by Dale Lucas
“What was that?” Galen asked. “I’ve seen incendiaries before—lamp oil in jars, like the stuff the Devils employed, or that pitch-based stuff the Magrabaris use in naval warfare—but never anything so . . . so . . .”
“Volatile?” Torval asked.
Galen nodded. Then added a word of her own. “Destructive.”
“That’s the art of my folk. It has all sorts of names, but the simplest is blasting powder. The recipe is a secret among our alchemists, and it’s only gained renown among your kind in the last hundred years or so, and slowly at that. The welk aren’t eager to let that fiery spirit out of its soul jar.”
“So how did those bombs arrive in the bed of the wagon?” Elvaris asked.
“I put them there,” someone said.
They all turned to find the lord marshal standing nearby, eyeing them with that familiar, dismissive gaze of his, like a schoolmaster studying a bunch of unruly children.
“Well, thank you, then,” Torval said. “We only got to use three of them, but those blasting spheres saved our lives—”
“They were not for you,” the lord marshal said, “and they were worth more than all three of you put together. Do you have any idea, you petulant stump, what those bombs cost me? How difficult it was to get any dwarf in that damned city of yours to even speak to me about them, let alone sell them to me? And now they’re all gone—expended. And for what?”
Torval felt anger rising in him. “Well, they kept the four of us alive—me and Rem and Elvaris and the Lady Tzimena. My sincere apologies if our survival wasn’t your highest priority.”
“The Lady Tzimena,” the lord marshal said, then made a point of looking around him before throwing up his hands. “Where is she now?”
“The Raven made off with her,” Elvaris said. “Rem gave chase.”
Torval whipped around toward the wounded woman. “Rem followed them?”
Elvaris nodded and indicated a stand of trees on the far side of the road. “Right through there.”
Torval turned and stared into the empty, silent, darkening woods. “Sundry hells,” he muttered. The lord marshal spoke then, as did Elvaris and Galen, in answer, but Torval was no longer listening. He was poking through the ruins of the half-blasted cage cart to find his maul, which he was sure still lay somewhere on the muddy ground where he’d been sprawled. When he picked its glint out in the failing light, he snatched it up and took off at a run into the woods.
“Torval, no!” Elvaris shouted. “Don’t go out there alone!”
“I won’t be alone once I find him!” Torval shouted over his shoulder and carried on into the brush.
He half expected to meet some of those infamous Devils of the Weald in his headlong plunge through the woods, but none materialized. Every now and again, Torval would see evidence of them: blood on leaves, footprints in the loam, broken branches or torn fern fronds, in one case a number of arrows, stuck upright into the earth for easy picking. But warm bodies were in short supply. Any outlaws formerly in the area either were dead or had fled.
Torval called out for Rem as he went—a foolish move, perhaps, if there were still brigands about, but he was little worried by that. That idiotic boy had gone off in pursuit of the Red Raven and his pretty prize, thinking, no doubt, that he could take the man in a one-on-one duel and fight off any of his accomplices who decided to come to his aid. Rem might bristle every time Torval or someone else called him Bonny Prince, but his instincts to protect pretty women from ill use were finely honed and nigh indomitable. He was cautious in a great many things, but if Rem believed there was a damsel in distress, he would rush in like a spring colt, eager to prove just how brave and gallant and dangerous he could be.
Torval had tried to break him of it, knowing it was an instinct that might get the boy killed, but clearly he had failed. Utterly.
And now here he was, in a darkening wood trying to find some evidence of the lad. Where in the sundry hells could he have gotten off to?
Torval’s night vision would serve him well, even in the dark, but seeing wasn’t his primary concern. He was focused on what might happen to Rem even if he’d escaped death at the hands of the Raven and his companions. What would he do? Where would he end up? Torval supposed a young man of noble birth probably knew how to take care of himself in the woods, but these woods weren’t like any others. Rem himself had tried to make that clear. They were vast, dangerous, and teeming with all sorts of unpredictable wildlife, from the hungry bears that innkeeper had spoken of to prowling, screaming hillcats to the outlaws and brigands that haunted the road.
