Mastiff

  “I don’t want to kill you, Beka. You’re like my daughter,” he said quietly. “But don’t you see? These people will win. I want to be on the winning side.”

  “What will you tell Sabine when you—win?” I demanded, waiting for an opening.

  “I’m doing this for Sabine!” he roared suddenly and charged, his baton almost magically in his grip. I dodged and struck sidelong, aiming for his left elbow. I had to go for his joints. He was vulnerable in his joints, where all the years, all his fights, and all the broken bones had added up.

  I missed and his left kick took me dead in the right hip, knocking me down. I rolled, my knife held out so I wouldn’t cut myself. He lunged in to stomp me with that kicking, booted foot, but I was already lurching to my feet. I’d made it onto the trail.

  “What will you say when you come back without me or Gareth?” I demanded, moving sideways, my eyes on the center of his body. I’d see the first twitch of movement there. He had not taught me that, but he’d taught me never to forget it. “Them’s your orders, right? Kill me and the lad? The lad dies, his parents die, and the lords’ hands are clean?”

  “I’ll say you were riding hard when your horse stumbled,” he told me. “It was up here, you went off the cliff. I couldn’t save you. Beka, don’t make me do this!”

  “I’m not making you do scummer!” I cried. “It’s greed, because it can’t be cowardice—”

  I knew he’d move if he thought he had me talking. He did, coming at me on the right, his baton in his left hand. He liked to fight left these days, with his right shoulder aching more and more. I blocked his baton with mine, lunged in, and got his knee in my belly. We went hilt to hilt on our knife hands. I collapsed against him with my shoulder up in his armpit and dug in with my bare feet, fighting to keep his knife hand occupied. Inside his right arm as I was, he could do naught with his baton but hammer at me weakly with the butt.

  I rammed my baton into the upper half of his belly. Then I jumped back. I wasn’t fast enough. His knife came down and cut me from ribs to hip, a long, thin, nasty slice that slashed my clothes, though not my belt.

  We backed off, trying to get some air. I cut a strip from my tunic, watching him try to catch his breath. I’d driven my baton as far up into his lungs as I could go. He was wheezing from it, though he still kept knife and baton pointed my way. Clumsily I tied the strip around the upper end of my cut, my shoulder and collarbone. I tried to calculate how long it would be until I’d bled so much I couldn’t stand.

  “You do this for Sabine? She’ll gut you as soon as she finds out!” I snapped.

  “She won’t know!” Tunstall wheezed. “No one will tell, lest I give out they were in a conspiracy to murder royal blood. Soon enough Baird will be king, I Lord Provost.” He took up a small flask at his hip and drank, his eyes watching me steadily. It was mead, to numb his pain. He sounded better when he said, “They’ll say they were impressed by my work on the Hunt. I’ll tell her I saved money from old bribes and invested it in trade. I’ll be almost good enough for her. We can marry.”

  “She doesn’t want to marry,” I reminded him. I reached for a handful of dirt, but he stepped closer with his baton. I had to back up. I needed to think of something, but what? I didn’t want to kill him. I couldn’t. But he had betrayed the law we served. He had betrayed that little boy, who had done naught to deserve his last days of hunger, cold, and whippings.

  “She says she don’t want to wed,” Tunstall replied. “She says it to spare my feelings. But she would do it if I had a place at court. If I had money.” He came straight at me this time. He gave me the high stroke we’d practiced so often in the yards and I countered it. Middle stroke, low stroke. His knife was out to the side, ready to block mine. He struck with all his strength even while he used practice blows. He toyed with me, and I knew it. He knew my ribs were hurting, that I was losing blood. Every time he smacked that baton down on mine, the shoulder ached more. Worse, the contempt of what he did lashed me like the torturers’ whips. This was Tunstall!

  I took a tiny step closer. He had to close his elbow up a little to make his next stroke. “You’re getting weak,” he told me. “I’ll do it quick—”

  He was older and tough. I was young and desperate. I rammed him in the sack with my foot, jamming my blade into his knife arm and the top of my head into his chin. He dropped his knife, but he used his leg to sweep my feet from under me while he grabbed my braid. He yelped and let go when the spikes bit into his palm.

  The back of my head was on fire. I fell on top of him as he got his baton arm under my chin and yanked my head up. He meant to choke me or break my neck, but he’d forgotten my arm guards. Rather than take time to pull at the arm around my throat, I let one of my hands fall. With it I drew a long, flat knife from my arm guard and shoved the blade clean through the heavy muscle of his left forearm. Gritting my teeth, I wrenched it all the way around.

  He grunted and let me go to yank the knives from his flesh. I scrambled halfway up, but again he grabbed my braid, at the end this time. I lifted myself as high as I could go, raising my arms as I gripped my baton two-handed. With all my strength I slammed my lead-cored baton down on Tunstall’s oft-broken knees.

  He bellowed in agony and released me, trying to sit up with legs that would not work. To be certain, weeping now, I struck his knees a second time.

  I did not dare nap tap him. The healers in Corus had been very clear. Another good blow on his head would kill Tunstall. I fumbled in the pouch on my belt that was supposed to hold hobbles, but found none. I glanced at him and saw that he’d started to roll toward the cliff.

