by Julia Knight
The night passed in cold hunger, and dawn saw them on their way again, the ponies with their heads down against the cold, Scar’s crew no better.
It was almost noon the next day by the sun as it lurked behind a bank of dark clouds when they came to a track that had been cut into the snow. Scar halted them with a raised hand, and she and Kepa rode forward to scope the lie of the land.
“Easy enough,” she said when she came back. “A soft little village, this. They’ll hand over what they have without a squeak, I don’t doubt, but take your usual care anyway.” Her gaze sought Petri out. “Watch today. Don’t interfere. I’m not sure yet whether I trust you.”
Kepa rolled his eyes behind her, and when she’d ridden to the front of the line to ready herself said, “Not to worry. She says that to everyone. She wants to see how good your training is. Me, I think I could take on a duellist today!’
With a parting grin, he kicked his pony up to Scar, and they waited for her signal. Petri hung at the back–with no weapon bar a practice blunt he’d be little enough use anyway.
They rode up the track, silent but for the crunch of hooves in the snow and the huff of their breath as it clouded in front of them. Over a shallow rise, and there below them sat a little village–a dozen houses and a barn, two ramshackle pigsties behind it. Slim pickings, Petri thought, and not enough here to feed all they had back at camp for a week, if that.
Scar nudged her horse forward. The village was quiet. No one moved between the houses though smoke puttered out of the chimneys. It wasn’t until Scar reached the little space at the centre of the village and slid down from her pony that they saw anyone.
A door opened in one of the larger houses and a woman came out. Very young, she seemed, with ice-fair hair pulled back from a fresh face that looked hauntingly familiar to Petri. No daughter of the household, he thought, dressed in ragged clothing more fitting to a slave, but she wore it with an aplomb that pulled Scar up short.
The woman looked them all over, and more than one man sat up straighter in his saddle at that look, before she turned to Scar and said, in a strange mix of Reyen and Ikaran, “What is it that you want? We have nothing.”
Other faces showed at doors that now opened in neighbouring houses. Faces shadowed and waiting.
Scar shrugged and laid a hand on her sword hilt. “We have less. Food is what we want. Meat, grain, whatever you have.”
The faces at the doors shrank back, and Petri realised that they were all very old, or very young.
The woman smiled, trying a welcome that was clearly forced. A quick glance behind her at the shadowy faces before she said, “We have nothing to spare.”
Scar stepped forward, Kepa at her side. “I think you misheard me. My name is Scar, and these are my crew. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”
The young woman’s smile faltered, and her face paled even further, but she didn’t back down, making Scar lift a sneering lip.
“We don’t have anything spare to give you,” the woman said. “Or I would. We’ve barely enough for ourselves to see us all through the winter.”
Scar slashed a hand close to the woman’s face, her patience at an end, and nodded to Kepa.
The village was soft, Scar had been right about that. Only old men and women or children, except for two–the young woman who’d greeted them and another about the same age, also dressed in rags. Petri wondered about that, wondered where the rest were, but Scar said nothing and so neither did he.
Scar’s crew spread through the village, taking what they wanted. Children cried, and an old man begged quietly for them to leave something, please, enough to get the children through the winter, and that was the only violence Petri saw, when Kepa shoved him out of the way and got on with unhooking a vast smoked ham from a ceiling. The swords Scar’s crew had in their hands were enough to stop any resistance, it seemed. Until they came to the last house, where the young woman stood in the doorway and refused to move.
“You can’t,” she said, chin high though her hand shook on her skirts. “I won’t let you.”
“Can,” Scar snapped. “And will.”
She nodded to Kepa, who loomed over the young woman. “I don’t want to hurt you, missy,” he said. “But a man’s got to eat, and I ain’t got nothing to eat. You got more here than this little lot needs, so why not share?”
She struck, quick as a snake, with a kitchen knife she’d held hidden in her skirts. Not for Kepa–she was bright enough to go for the leader but not bright enough to realise she might die doing it.
The kitchen knife missed Scar’s eye by a whisper, glanced off her brow in a blow that sent blood scudding down her cheek. The cut didn’t even get the chance to drip before Scar gripped her wrist and twisted the knife out of her hand, making her scream.
“I can take this,” she hissed at the woman. “I can take all of it, and I could make them kill all of you doing it, and you couldn’t stop me. So tell me, why are you protecting that which you can’t protect? Why is an Ikaran slave protecting what isn’t hers anyway?”
The woman yanked her arm from Scar’s grip and glared back at her but said nothing, only glowered in the doorway, one hand wiping Scar’s blood from her arm.
Kepa stepped towards her, sword out for the first time. “You want I should stick her?”
The woman flinched at that, but she didn’t back away.
“No,” Scar said at last, gently feeling the cut to her head. “No, find her a pony and put her on it. Tie her on if you have to. Then leave what’s in this house to the people in it. We’ve taken enough for one day.”
She stalked back up the slope to where Petri waited with the ponies, snarled at him when he got in her way and mounted. The rest came, quickly now, stowing all they’d taken onto the pack ponies they’d brought for the purpose and tying two cows behind. Then they wheeled the ponies and left without another word, the girl on a pony just behind Scar. Not tied on, Petri noted.
