by AC Cobble
“We should go,” whispered Rew, stooping to collect the two enchanted falchions from the dead ranger commandant. He nudged the body over with his foot, but he saw the rest of Grund’s valuables had been stripped away. Why had the falchions been left, what did it mean? “He is gone, but move quietly. Quickly.”
5
Rew, carrying Zaine’s bow, stalked through the tall grass a thousand paces off the highway. Anne followed on his heels, lifting her skirts to her knees so the cotton didn’t trail through the low vegetation. The rustle of her movement and her muttered curses almost assured Rew wouldn’t find any game, but they’d skipped looking for provisions after the encounter with the undead Vyar Grund, so Rew judged it was worth the attempt to find fresh supplies, even if Anne seemed to be doing her best to sabotage it.
“I’ll be back to the camp in an hour if you can wait to talk,” said Rew.
“I want to talk away from the children.”
Rew sighed.
“The king believes that Kallie Fedgley is the one with the necromantic powers,” said Anne, scampering after him as he sped his pace. “Rew, the king is after the wrong girl!”
“I know,” muttered the ranger.
“What does that mean?”
“It means, more than ever, we need to find Alsayer.”
Anne kept after him, nearly jogging in her skirts, and he conceded he wasn’t going to lose her, so he stopped and turned to face her.
“Baron Fedgley and his wife are dead. Baron Worgon is dead. Duke Eeron is dead. Vyar Grund is dead. Mistress Clae is dead,” stated Rew. “That means the list of people who know what Cinda is capable of is growing remarkably short. The princes must know or suspect, but as we’ve discussed, they won’t tell their father. It’s one of their plots against the man which started all of this, after all. There is Kallie herself, but she’s with Alsayer. That bastard spellcaster is in the thick of it, and he could spill his guts to anyone, but I’m starting to suspect it goes deeper. He’s not just a messenger boy for one of the princes. He has his own motivations for doing what he’s doing. I just wish I knew what they were.”
“So if we find Alsayer and Kallie, then we’re safe,” said Anne, a small grin curling her lips. “Relatively, I mean. It’s still the Investiture, but the king shouldn’t take any more interest in us, should he? He just wants your assistance finding them because you’re a ranger, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps,” said Rew, frowning at Anne’s smile. “I’ll be the first to admit I cannot guess the mind of the king. If we can corner Alsayer and Kallie before the king gets his hands on them, we’ve got a chance… But before you get too confident, remember we don’t have them yet, and there’s also Prince Heindaw and Arcanist Salwart. We heard the arcanist was missing, and I haven’t the faintest about where he might have gone. He could be on his way to Mordenhold, for all we know.”
Anne grimaced.
“It’s worse,” said Rew.
She frowned.
“Kallie Fedgley showed she has no love for her family. If she talks to the wrong person…”
Anne remained silent, and Rew nodded.
“As long as Kallie Fedgley lives, she’s an incredible threat to Cinda,” said Rew. “King’s Sake, she killed her own father! If she realizes how much danger she’s in and how easily she could flip it on her siblings, she will. You saw her eyes, Anne. She’d relish serving Cinda to the king.”
“You’re right,” admitted the empath with a sigh. “She’s a threat, at least until the end of the Investiture.”
Rew shook his head.
“But when one of the princes attains the throne—“
“They’ll be susceptible to the same plot that the king is now. If they’re aware of what Cinda is capable of or if Kallie Fedgley survives to tell them, Cinda is still in danger.”
“We can’t fight the princes!”
“Not all at once,” agreed Rew.
Anne reached out and gripped his shoulder, her eyes wide, her mouth open in a perfect oval. “You don’t mean—“
“You and the children could still run. Heindaw has as much reason to keep this secret as us. As long as Kallie and Salwart don’t talk where word will reach Vaisius Morden’s ears, you should be safe. The princes, the king, they’ll care nothing for you and the others as long as they don’t know Cinda’s secret. Together, you have the cunning and the strength to make nice lives for yourselves. It’s what I thought they should have done from the beginning. It’s what I tried to do myself, long ago.”
