The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  “You’re not wrong,” said Amris. “I… Gerant and I…”

  The trees were a green wall behind the rock where Darya sat. Beyond them was a road that Amris had known well, once. “Had this happened before, I could have told him or not, as the whim took me, and he’d have thought nothing of it. Not that you’re not—” He felt her assent, her total lack of affront. That made it easier to go on. “We knew what we were to each other.”

  “He didn’t talk about you much,” said Darya. “Not a subject for light conversation. But when he did…I didn’t get the impression any other person could’ve changed what you had.”

  It was good to hear, but painful: the flame of Letar, who governed love and death alike. “Time may have,” Amris said. “It’s a question we’ve not been in any place to answer yet, or even to ask.”

  Chapter 22

  They made their way back to the road. The hills got steeper and more forbidding as they approached Oakford, and she was almost glad they’d run into the scouts when they had. Now they could take the road, and save a scramble up and down among roots and rocks.

  Now they could also ride, in theory.

  The horses weren’t near either of the battle sites, as Darya had expected. “They’re a little big for us to have missed,” she said, “even in a fight. My guess is they hitched them a way up, then swung back through the trees. They thought they’d be coming back.”

  It still made her smile to say that, even to think it. Spiteful creature, Gerant would have teased her, though with no real reproof behind it.

  The thought of him made Darya grimace. She didn’t think Gerant would be angry if she told him about the kiss. Things happened in the moment after a battle. He’d retreated from her mind for her liaisons often enough in those circumstances and had made a few comments about the body in the wake of danger that suggested he’d understand.

  Understanding was one thing. Pain was another. She knew what Amris meant. A night or two far away, when your lover would be in your bed again before long, might be easy to ignore or even amusing to hear about afterward. If you had no bed and no body for him to return to, that was a different matter—to say nothing of having to work with the third party.

  Looking back, Darya thought she could have probably managed the bandage on her own, just more clumsily, or just ignored the cuts until she reached Oakford. If they’d gotten inflamed, the Mourner would’ve dealt with it, or one of the herbalists would’ve slapped on a salve that burned but did the job, and the cuts probably wouldn’t have bled enough to really hurt her. Looking back, she could have kicked herself.

  This was what a life of impulse did.

  Cursing at herself, she walked on, and watched for sight of the horses.

  * * *

  “There,” said Darya, pointing to a glimmer that Amris could barely see. “Thank the gods.”

  A few steps forward, the glimmer became shapes: the scouts’ two mounts, greenish-gray horse shapes with a sheen to their coats like that on a vultures’ wings. One of them swung its head around to regard the intruders with a yellowish eye and flared nostrils half the size of a true horse’s. In truth, its whole head was smaller than a horse’s would have been, out of proportion to the blocky lines of its body.

  “They’ll grace no nobleman’s carriage,” said Amris, “but they’ll serve, if they will serve.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Let me,” said Amris, stepping forward a pace. “Plate might be some protection against their temper.”

  So it was—against the first strike, at any rate. He approached from the side, carefully judging how the horses were tied up and how far they could get around to kick. The one Amris had his eye on shifted, snorted, and laid its ears back, but acted otherwise no worse than a number of mounts he’d had in the army. It was only when he reached for the rope tied to its bridle that it whipped its head sideways and snapped at him, showing more and sharper teeth than a grass-eater would ever need.

  Those teeth grazed the metal of his gauntlet, making a screeching sound that set Amris’s teeth on edge and drew a low obscenity from Darya, but did no harm to the flesh beneath. “Very well,” he said, and left the rope alone for the moment.

  Darya was following him on the other side, watching what he did and how the horses reacted. “There was another Sentinel blessed by Poram,” she said, her voice lower and more soothing than the words would have required. “Could talk to animals. I never was jealous of him before now.”

  “Talking might not aid us a great deal with these, no more than it does with some people.”

  Quickly, Amris placed a hand on the horse’s withers and swung himself up onto its back. The saddle was made for a creature with shorter legs and of little help; he held on with his thighs as the horse snorted and bucked. Indeed, he thought, any speech from the beast would most resemble the string of profanities he’d heard from men he’d had to pull out of tavern fights, a declaration of hatred for the entire world and most especially the part meddling with them.

  He felt a hair more pity for the horse, who had neither enlisted nor ordered a dozen pints of bad ale, but that changed nothing of the situation.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Darya mount the other horse, which liked the process no more than his had. He had a moment of concern, thinking of her lighter weight, but she stayed on, showing no more signs of distress than a few hissed breaths and some more muttered oaths.

  As a boy, Amris had seen men break horses by the simple expedient of mounting and then staying on until the beast grew tired enough to accept the weight. Those who knew better—his first commander, among them—said it didn’t result in good mounts, but they had no time just then, and Amris wasn’t certain anything could gain these creatures’ trust. He hung on and waited.

  Bad-tempered or not, these were broken to saddle, and it didn’t take more than a few minutes for them to accept their fate. As Amris’s mount settled itself, snorting and blowing, he looked over at Darya. “Be ready,” he said, drawing the knife from the belt.

