by Evie Manieri
The rain was holding off, but the darkness was making navigation difficult. It didn’t help that she’d avoided this area for so long. She tried not to let the others see her relief when they came into a clearing ringed by tree stumps.
“What’s that noise?” asked Jachad.
“The river,” said Lahlil, listening to the rushing sound beneath the forest’s relentless insect drone. “This way.”
The trees thinned out about thirty paces further along. A simple cabin with shuttered windows and a stone chimney sat in a cleared yard next to stacks of logs and a fenced-in coop. No light slipped through the shutters but she could smell the woodsmoke, even if she couldn’t see it against the cloudy sky. The land sloped down to a muddy bank and the sound of the Truant flowed into her weariness like some insidious lullaby.
She wanted there to be some other way. She knew what it would be like for them to have her appear on their doorstep, as callously indifferent to what they had built here as a forest fire. She was a walking catastrophe.
Lahlil slid out of her pack and drew her sword. She didn’t see a man at all, at first; all she saw was the momentum of the axe swinging out of the darkness toward her. It was a woodsman’s axe and not a battle-axe, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous. She threw her cheap sword aside—it would never have withstood that blow without breaking—and dived onto the wet leaves. Isa had drawn her sword as well, but at Lahlil’s hasty order, she placed herself in front of Jachad instead.
Their attacker swung through his missed blow and then used the momentum of the upstroke to turn around so he could come at her again.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Jachad spark both hands into flame.
“Jachi, no!”
But her warning came too late and he collapsed backward against the tree, clutching at his chest with his fingers still dripping blood-red sparks and his head rolling to one side.
Lahlil threw herself at her opponent’s legs as he came at her—big legs, like columns, attached to a big man—and tackled him to the ground. He fell hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and she made sure to pin him with her upper body before he could get it back. Only then did she stomp on his wrist hard enough to break his grip on the axe. She rammed her knee into his gut, forcing out the breath he had just gulped down, then snapped her knife from her hip and pointed it at his throat.
She waited for him to try to throw her off, but instead he just lifted up his curly-haired head and glared at her.
“General,” he said finally. He’d meant it to be the low, warning snarl of an animal defending its den, but he couldn’t quite disguise the edge of panic. “You can’t be here. You’re dead. Josten Drey’s carrying your body around on some crazy bounty-collecting tour.”
“Dredge.” Lahlil pushed her knee a little harder into his chest. He’d gained weight and cut his beard, and he had a scarf around his neck covering the Stowari prison tattoo. She might not have recognized him if she’d passed him in the street. “Anyone else out here? Don’t lie.”
“Just me.”
“Where’s Jaspar?”
Dredge’s lip jutted out as he considered lying to her despite her warning, but then he thought better of it. “Inside.”
“How did you know we were out here?”
“Trip-cord in the clearing. Old habits. You know how it is.” His slightly hooded eyes still had the steady, perspicacious gaze of a hunter. He didn’t acknowledge the others, but Lahlil knew he had already sized them up. “What do you want, General?”
“I’m calling in the favor you owe me.”
“Favor?” Dredge tried to sit up, but she moved the knife closer to his throat. “I was only in that jail because Alack’s fancy lock-pick didn’t work, that little shit. He owes you the favor, not me.”
“Alack can’t help me.”
Dredge craned his neck up a little higher. “Why not?”
“Because he doesn’t live upriver from Prol Irat,” Lahlil told him, “and because he’s dead.”
The Stowari stared at her from under his heavy eyebrows, square jaw clenched. “How?”
“Bar fight, a year ago. Somewhere in Uln.”
“A bar fight? That doesn’t sound like Alack.”
“The fight was supposed to be a distraction. He was robbing the tax collector next door.”
“That sounds like Alack,” said Dredge, and then added respectfully, “Greedy little bastard got what he deserved.”
“I don’t have a lot of time, Dredge.”
“I don’t do those kinds of jobs any more. Your kind,” he reminded her, speaking just a little too quickly. He must have thought the darkness would hide the hand creeping toward the spot where he’d let the axe fall. “I’ve fixed this place up. Jaspar’s back for good now and we live here just like regular people. We don’t—”
“Try it if you want,” she told him, gesturing to the axe. “You might get lucky.”
“Lucky?” Dredge’s voice dropped down into his chest as he spat the word back at her. “I’d be luckier dead than back out there with you. I don’t have much to lose.”
“Don’t you?” asked Lahlil. She went to retrieve her sword, backing up to keep him in sight. He sat up, rubbing his wrist where she’d kicked him. A sick feeling churned in her stomach as she saw Jachad and Isa watching her, but she had only this one option left and she had to make it work. “I don’t need to kill you. I can leave you alive—just alive enough for you to watch me drag Jaspar out here. Just like Bakkanresh. You remember Bakkanresh.”
Dredge looked her up and down and for a moment she was afraid he would know she was bluffing. She didn’t admit to herself the possibility that she wasn’t.
