by Devin Madson
Another flicker of movement upon our left. Not crimson this time, and I wished I could convince myself it was anything but a fellow Sword hunting us down. No sooner did I part my lips to warn Amun than he said, “I know,” and turned again.
I swallowed the urge to demand what he planned to do about it. Easier to handle the pressure when you’re the one in control, I reminded myself, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
When next he glanced at the sky and made a sudden turn, I was sure he knew where we were. Something about the way he looked about, scanning the trees, looking up at the sun and down at the tracks in the mud. Mud… it was all mud now, mud and pools of water, and had I not known we were travelling east I would have assumed we were heading deeper into the fen, not out of it.
A flicker of sparkling blue showed through the trees. Not someone following, but a river. The river we had followed with General Kitado and Empress Miko, all the way to Otobaru Shrine and on to Syan.
Our horse splashed through a particularly deep pool of water, wetting our legs. We weren’t in the fen anymore at all. We were in wetlands bordering the river, farther from the camp than I had thought.
“You have a plan?” I hissed in Amun’s ear. “We can’t outrun them.”
“I know,” he said. “I have half a plan.”
Half a plan would have to do.
A shout cut over the rapid thud of the horse’s hooves as we crossed a brief stretch of solid ground only to splash into another pool of water, narrowly missing a tangle of twisting branches more bird’s nest than tree. A shadow flickered behind us, and Amun must have heard me gasp for he urged the horse on faster, turning away from the river. Here every breath was full of mud and salt water and a stagnant kind of rot that tickled the nose, a smell that reminded me of another time I had been injured and on the run from my own people.
Amun wound through a series of dense copses before bearing sharply away from the riverside pools onto a narrow track. It twinged the same memories as the smells. This was the way to Otobaru. Perhaps if we could make it to the shrine we could… what? Fight? Hide? Neither would be an option if there were enough of them. But continuing on was increasingly not an option either.
The track was freshly churned, the hoofprints wet and gleaming in the morning light. They wound on ahead toward a sharp corner. The road to the shrine was close.
“Yes,” Amun said, exultant. Although if the tracks belonged to Ezma and the others, we would merely be exchanging one death for another. “Is anyone close enough to see us?”
I turned and, holding tight, hunted the surrounding trees. Dawn light filtered through at a sharp angle, making odd shadows of the morning, but there were no flitting shapes of horses or flickers of colour.
“No. But I’m sure they’re not far behind.”
He grunted, and at the sharp right turn in the track, he yanked the horse left and plunged us into the trees, their thin branches whipping our arms and legs and probably his face. He slowed as suddenly, reining in to a complete stop. And there in the middle of the dense foliage we stood still, breathing hard and sweating despite the morning chill.
I parted my lips to ask what he was doing, but he twisted in the saddle, shaking his head in warning. We listened. Leaves rustled all around us, and now we had stopped, insects buzzed into our faces, but for a while there was nothing but our ragged breathing. Then hoofbeats. Slowly rising above the other sounds, the growing thunder of them muted only by the mud over which they travelled. No shouts, no cries, just a concert of hooves hammering the track growing closer and closer.
Amun tensed, seeming to hold his breath as if, even at this distance, they might still hear him. Through the thick stands of trees and fluttering branches, swift shapes passed. I started counting them only to stop as they melded into a continuous line. Two dozen, maybe more, following the track. Slowly the hoofbeats began to fade, and Amun relaxed. “Well, that’s good for now,” he said, “but how far will they go before they wonder if they’ve missed us and send some doubling back?”
“At the speed they were catching up? A few minutes.”
He nodded, grim. “We need another plan.”
“We need rest. Somewhere safe.”
“What place is safe?” Amun ran a shaking hand over his face. His other hand still held the reins and was equally unsteady. It wasn’t the trembling of fear, I thought, watching it, rather the shakes of a man who has exerted himself too much on too little sustenance and rest. Our horse was sweating too and could not be pushed much farther.
