by Terah Edun
When she emerged like a fabled siren of the old, she could feel that the darkness had passed.
Turning to the edge, she saw Ezekiel waiting there.
Silent, watching, and shaking.
He held out a bar of soap with a quivering hand. She gently took it from him and smiled. Then she turned away to scrub herself raw. She heard him walk a few steps away to ask whoever was passing by to keep moving, and as she soaked her head for a final rinse, Sara felt a bit of calmness settle over her.
Even if it was only the ability to take a bath in peace, it was something.
As she rose out of the water, dried off, and clothed herself, she thought about what she had done and what she still needed to do. It was tempting to wall it off, but the day wasn’t yet finished. For now, however, she could at least claim her solitude.
Walking out of the hot springs area and toward her tent, she had to admit to herself that she was pleased Ezekiel had accompanied her. Even in silence. Especially in silence.
It wouldn’t be a long journey to her new quarters, she had the feeling by the metal heating up in her pocket.
“A moment?” she asked Ezekiel politely as she felt around in the new garments for the disc that was supposed to show her the way home.
Seeing her fumbling, after a few seconds Ezekiel asked hesitantly, “Need some help?”
Sara froze as he stepped forward. Seeing her freeze made him freeze too. But her actions weren’t preceded by the desire to kill him, she noticed with relief. Just awkwardness.
Deciding that it couldn’t hurt, she said “Yes” almost shyly.
He held out his hands and she realized he was offering to hold her possessions.
Almost too eagerly, as if she had something to prove, Sara Fairchild dumped her bare and blood-covered swords in his arms. Sara knew it wasn’t so simple but it almost felt as if by letting him hold the possessions that until now she had guarded jealously she could show him that she wasn’t just the woman he’d seen walking through camp soaked in blood.
She quickly went back to searching through both sides of her garments as she pushed that thought and what it said about her away.
It had to be in one of them. She couldn’t have lost the new outward sign of authority that the captain had given her so quickly. That wasn’t like her. She had so few personal possessions left after fleeing her mother’s burned out home after all.
With a sigh of relief she found it exactly where she’d left it and put it on around her neck.
Fortunately Ezekiel either didn’t notice or want to ask why her disc was different from the one that they’d been given what felt like ages ago but couldn’t be outside of this month’s timeframe in actuality.
Clearing his throat as she repossessed her weapons, he said quietly, “Ready?”
She shrugged with a tired, perhaps bitter smile. “As ever.”
He stepped back with a dramatic bow and pointed off in the distance. “Let’s go milady.”
Sara had to laugh and she walked off leading the way. She knew from her talks with others now that the discs did more than just garner entrance to certain parts of the encampment for its wearer and this one was no exception. She let her movements be directed by the subtle twitches of the disc as it re-directed them toward a different part of the tents.
Fortunately, Ezekiel didn’t question the direction because they had all been re-assigned to different quarters after the Kade bombardment had effectively sliced off half the encampment when it created the canyon of dead souls.
Nodding briefly at the squadron of guards strategically placed around a new grouping of tents, some of the command leaders’ tents Sara guessed, she walked through their unofficial blockade. They didn’t stop her as the twitching disc led her to her own and Sara realized that even with her minor rank, she was now considered one of those leaders.
For the moment she let that go as they approached the tent she knew as hers from the way the disc was heating up and Sara finally spoke.
“New assignment?” she said casually, carrying the weapons and accessories she hadn’t allowed to be burned by the hot springs attendant they’d passed on the way out.
Juggling the sword in her crossed arms was awkward, but she had no way else to carry it until she could wipe the dried blood from several days ago out of the grooves in the metal hilt.
Ezekiel knew better than to offer to carry them himself after she’d barely let him hold them for more than a few seconds.
“Yeah, this time I’m scouting with Reben. It’s not bad.”
“Far out?” Sara said.
“Not too far,” he replied. “Within a half-day ride of the encampment, and the scouts switch off the farther perimeter checks in a daily rotation.”
She nodded. “That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Ezekiel said, rubbing his nose. “The captain seemed to be trying hard to keep us from being surprised again.”
Sara glanced at his face at his mention of Barthis but didn’t react. It was good to get the common soldier’s view of how things were going.
Besides, she thought with a guilty conscience, she hadn’t yet told Ezekiel about her surprise promotion.
Bringing it up at the moment just didn’t seem right.
“You?” he asked.
Then again, why not? she thought as she reached her tent.
Biting her lip, Sara said, “This is me.”
His eyebrows rose. “This is a command tent.”
“I know,” she said. “Come on. I’ll tell you inside.”
He shrugged and followed her in.
Exhausted, but at least clean, Sara stepped into her new tent, which was larger and more opulent than the last, including its own desk and chair arrangement catty-corner to the bed.
As she thought about what to tell Ezekiel, who followed her in, she put her larger weapons on the bed and prepared to start the cleaning process with her knives.
That was her first mistake.
Her second was not telling Ezekiel to run when she could.
But what was done was done.
