The Ranger's Sorrow: The King's Ranger Book 4

by AC Cobble

  “What’d you see?” he asked. “I think that was a spellcaster, but… I don’t know. It was off.”

  She shook her head and did not answer.

  Rew considered turning, going the other way, but he didn’t know which direction the soldiers would move after visiting the village. Beyond Olsoth was Iyre. Any other way they walked, they would be going the wrong direction. They hiked for two more hours and then, behind them, saw tendrils of smoke clawing into the air. Valchon’s men were burning the village.

  “King’s Sake,” growled Rew. “It must have been an invoker leading them. There was nothing in that village which would have burned without high magic.”

  “Why are they doing it?” wondered Anne. “A signal to someone?”

  Rew had no answer for her.

  They moved quickly, hoping that Valchon’s men hadn’t bothered to climb atop one of the structures before they set it on fire. Without the additional elevation, Rew didn’t think the party would be visible so far away, but if those men had climbed up and looked around…

  An hour later, Raif broke the silence. “Where do you think they’ll go after the village?”

  Rew simply shrugged.

  They kept walking until the sun fell below the horizon. It was a cloudy night, and there was no light of the moon, so Rew called for a halt. “No point us falling over ourselves. There, up on the hill but short of the top. If we forgo a fire, no one should be able to pick us out, and in the morning, we’ll have a better view of what’s around.”

  They settled in for the night and, unfortunately, realized most of their provisions required cooking. Ang and Vurcell had given them ample meats and cheeses, but after a week of constant travel, most of it was gone. They were left with dried beans, rice, flour, and other foods that could keep for weeks. With no heat, though, it wasn’t edible. They pooled what was available and filled their bellies as best they could with stale ends of bread, a bit of salted meat, and water.

  Rew shook his waterskin, grimly thinking they didn’t have much more than a day of that left, either. They needed to find one of the tiny streams that crisscrossed the plains, which was more a matter of luck than of skill. There’d been a stream running near the village behind them, but they had left so quickly he hadn’t thought to have everyone refill their skins. He didn’t fancy going back that way. He could leave the others and scout ahead in the morning, moving several times faster than Anne and the children. They would be easy to locate once he found water as long as they headed on a steady course. He figured even the children could walk due north, and if not, he could find their tracks. Even on an empty plain, Raif left signs of his passage.

  Rew winced. If he could find those tracks, they may be possible for Valchon’s soldiers to locate as well.

  Still, they had to have water. He mentioned it to Anne, and she looked unhappy about the prospect of splitting up, but she didn’t object. Perhaps she recalled the man back at the first village who’d passed from dehydration. Rew suggested with little hope that perhaps he would find some game while he was scouting.

  “A herd of wild cattle?” said Anne with a laugh. “Even if you found one, killed it, and carved off a hunk of the meat, we still couldn’t cook it.”

  Shrugging, Rew decided to turn in for the night, letting the others take the first shifts at watch.

  When Anne woke him, some hours still until dawn, he got up and began a series of stretches to get his blood flowing again. They had no fire and no food, so they wouldn’t be pausing long in the morning. He had nothing to do, nothing to get ready for the others, so he merely walked broad circles around the hill, thinking.

  Valchon must have unleashed his men on the fringe of Prince Heindaw’s territory to either punish his younger brother or to distract him. Maybe he was trying to wound him, like Calb wounded Valchon? It didn’t seem like Valchon’s way, to lash out in retaliation, borrowing his brother’s tactics, but it was possible. If nothing else, it was confirmation that the Investiture had not ended. If the rumors they’d tried to start didn’t spread, the Investiture could end quickly now that it was between just two brothers. All it would take was one of them to slide through a fatal attack, but if Valchon’s men were out ravaging Heindaw’s territory, the fight was still on.

  Rew hadn’t considered what might happen if Valchon or Heindaw ended things while the party was traveling. During the time it would take to hike across the entire Western and Northern Provinces, Prince Valchon could move against his brother and end it, or Heindaw could enact some plot against Valchon, and it would be over. That would make things simpler in some ways.

