The King's Ranger: The King's Ranger Book 1

by AC Cobble

  Rew walked back to Arcanist Ralcrist’s tower, Jon following in his wake. The younger ranger was moving slow, and his hand kept rising unconsciously toward his chest where the thief had stabbed him, but he was moving more comfortably than he could have several hours before. It seemed the movement was helping to stretch his muscles, loosening them from the strain of Anne’s healing. After the short walk, his breathing was even, and Jon gave Rew an encouraging nod before they stepped into the room.

  “Stay behind me and just watch, no matter what we find,” warned the senior ranger.

  Jon murmured agreement, and Rew ducked inside.

  He’d tried to talk Jon out of coming, knowing the man needed time to rest, but the younger ranger insisted, perhaps feeling guilty that Zaine had slipped away while he was there. It was true that she had, but that didn’t mean the man was in any kind of condition to do something about it. Jon felt responsible for her, which he should, but the situation was what it was. Jon’s presence was more likely to be a burden than a help. It hadn’t mattered what Rew said, though. The younger ranger had insisted on coming. Rew had tried to drag Jon to Anne, to discuss it with the healer, knowing she would refuse to let her patient go, but Jon must have known that as well. He’d started hobbling off toward the arcanist’s tower the moment Rew had mentioned Anne. Now, Rew was responsible for the young man.

  Shaking himself, Rew forced his attention back to the present and to the wrecked room in Arcanist Ralcrist’s tower.

  The dead thieves were still there, along with the body of Ralcrist himself. The crystal was still shattered. Nothing had changed since Rew had last been in the room except Jon was walking about instead of lying on death’s door.

  Rew walked out onto the arcanist’s balcony and looked down at the lawn where the thief had made his escape. From the second floor, it was obvious where he’d dropped from the tree onto the soft turf. There were marks in the soil even a layman could spot. Rew followed the footsteps he could see to where they disappeared into the keep. It wouldn’t take a ranger to follow the trail across the grass, but not even Rew could see footprints on bare stone unless there were some traces of mud or crushed grass left on the thief’s boot. It was worth looking for, though Rew did not have great hope they could follow any signs for very far.

  Rew glanced at Jon, assessing the younger ranger. Jon was in no shape to shimmy down the tree outside, so Rew took them back out into the hall where they found a stairwell down to the lower level.

  “You think Zaine went this way?” questioned Jon as they reached the floor below and started walking, looking for any marks the escaped murderer had left. “Why’d she leave? What do you think she’s doing?”

  Rew shrugged. “I think there are two possibilities. One, she may have gone looking for the thieves who betrayed her. They knocked her over the head on the way in, remember? Perhaps she wants revenge, or maybe they owe her some reward. Two, she’s afraid of the consequences of helping the thieves into the keep, so she fled and is trying to find a place in the town to hide until she can escape Falvar.”

  “Fled from us?” questioned the younger ranger.

  “She was involved in a conspiracy against the baron,” reminded Rew. “The baroness died along with hundreds of soldiers. Zaine might try to explain to the soldiers that she was coerced, but what are the chances they will believe her? The penalty for conspiring against nobility is death, even when it’s not successful. She’s guilty, Jon. I cannot say I blame her if that’s the reason she fled.”

  The younger ranger swallowed, evidently his feelings for the girl clouding the facts of her actions. After a moment, he asked, “If she’s in hiding, how will we find her?”

  Glancing back at Jon, Rew shrugged again. “Find someone she knows. Find out who would be willing to hide her. We use the tools of the investigators, but I’d rather we find her before they do.”

  The younger ranger nodded.

  “You feel responsible for her,” said Rew, pausing to crouch down and peer at a rug that ran down the center of the stone hallway.

  “She slipped away on my watch,” remarked Jon.

  “Anne’s watch,” reminded Rew.

  “You won’t blame Anne,” retorted Jon.

  Rew stood, his eyes picking out a series of tiny smudges of dirt. Moving slowly so as not to miss any of them, walking bent half over, Rew followed the trail.

