The cough passed, but the tickle at the back of Kronmir’s throat was like the harbinger of a winter cold.
Giselle spat. “That was disgusting enough to be truly powerful,” she said. She loosened her sword in its scabbard.
Brown raised an eyebrow. He made a sign, Kronmir nodded, and the smaller man turned and rode away south along the stream bank. Tomaso Lupi checked his weapons and stood in his stirrups.
“You think we are close to the Darkness?” he asked. “Blessed Saviour, that tasted like crap.”
Kronmir looked around. “I think we are in the Darkness,” he said.
Ser Tomaso crossed himself. “It is not dark,” he said.
“It is a name,” Kronmir said.
“A metaphor,” Giselle said.
Tomaso spat.
* * *
They rode forward for two hours, moving no faster than a walk, raising no dust. Giselle proved a skilled scout; she never broke a ridgeline, and she seemed instinctively to know when to lean low on the neck of her horse. Kronmir watched her carefully.
She had been trained to do these things. Carefully trained.
Toward evening, they were all of them exhausted from a full day of moving from cover to cover. They rode well out of their intended path to climb a long ridge, one of the outliers of the great mountains to the north, a barrier that Etruscans were used to thinking impregnable against their foes. But as they made camp, Lupi regaled them with tales from the time of Saint Aeteas, when the Wild boiled over the mountains and the sorcerer Il Khan penetrated Etrusca as far as Rhum. Giselle watched the woods below them, and Kronmir watched her.
Lupi was easy to read. He moved well, even in armour; he was well-read and probably an excellent dancer. A knight. Kronmir found him unexceptional beyond his obvious intellect and devotion to reading, rare in warriors anywhere.
But the duchess was another matter entirely. It was not that Kronmir disliked or mistrusted her particularly. It was merely that she was an anomaly many times over; a young wife of an old and powerful man, who nonetheless claimed to love her husband; one of the richest women in the world, who nonetheless seemed to possess similar skills to Kronmir himself; a woman of vast political power, risking herself on what had to be a mixture of whim and desperation.
She knew how to build and start a small fire and how to place it among the roots of a great oak tree so that the smoke rose invisibly into the branches. The smell would carry, but neither flame nor smoke would show in the deep valley at their feet.
Nightfall was perhaps more eerie in the Darkness than daytime. Insect noises rose, and Kronmir noted with something akin to relief the rustling of squirrels in the trees.
Lupi sat with his back to the oak. Away to the east, there were lights. West, there was only darkness. “Squirrels,” he said.
“And cats,” Giselle put in. “And crickets and grasshoppers.”
When the sky was a delicate charcoal pink and the first stars were out, there was a rushing noise overhead, and a long cry—a piercing cry like a soul being wrenched down to hell.
Lupi flinched and leapt to his feet. Giselle produced a long knife that Kronmir hadn’t seen.
But he knew the sound, and his heart reached to meet it as he imagined other people reached for loved ones.
He rolled to his feet, snatching his armoured gauntlets from the ground and running for the center of their small clearing.
The enormous black-and-white bird emerged from the west, its wings beating hard as it reached, reached for his wrist, straining with its talons, and settled.
Kronmir had handled imperial messengers for years, and never before had one leaned and rubbed its feathered, bicoloured head against his cheek.
Kronmir’s lack of empathy was a byword with his colleagues and victims but did not extend to animals. He held its weight by bracing his arm on his saddle, kneeling, and talked to the heavy bird.
“You are very beautiful,” he said, “and I am very happy to see you. And oh, my love, you crossed the Darkness, did you not? You crossed. So brave. So talented.” He turned to the two people at the fire. “Sausage, please,” he asked.
Giselle knelt next to him. “I have seen them only in books,” she said.
“This one is a she. She has no name, only a number.” Kronmir slipped the golden tag on her right leg so he could read it. “Number Thirty-Four,” he said.
Giselle patted the bird, smoothing her feathers and offering bits of sausage, which the clever beak took delicately and made to vanish with little tosses of the great, owl-like head.
