Oath Bound (Book 3)

by M. A. Ray

  “I’m fine,” Dingus said.

  “I can help you if you only let me, but you have to let me.” The sailor patted the battleaxe slung over his back. “I’ll keep you safe while you rest, you and these little ones you love. Nothing bad will happen to them while I watch. I promise.”

  Dingus said nothing. He shook his head. He couldn’t trust anyone, even if they said they were from Vandis, and charmed the hell out of everyone, and didn’t even look twice at Kessa that way.

  “You don’t trust me.” With a grunt, Haakon hunkered next to him, propping his back on the same rock, and Dingus’s nerves prickled. “That’s smart, but I can tell you I’ll never let anyone hurt these tiny ones. At home in Rodansk, I have three little boys. When you’re a father, you can’t look at a little one without seeing your own child in his eyes.”

  “I like kids.” Tai let out a cheeping, blissful sigh and snuggled against his jerkin. Kids judged you different. It wasn’t so much what you were as who you showed you were, and they didn’t assume things quite the same way.

  “They can tell. They call you Kunu, these ones. To them, I can see how you’re that.”

  “I don’t know what it means.” He’d forgotten to ask Tai.

  Behind the rock, the fire spat, and Haakon chuckled. Shadows danced in the pines in front of Dingus, and he was so god-awful tired. Tai made a warm spot over his heart. His lids felt heavy, and he squeezed them shut and dragged them open again.

  “It’s a shaman,” Haakon said. “A magic man. I can see how they think it.”

  Dingus gazed into the shadows. He didn’t have any magic. All he did was give a shit.

  “I have one question for you, though.”

  “Hm.”

  “Has Yatan come to find you yet?”

  A hot wire ran up Dingus’s spine. He stared at Haakon.

  Haakon frowned. “I hope you’re not thinking not to pay him, because if that is so, I can’t do much for you. If you don’t have the money, I can—”

  “Even if I had it, I wouldn’t pay him.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “You’re a good man, Dingus, but like many good men who’ve died before you, you act the fool. Your honor swamps your reason like the wide open sea swamps a little canoe. Go to sleep. Maybe in the morning the waves will have calmed.”

  “Not likely,” Dingus said, but he rose, cradling Tai, and went to lie down. He curled around his tiny friend and pulled the blanket over them. He’d been determined to stay awake, no matter what, but he fell asleep before the warmth reached his toes—too tired to dream.

  Innocent

  Fort Rule

  The gates almost never opened to let anyone out. Usually, the great portal at the front of Fort Rule only admitted, never emitted. Even the guards who kept watch over the great Stone in the field used one of the posterns when they went out on a shift. Today was no exception, and though the gates swung wide, it was only to grant three people entry. The moment they cleared, the high, heavy doors ground into their places on the sweaty backs of the garrison. Two men swathed in bandages escorted the most singular figure—singular, he’d be, anywhere but Fort Rule.

  The boy was about fourteen, nude, and hairless, without so much as an eyebrow, let alone a short-and-curly, to cover his nakedness. Krakus noticed that first thing, and only after he’d finished his slack-jawed stare—how dare they humiliate a child this way?—did he see the fire. Flames, translucent in the beating sun, rippled over every inch of the boy’s skin, toes to crown, and where he stepped, he left sooty footprints in the dust. Plants withered and crisped in his wake. He walked with agonizing care up the long path to Section Two, and the two bandaged men followed.

  Krakus rose from the middle of the garrison’s kitchen garden, where he and Fillip had been helping the cooks to harvest tomatoes and summer squash, a bumper crop in spite of the dry weather they’d had lately. “I should go,” he said, brushing his palms together.

  “I’ll meet you at the office later,” Brother Fillip said, and he nodded. The knees and calves of his white breeches shed yellow dirt as he picked his way over rows of snap beans and bell peppers.

  “Ho there!” he called when he reached the broad path, raising a hand to hail the little group. The gates to Section Two had already begun to open. Krakus jogged to catch them up, and slowed to fall into step with the boy. “Afternoon. I’m Father Krakus,” he said, as if this were nothing more than an after-dinner stroll.