  “I was in position in the throne room,” continued Jon, “I should have known better when I saw her walking out. I should have stopped her.”

  “You were injured,” said Rew. “You almost died.”

  “You would have stopped her,” replied Jon.

  Rew didn’t respond.

  “I’ll get her back,” declared Jon. “Whatever we have to do, I’ll get her back.”

  Rew snorted. “And then what?”

  “She’ll…”

  “Do you mean to protect her or punish her?” asked Rew. “We’re not in the territory, Ranger. What happens to Zaine will be up to the Fedgleys, not us.”

  “I—We can question her, get to the bottom of this, find out what she knows,” said Jon. “Before anyone decides anything, we should know the truth. She could have been forced into their conspiracy. It may not be her fault.”

  “It’s worth keeping in mind,” said Rew, “that the answers you get from the lass may not be the ones you want to hear.”

  Rew followed the faint scuffs of mud to a door. He looked up and down the hall and then opened the door. It led to another hall, another door, and then exited into an open space that circled between the buildings of the keep and the wall that encircled the place. Fifty paces from them, a handful of guards were milling about near the small private gate Zaine and the thieves had entered.

  “Well, we can assume the man is no longer inside of the keep, I think,” said Rew.

  Jon grunted, and they walked toward the soldiers.

  The men looked up.

  Rew asked them, “What did you find?” When they looked unsure if they should answer, Rew added, “We’re tracking the perpetrators of an attack against the baron and his family. It appears they came this way.”

  The soldiers, evidently deciding there was no reason not to share what they knew, pointed to the bodies of two armored men and then to the open gate. “Looks like someone attacked these men as they were escaping, sir.”

  “They came in this way,” corrected Rew. “They killed these men when they entered, not when they left. There were witnesses who saw it happen, but you’re right. I believe this is also the way the assassins exited. The gate had been shut after they slipped inside.”

  “Oh…” said one of the soldiers.

  “You group familiar with Sergeant Gage?” asked Rew. “He’s been promoted to captain, and at the moment, I believe he’s the most senior official in Falvar. Send a runner to find him and tell him what happened here. And men? Close this gate once we’re outside.”

  Rew and Jon stepped around the confused guards and left through the open gate.

  “Zaine could have exited there just as easily as the thief,” said Jon.

  Rew didn’t respond. He was looking around the area, seeing it would be impossible to track the faint traces of dirt through the public streets of Falvar.

  He suggested, “Let’s go to the market.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They walked through deserted stalls. The vendors had gathered what they could and closed quickly. Rew guessed all of them were currently huddled in their homes, doors barred, families clustered around them. Word that the Dark Kind had breached the gates would have sent the citizens of Falvar scrambling. Most of them would have hidden behind whatever rudimentary barriers they could quickly erect. A few of them would have rushed out to help the soldiers. None of them would be shopping.

  “What are we looking for?” asked Jon.

  Rew shrugged and did not reply. He didn’t know.

  In the forest, he was comfortable. After a decade as the eastern territory’
s senior ranger, he knew the wilderness like the back of his hand. In any wild place, he felt more at home than in a town. Not that he was unfamiliar with towns and the peculiar rules that they operated by, but the signs and the tells were a mystery to him. Rew didn’t know the first thing about how to identify a thieves’ lair or how to get in contact with members of the thieves’ guild. He’d never needed to know such a thing, and even if he had, he suspected that sort of information wouldn’t be widely shared. They had to do something, though, and going to the place he’d first seen Zaine and the thieves stalking through the town seemed a logical place to start.

  He’d watched as Zaine had appeared, the thieves in tow, and they’d come from the far side of the market. There wasn’t a main road there going to and from the city’s gates, so whatever lair the thieves had, Rew guessed it was somewhere within the city walls. It wasn’t on the far side of the keep, and it wasn’t easily accessible to the most heavily tracked thoroughfares that ran through Falvar. If it had been, the thieves would have come from the other direction or used busier streets. They needed the flow of the other citizens to mask their movement.

