Don’t look at me because I didn’t heal her then, Pounce said. The stakes weren’t so high.
“When will they punish you?” Farmer asked, his eyes worried. “The Great Gods?”
If Pounce had been human, he might have rolled his eyes. I could not begin to guess, he replied. It could be tonight, or tomorrow, or next year. They do not exactly understand mortal time, and the nature of the crisis confuses their vision of this world right now.
“Will they let us speak for you?” Tunstall asked. “Explain things?”
Let us worry when it happens, Pounce told him. If we may cease fussing, please, and go now?
We finished getting our armor on and bringing out the weapons we preferred to use. I noticed that today Sabine had strapped her longbow and quiver to her saddle, while Tunstall wore his short sword. Farmer had his embroidery hoop and thread ready for work, which made me grind my teeth. Though I can write in the saddle, I cannot sew without plunging the needle into my flesh over and over. It was very annoying.
The day was fine, cool turning to warm, but the road was in shade most of the time. I found the first evidence of several humans’ piss before my legs were even well stretched. Achoo told us all that Prince Gareth’s scent was there. On we went, the others riding close to my heels to guard Achoo and me. We did not even stop at the next wayhouse. Traffic was light, local folk with carts and two merchant caravans bound south.
By mid-afternoon the brightness was failing. Clouds fat with rain rolled over the trees. Achoo was tired of riding by then. At a stop when we still had a bit of sun in the sky she refused to return to her place atop the mare. I thought she would know if she was up to regular duty, and let her take the lead on foot. She did not waste time, but sniffed the midden, sneezed, and set out down the road. Now Tunstall rode beside us, Sabine and Farmer having dropped back to rest the bigger horses.
We were an hour along and I wanted to stop to make a piss-mark of my own when I began to feel sommat was off. Thunder rolled in the distance. The wind was blowing in the strangest way, first from the east, then the south, whipping the trees madly. Branches tore off and flew through the air. One struck me on the right cheek. Sabine shouted an inquiry and I raised my hand in warning. I was fine, or fine enough, but Achoo was suddenly acting strange.
We were running up the slope of a hill. Near the top she halted, going from middle-air-seek, with her nose at the same level as her shoulder, to madly questing in the air, nose raised, mouth open, turning in the road. She smelled sommat she didn’t like. I hand-signaled trouble to Tunstall as I drew my baton and called Achoo to heel.
The bandits ran at us from the woods on both sides of the road at the hill’s crest. They were armed with crossbows. Achoo and I dove for the protection of a big tree without waiting to see if they meant to shoot or no.
They shot. A wall of Farmer’s blue flame ate their first arrows. Then a mage came out, eight feet tall and hooded and robed in fire. I bit my hand rather than scream. The thing wavered, to my relief. It was an image or disguise, not a true creature. It was deadly all the same, returning Farmer’s blue Gift with a bronze-colored blaze of its own. The two lines of fire met over the road and meshed, surging back and forth like arm wrestlers. I looked at Farmer. He was sweat-soaked and grim-faced.
Sabine dismounted from Drummer and walked forward, her longbow strung and an arrow already set to the string. She loosed and took a bandit through the throat. Drummer and the other horses save for Farmer’s gelding moved back, away from the lady. Sabine continued to shoot, using up the extra arrows she held in her mouth before plucking more from the quiver on her back. She killed three more bandits outright before the others stopped watching the mages and realized their own peril.
Tunstall’s saddle was empty, his mount backing up, seeking the safety of the herd of packhorses. Immediately I knew what my partner was up to. He’d gone into the brush and trees on the far side of the road, just as I’d sought the right side. “Tinggal, Achoo,” I whispered to her. She sat, whimpering. “I don’t care how you sarden feel, we are not risking you. We need you to seek, so you curst well tinggal.”
I left her hidden behind the tree as I went back into the forest. The wind steadied into a blow from the east—the mage had whipped it up before, I would wager, to keep Achoo from smelling the bandits beforetime. The thunder was closer and louder now. Its boom covered any noise I might have made.
I found the bandits’ camp and their horses first. Quickly I stripped the animals of their gear and slapped their backsides, scaring them into a flight through the woods. They were scrawny, half-starved things. I asked the Goddess to lead them to better owners if she would.
A bandit fleeing the action on the road discovered I had driven off his means of escape. He came at me with a battle-ax raised high. They always think I’ll try to meet such an attack from a longer weapon or blade and a taller foe. They never expect me to come in from the side opposite the weapon, driving my baton up between the rusher’s legs. He’d just grabbed my shoulder when my lead-cored weapon hit his loving muscles. That straightened him up. He gripped me still until I seized his hand and smashed the end of my baton up under his chin. That was the last of him for a while. I bound him hand and foot in case I hadn’t killed him, and went back the way he had come, looking for his nest mates.
Another coward on the run with a black arrow lodged in his shoulder raced down the trail. He was looking back toward the road and never saw me as I stepped aside and swung my baton right into his middle. Down he went. I bound him with strips torn from his filthy tunic and turned him over so he wasn’t jamming that arrow deeper into his flesh. I wasn’t sure if I ought to remove it or not, but decided to leave that decision for our mage.