  Limping—he had kicked me at some point right on some torturer’s lump—I caught him by the back of the tunic and dragged him away from the trail. He fought to reach me over his head until I dropped him and stood on the arm that bled the most. He lay back, tears rolling into his hair and ears, as I stripped off his belt. I winkled his buckle knife out of its hidden sheath and tossed it over the cliff. The strangling cord followed it. I could not trust him not to hang himself. I used my own knife to cut up his tunic, first to tie his hands in front of him, then to bandage the knife wounds in his arms.

  “Let me die, Cooper,” he ordered as I wiped the tears from his face with a piece of the cloth. “Or kill me.” It was only when I saw more drops fall on his skin that I realized I was crying, myself.

  I could only stare at him. “I’m not a killer, Tunstall. I’m a Dog—remember? You taught me how to be a Dog. We don’t kill. We hobble and we let the magistrates decide.”

  “You know what they’ll do,” he said, trying to reach the cliff. It must have been agonizing with the pain in his knees, but he would not stop.

  “Mattes.” The voice was Sabine’s, raw and broken. “Is it true?”

  He started to roll cliffward, not daring to face her. How could I hate him and pity him at the same time? Feeling dizzy, I went after him and seized the back of his tunic. My right hand lost the grip.

  “Here.” Nomalla had come out of the shadows on the trail leading a horse. A cut on her forehead had bled on her face and dried, giving her a dark half mask. She took a rope from her saddlebag and looped it around Tunstall’s chest, slipping it under his hands and arms, ignoring his face. Fixing it in a knot at his back, she then looped it around her mount’s saddle horn and dragged Tunstall to a tree on the far side of the trail. There she tied him, wrapping the rope around him and the tree several times before she secured it with hands that shook.

  Then she spat on him.

  She looked at me. “We heard most of it. We were afraid to interrupt and risk your getting hurt.”

  My dizziness was worse. The bandage I had put around my shoulder was soaked with blood. “Just you two?” I asked.

  Sabine and Farmer rode forward. Sabine’s muddy face showed tear tracks. Farmer’s hair was all on end. His tunic was gone. He passed his horse’s reins to Sabine and dismounted with a wince, then limped over to me. “She’s bleed
ing,” he called to Sabine. “That horse you’re riding—it was Dolsa’s. There should be medicines in the saddle pack.”

  “The prince?” Nomalla asked. I glared at her as I leaned on Farmer. I did not trust her any more now than before. Perhaps even less.

  Sabine came over with a small pack in one hand, the riding horses, Drummer, and Steady trailing her. “You should have seen Nomalla fight,” she told me. “Her father’s men cursed her with every swing. You could have learned a word or two. And I too would like to be certain of the boy’s well-being.”

  Farmer picked me up, wincing. “We’ll all go together,” he said firmly.

  This way, Pounce said, a black spot in the grass. Would you hurry, Farmer? Achoo and I are really quite concerned. It’s only because she was ordered to stay with Gareth that Achoo didn’t come out to fight herself.

  “Good girl,” I whispered. My shoulder hurt. I faded in and out. I remember that Nomalla surrendered a saddle blanket for me to lie on. Sabine gave me a drink of some liquid that set my insides on fire. I slept.

  Thursday, June 28–Saturday, June 30, 249

  Halleburn Fiefdom

  yet recorded in my memory

  When I woke in the morning with the sun near ten of the clock, I was surrounded by sleepers. Farmer lay at my side, snoring lightly. Nomalla and Sabine had taken blankets from three more of our stolen horses and slept on them nearby, Sabine with one arm wrapped around Gareth. Pounce and Achoo slept with them.

  The horses were picketed nearby. Next to Drummer, who would have announced it if anyone came near who was not Sabine, was Tunstall. He looked gray and old in his bonds. Someone had put wooden splints on both of his legs. I suspected Farmer. Kora always says that mages are selfish at bottom, which made Farmer the exception who proves the rule.

  Slowly, clutching the tree near me, I got to my feet. Every move was an ache. Keeping as silent as I could, I hobbled out into the long grass between forest and trail. The dew was still on it, the cool ground a blessing to my poor feet. I was used to running barefoot, not fighting. At the trail, I passed through something like a gauzy curtain. I’d wager that Farmer had found sommat in Dolsa’s bags to hide us.

  When I turned, the forest looked normal as could be. There was no sign of seven horses or their riders, and no sound of some riders’ snores.

  I thought I heard thunder, but after a Hunt plagued by rain, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Slowly I walked to the cliff’s edge. By the time I reached it, I realized the boom was too regular to be thunder. It was the steady heartbeat of battle drums.

  As I gazed into the valley, I heard someone patter across the trail. I glanced back. Gareth was awake. “Did you tell Lady Sabine where you were going?” I asked. My voice was gravelly, as if I had a cold coming on.

  “She said something and went back to sleep,” Gareth replied. “I believe she wished me to stay nearby.” He tucked his hand into one of mine. “Where must we run to next?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Mayhap things have changed.”

