by Kate Elliott
Tomen grabbed Shai’s vest, hauling him up. He was strong, maybe not strong enough to defeat Shai arm-wrestling but with enough strength to make his will known. “If you’re a spy who has betrayed us, you’ll die.”
“I have not betrayed you. I’m just trying to get to Nessumara.”
A whistle pierced the air, followed by a scatter of cries like flocking birds. With weapons in hand, folk faced the track. A bare-legged and bare-footed youth raced into the clearing, a skinny child not more than twelve or thirteen years of age clothed in a dirty linen jacket belted at the waist and reaching its knees.
“Soldiers . . . attacking . . . Upperpool . . . village . . . no quarter . . . help . . .” Words gave way to a hacking cough and a spew of bile.
“Arm up, all hands,” said Tomen as everyone listened, poised and tense and eager.
“Action at last,” murmured Laukas.
“Anyone who wants to stay back with the elder can help her move the supplies to the cave,” added Tomen.
No one wanted to stay back. They assembled with such weapons and armor—thick leather coats—as they possessed, while Tomen coaxed information out of the youth.
“Lots of them. More than twenty? I didn’t see. Upperpool burning. We can see the flames from Lowerpool. My cousin got away. There were others running.”
“Lowerpool will be hit next.” Tomen raised a hand to gain the attention of his fighters. “These strikes on villages are the same, a cadre of bullies with good weapons using surprise and intimidation to overtake resistance. We’ve talked over the drill. We’re equal in numbers. They’re better armed. We’ll use archers and ambush to pick them off, then we close and kill the rest. No prisoners. Laukas, you’ll take lookout.”
“The hells! I want to fight—”
“You’ll take lookout. It’s time for us to make known we don’t intend to let this army burn and pillage at will. Tonight our weapons will be our voice, a bold cry against the invaders!”
The company cheered.
“Uh. Might I ask a question? If you don’t actually know how many there are—?” Shai’s voice fell unheeded as they scrambled for the track, those still gathering their gear swearing as they hurried so as not to be left behind. He was left behind as the clearing emptied.
“What are you?” the youth asked, looking alarmed as he saw Shai. “An outlander!”
Branches pitched as though in the grip of a mighty wind. A figure dropped from tree to earth, not six paces from the youth, who tripped and sprawled backward. Shaking, he displayed his hands palms up, then sketched a familiar gesture of meeting as he stood.
“Greetings of the day, honored one.”
It blinked, black-eyed, before copying the hand gesture so perfectly that Shai expected it to continue into some extended tale told through song and gesture. It was a male, its slim hips and legs clothed in leggings.
“I have to go, honored one.” The child ran down the track after the fighters, and the creature loped after it.
The noise of their passage faded.
“Here, mule,” said the elder, beckoning to Shai. “Help me and Navita carry things.”
Was it better to run now while he was unguarded, to head south alone and easily marked as an outlander, knowing everyone he met would be suspicious of him? Or should he stay here, hoping to earn their trust and help? The elder and the young envoy watched him, surely needing no third eye or second heart to interpret his thoughts.
He shrugged. “Show me what you need carried, verea.”
He hauled from the clearing along a track and over a streamlet and through rockier ground where trees struggled for a foothold. They reached an escarpment thrust so abruptly out of the ground it was like walking into a wall. Vines obscured the face of the cliff. He pushed through a tangle of ropy vegetation to deposit the basket on a dirt floor in the gloom. The cave smelled of dirt and tasted of the forge.
As they came out, the young envoy smiled anxiously at him, as if she had decided to treat him as a comrade. “My ostiary said I had to get out of town because I was being hunted. I’ve never been outside the city before today. I don’t like the forest. It smells funny. Anything might be creeping up on you!”
“Heya!” called the elder.
Shai and the envoy, sharing a complicit glance, hurried after. They hauled supplies as the afternoon lengthened into dusk. When it got too dark to see, the elder lit a lantern. Eventually they paused for a rest in the abandoned clearing.
