“I suppose Voln could command these,” the sergeant said. He chewed his mustache. “It’s risky, sir—risky for you. Most of us old-timers will have to go with the larger bunch, be sure none of ’em get the idea to slope off home without you there. At least they’re a day away from their homes. But you promise me, sir, if something does happen and I say go, you will go—no matter what.”
“Is that what the Duke said?” Beclan said.
“Yes, sir, it is. It’s my honor, you see. Your safety.”
Beclan felt a cold chill down his back. As a boy, he’d expected protection from his father’s vassals—adults protected children anyway. But for years he had not thought of anyone literally dying to save him. Yet there the sergeant was, the same unemotional quiet man who had been assigned to him … and he would send Beclan away, to save him, and die holding off pursuit.
Until that moment, he realized, he had not really grasped the commander’s dilemma, though Duke Verrakai had spoken of it to the squires more than once. We send those who trust us to their deaths, she’d said. That is what battlefield command is. When someone gives you an oath, you are responsible for your commands, so think before you command. If you are not able to accept this, you are not fit for it.
War had come, and the Duke would be doing that now, as she had done before. He must try to do the same. Out of a dry mouth he said, “Well, Sergeant, I so promise. And I also swear not to lead us into trouble—if it comes to us, I cannot stop it.”
“Very well, sir.” The sergeant stared into the snowy woods for a moment, then smiled. “I don’t expect there’s much to worry about after a storm like that the other day.” He gave over command of the muster to Voln, then named the five Verrakai militia who would stay with him and Beclan.
“T’ young lord’s not comin’?” asked one of the men from the last village.
“We’re going to Thornapple and Oakmotte,” Beclan said. “Then on to Harway.”
“But—” the man began.
Two others shushed him; one said, “He’s the king’s cousin; he can do what he wants, Tam.”
Beclan felt a tiny glow of pride that he had not told them and one had recognized him.
He and his smaller escort, all mounted, passed through Oakmotte—no muster there—and were most of the way to Thornapple along the crest of a hill where the snow was not so deep when Beclan heard someone calling for help off to the east. He turned his horse off the trail, into deeper snow.
“Sir, stop—”
“Someone needs help. Didn’t you hear?”
“Yes, sir, I heard a yell. But there’s a war, the Duke says. It might be an enemy.”
“And it might be one of the Duke’s own people in trouble. We have to find out.” He reined in just as his horse lurched, snorted in alarm, and then slipped down the slope, steeper than it had looked under its concealing blanket. “I can’t stop here,” he yelled back up to the others. “He’s sliding.”
The sergeant’s curse was eloquent and complex; Beclan spared a moment to admire it while he tried to help his horse balance. They ended up in a hollow, the horse belly-deep in snow. Beclan looked back up to the trail; they had left an obvious track that looked very difficult indeed, ice patches visible under the disturbed snow. “Sorry,” he said to the horse and to the sergeant. “I’ll see if we can get back up.”
“Leave the horse,” the sergeant said. “You might make it.”
“What about the horse?” Beclan asked. He did not relish the idea of dismounting in snow that deep, and he noticed that the “sir” had disappeared.
“It’ll do better without you on top.”
That made sense, yet he wanted to find a way to ride up. “Maybe there’s a gentler slope a little way back—or along.”
“And maybe it’s worse.”
Beclan’s horse, clearly uneasy, snorted repeatedly, stamping one hoof after another. Beclan slid off on the uphill side and found himself uncomfortably close to his nervous horse, in snow over waist deep. It would be really stupid to slip and fall under the horse.
He pulled the reins over the horse’s head, untied his saddlebags to relieve the horse of more weight, and slung them over his shoulder. He felt unbalanced but, on the sergeant’s direction, turned the horse in its length several times, hoping it would trample out a space from which to scramble up the slope. Gradually, he and the horse together made a space where the snow was no more than halfway to his knees.
Then he tried to climb up the slope, digging his hands into the snow and kicking at it to make steps. He had gone up a little more than his own height when his feet slipped out from under him, and he slid back down as if he were playing a child’s game. He tried again, furious with himself for looking silly—though the men above weren’t laughing—and again slipped and slid, this time almost all the way to his horse, which snorted and feinted a kick at him.
“This won’t do,” he heard the sergeant say, but he flung himself at the slope once more, and once more failed. “Sir, we’re coming down,” the sergeant said. “You nor your horse can make it up. Put those saddlebags back on him and mount, so you can get clear if one of ours falls.” To the rest he said, “You two—back down that way—at least three lengths apart—and you others, come forward with me. Don’t start downslope until I give you the signal, and remember: point ’em straight down and sit back. Whatever you do, don’t yank ’em to the side.”
Beclan tied the saddlebags on again, put the reins back over his horse’s head, and mounted. Once he was up, he glanced up the slope and saw that the sergeant had positioned them all facing the slope and separated enough that one horse falling wouldn’t trip another. He heard the sergeant say “Now!” and the other horses started down. The sergeant, Beclan saw, leaned right back and his horse seemed almost to swim down the slope, snorting with every stride, until he had gone past Beclan’s level. One of the other men lost his balance and yanked sideways on the reins as he slipped; his horse, twisting, fell to that side and then rolled, legs thrashing in air for a moment. A sound like a branch breaking came from underneath; the horse squealed.