Trembling, Anne did not respond.
“It’s too late for me to hide from all of this,” said Rew. “The king sending Vyar as his messenger was proof enough of that. You heard him. The ancient magic of the Investiture is tied to me. Vaisius Morden can find me whenever he wants. Regardless of that, I’ve run long enough, and it’s time I faced my past. It’s time I fought for the future.”
“The children will never turn their backs on this.”
Rew could only shrug.
Anne frowned at him.
“Raif and Zaine don’t understand,” said Rew. “They haven’t guessed what lies ahead. They don’t realize that Carff, Kallie, even Alsayer—none of it is the end of this road. Because they don’t know, because they don’t understand, there is still the chance they could walk away, even if Cinda does not. It’s worth a try, Anne, if you really want to steer them to safety.”
“But you cannot…” worried Anne. She raised an eyebrow. “And Cinda?”
Rew nodded. “She does not know all, but she is starting to realize how far this road will take us. She’s starting to accept that she will have a role to play when we reach the end of it. Besides, while she is with you and the others, there will always be risk. As long as she is who she is, the Mordens will seek her.”
“Then there is no choice,” said Anne, steel in her voice. “I told you we’re bound together. It doesn’t matter if the king is looking for the wrong girl. It doesn’t matter if he never finds her. It doesn’t matter if he realizes his mistake. No matter what, we are bound together, and we will stay together, but we have to know what it means that the king is seeking Kallie! Why does he want her?”
“You’ve said we are together before,” acknowledged Rew, “but, Anne, you should know… I’m not sure we can succeed. I will try, but the odds are we will fail. There is a reason I’ve run from this for so long. If I do fail, then Cinda and I are doomed. The rest of you do not have to face the same fate. As long as you do not know all, why the king wants Kallie, any of it, then you could walk away.” He held up a hand to stall her protest. “We’re together. We’re family. I understand that, but it’s the captain that goes down on a sinking ship, not the entire crew. There’s no need for me to put you at more risk than you already are. I know it’s frustrating, but trust me. It’s for the best.”
Anne shook her head. “Your fate is our fate, Rew. If the ship goes down, we all go down. That discussion is over. What matters now is what can we do? We may fail, true, but allow us to help so we’ve got the best odds we can get. How do we react to the king’s personal involvement, and how can we leverage his instructions to you? There’s got to be something we can do.”
“We find Alsayer,” responded the ranger. “That’s what we can do.”
That night, they discussed the immediate path forward. Cinda, as Rew had known she would, simply nodded. She had no more interest in talking about the details than the ranger did. Raif was shaken by the appearance of the king’s undead minion, but he remained steadfast about finding Kallie. Behind his back, Cinda’s dark eyes met Rew’s, but neither of them spoke to Raif about what would occur when they did find the Fedgley’s eldest sister. They hadn’t discussed it since that night in Bressan’s inn, when Cinda had requested Rew be the one who put the blade home.
Zaine, the one who could abandon the quest most easily, simply shook her head and told them she had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t the best reason to march straight into mortal peril, but
none of them argued about it with her because it was true. The thief knew no one outside of the party except other thieves. Besides, another companion in the party, facing what they had to face, was a comfort.
And none of them pressed Rew for more details about what it was the princes expected Cinda to do and how he knew so much about it. Even Anne, after a long, searching look at Cinda, did not comment. The empath, it seemed, had decided to put her attention to the health and safety of the party and not where they were headed. Rew wondered if Anne and the others had finally reached the point they were not questioning his direction because they simply did not want to know. Some things were too big to know.
“So we’re all in this together,” said Anne. “How, ah, how are we going to get there? Carff is still hundreds of leagues away, isn’t it?”