I reached the road just as lightning struck the ground in front of Farmer. The Rats’ mage was too busy watching him and paying no attention to aught else. I looked for the solid form inside the wavering illusion and struck as hard as I could. The mage was female, as I learned right off. She must have used her protective magic in her battle with Farmer or she had trusted the bandits to guard her. The image vanished. The mage lay in the road, a dent in her head from my blow. I knelt, looking all around me as I checked the mage’s throat for a pulse. She was as dead as the first of our kings. Tunstall was pulling his short sword from a bandit’s corpse. Two Rats were on the ground before him, one moaning and the other still. Three more lay in the road with arrows in them. They would not be getting up again.
Sabine dismounted to help Farmer to his feet. His horse lay in the road unmoving, killed by the lightning at my guess. Farmer looked dazed, but no part of him was singed or burned.
The local weather god decided to receive the Great Gods’ gift of rain. The clouds split to bless the land, if not us, with a blinding downpour.
I started dragging the dead off the road. Tunstall’s moaner had gone to the Black God by the time I reached him. I’d moved two raw ones before I remembered Achoo and whistled for her. With my hound’s aid I was able to drag three more onto the side of the road closest to the camp.
That was when Sabine and Tunstall appeared out of the downpour, leading the horses. They had gotten Farmer onto Tunstall’s horse. He swayed in the saddle, his eyes half open. Even in the rain he smelled of smoke and cooked meat from his horse’s death. He looked at the enemy’s mage, who still lay in the road, and a slow smile spread across his face.
“I see she met Beka.” I barely heard him through the rain.
“It could have been Tunstall who did for her,” I called. “Though he’d have done the left side of her skull, then, or mayhap the whole thing.”
“Let’s get under cover for a bit,” Sabine shouted. “We’ll search the dead when it lets up some.”
I didn’t exactly like that, leaving what information those raw ones might hold in the road for passersby to loot, but with so hard a rain it was difficult to see. Quickly I dug in the pockets of the one closest to me, bringing out an amulet and a couple of copper
coins. Then I gestured for my partners and their horses to follow me. I collected the prisoner with the arrow in his shoulder while Tunstall grabbed the other cove near the camp.
The gods be thanked, the trees were bigger and heavier here, so we did have some shelter from the drumming rain. We set the prisoners off to the side. Tunstall helped Farmer down from his horse. Once the mage was seated against a tree with enough leaves to keep him from getting wet, we searched the bandits’ gear. Their packs were poor things, with rags of clothes and carved wood charms, knives so worn from sharpening they were almost needles, and herb medicines.
“Locals recruited by the enemy,” Tunstall said with disgust when he and I had inspected the lot. He held up a leather purse he’d found in the best-quality pack of them all. It was heavy with jingling metal, but when we poured it out, we found only tin coles.
Farmer touched one and grimaced. “The count’s mage did this. He put a seeming on the coins, to make them look like silver. Poor men lost their lives for a lie.” He gathered up the rest of the pocket gleanings. “I can’t do anything with the amulets and charms, but later, when there’s time and I have the strength, I’ll go over the rest.”
“I’m just as grateful these men lost their lives, Farmer, if you don’t mind,” Sabine said, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Given they wanted to kill us. And there’s sad news about our living prisoners.” While we’d been examining the bandits’ gear, the two coves we’d brought into the camp had decided not to wait for us to question them. They had swallowed their tongues. Like every other enemy we’d taken down this Hunt, they had naught in their pockets. “Pox,” my lady said.
She’d put it lightly. I stepped back a little ways in the trees, behind the horses, so I might be sick. Over the years I’d had to harden myself to crushed skulls, gaping and rotting wounds and their stink, cut bellies, the burned dead, and those who’d been gone and left unfound for a day or more. But there’s something about a mumper swallowing his tongue, or the magic that forces him to do it, that gives me the heaves.
There was nothing I could do with these poor Rats, so I went to the packhorses. Farmer needed sommat to perk him up. I don’t know if he’d had a chance to replenish the Gift in the ribbons he had used at the poisoned river, but he had other ribbons. He’d about done for the shelled almonds, too, but I could crack the ones in the pouch for him to eat.
I found Whitknees, the mare who carried Farmer’s gear, and was reaching to undo the straps that secured the bag with his magic things when I saw sommat odd. Dangling from a buckle on top of the pack was a bronze medallion I recognized right off. I reached for it and ran my fingers over that raised design—four leaves, pointed inward. The last time I had opened this bag, it had not been there. What was it doing on anything of ours, hanging out in the open like a signal to follow or to steal these packs and not Sabine’s, Tunstall’s, or mine?
I was tugging the buckle to the main compartment when Farmer’s big hands closed over mine. “I’ll do that,” he said wearily. He stopped for a moment, as if he was deciding what to say or how to say it. “I’ve been thinking, maybe I shouldn’t ask you to get things.… So much in there is dangerous.” He wouldn’t look at me but he did look, I saw, at that bronze medallion. After another pause he said, “I didn’t put that there.”
“I never thought you did,” I said warily. He wasn’t normally a pauser when he spoke to me. “Nor did I.”
