“Caleb of Kirakath, thank you.”
Caleb’s attention turned to the dozen other prisoners that had been sleeping earlier. They were all looking towards him.
“We owe you a debt,” one of the men of the group said.
“I don’t have need for a debt,” Caleb said as he wiped off the blood from his sword on Jon’s tunic. “Just return to the lives you lived before today. I have some things I need to do,”
One by one, the former prisoners left the camp. From Caleb’s gruff dismissal, they feared that they would upset him. Well… all except one of them felt that way.
“I’m not accepting a dismissal,” the redheaded girl said with a serious expression upon her face. “The others may have been content to accept it, but I won’t. I pay all my debts in full.”
Caleb looked at her curiously. “What do you expect me to say? I do not want anyone to feel that they have to pay me a debt. All I did was fight for my freedom.”
“You could have accepted his offer to leave of your own accord, but you didn’t,” she countered.
“He said that he’d do it in honor of my father,” Caleb said with a flash of anger in his eyes. “My father would have been ashamed of me if I walked away and left others with a life of slavery awaiting them.”
“I do not care for your reasons,” she said as she walked up to him. “All I want is to pay the debt that I owe you.”
Sighing, Caleb asked the only question that seemed to be needed. “What do you have in mind?”
“By your words, your home village was razed and massacred, right?” she asked. She saw him reluctantly nod, but she continued regardless. “You are no doubt hunting them. That is something I can help you with. You can’t hunt them down if you can’t find them, and you can’t find them without coin or the know-how.”
As much as he hated to say it, Caleb could see the uses of such a person. He was not happy about it, but the important part was that they met their end. He would resort to any means to achieve that.
“If you want to do this, then you’re going to be with me for a while. I have something else that I need to do first,” Caleb said flatly. He was not interested in explaining everything to her at that moment.
Though curious, the girl nodded her head. “I’ll stick around then.” Something occurred to her at that moment that surprised her. “I never introduced myself. I’m Katie.”
“I’m Caleb of Kirakath,” Caleb said with a small nod.
“I noticed,” Katie said dryly. “Now, if you’ll follow me, I will show you where we can find what they took from us.
She may be useful to have around after all, Caleb thought.
With that, she began to walk towards the largest tent, which was directly across the camp from the spot where they had met.
Caleb quickly walked over to Correll’s body and removed the scabbard from his belt before following after Katie. Along the way, he sheathed his longsword.
Entering the tent, Caleb immediately saw that the tent had a rather simplistic design on the inside. There were two large chests to his left, two to his right, and a cot centered at the back wall.
Katie stopped at the first chest to their left and lifted the heavy lid with little effort. Peering inside, she removed a pair of boots from it. Moving away from the chest, but leaving it open, Katie sat down and slipped the boots on, going over her leggings and coming up just below her knees.
Walking over to the chest, Caleb immediately saw that it was full of boots.
This must be where they put everyone’s boots so they couldn’t run away, he thought as he grabbed his boots. Dropping them to the ground, he slipped them on and moved to the next chest.
Caleb flipped the latch up and hoisted the door open, seeing that it was full of belts, and his was at the top. He picked it up and cinched it around his waist before stepping back.
The moment that he was out of the way, Katie removed her belt from it. had six sheathed knives attached to it.
Caleb began to move to one of the other chests when Katie spoke.
“The other chests are empty. They showed that to me when I tried to run the last time,” Katie said softly. “They didn’t want to beat me, so they stuck me in one of those chests for an entire day.”
He nodded, seeing that it was not a subject she wished to talk about. “Do you know if they have keys to these irons?” He held up the irons that had been clapped around his wrist at that point.
She looked at him for a moment before stepping in front of him. Grabbing his right wrist, she inspected the iron cuff carefully. It had a small keyhole on its underside.
After several moments, she removed one the knives at her belt, stick the tip of the blade in the keyhole, and twisted her wrist. With a click, the shackle fell to the ground. She quickly repeated the process with the iron cuff on his left wrist.
With the shackles removed, he rubbed his wrists. “That feels much better,” he said, looking at her in surprise. “You have a talent or two after all, it seems.”
“I do,” Katie said, looking a bit confused suddenly. “Why do you have an empty sheath at your belt?”
Glancing down, Caleb felt a pang of guilt as he saw that the knife his father had given him was not at his belt. Memories of him throwing it at a highwayman came to the surface, but that did not change anything. He would be hard pressed to find it.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said with a sigh. “Let’s just get out of here.”
“Where are we headed to?” Katie asked.