“Well we can’t stay here, but… I don’t think it’s safe to catch up with the others.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Amun laughed wildly, before snapping his mouth shut. “We aren’t safe anywhere. I don’t know where we ought to go. Or even… or even what we ought to do.” He ran his hand over his face, and it was a man much older than his years who looked back at me. “Fuck this, Rah, this is horseshit. How do you just stubbornly deal with this? Every time I try to do the right thing, shit goes wrong and…”
He trailed off, looking away.
“Because doing the right thing in difficult times is almost always the hardest of all the choices you can make. You think rising high in the eyes of the gods is easy?”
“I don’t care about gods. I don’t… I don’t even believe they’re there. I tried to just leave you behind, you know. I tried. I tried to tell myself Whisperer Ezma had a good reason for calling kutum, but I couldn’t deal with the little voice of doubt in my mind. Because the voice of doubt was proof I could do something, and if I didn’t I would think about it every day for the rest of my life. And that would be worse than being exiled by a whisperer, because who do we really have anymore except ourselves? Except the few we can cling to. Can trust.”
“I don’t know,” I said, the truth a pain in my chest. “I don’t know. This whole thing is a mess, but we will figure it out, Amun, I’m sure of it. Things will get better. We will find a path. Whether here or back home, we will find the right path. For now we just need to get out of here and find shelter.”
Amun didn’t immediately answer, but neither did he set the horse walking again. Instead he sat pushing his lip between his teeth with a shaking finger. He gnawed at the skin, not seeming to realise he was doing it.
“We have to go back,” he said at last. “Go home. This isn’t our home. These aren’t our people. If we can find out what is wrong on the plains and fight the city states, we could put things back the way they were and be true Levanti again.”
When Tor had brought up fighting for the plains I had refused because to do so would require uniting the Levanti, breaking down everything we were to create a new whole. But if we couldn’t fight for the plains and we couldn’t fight for this new empire, what was there left to fight for? Was it time to just let the Levanti way of life die away to nothing but a memory? Should we? Could I?
“We need to survive the day first,” I said, refusing to make a decision yet.
Amun set the exhausted horse walking, the animal reluctant to move. “Where to, then?”
I was tired. I was done with running, with being chased by my own people, with trying to find safe shelter. But I didn’t want to die. We needed rest.
“We could head toward Otobaru,” I said.
“The shrine?”
“You know it?”
“I’ve hunted out this way a few times. There are some abandoned huts along the riverside. I sheltered in one when a fierce squall blew up while I was gathering crabs. We could go there and hope they think we wouldn’t be mad enough to stay so close.”
“Or that they decide chasing Ezma is more important.”
Amun grimaced, because we both knew if they caught her a lot of Levanti would die, and we were neither of us so detached from our heritage to accept that without pain.
We saw the hoofprints first. Then the footprints. So many they churned the mud to a cratered mire.
“They had Kisians with them,” Am
un said. “But they can’t have walked this far overnight.”
He had been letting the horse walk at an easy pace, the morning peaceful with the rush of the swollen river roaring by. Every bush and tree seemed to be full of bugs and birds making the insistent sounds of life, but there was no sign of people.
A hut emerged from the morning haze, but where there ought to have been relief at finding shelter, my stomach only tightened. Amun had tensed too, but whatever our private thoughts we said nothing, the eeriness of the day demanding silence. Even the birds had stopped singing.
“I think—”
An arrow plunged into the mud in front of us. The horse backed. Someone shouted from the trees in Kisian. Having found one dark figure in the branches I soon found many. One in almost every tree. How long had they been watching us, just waiting?
More appeared ahead of us, a group emerging from the trees with arrows nocked to their bows. That they hadn’t drawn made it the friendliest, most trusting greeting I’d received in a while.
The men in the trees blended in, but the ones ahead wore Kisian military uniforms exactly like those we had fought as we travelled south with the Chiltaens, conquering their lands.