  One less brother meant one less that Rew would have to face, but once there was only one, the Investiture would end, and the brother would be brought to Mordenhold to ascend the throne. If Rew and the others hadn’t given away their involvement, he would have been called to the capital as well. The king’s rangers always had representatives at coronations. They were expected to pledge loyalty to the new occupant of the throne. Rew had made that pledge once, twenty-five years earlier. He hadn’t been a ranger then, but he’d been a resident of the creche, and it was expected of them. It was a father or an uncle who ascended the throne, after all. None of the younglings in Mordenhold had known that they were pledging fealty to the same man who had occupied the throne before, just in a new body.

  What if Rew had known it was the ancient spirit of Vaisius Morden the first instead of his blood father? Would he still have bowed and said the words? How many others through the centuries had suspected, and what had they done? He couldn’t believe he was the only man to have learned Vaisius Morden’s awful truth, but none of the others had made the histories, not even the spoken history the rangers shared amongst themselves.

  Rew chose not to think about what that implied. It was too dark a consideration, alone in the middle of the night, far from home.

  He was still wandering broad loops around the camp when the first rays of dawn spread across the plains. He paused, one foot halfway down to the turf.

  Had it been his imagination, or had that early light reflected off of something?

  Clouds, still thick from the night before, rolled slowly across the sky, and when the next beams of full sun peeked through, Rew saw the twinkling reflection again. He raced back to his pack and ripped his spyglass out. Slapping it to his eye, he trained it on where he’d seen the reflection, and his heart sank. One hundred men, garbed in Valchon’s copper armor, were marching in formation. They were led by a man wearing spellcaster’s robes that were purple. Purple robes? Rew didn’t know what branch of high magic that might be, if it even represented a talent with high magic, but it didn’t matter. One hundred trained soldiers were too much for the party to face.

  Rew shouted to the others, waking them and demanding they get moving. Luckily, with no fire and no food, there’d been little unpacking the night before. The younglings and Anne scrambled to their feet, and Rew shouted to the nameless woman to wake her. He rushed to her bedroll, but she was gone.

  Confused, he kicked her blankets, thinking she was hidden out of sight somehow, but all he found was a pile of old clothing and mounded soil. Her pack was missing as well, her armor too, but he hadn’t noticed in the night. Rew spun, looking around frantically, but the nameless woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Already, Anne and the others were jogging down the side of the hill, headed northeast. Raif was trotting behind the women, still trying to twirl his blankets into a wad that he could stuff into his pack.

  “Rew?” called Anne, realizing he’d stopped behind them.

  Cursing, he ran after her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  An hour behind them, the copper breastplates flashed in the sun as Prince Valchon’s men marched closer. Growling, Rew snapped the spyglass closed and flung it into his pack. He waved to the others, and they kept hiking. For half the day, they’d been marching relentlessly northeast, the one hundred men following behind on their tail. At first, they hadn’t been su
re if the soldiers were pursuing them. Those men could simply be headed in the same direction, walking toward the largest city in the region.

  But after a couple of hours, it was clear it was a chase. Rew had turned the group, taking a different direction, and the soldiers had adjusted as well, gaining some distance on the party as Valchon’s men got a better angle.

  Frustrated, Rew turned the party back, headed toward Olsoth, the soldiers following behind. The land was open, just rolling plains and winter-dead grass. There was nowhere to hide, even if they’d wanted to risk it. There were no features nearby or anywhere on the horizon that would be defensible. Even if they had stumbled across another of the small villages, Rew would avoid the place. They’d seen the remains of one village and smoke from others. These soldiers wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone in their way, and the ranger knew there would be no one in the villages who could face a company of Valchon’s soldiers.

  “Why are they following us?” snapped Zaine, voicing everyone’s frustration. “They can’t know who we are, can they?”

  Rew shrugged and kept walking.

  “What if they do know who we are?” asked Cinda. “Now that Rew has killed Calb, Valchon could see us as a threat, and maybe he found out where we went after the Arcanum.”

  “If he kills us, Rew won’t be able to take on Heindaw,” argued Zaine. “Isn’t that what Valchon wanted, for Rew to face the younger brothers?”