What was that? Something glinting, lying right in the middle of a half-trodden path through the undergrowth, just off to Torval’s right. Torval all but sprinted to the spot of trampled grass and earth. When he saw what lay there, something in the center of him seemed to drop, like a floor with the struts yanked out from under it.
It was Rem’s sword—the one Torval himself had gotten him when he’d first joined the wardwatch. It was just lying there on the loam, discarded and ignored.
He wouldn’t part with that, Torval thought, staring at the abandoned blade, not by choice. If it’s lying here, it’s because he had to throw it down.
But Rem wasn’t lying there with it . . . That was something, wasn’t it?
So what had happened? Had he been taken prisoner? Or had they just gotten the drop on him and forced him to throw down his blade before he’d made another run for safety?
Torval searched about him for some sign. He could see just fine, even in the failing light, but he knew nothing of woodcraft. Certainly he could recognize the most obvious and clumsy signs of passage—broken twigs and deep, clear footprints and the like—but he was no tracker, no scout. What could he glean from the world around him now?
The woods were brightening. Suddenly, when there had only been deepening gloom before, Torval realized that he had started to sprout a shadow. Someone was approaching with a light source; he turned to greet them.
It was Galen, the Lady Tzimena’s scout, and old Wallenbrand, the lord marshal’s lieutenant. Each of them carried a torch, their bright, flickering orange light making the shadows of the forest deeper, spewing the smell of burning pitch.
“Did you find him?” the old man asked. He sounded genuinely concerned.
Torval shook his head. “Here’s his sword,” he said, snatching up the blade, “but he’s nowhere in sight. I don’t know where he could be, what he might have—”
“Here!” Galen said, hurrying forward and lowering her torch toward the ground where Rem’s sword had been lying. She knelt and reached out, indicating a very shallow, barely visible depression in the forest floor. “That’s a footprint,” she said, showing Torval. “Looks like a long stride—running. Heading straight that way.”
She pointed, then rose and led the way through the bracken and brush, following the line of Rem’s headlong rush.
Torval heard the sound and realized what they were moving toward: the river. Rem had been running, straight as an arrow, toward the Kaarten River. Soon he, Galen, and Wallenbrand had reached the spot where the bank suddenly dropped bluff-like toward the river below. It wasn’t a long fall—no more than the height of a grown man—but it was certainly abrupt.
Galen knelt on the bank and studied Rem’s tracks. “They stop here,” she said. “And there’s no distress at the edge. He didn’t fall or slip—he took a running jump.”
Torval stared down into the roiling waters. The river was wide here, but also rocky and uneven. It dipped and curled and bent, the waters tumbling and foaming on a gentle decline off toward the west, back the way they’d been traveling for the last few days. If Rem had leapt into the river and let the current carry him, he might have ended up all the way back at the ford they’d crossed that morning—or even farther!
“I’ve got to go after him,” Torval said, and marched away from the river’s edge.
“Torval, no,” Wallenbrand said, stalking after him. “I k
now he’s your mate, but we can’t go traipsing off into the woods tonight. We have wounded to tend, and we’ve got to keep watch if we’re going to survive ’til morning.”
“That sounds like your problem, not mine,” Torval said, not breaking stride as he barreled through the brush on a straight path back toward the road. “Our prisoner is gone, as is your duke’s precious bride. You lot can see to the two of them—I’m going after my friend.”
“He’s right, Torval,” Galen said. “I know what you’re feeling—how frightened for him you must be—but if you go after him now, in the night, there’s no telling what could befall you.”
Torval had barely spoken to the woman during their travels, but he’d seen Rem talking with her more than once. The Bonny Prince had respected her, so Torval supposed he could just adopt the same position by default. But right now, he didn’t want to hear any more attempts to dissuade him. He needed to move, to seek, to do something. He couldn’t simply sit, wait, think . . .
“I can’t just abandon him,” Torval said, rounding on the female scout. She and Wallenbrand both halted. “He’s alone out there, probably lost. He doesn’t have my night vision and he doesn’t have his sword. How’s he supposed to protect himself?”
