Teer wasn’t sure what Doka had handed Kard, but there was pressure along his middle back. The compress felt cool but dry, easing some of the pain that he was now noticing.
“It’s shallow, Teer, but your entire back is bleeding,” Kard said softly. “The compress should help clot the blood, but you’ve likely lost more than is safe already.”
Doka helped lift Teer up so Kard could wrap a cloth around his midsection to hold the dressing in place.
“Get him on the coach,” Kard instructed. “Give me one cursed reason not to line these fuckers up and deliver them as cargo.”
“Do what needs, no more,” Teer managed to get out.
“I see you’ve been listening to Doka. And me,” the bounty hunter said with a long sigh, the two of them lifting him up onto the driver’s seat. “I know Doka’s poultices,” he continued. “You’ll be fine, but we’ll want to clean the wound out and apply a new one tonight. You driving is a bad idea, so Doka will sit with you.”
“Star should follow, but we can tie her to the line,” Teer suggested, struggling to get the words out. “We still got everyone?”
“Seven prisoners, three rescuees. Everyone is alive,” Kard told him. “The one you punched out might not be okay in the end, but he’s breathing and my concern for him is limited.”
“Okay,” Teer said, leaning his side against the stagecoach to keep his wound clear. There was no cushion on the bench and he was leaning against hard wood. It shouldn’t feel quite as comfortable as it did.
“Doka, feed him, watch him,” Kard ordered.
“Easy,” she said, climbing up on the coach from the other side. Teer felt her lift him up to tuck a blanket and cushion beneath him. “He need rest.”
“Better on the coach than the horse,” Kard said. “Let’s get going. Even with your poultices, he’s better in a bed than here.”
21
Teer didn’t know what magical or mechanical wizardry was at play to smooth the ride on the stagecoach, but the few bumps that made it through made him glad for it. Doka’s poultice and wrap were keeping him from bleeding onto anything, but every bump jarred the cut and made him very aware of the long gash across his back.
The blood loss had left him tired and he was resting as best as he could. He was also holding his hunter across his lap, in case any of their prisoners decided that now was a good time to run. Kard was the only one of the three captors on horseback now, even if he seemed to regard corralling seven prisoners as straightforward enough.
Despite everything, they made it to nightfall without any issues.
“I’ll help handle the prisoners,” Teer offered, trying to rise from the driver’s bench.
“You not,” Doka snapped, her hand on his chest and pushing him back onto the bench. “You move too hard, you reopen gash. Doka help Kard. Teer sit. Stay.”
Teer didn’t know if the Kotan was familiar with the usual commands trained into dogs in the Unity. Probably. The tone was far too close to be accidental—but he obeyed anyway, leaning back into the blankets she’d set up on the coach for him and watching as the homesteader women carefully dismounted and set up their own camp, a short distance from where Kard and Doka were hauling the prisoners off the horses.
To his surprise, Rala came back to check on him after they had their tent set up.
“Mister Teer, right?” she asked. “Do you need anything?”
“I’m fine, miss,” he said. “Idleness chafes, but it helps heal.”
“Wanted to thank you,” she said shyly. “It’s…hard right now, but you saved us. We won’t forget.”
“Might be better to, to my mind,” Teer told her. “You don’t owe us anything, Miss Rala. We get paid to bring in scum like this. We’re glad to help.”
Rala shivered.
“Doka said…I don’t think she meant to, but she mentioned that you would have waited ’til morning without us being there,” the young woman admitted. “I…I’m not sure my ma would have made another night with those monsters.”
“We weren’t gonna leave you, Miss Rala,” Teer assured her. “We’ll get you to town safe.”
“I know,” Rala told him, and the sheer certainty in her voice touched him. “And thank you. For coming when no one else could have. We’d ’a died and died bad.”
“You didn’t, and they won’t hurt anyone else,” he said. “That’s the point, I think.”
