than that he had died in the house. Death no longer shocks me, but I still prefer that it not visit my friends and acquaintances in my presence.

Soldier’s heart, my American friend Denton called it. He had been a combat medic during his country’s civil war, and he had plenty of experience with it.

Soldier’s heart doesn’t know the difference between terrible things. Fungus or cannon fire, it’s all just the war.

One of the skulls rolled its eyes at me. I was against the opposite wall, heart pounding and spine digging into the plaster, before I quite realized what had happened. I stared up at the skull, the empty eye sockets dark as grief. Had I imagined it? Would it be better or worse if I had? A white moth climbed out of the eye socket. I sagged against the wall and made a noise that could have passed for a laugh if you didn’t examine it closely.

Granted, she probably wouldn’t say anything critical. Miss Potter belonged to a fine old school of courtesy, and if she thought you were doing your best, you could offer her skinned mice and boiled newt-water for tea, and she would by God drink the newt-water with her pinky finger extended and praise the plating of the mice.

the commander—may he shit pinecones in hell—heard

“What got him?” It didn’t matter, really, but at the same time, it mattered very very much, if you understand what I mean. Angus shook his head. “Nobody knew, or most likely, nobody would tell me. If they didn’t actually know, I’d have gotten ten different stories.” I looked up sharply at that. “Won’t tell you? Why not?” “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

It occurs to me that you may think that I am making a great deal of nothing about traveling, granted that I had spent much of my youth gallivanting across Europe, sometimes while being shot at. Possibly you’re right. All I can say in my defense is that while I was in the army, no matter where we went, we had a routine. We got up, we ate bad food, we complained, we tended the horses, we were extremely bored, we ate again, we went to sleep. Occasionally we would go somewhere else and be bored there. Once in a very great while, we would spend an absolutely nerve-wracking few hours, and afterward we would be shaky and bored, but in general, the routine reigned supreme.

When I got out of the military a few years back, the lack of routine was the hardest part. People kept doing things at any hour of the day or night! And expecting me to do the same! I don’t know how anyone stands it.

Eventually I built a new routine, but it was centered around Paris. I ate at the same café every day, at the same hour, and went to the same public house when it opened, and on Wednesday there was always a salon, which I duly attended, and on Friday there would be a party, and on Sunday, I woke to the sound of cathedral bells and thought ...

“The Devil overlook you, sir,” he said, which is a greeting you don’t hear much anymore. I smiled involuntarily.

I drew a sudden blank and fell back on polite ritual. “How are you today?” Codrin’s daughter tilted her head slightly and said, “I’m keeping.” “Right,” I said. “Of course.” I’m keeping is what we say in Gallacia to any such inquiry, and it covers such a broad range as to convey no information whatsoever. It can mean “I am filled with unspeakable joy, my gout is cured, and angels attend my every step,” or it can mean “a bear just ripped my leg off and I am, at this moment, bleeding out, but please don’t make a fuss.” Either way, you’re keeping.

It occurred to me, belatedly, that she might be expecting me to demand Codrin’s last packet of wages back. The thought had never crossed my mind, and if it had, I would have chased it out with my pistol in one hand and a horsewhip in the other.

The last word came out strangled. I didn’t expect that. I don’t cry any longer. I’ve lost the trick of it. Lots of soldiers do, eventually, and only the lucky ones get it back. But even if I can’t, my throat still closes up sometimes, and it closed up now, because I knew I couldn’t explain what it had meant, when I sat there staring at the snow for a month straight with my mouth full of ashes and my head full of dead men, that the tea was always there and always hot.

I cursed myself for having not just abandoned tact but set it ablaze.

there’s a rumor that Codrin’s illness was caused by a moroi.” “A what?” His mustache looked exasperated. “You know. From the old stories. The mare, the hag, the old woman that lives behind the woodpile?”

Your mother never wanted your father to tell the old stories to you children. Said it would give you nightmares. A bit ironic, in the case of the moroi, since nightmares are what they’re supposed to bring.”