“He’s no fool,” Wallenbrand said. “He knows his way around horses, and he’s been a good member of this expedition. If he dragged himself out of that river, then he’s probably smart enough to stay put. He’ll try to build a fire, keep a sharp stick at hand, and wait for us to come looking for him.”
“And what if he didn’t drag himself out of the river?” Torval snapped. “What if he’s hung up on a fallen log somewhere, dead and cold? Do you think he’ll wait ’til morning to be found then? Or will some hungry beast come along and cart him away? Or worse, what if he’s still alive and he made it out of the water, but he’s wounded? Hurt? Helpless?”
“Torval,” Galen said, “right now, we’re all hurt and helpless. Don’t make it worse. Come back to camp and help us through the night. Come morning, I’ll go with you myself. We’ll find him, come hell or high water.”
Torval stared at the woman, then at Wallenbrand. He took a number of deep, ragged breaths before he finally relented.
“Fine,” he muttered. “First light.”
“Impossible,” the lord marshal said, once they were back on the road. “I forbid it.”
“You what?” Torval asked, incredulous.
The lord marshal was singlehandedly preparing a hasty camp just off the forest road, only a short distance from the ruins of the wagon and the lined-up corpses of their companions. Currently he was seeing to the small fire now crackling in a hasty pit, doing his best to keep it stoked and fed with what little flammable wood they’d managed to scrounge.
“I said there will be no search party for your companion, master dwarf. Not tonight, and not come first light. Our first priority is recovering the Raven and the Lady Tzimena. Your foolish friend is on his own.”
“All due respect, Lord Marshal,” Elvaris broke in. She was sitting nearby on one of the dead horses. “We don’t work for you.”
“Ask your captain, then,” the lord marshal said. He looked to Captain Tuvera. She was busy trying to clean and stitch up that seeping wound in Elvaris’s thigh.
Tuvera didn’t even raise her eyes from her work. “Our job here is to protect the Lady Tzimena. That’s why her mother pays us. That’s the whole reason we came along. If she’s missing, she’s the one we need to find.”
“May I remind you,” Galen said calmly, “that our charge ran away from us? She could’ve fought. She could’ve kicked, screamed, clawed, punched—done anything necessary to keep that bastard from running off with her. But she didn’t.”
“It wasn’t that simple, Galen,” Elvaris broke in. “One of the Raven’s archers had Rem and me dead in his sights. Tzimena left with him to spare the two of us.”
“How convenient,” the hard-faced scout snapped. “Last time I checked, it wasn’t the lady’s job to keep any of us safe.”
“Aye, that,” Torval broke in. “Rem heard her talking with the Raven last night. Said she knew something was bound to happen. She just took his word for it that no one would be hurt.”
Tuvera raised her eyes, staring. Clearly she could not believe what Torval had just reported.
“Did she now?” the lord marshal asked.
“Did I stutter?” Torval asked in return.
“Did you hear her yourself?” Tuvera asked.
Torval shook his head. “No. That’s just what Rem told me. I trusted his report.”
“And still, you kept this from us?” the lord marshal asked, squaring his shoulders and planting his palms on his knees. “My son lies dead, master dwarf. If you two knew about this attack—”
“Spare me your sanctimony,” Torval spat back, in no mood to have such a conversation with a man like him. “We were the odd men out in this company—how did we know who to trust? Certainly not you, you gods-damned strutting peacock. You haven’t wanted us here from the start.”
“Because you were a burden!” the lord marshal shouted. “You coin-grubbing sons of whores! Unable to take the word of a man of honor—”
“Man of honor?” Torval answered. “If you’re so gods-damned honorable, why don’t you tell Captain Tuvera and her soldiers who the Red Raven really is?”
The lord marshal’s eyes went wide. “What did you say?”
Torval knew it was a rather daring gambit—perhaps even a foolish one—but there was no point being delicate any longer. All cards needed to be slapped onto the table and read, and he would know if Rem’s theory about the Raven was correct only if he confronted the lord marshal with it.
And now the man’s look of shock and panic told him all that he needed to know.