Kepa dropped back to where Petri brought up the rear, deep in thought.
“She going to be scratchy as hells all the way back now,” Kepa said.
“A nasty wound,” Petri replied. It was too, stretching from one brow right up into her hair in a jagged line, and it had bled copiously.
“Oh, that’s not what’ll make her scratchy. She looks all scary on the outside, does our Scar, and she is. Bloody scary. But she don’t like it when things go wrong on a raid. She was lax there. Should have herded them all up and kept an eye on them while we did our business. They put up with us around here, mostly. We don’t give them too much trouble; they don’t give us too much trouble. Like an agreement.”
“An agreement? They let you rob them?”
Kepa laughed so his jowls wobbled. “Yes and no. They don’t like it much, but they don’t create too much of a fuss either as long as we don’t take the piss, at least on the Reyen side of the mountain. But this winter, it’s a bad one for everyone. Closed in worse than I’ve ever seen it, and it’s early yet. That village weren’t on the Reyen side neither, so maybe they don’t know about our little contract. We’re having to go further afield just to keep fed, especially with them refugees who came after the battle last year. And the villages have less to spare as well, with the weather as it is. It’s hard all round. We take a bit, mostly, though this year we got to take more. But that there–that girl was brave, but she almost got herself killed, and that was because Scar was lax. She’d have been scratchier still if we’d had to kill the girl. No killing, that’s the rule.”
“You’ve never killed anyone? On your raids? Surely you must have to use violence sometimes?”
Kepa shrugged. “Oh, sometimes, yes. Bit of roughhousing to soften ’em up if they’re getting uppity like, though mostly they ain’t. Broke a man’s jaw once, one that wouldn’t lie down. Mostly we wave the swords around to scare ’em up a bit, and that’s enough. But killing, well, if we start killing them, then like as not the guard outposts up here will start sitting up and taking a
bit more notice. They can–and do–ignore a bit of thieving, a broken bone. They can’t ignore killing.”
“If you’re only waving the swords around, why did Scar need me to train you?”
A sly look from Kepa. “She didn’t, not really. Soft touch for lost causes, ain’t she? Why else do you think all us dregs is here? It looks better if we can wave the swords like we know what we’re doing, but it’s best not to use them if we don’t have to. But best too to know how to use them if we do. More’n one of us would go to the gallows if they found us.”
So would Petri–treason just to start with.
“So what about her?” He nodded towards the young woman, who sat ramrod straight in the saddle.
“Told you. Soft touch for lost causes. She might tell you, she might not, but she was that girl once. Long time ago–when we first met. Both slaves in Ikaras, weren’t we? A bit further down the mountain but not much. Always been outlaws up around here, skimming off the top, and one day they came to our village, and she went for one. Almost had him too. Rennal his name was. Big man in these parts for a long time, though he were getting old then. Me and her fought him tooth and bloody nail, and she caught him a good ’un, and you know what he did? He laughed and said he was taking us two as part of his day’s prize.”
“So you were still slaves?” Petri glanced ahead at Scar, thought of the hard planes on her face, the face of someone who’d seen a lot, too much maybe.
“Naw, he set us free, and we joined up! He’s the one that taught us, see. Be quiet, be subtle, be kind when you can. The guards is lazy around here, so don’t give them too much cause to come find you, because if you do, it’ll be the gallows. They caught old Rennal in the end though–he killed a man accidental in a bar fight and even the guards around here couldn’t ignore that. Rennal never did take his own advice.”
They rode on in silence, into a clear cold that deepened as the sun waned. Scar signalled to make camp, and while it was cheerier than the last–they had some food for a start–Scar sat deep in frowning thought, though her gaze softened when she looked at the young woman. Maitea was her name, she said at last, when Scar insisted, though she said nothing else, not even when Scar told her she was free now. She merely sat, haughty and separate as though even a captured slave was better than an outlaw.
They camped in a little hollow dotted with stunted trees to give a bit of shelter and cut the worst of the wind. Scar set sentries, but they were far from anywhere and mostly it was wolves they need worry on so she didn’t set many. By the time the sun had spent its last, most of the crew were asleep under bundles of ragged furs as close to the fire as they could get. Maitea had been given furs of her own and hunkered under them, but Petri doubted she slept.
A soft sound disturbed him. He looked out into the darkness but couldn’t see anything past the flickering halo from the fire. Another scuffing sound brought him to his feet.
“What’s the matter with you?” Kepa asked sleepily.
“Shh!” The air seemed far too still, the silence far too deep. Shadows flickered in the trees, but Petri couldn’t tell if it was the fire that made them or something else. Someone else.
Scar looked up as he took a few steps towards the trees, peering into the darkness. There was something there, perhaps, but it was too soon to look a fool by flinching at nothing.
A figure stepped out of the darkness, hands raised in thick fur mittens. Scar was on her feet in an instant.
“Who are you?”