  We looked down at armies as they circled Halleburn. They were too far distant for me to see their banners.

  “Are they for us or against us?” asked the little old man.

  “My work is to assume that they are against us until your parents or Lord Gershom order me otherwise,” I told him. “We’d best wake the others.”

  Gareth clung to my hand for a moment. “You will stay with me?”

  I knelt and hugged him like I’d hugged my little brothers when they were his size. “Until I give you to your mother like I promised her, I will stay with you,” I told him.

  By the time I had brought the others to see what was happening in the valley, mages were attacking the walls of Halleburn. Some of their fires only scorched the walls, unless they chanced to hit a window. Then the colored blaze disappeared inside. Some blew chunks from the stone.

  Nomalla stood on the cliff, her hands planted on her hips. “I think it’s safe to say they aren’t on Father’s side,” she said coldly, as if she did not care about the outcome. She’d taken off her armor last night. Now she looked to be a weary lady of Sabine’s years, dressed in a sweat-stained quilted pink tunic and gray breeches. “There’s a trail near the tunnel we used. It goes down the cliffside. I could get closer that way, see who’s out there.”

  “I have a better idea.” Farmer had stopped to pick up a saddlebag with the letter D prettily sewn on it in pearls. He’d opened it up while the rest of us stared wearily at the battlefield. Now he waved a mirror the size of both of my hands, framed in gold. “Dolsa has given us her scrying mirror.”

  That made me ask, “What did you do with her?”

  The two older mots also looked at him. “That’s a good question,” Sabine murmured. She looked as if the gods had ground her to meal since she’d learned the truth about Tunstall. Her eyes were red from silent weeping.

  “I left her in that pasture with the others,” Farmer replied, inspecting the mirror back and front.

  “Locked up in ice like you did Elyot?” Nomalla asked warily.

  “No, no. I improvised with those three,” Farmer said. Standing in the sunlight with no tunic on, his chest and back covered with bruises and lash marks, his face cut and swollen in spots, he still looked wonderful to me. “I left them sunk into the pasture up to their chins,” Farmer continued between puffs of air as he covered the mirror with steam from his own mouth. “I drained off their power. Orielle seemed concerned that the cows might step on them. I noticed an anthill nearby, but honestly, what can any man do about ants?” He sat cross-legged on the ground and passed his open palm over the mirror. “At least now they can wait to be taken in charge, before enough magic returns to them that they can do more damage.”

  We all drew near to look on. The mirror went foggy, then cleared to show us a close view of the armies below. Farmer looked first at those on the northwest side of the lake and their banners.

  “Korpita, Lisbethan, and Hannalof,” Nomalla said, identifying their devices. “They have to have come on at fast march, but how did they know?”

  “I reached Cassine while they were taking us to Halleburn,” Farmer said quietly. “I used a hole in the power that was supposed to keep me captive.” He looked up at me and smiled. “I don’t really need a scrying tool to communicate a single word, and that one plainly got through.”

  “What word?” I asked, curious.

  “Halleburn. She was waiting for news of where I was and if I needed help,” Farmer explained. “That I sent only one word, when she forever accuses me of chattering, told her I was in trouble.”

  The image in the mirror shifted to troops on the lake’s southwest side. “Those are King’s Reach colors on the biggest contingent,” Sabine murmured. “Gerry, Fenrigh, Susha. Quicker for some of them, perhaps, because they could use the rivers. Goddess bless us, it’s as if the realm has declared war on Halleburn.”

  Farmer looked up at her. “Halleburn started it. Look at this. It’s the King’s Reach banner.”

  The mirror blurred, then cleared. A handsome young squire in gold and purple rode beside an ominous-looking cove all in armor. The squire carried a banner pole with two flags on it. The lower one was that of the Reach, double towers framing an upright sword, both in gold, on a purple field. The upper banner was the silver sword and crown of Tortall on a bright blue field—the flag of the kings of the realm. These warriors had come at the king’s request.

  The mirror blurred again. “What are you doing?” demanded Nomalla. “I wanted a look at our gates!”

  “I want a look at Queensgrace and Aspen Vale,” Farmer replied quietly. Nomalla went silent.

  An image came into the mirror, a castle in flames, surrounded by the men in the maroon and ivory of the realm’s army. “So much for Aspen Vale,” Sabine murmured.

  “How can you say that?” Nomalla demanded hotly. “They’re of our rank, they—”

  “Traitors,” Sabine told her in a voice like
ice. “Or will you sanction child murder now?”

  Nomalla looked down and away from Sabine and straight into Gareth’s eyes. “I was the one they tried to murder,” he told her. “And the wicked man killed Daeggan.”

  I picked him up and balanced him on my hip, in case Nomalla was actually having second thoughts. I wasn’t sure. “They didn’t even have the sack to kill this lad clean,” I reminded her. “They were killing him day by day, holding off feeding him, then beating him.”

  Tears overflowed Nomalla’s eyes. “I didn’t know,” she said, and knelt before the prince. “I pledge my blood and service to you in repayment, Your Highness. Whatever you command of me, if you demand my life, I will give it to repay any small measure of the hurt my family has done to you.”