“You’re a monster, you know that?” Dredge said. He lurched to his feet and brushed the wet leaves from his trousers. With the extra weight on him, he looked as massive as the trees behind him, but she knew his blustering was just compensation for the fact that he still feared her. “Jaspar only came back because I promised him I was through with this life, and with you. General—for once, please—just do the good thing and walk away.”
“Prol Irat,” she said again. “We need to get there. You must have a boat.”
He stood there for a moment longer, grinding his teeth together. Somewhere in the woods behind them an owl hooted and shot down through the leaves.
“I have a boat,” said Dredge at last. “It’s around the other side of the house.”
“You’re going to take us to the edge of the city.”
“Then what?”
“Then nothing,” said Lahlil. “Then you can go home.”
Dredge’s eyebrows arched. “Is this a joke? That’s what all this is about? A ride?”
“We have to leave right now.”
“Can’t I even—?”
“Now.”
Dredge stomped away down the sloping ground, leaving the rest of them to follow as they would. Lahlil sheathed her sword and turned back to Jachad, bracing herself for what she would find. The way he listed on his feet reminded her of the times she’d been so drunk she’d forgotten how to fall down, but he was still conscious, and capable of taking another swig from the brown bottle.
“He’ll take us,” Lahlil told her companions, since neither of them spoke Stowari.
said Isa.
“I can’t walk by myself,” he admitted.
“I know.” She put his arm over her shoulder and helped him slowly down the slope toward the water.
“You said something about Bakkanresh,” said Jachad.
She scanned the ground up ahead, making sure there was nothing that might trip him. “I’ve told enough stories for one day.”
“I already know the story. The duke opene
d the gates to the Stowari after they—after you—killed his wife in front of him and the whole court and threatened to do the same to his children.”
“Yes,” said Lahlil. The word felt like a stone hurled straight at him, but she had gone too far now to allow herself to soften it for either of them. “It ended the siege.”
“And then the Stowari sacked the town.”
“We were hired to get the gate open. We weren’t paid to care about what happened afterward.” Something hard bumped against her knee and then rolled away through the rustling leaves. She bent down to search for it.
“Don’t bother,” said Jachad. “It was empty.”
They came over a little rise and saw the boat sitting in a trench dug out from the bank, upside-down. Dredge was just in the process of flipping it over. It was a simple boat and not very big, but it had three benches besides the one in the stern for the pilot. Lahlil took what felt like the first breath she had taken in days.
“How long will it take to get there?” she asked as she helped Dredge drag the boat down to the trench.
“River’s fast from all this rain. Around dawn,” he said shortly, stopping to catch his breath; he was getting soft. He leaned in toward her with his hand on the rail while water lapped at the bottom of the boat. “You know, getting away from you was the only good decision I ever made. You made it seem … normal, somehow, like it was just what people did. It’s not, you know. I thought somebody as smart as you would have figured that out by now.”
Isa climbed in while Dredge lit a lantern and hung it from a hook on the prow. Lahlil helped Jachad in and then tossed their packs aboard before climbing in after him. Isa took the bench in the prow. Dredge loaded the oars—he’d need them to get back upstream—and pushed the boat out into the water. Then he hauled his boots up out of the muck and jumped in himself, bringing the murky scent of the river bottom along with him.
“You can sleep for a while now,” she told Jachad, balancing in front of him as he sat hunched over on the middle bench. He didn’t look up at her, and when she leaned over she saw a distant look in his eyes that she didn’t like at all. “What is it?”
“I thought I smelled the sea … but it’s gone now,” he said, slurring his words. She tried to blame it on the medicine, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. “I like this boat. Reminds me of my hammock on my mother’s ship, rocking, like when I was a boy.”
“Lie down,” she said, guiding his shoulders down until he was curled up on the bench with his head resting on his pack. She adjusted his cloak to protect him from the damp air and saw that the clasp at his neck had come undone, exposing a patch of freckled skin just below his throat. She pressed the collar of his shirt between her fingers.
“Don’t look,” he said, taking her hand even though his eyes had already closed. “I don’t want to know how bad it is.”
“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” she said, tucking his hand back beneath the cloak. “Try to sleep.”
She sat down in the stern where she could watch Dredge at the tiller. The banks streamed by as the swollen river bore them along, but she felt like they were standing still. Breaks in the clouds showed monotonous stands of colorless trees and the occasional drowsy homestead perched up on higher ground. Normal people lived there, with normal lives, like the one Dredge and Jaspar were trying to have.
“So, this is your new crew,” Dredge said, startling her out of a half-sleep. “Sounds like the beginning of one of Bartow’s jokes: a one-armed Norlander, a ginger drunk and the Mongrel all get into a boat for Prol Irat…”
“I don’t have a crew any more.”
“No?” he asked, leaning over to get a better view as he guided the boat around a bend, then mumbled to himself, “Pengar’s hairy balls, it’s a dark night.”
“I quit, like you.”
He took his eyes from the water for the first time. “You, General?” He gave a curt shake of his head. “You’re yanking me. You’ll never leave the life. Not like that, anyhow.”
“How, then?”