Kronmir sat again when the bird was fed and opened the sheet that Thirty-Four had brought him. He read it several times.
“News?” Giselle asked.
“Yes,” Kronmir said. “The plague is ravaging Alba and Occitan.” There was a dense paragraph on the working of gates. No need to share that. “My...employer expects to be crowned emperor in Liviapolis. Very soon. Perhaps this week.” He met Giselle’s eyes. “I believe he will come here,” he said. “He needs to know if the citadel of Arles has fallen.”
Giselle made a noise of annoyance. “Of course it has,” she said. “The battles were lost almost two months ago. Two of them, or even three.” She looked east. “Or four,” she said.
“I would appreciate understanding your four battles,” Kronmir said carefully.
She shrugged. “We know there was a great battle between the Count of Arles and the Wild. By the wild, I do not mean the Darkness. I mean irks, and perhaps these new bogglins.”
“Yes?” Kronmir said helpfully.
“Then many Etruscans went north to fight, as many as we could spare from our own defences. I’m going to posit that they fought the Darkness, and lost. And I have to guess, and it is no more than that, that the initial army of the Wild that I faced east of here and that the Count of Arles faced in the north also fought the Darkness, and was defeated by it.”
Kronmir pursed his lips. “Why...you think there are more than two sides?”
“Since when does war only have two sides, Master Spy?” Giselle shook her head.
Kronmir shrugged. “You said four,” he pointed out.
“Well, at some point the King of Galle went to raise the siege of Arles and died trying,” she said. “But I do not know in what order these things happened, and I do not know for sure that the Darkness and the Wild are adversaries. But when we fought in the woods of Istria, I can tell you that the Wild creatures were not on a raid. I saw one of their camps. They were...fleeing. Or moving. Or invading.”
“Fascinating,” Kronmir said. “Why do you think Arles has fallen?”
“It’s been under siege for at least two months,” Giselle said.
“It is reputed one of the greatest citadels in the world,” Kronmir said. “How far is it?” Kronmir asked.
“Sheer suicide,” she said. “Too damned far.”
“We haven’t been attacked yet,” Kronmir said. He’d just been given a two-paragraph outline of the powers of the Odine. The cat, the mouse, and the squirrels made sense to him. In fact, they, and the insects, were evidence of a sort. But the bone powder was clearly unknown at the other end, and that suggested that other things might not be known.
Kronmir opened an oiled leather wallet and extracted writing materials. He had a report, written in code; it covered every aspect of his trip, of Venike and what he’d found there, and even his thoughts about Giselle. He took a fine gold nib, fit it to a steel stylus, and began to write. He disliked writing in front of her; he disliked it more when she helped him by bringing light. He disliked having anyone who even knew he wrote in code.
But he disliked the Darkness more. He wrote swiftly, pen dipping...the day, the insects, the cat. And the performance of Thirty-Four, flying over the Darkness from west to east, as she must have come.
“She cannot fly again for at least twelve hours, and given...the situation...” Kronmir stared out to the lightless west. “Giselle, who are you?”
She smil
ed, her even, perfect teeth showing neatly. “The wife of the Duke of Venike,” she said evenly. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Kronmir looked at her. “I think I can take both of you,” he said.
Giselle rolled on her haunches. Lupi, who had been cooking, froze.
Kronmir remained still, and his hands didn’t twitch. “I am a careful man, and my understanding of this situation is flawed.” He looked at her. “But if you do not explain to me how you and your golden hair and flawless skin display so many of the talents of an assassin, I will have to assume the worst.”
“Looks are a curse,” she said. Her right hand showed the glint of polished metal in the firelight. “I am not an assassin. But I have been a ranger.”
“Ranger?” Kronmir asked.
“From Venike, into the mountains. All about us, there are trees. Ancient trees. We keep the borders.” She nodded. “We protect the trees.” She shuffled. “We fight the things that people think do not exist.”
Kronmir thought about that. “Really?” he asked.
