Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 13: The Boundary
Coll worked the rope.
He had it off Tarn’s saddle and uncoiled on the ground before any of the rest of us had decided what to do with our hands. He ran one end of it twice round the great elm on our side of the river and pulled the knot tight, leaning back on it with his whole weight to set it, and then he gathered the great running coil over his shoulder and turned to Tarn.
From Tarn’s saddlebag he drew out two long parcels wrapped tight in oiled cloth, lashed them together with a short cord, and slung them across his own back beside the rope. He saw me looking.
“My bow,” he said. “And another. We are crossing wet country and a wet bow is a stick. They ride dry. They land dry.” He patted the bundle. “First man over carries them. That is me.” Then he laid his small belt-axe across the top of the bundle, between the lashings, where it could be drawn one-handed without unwrapping anything; and that, too, he showed me without comment, as a man shows another the small ways he means to be ready for what may come.
“You and me again, old lad.”
Tarn blew softly into his collarbone. They had done this before; you could see it in their faces.
Coll mounted, and Tarn picked his way down through the muddy lip of the bank into the water without hesitation, and Coll let out the rope hand over hand from his shoulder as Tarn went. The horse turned his head a fraction upstream and walked into the current as a man might walk into a strong wind — body angled, weight forward, legs picking the bottom that the eye could not see. The water came up to the saddle-skirt. It came to Coll’s stirrup. He drew his feet up clear of it and let Tarn make his own road.
It was wonderful and it was frightening, both at once. The water broke white around them in a long curl as it parted, and below the curl the river was running fast enough that I could see Tarn’s whole body braced against it under the surface, every muscle of him working, and yet he was not being moved.
He came up the far bank in the steepest place I would have thought a horse could climb, set himself, shook the water out of his mane, and stood. Coll dropped to the mud and walked the running end of the rope twice around the great elm on the far bank — not knotted off, I marked, only looped, the wet rope sliding through itself with a small dark sound — and brought the running end back along the line. He gathered it up and made a quick set of half-hitches at the near elm beside the first knot, so that the rope was now a long doubled loop, anchored on our bank, around the far elm, and back again.
He turned in the saddle and lifted a hand to us across the brown water. He cupped his hand around his mouth.
“It will hold. Send the first.”
We stood on the near bank in a small cold huddle. The fog was coming up off the river. The light had begun to slant.
“I’ll go,” said Trimmel, “if no one minds. I can swim if it comes to it. Best the first man over be one that can.”
“Aye,” said Josen.
Trimmel mounted, took the rope where Coll had marked it, tied a short loop into the bridle of his horse with the practiced quickness of a man who had done a hundred river crossings under arms, set his free hand on the doubled line, and put the horse into the water.
The river took the horse fast. The water was at the horse’s hocks by the third stride and at his ribs by the fifth, and within ten paces the horse had lost its footing altogether and was swimming, and for one terrible moment Trimmel was up on the saddle with his boots clear of the water and his horse half-down in the current under him, swimming hard with its head up — and the rope held. Trimmel kept his free hand on the line and the other on the bridle and turned the horse’s head upstream the way a man turns a boat into a wave, and they made the rest of the crossing as a thing being dragged sideways against a stronger force. When the horse found bottom again on the far side Trimmel came up the slope dripping to the thighs and laughing through his teeth, and Coll caught the bridle as they reached the mud.
“Good crossing,” Coll said. “She is high. Higher than I had her in my head.”
“Aye. She is high.” Trimmel turned and waved his hat at us, and the King raised a hand back.
It was the first thing that had given me real cold. Higher than I had her in my head. Coll had set his plan on a river. The river was not the river he had planned for. We were already in a thing larger than its makers.
Coll came back across on Tarn, and the second crossing was as the first — Tarn into the current, the unimpressed eye, the wonderful patient walk against the brown water.
“My Lady’s woman next,” he said to my mother, when he came up our bank. “If you please.”
Maerith stepped forward without a word. She had her own horse on a short lead, and Aelea’s beside it on a longer one — the little mare the princess had ridden the road, gentle and biddable, no trouble on a lead behind a steady horse. Maerith took both down to the water and let Coll tie the bridle of her own horse to the rope, and the lead-line ran from her saddle back to Aelea’s mare so that the two horses would cross as a small string. She put her hand on the doubled rope and went into the river after Coll with the small contained competence she did everything in. The mare followed without making a fuss. They made the crossing without trouble. Aelea, on the near bank still, watched her own horse go with her hand at her mouth.
“It’s all right,” I told my sister. “Maerith is on the rope. The rope is good.”
“You’re sure.”
“I am sure.”
She believed me. She was eleven, and her brother had told her the rope was good. She had no other way to be.
Coll came back a third time. Tarn was breathing harder now, but he came as he had come.
“My Lady the daughter,” said Coll, dismounting. “Josen, you will take her, will you not. Coming back is mine; the going I will leave to a man who keeps her by trade.”
Josen nodded. He mounted, swung Aelea up before him on the saddle, set his arm around her ribs, and laid his other hand on her crown of fair hair for a moment as a man swears something he does not need to say aloud. He looked at the rope. He looked at Coll.
“Together,” he said.
