He made an odd gesture with his fingers, and Tier dropped his sword with a cry as it became too hot to hold.
Wizard, thought Tier, but neither surprise nor dismay slowed him. Leaving his sword where it lay, Tier charged, catching the other man in the stomach with his shoulder and pushing both of them back into a mass of shrubs, which caught at their feet.
Wresen, unprepared, stumbled and fell. Tier struck hard, aiming for the throat, but his opponent rolled too fast. Quick as a weasel, Wresen regained his feet. Twice Tier jumped and narrowly avoided the other’s blade. But he wasn’t a fool; unarmed, his chances weren’t good.
“Run, Seraph,” he said. “Take the horse and get out of here.”
With luck he should be capable of holding her pursuer long enough that she could lose him in the woods. If he could keep him busy enough, Wresen wouldn’t have time to work magic.
“Don’t be more of a fool than you can help, Bard,” she said coldly.
The other man swore, and Tier saw that Wresen’s sword had begun to glow as if it were still in the blacksmith’s fire. Steam rose from his sword hand as he made odd gestures toward it with his free hand. Wresen was no longer giving any heed to Tier at all—which was the last mistake he ever made.
Tier pulled his boot knife out of the man’s neck and cleaned it on the other’s cloak. When he was finished, he looked at Seraph.
Her pale skin and face were easy to find in the darkness. She reminded him of a hundred legends: so must Loriel have stood when she faced the Shadowed with nothing more than her song, or Terabet before throwing herself from the walls of Anarorgehn rather than betraying her people. His father had always said that his grandfather told him too many stories.
“Why choose me over him?” Tier asked her.
She said, “I heard him at the inn. He was no friend of mine.”
Tier narrowed his eyes. “You heard me at the inn as well. He only helped the innkeeper add coppers—I bought you intent on revenge.”
She lifted her chin. “I’m not stupid. I am Raven—and you are Bard. I saw what you did.”
The words were in Common, but they made no sense to him.
He frowned at her. “What do you mean? Mistress, I have been a baker and a soldier, which is to say swordsman, tracker, spy, and even tailor, blacksmith, and harness maker upon occasion—and doubtless a half dozen other professions. But I make no claim to be a bard. Even if I were, I have no idea what that has to do with you. Or what being a raven means.”
She stared at him as if he made as little sense to her as she had to him. “You are Bard,” she said again, but this time there was a wobble in her voice.
He took a good look at her. It might have been rain that wet her cheeks, but he’d bet his good knife that there would be salt in the water. She was little more than a child and she’d just lost her brother under appalling circumstances. It was the middle of the night, she was shaking with cold, and she’d held up to more than many a veteran soldier.
“I’ll dispose of the body,” he said. “Neither of us will get any sleep with him out here attracting carrion-eaters. You get out of the rain and into dry clothes. We’ll talk in the morning. I promise that no one will harm you until morning at least.”
When she was occupied getting her baggage out of the cart, he led Skew to the body and somehow wrestled the dead man onto the horse’s wet back. He had no intention of burying the man, just moving him far enough away that whatever scavengers the body attracted wouldn’t trouble them. It occurred to him that Wresen might not be alone—indeed, it would be odd if he were because noblemen traveled with servants.
But all he found was a single grey horse tied to a tree about a hundred paces back down the trail and no sign that another horse had been tied nearby.
Tier stopped beside the animal, and let the body slide off Skew’s back into the mud, sword still welded to his hand. Skew, who’d borne with everything, jumped three steps sideways as the body fell and snorted unhappily. The grey pulled back and shook her head, trying to break free—but the reins held. When nothing further happened the horse quieted and lipped nervously at a bunch of nearby leaves.
Tier rifled through the man’s saddlebags, but there was nothing in them but the makings of a few meals and a pouch of silver and copper coins. This last he tucked into his own purse with a soldier’s thrift. He took the food as well. There was nothing on the body either—except for a chunky silver ring with a bit of dark stone in it. He deemed the ring, like the horse and the man’s sword, too identifiable to take, and left it where it was.