She smiled. “Think, Master Kronmir. What is the one thing on which a fleet of warships depends?”
Kronmir understood. “Trees. Old, straight, tall trees.”
“It is none of your business how I came to be married to the duke. Only perhaps it is your business that I saved him. And we met.” She shrugged. “This campsite is one of ours, though we seldom venture into these settled lands. But in the mountains north of Fruli, there are irks and other creatures that the church denies. And here...our ill-feeling for Mitla is not new.”
Kronmir nodded, and his hands relaxed. “I find it...unlikely...that a woman of your status would come on such a mission.”
She smiled thinly. “You know what is sad, assassin? The world is in danger; may be about to end, for me and mine. My family lives in the plains north of the city. I could lose them very easily. And yet...” She shrugged.
“And yet, you are happy to be here.” Kronmir nodded.
By the campfire, Tomaso Lupi snorted.
“I am,” she admitted. “Out under the trees, on the edge of battle?” She looked at Kronmir. “May we all live?”
Kronmir nodded.
“May I make bold and ask you some questions?” she asked.
Kronmir shrugged.
“Where is the small man whose face is so very easy to forget?” she asked.
“Somewhere close,” Kronmir said. “He is covering us.”
“Doesn’t he eat?” she asked.
Kronmir smiled and looked away.
“Let’s eat,” the knight said. Like any competent huntsman, he could cook in the field, and he’d made them a fine camp dish, cutlets of beef rolled with slices of beef fat and slices of bone marrow, skewered and done on the fire. He’d made eight, and each of them took two. He also produced a bottle of good red wine and a loaf of bread, a little stale, which they toasted on sticks and ate with beef fat.
Kronmir nodded and wiped grease from his beard. “You can come with me any time, Ser Tomaso.”
Lupi laughed. “I lived by myself a whole year,” he said. “I learned a great deal.”
With their cups in their hands, they went to the edge of the bluff beyond the fire. It was fully dark at last, and to the west, the shapes of hills were just visible in the moonlight, but there were no torches, no candles, not a fire burned.
“Am I in command?” Kronmir asked.
The duchess was unreadable in the Darkness. “We are allies,” she said. “Not subordinates.”
Kronmir considered how little he enjoyed working with amateurs, and contrasted this with the excellence of their camp. “I would like to withdraw from the Darkness the way we came,” he said. “I want to move south and release my bird where she will not cross the Darkness going home. Then I want to ride west, and see if my guess that the Darkness is roughly circular is correct.”
Giselle sighed. So did Tomaso.
“I won’t pretend. I’d be delighted to leave this blight and never return,” Lupi said.
Giselle nodded. “I feel it like sickness. Those who are chosen to be rangers...we are attuned. To the Wild. We do not hate it.”
Kronmir nodded. “Of course. To hate the Wild is to fail in understanding.”
She grunted, a very un-duchess-like sound. “I need to see what is happening to these people.”
“I’m sure we will see,” Kronmir said.
* * *
Kronmir lay awake, aware that the duchess was also awake. Lupi was on guard. It might have amused him, that all three of them were awake in mutual distrust, but instead it seemed wasteful.
And yet he had a hard time trusting her.
He lay, thinking about her hard hands and soft face, and he felt his irritability and his fear rising. He listened to his heart beat too fast.
What is happening here? he wondered, and for a long moment, he lay wondering if he’d been poisoned.
Thirty-Four was sitting on her makeshift perch, a dead branch laid across two small logs. She continually raised her wings and baited. But she did so in silence, having been trained to be silent. Her rustling disturbed him, and only gradually did he realize that the great bird was as disturbed as he was himself.
He rose, throwing off his blanket and his cloak, and moved to the bird’s perch.
“What is it?” Giselle asked.
Kronmir put a hand on the bird and calmed it. As the bird’s wings quieted, Kronmir could hear clearly, and he heard wings again.
A vast, slow beating of wings at the very edge of his hearing.