Their leader, a step ahead of the rest, set his hands on his hips and spoke, slowly, the tone of a man speaking to someone old and hard of hearing.
Amun made a disgusted noise in his throat. “Why do they always think we’re idiots?”
“Don’t you ever think they’re idiots?”
“Ha! Sometimes. What do you think they want?”
They hadn’t yet lifted their bows, but that wasn’t reassuring. “A reason to kill us, I think,” I said. I gripped the edge of the saddle and began the painful process of dismounting, always a difficult task when injured but doubly so when there’s someone before you taking up all the wiggle room. I kneed Amun in the back by accident, but he remained proudly upright in the saddle while I climbed down, hoping my knees wouldn’t buckle.
My knees buckled. I would have fallen into the mud had Amun’s leg not been there, saving me from an ignoble fall that would have robbed my planned speech of its authority.
With a hand on Amun’s knee to steady my shaking legs, I stepped forward a pace. “My name is Rah e’Torin,” I said, hoping my name and tone would mean something even if the words did not. “We are not your enemies. We aren’t loyal to the Levanti in Kogahaera. Nor to the others who came this way.” The words were making no difference. Arrows remained nocked and fatigue was fast sapping how much I cared. It was time to risk all or nothing. “Both Minister Manshin and Empress Miko know me, if you answer to either.”
Those names caused more muttering, and I watched their weapons rather than their faces. One by one, the bows lowered like weights pulling down their arms.
The man I had deemed their leader repeated Minister Manshin’s name, pointing into the trees.
“He’s here?” I said. Could we be so lucky? But what was he doing here? Was Empress Miko with him? Or had he been too late to save her? I hated how much hope and fear seared through my heart. I had tried not to hope I would see her again, tried not to think about the evening in the bathhouse or the night lying beside her in the busy inn.
“Who is he?” Amun said as the soldiers pointed again, seeming to invite us—demand us even—to follow them.
“He’s… sort of like a second to the empress, I guess. Gideon locked him up in Mei’lian and I let him out, so he owes me a debt.”
“A give us shelter and supplies kind of debt or a stab you through the ribs while smiling at you kind of debt?”
I looked up at him. “I… wish you hadn’t put that thought in my head. The former, I hope. I helped the empress at a difficult time too, so I would like to think they aren’t about to order us filled with arrows.”
“You’ve been busy.”
It was just a statement, yet I caught disparagement in the tone and hoped it was my imagination. My own doubts. “Busy making friends and enemies in all the wrong places,” I said. “Here, help me up. If nothing else the minister ought to be able to keep us from being torn apart by other Levanti.”
“As long as we aren’t about to get torn apart by Kisians instead. In this state you’d probably fall over if you tried to fight, and I’d be little better.”
The Kisians watched us expectantly, still holding their bows. The ones in the trees perched like hawks ready to dive.
“I really don’t think we have a choice,” I said.
“No, that seems to happen all too much around here.” With a grunt of effort, Amun helped me back up into the saddle, and with a nod to the Kisians, we followed their lead off into the trees.
I had expected to find a handful of Kisians with the minister, but there were more than I had thought possible gathered in such a tangled, out of the way place, a ragtag collection of men in different uniforms. Even more surprising was the presence of Tor. He stood talking to Minister Manshin away from the clusters of tense soldiers awaiting orders, the others with them having the look of commanders. A map sat on the ground at their feet, and their intense discussion only ceased at our approach.
“Rah. Amun,” Tor said, glancing up with neither interest nor surprise. “Did you get separated from the others?”
“No. Ezma called a kutum and left me to die.” It had been too long a night for anything but blunt honesty.
“What?” His shock drew the attention of some of the Kisians. Minister Manshin’s gaze flitted between us despite the disinterest of his expression. “Amun?”
Having halted our horse, the Sword before me folded his arms. “You think he’s lying?”
“No, I—no.” Tor grimaced at me. “Shit.”