“Morro,” he said in a voice heavily accented by Ikaran birth. “The village you just raided… You took her. Take me too.”
Morro wasn’t a big man, nor well set up. Small, furtive-looking, with a cast to his eyes that suggested secrecy and lies. Petri’s hand groped for his blunt weapon.
Scar lowered her sword and snorted a laugh. “You? What for?”
“I can help you.” His glance skittered over Scar, Kepa as he got to sleepy feet, over Petri. Something about the man made Petri shiver and not with cold. “I can help you with whatever you want.”
“In return for what?”
Morro shrugged. “Reyes wants me dead. So does Ikaras. I want only somewhere where I can live, like you. I was trying to get past Ikaras, out into the states beyond. But I can’t on my own, not in this snow. Not even me, not on my own. The village agreed to shelter me for the winter, but they couldn’t help me. You can. Help me get past Ikaras in the spring, help me find a home. Me and Maitea. And in return I can help you get what you really want.”
Something hypnotic about that voice, lulling the senses, so when Kepa laughed and said, “What good’s a little runt like you?” his words startled Petri with their harshness.
Morro only smiled and shook his head. His eyes kept going to Maitea, little skimming looks that might miss being noticed. She marked them though, had sat up straight at his mention of her name, her going with him, though Petri couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or disgusted.
Those looks weren’t missed by Scar either–she saw and smiled to herself. “Sit,” she commanded. “Explain. Make it good, and maybe I’ll listen.”
He bowed a gracious head and sat where she pointed, close to the fire and by her crew, who slept or lay half awake from the noise and watched.
“Well?”
Morro peeked at Maitea, who ignored him, before he said, “I’m no use with a weapon, as such. But I know things. Lots of things. You’re starving, I see that well enough.” Hard to deny, given the pinched state of all their cheeks. “This amount of snow has made it harder for everyone, and the winter looks to deepen yet. You can’t move easily through it to raid, and when you get to them villages have less or try to keep more for themselves.”
“And?” Scar asked, but her voice had softened a touch.
“And I can help you move when they can’t. The snow will not trouble you if you help me.”
Petri looked down at where the man kept his hands in his lap. He’d taken the mittens off, and the gloves underneath, and black markings writhed there, pulling the eye, turning the mind. He opened his mouth to shout a warning but didn’t get the chance.
Someone roared past him–a man in rags with a long slim blade out, mouth agape as he knocked Petri aside and plunged for Scar.
Petri fell to the snow and rolled, his blunt sword already coming out as he got to his feet. Scar was on her back, the man atop her with his blade held aloft, ready to stab down into her eye. The rest of the camp was in uproar–half asleep, jerking out of their bedrolls. Kepa was ahead of the rest by a good dozen paces as he threw himself at their attacker and knocked him from Scar’s chest, sending him sprawling into a low snow bank. Kepa pounced, but the man was no longer there to receive him. Petri whirled, but all he could see were Scar’s crew, all awake now. No sign of those Scar had set as sentries, and Petri thought all they would find would be blood and bodies.
Scar got to her feet, her hand on her sword.
“That village had no adult men and women in it,” Petri said. “Only very old and very young.”
Scar swore under her breath.
“Out hunting,” Morro said. “They’ll have found what you left by now. And now they’ve found you.”
“Or one of them has.” Petri scanned the shadows again but saw no trace of anything untoward. “But they come for a slave?”
A shadow flickered, and Petri turned a half-second too slow as the man came again in a rush from behind Scar. But that rush, or perhaps the rage that boiled out of him, sounded in his snarl, made him too reckless. He leaped for Scar, but the newcomer, Morro, stood up in a blink and waved a hand. A faint tang of blood stained the air.
Petri didn’t get to Scar before the attacker flew backwards to land in a tangled heap in the snow. The man tried to get up, but Morro smiled and twitched a hand and he stayed where he was as though struck to stone. It was only a moment before Kepa was on him in any case, and then he moved, thrashed and struggled and bit and spat. Kepa struck at the arm holding the kni
fe, a hammer blow that might be enough to break it, but the bone stayed whole, and the knife spiralled off towards the fire. Another smack from Kepa’s great fist into the man’s face, but he didn’t still, not until Kepa was astride his chest like he was riding a pony, and Petri came to help, to hang on to one arm as someone else grabbed the sword from the man’s waist and a third got his legs. A last smack in the face, and the man was finally limp under Kepa’s weight.
Scar stood by the fire, a hand on her sword but looking shaken. Kepa sat on the ragged attacker until the rest had managed to bind him as firmly as they could, take all the weapons they could find and give them to Scar.
“Leave him be for now,” she said. “Just tie him and watch him. Kepa, take a few crew, make sure it was only him.”
Kepa nodded and picked a woman and two men who had done better than most with their blades, and they slunk off into the night.
“Who is he? From that village, you think?” Scar asked Petri when they’d gone.
“Where else?”
Maitea spoke at last. “He turned up a few days ago. He says he’s my father.”
Scar glanced at her sharply, a frown dividing her face, splitting it around her scar. “And you don’t believe him.”