Kronmir listened until he was sure he was not creating the noise out of fear and panic and his own fertile imagination, and then he knelt. “Giselle,” he said. “Something is above us. Hunting us.”
She came out of her own cloak in a motion largely hidden by the darkness. There was no firelight and no smoke.
“Tomaso!” she called.
The Beronese knight came out of the trees.
“Something above us,” Kronmir whispered.
He kept stroking Thirty-Four. Now he was looking up, his attention focused by the bird’s agitation.
“See to the horses,” Giselle said. “No, I’ll go myself,” she muttered, and slipped away.
Kronmir stayed, kneeling by the perch. Tomaso slowly cocked his heavy crossbow, a windlass that could put a bolt through an armoured knight and his horse, too. “What is it?” he asked very quietly.
Kronmir shook his head. He heard the long whoosh again, very far away, more the suggestion of sound than a sound.
And then he saw it. Or rather, he saw its absence; the stars went out to the north.
Unbidden, Kronmir’s heart began to race as a tenth of the sky was blotted out altogether. He gathered Thirty-Four to his chest and made himself as small as he could.
“Saint Maurizio and all the saints of war!” he whispered. “What is that?”
Then they could hear nothing but their breathing. It was so quiet that they could hear Thirty-Four breathe, and then Giselle was back.
“Brown had the horses. What is it? I feel afraid. I don’t even know why!”
“It’s big, and it flies,” Kronmir said. “I feel...better.” He looked at the sky, and it was clean. “I think it’s gone.”
“I think you are premature,” Giselle said. “But I hope you are right.”
An hour later they agreed it must be gone, but no one slept.
* * *
They retreated from the Darkness with less care than they had entered, and still endured two hours of riding across an empty landscape devoid of life, almost noiseless besides the sounds of insects and the wind on the ripening wheat.
They left the Darkness at the same bridge where they’d entered, and Brown was waiting there, and followed them across. Lupi became cheerful, almost ebullient. Giselle kept looking back.
Thirty-Four rode on Kronmir’s saddlebow, her head turning back and forth. She ate every time she was offered food, and when they left the Darkn
ess, she spread her wings and gave a great cry, as if in triumph.
Giselle wanted to return to the small town from which they had started into the Darkness, and they did. To everyone’s relief, the inn was unlocked, although the town was virtually deserted. They took food for travelling and left coins on the counter.
Lupi spoke to two old people who sat alone on the steps of the church. “One of my comrades came yesterday and led the people away,” he said. “Il Conte has sent knights into the land of Mitla to move the people east if they will go. He has declared a state of siege, although there is no obvious enemy. People are obeying. The priest is a fool, but”—Lupi flourished a heavy bottle—“we’ll be the better for it. I told him to go. I told him the Wild was on his doorstep.” He looked at Giselle, who frowned.
“Well, my lady, I had to tell him something,” he remarked pettishly.
Giselle shrugged. “Rumour will be as much our enemy as the Darkness,” she said. “Let’s ride.”
They rode south for two hours, and Thirty-Four rose from Kronmir’s fist to take a bird in the air, which she ate greedily, and then later climbed away to take a small goat, which Kronmir suggested was going to start its own rumour somewhere. She ate the goat more fastidiously, and appeared restored.
In midafternoon, they entered a small village that was empty, but tracks and dung in the streets and on the road south of the village showed that the populace had moved away in a natural way, and they found two old people sitting in the town square, drunk. Most of the livestock had left with the people, but there were pigs out under the trees and someone had left a forlorn dog. Giselle fed the dog, and it followed them.
They rode south, with Kronmir using a staff to take sightings on the mountain peaks of the north. “We are now four miles farther west than last night’s camp,” he said, in late afternoon.
Giselle nodded. “You do not need to use an instrument to know that,” she said.
“I do,” Kronmir said. “I need to be sure.”
“I am sure,” Giselle said.
Lupi tried, and failed, to hide a smile. He dismounted, and the dog was there again. He went into the woods, came back, and started scratching the dog’s jaw.
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