Rew, rubbing his chin where his beard was growing long and itchy, replied, “If it was just me, I’d keep walking. No offense, but I could cover three times as much ground each day as we can as a group. But we are traveling as a group, and you’re right Anne, it’s still a long way away. Walking is going to take us several more weeks, and now the king knows where we are and where we’re going. Events are happening too quickly for us to dawdle on the highway.”
“We should have bought some of those horses back at Bressan’s,” mentioned Zaine.
Rew ignored her. “A carriage is what we need.”
“So we stop in the next town of sufficient size, and we hire one,” suggested Anne.
Shrugging, Rew admitted, “I don’t think we have coin for that.”
“Oh,” replied Anne, blinking as if the thought had never occurred to her they might run out of funds. “How much do we have…”
“Enough for provisions for a month or so, a few stays at inns along the way, and ale,” said Rew, pulling his coin purse off his belt and bouncing it on his hand. “A carriage ride halfway across the Eastern Province is not cheap.”
“We could steal a carriage,” offered Zaine helpfully, earning a scowl from Anne.
“If we got jobs…” began Raif. He shook his head. “At common laborers’ wages, it would take us the better part of a year to earn sufficient income to afford a carriage. Longer, I suppose, as we’ll need to eat and a place to stay while we worked.”
“The king’s coffers?” asked Anne.
“We’d have to find a town with a large enough bank to recognize the king’s account,” said Rew. “There’s Stanton, I suppose, but few other choices. It’d give us away, walking into a bank, but the king already knows where we are, so I suppose it’s worth a try. It’s unlikely the princes will have resources to closely monitor activity on the king’s account at all of the banks with authority to draw from it. The problem is, we still have to get to Stanton.”
They all frowned at him.
“How much are those blades worth?” wondered Zaine, pointing to the bundle where Rew had secured Vyar Grund’s falchions. “Could we sell them?”
“They’re worth a lot,” said Rew, glancing at the enchanted blades that were wrapped tightly and bound to his pack. He’d taken them and nothing else from the body of his former commandant. He was regretting it. The weapons felt cold, tainted by Vyar Grund’s betrayal, but the enchanted blades were too valuable, and too dangerous, to leave lying in the middle of the highway where anyone could find them. He wondered why the king had left the falchions on Grund. Had he wanted Rew to use them? The ranger wasn’t planning on it. Rew hadn’t been able to do more than draw the falchions for a brief inspection. Then, he’d wrapped them tightly and tied them to his pack where he didn’t have to look at the things. The hurt of Vyar’s betrayal was too soon to consider using the man’s weapons.
“That sounds promising,” responded Cinda cautiously, but seeing Rew’s expression, she asked, “What am I missing?”
He offered her a quick smile. The girl was sharp. “The people who could afford to pay for weapons such as these will be in the cities, not the roadside towns. Even a well-off merchant, if we can find one, might balk at buying enchanted blades. Weapons like these are valuable, but carrying them and selling them entails risk. The people who could make use of the swords might simply take them rather than paying for them, for example. But even if we found someone we were willing to deal with, there’s no one at these little villages who could pay a fraction of what the falchions are worth. Not that I’m set on holding out for the best deal, but I doubt there’s anyone who could pay enough for a carriage ride to Carff. Not for a pair of swords.”
“Well, this is frustrating,” complained Raif.
Rew nodded.
“But you have an idea?” asked Cinda, peering at Rew.
“The king told us there were many dangers ahead,” said Rew, “both Dark Kind and armed men. Remember his final words to me, his test? He warned us of these threats for a reason, and I assure you it wasn’t for our safety. He left Grund’s blades on the commandant but took items like the silver box Alsayer captured the wraiths in. There is reason in all that the king does, and I wonder if he meant us to encounter these men. Bandits, I suspect. He could have intended me to use the weapons on them. I may be wrong, but why else would the king place those clues in our hands? If they are bandits, then they may have sufficient coin to get us into a carriage.”