  Cinda frowned, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear as she walked. “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” interjected Raif. “It seems pretty clear these men have instructions to kill anyone they find. We saw evidence enough of that in the villages. We’d be crazy to think they’d do anything different if they catch us.”

  The girls fell silent at that, and Rew glanced at Anne from the corner of his eye. The empath marched on stoically, perhaps already having decided the point Raif was making. Whatever the intentions of Prince Valchon’s men, they were unlikely to be good for Rew and the others.

  They couldn’t hide. They couldn’t stand and defend against one hundred soldiers and a pair of spellcasters, so there was only one choice. They would run, and keep running until they somehow lost their pursuers, or they got caught.

  As evening came, they hadn’t paused except for brief moments to peer through the spyglass behind them or to dig food or water out of a pack. Rew was growing more and more concerned. He thought they’d gained some ground on the soldiers but not much. Their party was fit from months on the road, but the men and women behind them were keeping the pace. Both groups were in a battle of stamina, and Rew knew nothing about their opponents. He didn’t know if they would stop for the evening or keep marching on through the dark. If they did keep marching at night, Rew and the others would have almost no warning until the soldiers were on top of them.

  He told the party, “We’ve got to keep going.”

  There were no complaints, not even grumbles. They all knew the stakes of the game they played now, and they’d seen enough death to understand what was behind them. Wordlessly, they continued on, and the sun kissed the horizon.

  “Where do you think she went?” Cinda asked as darkness fell across the plains.

  Rew grunted and didn’t respond.

  “She must have gone to those soldiers,” decided Raif. “It could be that’s why they’re following us.”

  “If she wanted to be associated with Valchon, she could have simply stayed in Carff,” argued Cinda. “Remember, she came after we were thrown through the portal. No, I think whatever she is hiding, it’s not loyalty to Valchon.”

  “She could be his spy now, even if she wasn’t before,” retorted Raif. “Maybe after we were gone, she spoke to him, and he recruited her. He could have promised that he’d rescue her father once he became king. She might have fallen for that, you know? She’s been hiding the truth from us this entire time.”

  “Or she could have just gotten up to heed nature’s call, and we left her,” retorted Zaine.

  Scoffing, Raif replied, “Gotten up and walked off so far we couldn’t see her? Taking her pack, her sword, and her armor? It isn’t so easy to heed nature’s call while wearing several stone worth of armor, believe me. And don’t forget, Rew had the last shift, so she must have left before then, unless you think she was able to sneak away while he was watching. That’d be an awfully long time to spend relieving oneself.”

  “Was it your shift, then, when she disappeared?”

  “What are you saying, that you think I fell asleep?” barked Raif. “I didn’t. I don’t… I think she was there, sleeping, during my shift.”

  “Well, it wasn’t when I was on watch!” snapped Zaine. She crossed her arms. “The woman had her shift after mine, and I woke her up. I fell asleep to the sound of her putting on her armor.”

  “I don’t like the way you’re—“

  “Wait,” cried Rew, grabbing Zaine’s arm. “The armor!”

  The thief blinked at him.

  “No way she could have snuck off wearing that armor if someone was awake,” muttered Raif under his breath. He glanced around. “It wasn’t me. I was awake.”

  “If she was planning to sneak off during anyone’s watch, would she put on her armor? She took it off to polish it last night and could have wrapped it in her cloak. That would have been a lot quieter than stalking off with all of that bronze on,” suggested Rew.

  “So she was… taken?” asked Cinda.

  Shaking his head, Rew kept striding across the grass. “Not taken. We would have seen that. But there’s something about that armor. It was a custom fit for her, which is far too expensive for a priest of the Cursed Father to have paid for, so who would have done such an extraordinary deed for her? She was in Iyre, which is ruled by the greatest enchanter of our age. Years later, she just happened to be in Spinesend around when we were and then in Stanton? I think Heindaw himself enchanted the armor and set her on her course, though I don’t know if the nameless woman realizes it.”

  No one answered, but after a while, Raif blurted out, “So she was Heindaw’s spy?”