  That narrowed the search considerably, but it left them with five by ten square blocks of Falvar that Rew suspected could hide the thieves’ lair. Fifty individual blocks, hundreds of buildings. He grimaced, thinking about searching each of them, but maybe they would see something or find some person who might know more.

  At the edge of the market, Rew stared down an empty street that he thought was where Zaine and the others had come from. It was lined with small shops that would have been doing brisk business while the market was open. Now, they were shuttered, their owners barricaded inside of the stores or in the apartments over them. Those places were too small, Rew thought, to hide a meeting place for the thieves. They would want something larger, somewhere it wouldn’t be unusual for people to walk in and out of. It would have to be open all hours as much of their comings and goings would be at night.

  A shop with a back entrance? He frowned. Maybe. Would the neighbors complain, or would they be content to have suspicious characters operating next door? Rew guessed the thieves wouldn’t rob their neighbors. No, they would be good to those who lived in the immediate vicinity, hoping to tamp down suspicions and to give no reason anyone would go scuttling off to the baron’s soldiers. The thieves couldn’t rely on goodwill alone, though. They would need secrecy.

  Rew and Jon strolled down the street, eyeing the small shops and the housing where the proprietors lived above. An inn, maybe? It would offer an excuse to have strangers coming in and out at odd hours. It would also give the thieves reason not to spend time building relationships with those they shared a street with. Inns had ale, and he supposed a thief might enjoy a celebratory drink following a heist as much as he did after an expedition.

  This quarter of the town didn’t seem to have any inns, though, and as they walked, he realized it was because those places were clustered near the city gates or the keep. Travelers would have no reason to venture into some quiet, residential quarter of Falvar to find a bed for the night. There were taverns instead where people could get a mug of ale or wine and a simple dinner.

  A tavern, then? It offered many of the advantages of an inn, and he saw some of them on the corners of the streets they passed, but he kept walking, unsure what else he was looking for, but not convinced the thieves’ guild would be upstairs of some tavern. He wasn’t sure what signs he searched for, or if he’d recognize them when he saw them, but in the forest, he’d learned to trust his instincts. Out in the wilderness, it was the absence of a thing that sometimes was just as important as the thing itself. Animals moved naturally, looking for food, mates, and rest, until their base senses alerted them of a threat. People, civilized and removed from the forest, lost that incredible ability to know when something was wrong. Their higher skills robbed from the lower ones, Rew supposed, but he had learned to watch the animals, to watch them react to the signs he himself could not detect.

  The movement around the taverns, as quiet as they were, did not seem suspicious. Most of the ones he saw were open, and hesitantly, people were ducking their heads in. Maybe to get a drink to steady their nerves or maybe to glean information about what had happened. The Dark Kind had attacked and were repelled. What had occurred at the keep? Taverns in a town like Falvar would be central places for gossip, the way people got their news, and Rew saw they appeared to be operating as usual. Like animals at the watering hole, the people were approaching, and they did not seem afraid of what they would find there.

  He kept walking, Jon pacing at his side, both of them quiet.

  Then, Rew stopped. Down a dead-end cross street, there was a large building that looked much like an inn except all of its windows were shuttered. It was three stories tall, and as Rew watched, a man stepped outside, glanced around, and tugged at his belt to make sure it was secure and still held up his trousers. The man walked off. In the cul-de-sac, Rew spied a decrepit-looking tavern, an herbalist, and a coin changer.

  “Let’s stop in there,” he suggested.

  “What is that place?” wondered Jon.

  Rew snorted. “When you were in training for the king’s army, did you not spend some wild nights on the town?”

  “You think… you think it’s a brothel?”

  “Yes,” said Rew, “I think it’s a brothel, and maybe it’s more.”

  Jon adjusted his belt, making sure his longsword was in reach. Rew, thinking of how the man had done much the same on the way out of the building, rubbed at his lips with the back of his hand, trying to hide his smile.