  Up close, he saw better what was going on, the hurt branded all over the boy’s face and the smudges of ash where his clothes might have been, the salt crust on his cheeks. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. I’m Jan, Father.”

  “We’re down from Number One Cloister,” said one of the men, in a voice sore and raspy from breathing smoke and ash. “The boy was a novice.”

  “And then,” Jan said, savage with pain, “I killed Kas.”

  Krakus glanced back over his shoulder.

  “His Brother,” the other man said.

  “I burned him.” The heat from Jan’s body flared. Flame licked at Krakus’s tunic sleeve, but he didn’t flinch away, no matter how he wanted to. Instead, he smothered the little tongue with his palm.

  “You didn’t mean to, though,” he said.

  “How would you know?”

  “I have a feeling.” Krakus smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “You must’ve been about to take your vows.”

  “Next summer. I’m supposed to—was supposed to next summer.” Jan turned big brown eyes onto him, sad-rabbit eyes that stabbed into his belly. “I’m not going to now, am I?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  They walked on in silence, until they passed through the gates between Four and Three. “What is this place?” the boy asked.

  “Fort Rule,” Krakus said at first, but it didn’t seem like quite enough. Prison, maybe, a prison for everyone even a little bit magical, but that wouldn’t be of any particular comfort. “Home,” he decided. “You’ll see. There are other people like you. People who can do things like you can.”

  “All I can do is burn.” It came out in a whisper, and when he looked over his shoulder, Krakus followed his eyes to the trail of footprints in the dirt. When Jan took a step, the print would smoke briefly behind him.

  “We’ll work on that.”

  Jan let out a sound, half laugh, half sob: all the answer he needed to give.

  “You don’t believe me,” Krakus said. “That’s all right. We’ll get there. Can you rein it in at all?”

  “Sometimes,” the boy whispered.

  He nodded. “Listen,” he said to the two monks trailing them, “I’ll take him from here. You boys go relax.”

  “Yes, Father Krakus,” they said in unison, and peeled off toward the commissars’ barracks, leaving Jan and Krakus alone. Jan watched them go with his sad-rabbit eyes, translucent flame leaping off his head.

  “We’ll get there. Don’t be afraid, if you can help it,” Krakus said. “Come on. Almost home.” He patted the boy’s shoulder with his ring hand, tried not to let the pain of touching open fire show on his face. Thankfully, the fairy ring made an empty space on Jan’s skin, pushing that fire away, but his palm came away blistered, and he forced himself to remain nonchalant while he extinguished his sleeve again.

  “How did you do that?” Instead of sad rabbit, Jan’s expression was fishy and curious, and he rubbed at his shoulder, which the flames had already covered again.

  “Did it hurt you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  Krakus took him to Section One and introduced him around while a quartermaster and a sergeant rushed to try and fill the needs of a burning boy. Except for little Pete Zielski, whose falcon wings were molting again, nobody batted an eyelash at Jan’s nakedness, and Krakus was proud of them. Even for strange people like these, dressing only in fire was a bit of a stretch.
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  They didn’t have much for Jan, as it turned out, and in the end they wound up dragging a spare stone slab that hadn’t been used for repairs yet into Section One for the boy to use as a bed. They put it in a corner of the section, up against two of the walls, and tried to rig a curtain around it. Krakus watched out of the corner of his eye and made a note to talk to the armorers about chainmail screens. At dinnertime, Jan couldn’t sit at the table with the others. Krakus sat on the ground with him, and Eddie and Danny joined them. Danny seemed to enjoy the heat radiating from Jan’s thin body.

  They had a good time. Eddie and Jan were just about the same age, and laughed at each other’s jokes after a few awkward, initial stabs at interaction on Eddie’s part. By the time Krakus needed to go to his office—he had to spend some time there, much as he hated it, and make himself available to the commissars—he felt comfortable leaving Jan with his two favorites. Before he left, he made sure to press the new boy in a hug, as natural as he could make it; the ring helped, but he still came away with charred clothes and reddened skin.

  Krakus didn’t mind. The thunderstruck expression and hard return squeeze from Jan was payment enough for a hundred burns.

