Halls of Law

by V. M. Escalada

  Afterward, odd snippets of things came back to her when she thought about the next few minutes. How the wind blew the corner of the borrowed cloak into her face as she ran across the stable yard. How her boots slipped on the cobbles—and how grateful she was to Barid for suggesting she put boots on that morning.

  Barid. She hadn’t seen him back in the great room. Was it possible he’d escaped? Or was he already dead? She pushed that thought away. Too much time spent thinking like that, and she’d be dead herself.

  Once out in the yard, dodging from outbuilding to outbuilding, Kerida headed for the stables. The regular mounts were still in the paddock, but there was no chance she could catch one of the loose horses. With the smell of blood and burning in their nostrils, they were already nervous, trotting from side to side, corner to corner. Besides, those were the regular mounts and work horses. Ker wanted something with more speed, and those horses she’d find stabled.

  Inside, it was quieter, the animals less disturbed. A bay horse had come in the day before, ridden by the factor of a nearby holding. He’d eaten with the Senior Staff last night, and Ker wondered where he was now, and whether he was one of those in the great room. The bay was in the third stall down, but Ker stopped before she got that far.

  Most of the stalls on this side of the stable buildings were boxes, closed off with doors that actually shut, but the door to the bay’s stall was standing open, held open, in fact, by the weight of a battle-ax. It seemed that she wasn’t the only one who recognized a good horse when she saw one. Ker had frozen when she’d seen the open door, now she drew her dagger and crept forward, mouth dry, careful to place her feet quietly, and to keep her balance. Afterward, she shivered, thinking over what she had done, how risky it was, how she should have just turned around and left. Taken her chances on foot. But at the time, things moved so quickly she didn’t even stop to think about how long it had been since she’d trained to do this.

  The man inside the stall was standing with his back to her, smoothing his hands over the bay’s head and neck, crooning to it. He was about her height, maybe just a little taller, and wearing the same rounded leather helm she’d seen on the others in the great room. Thinking of that made what she had to do easier. His raised arms had lifted the edge of the leather cuirass he was wearing, leaving a gap where his skin showed. Which made it easier still.

  That was where Kerida slipped her dagger. It slid in like a warm knife into butter, but the man did not cry out. As his arms came down, Ker reached up with her other hand, taking hold of his chin, and dragged him backward. She pulled the dagger out of his kidney and sliced it across the front of his throat.

  The bay horse didn’t take kindly to being sprayed with blood, but once Ker had brought it out to the saddling area, the familiar movements, and the soothing noises that came automatically out of her throat, settled it enough that she could finish saddling. She had nicked her own finger, and smeared blood on everything she touched, but she hadn’t time to deal with that. As she was about to mount, she had another thought and returned to the body. The rounded helm had fallen free of the dead man’s head, showing close-cropped blond hair turning to gray. She picked it up from where it had rolled into a corner, cramming it onto her own head. The ax she took as well, finding a loop on the saddle that would do to hold it for now.

  She mounted easily, old habits from childhood coming back, so long as she didn’t think too much about them. If only she could stop shivering. The wind wasn’t that cold, was it?

  Once outside, she opened the paddock gates and rode in. The loose horses clustered around her, finding some comfort in the familiarity of a horse with a rider. She urged them toward the open gate, and it didn’t take long for them to see this as their chance to escape the bad smells that were disturbing them. Ker leaned as low as she could over the bay’s neck, riding out into the fields west of the stables, using the other horses as cover. There were no fences on this side of the property, only hedgerows and fields, empty now of the grain that was meant to feed them all, humans and beasts alike, over the winter. If she could get to the other side before anyone noticed her—if she could get to the road—she would head for the safe place she’d told Tel Cursar about.

  She’d head for the cave.