She nodded and gave him a shy smile before heading back to her mother and aunt. Teer didn’t even want to guess at how badly they’d been handled. What he knew was enough for him to hope that the Carlon Wardkeeper decided to hang all of their prisoners, even with the effort it was taking to bring the bandits in alive.
“She strong one,” Doka said from his other side. He turned to find that the guide had returned to the coach and was smiling up at him. “The others not talk to men yet. Take time.”
“Monsters,” Teer said quietly, glaring over at the prisoners. “If we weren’t being paid extra to bring ’em in alive…”
“Do what needs, no more,” Doka reminded him. “Kill only when all else fails.”
“Right.” He exhaled and nodded. “Killing wasn’t even something I considered two tendays ago. So much changes.”
“Called growing up,” she said, hopping up onto the bench. “Kard handling prisoners and food. Doka help you. Ready to move?”
“Think so.”
He still took her offered arm to rise from the bench and moved slowly and carefully. Doka guided him down from the coach and over to where someone had already laid out his bedroll.
“Lie on face,” she ordered. “Wound needs checking.”
He obeyed, hissing in pain as she gently removed his shirt and the wrapped poultice.
“Poultice special,” Doka told him. “Ingredients easy, making hard. Shaman’s work—work better when shaman applies.”
“You said you have some training?” Teer asked as she began to rub something on the wound. It felt like it should have hurt a lot more.
“Doka did,” she confirmed. “Don’t use much. Draws attention in Unity. Bad attention.”
There was a warmth across his back now, one that had nothing to do with whatever ointment she was rubbing into his skin. It felt…it felt like the lights Teer saw when Kard was doing magic.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he promised. “Thank you.”
“Poultice good once made,” she told him. “Ointment…not so good without shaman. Both much better used with ishna.”
Teer didn’t know exactly what the word meant, but he could guess. Some form of magic or power—Kotan magic or power, a style utterly foreign to the Unity’s Spehari masters.
“You be fine,” Doka said, applying a fresh poultice over the wound. “Doka spend first night in town, make sure you healed up.”
“You won’t stay longer?” Teer asked, lifting himself up to let her wrap a cloth around him and then turning to look at her in the twilight. He could see the end of the forest past her, he realized. If he remembered the map right, they’d made good time to get this far.
“Carlon too big,” she told him. “Doka find it too much. Soft beds nice, but towns too loud.”
“Alvid is as large as I’ve ever seen,” Teer admitted. “Seven, eight hundred people. Seems loud enough.”
“You learn,” she warned with a smile. “If your gifts what Doka think, you learn.”
“My gifts?”
“Doka not blind. You not ordinary Merik. Doka told Kard to bring you to Doka’s people.” She shrugged. “You find more answers in tribes than Spehari, Doka think.”
“I follow where Kard leads; it’s his call,” Teer told her. “Carlon first. We’ll see what happens after that.”
“Doka knows. Doka stay one night in Carlon, enjoy soft beds and check on friend,” she asserted. “Then Doka see what wind and river hold for Doka.”
“We all will, I guess,” Teer agreed. “The future always holds its secrets. My ma used to say that.”
“She clever woman, your ma.”
22
“You’re on the coach again today,” Kard said flatly as Teer rose. “I know Doka’s poultices and you’ll be fine faster than you’ve any right to be, but you’re still riding on something with shock absorbers.”
“I’ll ask you what those are another time,” Teer told his boss as he slowly and carefully rolled up his bed. “I’ll ride on the coach, but I can drive it at least.”
“Fair. We can use Doka and Grump to keep things in order,” Kard conceded. “I’ll have her check with Kova and the others first. They might not be okay with it.”
“True,” the youth admitted. “Can you handle the prisoners on your own?”
“Isn’t the first time I’ve led a train of tied-up bounties,” his boss told him. “It’s no worse than cattle, most of the time. We’ll be done with them today, then you and I need to talk.”