  He whistled tunelessly to himself on his way back to Section Three, happy in spite of the burnt holes in the front of his whites and the pain in his right palm. Before he went into the office, he stopped in his bedroom, changed clothes, and buckled on his sword.

  When he got to the door, at first he reached for the knob with his right and hissed, releasing it to examine the burn. One of the blisters had already popped. Clear fluid oozed down to his wrist, and he took out a handkerchief to wipe it clean, knob and hand both. He thought maybe he’d better go over to the hospital and get a salve and bandage from Doctor Kuskov.

  Inside, Lech talked to someone whose voice Krakus didn’t recognize, the words muffled by the wood of the door. He was on the point of turning aside in favor of treatment for his hand when he heard a third voice, and that one, he would’ve known in the deepest, darkest part of a four-day bender.

  Droshky.

  Krakus wrenched the door open, forgetting his burnt hand entirely, even when he tore half the skin off. He saw that Prince Vlad was in there, too, but he didn’t spare much thought to wonder how the Prince had gotten in without anybody knowing it. “Tadeusz Droshky!” he bellowed, and pain slammed into his head as the sword cleared its scabbard. He reeled back against the doorjamb, bounced off, fell to his hands and knees in a black-and-red whirl; his sword clanged on the floorboards and slid away.

  “Vlad!” Lech cried, from far away, while Krakus clutched at his skull, unable to move or think. “No!”

  “Why not, Father?” Vlad said, coldly. “You’ve said yourself that lately Father Krakus is acting the fool, have you not? Prowling the Fort, poking his nose into how training’s conducted for the Special Units…”

  “Distracting himself.” He thought Lech moved; he thought he heard the chair scrape back over the wooden floor, the heavy rub of wool vestments against themselves, and the sounds tore into his ears. He screamed. “He’s useful to me. Don’t kill him. Make him forget—surely that’s easy enough for you to do.”

  “Easier to kill him,” Vlad said, with a three-year-old’s petulance.

  “If you do,” Lech said, “rest assured that I can find an excuse to excommunicate you on a moment’s notice. Don’t kill…”

  Krakus slumped to the floor in a dead blackout.

  When he woke in a hospital bed with a poultice on his right hand and a ravening monster of a headache, he didn’t know how he’d gotten there. “You collapsed, Father Krakus,” Doctor Kuskov explained, in a voice so quiet it was hardly even a whisper. Krakus wanted to tell him not to bother. The hospital already rang with moans and heavy breathing, and it didn’t make much difference whether Kuskov whispered or shouted.

  “…how long?” Krakus asked.

  “Less than half a day,” Kuskov said, as if to reassure him. “It’s late night just now. All the same, I’d like for you to stay at least through tomorrow. I’m not sure what’s happened to you, Father.”

  “All right.”

  Kuskov nodded and bustled away to see to someone else. He left Krakus staring at the candlelit ceiling, hurting all over, but mostly in his head.

  He had the awful, frustrating feeling that something vital had slipped his mind, and he couldn’t think what the hell it was. Something about the boys? The more he tried to comb through his memory, the more his brain throbbed, ’til he couldn’t think at all. Finally he shut his eyes, but even sleep eluded him. Krakus groaned, and he tossed and turned until Doctor Kuskov came by and gave him a sleeping draught.

  And then there was nothing.

  Yatan

  ten days later

  Dingus sliced spoo and carrots into the bubbling pot from where he sat tailor-fashion on the ground. The Salmon ladies had been and gone that morning, leaving a load of fruits, vegetables, and shellfish behind. The Ishlings had already polished off most of the apples, and now they were playing their favorite game: Teach Dingus Ishian. Really, though, it was Laugh at Dingus’s Accent. His voice couldn’t do a lot of the stuff an Ish voice needed to do. For one thing, no way could he get it to reach that high, and for another, the necessary notes eluded him. He could hear the tones, and he understood a lot more Ishian than he had when they’d first come here, enough to make out most of what the kids said to each other, but he couldn’t get his voice to chirp, cheep, or squeal, let alone do that long, sliding chirr they used sometimes. It sure would crack, though: more often, and more horribly, than ever. He used to sing, some at least, to himself, but when his own breaking voice made him cringe, a lot of the pleasure went out of it.