27
As she heard a step behind her, Sara had a decision to make. Go for the sword with Ezekiel in the way in the impossibly small space, most likely disabling him with a blow to the back of the head in the process. Or use her knives and save his life.
She chose the latter, whirling with a knife in hand and pushing Ezekiel down so fast that he fell into a chair and then head over heels.
She paid no heed to Ezekiel’s harsh cry as she stepped forward and barked, “Step out.”
The shadow didn’t move. But Sara wasn’t worried that she’d jumped to conclusions. Her hearing was too good for that.
She raised her knife. “Step out, or the next thing you see will be a knife halfway up your gut.”
Then the shadow moved. A man walked forward from the deep shadows near her desk.
Sara frowned. He shouldn’t have been able to hide in that, admittedly deep, fold in her tent at all. Shaking her head though she realized she had more immediate problems—starting with being on her feet unceasing for over a day.
Although she wished she’d heard him lurking around before coming into the tent, she knew that her exhaustion was a factor in that. It hadn’t even occurred to her to send out feelers with her magic to check for entrapments.
That had certainly never happened before and it wouldn’t happen again.
As he raised his hands slowly, Sara asked, “How’d you get past the command center guards?”
“Those louts? They know me, and as long as I slip them a tidbit on a nice bunker around camp, they don’t care.”
Sara felt all the wariness in her mind ease as she lowered her guard.
She had not been expecting him. How’d he even know where she lived, anyway?
“What do you want?” she said as she let her weapon fall limp and then reached out to help a dazed Ezekiel up from the ground.
“Well, you may not remember,” he said with quivering
excitement. “But I’m—”
“I know exactly who you are,” she snarled. “And if you don’t get your ass out of my tent, you’ll find yourself thrown out head first.”
“My, touchy-touchy,” said the man who obviously wasn’t aware of where she’d just been or what she’d done.
She didn’t get paid enough to even stay awake for this.
“Ezekiel,” Sara said as she sat down on the bed, the beginnings of a headache coming on, “make him leave.”
“Yeah, no problem,” her stalwart friend replied as he gently helped her sit down.
Sara’s lips twitched. Trust Ezekiel to baby a woman who had, up until an hour before, been covered in blood, and it hadn’t been her own. Then Ezekiel walked toward the man, his hands making shooing motions all the while.
As she moved her sword out of the way with a menacing air, the man squealed.
“Don’t make me leave,” he said. “I need your help.”
Ezekiel paused with his hand on the man’s chest.
“You need our help?” the scholar said.
“Yes,” the intruder said.
“No!” Sara said angrily. “Get out. I don’t owe you a thing.”
“Au contraire, mon ami,” the man said, speaking in the language of the Windswept Isles.
How quaint, Sara thought.
“Speak the common tongue or leave,” Ezekiel advised in the same language.
“Or how about just get out?” Sara added.
The man held up his hands. “No offense intended. All I meant to say in our common tongue was ‘On the contrary, my friend.’ And I do believe you all owe me some time, especially after you kicked me out of the mess without my breakfast being done.”
“All right,” Sara snarled. “I’ve had enough. First off, that was my breakfast you wanted to scarf down, piggy. Second, I don’t owe you a damned thing. And third, you’d have come barking up the wrong tree even if I had.”
Meanwhile, it was like a light went off in Ezekiel’s head.
“Wait!” he said as he rushed from where he’d been pushing the intruder out the tent doorway and over to the table. “I know you, don’t I?”
Oh no, Sara thought horrified. But it was too late. He was already off on a tangent.
It wasn’t long before Sara heard supplies being ripped open by the scholar, and with a groan, she saw Ezekiel activate the light orb that had been left in her tent.
As soon as he turned around, Ezekiel said excitedly, “It is you. You’re Sara’s dining companion from before.”
“He’s not my anything!” she snapped.
At the same time, the intruder said, “You do remember me, then.”
Ezekiel ignored them both. “Yes, you’re the one who told me about the—”
Ezekiel snapped his fingers, trying to remember the words…or maybe the context of the conversation; Sara didn’t know.
“What was it?” he muttered to himself. “Sara, do you know?”
“No,” she said sourly, not even trying to guess.
“I remember now!” Ezekiel said. “The fortifications on the eastern wall front—that was you. The information, I mean.”
“Yes!” the man said.
“Enough!” Sara snapped, rubbing her temples in irritation. “All I wanted was some peace and quiet.”
“And I’ll gladly give you that,” the intruder said. “I just need some assistance first.”
“Doing what?” said Sara. She really wasn’t in the mood for anything but sleep. But it seemed nothing else would get him to leave her tent.
“Well,” the man said, “there are some people looking for me, and I don’t believe they have good intentions. After meeting the two of you—even if you, miss, are a bit of a prickly pear—I believe you could be the best person to aid me.”
Sara snorted. That was the politest way she’d ever heard someone call her a bitch, but she wasn’t mad. She was just annoyed.
Resolving to let Ezekiel handle this on his own and ignore them both until at least the intruder left, she lay back and put a pillow over her head.