“I follow where you lead,” Teer murmured. “Serve as you command. Pretty sure that’s what I swore.”
“It is, but fealty flows both ways,” Kard replied. “We’ll see what work is in Carlon, but I’ve spent the last few turnings adrift at the whim of the wind. We might want to take a different course now that there is a ‘we.’”
Teer nodded and finished packing his things into Star’s saddlebags. Doka materialized a moment later with mugs of tea and fire-heated trail bread for them both.
“Drink, eat,” she ordered.
“Thank you,” Kard told her. “Can you check with Kova and the others? Makes sense for Teer to drive the coach today, but I want to be sure they’re okay with it.”
“Better Teer than you,” Doka said bluntly. “He bled for them. And he less scary.”
Teer swallowed a cough of amusement as he remembered that everyone else saw Kard as a burly Merik with similar coloring to Teer. Even the Kotan didn’t see the knife-eared pale El-Spehari that Teer did.
Maybe one day they’d work out a way for Kard to create an illusion Teer could see, but right now, he saw through everything the El-Spehari created like it was a light fog at best. All he really got from Kard’s illusions was a headache.
“I figure the same,” Kard said. “But check. I feel more responsible for them than I do for this collection of bandit trash.”
“Doka ask,” she confirmed. “You eat. Drink.”
Teer obeyed the instructions, setting into the tea and hot bread with enthusiasm. The trail bread was packed with various ingredients to make it a meal in one piece, which meant it often tasted terrible. Doka had heated it and added something—honey, he figured—to make it far more palatable.
He was also hungry. The faster healing Doka’s magic was giving him likely had to be paid for somehow, and it was unlikely that her bringing him a larger portion than usual was an accident.
“We’re maybe five candlemarks from Carlon,” Kard told him. “We’ve made good time despite everything, and if we keep it up, we can be done with this bounty early enough that I can find Iko’s partners while it’s still light.”
“Can’t be that hard, can it?” Teer asked.
Kard laughed.
“Carlon is one of the larger towns in the Eastern Territories and the largest this far east,” he pointed out. “Ten thousand people, built up at the point where the Carahassee River stops being usable by barges. There’s a Unity fort there, but we won’t go near it.”
“Wouldn’t they pay out the bounty?” Teer asked.
“No, local Wardkeeper will handle that,” the older bounty hunter told him. “Fort has its own ward, even. Much stronger than the one for a town. No, we stay well away from the Unity Army.”
“Would they recognize you?” Teer asked in a whisper.
“No, the spell is proof against Spehari magic,” Kard murmured back. “But there almost certainly is a Spehari in Fort Carlon, and I avoid my kin.”
Further discussion was interrupted by Doka’s return.
“They okay with Teer driving,” she told them. “So long as Doka close. Doka take lead, Kard tail?”
“Clear enough,” Kard agreed. “Let’s ride. I’m looking forward to getting paid!”
They’d been traveling through forested hills ever since leaving Odar. Teer hadn’t found them particularly bothersome, but he found himself sighing in relief as the horses pulled the stagecoach out of the woods and onto a more open stretch of land. The hill they were on sloped gently down toward a plain that reminded him of home, and in the distance he could see the glint of light marking their destination.
The Carahassee River ran from there back toward the west, eventually entering the northern swamps and becoming unusable for different reasons. It still gave the Eastern Territories a natural waterway that helped supply the larger towns.
The dragon lines were spreading east, but none of them were within five hundred miles of here yet. A town the size of Carlon needed a supply line—and without the steam-driven dragons and their caravans, Carlon’s was the Carahassee River.
The town itself was little more than a hazy spot beside the river to Teer. He could pick out a couple of spots there that he suspected were the domes of the wards, but they were still miles and miles away.
He clucked at the horses, snapping the reins lightly to get them to pick up the pace. He could hear the line of prisoners behind him, the hooves of over a dozen horses keeping time as they headed down onto the plains.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” he heard Kard demand behind him, and grinned. One of their prisoners had presumably been trying something clever.