“We stand on the threshold of the twentieth century, and people are turning down jobs because they’re afraid of a … a…” “Hag that sits on your chest and steals your breath,” said Angus helpfully. “And maybe the rest of the world is on the threshold of the twentieth century, but we’re in Gallacia, if you hadn’t noticed.” He frowned at me. “And you of all people should know that we don’t always know what we should be afraid of.” “Yes, but…” I trailed off. He was right. At the Usher house, I’d seen things and hadn’t had the wit to fear them until much too late. But still, a fairy-tale woman that sits on your chest? Really?

He was a large, amiable young man who chopped firewood and milked goats and lifted heavy objects with one hand. When you talked to Bors for very long, you realized that he was slow, and if I had meant stupid I would have said that instead. Bors had a mind like a lava flow. It took a long time to get where it was going, but there was no stopping it. I quite liked him.

She needed the money and was grateful to have it and resented both the need and the gratitude. She dealt with that resentment by taking it out on her employer, namely me. Not in her work, of course—it would have been a mortal sin, in the Widow’s world, to shirk her duty. So the food was good, if unimaginative, and the boards were worn thin with scrubbing. Meanwhile she bristled and argued if I made any suggestions, and if I went so far as to express a preference, she would gaze at the ceiling and tell God in no uncertain terms what she thought of young wastrels who treated the world as if it were an orchard ripe for plucking and how someday we would learn the truth, to our sorrow. I had suffered far worse at the hands of drill instructors. I smiled vacuously through these impromptu sermons and slipped Bors extra coins.

If you have ever dealt with the possessions of the dead, you probably know what I mean. You take things away and leave behind emptiness, and everything you remove—every sheet and pillowcase, every lost sock and old razor—erases a little bit of the dead person’s footprint in the world. You picture your own home being carted away, piece by piece, hopefully by loved ones and not by strangers. I tried to express this to Angus, who snorted and said, “Don’t worry, it’ll take ten men to clear your apartment in Paris, and the next tenants will be finding bottles of livrit stashed in odd corners for years.” Strangely enough, that made me feel better about the whole thing.

“No need to put yourself out,” he repeated, in the tones of one prepared to pronounce blood feud on an entire family, down to the smallest baby in the cradle.

Although selling property takes money and work, God knows, so it’s very possible that she didn’t have the money to pay the solicitors to wrangle the papers. I looked into buying a flat in Paris once and I think the papers cost more than the flat.)

When a sound broke over me, shockingly loud, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I swung my rifle up instinctively, sighting down the barrel at the enemy, and … “Caw,” said the enemy agreeably. I burst into slightly embarrassed laughter and lowered my gun. My heart thudded against my ribs. The hooded crow—kachulkni, we call them here—looked down at me with the wary interest and mild pity that crows and ravens always seem to have for humanity.

Tomorrow, in my experience, is only worth worrying about when there’s something you can do about it.

Anyway, never argue with your laundress. She has subtle and terrible ways of taking her revenge.

“You are a braver soul than I am, Miss Potter.” She raised an eyebrow. “How many medals do you have in a box somewhere, Lieutenant?” “Too many. They mostly don’t hand those out for being brave, just for being too foolish to run away.”

God, in my experience, is more likely to be found in gutters and at the bottom of dirty trenches than in designated architecture, but possibly that’s just because that’s where Ha is needed. (Ha and Har are our particular Gallacian pronouns that are used only for God. When I found out that in English those are sounds associated with laughter, all I could think was, “Yeah, sounds about right.”) Nevertheless, I do not believe that God cares where you worship Har. The prayers of the dying on the mud of the battlefield and the pleas of the fearful hiding in cellars must surely ascend just as quickly as those uttered under the light of stained glass. More quickly, if there is justice in the universe.

