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He’s terrified.
Their faces are misshapen – great grey beasts with fangs as long as his Da’s forearm. The ground shudders when they move, and as they run towards his line of defence the cacophony sends bright bursts of light to flash behind his eyes. They shout a battle charge and he’s more afraid than he has ever been in his life.
More afraid than when his older sister came of age to fight. When she pleaded and begged and he had been rooted to the ground powerless to help.
He sees the southern wall crumble as they bear the first brunt of the attack, and he can only imagine the same happening to them. They’d lost fifteen people yesterday and ten the day before.
He supposes he should consider himself lucky that the lord of his family’s land actually cared about keeping to the law. Two of his fellow soldiers were too young to be fighting. Hell, he was too young to be fighting. They were all too young.
He sweats, his whole body chafes in the new armour. He’ll never wear plate metal again he vows, but he can’t think that far ahead – can’t begin to. He just wants to live through the night. The ogres have been pushing the lines back for months and they grin with the victory of their slaughter.
The countryside had been verdant and lush but now the ground is slick mud and it churns his stomach to know that there’s been a drought, that it is gore that waters these killing fields, and that the sky itself is stained blood red.
When they change shifts and he manages to choke down a meal, he doesn’t eat with the other children. He can’t. They’re not children anymore. Not a one. And fighting like this – well it changes people. One of the squad leaders laughs with meat in his teeth. The leader has never felt this alive, and he says so every night as the rations disappear into his mouth.
“How about you, Rumpled-split-skin? Enjoying your duty?” The leader asks. Rumpelstiltskin bites his tongue. Some fights aren’t meant for him.
A girl with flaming red hair catches his eye and smiles. She’s the commander of the day squad and she doesn’t care about his name, or how small he is.
On his first day of weapons training she had found him nursing bloody fingers and wrapped them up, singing a small healing spell beneath her breath.
“One day,” she told him, as she wound white strips of cloth along his palm, “I’m going to cook for kings and queens. Back home I could bake the best blackbird pies you’ve ever tasted.” Then she smiled and kissed his head and pretended that he wasn’t crying.
And when he’d found her holding the dispatch that said the small town that she’d lived in was too close to the border, that the village had gotten involved in a border skirmish, that smoke and ash were all that remained of the people that she’d loved, he spoke to her of spinning.
Of watching the wheel turn and making the rough sheep’s wool smooth and useful. He spoke to her of lanolin and how he wished he could make silk and other things that shone with beauty. She smiled and kissed him and he pretended that her kisses did not taste of salt.
But in the dugouts – the trenches that they would have to abandon and fill with liquid fire to stall the approach of the ogres in but a few days time – they never talked of dreams or kisses or of the shadows of the dead that trailed their every step.
Dreams had no place where sleep was perfunctory, kisses useless, and the dead familiar.
Deep in the sixth month of his conscription, the commander is ordered to lead an attack against the ogres hiding in the eastern part of the Forest of Thorns. She’d stationed him at the back, well surrounded by shields and spears. He’s in perfect position to watch as she is cut down, a cruel line of red spilling from her midsection, her armour shredding like paper beneath the ogre’s vicious weapons.
His Jenny Wren, torn asunder.
The bellowing of the ogres cling to his bones and he drops his spear. Beneath the scarlet sky, he flees, each tortured step calling coward. When he stops to breathe and to find where his scattered wits have carried him he realises he’s been bleeding for as long as he’s been running. That his leg aches with torn muscle and broken bone. And that the cry of coward follows him into the darkness.
And the darkness follows him.
When his wife turns to him and scolds, “For once in your life stand up for yourself,” he can see the sky turning red. Can see his friend cut down, the futility of fighting.
“I jus dinnae see the point,” he tells her.
And Bae’s too young to know why Pa is crying over his cradle. The hovel empty of gold. Only a spindle to keep the corner company.
But when Bae is older and he looks at his Pa the way his Pa looked at blood-slick dirt, and he runs, Rumpelstiltskin can’t follow. Can’t claim to own his child’s fear though he wished to claim his child.
Coward.
But it’s been so long since he was unafraid. He can’t remember ever feeling unafraid.
When he feels his curse drain from him – the unlimited power that sings him to sleep on his empty nights, rage spills from his lips. Crowds his head with red-sky-at-nights but the sailors would weep at his cruel words, at the viciousness with which he tries to deny his desire and fight his fear incarnate.
The fear that he could be vulnerable, that his power means nothing.
Coward, she accuses.
Yes.
And the darkness follows him.