The Ranger's Path: The King's Ranger Book 2

by AC Cobble

  The nobleman, twirling his huge greatsword above his head, began laying about with it. Anne and Zaine, still supporting Cinda, followed in Raif’s wake, just far enough behind the big fighter that they avoided his greatsword.

  Raif struck a soldier in the arm, crunching through chainmail to find flesh and shatter the bone. The man wailed, falling away, but another smashed his sword across Raif’s back. Zaine rammed the end of her bow into the eye of Raif’s attacker, and the party was clear of the soldiers, Raif leading them into the night.

  Rew brought up the rear, defending furiously against three men who came after them. One thrust at him, and he stepped aside, gripping the man’s wrist and hauling on it, directing the blow into the unprotected hip of another soldier. The ranger swung his longsword over the head of the man whose wrist he held, killing a third soldier, then brought his knee up, catching the trapped man on the nose. He let go, and the soldier slumped down, clutching his ruined face.

  Seeing no one coming and no one paying attention to them in the insanity of the battle, Rew scooped up Cinda and started to jog away from the fight, taking the party past the road into the open land around the camp. With the shining moon overhead, he had no trouble seeing, though Anne and the others seemed to as they offered a constant litany of curses as they tripped and stumbled.

  Cinda cradled in his arms, Rew began whispering a rolling incantation. He felt weariness settle into him, as if his strength was draining out with each of his steps. His magic, flowing out and around him, spread to encompass the party, drawing the darkness around them and clinging to the ground they walked across, obscuring the tracks that they left.

  The fog of concealment would hold over their trail but not for long. Hopefully long enough that they could gain distance between themselves and the camp. If there were any decent trackers in Duke Eeron’s army, they would have hell sorting through the mess of footprints that must be scattered all around the campsite. If they could somehow sort it out and began following the party across the countryside, well, then Rew and the companions would have a problem.

  But Rew had no reason to believe the attack on the camp was directed at the younglings. Duke Eeron wanted them, certainly, but he might not have known the children were with Worgon. Planning the ambush and the glamours would have taken longer than the time the children had been in Yarrow. Of course, once Duke Eeron did learn they’d been with Worgon, Rew had no doubt the duke would set his hounds on their scent.

  They ran, tripped, and scrambled for two leagues before Cinda finally began to stir in Rew’s arms. She blinked up at him and worked her jaw, as if learning to use it for the first time. She pulled loose a hand and clasped her head with it.

  Rew kept going, afraid to slow, terrified that if he stopped, he wouldn’t get moving again. The strain of fleeing in the night, he could handle. Even carrying the slender girl was a burden he could shoulder for hours, but doing it while maintaining a fog of concealment around them was taking all that he had. It was as if he’d had to peel his mind in two, one repeating his incantation, the other focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and not stumbling in the dark, pitching both himself and the noblewoman onto the ground.

  Finally, Cinda was able to croak, “I guess we escaped?”

  “We’re trying to,” said Anne in a low voice, barely loud enough for Cinda to hear. The empath came to walk beside them and touched Rew’s arm. “How are you holding up?”

  He shrugged, lifting Cinda with the movement, but did not respond. He had to keep repeating his spell, or it would fail, and if Duke Eeron’s men were close enough, the group would be exposed.

  “Can you walk?” Anne asked Cinda.

  “I—maybe in a little bit,” responded the noblewoman, stretching her leg out past Rew’s arm. She looked up at the ranger’s face. “Sorry. My legs feel like cold gravy.”

  “You did well,” said Anne. “That… that wasn’t the death’s grip spell I suggested, but it was good.”

  “I don’t even know what I did,” responded Cinda. “It was like I was shoving my hands into an icy stream, grasping for a bar of wet soap with frozen fingers. It kept slipping from me, but all of a sudden, a torrent of power surged through my body. It felt like it was filling my heart and lungs to bursting, pulsing out into the rest of me. My fingers were burning, and I had to get it away, so I cast it at those men.”