  “On it,” she said, and cut the rope tying her horse to the tree.

  * * *

  Once they had the freedom to move, the horses didn’t act like they cared who or what was on their backs. It took some tugging on the reins to get them to go the right direction, but the land was an ally there: so close to Oakford, the hills were steep on either side and thick with trees, terrain no sensible horse—or sort-of-horse thing—would risk.

  That didn’t make the ride pleasant. The saddle wasn’t made for human proportions: the stirrups cramped Darya’s legs, and bits of leather poked her in the tailbone. Farther down, the “horse” felt as if it’d grown extra bumps on its ribs, maybe as a defense against being stabbed or just to aggravate any human trying to ride it. The animal smelled like wine going to vinegar, too, and its natural gait was swaying and unsteady.

  On the other hand, it covered ground faster than she and Amris would’ve managed walking. That was the important thing.

  “And you’re both mares, thank the gods,” Darya said to her horse’s ears.

  “No interest in fresh blood for the local stock?” Amris joked from behind her.

  “Isen would nail my head up over the stables if I introduced this”—she waved a hand to indicate smell, sharp teeth, and all—“to his mares. And I think the farmers would come after me in a mob if their draft horses caught pregnant with this line.” She thought of the hooves and the teeth, as well as the odd bone structure. “For a start, I don’t know that a normal mare would survive.”

  Amris made a sound of revulsion. Glancing back, Darya saw his upper lip curled, and he shook his dark head with considerably more disgust than she’d expected—not that the subject was pleasant.

  “Much of the farm boy remains in the man,” he said after a moment. “I’d never have called us sentimental about our stock, and I’
ve long since been used to their deaths in battle, but this…” Amris shrugged, his armor clanking. “It calls forth the shade of my father in me, perhaps.”

  Because the mention of his father didn’t seem to sadden him further, Darya felt free to smile. “You’ll like Isen, then. Practical man, but damned if he doesn’t think our horses are worth more than our own skins. Especially the breeding stock. If Ironhide hadn’t been a gelding, I don’t know that I’d have the nerve to tell him about the loss.”

  She still wasn’t eager for that conversation—or many others. Oakford itself—in the form of beds, baths, and food, not to mention being in company less attractive and less forbidden than Amris’s—sounded as good as it had all along. She’d thought about the good points, Darya realized. Conveniently, she’d forgotten, not the news she was bringing, but the ways she’d have to deliver it.

  The road ahead looked less promising in that moment.

  Chapter 23

  In Amris’s youth, Oakford had been a cheerful bustling crossroads of a town, thick with traders and travelers and the places that met their needs: taverns, inns, brothels, smithies, and a market square full of noisy peddlers. Luxury had been the province of Heliodar in the south and Klaishil in the north, as had culture and scholarship, but for cheap goods from a distance, a night or two of merriment, or a horse of dubious origin, Oakford had been more than sufficient.

  Often, he’d been able to hear the town before he’d seen the first house.

  He still could, but mirth and even trading had little to do with it. Save for the white towers that had once belonged to the lord’s residence, all of the houses were hidden behind a palisade of stout logs, their ends sharpened to points, planted in a mound of earth as high as a man’s chest. At each end of the wall facing Amris, where it formed a corner with another, a tower held torches and two men with bows. Four others, armed with spear and shield, stood guard beside a gate. The road leading to it was too narrow for more than one horse to travel abreast.

  At the sight, Amris’s mind, or perhaps his heart, split in two. Half of him mourned the changes and the picture they painted: a town on guard, anticipating no revelry or trade from the north, only threats. The other half reckoned how long the gate would take to close, how well the palisade would hold off a siege tower and how well the wood would burn; it noted how the guards talked idly to one another and how unscarred their faces were; it thought of what would come out of the forest in a few days, and knew that Oakford wasn’t wary enough.

  * * *

  “Evening, Aldrich,” Darya said to the chief of the men on duty, and raised a hand in further greeting: See, you know me, and I’m not here to knife you in your sleep. Given the horses, going out of her way to be harmless was probably a good idea.

  Sure enough, the guards were staring at her and Amris’s mounts in surprise and revulsion. It took a second for Aldrich to snap his gaze up and focus on her face. “Sentinel,” he said, giving her a quick on-guard bow—a gesture that combined courtesy with the need to keep hold of his weapon. “What are those? And who’s he?”

  “Amris, this is Corporal Aldrich. Aldrich, Amris,” said Darya, hoping she didn’t sound unfriendly but talking rapidly enough to forestall questions. There’d be enough of those in time. Giving out the answers was neither her duty nor her place. “And these… Might as well say they’re horses. We found them out in the forest.”

  Aldrich peered at the slick coats. His nostrils flared at the scent of bad wine. One of his men looked at the teeth and forked the sign of the gods’ protection in front of him. Aldrich, less observant in any number of ways, laughed. “Horses. More like horse-isn’t.”

  Two of the men laughed along with him. The others groaned. Aldrich shrugged it off—the man was even-tempered, you could say that for him—and added, “Well, they’re in your care and not mine. Go on in. You both look like hell.”