“You’re a hard worker, Shayi,” the elder said, “I’ll give you that. You might have bashed me over the head and taken a run for it, although you’d not escape the wildings, would you, eh?”
“The wildings?”
As if the word were a summons, the male dropped out of the trees. In lamplight, it sketched gestures with its hands.
The old woman became rigid with disbelief. “Ambushed at the waterwheel? No survivors? Soldiers coming this way?”
The wilding gestured toward Navita and indicated that the young woman should climb onto its back. Hurry! Hurry!
The breeze waned to stillness. A distant shout hung in the air, and then it was drowned by an odd sound shuddering within the trees, a spill like falling rain. A rippling shadow descended out of darkness: a woman cloaked in night, riding a winged horse. Soldiers emerged out of the forest, surrounding them.
The cloaked woman reined in the horse, raising a hand. “Child of the Four Mothers,” she said to the wilding. “I will not harm you because of the ancient law binding my kind to that of the other children of the Hundred. Out of the same blood and bone and thread we were created.”
It hesitated, an arm extended to indicate the trembling young envoy.
“You think to save her, but no action you take can save her from my scrutiny. Go. I may not kill you, but that does not mean my soldiers may not grow impatient and strike.”
It showed its teeth in a grin of furious despair but retreated, vanishing into the trees.
“Aui!” called one of the soldiers. “Was that a wilding? It’s cursed bad luck to kill any of the other children. Curses ten times down the generations.”
“Shut up,” said the captain in charge. “Holy One, this girl is the Flag Quarter envoy we’ve been seeking, I’m sure of it.”
“Look at me,” said the cloaked woman pleasantly.
Meeting that gaze, the elder staggered and clutched at her heart as she dropped the lantern, which hit square and did not tip. Two soldiers hauled Navita forward to face the cloak.
“Veiled to my sight!” said the cloak, more a murmur of disappointment. “You are a seventh daughter, perhaps?”
The girl maintained her dignity with remarkable self-possession. “I am, Holy One. Seventh of eight girls born to my good mother. I am gods-touched, and according to the law will serve out my days as a servant of the gods. I was dedicated to Ilu the Herald three years ago.”
“Still young,” said the cloak, signaling to the captain, who moved up behind the young woman with his drawn sword. “But gods-cursed, not gods-touched.”
The man stabbed Navita in the back, up under the ribs. Her grunt was all that betrayed her surprise. The elder collapsed, sobbing, to her knees, as the captain cut Navita’s throat. Her death was swift, and her ghost, twisting out of her body, cast a surprised look at Shai.
“You’re gods-touched, too!” the ghost cried. “Hurry, Shayi! Save yourself!”
Then her spirit fled, crossing under the Gate.
“Are you the veiled outlander Bevard spoke of?” the cloak asked.
“I don’t have to tell you,” said Shai. “What harm did Navita ever do to you?”
“Those who are veiled are dangerous because they can lie without fear. They are demons with human faces. It was not the intention of the gods that any stand veiled before us. Captain?”
The captain moved up behind Shai, sword still wet with blood.
“You don’t want to kill me,” said Shai.
The cloak sighed a mournful smi
le. “Why not?”
“I came to the Hundred looking for my brother. You know him. His name is Harishil, and he wears one of the cloaks.”
The captain whistled. “There is a resemblance between him and Lord Twilight.”
“Harishil’s brother.” The cloak’s gaze was as smooth as a polished stone and just as unfathomable. “Captain, take him to Wedrewe. I’ll join you after I have tracked down the gods-touched mendicants so many have spoken of.”
“To Wedrewe! Holy One, that’s a cursed long way!”
“Are you a captain, or do you wish to be a sergeant again?”
“Of course, Holy One. It will be done exactly as you wish.” He prodded Shai with the bloody point of his sword. “Pick up the lantern, and let’s get the hells out of this cursed woodland and to a decent road.”
Not dead yet: at this point, that seemed to be the most Shai could ask for. He picked up the lantern and starting walking.