  “Stay behind me,” warned Rew, forcing his voice to be stern. “You’re not well, and if you put yourself at risk, you’ll put me at risk too. No matter what we find, stay behind me. That’s safer for both of us.”

  Jon nodded. “Understood.”

  “And if you draw steel, which you shouldn’t, don’t go immediately for your longsword,” advised Rew. “Inside a building, without room to swing, a dagger or a knife will serve you better.”

  They strode into the cul-de-sac, reached the front of the building, and pushed the door open to walk inside. The entrance was boxed by wooden posts hung with diaphanous silk curtains. The curtains lent a hazy aspect to everything beyond, but it was clear enough that it was a house of ill repute. There was a bar against the far wall, and low couches strewn about the floor around it. One side of the room looked to have tables for gambling and another a stage for performances. In the middle of the day after an attack on the town, the stage was empty, and no one was gambling.

  A girl stood behind a podium and smiled at them as they walked inside. “Good day, sirs. Welcome to the Two Eggs. What can I do for you today?”

  “The Two Eggs?” asked Rew.

  “Your first time here?” asked the girl. She nodded to a sign hanging above her head. Two eggs, cooked sunny side up, were carved out of wood and adorned with the name of the establishment. In the context of the place, they looked rather a lot like breasts.

  Rew nodded. “First time.”

  The girl had the look of one who would work in such a place. Young and pretty, though her pale skin was dusted in powder and rouge. She wore modest clothing, but it clung to her tightly. Her attire was meant as a promise of what lay beyond the silk curtains, he supposed.

  “Visitors to Falvar, then?” she asked them, her welcoming smile painted on her face as carefully as the kohl around her eyes.

  “We are,” agreed Rew. “Normally, we don’t pause long, but you heard there was a bit of trouble outside of the city today? We figured no one is coming or going until it’s all sorted. If we’re here, we may as well enjoy the stay, eh?”

  “I heard there was a bit of trouble,” said the girl, looking at their clothing.

  Rew winced. They should have taken time to clean up, but it was too late now. “Aye, more than a bit, I’m afraid. Dark Kind breached the gates, and we got caught up in it. I don’t mind a bit of
a tussle, but well, we’re looking for something to take our minds off it, you understand?”

  “Yes, I can imagine,” said the girl with her false smile. “You’ve found the right place. What’s your pleasure, then?”

  “A drink to start with,” said Rew. “After that, ah, I gotta wet my throat afore I think of what else.”

  The girl looked them up and down, clearly unhappy with their openly displayed weapons and filthy appearance, but evidently, it wasn’t enough to turn them away. She turned to open the curtains for them.

  “The bar is in the back, and once you’re settled, some girls will be along to see if there’s anything else we can do to make your time in the Two Eggs more comfortable,” said the girl. She paused and added, “We have baths finer than anything you’ll find outside Baron Fedgley’s keep. You can soak there by yourself for a bit, or some men enjoy having the girls accompany them. I’m afraid we’ve no laundry.”

  “The bar first,” said Rew, and he stepped through the curtain.

  He led Jon toward the bar, having to step quick so the younger man didn’t walk on his heels. Rew shot the younger ranger a glare, but saw Jon wasn’t paying attention to him. Jon’s attention was on the rest of the room. The place was sparsely populated, which made sense in the middle of the day after an attack on the town, but there were people there, a dozen girls in skimpy attire and several men lounging comfortably throughout the space.

  The barman offered them a smile and a cheerful greeting, and Rew ordered himself an ale. He turned, leaning back against the counter as he waited on the drink. He pretended to study the girls. They might be eyes for the thieves’ guild, but a very quick look let him know they were not carrying any weapons of serious size. The men, though, could have been.

  Dressed in clothing that would be typical for a burgher in Falvar, those men wouldn’t have looked out of place except they were sitting in a brothel and weren’t speaking to any of the women working there. Why come to such a place if you weren’t going to do business?