“Caldreth,” he replied simple as he began to walk away from the camp.
“Of course,” Katie said with a small laugh.
He shot a look of curiosity at her at that, but she did not seem inclined to reveal what she found so humorous.
Chapter 7
“We need to stop and rest for the night,” Caleb said an hour after they left the bandit camp where they had been held captive.
They were standing on the road that ran from Vendae and Caldreth. That portion of the road seemed to be built on a hill. There was no doubt in his mind that a boulder could easily roll off the top of the hill to their left and gain enough momentum to take out a cart rather easily. That was actually one thing that made the location convenient.
“I see a cave up there,” he said as he pointed towards it.
“I thought you’d want to go farther than this,” Katie commented, though she did not sound upset by the news.
“I’ve been here before,” he said in annoyance. “They captured me down the road from here.”
Katie did not say anything in response to that. It was clearly not a subject that he wished to speak of, and she understood. She would not have wished to tell anyone the details of her capture either.
“What’s the plan?” Katie asked, peering at the cave through the darkness.
“We go inside, make sure there’s nothing in there, and go to sleep,” Caleb said with a yawn. “We’ll deal with everything else in the morning.”
Planning is not his forte, apparently, Katie thought with a bit of humor. “And what do we do if there’s a bear in there?”
“Then we eat well in the morning,” Caleb said as he began to walk up the hill towards the cave. “It wouldn’t be my first encounter with a bear.”
The thought of Caleb fighting a bear with only his sword brought a smile to Katie’s face. She was unsure how such an encounter would end, especially if he was as good as he appeared to be during the fight with the bandits earlier.
Seeing that he was already halfway up the hill, Katie followed after him, curious as to how he would check to see if there was anything in the cave.
They both stopped at the entrance of the cave. It was framed by thick moss, and the ground before it was littered with large stones.
Glancing at the ground around them, Caleb spotted a tree branch that had broken off. It was only about two feet long, but it was long enough for what he had in mind.
Using his feet, Caleb slid several r
ocks in a circle a few feet away from the tree branch. As he was doing that, he looked over to Katie. “Can you get me a few branches?”
Katie did as requested without hesitation. It only took a little while to manage his request.
“That’s good,” Caleb said as he tossed the tenth branch that she had brought him into a pile in the center of that circle of stones. With that done, he began to work on starting the fire.
After the fire was started, Caleb picked up the branch that he had found earlier. Sticking one end of it into the fire, he ignited it like a torch.
Following his example, Katie picked up a suitable branch and lit it like a torch as well.
Walking into the cave, they saw that it was completely empty, barring the spider webs that were in the corners. It was a rather small cave, barely bigger than Caleb’s old home in Kirakath. No flora occupied the area as a result of the rock floor.
“This will work,” Caleb said as he exhaled a sigh of relief. Exhaustion continued to creep upon him, making even the rock floor look comfortable.
“Should we set up a fire in here?” Katie asked.
Caleb considered it for a moment before nodding his head. Inside the cave, the fire would not get out of control, so they could both sleep with it burning.
“Take this,” Katie said, handing him her torch. “I’ll go and get some more firewood.”
Caleb looked surprised as her torch was forced into his hand. His instincts told him to object to her doing the labor, but she was out of the cave before he could think any further on the subject.
After Katie made two more trips, Caleb handed the torches back to her and went down to his knees. He methodically stacked firewood in a pyramid-like structure within moments.
“I’d normally put some stones around it to keep the fire contained, but it shouldn’t be a problem here,” Caleb said as he took the torches from her once again and laid them at opposite sides of the structure.
Within moments, the fire had engulfed the pyramid of wood.
“You have a bit of experience at something, it seems,” Katie commented. When a reply did not come, she looked towards Caleb and saw that he was already asleep, lying about ten feet from the campfire.
“I guess he really was tired,” Katie said with a small smile. “He definitely has the right idea, anyways.”
With that, she laid down across the fire from him.
* * * * *
Caleb’s eyes snapped open, instantly becoming alert to his surroundings.
Though the campfire was still alight, it was not longer the source of light in the cave. The sun had risen and was shining through the entrance of the cave with the intensity that only the sun seemed to possess.
“Awake, I see,” Katie said as she placed another branch upon the fire, fueling it further. “The sun rose a few hours ago.”
“You’ve been awake since then?” Caleb asked as he sat up, stretching in an attempt to loosen his stiff muscles. Pain lanced through his arms and back as he moved, but he did not show it.
“I have,” Katie said with a small nod. “I’ve gotten in the habit of waking at sunrise.”