Or at least something they thought was clever. Teer couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation, as the voices lowered a bit, but it didn’t sound like anyone was going anywhere.
His back already hurt less than he expected. He wasn’t going to start poking at the wound under the poultice, but he wondered if Doka’s magic had already healed him. That would be…well, it would be magic.
The “shock absorbers” Kard had spoken of were more than capable of handling the slowly reducing roughness as they followed the road toward Carlon. The stagecoach was probably the single smoothest ride that Teer had ever had, and he took the time to enjoy it as they made their way toward the warded city.
And city was the right word. As they grew closer, he realized that he’d misjudged the size of the ward he’d picked out. Alvid’s ward, the one he was most used to, covered a circle about two miles across.
From the buildings Teer could see through the ward, Carlon’s wardstone was projecting a dome at least six miles wide—and there were buildings outside the ward, which Wardkeeper Komo would never have allowed.
Still, the ward over Carlon was much the same as Alvid’s ward except for its scale. It was still a dome to Teer’s eyes and still a pale translucent green. The second ward that became visible as they drew nearer was very different.
It wasn’t clear whether the hill on the other side of the Carahassee River was natural. It was alone in the middle of the prairie, so it might have been built by Unity diggers at one point. Mixed wood and earth walls circled the top, with shorter walls leading down to the river, where two towers flanked the water on the western edge of town.
The walls linking the fort to the water were unwarded, but the fort itself was encased in a gleaming blood-red cylinder that rose at least two hundred feet into the air. It was less translucent than the ward over the town, and it took conscious focus for Teer to see past the barrier to see the walled fortress within.
“Welcome to civilization,” he muttered to himself as he took in the scale of the much larger wardtown. “Bit different from the ranch, I suppose.”
For the first time since leaving Odar, he’d have to consciously avoid alcohol, too. After everything that had happened with Kard, he wasn’t going to risk getting drunk. He was never touching the stuff again, but it would be a lot more available in town than on the road.
He knew Kard had several canteens of whiskey or similar in the supplies, but his El-
Spehari boss had listened to Teer’s reasoning the first time he’d offered and never repeated the gesture. Both the original offer and the lack of a second offer were meaningful to Teer.
They gave him hope for a future after delivering this group of bounties. He’d been focused on the immediate job, but as the green dome of Carlon grew ahead of him, he knew that this job was almost over.
Which meant that uncertain future was almost upon him.
23
“Well, now, just what under the Iron Pillars is this lot?” the Merik woman on the front steps of the Wardkeeper’s office demanded.
Kard was now out in the lead, with Teer following the bounty hunter carefully in the stagecoach. There were a lot of horses and carriages on Carlon’s streets, and the noise and smell were oppressive in a way that suggested his senses had grown sharper since leaving Alvid.
The tighter his focus, the less the wardtown overwhelmed him, which meant Teer was entirely focused on Kard and the stone building they’d arrived at.
“Writ of seizure, Wardkeeper,” Kard greeted the woman. Teer realized that there was a golden snowflake on the woman’s black vest. It stood out against leather only a shade paler than the officer’s skin.
“I see it,” she agreed, studying the cavalcade that Doka was organizing in front of her. “Who’s the sack?”
“Boulder himself,” Kard said simply, hauling the bag over and cutting it open to show the Wardkeeper. “He tried to draw on me and my partner shot him.”
“Writ makes no difference if he’s alive or dead,” the Wardkeeper said cheerfully. “That man left three of my Wardwatches dead last time he came through Carlon. I ain’t shedding tears over his corpse. And this lot?” She gestured at the prisoners.
“They were riding with him when we brought him down,” Kard said. “Cut up my partner good, but we got them all alive.” He paused. “Rescued three kidnap victims, too. In the coach. They need…care and help. Coach horses are theirs, too.”
Wardtown (Teer & Kard Book 1) Page 12
