Will (Book 2)

by S. F. Burgess

  Reacting on razor-sharp instincts, the assassin leapt, cleared the fire and landed neatly on the other side—only to get pushed back by Air’s force again. Momentarily losing his balance, he staggered back, failing to notice Moylan, who purposely stretched out his legs, tripping Barrows as Air gave him another shove. Pinwheeling his arms, recovery impossible, the assassin fell backwards, through the branches, into the trap he had just dug. He landed at the bottom with a thud and a groan.

  “Teach you to call me a ‘sheep’,” Moylan muttered, his words slurred and weak.

  Conlan raised an eyebrow. “Useful—but what exactly was this trap for, Davlin?”

  Davlin shrugged. “To save me from having to dig it later.”

  “You had us dig our own grave?” Sol asked in wide-eyed horror.

  “I told you Davlin was the most devious and ruthless commander we ever had,” Adian said with a resigned half smile, pride clear in his voice. “Are you alive down there, Barrows?” he added.

  “Yes… sir…” came the winded, gasping response.

  “Should we not give our prisoners the chance to save themselves before we threaten them with death?” Conlan asked, peering over the lip of the hole.

  “Is false hope not crueller?” Davlin retorted.

  “There is nothing false in the hope I offer those willing to change,” Conlan said.

  “You waste your words,” Davlin replied. “But as you wish; I can slit their throats just as easily later as now.”

  Sol gasped and shook his head. “I would listen to what you have to say, Conlan Baydon.”

  “I, too, would listen,” Adian said with slow consideration. “I have no desire to rush to my death, though I do not believe in the hope you offer. You would never be able to trust us. Only a fool clutches a viper to his breast in the vain belief that his words alone will keep it from biting him. And you do not strike me as a fool, Conlan Baydon.”

  Conlan smiled. “The hearts of men and vipers beat very differently. Come, sit and talk with me.”

  “The hearts of men and vipers beat very differently… wow!” Eleanor murmured, an amused smirk on her face. “Who knew—being in love has turned Conlan into a poet!”

  Adian and Sol sat in stiff attention on one side of the fire, Conlan on the other. Amelia stood at his right shoulder, as quiet protection, watching intently and ready to create a shield at a moment’s notice. Will was impressed and inordinately proud of her calm, alert composure. He had seen the distress in her eyes when they had first arrived, and he knew she would want nothing more than to assure herself that he was alive and in one piece. Instead, she had pushed her feelings aside and done the job for which she was uniquely equipped.

  While Conlan talked, explaining who they all were and what they were trying to achieve, Eleanor and Davlin released the ropes holding Moylan and Mickle and brought them water. Will knelt at the river’s edge, drank greedily, then washed the blood from his face. It appeared to have come from a bruised, torn piece of skin above his left eye that had already scabbed over.

  Freddie gave Will his medical bag, and he set about doing what he could for Mickle. With Freddie and Davlin holding the large man down, Will was able to remove the arrow and reset Mickle’s nose. There was damage, but not as much as he had feared; it was unlikely Mickle would ever be able to draw a bow fully again, but Will saw no point in telling him this—he was complaining enough about Will’s treatment already. While he worked, he explained to Eleanor what he was doing and why, and she acted as his nurse. Under his instruction, she bound Mickle’s shoulder, and he gave their patient some of his small supply of concentrated lepdrac root, to numb some of his pain.

  Moylan was sitting up by this time, clutching a cup of water, although raising it to his mouth and drinking seemed to be an insurmountable challenge. Will was worried about the dazed look in his eyes that he knew indicated concussion—or worse. Raised purple lumps spoke of several heavy blows to the head.

  “You look worried,” Eleanor commented in English, her statement at odds with her cheery tone and the smile she had plastered on her face. “You’re going to worry Moylan.”

  Will looked at his patient and shook his head. “I don’t think Moylan is aware enough to notice right now.”