“That’s pretty thin, Rew,” muttered Zaine.
Rew shrugged. “The way he said it, I don’t believe the men would be affiliated with any of the princes or their bannermen, which means they must be bandits, right? And if the king didn’t want us to find them, why would he mention them?”
“King’s Sake, Rew,” scoffed Anne. “Zaine is right, that is thin. Maybe the king warned us of the bandits so we could accomplish the task he set for you? But even if you are correct, you want us to… steal from criminals?”
Rew shrugged. “Who better to steal from?”
“No,” said Anne. “The answer is no.”
“Anne,” he said, waving his hands at the empty landscape around them, “the alternative is to walk hundreds of leagues farther, or at least as far as Stanton, which isn’t much closer. Or, perhaps you’d prefer as Zaine suggests, we steal a carriage? We could wait in hiding along the road and waylay whatever innocent traveler comes rolling by next.”
The empath shook her head.
“We could sell the bandits the falchions, then,” said Rew, knowing that she definitely wouldn’t agree to that but hoping she’d meet him in the middle. “Bandits ought to have coin, and they can always use a sharp blade.”
“Sell weapons to murderers!” snapped Anne. “You cannot be serious. I’d rather walk than make a bargain with bandits.”
“Anne is right. We should not deal with bandits,” declared Cinda, but then at the empath’s surprised grin, she added, “but Rew is right, too. The king mentioned a test, and he mentioned these bandits. He wants us to locate them, though I can only guess what he wants us to do when we find them. The point is, if that is what the king wants, it is what we need to do. Right now, the king is fooled, thinking our sister is the one who threatens him. To keep him fooled, we should avoid his scrutiny, and to avoid that, we need to do what he asks.”
Anne grunted, but she did not argue.
Cinda turned to Rew, and he nodded. “Well thought. Well said.”
“So we find these bandits, and then we rob them,” said Zaine, rubbing her hands together mischievously. “Thieving from the thieves. I like it.”
They knew the bandits were ahead of them, but in the wide world, that was little help. They narrowed down the area, though, when they stumbled across the site of an attack which was obviously the work of men and not of the Dark Kind. Rew spotted signs on the road where a fight had occurred, and when they followed them, they found half a dozen armed men who must have been guards and a man and a woman who Rew took to be merchants. They’d suffered before they had died, the woman in particular. Grimly, Rew kept looking around, assessing the evidence. The bodies were lying two hundred paces off the side of th
e highway, tossed down behind a hill to hide them from view.
“So they are bandits,” murmured Cinda.
Rew nodded. The bandits had made some effort to hide their work, but for the King’s Ranger, there was little difficulty spotting where an attack had occurred on the highway, where the bodies had been dragged, and the trail the bandits had left when they’d fled with the wagons they’d stolen from the merchants.
Rew had circled the scene and determined that the incident had taken place two days earlier. Had Vaisius Morden known of this, and had he alerted them about it as part of the test? The ranger judged the encounter with Vyar Grund and the murder of these people had happened at almost the exact same time. Scratching his beard, Rew had spent long moments studying the site, hoping for some clue as to why the king would want them to pay particular attention to this attack. He found nothing that spoke of anything other than opportunistic men with no moral code, who’d taken advantage of a lightly guarded merchant caravan.
They followed the trail the bandits had left after the attack across rolling hills, through thin copses of trees to where the wagons had been emptied of valuables and discarded. They kept following the signs from there, through more stands of trees, over hard packed earth, and half a league down a brisk stream. The bandits were skilled in woodcraft, but not as skilled as Rew.
He figured there were two dozen of them, all men from the depth of the impressions their boots left. While they had some skill at staying hidden—walking through the stream was a nifty trick—there were too many of them, and they were too burdened, to leave no trace. Rew followed them easily. He knew simply keeping on the trail of these men was not the test which the king had spoken of, and he worried about what lay ahead.