“You know what I mean,” said Dredge. “I’d watch you sometimes when some stupid kid tried to take you on—trying to prove something—and think, ‘She’s gonna let him do it.’ I guess we all had days like that, when we just wanted it to be over.”
Lahlil didn’t have the energy to lie to him, or the courage to admit that he was right, so she said nothing.
Dredge said, “Josten Drey lied about killing you, then. That means there’s still a price on your head: a big, fat one.”
“I know.”
“I could make a fair bit of money just telling people I’ve seen you.” The tendons in his wrist hardened as he tightened his grip on the tiller. His size and strength would be better than any sword in a fight on a moving boat. “I’ve been thinking, you might be planning to kill me when we get to Prol to stop me from talking. And now I’m thinking I might stand a better chance if I steered us into the bank right now. I’m a good swimmer, and I know this river. I don’t know about you, but I’d say the rest of your ‘crew’ wouldn’t stand much of a chance in the water.”
“I’m not going to kill you. You can tell anyone you want where I went.”
The boat rocked hard as he cut into the current, taking them around another bend. “Staking out a cold trail, is that it? Draw everyone to Prol Irat looking for you while you’re off somewhere else?”
“Something like that.”
The river straightened out again and he leaned back against the rail. The shadow of a large moth flicked over the boat as the insect courted their lantern. “You remember that time in Volifer,” he said, “when they set fire to that barn because you tricked them into thinking they’d trapped us all in there, and then we went back to their castle and beheaded that asshole Prince Burton while his bodyguards were still standing out in that field, watching it burn and slapping each other on the back?” He laughed aloud, but the laugh choked off into something else far less nostalgic. “Damn me, that didn’t take long,” he mumbled.
“I wouldn’t have brought you into this if there’d been another way.”
Jachad moaned and opened his eyes. Lahlil knelt down next to him in the bottom of the boat and checked his forehead. It was cold as wax.
“Go back to sleep,” she told him, adjusting his cloak so that it covered him better. “We still have a long way to go.”
“I had a dream we were in the desert and King Tobias was still alive,” he said. His eyes were already fluttering. “He was chasing us, and I looked over and you were gone. I was alone.”
“It was just a dream.” She kept her hand on his back until his breathing slowed. Then she went back and sat down across from Dredge.
Her old comrade sucked his teeth. “He’s not drunk, is he?”
“No.”
“Is it something catching?”
“He’s been poisoned.”
“Oh. Tough break,” said Dredge, not without sympathy. “Who is he, anyway?”
She watched the black water flow past. “He’s my Jaspar.”
The river narrowed a short time later, then they passed through a section where the trees grew out sideways from the banks to spread their canopies over the water, and the lantern light picked out the trembling leaves as they passed underneath. Lahlil smelled the stink of rotting vegetation and saw bright green pools of algae floating in the standing water around the trunks.
“You really want to leave the life?” Dredge asked.
“I already have.”
“I’ll admit,” said Dredge, with his eyes locked on the lantern and the patch of water in front of the boat, “the quiet life gets to me sometimes. I miss the action. Still, I’ll be sorry to see it end.”
“Why do you think it’s going to end?”
He raised his eyebrows, as if surprised he would have to tell her. “The empire can’t hold. They’re spread too thin. Mercenaries like us are fine for a siege or filling out your ranks in a battle, but afterward … The onl
y reason the empire is still holding together is that no one wants to be the first to give ’em the chuck. One of these days, some nobody in some little shit kingdom somewhere is going to throw a rock at a Norlander’s head, and then the whole thing is going to come toppling down and it’ll be war for everyone, then: proper war, not that sneaky stuff we were doing toward the end.”
She hardly heard his last few words over the sound of her pulse pounding. She could feel the slippery grass of the battlefield under her boots, and smell the oil and smoke. She could hear the sound of swords clanging, and that noise a blade makes when it notches into a bone, like an axe into a tree-limb.
“If I was you, General, I’d think again about leaving the life. It’s hard enough for me to live with the things I’ve done. I can’t guess the shit that would catch up with you if you stood still long enough to let it.”
* * *
Lahlil woke up after her sunrise attack beneath the bench where Jachad slept on, still feeling the pain twitch along with her racing pulse. She knew she had only been unconscious for a few moments, but it was a few too many; anything could have happened. She craned her head back and saw Dredge still at the tiller where he’d been all night. Jachad’s hand hung over the bench; his pulse was fast and dangerously faint, but that was still better than none at all. Looking under the bench, Lahlil could see Isa’s legs stretched out and guessed that she was asleep as well.
“Almost there,” Dredge called over to her, his voice softening in the haze of the encroaching dawn.
Not long after, Lahlil spotted the silhouettes of Prol Irat up ahead like a swarm of fat-bellied spiders on spindly stilt legs. The wind changed direction and greeted her with the swampy, inescapable odor of one of the richest cities in the world. She had a momentary impulse to let the boat go past into the bay, to find the nearest tavern and drink herself blind. Dredge wasn’t the only one with old habits.