9
THE ENEMY CREPT cautiously out of the forest’s edge, watching for the glare of fire in the distance where villages burned. Captain Arras had set his ambush carefully: four lines of attack, trip wires, and a gauntlet of spearmen to sweep around from behind so no stragglers could escape back into the trees. The fighting was short, sharp, and efficient; not one of his men was killed, although ten sustained wounds and two were so badly hurt they’d likely be crippled. Ten of the enemy survived the main attack on their feet and refused to surrender, preferring to fight to the death, so he had them taken down with arrows. Three of the enemy were mortally wounded but still breathing; he cut their throats himself, as a mercy.
At dawn, he commanded the men to drag the bodies into the open clearing behind the ruined waterwheel, where he paced out the measure of the dead, his sandaled feet moistened with dew as he counted thirty-four men and women, two short of a full cadre. Too bad they’d joined up with the wrong side; he could have used such bold, hard fighters, molded them into something more than a ragtag poorly led herd of frustrated rebels.
Sergeant Giyara herded the shivering child forward and, at his gesture, moved away to the perimeter. No one could overhear them now.
“You did as you were told,” he said to the child: he wasn’t sure if it was a homely boy or a brawny girl. “How many were left at camp?”
The child was weeping, tears smearing lines through its filthy face. “Dunno. A few. Not fighters.”
“Any outlanders?”
“I saw one.” Its voice trembled as it contemplated the ashes of its triumph. Under Arras’s steady gaze it found its tongue and spoke in a whisper. “You won’t kill my family?”
“First, you’ll lead us to the clearing.” The captain fastened a hand over the neck of the child’s jacket.
The raid on the villages was well in hand, according to the runners who came in from his other companies to report. He called in the men, had the wounded set up a perimeter within the ruins to await his return, and settled the rest into files, making sure his strongest, most stubborn fighters were concentrated in the van and at the rearguard. The dogs and their handlers were sprinkled throughout the line in case of attack while they were strung out and vulnerable on a forest track. This was the dangerous part of the operation, so he took point with a pair of trusted men, put the child on a rope, and sent him ahead like a dog. They trotted at good speed along the track.
A mind, surely, was like this forest, tangled and overgrown, its reaches hidden to the common eye. What the cloaks possessed was something like the path they marched along, a way to punch into what you otherwise could not penetrate. What if there was a way to let your thoughts grow over and hide from the cloaks?
The enemy hadn’t been entirely stupid. They’d emplaced a lookout, but the person had fled, the only survivor. They’d tried to cover their tracks, keep their base hidden. His company had to wade up a stream, a good technique for throwing off dogs on a scent, and take a second track yet deeper into the forest. But in the end they found the clearing with its canvas structures still strung up. The fire was ashes. Platters were scattered around logs set out as benches; small animals had been feeding on the leavings. Wind bellied the canvas awnings. Birds fluttered away through high branches. Two corpses cooled: an elderly woman and a lass wearing the blue cloak of an envoy of Ilu.
He had an itch on his shoulders, that gods-rotted feeling he was being watched, but although he paced the edge of the clearing and peered into the foliage, he saw not even a bold crow. There! The bright flash revealed birds with red and yellow plumage.
“Track over here, Captain,” called Sergeant Giyara.
“Secure the site,” said Arras to her. “Search for weapons, supplies, and coin. You twenty, come with me.”
They followed the second trail through more forest, over rockier ground, only to have it give way at a rocky spine thrust out of the earth and covered with hanging vines and low-growing shrubs nestled in its crevices. There was an actual cave inhabited by a scatter of ancient debris, rotting leaves blown in through the vines that screened the entrance, and a jumbled pile of animal bones scored with tooth marks.
“A predator’s nest,” said one of the men nervously.
“Nothing’s lived here for a long while,” observed the captain, “and I see no sign they were storing anything here either.”
They lit a pair of torches, but the cave’s ceiling lowered in the back until they’d have had to crawl to get in any farther, and there was an odd smell like rotten eggs that made the man in the front cough and choke until he couldn’t speak, so Arras called them back. They searched the vicinity but found only a scumble of tracks.