Ezekiel didn’t seem to see the problem, though. “What kind of people and aid? Sara’s definitely the person you’d go to if someone is after you. She’s protected my butt more times than I can count.”
“Oh, oh, that’s good!” she heard the unwelcome visitor squeal as she peeked out from underneath the pillow narrowed eyes. “Just what I need.”
As he talked, Ezekiel made it over to her side of the tent, leaving the intruder free to sidle his way out of the doorway. Which she noticed he didn’t do, instead the man promptly toddled further back into the room.
Replacing her pillow with a groan, Sara reached out blindly and slapped Ezekiel on the back. Hard.
She knew he felt it from the way he jumped, and she was considering kicking him as well. The only reason she didn’t was because that would entail more physical movement, and she’d actually grown comfortable on the bed.
Finally, Sara grew fed up, and when she grew fed up, she went on the attack. Luckily, for him and her, this poor sod was so pathetic that she didn’t even have to rise from her bed to do it.
Then the stranger said something that stopped her in her figurative tracks.
“The Fairchild line has always been bold,” the man said sadly. “I didn’t know they’d grown lazy and selfish as well.”
With a snarl on her face, Sara sat up with a knife in her hand—done playing games.
“What did you just say?” she said through gritted teeth.
The man tittered and said, “Well, at least you’re up now.”
She prepared to throw her weapon in his face, it was the perfect distance to put the five-inch blade directly between his eyes.
He must have sensed the change in her mood because he quickly said, “I help you, you help me. It’s not a bad deal! And there’s a lot I can give you—information you need. Information on a certain murder or a kidnapping. Take your pick.”
Sara only gripped the hilt harder as she stared at him hard. This walking buffoon was more than he seemed and had depths that she wasn’t sure she wanted to tap either. But he had invaded her tent. Not the other way around. She had to find out who he was and what he wanted and this time she wasn’t going to be distracted by a jovial nature either.
“Who are you?” she said flatly.
The rotund man who had spit eggs all over her lap at breakfast turned to her with an eager smile on his face, as if just by recognizing his existence, and actually asking a question in a tone that was only semi-indicative of her propensity for murder, that she had welcomed him with open arms.
Which couldn’t be further from the truth, and he was an idiot if he didn’t recognize a situation going south when he saw it.
For a moment, she had to wonder how he’d joined the Mercenary’s Guild at all with those lackluster instincts, but she also wondered what if he was like a still lake—only calm and innocent on the surface. Regardless, she didn’t really care about that, what she did care about was why he kept barging into her life.
“Surely you’ll help me even if I didn’t want to tell you my name?” he said with what Sara would generously call a pout.
Sara had gathered her feet under by then, and the only thing preventing her from leaving the bed was Ezekiel’s wiggling body.
“Better answer her, friend,” Ezekiel said while trying to poke Sara’s knife-wielding hand away from his side.
“Well, I’m a mercenary like yourself,” the intruder answered nervously. “I do camp planning, and boy, after that Kade bombardment, have I ever been busy. Relocating whole regiments, finding new drop zones for supplies—”
He would have continued, but even Ezekiel knew when someone was avoiding the question.
“Just tell us your name,” the scholar said.
The man gulped and then bobbed into a semi-bow. “Matteas Hillan, at your service.”
Sara got up so fast that she pushed Ezekiel off the bed with her.
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“Wait, what?” she screeched at the intruder.
To say she was shocked to hear that name would have been an understatement.
“Well,” Ezekiel said after a moment of being stupefied, “at least we don’t have to go looking for the file codices for the encampment anymore. Matteas Hillan found us.”
Sara’s jaw was still on the floor. “You’ve got to be kidding me. This is the man my father trusted above all others?”
She looked him up and down in disbelief as if really seeing him for the first time. She’d barely paid him any mind the one other time she’d met him, and certainly not after she’d disregarded him as a potential threat in her tent.
He was as slovenly as she remembered, with a wrinkled tunic that looked like it had been wrung out tight, hung on a line, and then trampled…albeit with clean feet. He had stains on his pants, a beat-up satchel half hanging off his shoulder, and a bald, splotchy head.
She couldn’t believe her eyes.
Hillan looked between the two of them quizzically. “Were the two of you looking for me?”
Ezekiel let out a half laugh, half snort. “That’s like asking if the stars follow the moon. We’ve traveled across the empire in search of you.”
Sara, however, was still stuck in the world of disbelief.
“Never mind that,” she snapped. “You’re Matteas Hillan?”
The man blinked. “One and the same.”
“The Matteas?”
Looking a bit put out, he said, “Is there another?”
Sara blinked and stared—if he was faking, it was a good act.
“This can’t be real,” Sara said as she moved to sit down on the empty stool next to the desk, her head in her hands.
“Well, this is just the best thing to have happened,” Matteas said in a voice that practically dripped with sunshine and rainbows. “You were looking for me. I was looking for you. We need each other. It’s almost fate.”