  Eleanor’s smile dropped. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Will frowned. “It could be a severe concussion that he might recover from with a bit of rest. Or it might be something more serious, like a skull fracture, cranial swelling or a blood clot. The light isn’t good enough for me to be able to check his pupil response to stimulus, but he seems very—distant.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. What do we do if it’s something more serious?” Eleanor asked, unconsciously reaching for Moylan’s hand and patting it gently.

  “Eleanor, I may be a good healer by Mydren’s rather low standards, but I’m not even a doctor, let alone a brain surgeon. There are limits to what I can do. I’ve had to make my peace with that, and so must you. There will be some we can’t save,” Will said, dropping his gaze from the tears he could see pooling in the little pixie’s beautiful brown eyes. This was not a lesson he had wanted her to learn so soon. “Stay with him,” he continued gently. “Keep him warm and make sure he drinks some of that water. If he wants to sleep, let him. It will do more good than harm now. Only time will tell.”

  Eleanor nodded and turned back to Moylan, gently brushing his wild red hair back off his bruised face and bringing the water cup to his lips. Freddie joined her, wrapping a blanket around Moylan’s broad shoulders.

  Will stood, stretching slightly. Conlan was still talking to Adian and Sol, who seemed engrossed in what they were being told. The advantages of having a bunch of assassins on their side were many, but Adian was right: they would never be able to trust these men. He was having enough trouble just trying to keep his trust in Davlin.

  Working a tension knot out of his lower back, Will walked down to the river’s edge again and washed his hands, taking another drink of water.

  “Is Moylan going to recover?”

  The quiet question made Will jump; he had not heard the man approach. Getting to his feet, he found Davlin stood behind him.

  “I do not know. Damage to the head is always tricky,” Will said. “Were you really the commander of the Lords’ assassins?”

  “For eight years,” Davlin answered.

  “I find it hard to believe you gave up a position of such power to be Eleanor’s nursemaid,” Will said, allowing some of his distrust to show in his face. “What game are you playing?”

  A self-mocking smile crept along Davlin’s lips. “I grew tired of being the bad man, the monster in the shadows. Conlan has done more to earn my loyalty in the last few weeks than my former masters managed in all my thirty-eight years of life. Is it so hard for you to understand that I could choose to believe in and follow the good I see in Conlan Baydon? I want my life to mean more than blood, pain and death. My allegiance is real; it is, perhaps, the most real thing I have ever offered anyone.”

  Brothers

  “He is a moron,” Mickle spat. The comment was delivered with a deep growl of contempt.

  “No, he is just a better leader than you can comprehend,” Moylan retorted.

  “He is going to get us killed,” Teris muttered.

  “Teris is right,” Mickle said, and his imitation of wise concern made Will want to punch him. Unaware, Mickle droned on. “He let them go! Even the idiot who fell in the hole. Assassins to the Lords of Mydren, a group so shadowy we were unaware they even existed! They found Davlin in less than a month of looking; how long do you think it will take for them to find us again, but next time with a thousand Protectors in tow?”

  “By their own admission, luck played a large part in finding Davlin,” Moylan argued. “They just happened to have a man undercover in Gallendary who reported Davlin’s visit with Eleanor.”

  “They are prepared, organised, informed and exceptionally well-trained men,” Mickle said bitte
rly. “They might call finding Davlin ‘luck’—but I call it inevitable!”

  Trusting Brutus and Moss to follow the mule being pulled along by the lead cart, Will relaxed his grip on the reins, closed his eyes and, tipping his head back, let out a long sigh. He was getting a headache again, and this time it had nothing to do with the lump on the forehead that Barrows had given him. This same argument had been bouncing back and forth for days. Will was sick of hearing to it, sick of fighting the urge to defend Conlan with sensibilities that belonged to another world, but mostly he was sick of listening to Mickle talk. He wished he and Amelia were travelling in the cart Kip drove, where Arran, Freddie and Davlin laughed as they played cards, with Conlan and Eleanor offering occasional advice as they rode next to them on Meran and Horse.

  Amelia rested a light hand on his leg and squeezed ever so slightly. Will brought his head up and gave her a wan smile.