(We don’t have that many bandits this far out of the capital. No one has enough to steal and everyone knows one another, so if you did ride up, pull a pistol, and shout, “Stand and deliver!” you’d most likely get a smack on the ear and dire warnings to tell your mother. Many a prospective bandit’s career has been blighted by sheer embarrassment.)

You can find variations all across this part of Europe. The mare, the marra, the moroi … she has a very wide range.” Va steepled var fingers. “A demon that comes in while you sleep and crouches atop your chest, stealing the breath from your lungs.” “Like an alb,” said Miss Potter. “Yes, much like that. Though the moroi, she is always female. She is often supposed to be like a werewolf, too, in that sometimes she is a living person who goes about at night.”

“Ah. The story goes that there was a town here with a different name, long ago, that was plagued by a werewolf. One night a man was walking home and was set upon by a wolf. He fought back and managed to cut its ear off. In the morning, the mayor was missing an ear. He tried to hide it, but the man nailed the wolf’s ear to the door of the church, and by that, everyone knew that the mayor was a werewolf.” “Or he was simply very unlucky and lost an ear at exactly the wrong time,” I muttered. “Ah.” The priest’s lips twisted ruefully. “They thought of that. We are a practical people, are we not? They cut off his other ear first, and it, too, became the ear of a wolf, and so they drove him from the village with stones.”

I am no stranger to death, sad to say. Mostly the fast kind, at the end of a bullet or a mortar shell, but I’ve seen the slow kind often enough, as infection and wound fever takes its toll. Often enough, the dying saw things that weren’t there. Sometimes it was the enemy, coming for them. Usually it was their mothers. Once or twice, something more dramatic. There was no rhyme or reason to it, not really. The most fanciful soldier I ever served beside was coldly lucid until kan heart stopped, and Sergeant Melisa, who had less imagination than a sheep, took two days to die and raved about angels and devils and spinning wheels of fire throughout. To have someone spread tales of whatever Codrin ranted about in his final days seemed monstrously crass. What the dying say is between them and God.

“In England, all we had were druids. And fairies, of course.” Angus didn’t quite wince when she said fairies aloud, but he stilled just a little, as if hearing someone cock a gun in the distance. “We’ve got those here too,” I said. “Err … not the druids.” I found myself reluctant to speak the word either. “In Gallacia, we call them the other families. They’re supposed to lead people astray in the woods and … whatnot.”

While I have occasionally kissed women that I haven’t been introduced to, I do like to at least know their names if I’m in bed with them.

The problem with telling a story, of course, is that you already know that I’m telling you about something significant that happened. It’s not as if we sat down together and you said, “Alex, tell me a tale where you had a pleasant trip to your homeland and the worst menace you faced was the amount of paprika the Widow put in the sausages.” No, you wanted a proper hair-raiser and here I am, trying to tell you one, whoever you are. So of course, when you read me dreaming about the moroi, it seems significant. Doubtless I seem like a proper fool for not immediately packing up and going back to Paris. You can turn the page and assure yourself that you would be much wiser in my situation. (Quite possibly you would be. I’ve never claimed to be the sharpest tooth in the wolf’s mouth.) But for me, at the time, it was just a dream I had after heavy drinking and talking about a dream monster. The power of suggestion, as Father Sebastian had said. I got up and went downstairs and the Widow grumbled about young wastrels who slept until all hours, and I genuinely thought no more about it for quite some time.

Bors would stop work for an hour when the sun was high, to avoid the attentions of the Noon Witch. (Do you have the Noon Witch in your country? She might be endemic to our region. She looks like a girl dressed in white, and she carries a scythe. If she talks to you while you are working, you must never try to change the subject or she will strike off your head or give you heatstroke. I’ve never heard of her appearing in the winter, as she’s a demon of sunstroke, but obviously it was better to be safe than sorry.)

Bors was willing to make a fourth for whist, provided that there was no actual gambling, and while he took a long time to make his plays, he was absolutely cutthroat once he did. It was like being bludgeoned to death by a cheerful turtle.

