by J. C. Owens
Was that why the men had been falling ill so fast? Someone was withholding their food? Or were their meals being supplemented by the local villages?
“Whose villagers don’t even seem to exist,” Randall muttered to himself. He’d been deployed on this road for nearly six months, and he’d yet to see a village filled with people beside it. Admittedly, the advance battalions went out first to bargain with the locals, offering them money and land vouchers to relocate, so there was no real reason Randall should be seeing people. It was all a bit odd though. Were there no stragglers? No people who didn’t want to take the deals being offered? Randall had expected to be called on to bargain, to make deals for food and seed and equipment, and yet things on that front had been astonishingly simple.
“I’ll take care of the villagers,” Captain Vindon had said when Randall had asked about the strange state of affairs. “All you need to concern yourself with for now is our own men, Lieutenant Degarre. I assure you, I’ve got the situation well in hand.” He’d patted Randall’s shoulder, as condescendingly chummy as he always was, and rode off whistling.
Randall craned his neck back until his spine cracked. Ah, he’d had enough of papers and numbers and worries for one day. He needed rest, but first, he needed a wash.
An aide had brought a bowl of water in two hours ago after clearing away the dinner plate. The water was tepid, but Randall wet one of his shoulder sashes and draped it across the back of his neck with a satisfied sigh. Gods, that felt good. He let it sit for a moment, then wet it fresh and used it to sluice the worst of the sweat and grime from his body. He dipped the cloth between his legs, cradling himself for a moment. Did he have time to…no, probably not. In this heat, it hardly felt worth it anyhow.
“Tired of handling yourself already?” he muttered, a little ashamed of his own lack of interest. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to orgasm or have sex—he did, and that seemed to be the problem. Nobody in the camp was willing to dally with him. The men got each other off—of course they did, away from their women for so long. It was only natural that they’d turn to each other for relief. It was common, accepted, unremarkable…except where Randall was concerned. He seemed to have a scarlet letter across his chest, one that made men wary of a bit of mutual comfort. Another way in which his father’s overwhelming shadow fell across him, blotting out the light.
Don’t dwell on it. Why should he bother after all? Nothing was going to change. Not yet, at any rate. Randall was still proving himself, still showing that he could not only do the work he was assigned to complete, he could excel at it. Once the road was built—which seemed to become a more distant prospect by the day at the snail’s pace they were moving—his father would have to recognize that his teachings had taken, that Randall was the son he’d always wanted, instead of the disappointing one he’d gotten.
“You came from the weak side of your mother’s womb,” he remembered his father saying when he was only five. It was one of his earliest memories of the man. Randall had been running to greet him as he returned home from a campaign and had fallen on the path, skinning the bottom of his chin. He had teared up, and the look on his father’s face had held only contempt, no sympathy. “No son of mine worthy of the name would cry like a puling infant because of a little fall.”
Randall snapped out of the memory with a gasp. His chest hurt—he’d been holding his breath again. “Those days are over,” he whispered. “You’re better than that. You’re stronger now. You’re going to prove him wrong.”
As tired as he was, he went back to look at the map again. He was trying to fill in the blank spots as they went, sending out patrols to pace distances and describe features, but the men were too scared to go far from the construction.
“The Outlaw Wolf will get us if we stray too far, sir,” his own sergeant, a hearty if blustery individual, had told him yesterday. His normal joviality was gone, replaced by stone cold fear. “You can’t see him in all these rocks, can’t track him, but you can feel him watching you, sir. Like them wolves up north. And they say you can’t hardly see him, and he’s silent as a wolf, and he has the wolf eyes, cold and cruel as death. Step one foot out of line and he fires on you, fast as the wind. Damn good archer. We’ve tried chasing him down, but there are so many gullies and cliffs—”
“That’s why we need the map to be accurate!” Randall had tried, but his sergeant had simply shaken his head.
When Randall had taken his concerns to Captain Vindon, he’d just chuckled. “The Outlaw Wolf, right? This bandit ‘wolf’ is a simple brigand, nothing more, certainly not a wolf or any kind of skinchanger. Don’t believe a bunch of superstitious talk. He’s a fire ant who’s bitten through our shoe—painful in the moment but ultimately small and forgettable. Soon enough one of our boys will put a sword through his guts.”
Pulling his thoughts back to the present, Randall shoved the map away and blew out his lantern. “Enough of this.”
He was going to get precious little sleep as it was. He crossed over to his thin cot and lay down, not able to bear the thought of a blanket. He closed his eyes, determined to sleep. Except his mind was just as determined to brood tonight, it seemed.