In the end, Tier found no hint of who Wresen was, or why he’d been so intent on getting Seraph. Surely a mage wouldn’t have the same unreasoning fear of Travelers that the villagers here had.
He took his knife and cut most of the way through the grey’s reins near the bit. When she got hungry enough she’d break free, but it wouldn’t be for a while yet.
By the time he rode back to camp, Tier was dragging with fatigue. Seraph had taken his advice; he found her huddled under the tree.
A second oilskin tarp, bigger and even more worn that his, increased the size of their shelter so that he might even be able to keep his feet dry. His saddle was in the shelter too, the mud wiped mostly off. He rummaged in the saddlebags and changed to his second set of clothing. They weren’t clean, but dry was more important just now.
Seraph had turned her face away while he changed. Knowing she’d not sleep for the cold on her own, nor agree to snuggle with a stranger—especially not in the present circumstances, he didn’t bother to say anything. He wrapped an arm around her, ignored her squeak of surprised dismay, and stretched out to sleep.
She tried to wiggle away from him, but there wasn’t much room. Then she was still for a long time while Tier drifted into a light doze. Some time later her quiet weeping woke him, and he shifted her closer, patting her back as if she were his little sister coming to him with a scraped knee rather than the loss of her family.
He woke to her strange pale eyes staring at him, lit by sunlight leaking through morning clouds.
“I could have used this on you,” Seraph said.
He looked at the blade she held in her dirty hands—his best knife. She must have been into his saddlebags.
“Yes,” he agreed, taking it from her unresisting hand. “But I saw your face when you looked at our dead friend last night. I was pretty certain you wouldn’t want to deal with another dead body any time soon.”
“I have seen many dead,” she said, and he saw in her eyes that it was true.
“But none that you have killed,” he guessed.
“If I had not been asleep when they were killing my brother,” she said, “I would have killed them all, Bard.”
“You might have.” Tier stretched and slid out from under the tree. “But then you would have been killed also. And, as I told you last night, I am no bard.”
“Just a baker’s son,” she said. “From Redern.”
“Where I am returning,” he agreed.
“You are no solsenti,” she disagreed smugly. “There are no solsenti Bards.”
“Solsenti?” He was beginning to get the feeling that they knew two entirely different languages that happened to have a few words in common.
Her assuredness began to falter, as if she’d expected some other reaction from him. “Solsenti means someone who is not Traveler.”
“Then I’m afraid I am most certainly solsenti.” He dusted off his clothes, but nothing could remove the stains of travel. At least they weren’t wet. “I can play a lute and a little harp, but I am not a bard—though I think that means something different to you than it does to me.”
She stared at him. “But I saw you,” she said. “I felt your magic at the inn last night.”
Startled he stared at her. “I am no mage, either.”
“No,” she agreed. “But you charmed the innkeeper at the inn so that he didn’t allow that man to buy my debt.”
“I am a
soldier, mistress,” he said. “And I was an officer. Any good officer learns to manage people—or he doesn’t last long. The innkeeper was more worried about losing his inn than he was about earning another silver or two. It had nothing to do with magic.”
“You don’t know,” she said at last, and not, he thought, particularly to him. “How is it possible not to know that you are Bard?”
“What do you mean?”
She frowned. “I am Raven, you would say Mage—very like a solsenti wizard. But there are other ways to use magic among the Travelers, things your solsenti wizards cannot do. A few of us are gifted in different ways and depending upon that gift, we belong to Orders. One of those Orders is Bard—as you are. A Bard is, as you said, a musician first. Your voice is true and rich. You have a remarkable memory, especially for words. No one can lie to you without you knowing.”
He opened his mouth to say something—he knew not what except that it wouldn’t be kind—but he looked at her first and closed his mouth.