  Anne nodded. “Your family and Baron Worgon, through intent or incompetence, have done you a disservice. They attempted to train you as an invoker, like your mother, but it’s clear you’ve an affinity for necromancy. That power you felt was the cloud of departing souls freed from their bodies during the battle. You were able to tap into their strength, wresting it from the other necromancers, and the results were obvious. You have talent, lass, and if we can teach you the skill to control it, you will be a potent force.”

  “The power of the departing souls?” whispered Cinda. “I—You’re saying I made use of those men’s souls? The dying soldiers?”

  “You’re a natural,” said Anne, “and it’s a good thing, too. I’m not certain we would have walked out of there so easily without you plowing the way for us.”

  “So easily?” hissed Raif from behind them.

  “I didn’t have to heal you this time,” quipped Anne.

  They trudged on, lost in the hours, until Zaine noticed, “There’s a structure up there. A barn, I think. It looks dark, but that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “Rew,” asked Anne, “shall we take a moment to rest? We have to pause sooner or later, and from up there, we’ll have a clear view of the way we came. Dawn is just an hour or two away, and there’s sense in finding a place out of sight where we can rest and watch to see if anyone followed us.”

  The ranger nodded but did not respond. Like a plodding beast of burden, he turned, shuffling toward the hill Zaine pointed to. He glanced up, seeing the silhouette of a building and nothing more, but he trusted the young thief’s vision more than his own. He tried to gesture with his hands, shifting Cinda awkwardly.

  Zaine asked, “You want me to scout?”

  He nodded again.

  Swallowing, Zaine looked at the others and said, “Stop five hundred paces short of the barn, and I’ll find you there.”

  “If you run into trouble, shout,” suggested Anne. “We don’t want to give ourselves away, but if you need us, then we’re already in trouble.”

  Wordlessly, Zaine flitted away, quickly vanishing into the gloom ahead of them.

  15

  Rew woke with a start. The air was cold and his cloak had fallen open as he’d slumbered. Around him, clustered in the corner of the abandoned barn, were Raif, Cinda, Anne, and Zaine. Rew frowned. The four of them were asleep, as he had been, which meant that no one was on watch.

  Silently, he rose and moved to the cracked doorway that they’d slipped through in the hour before dawn. Drained from covering their flight with his magic and carrying Cinda, Rew had collapsed and almost immediately fallen asleep. He’d thought the others were discussing setting a watch, but he realized now, if he’d been that exhausted, they wouldn’t have been in much better condition. They had no magic to maintain as they ran, but Cinda had cast plenty of her own during the battle. Raif had been in the thick of it, and none of their party had the stamina to continue hiking for very long after a sleepless night.

  But no one had found them, it seemed, and as Rew peered with one eye through the gap in the door, he didn’t see any throngs of soldiers covering the countryside. He didn’t see any trackers following their path. He didn’t see anyone at all.

  He waited, listening and extending his senses. Even in the forest where his connection to the world was strongest, he could only gather vague impressions, but here, he felt nothing at all which could be construed as a threat. There was little plant life other than the grass that covered the low, sweeping hills. He detected no animal life larger than a bird or a mouse. Glancing at the others to see they still slept, he gent
ly shoved on the ancient door, cracking it open a little more, and he slipped out into the sunlight.

  It was cold, the weight of autumn fully upon them, but the sky was clear, and the sun hung huge and yellow overhead. Both appeared faded, as if they’d been scrubbed on the washboard too many times. The natural world had been drawn upon. Someone had pulled through their connection to the world to cast the glamour the night before. Rew shivered from the air and from the knowledge of how much strength it would have taken to pull so much from their surroundings. It implied both a sensitivity to the world and a mind-boggling power over it.

  Rew turned from the sky and circled the abandoned barn. The grasses around them, not as lush as those in the barrowlands, were already turning yellow to match the pale glow of the sun. There were no trees nearby, just the grass and long rows of fallow fields that some forgotten farmer had dug into the infertile soil.