  KERIDA crouched down on her heels, peering up at the dark tops of the trees silhouetted against the brighter night sky. Still no sign of the double-crowned pine. The previous afternoon she’d ridden the bay horse all the way to the oak grove she’d told Tel Cursar about. She’d gone up into the trees straight from the horse’s back before letting it go, walking along the branches of the great mother oaks, jumping from tree to tree, and not coming down until she was at least thirty spans away. With luck, anyone tracking her would follow the bay horse, calmly proceeding down the road, going home to its own stable.

  Ker had thought about keeping the horse, but once she was well away from the Hall, the beast was more useful as a decoy. He’d be easier to track than a person on foot, and she couldn’t fit him into the cave anyway. Without the horse, however, Ker had to stop more frequently to rest; she judged it to be close to sunrise now, which meant she’d gone a whole day without sleep. She told herself she couldn’t sleep until she was safe, but she wondered if she wasn’t afraid to—afraid of who and what she might see if she closed her eyes for too long.

  The moon was waning, but the sky was clear and there was still more than enough light to make walking easy. She’d bound up her sliced finger with a few strips torn from the bottom of her shirt. Though the wound was not serious, it was sore enough to distract her. She was stopping every ten paces to check the skyline for the silhouette of the pine tree, and finding it harder each time to keep going. All those good meals and soft beds at the Hall hadn’t been offset by the small amount of exercise she’d done in secret, and the discovery of her flabby condition frightened her more than a little. If she didn’t reach the old cave soon, she’d have to find some other place for a long rest, even if she didn’t sleep.

  The sky was lightening with the approach of the sun when Kerida finally saw the pine’s distinctive silhouette and took what felt like her first easy breath since swinging back the trapdoor in the Hall kitchen. Just past the forked tree the footing became much rockier and rougher, no longer the carpet of dried grasses and old needles there’d been under the pines. In spring and summer, scrub trees, weeds, and wildflowers grew rampant around the entrance. Even dead and drying in the winter air, the growth helped to disguise the presence of the cave opening so much that Ker wasn’t sure she could have found it if she hadn’t known it was there.

  As it was, she had to feel her way to the darker patch that was the actual entrance, stubbing her toes and bruising her sore finger against rocks hidden in the frost-killed growth. One minute she was feeling her way along the rock, and the next her hands met nothing but air and she fell forward. She didn’t bother to stand up, but crawled into the opening on her hands and knees, feeling the twitches of muscle exhaustion in her legs. Once inside, she sat back on her heels, rubbing at her face, the relief almost too much to bear. Finally, she could sit down and rest. Maybe eat something, even make a fire, if she could find the hearthstones and the kindling the shepherds were sure to have left, if Tel and the others hadn’t used it all.

  She was getting to her feet again when something heavy slammed against her. Old training automatically took over, and she wriggled sideways, raising her arms and turning away from the hands that were reaching for her throat. The same half-forgotten training brought her knees up as she was pushed down, and she managed to wedge one in against her assailant as she clawed at his face, her fingers brushing against skin that felt unnaturally hot.

  “Hah, thought you’d kill me, did you? I could hear you coming a mile off, clumsy fool.”

  That voice again. Ker stopped clawing and concentrated on keeping the hands away. “Tel? Tel Cursar? It’s me, it’s Kerida Nast. Hey!” She braced her
self and shoved as hard as she could with her knee, but his arms were so long, it hardly made any difference to his reach. “Tel, you idiot! IT’S KERIDA!”

  “Kerida?” The hands with their long steely fingers stopped trying to choke her and clutched at her instead, dragging her upright. “Kerida, is it you?” And then he was crushing her in a hug that shoved her face against the hard planes of his chest. He thrust her away almost as roughly, turning her to face the dawn light that ghosted its way into the mine entrance.

  “Is it really you? You’re not a fever vision?” There was a shakiness to his voice that told her all she needed to know. That and the heat she’d felt in his skin.

  “It’s really me,” she said. “Not your fever. What happened? Where are the others?” She led him deeper into the cave, away from the entrance. She didn’t think there was anyone out there, but then she hadn’t thought there’d be anyone in here either. “Do you have any light?”