“What’s he talking about?” Tuvera asked.
“Aye, what’s he talking about?” Croften added. An arrow still protruded from his shoulder, awaiting ministrations.
“I won’t be interrogated,” the lord marshal said. “Especially not by a worm-ridden, grub-eating, shrunken little mercenary who extorts whores and thieves for a living.”
“Then you’ll be interrogated by me,” Tuvera said, rising to her feet and facing off with the lord marshal now. “I am captain of a royal honor guard and your peer in this affair. Tell me now, Lord Marshal, what is this dwarf intimating?”
“Nothing,” the lord marshal said, determined to stonewall them. Torval saw that he was trying to control his expression and body language now—removing the stricken look from his face, bending forward, letting his balled fists loosen and release. He actually thought he could convince them that his silent panic had been nothing at all.
“Rem heard the Lady Tzimena call the Red Raven by the name Korin. Tell me, Lord Marshal, have you ever known a man named Korin? Or worked for one?”
Tuvera’s blue eyes were large and wondering. Clearly she was starting to understand. “Korin . . . as in Korin Lyr? Your duke’s murdered brother?”
“Not murdered at all, apparently,” Torval said, still challenging the lord marshal with a white-hot glare to argue. “Korin Lyr is the Red Raven!”
The lord marshal pointed at Torval. “You would believe this foolish dwarf? This illiterate, inbred pickmonkey who makes his living cracking heads and jostling coin from hardworking people?”
“I would indeed,” Wallenbrand said bitterly. “That explains a great deal, I think.”
“That’s who we were hired to help him catch?” Croften asked, face a mask of shock and confusion. “A runaway duke?”
“Hired?” Torval broke in. “I thought you were Eraldic house guards?”
“Provisionally,” Wallenbrand said. “We only met the good lord marshal two weeks ago, in Yenara, when he hired us to help him trap and transport a notorious outlaw. Croften, Wirren, and I? We’re not house guards—we’re mercenaries.”
Torval couldn’t believe his ears. Hadn’t Rem suggested this very thing? Hadn’t he no
ted that all the lord marshal’s men seemed to be using private tack and harness on their horses—the sort one owned, not the sort one acquired with a hired nag? Torval hadn’t been sure what to make of it, but now it made sense.
These men weren’t the survivors of an ambush. They’d been hired by the lord marshal in Yenara. And they were waiting for the Red Raven to show himself. Which meant—
“You didn’t lose any of your men, did you?” Torval spat at the lord marshal. “You didn’t chase the Red Raven to Yenara, you were waiting for him!”
The lord marshal leapt to his feet. His voice was a roar in the night-silent forest. “I lost men!” he shouted. “They were waylaid here, in this forest, on this very road, carrying missives regarding our rendezvous with the Lady Tzimena!”
“But you weren’t among them!” Torval pressed. “You were so eager to capture your prize, you sent your own soldiers into harm’s way!”
“Used them as bait,” Wallenbrand said. “To draw him out.” The old mercenary sighed and shook his head. “It would seem, Torval, that none of us had the whole story.”
The lord marshal looked to Captain Tuvera now. Though his aspect remained severe—belligerent—his voice carried a note of desperation. “Captain,” he said, “these men are hired hands, and this dwarf is a hanger-on. I swear to you, my only concerns in this are the Lady Tzimena’s safety and the Red Raven’s final date with justice.”
“I don’t know a gods-damned thing about your hired hands or this dwarf,” Tuvera said bitterly. “But your face is telling me all I need to know about their words and how true they are.”
“You lying snake,” Elvaris spat. “You knew this whole time! Your own men and our noble lady—just bait to catch your errant prince?”
Galen was shaking her head, trying to keep up with the revelations as they tumbled forth. “That makes no sense,” she said. “He’s your master—the rightful heir to the throne.”
“An inheritance he would rather steal than claim,” the lord marshal said bitterly. “A throne he abdicated in favor of this—this banditry! He is a traitor to the Duchy of Erald and a villain of the highest order, and if it is with my last breath, I will see him punished.”