He looked at me then, hard, asking me with his pale blue eyes if I’d tagged his pack. If I might be a traitor to our Hunt, to our realm. His hands tightened on mine. I held his gaze, trying to say without words that I’d had no part in marking his things with the enemy’s sign. It’s harder to do with the eyes than it is with words, but that’s the trick. It’s easy to lie with words. I’m told it is, anyway. I’m not good at it, so I seldom lie, but Farmer did not know me well and could not risk believing any speech of mine. He didn’t try to magic me in that moment. Tired as he was, I think he could have done it. He always seemed to have some little bit of Gift tucked away. But he didn’t try. He either respected me or wanted to believe I would not lie to him. I hoped for both.
And me? I’ve met so few folk in the world I trust to the bone. Can I be wrong about Farmer? Because that medallion says I am dead wrong about someone.
He released my hands. “I’ll get what I need, and thank you.”
I nodded and went to my packhorse Fireball for my helm. It was time to start wearing it.
Freshly helmed, with the rain ringing on the metal, I passed among the pack animals, making sure they were comfortable and promising I would take their burdens off if we were stopping there. I hoped not. I did not like that place. I also checked for other medallions.
As I was saying hello to Saucebox, I noticed that Pounce stood by Drummer and Steady. They were still worked up over the fight, shifting to and fro on their great steel-shod weapons of hooves. Since my eyes were drawn to Pounce on the ground, I also saw that the fighting horses’ hooves were bloody and caked with pieces of matter and lengths of hair. When had they killed anything?
I called to Sabine, who was talking intently with Tunstall. She walked over, shaking her head. “He wants to push on,” she called to Farmer as he cracked nuts at Whitknees’s side. “We’ll need a boat if this rain keeps up!” Coming to my side, she looked where I pointed. Then she said quietly, “Beka, let’s scout the road.” She hand-signaled Tunstall, murmuring to me, “We didn’t look behind us in that downpour, we just whistled the horses along.”
She drew her longsword and followed me into the tree cover along the thin trail. Achoo wanted to come, but again I made her stay behind. Tunstall vanished into the woods behind the camp. I knew he would be silent and not take foolish risks while he searched in that direction. I also knew I’d feel much better if Farmer were up to strength and able to go with him.
Both of you managed without a pet mage for three years, I scolded myself. You split up all the time and it worked out very well. It’s just having Sabine and Farmer and all these animals along that makes you wish for baby minders.
It was easier to see along the road with the rain easing. Sabine and I walked along the place where we’d been attacked. Now we saw two black-clad corpses in the middle of it. They must have been hidden by the downpour when Sabine and Tunstall collected the horses.
“Stormwings,” Sabine whispered. “They distracted us to steal the packs.”
“I doubt they had a proper chance,” I replied, the image of the medallion on Farmer’s pack clear in my mind’s eye. “I think your horses put paid to that.”
Sure enough, when we got close, we saw the marks of heavy steel shoes in the bodies. They’d been sorely trampled.
“I’m thinking that when we give Lord Gershom the accounts for this Hunt, we ought to add Drummer and Steady to the pay roster,” I told Sabine as we searched the corpses. “They’re as good as two more Dogs, and they’re always sober.”
She grinned. “You should see them drunk.”
My raw one wore only a Mithran emblem at his neck, which I took. His pockets were empty. I stood with a sigh and Sabine too got to her feet. She showed me an earring, a plain amber drop. “These might tell Farmer something, when he has the strength for it.”
She tucked the drop in a pocket, bent, and gripped her corpse by the boots. I did the same. Neither of us wanted to touch the soggy mass around their heads and chests again. Together we dragged these two coves to the side of the road.
“I can’t help noticing,” I said as I tugged, “that Drummer and Steady appear to go out of their way to kick a foe in the head.” Looking at the remains of both raw ones with a gulp, I added, “They are truly enthusiastic when it comes to the head, in fact.”
“Ah, that,” Sabine replied. She dragged her corpse into line with those I had set by the road before. She helped me settle mine. Then she stood for a moment, looking at them in the mud side by side. Finally she said, “Being one of the sisterhood—the lady knig
hts—it isn’t always easy. Plenty of men are happy to try to do to one of us what they’d never do to a male knight. Sadly, some of those happy men are our fellow knights. It happened to me but once. After that I not only trained Drummer and Steady to fight as all warhorses fight, I trained them to go for a man’s face. Once my fellow knights saw it, or talked to someone who had seen it, they left me alone.”
“Good plan,” I whispered in awe.
“I know a number of fine men,” Sabine told me. “Your partner is one of them.” She sighed. “If only he would give up this notion that he is not good enough for me.”
“I tell him you know your own mind when he mentions it,” I assured her. “That you’re a grown mot who knows what she needs and has.”
She gripped my shoulder. “So he says. I thank you. He respects your opinion.”
As we returned to the bandit camp, I wondered if he would respect it if I said we might have a traitor among us. But who? Farmer? He was the most likely, being the one we knew the least, but I could not fit my mind around it. Was I a fool to think there was no evil in that broad face, or those placid blue eyes?