  He did. The cave had originally been a long straight tunnel shape, but the shepherds who used it had filled in a portion of it with rock, enough to give themselves a windbreak, and to cover the light of a fire from the outside. Once around this, Ker could see embers glowing in the ring of hearthstones, and the pile of blankets Tel had been sleeping on.

  She saw a candle perched on a convenient shelf of rock and managed to get it lit, even though Tel was still holding on to her, touching her face from time to time as if he couldn’t believe she was real.

  “Where are the others?” she asked again.

  “Had to go on without me.” The words were barely out of his mouth before Tel’s legs failed him and he sat down, dragging Kerida down with him. For a minute, she thought he’d fainted, but he was still gripping her sleeves fiercely, as if afraid that if he let her go she would disappear. She managed to shift him around so that at least they both had room to sit, and not too close to the fire.

  “They left you behind?” Did she hear a bleakness in her own voice? Tel hadn’t been the only person left behind. She shivered, and again pushed away images of the Hall’s great room.

  “Had to,” he repeated. He swallowed, grimacing. “Wound got worse. Slow them down. Not my Wing, anyway,” he added. They were Eagles, he meant, while he was a Bear.

  Ker opened her mouth, and closed it again. Nothing she could say to that.

  Instead she looked around, taking in what she could of the place in the meager light from the candle. The space was about four paces across, perhaps twice that in length. The shepherds had made good use of small rock ledges as spots to set supplies and utensils. There was indeed firewood ready to hand, either left behind by the shepherds, or by Tel’s friends when they’d abandoned him. There were also a couple of packs of travel cakes, and a waterskin, now half empty. It must have hurt the others to leave behind food and water, but they’d done it.

  What would have happened if she hadn’t come along was something Ker tried not to think about. The others might have been kinder to cut Tel’s throat than to leave him with a festering wound, waterskin or no waterskin. A shiver ran up her spine like mice on a curtain as she picked up the skin. Cutting throats was something else she didn’t want to think about just yet. She handed the water to Tel. “When did you last drink something?”

  “Rationing,” was his answer. Not unexpected, but Kerida rolled her eyes.

  “Well, drink something now, there’s plenty of water around here. Hey! Slowly, don’t choke on it.”

  When she saw that he was obeying her, she turned her attention to the fire, building it up until she had a fair blaze going. She found Tel gazing at her with fierce concentration, his eyes shinier than the firelight alone would account for. She could see signs of pain and fever on his face, and he seemed thinner even than he had been only a few days before.

  “Have you been eating at all?”

  Licking his lips, Tel nodded. “Tried to.”

  “You were keeping the food down?” He nodded again. That was all to the good. At least the bad wound hadn’t poisoned his stomach. Yet.

  “Come sit here, between the fire and the candle. Let me have a look at that wound.” She managed to pull off tunic, under tunic, and shirt, although with much clenching of teeth and hissing from Tel and much apologizing and eye-rolling from her. The wrapping around his right shoulder had been neat and tidy once, but Kerida wrinkled her nose at it now, and not just because of the smell. Their struggle by the entrance had dislodged it, and that looked to be a good thing.

  “Did they leave you any medicines?” she said. “The bandage is loose and dirty, so at the very least the wound has to be cleaned again.”

  “It was boiled when it went on.”

  “And how many days ago was that?” Getting the bandage off was going to be trickier even than the shirt and tunics. Disturbed as it was, it had stuck in places where the wound had bled and the blood dried. On the other hand, if the wound had started to go bad—and from the faint smell she thought it might have—there was no real need to be gentle. She made a face.

  “Bite on this,” she told him, handing him a wadded-up corner of his own shirt. When she was sure he had a good wad of cloth between his teeth, she took a firm grip on the bandage and yanked it off as quickly and as cleanly as she could.

  But not so quickly that Tel didn’t scream into the cloth and grab her wrist in a grip that made her fingers numb.