“I think we’ve flushed out what’s left of this nest of rats.” He took no pleasure in killing; it’s just it had to be done and he liked doing what he was good at. Yet he still had that prickling feeling on the back of his neck: someone watching. “We’ll gather up the other units and march on.”
“We going back to Toskala, Captain?” asked one of the newcomers assigned to his command by Toskala’s governor along with seventeen other untested men. Arras had spread them out, three to each cadre, keeping them isolated from each other so they’d bond with the soldiers he knew and trusted.
“No.” His strong voice carried. “We’re marching on Nessumara to join the army there, as we were commanded to by Lord Twilight himself. There’s fighting ahead, and plenty of coin and loot to be had after the city falls.”
The three newcomers whooped, then fell silent as the veterans yawned and scratched, pretending to ignore the novices’ enthusiasm.
The cadre retraced their steps to the clearing, where the pathetic items swept up from the remains of the camp were neatly laid out under Sergeant Giyara’s supervision. Arras liked a woman with a tidy mind; Giyara was tough-minded and effective. She was attractive as well, but he knew better than to indulge that itch with a valued subordinate.
To the men he said, “Divvy up what’s portable in even lots.”
Giyara had already divided out the food: ten small sacks of rice, nai, turnips, bundled herbs, and a substantial store of smoked venison. The durable trenchers were easy to store in their travel packs. The canvas was good quality.
“We’ll meet up with our other companies and continue south to Nessumara,” he said, again, his voice ringing beneath the canopy. “According to our orders from Lord Twilight. We’re expected to make good time, so let’s hustle.”
The sergeant called out, “Line up!”
The child looked like a beaten dog, all mournful eyes and drooping head. “Are you leaving? What about my family?”
“Your family has not been harmed.” As the men began to march out, he realized he could still make use of the child. “A word of warning. The other survivors will begin to suspect your family’s curious luck in escaping with no injuries. And although your family may be grateful now, they’ll come to hate you later. Your kinsfolk’s resentment may be worse than the anger of your neighbors. If I were you, I’d leave, and find a new place
to make your way.”
He fell in with the rearguard.
No doubt it would straggle home bawling, yet wasn’t it better to die than be a traitor? The angry ghosts of its dead would haunt it for the rest of its life, however long that would prove to be in these disordered times. He wondered if he felt kinship or disgust for the child.
“Captain?” Sergeant Giyara had fallen back. “Sure you don’t want that child’s kinsfolk cleansed? Traitors ought to be punished.”
“Neh, we made them, so leave them be. Anyway, if I were a wagering man, I’d bet you the child will follow us and before five days are out be begging to let it join the company.”
“You think so?”
This was how you obscured your trail. “I do.”
He scanned the forest. He was used to high-elevation trees, ones that could survive frost and a seasonal dusting of the snow never seen down here. These lowland hothouse woodlands creeped him, for sure, so dense and moist it was like being inside a vast sensate beast. Branches were swaying although the breeze wasn’t strong enough to send them rocking like that.
At the ruins of the waterwheel, they carted up their wounded and called in the other companies, leaving behind half-pillaged villages with corpses and burned houses scattered like chaff. There was a decent north-south road here, running roughly parallel to but rather more inland than the famed Istri Walk, the major road that ran on high ground on both banks alongside the magnificent River Istri, whose humble headwaters he had grown up fishing.
Strange where life took an insignificant ordinand. He’d never imagined in his youth that he’d find himself living in a time where he could become a true soldier, just like those who were more reviled than admired in the tales.
By midafternoon they could no longer smell the smoke of their raid, and in the villages they marched through they paused only long enough to demand coin. In one village, a pair of rambunctious cousins begged leave to join them, and he allowed them to sign on as hirelings mostly because their clansmen were clearly horrified at this desertion. Later, when he halted to allow his men to wet their throats at an inn, a rough-looking traveler named Laukas asked for a hire, saying he’d tend to horses or boots, anything for a meal and a chance at learning how to fight properly. The new men worked hard that evening when they set up camp; they’d either grow tired of the labor, or they wouldn’t. Only time would tell.