  “Are they ‘discussing’ Conlan’s decision to let the assassins walk free again?” Amelia asked.

  Will nodded. “Mickle only seems to bring up the subject so he can rip Conlan apart. If Conlan were king, those comments would be treasonous. I’m all for discussion, but if he hates us all so much, what is he doing here?”

  “Mickle is just angry because Conlan refused to flog Davlin for breaking his nose. His pride has been wounded. This is the only way he knows to fight back,” Amelia said.

  Conlan’s reasoning on this had been very sensible, as far as Will saw it. They already had three men injured with varying degree of severity, and he did not see the sense in making them even more vulnerable by purposely injuring a fourth. But Will also suspected that, rational reason aside, Conlan was just as irritated by Mickle’s behaviour as he was—and humiliating the annoying man was an indirect punishment.

  “That isn’t justification!” Will said. “I just don’t understand why Conlan tolerates the arrogant, petty little man. I’d have been a much better choice as captain of his men.”

  Amelia shrugged. “Did you ask him for the position?”

  Will shook his head; he had not really thought about it. “I didn’t realise I needed to. I assumed Conlan would just give me the task,” Will said, acknowledging to himself, for the first time, the hurt he felt over Mickle’s appointment.

  Amelia smiled. “Silly Bear, Conlan has more respect for you than you realise. You’re the only person he ‘asks’ to do something; everyone else gets orders. He would never have given you a responsibility he wasn’t sure you wanted. If you want to be captain, tell him.”

  Will nodded, screwing his eyes up and pinching the bridge of his nose, the sound of Mickle’s voice still grating on his nerves.

  Amelia leaned into him and kissed his cheek. “Would you like some distraction?” she purred in his ear, her hand running slow strokes up and down his thigh. Will shuddered at his body’s instant reaction to her gentle touch. They had been given very little time alone recently and he yearned for her.

  “Errmm… as lovely as that is, Amelia, it’s a little more distraction than I can handle right now,” Will said as his mouth dried up and his heart rate doubled.

  Amelia removed her hand with a soft, sultry chuckle that did nothing to calm the situation down. Now needing to distract himself from his body’s insistent demand that he act on the passion Amelia had just stirred up, Will went back to concentrating on the conversation going on behind him. Fortunately it worked very much like a cold shower.

  Mickle was just coming to the end of a ranting speech about how the Lords would never have shown such weakness. There was a pause, and then Elroy spoke softly. “What would you have done, Mickle?”

  Will was surprised. In the four days they had been travelling, bouncing and jolting along almost nonexistent forest tracks, there had been countless reruns of this ‘discussion’—as Amelia had called it—and yet this was the first time Elroy had said anything.

  “I would have slit their throats and buried them in the pit Davlin conveniently had them dig,” Mickle said with cold certainty.

  “A sensible precaution,” Elroy agreed.

  “Of course. But Conlan is too weak to see this,” Mickle replied.

  “Yet I wonder,” Elroy continued calmly. “What would have happened when others came looking for them?”

  “Dead men do not speak,” Teris pointed out.

  “That is true,” Elroy said. “However, the woman with the child would have, as would the Protectors at the gate of Gallendary. It would not have taken much for these ‘prepared, organised, informed and exceptionally well-trained men’ to track down witnesses and work that back to the forest clearing. Graves do not settle that quickly; the bodies would have been found.”

  “Perhaps,” Mickle grudgingly admitted. “But they would not have found us.”

  “The dead bodies of their commander and two of their men, Davlin’s rogue status confirmed, and a woman talking of magic,” Elroy explained, his voice still calm and rational. “Two and two would become four, and we would have become the Night Paws’ next target.”

  “And how is this different from our current situation?” Mickle snapped.

  There was another pause. When Elroy continued, Will heard the slow patience in his voice, as if he were explaining something very simple to a stupid child.

