Water Instead of Death
The battlefield at Grayshade Ford no longer sounded like victory.
It sounded like wet breath.
Distant fire.
A horse crying somewhere in the dark.
Wind moving through broken cannon spokes.
Thomas Reed lay half-reclined against a low wall of torn earth and stone, his back burning where the ground had scraped skin through wool. His eighteenth-century red coat hung open at the chest, one white strap ripped loose and dark with mud. Blood had dried from his nose to his split lip. His gray eyes stayed fixed on the figure emerging from the smoke.
The man was enormous.
Dark-skinned.
Bare-armed despite the cold.
White clay marked his brow in two hard strokes. Black tattoos climbed across his chest and vanished beneath a fur shoulder piece damp with ash. His black hair was shaved at the sides and drawn into a thick knot behind his head. Moonlight touched the scar on his cheek and made it silver.
Enemy, Thomas thought.
The word arrived before reason.
The warrior carried no rifle in his hands. Only a clay water vessel.
Thomas tried to move anyway. His legs failed him. His fingers sank into mud beside the broken cannon wheel. He expected steel. An axe. A knife across the throat to finish what the artillery had started.
Instead, the man knelt.
One large hand slid behind Thomas’s neck, lifting carefully. The other tilted the clay vessel.
Water touched Thomas’s mouth.
He flinched as though mercy itself were a trick. Then thirst won. He swallowed too greedily, coughed, and felt the cold stream spill down his chin into the torn collar of his coat.
The warrior waited until he caught his breath before offering more.
Thomas looked up in disbelief.
The face above him remained stern, unreadable. Not gentle. Not cruel. Only watchful.
"Why?" Thomas rasped.
The warrior did not answer.
Somewhere behind them, embers shifted in a smoking crater. A red banner lay face down in the mud. Near Thomas’s boot, a drummer boy’s stick was snapped clean in two.
The warrior reached to his own belt and untied a folded strip of paper sealed with dark red wax.
Thomas stared.
British paper.
Official paper.
The crest of the Crown artillery command.
The warrior held it just long enough for Thomas to see the seal. Then he tucked it back into his belt.
May you like
At last he spoke, his English low and rough with another music beneath it.
"If you can still breathe, Redcoat," he said, "then you can still listen."