  “Something like that,” responded Rew. “She must have gone off to report to him, or perhaps she was compelled? Enchantments are typically designed to benefit the user, but they can trap one as well. I can only speculate about what Heindaw is capable of. King’s Sake, maybe it wasn’t him. I don’t know.”

  “Why now?” questioned Cinda. “Why would she break her cover and move now? Something she saw in the villages?”

  “The purple robes of that spellcaster,” declared Rew suddenly. “She could have recognized something we did not or seen something we missed through the spyglass.”

  “Right before we fled the village, she did look at that man longer than the rest of us,” mentioned Raif. “She was upset about it. It didn’t seem that suspicious yesterday, because we were all distressed, but now I wonder. Why was she studying the spellcaster so closely? It was like she knew him.”

  Zaine collected Rew’s spyglass and, walking backward, peered through the device at their pursuers. She murmured, “Hard to see in the fading light. They’re less than an hour behind us, now. No doubt they’re following us. I don’t see the nameless woman, for what that’s worth. Pfah. The leader’s robes are a different color, but he does look like a spellcaster. Thinking back to how he looked earlier, he had the same posture, same arrogance clinging to him as all of them. Reminds me of Valchon himself. I wish I could see this man’s face better. I bet he looks like some sniveling worm.”

  “Purple robes,” mused Anne. “A new strain of high magic? I don’t think there’s ever been one of those, has there? Even in the earliest histories of the kingdom, it was always invoking, necromancy, conjuring, and enchantment. Who would determine such a thing, what color of robes the new talents would wear? The king?”

  Shaking his head, Rew replied, “I don’t think the king would have anything… Zaine, you said the man looked like
Valchon?”

  “Well, it was pretty far away, so I can’t actually see what he looks like, but he reminds me of the prince. I’m not saying… Are you thinking it’s him?”

  “Not him, not exactly. Heindaw was working on a new form of necromancy in the Arcanum,” said Rew. “He was attempting to conduct high magic with low magic and mechanics. What if Prince Valchon had considered something different but along the same lines? Instead of low magic, he could use his own blood. In years past, the prince had a plethora of young women around him at all times. They were gone when we saw him in Carff. A lothario, I thought, but what if…”

  “He was breeding a new army of spellcasters somehow?” questioned Anne. “To do that, he would have had to start decades ago.”

  “Aye, a few years after he left the creche in Mordenhold. He’s always known this was coming,” murmured Rew. “He’s the second oldest of Vaisius Morden’s children, right behind me. He… he knew. Twenty-five years ago, he saw what happened in the last Investiture. He could have been planning this since then.”

  “Blessed Mother,” said Anne.

  “If that’s the prince’s offspring behind us, we need to hurry,” advised Rew.

  They trudged on and, in an hour, were fully enveloped in the dark night, hardly any light from the sky falling to illuminate the way in front of them. The plains were flat, though, and at the end of winter, the grasses were small and limp. It was easy walking, if they could see where their feet were falling and hadn’t been hiking all day with hardly a pause for breath and water.

  For supper, Cinda trailed behind Anne, casting the glow of funeral fire into the empath’s pack and rooting around for what little food they had left. They didn’t stop to eat it, just kept walking. After several hours, Rew nearly fell into a small stream before hearing the gurgle of water, and he allowed a break as they crouched and refilled their waterskins in the crisp, cold flow.

  He stared back the way they’d come, wondering if Prince Valchon’s soldiers were still following or if they’d stopped for the night. There was no sign of a fire or any other light bleeding up from a camp, but they might have been too far back to see any glow had the soldiers made an effort to obscure it. Rew scratched his beard. He could go back, find their pursuers, and see if they were still coming. He would have no problem catching up to Anne and the children, if he could find them. He grimaced. In the dark of night, with no light from overhead, he wouldn’t be able to follow their tracks. If they turned from their course, they could easily lose each other. He could catch them in the morning, but what if their pursuers kept coming and dawn found them closer to Anne and the children? No, splitting up wasn’t a choice, not with enemies so close behind.