  A league to the south was the road that ran between Yarrow and Spinesend. Several leagues to the north and in the west, the Spine stretched across the horizon, passing beyond his vision to the tip of the range, where Spinesend sat at the foot of the mountain like some brooding gargoyle guarding the entry to the Eastern Territory.

  Pulling his cloak tight around himself, thinking he should have bought a warmer one in Yarrow, Rew circled the hill. The road and the Spine passed west and out of sight. Days from their position was Spinesend. Several hours behind them was the site of the battle. Considering what he’d seen as they’d fled, Rew was confident Baron Worgon’s men had been slaughtered. It was possible a few had escaped, but since none of them appeared to be roaming the hills nearby, and there was no sign of the duke’s forces hunting them, Rew guessed the survivors would be very few.

  His magic had held; that was clear. If it hadn’t, there would be pursuit. They hadn’t stumbled far enough the night before to completely evade any patrols Duke Eeron sent after them. Rew’s magic had obscured their flight and saved them, but it wouldn’t keep the hounds away forever. Whether from captives taken after the battle or when Duke Eeron moved against Yarrow, someone was going to spill the story that Raif and Cinda had been in the baron’s company. Would Duke Eeron expect them to be so bold as to continue their journey to Spinesend? Or would he think they’d go into hiding after seeing the duke’s might?

  Rew couldn’t guess what Duke Eeron might think, but he knew what the children would want to do. Sighing, he turned back to the barn. Enough sleep or not, they had to get up, and they had to move. They might have no allies and no plan, but they had a mission.

  When Rew returned to the barn, he bustled about, making enough noise to wake the others. Anne rose wordlessly and began checking on everyone’s health, though Rew was certain she would have done the same before they’d all fallen asleep. Once she’d determined that no new injuries had somehow occurred during their slumber, she prepared a cold meal. There was no need to discuss whether it was appropriate for a fire. No matter how much Rew wanted a cup of coffee or the others wanted something warm in their bellies, it would be reckless to tear apart the barn and raise a plume of smoke signaling their position and leaving signs that they’d camped there.

  The younglings remained quiet, but Rew suspected they had questions bubbling under the surface. When the shock wore off, when they could move past the horror of the battle, they would consider what was next. For now, their thoughts would be riven with images of bodies obliterated by magic and cut open by steel. He thought the night before had been the first time that any of the children had killed a person.

  Rew could only recall some of the details of his first. It had been a long time ago, and while he hated to acknowledge it, killing got easier. He remembered even fewer details about the second, and at some point, he’d lost count. It shouldn’t get easier. Death was the same horrible truth no matter how many times one brought it. A life, full of promise, was ended. The familiar sickening coil of guilt wormed through his stomach, but he’d learned to ignore it, or to live with it when he couldn’t. If the children survived the Investiture, they would as well.

  King’s Sake, he could use an ale.

  Rew squatted down in front of the younglings while Anne prepared the food. He told them, “It is not your fault. You did nothing wrong.”

  “I—I took the power of people’s souls,” whispered Cinda, staring down at her hands. “I used it to… I killed a man. I burned him. I—What happened to him? He—He was… animated.”

  “You saved us,” said her brother, putting a hand on his sister’s shoulder.

  “I’m a necromancer!” exclaimed Cinda, her voice loud in the abandoned barn. “I held that man’s soul. After he was dead, I kept him here!”

  “You released the power,” said Rew. “You did not bind that man to his corporeal body. You borrowed the souls of the others only and then granted them rest. You only killed to protect us.”

  Cinda shook her head, unable to meet anyone’s eyes. “I felt that man lingering here on this plane. He was in pain, tied to his skeletal remains! Bound tightly or not, that is what I did to him. I kept him here. There are tales of horrible men and women who bound the souls of others, who—”

  “You are just like Father,” retorted Raif.

  A tear welled in her eye and then dripped down Cinda’s cheek.

  “What?” asked Raif, staring at her. “What?”