  “Let go of me,” she said. She wanted to slap him. Her eyes felt gritty with fatigue, her own cut finger throbbed, and dealing with Tel’s wound was draining the last reserves of her strength. She probably should have waited—for more daylight if for nothing else, but she couldn’t leave the wound undressed at this point.

  “Well, that’s not so bad,” she said once the filthy dressing was cleared away. “The wound’s definitely inflamed . . . edges red . . . and the skin hasn’t started knitting—”

  “That’s ‘not so bad’?”

  “As I was about to say, it’s a nice clean slice, straight and even along the line of the muscle, not a puncture, and there’s not as much discharge as there might have been. If someone had only cleaned the wound properly in the first place, and perhaps stitched it up, you’d be well on the way to mending.” Ker chewed on her lower lip. As it was, it would all depend on the herbs she had in her pack. “The arrow must have just grazed you.”

  Tel licked his lips. “Lucky it wasn’t an ax.”

  Ker winced, glancing at the weapon lying next to her pack. “Here. Lie down on your side. That’s it, back to the fire.” The shepherds had left two cooking pots, one larger than the other, along with a collection of mismatched cups and two wooden spoons, carved by someone who was no expert. Ker filled the smaller of the two pots with water from Tel’s bag and set it on the fire to boil while she looked over his shirt for a good edge to cut fresh bandages from. She wrinkled her nose. The shirt didn’t smell any too clean.

  “Do you have any cleaner piece of clothing than this?”

  The sound Tel made wasn’t in the least helpful, and Kerida sighed. There was no point in looking into Tel’s pack for any more dressings. Every soldier carried a single set of bandages; the theory was that if you needed more, your wound was too serious for you to be helped in the field. Tel’s bandages would have been the ones she’d pulled off his wound. Ker sighed again, and hauled her own tunic and under tunic off over her head. Her shirt had at least been clean the day before. If she needed more dressings, she would have to cut strips off Tel’s shirt and boil them. The old ones she pushed into the fire.

  Once the water was boiling, Ker added two careful pinches of dried yarrow out of one of the packets she’d brought with her. She waited until the sharply aromatic steam rose up before pulling the pot off the fire. First, she scooped up a small amount in one of the cups and set it aside for Tel to drink later. Then she folded up one of the pieces of cloth she’d cut from her shirt, dipped it into the cooli
ng liquid, and began cleaning Tel’s wound, dabbing at the mess gently but firmly. Tel hissed again, and tried to shift away from her, and this time she did slap him, gripping him firmly with her free hand above the wound, where his neck met his shoulder.

  “Hold still. Do you want to die from this?”

  He murmured something from which Ker could only make out the word “bossy.” “This is nothing,” she said, smiling. “You’re lucky it’s not my sister Tonia doing this.” Tonia was Ker’s oldest sister, and had been their father’s Laxtor, his second-in-command, before she herself became Faro of Panthers.

  Once the wound was cleaned to her satisfaction, Ker pressed the edges together as closely as she could, sprinkled some of the dried yarrow directly on it, and wrapped the shoulder up again with clean bandages. Fresh leaves would have been better, or a salve made from the dried herb, but this was the best she could do under the circumstances. It was better than Tel and his fellows had been able to manage on their own.

  “Didn’t any of you get medic’s training?” Never mind her sister Tonia. In Ester’s Cohort, everyone who expected to advance had to receive all the basics of training, and it was lucky for Tel that she had. And lucky I thought to bring medicines with me.

  “Next time I’m on the run from an invading army, I’ll make sure to run with someone who did well at his studies.”

  Ker ignored him, picking up his shirt again. It would do for a sling, if nothing else. “Here, lean forward. I’m going to bind your arm.”

  “What? Come on. It’s not that bad.”

  “It is that bad.” He might protest, Ker thought, but Tel was leaning forward all the same. She tucked his forearm into the folded shirt, wrapping the sleeves around his torso. “I’ve nothing to stitch the wound with,” she added as she tied the sleeves off. “You’ve got to move it as little as possible.”

  “Good thing I can fight left-handed.”