  “Okay, okay, now you say yeeyus,” Jooga demanded.

  “What’s that one?”

  “Is this,” the little girl said, picking up one of the crooked purple carrots with her dark brown hand.

  “Carrot,” Dingus said. “In hituleti, that’s shilan.”

  “Say it!”

  He sighed. “Yeeyus.”

  “Eeheeheeheehee!”

  “Now say veeklootz!” Zeeta demanded. That one was a favorite. It was supposed to come out something like “vee-EEK-loo-tuz,” and it never came from Dingus that way no matter how he tried.

  “Cypress,” he said. “Lashkehanmayama.” Then he grinned. “Veeklootz.”

  The Ishlings shrieked and howled, rolling on the ground, over and over each other. Dingus chuckled. They were funny as hell even if they were laughing at him.

  “How ’bout you guys try some hituleti words, huh? Then we’ll see who talks funny.”

  Tai sniffed and straightened to his hind legs. He put one hand on his chest, one behind his back, and said, “Lashkehanmayama,” in Dingus’s voice, with Dingus’s accent just so.

  “Not you, you little aper.” Before Dingus grabbed another carrot, he poked Tai in the stomach. “Anyways, you ought to talk better. I is this, I is that—you know better by now and no mistake.”

  “Pfft!” Tai said. “Too hard to remember always to do it.”

  “Bullshit it is. You let somebody else try now. Zeeta, how ’bout you? Can you say it?”

  “I isn’t think so!” she said, eyes wide. “No, Dingus!”

  “C’mon. Lashkehanmayama—if I can say it, you can too.”

  “Lashkehanmayama,” she said, getting all the syllables in, but mangling the accent.

  He nodded anyway. “That’s a good try.”

  “Hmm!” She gave a smug smile and preened the front of her tunic. “By course it is. I is your smart chickadee.”

  He reached over and rubbed under her chin. “Ralimovaran, you sure are.”

  “What is that word?” Tai demanded.

  Dingus picked up another spoo. “It’s ‘my little heart.’ Sweetie, for a little girl. If you’re a boy it’s ralimovaro.”

  “O is for boys, an is for girls?”

  “Most of the time. Sometimes on
is for guys and ua is for girls. Depends on the word and what you’re using it for.”

  “See? Is confusing. All the different languages! They is mixing up in my brains!” Tai groaned dramatically and flopped onto his back, playing dead—except that he cracked one eyelid to see if Dingus was watching. Dingus pretended not to be. Instead, he finished the vegetables and talked to the others, who’d gotten bored with Laugh at Dingus’s Accent and pestered him with questions about what it was like in a country where they spoke hituleti all the time. Thank the Lady Dingus had learned to edit stories for audience. A lot of his childhood wasn’t kid-appropriate.

  Good thing nobody had ever seen a sheep. He had them all giggling, and Kessa too, so much she fell on her face in the middle of a one-armed push-up. “They are very stupid, though,” Haakon put in from the other side of the fire. He’d spent a lot of time just sitting, and somehow contrived never to be nearby when Captain Dar visited. “If they were smarter, I think maybe sheep would rule the world, but they are so stupid they can’t even find their own way home.”

  “That’s right,” Dingus said. “You gotta count ’em at least once a day, and if any are missing you gotta go find ’em, otherwise you won’t get ’em back.”

  “This is why it’s so important to have a good dog. They mostly keep the stupid sheep together, and if—ho!” Haakon rose.

  Dingus followed his eyes, and gulped. Yatan stood between two pines, flanked by four goons this time, two on each side. Someone, Dingus didn’t know who, let out a tiny cheep of fear.

  “Time to pay up,” Yatan said, no pleasantries, no kindness in it.

  Dingus got slowly to his feet, adjusting his grip on the knife he’d been using to slice vegetables. His hunting knife. “Not in front of the kids.”

  “You don’t have my money, do you, Dingus?”

  “I said, not in front—”

  “Get me the right hand. I want the one with the leaf.”

  Dingus’s stomach flipped and took a dive for his toes, but he tried not to let it show. “Come take it. If you can.” He let the sunlight flash off his knife.