  “Like Father,” she snapped. “I’m not sure that is a good thing. Why did Father keep the stories of our family from us if it’s something to be proud of? I’d rather be some commoner with no magic at all than—I didn’t mean it like that, Raif. I didn’t—”

  Raif stood, his jaw set, his eyes hard. He turned and walked to Anne. The empath handed him a roll of bread stuffed with cold sausage and cheese.

  “You have power that can be used for terrible purposes,” said Rew quietly, leaning toward Cinda, “but it is not what you are capable of that defines you. It is what you do. If you use necromancy to bind souls of your service, to steal power, to slaughter and bathe in the blood of innocents, then yes, you’ll be like those terrible men and women you are thinking of. If you use your strength to help others, to fight atrocity, then you will not. The choice is yours. There are necromancers on both sides of history, Cinda. Both good and evil.”

  Cinda blinked at him.

  Rew stood, stretching his back where it was sore from sleeping slumped over in the corner. “You have a choice. Always remember that.”

  “Duke Eeron was behind the capture of our father,” declared Raif, gesturing with his roll from the other side of the abandoned barn. “He was marching against Falvar, and we can only imagine what he did there. He ambushed Baron Worgon and killed his men with no warning, no quarter. Duke Eeron is an evil man, and those who choose to serve him are evil as well. I do not feel any guilt for doing what we had to do last night, and I feel no guilt for what we’ll have to do to free Father and secure the barony. I regret that violence is necessary, but it’s men like Duke Eeron who make it so. It’s not us, Cinda.”

  Rew glanced at Anne, and she shrugged.

  It was more complicated than that. Duke Eeron had moved against his bannermen, true enough, but both of them had been plotting against the duke as well. They were equally guilty in Rew’s view. All nobles were, but he wasn’t going to tell Raif that. The nobleman just wanted to recover his father. He just wanted to return to what his life had been. It wasn’t going to happen, but it wouldn’t hurt the boy to keep dreaming. For a while, at least.

  “Right,” said Zaine, startling everyone. “How do we get out of this?”

  Grinning, Rew picked up a sausage from Anne, and he pointed north then swung southwest with it. “That’s the direction the Spine thrusts toward Spinesend. Assuming the nobles in our party have had no change of plans, that’s still the place we need to go. Frankly, after what we’ve seen the last several days, I don’t think it’s much more treacherous than anywhere else we could set our path.”

  “We have not changed our min
ds,” stated Raif.

  “The roads will be too dangerous,” said Rew. “There are far too many people looking for you, and we’re not lucky enough to keep slipping away unscathed. That leaves travel across the open land, or we can move into the lower elevations of the Spine and work through the mountains.”

  “The Spine doesn’t seem like it’d be easy travel,” remarked Cinda.

  “It would not be,” agreed Rew.

  “From what I recall of our flight last night,” said Zaine, “there’s nothing but grass and low hills for leagues around us.”

  “The terrain is quite flat, and there’s almost no cover,” acknowledged Rew.

  “Slow travel or dangerous travel,” mused Raif. “Neither choice sounds very good.”

  “It’s all dangerous, is it not?” asked Zaine.

  Rew, chewing on the link of sausage, swallowed his bite and responded, “It’s all dangerous, but the simple fact is that there are too many people after us, and we have no way of knowing what’s ahead. Speed could be an ally but not one we can trust. Stealth is the only way we can be certain we’ll make it to Spinesend. We have to take the mountain route.”

  “I don’t like the additional time it will take, but if you think the mountains are the most certain route, that’s the way we’ll go,” said Raif, not waiting for the input of the others. Pointedly not turning to look at his sister.

  Rew eyed the boy from the corner of his eye. Had the battle changed the youth’s mind, and he was willing to accept Rew’s leadership, or was he merely conceding common sense? Or, perhaps more likely, was he just being obstinate and refusing to discuss a plan to rescue his father?

  Apparently seeing the look, Raif stated, “You’re right. We’ve pressed our luck as far as we can escaping from our enemies while they face each other. I don’t think any of us want to rely on that happening again. Freeing my father is too important to risk on electing an easier walk. No matter the difficulty, the mountains are the best way.”