They went together. Josen with Aelea against his chest, his horse on the rope. Coll on Tarn alongside, the rope at his free hand, watching the water on Aelea’s side. Aelea was not afraid. She was wide-eyed but she was not afraid. She had Josen, and she had Coll, and she had her brother behind her on the bank with his eyes on her, and she was going across a river, and she was eleven and the world was wonderful.
The crossing took longer than the others. Josen’s horse stumbled once and Aelea gave a small high yelp and Josen tightened his arm and said something to her I could not hear, and the horse found its feet, and they went on. They came up the far bank and Aelea was already laughing before her feet were on the ground. Maerith stepped forward and folded her into a cloak that was, plainly, already drying by some small fire I had not yet seen the smoke of in the dell behind the elm.
I let out the breath I had been holding for a quarter of an hour.
Josen did not come back. He took his horse up to the elm on the far bank where Coll had set the loop, dismounted, and stood beside the trunk with his hand resting on the rope as a man tends an anchor. He did not signal anything. He simply stayed.
He had stayed because someone should hold the far end while the rest of the crossings were done. That was the part the rest of us were meant to see. He had stayed for the other reason as well. I did not yet let myself look at it.
Coll came back. Tarn was wet through to the shoulders now and his head was lower than it had been.
“My Lord cleric,” said Coll, “your turn.”
The King came forward. He did not, I noticed, look at any of us. He had been growing inward as the crossings went on; not afraid, I thought, but assembling himself for the thing he had agreed to and could not, at his age and weight, do gracefully. The cleric’s robe was an awkward thing to take into a river. He hitched it up at his belt without dignity and led his horse down to the water, and Coll tied the bridle on, and took the King’s free hand and laid it firmly on the rope.
“Two hands on the rope, sir,” he said, low. “The horse has the bridle. The rope has you. Do not let it go for any reason.”
“I shall not.”
They went. The King was a heavier man than Trimmel and the horse felt it; the crossing was the worst of the day until that point, and there was a quarter-minute in the middle when the horse was clear of the bottom and swimming, the King hanging on the rope with both hands, his feet trailing in the brown current, and I think every one of us on the bank stopped breathing together. Then the horse found bottom again. Then they were on the far slope. The King came up out of the water with his cleric’s robe heavy and dragging and his beard streaming, looking like nothing so much as an old wet priest of any country in the world, and Trimmel reached down and hauled him onto the bank, and there was a moment when no one said anything because no one knew whether the King wished it acknowledged that he had been hauled by a hand.
He acknowledged it. He nodded once at Trimmel. “My thanks.”
“Sir.”
He went up to the dell with his head down. He did not look back.
My mother last of the family.
Coll came across, and back, and the fourth crossing of Tarn was slower again. The horse was tired. Tired in the way a hard horse is tired — still doing the work, no complaint in him, only the head lower and the breath in him going harder. Coll patted his neck on the near bank.
“Once more for the Queen, old lad. Then one more for me. Then a long rest.”
Tarn snorted.
My mother had stood very still on the bank through the four crossings, watching her daughter cross, then her King, then waiting. Now she came forward, and gave me her hand — not the formal hand, the dry small hand of a woman handing herself to her son for the next thing — and let me steady her down the slope to the water. She did not flinch when the river came up over her boots. She did not flinch when it came up over her hips. She took the rope as the King had taken it, two hands, and looked at Coll once with a clarity I had never seen in her in a public place.
“Master Coll, if you would.”
“My Lady.”
He took her horse on the lead. They went. She crossed as she had ridden the road — quietly, competently, as a woman to whom the difficult thing was simply the thing in front of her now, and she would do it. Halfway across her horse stumbled and she made no sound at all, only adjusted her grip on the rope and let her body go with the horse’s recovery. She came up the far bank with her skirts black to the waist and her hair half out of its pin, and she went up to the dell to Aelea without speaking, and Aelea folded herself into her mother as a child folds.
I watched my mother go up the slope, and I thought: that woman.
Three of us remained on the kingdom bank. Coll, dripping. Me. Cinder.
Cinder had been silent the whole hour.
He had stood at the rear of the small group on our side, watching each crossing in turn with the careful blankness of a man assessing a thing he had not yet decided how to feel about. Once, when Trimmel went deep, his eyes had flickered. Once, when the King’s horse swam, he had taken a half-step back from the bank. Only those.
Now, with the bank empty but for the three of us, he came forward, and stood a careful pace from the water’s edge, and addressed the air between Coll and me with the quiet contempt of a man taking back a small piece of himself before a thing he meant to endure.
“I do not like water,” he said. He looked at the brown river. “I have never liked water. I do not swim. I am told I will not need to. I will take this on the rope and on the horse and on the trust of a wilderness man whose horse is more impressive than any of his other qualities, and I will trust him, because what else.” His mouth thinned. “Let us be quick about it.”
I had not seen him afraid before. I do not think I had thought he could be. I had not thought a Black Coat would be afraid of water, of all things — afraid in the small ordinary way a man is afraid of a thing he has hated since boyhood, that has nothing to do with his trade.
Coll, beside me, gave the smallest possible nod, the kind a hunter gives at his own work going right.
“Quick about it we shall be,” said Coll. “My Lord, you next. The Black Coat after.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.