  “Much obliged,” said Darya dryly, though she couldn’t be offended by the comment. Glancing behind her at Amris, she saw the same acknowledgment on his face. Cold water made a poor bath, and it had been days since either of them had spent the night in a bed.

  They passed through the gate. The main road grew wider there, and Amris rode up beside her without any problem.

  “Well,” said Darya, gesturing around. “Here we are. Welcome to civilization—or the closest you’ll get for a hundred miles.”

  * * *

  The broad street running from the gate to the manor was much as it had been in Amris’s day, but the buildings along it were far fewer. Oakford didn’t have any ruins that he could see, but trees grew on the site of the tavern where he’d gotten his nose broken at sixteen, and sheep grazed where he’d shod his horse before riding off to meet Thyran’s forces at Klaishil.

  What shops and dwellings there were had become patchwork creations. Amris saw log cabins with thatched roofs and first floors made of stone, and houses where timber beams had propped up failing stone walls. Scavenging had clearly been the order of the day in the past, when the usual routes for goods had failed, and the living had taken what they needed from those who could use it no longer.

  Amris thought of the fallen tree he and Darya had hidden behind, and the plants that had grown over it.

  Life went on, however it might manage to do so.

  Two taverns yet hung out their shingles along the main road, and an upper story on one, as well as a rough picture of a bed below the sign of a wolf baying at the moon, suggested rooms to let. A short ways down, a smithy sent up clouds of smoke and the smell of hot metal; a fat brown gelding outside snorted and neighed restlessly as Amris and Darya passed on their uncanny beasts.

  The market square was empty, though the ground bore the marks of feet and wagons. “Do people yet come here to trade?” Amris asked.

  “Not constantly. There are”—Darya gestured vaguely—“market days and things. Probably. I got rations and equipment up at the garrison.”

  The manor had become a fortress, then, though one that showed it little on the outside. The delicate wrought-iron railings he remembered were gone, though, buried behind another wall of logs. Only the gates, with their abstract swirling designs, remained.

  “What became of the lord?”

  “Gods, I don’t know,” she said. He felt her astonishment that he’d even think to ask turn to gentleness when she remembered his reasons. “Was he a friend?”

  “No, nothing of the sort. I doubt we ever spoke. When first I came through, our ranks were far too different.” Amris remembered lights in manor windows, carriages with noble crests, tall, handsome figures on fine horses. “I was only curious.”

  “Commander Hallis might be able to tell you, or some of the men. Most of the garrison, the regular army, comes from around here. And there are probably records. Sorry. There are only a few ways I ever bother learning the history of a place. He didn’t leave any treasures, curse the place, or become a revenant, so…”

  “No,” he said. “No reason to do so, I suppose.”

  The last light of the sun shone on Darya, drawing rainbows across her skin and bringing out the sheen in her dark hair. She sat the not-horse she rode with as much grace as anyone could have managed, and neither the bloodstained and torn armor she wore nor the clear signs of long travel could greatly blight her appearance.

  In that moment, Amris realized she was not just comely but beautiful…and felt her more a stranger to him than at any time since he’d woken to stare into her eyes and find that his life had vanished.

  Chapter 24

  Entering the grounds of the garrison itself was easier than the village had been, since Amris had never been there in his own time. When he’d come through at the end, leading men, he’d had no time to stop for more than a few hours; when first he’d been in the then-town, he’d been a gawky youth in ill-fitting armor with barely a coin to his name, and most decidedly not the sort of man to dine
with nobility.

  Outwardly, the years hadn’t wrought many changes in the manor itself. The white and tan stone of which it was made had lasted centuries before Thyran and had held its own well against storms and scavengers alike. A flat, featureless parade of ground stretched in front of the gates where gardens had once blossomed, and smaller outbuildings had mushroomed farther back; that was all.

  There had always been footmen in front of the manor. Now there were guards, but it wasn’t so dramatic a change. They were only outfitted differently: pikes and short swords, and businesslike leather armor rather than the livery Oakford’s servants had worn, all silver buttons and lace against purple cloth.

  The pair of guards at the manor doors were young—just old enough to enlist, to Amris’s practiced vision. They gawked at the horses and Amris even more obviously, and for longer than those at the village gates had done.

  “Tell Hallis we’ll meet him in his office in a quarter hour,” Darya said to them. “Literally life or death, sad to say.”

  The guards went pale—paler, in the case of the towheaded lad on the left. He swallowed and stepped forward, extending a hand. “And the…horses, ma’am?”

  Darya shook her head. “That’s why the delay. We’ll take them ’round to the stables. Best nobody else try and touch them without armor.”

  The boy retreated, trying and failing to conceal an expression of profound relief. He and his fellow didn’t give Amris much scrutiny after that. Compared to odd beasts and unexplained news, one stranger in armor wasn’t much excitement.

  A small flagstone path took them around the side of the house. In the back, the stables stretched out in a long, low row of solidly constructed wood, with several paddocks occupying the space between the building and the dark line of trees where the forest resumed. A few horses sported in the larger one; the others were empty.