“At least the fire is still going,” Caleb said after a few moments of thought. “I’ll go and see if I can get something to eat. There’s likely a squirrel or a rabbit around.”
“And how, pray tell, are you going to kill a squirrel or a rabbit?” Katie said with a raised eyebrow. “You may have a quiver of arrows, but you don’t have a bow. Surely you don’t intend to try to kill them with your sword. As skilled as you may be, I doubt that such a feat is within your ability.”
Caleb frowned. He knew that she had a point, but that did not mean that he had to like it. He had absolutely no idea how he would kill an animal, which made his hunger even worse.
“If you can find us something, I’ll be more than happy to kill it for us,” Katie suggested.
“How would you manage that?” he asked, sincerely curious.
“I killed five of those bandits last night,” Katie said as she crossed her arms and frowned at him. “Did you fail to notice the wooden spikes that had been lodged into their throats?”
He was suddenly reminded on the five bandits that had been lying on the ground with a single wooden spike in each of their throats. He had not even stopped to think about it at the time as a result of his exhaustion.
“That was you?” he asked in surprise.
She nodded without hesitation in response to that. “After my last escape attempt, I worked on making wooden spikes. It was pretty difficult to get them and keep them a secret. I’m very creative though.”
“I’m more impressed that you could kill them with a single hit,” Caleb admitted. “Throwing objects isn’t something I I’m very good at… though I can hit a black bear in the face with a rabbit.”
Whatever Katie was going to say was suddenly overridden by laughter as she no doubt imagined him throwing a rabbit at a bear’s face.
“I wasn’t aiming for the bear,” he said with a sigh, but that only increased the intensity of her melodic laughter.
“You are, by far, the most interesting man I’ve ever met,” she said once the laughter died. A smile played upon her lips as she said those words.
“I’m not yet a man,” Caleb said dismissively. “I’ve only seen seventeen years.”
Katie shook her head at his words. “I’m not a magistrate or a countess. I don’t think a man is made by the summers that he has seen but by the deeds that he has committed. By your words, you’ve encountered a black bear. You’ve also seen your kin dead, been taken captive by slavers, and killed more men than an average soldier does. If you’re not a man, then I’m a horse.”
Naturally, Caleb had no idea how to respond to that, so he simply said, “Are you interested in getting something to eat or not?”
Taking his words as a sign of victory, Katie rose to her feet and grasped the handle of one of the knives at her belt. “I’m ready when you are.”
Caleb quickly rose to his feet and walked passed her, moving through the cave entrance with focused eyes. Those same focused eyes narrowed moments later.
He saw three rabbits off to the left.
Don’t tell me that I’m going to have good luck now, he thought cynically. Shaking his head, he pointed towards them.
“Looks like we’ve got three rabbits, all at about twenty-five paces away,” Katie said thoughtfully as she withdrew two knives from her belt. “I don’t normally let people watch me in action, but I’ll make an exception.”
With that, she quickly threw her first knife with her right hand. The moment it left her hand, she tossed the knife from her left hand to her right hand. The second knife followed after the first with barely a second gap between them. The third knife made its way from her belt to her hand and from her hand towards her target just as fast.
After a display that took no more than five seconds, the three gray rabbits were hit by the fast traveling knives. The impact of the bladed weapons sent the small animals rolling, but that was the most movement that they seemed to be capable of.
“You’re really good at that,” Caleb said in a whisper. He was stunned. He had never imagined that he would see such a feat performed.
“My knives are perfectly balanced for throwing,” Katie said as she smiled. It seemed that she enjoyed hearing such a compliment from him. “Hitting a stationary target has never been difficult anyways. If they were running, I probably would have missed.”
“Whatever you say,” Caleb said as he began to walk down the hill towards the rabbits. By the rustling of leaves behind him, he could tell that she was following after him.
Once they reached the three dead rabbits, he removed the knives from them and handed them to Katie, who sheathed them after wiping the blood off.
“I’ll carry one of them,” Katie said as she held out her hand.
Caleb glanced at her for a moment before he handed her the largest rabbit. He had no doubts in his mind that any other w
ould offend her.
“When we get back up there, I’ll need one of your knives,” Caleb said as he held a rabbit in each hand.
She nodded, clearly not surprised by his words. “We can’t very well cook them as they are now, can we?” she asked rhetorically, confirming that she understood the reasoning behind his statement.
Caleb merely nodded his head once before beginning his trek up the hill.
Rise of the Champion (The Sword of Kirakath Omnibus #1) Page 5