She was so young, for all that she had the imposing manner of an empress. Her skin was grey with fatigue and her eyes were puffy and red with weeping she must have done while he slept. He decided not to argue with her—or believe what she said though it caused cold chills to run down his spine. He was merely good with people, that was all. He could sing, but then so could most Rederni. He was no magic user.
He left her to her speculations and began to take down the camp. If Wresen’s horse made it back to the inn, there might be people looking for him soon. Without saying anything more, she stood up and helped.
“I’m going to take you to my kin in Redern,” he said when their camp was packed and Skew once more attached to the Traveler cart. “But you’ll have to promise me not to use magic while you’re there. My people are as wary as any near Shadow’s Fall. Redern’s a trading town; if there are any Traveler clans around, we’ll hear about them.”
But she didn’t appear to be listening to him. Instead, when she’d scrambled to Skew’s back she said, “You don’t have to worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Tell what?” he asked, leading the way back to the trail they’d followed the night before.
“That someone in your family, however far back, laid with a Traveler. Only someone of Traveler blood could be a Bard,” she said. “There are no solsenti Bards.”
He was beginning to resent the way she said solsenti; whatever the true meaning of the word, he was willing to bet it was also a deadly insult.
“I won’t tell anyone else,” she said. “Being Traveler is no healthy thing.”
She glanced up at the mountains that towered above the narrow trail and shivered.
There were not as many thieves in that part of the Empire as there were in the lands to the east where war had driven men off their lands. But Conex the Tinker, who found the dead body beside the trail, was not so honest as all that. He took everything he could find of value: two good boots, a bow, a scorched sword with scraps of flesh still clinging to it (he almost left that but greed outweighed squeamishness in the end), a belt, and a silver ring with a bit of onyx stone set in it.
Two weeks after his unexpected good fortune a stranger met up with him on the road, as sometimes happens when two men have the same destination in mind. They spent most of the day exchanging news and ate together that night. The next morning the stranger, a silver ring safely in his belt pouch, rode off alone.
Conex would never more go a-tinkering.
CHAPTER 2
“You see those two mountains over there?” Tier gestured with his chin toward two rocky peaks that seemed to lean away from each other.
Seraph nodded. After several days’ travel she knew Tier well enough to expect the start of another story, and she wasn’t wrong.
Tier was a good traveling companion, she thought as she listened to his story with half an ear. He was better than her brother Ushireh had been. He was generally cheerful and did more than his fair share of the camp work. He didn’t expect her to say much, which was just as well, for Seraph didn’t have much to say—and she enjoyed his stories.
She knew that she should be planning what to do when they reached Tier’s village. If she could find another clan, they’d take her in just for being Traveler, but being Raven would make her valuable to them.
If Ushireh had been less proud they would have joined another clan when their own clan died. But Ushireh had no Order to lend him rank; he would have gone from clan chief’s son to being no one of importance. Having more than her share of pride, Seraph had understood his dilemma. She’d agreed that they would go on and see what the road brought them.
Only see what the road brought, Ushireh.
There was no reason now not to find another clan. No reason to continue on with this solsenti Bard to his solsenti village. There would be no welcome for her in such a place. From what Tier said, it lay very near Shadow’s Fall. There would be no clans anywhere near it.
But instead of telling him that she would be on her way, she continued to ride on his odd-colored gelding while Tier walked beside her and amused them both with a wondrous array of stories that touched on everything except his home, stories that distracted her from the shivery pain of Ushireh’s death that she’d buried in the same tightly locked place she kept the deaths of the rest of her family.
Arrogance and control were necessary to those who bore the Raven Order. Manipulation of the raw forces of magic was dangerous, and the slightest bit of self-doubt or passion could let it slip out of control. She’d never had trouble with arrogance, but she’d had a terrible time learning emotional control. Eventually she had learned to avoid things that drew her temper: mostly that meant that she kept to herself as much as possible. Her brother, being a loner himself, had respected that. They had often gone days without speaking at all.