“Yeah, shit,” Amun said, and it had been so long since anyone had stood up for me that it felt like an entirely new experience. “Where were you?”
“Here, obviously. I was trying to get to Kogahaera, but—”
Beside Tor, Minister Manshin pointed at us, demanding answers. The man I had last seen leaving the prison cells beneath the palace did not smile. He didn’t look like he knew how, but he hadn’t scowled at us or ordered his men to run us through, which was a good start. And he remembered me. “Rah e’Torin,” he said after getting an answer from Tor.
“Minister Manshin,” I returned as Amun made to dismount. I wanted to get out of the saddle, was as sick of riding as the horse must be of carrying us, but I did not want to appear weak before the man I had to bargain with, so I stayed where I was, looking down at him. “We do not mean you or your soldiers any harm,” I began, though the first question I longed to ask was whether he had helped Empress Miko and if she was all right.
The minister looked healthier than when I had last seen him but hardly more rested, the skin beneath his eyes dark. Those eyes looked me up and down now, lingering on my injured leg. Tor translated, “You’re injured.”
“I am. By my own people, not yours.”
His expression didn’t change. “What are you doing here?” the minister said, Tor managing something of the man’s tone. “You are alone?”
“But for Amun. We are trying not to die. What are you doing here?”
He stared at me without blinking. “There are some of your people at the shrine,” Tor translated. “A lot of them. We were passing nearby and stopped to see if they were a danger or not.”
“Whisperer Ezma?” I said to Tor, who nodded.
“I was in the middle of explaining they would do no Kisian harm if left alone when you arrived.” He looked to Manshin as the man spoke and added, “The minister wants to know if you are part of the group at the shrine.”
“If he means the deserters, tell him no. Their leader and I disagree on something rather fundamental.”
“Enlighten me,” the minister said. “What is this fundamental point?”
“My continued existence.”
His brows rose, and at any other time I might have been glad to have elicited a reaction, but my whole body was heavy with fat
igue and pain and a dull ache had started in my ear like someone jamming a stick in there.
“He wants to know what you want,” Tor said. “He’s quite busy.”
“What I want? We aren’t here by choice. His men insisted. We want safety. And rest.”
“And food,” Amun added. “I could eat a whole deer.”
“If I ask him to let you go, will you be heading to Kogahaera?”
“Kogahaera?” Amun said. “Why would we go there? From one snakes’ nest to another.”
Tor glanced my way, and I wondered how much of my intentions he had guessed. Had he overheard me begging Yitti to ride that way to help Gideon? Or was he just hopeful I would carry a message to Dishiva?
Both of them stared at me, the Kisians getting restless behind Tor as Minister Manshin’s expression soured. “I don’t have a plan yet,” I said, a conversation about Gideon the last thing I wanted to have standing right there. “Right now I just want to not—”
“Minister!” A Kisian sped down the nearby slope, kicking up leaves and almost losing his footing in his haste. “Minister!” He halted, breathing heavily and pointing up the slope. He went on, and all Amun and I could do was watch for the nonexistent reactions of the gathered Kisians and wait for Tor to tell us what was going on. I hated relying on him, both for my sake and his, and tried to bury my impatience.
“This is ridiculous,” Amun muttered. “We should have taken our chances against the arrows.”
Tor glared at him while the Kisians went on talking. “It sounds like Gideon’s Levanti have caught up with Ezma’s. The man says there are more Levanti coming, that the road is thick with them. He says it looks like the ones in the shrine are preparing for a fight, and he doesn’t understand why.”
“Shit,” Amun said. The word was getting a lot of use today and it wasn’t even noon.
Ezma had called a kutum against me, but the Levanti following her only wanted peace, wanted to go home, and the thought of them dying here on these shores at the hands of other Levanti made my stomach churn. This wasn’t how it was meant to go. Surely wasn’t what Gideon wanted. He had wanted to build a new home for his people, not bury them all.