  “If Conlan had murdered them, he would have guaranteed the Night Paws hunting us down. By letting them go, he took a fifty-fifty gamble. It might be that they hunt us down anyway—and that will be a problem we have to deal with if it arises. But Davlin says that Adian is a reasonable man. He might see Conlan’s ‘weakness’ for what it truly is: wisdom and mercy. He might decide to let it rest. He might even decide to join us when the time comes. With his decision not to take three lives, Conlan has given us all even odds on not having to encounter these assassins again.”

  Will smiled. Having listened to Mickle’s sour, acrimonious assessment of the situation for days, it was a huge relief to know that it was not just Moylan who thought Conlan had made the right decision.

  “Maybe Conlan did make the right choice,” Teris ventured.

  Mickle snorted. “You are easily led, Teris.”

  “No, he is just more capable of seeing logic,” Moylan said, and Will could hear the grin in his voice.

  “Regardless, I believe we have exhausted this topic of conversation,” Elroy said, a note of finality in his tone. “We are King’s Men; we follow our king and trust that he made the right choice.”

  “Only time will tell,” Mickle muttered in disgust.

  Elroy ignored this last comment and artfully steered the conversation towards the plans they had for how they were going to turn the carts into comfortable, portable homes for the next few months. Using a lump of charcoal they seemed to have saved for the purpose and the wooden side walls, Teris and Elroy began mapping out the space and the best ways to use it.

  Moylan made a few comments, but soon drifted off to sleep. The confusion, distress and inability to focus that had slowed him down for the last few days was starting to lift, and while he still seemed to need a lot of sleep, Will was optimistic about Moylan’s chances for a full recovery.

  Looking after their patients’ needs had given Will lots of opportunity to involve Eleanor and Amelia in the art of healing. While they were both picking up the theory as quickly as he knew they would, Eleanor was bolder in applying her knowledge, even convincing Davlin to allow her to stitch up the wound Will had left in his back. She had done a passable job—even if there had been several moments when the poor man had looked like he was going to pass out as he fought to maintain his composure.

  They stopped a little after sunset that evening in what appeared, to Will’s tired eyes, to be a piece of forest identical to the one they had left. Conlan sent them all to sleep early after a light dinner. They would be up early, he explained, working on the carts. He wanted them kitted out and fixed up like players’ travelling homes within ten days.

  The following days were filled with hours of
endless, exhausting tasks. From the moment the sun breached the horizon until after it had sunk again, they chopped trees, carried logs, shaped planks, sanded and nailed them, and hauled water. When there was no daylight left for these activities, they practiced their fighting and worked on the finer details of the building jobs that could be done around the fire. And Conlan still insisted the Avatars find time for balancing sessions. This left time for only a few hours of sleep each night, which was nowhere near enough. The only people excused from this heavy work schedule were Mickle and Moylan—and even they were made useful; Elroy and Amelia put them to work learning to sew so they could make players’ outfits for the main archetypes and soft furnishings for their carts.

  Will knew there would have been complaints had Conlan not worked harder and put more effort into what he was doing than anyone else. He took the toughest, most strenuous jobs himself, never delegating a difficult task. Sometimes he turned work into a game, like when he challenged Davlin and Freddie to see who could make it back to the camp the fastest with the huge pieces of felled oak they each carried. He was generous with his praise and observant of the tasks people took on, and he moved among them like a human hurricane, inspiring and encouraging his men to Herculean effort.

  For a while, Will had tried to keep up, carrying logs with the others, but by the morning of the fifth day, wobbly legs and dark spots in his vision let him know he was pushing himself too far. Slowing to a stop, he dropped his cumbersome burden, leaned over, panting, and clasped a hand around bruised ribs that were taking a long time to heal. As the sharp, stabbing pain slowly faded, Will wondered if his slower healing time was due to deeper tissue damage caused by the knuckle dusters.

  “Come on, old man, you can do it!”

  Turning, Will found Davlin jogging towards him, a long length of heart wood resting on his shoulder as if it was nothing.

  “Old man?” Will argued in good-natured distress. “I am only two years older than you, Davlin!”