The Outlaw Wolf… There was no perfect description of him. He was tall, he was short, he was burly, he was slender. He rode a white horse and carried a black bow, or he rode a black horse and carried a white bow. The only consistency between all the descriptions was that he wore a black half-mask, concealing the top of his face. That, and he was daring. More daring than Randall could even dream of being.
Daring is overrated. The Outlaw Wolf was the sort of man who would get himself killed with his own reckless displays sooner or later. Randall’s life might be dull, but it was productive and purposeful. He didn’t have to be daring in battle to be useful. He would prove his utility in other ways.
After all, the stores of salted beef won’t count themselves.
Ugh. Randall groaned and rolled over onto his side. He didn’t want to think anymore, didn’t want to worry. He just wanted to sleep, but even that seemed destined to elude him tonight because his thoughts only lingered on the Outlaw Wolf.
What would it be like to be kissed by a man like that? A renegade. An outlaw. Bold and fearless and strong. I was willing to wager that kiss would steal my breath, leave me hard as iron, and have my knees ready to give out. More foolish fantasies of mine. Bandits were nothing to lust after.
Besides, a kiss like that would never happen for a man like me. Better to go to sleep and hope for good dreams, a place where a general’s son could be claimed by a fearless outlaw without consequence…
* * *
A beautiful green hill lay just ahead of Randall. He looked up at it, then looked back at his father. “I’ll beat you there.”
“On those little legs?” His father laughed. “You’ll never make it up that hill.” He started to walk forward, and true enough, Randall couldn’t keep up.
He looked down at his legs—they looked like the belonged on a child. Wait—he was a child again, and run as hard as he could he couldn’t keep up with his father, couldn’t even finish climbing the hill. The grass began to burn, filling the air with smoke. Randall coughed, trying to see where his father had gone.
“Wait! Come back for me!” But there was no one coming for him now, no one to save him from the burning path and the thick, choking smoke…choking…hell, he was—
Randall bolted upright from his cot, coughing roughly as he rolled over and bent low to the ground. His fucking tent was on fire! He heard men shouting and horses whinnying outside—it sounded like pandemonium. He needed to get out there, help take charge of the situation. He hastily slid into his boots and crouch-ran to the tent’s exit, dodging a falling piece of burning oilcloth as he went.
He had no more than two seconds to take in the chaotic scene in front of him before a small, dusky gray horse rode up to him, carrying an oddly familiar-seeming man on his back.
Randall’s eyes widened. �
��You—you’re the—”
A boot connected with his chest, driving the air from his lungs. As he crouched down, wheezing, a coarse rope fell around his torso and tightened quickly. He tried to fight it off, but writhing against it only made it pull tighter.
He got to his knees and tried to crawl away, but another boot to his side sent him sprawling again. Randall glared up into the roaring red light above him, the remnants of his tent burning into flying ash. The man in the half-black mask stood above him, a smirk visible under his sparse, dark beard. His eyes burned as bright as any coal, and for a moment Randall was frozen with fear at the sight of a man who seemed like something out of legend.
Then the man spoke. “You’re coming with me, boy.”
Boy? Boy? Nothing broke a spell of power faster than the very humanness that came from stupid condescension. Randall lashed out with his foot, catching the Outlaw Wolf just beneath the right knee.
The man staggered back with a yell of surprise, and Randall took the opportunity to press back against the rope binding his chest, loosening it just enough to wrestle one of his arms free. He rolled over onto his side and looked for his weapon. His sword had to be there somewhere. If he could just get to it—
A fresh rope fell over him—this time around his neck, hauling him backward as his breath was suddenly cut off. Stars danced in front of his eyes, and Randall could think of nothing except getting the rope off and getting his air back. If he could just—if he just—
A strong hand twisted his arms behind him, twining a ready set of rope cuffs around his wrists even as the rope around his throat loosened. Randall gasped in desperate relief.
“Surprising, that,” the man’s amused voice murmured in his ear, his breath nearly as hot as the crackling air. “You’ve got some unexpected fight in you, Lieutenant Degarre. But you won’t be beating me tonight.”
The weight of his body disappeared, and a moment later, Randall found himself hauled to his feet.
Embers lit the air, and he shut his eyes against the heat as he was dragged backward until his shoulder hit the flank of a horse. A second later he was hauled into the air and deposited at the base of its neck, the pommel of the saddle digging into his stomach.
“Better not struggle too much after this though, sir,” the Outlaw Wolf continued, shouting in order to be heard over the battle. “If you fall off from here forward, you’ll likely be falling to your death!”
Falling to my…
The horse leaped forward, and a second later the only thing Randall was thinking about was the way his nose almost broke against the horse’s sweaty hide.
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