Tier, with his constant speech and teasing ways, was outside of her experience. She wasn’t in the habit of observing people; it hadn’t been a skill that she’d needed. But, if truth be told, after journeying with Tier only a few days, she knew more about him than she had most of the people she’d lived with all her life.
He wasn’t one of those soldiers who talked of nothing but the battles he’d fought in. Tier shared funny stories about the life of a solder, but he didn’t talk about the fighting at all. Every morning he rose early and practiced with his sword—finding a quiet place away from her. She knew about the need for quiet and let him be while she did her own practice.
When he wasn’t talking he was humming or singing, but he seldom talked of important things, and when he did he used far fewer words. He didn’t make her talk and didn’t seem uncomfortable with her silence. When they passed other people on the road, he smiled or talked as it came to him. Even with Seraph’s silent presence, a moment or two of Tier’s patter and the other people opened up. No wonder she found herself liking him—everyone liked him. Isolated as most Ravens were kept, even within the clan, she’d never paid enough attention to anyone outside of her family to actually like them before.
“What are you smiling at?” he asked as he finished his story. “That poor goatherd had to live with a wealthy man’s daughter for the rest of his life. Can you imagine a worse fate?”
“Traveling with a man who talks all the time,” she replied, trying her hand at teasing.
Thankfully, he grinned.
It was evening the first time Seraph laid eyes on Redern, a middling-size village carved into the eastern face of a steep-sided mountain that rose ponderously from the icy fury of the Silver River. The settling sun lent a red cast to the uniform grey stones of the buildings that zigzagged up from the road.
Tier slowed to look, and Skew bumped him. He patted the horse’s head absently, then continued at his normal, brisk pace. The road they were on continued past the base of the mountain and then veered abruptly toward a narrow stone bridge that crossed the Silver at the foot of the village.
“The Silver is narrowest here,” he said. “Ther
e used to be a ferry, but a few generations ago the Sept ordered a bridge built.”
Seraph thought he was going to begin another story, but he fell silent. He bypassed the bridge by taking a narrow track that continued along the river’s edge. A few donkeys and a couple of mules occupied a series of pens just a few dozen yards beyond the bridge.
He found an empty pen and began to separate Skew from the cart. Seraph climbed down and helped him.
A boy appeared out of one of the pens. “I’ll find some hay for ’em, sir,” he said briskly. “You can store the cart in the shelter in the far pen.” He took a better look at Skew and whistled, “Now that’s an odd one. Never seen a horse with so many colors—like he was supposed to be a bay and someone painted him with big white patches.”
“He’s Fahlarn bred,” said Tier. “Though most of them are bay or brown, I’ve seen a number of spotted horses.”
“Fahlarn?” said the boy, and he looked closer at Tier. “You’re a soldier then?”
“Was,” agreed Tier as he led Skew into the pen. “Where did you say to put the cart?”
The boy turned to look at the cart and his gaze touched Seraph and stuck there. “You’re Travelers?” The boy licked his lips nervously.
“She is,” said Tier closing the pen. “I’m Rederni.”
Tier was good with people: Seraph had every confidence that the boy wouldn’t make them move on if she left Tier to talk to him.
“He said to put the cart in the far pen,” murmured Seraph to that end. “I’ll take it.”
When she got back to Tier, the boy was gone, and Tier had his saddle and bridle on his shoulder.
“The boy’s gone to get some hay for Skew,” he said. “He’ll be in good care here. They don’t allow large animals on the streets—the streets are too steep anyway.”
He didn’t lie about that. The cobblestone village road followed the contours of the mountain for almost a quarter of a mile, with houses on the uppermost side of the road, and then swung abruptly back on itself like a snake, climbing rapidly to a new level as it did so. The second layer of road still had houses on the uphill side, but, looking toward the river, Seraph could see the roofs of the houses they’d just passed.
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