I closed my eyes briefly, struck by a sudden dreadful suspicion. “Is there … by chance … any cutlery under your pillow?” “… Cutlery,” said Miss Potter. “I’m afraid so.” In Miss Potter, the legendary stiff upper lip of the British was cast in steel. She nodded as if this was a perfectly normal request, returned to her room, and reappeared a moment later, holding a very large butcher knife. Her expression wavered between “this is arguably somewhat peculiar” and “of course, all the best people keep knives in the bed.” At the moment, peculiar was winning, but only just.

I sometimes think the fundamental disconnect with civilians is that they think a war is an event, something neatly bounded on either end by dates. What anyone who’s lived through one can tell you is that it’s actually a place. You’re there and then you leave, but places don’t stop existing just because you aren’t looking at them. The war’s still there. I don’t live in it anymore, but it’s right over there, just on the other side of … I don’t know. Something. Maybe the mystic veil that the spiritualists are always going on about, except there’s nothing mystic about it. And sometimes, for a little while, I slip over into that other place. The war. It’s not like just remembering something bad. I have plenty of bad memories, many of them related to the war, in fact, but remembering them doesn’t mean I’m there, any more than remembering that I had the flu as a child means that I run a fever now. This is more like rounding a corner and finding myself unexpectedly in a familiar neighborhood. It’s a place I go to, even if nobody else can see that I’ve gone. I can smell it and certainly hear it, even if I can’t always see it. That’s the problem with all those well-meaning people who try to comfort you by telling you that everything’s okay, you’re home now, and the war’s over, as if you’re an idiot who can’t read a newspaper and see that an armistice has been declared. It’s like telling someone that Greece is over, or England, or Russia. It’s nonsensical. Places aren’t ever over, ex...

I’ve always had a soft spot for Finns. Some claim they’re unfriendly, but every one that I’ve ever met has been quite pleasant, if reserved. They have the quiet confidence of a people who know that, at any moment, they could strap on skis, go into the woods, and take out an entire squad of enemy soldiers before anyone knows they’re there.

It’s not that I’m a skeptic, you understand. It’s just … look, so far as I’m concerned, ghosts are rather like ostriches. (“But Easton,” you say, “ostriches? Really?” Hush, I’m getting to that.) I don’t doubt that ostriches exist. Many people who are far more intelligent than I am have traveled to the lands where ostriches dwell and reported back on their existence. There are photographs and taxidermy and centuries’ worth of anecdotes and whole civilizations local to the ostrich who have produced great quantities of art depicting this noble bird. Nevertheless, I personally have never seen an ostrich. They simply don’t play a large part in my life. If I woke in the night and heard footsteps in the hall, I would not immediately assume it was an ostrich. Why would I? Ostriches are things that happen to other people, far away, in countries more Serengeti-adjacent. If you want to tell me your saga of your encounter with an ostrich, I will listen appreciatively, but it’s just not something I worry about happening to me. Likewise, ghosts do not play any significant role in my life. I have slept in reputedly haunted houses and never seen anything worse than a stray cockroach. The howls of banshees and Gray Ladies fall on deaf ears (or at least ears rather badly affected by tinnitus). I’ve never attended a séance and while I have a vague skepticism about mediums, it’s the same kind that I have about landlords and minstrels. Undoubtedly some of them are fine people, and I do not que...

I loathe people who assume that because they are an expert in one field, they are therefore infallible on a totally unrelated topic, merely because they gave it five minutes of thought.”

You hear a lot of stories from the line. Most of them are bullshit. You can usually tell because those are the ones that are all about ghosts and miracles and the Blessed Virgin putting Her hand in the way of a shell. They’re tidy. They wrap everything up in a neat little bow, complete with punch line. The ones you believe are the ones that aren’t tidy. The ones that make no sense.

“Blessed Virgin,” I whispered, even though I couldn’t even hear myself. “Why must you keep sending me innocent monsters?”