There was nothing to be done for rider or horse. The man was dead, his body a horse-length from the horse, his skull crushed, the horse with a broken leg. Without saying a word, the sergeant cut its throat; the blood spurted out onto the snow. The men looked at Beclan; he could scarcely meet their eyes. If he had not been stupid … but he hadn’t meant to slide down … he hadn’t known the slope was that steep.
“Sir,” the sergeant said. “With all respect, it is my advice that we go east, over to the other road, and go straight to Harway.”
“I’m sorry,” Beclan said through stiff lips. He felt like throwing up. “What about … him?” He could not think of the man’s name.
“Hadrin, sir?” The sergeant’s slight emphasis made it clear he was aware Beclan didn’t know the name. “We’ll take him along, of course. Can’t leave him out here in this.” Quickly the sergeant set the other men to work as Beclan eased his horse down to their level. One cut the girth of the dead horse’s saddle and pulled it free, then opened the saddlebags to find Hadrin’s spare shirt to wrap around that ruined head. As Beclan came close, the sergeant said, “If you’ll just hold the horses, sir,” and handed him the reins in a bunch.
The call for help came again, this time clearer. Beclan looked in that direction but could see nothing; the sergeant and men were using the dead man’s cloak to wrap his body, tying it closed; they didn’t seem to hear. He did not know what to do; he felt wrong, sitting there just holding the reins while they worked … and none of them now would meet his eyes, not even the sergeant. Was it because he hadn’t used Hadrin’s name? Did they know he’d forgotten it, or did they think—what did they think?
You must know your people, the Duke had said. You must know their names and their faces, their families and their hopes and fears. He had known their names—at least he had learned them once—but … but they were just Verrakai serfs, really, with
so thick an eastern accent he could barely understand them, and anyway, all they ever talked about was … he couldn’t even remember. What did he know about Hadrin? Married … yes. An ugly wife with a scar on her face that pulled up one side of her mouth; he’d wondered why anyone had married her. Children? He didn’t know.
He should know. He should know all those things the Duke had said, and … he hadn’t bothered. Gwennothlin had. Daryan had. He’d heard them talking about their patrol groups. What had he been doing, those times he might have been learning? Thinking of his rank. Thinking of what he would tell his father, his brothers, when he came back to Vérella.
And now he had led these men into danger, and Hadrin had died because he himself couldn’t climb up the side of a hill in the snow, and it was all his fault.
The call came again. “Help! Help!” This time all the men turned toward it; the sergeant shook his head, then gave Beclan a hard look that Beclan interpreted as contempt. He dismounted, still holding the reins he’d been given, and looked the remaining horses over. His own had a scrape on one knee; one of the others had a jagged but shallow tear on its neck, probably from a branch. The other four were apparently unharmed. He dug into his saddlebags for the jar of ointment he carried and smeared it on the injuries.
“We’ll put him on your bay, Efrin,” the sergeant said. Beclan looked up and saw two of the men carrying the cloak-wrapped bundle toward him. “You can ride double with Pedar; we’ll rotate the riders.” There were two bays; Beclan couldn’t remember which one Efrin rode, and the reins were all tangled in his hand. The sergeant moved past him, saying, “Just drop them,” and grabbed the right set, leading the unmarked bay forward. Beclan scooped up the reins again, watching as the men heaved Hadrin’s corpse over the saddle and lashed it on; the horse snorted, but the sergeant soothed it.
Finally they were all mounted again.
“We’ll be going through woods without a clear trail,” the sergeant said. “Easy to get off our aim that way. I should break trail.” He looked at Beclan; Beclan nodded. He still felt sick to his stomach. “While it’s day and the sky’s mostly clear, it’ll be easy going east, but picking a way in this snow won’t be. If it looks like a gentle slope down, could be a drop-off under it. So follow single file. If I go down—” He chewed his mustache longer than usual. “I’d best not,” he said finally.
Beclan rode second, feeling the gazes of the others as if they were made of cold steel chilling his back. The sergeant’s progress through the snowy woods was not straight; Beclan wondered, the first time he went around a low hump in a sort of opening rather than straight across, but the ragged root-end of a storm-felled tree, visible as they came even with it, proved the sergeant had seen danger where he himself had seen only an easier route.
He looked ahead, past the sergeant, trying to see what the sergeant saw, trying to anticipate where he would turn and which way.
“Help! Help!” Closer now, and he could tell it was a man’s voice for certain. Ahead and to the heart-side, where the trees were thicker. Beclan could not help noticing that the sergeant’s head did not so much as twitch in the direction of the call. He wanted to get his young fool of a squire to the Duke, that was it, and others would die because he would not risk Beclan’s skin. Because Beclan had proved himself stupid and one had already died of his stupidity. It wasn’t fair.
He felt his shoulders hunching and tried to sit straighter, but the denser woods made it necessary to bend and twist to avoid being knocked in the head or swept off the saddle entirely. He tried to fix the faces of the men with him to their names, to their horses: Efrin usually rode the plain bay now carrying Hadrin’s body, Pedar rode the chestnut now carrying double, Vidar rode the bay with a blaze and a hind sock, and that meant Simi-with-spots rode the roan.
“Help! Help! Please!”
The sergeant angled slightly away from the call and the thicker trees that hid whoever had called. “Sergeant,” Beclan said. “Shouldn’t we at least look?”
“I’m not risking you, sir. And there’s something uncanny about these calls. They don’t come from the same direction all the time.”
“They’re always on our heart-hand—”
“Yes—and we’ve been turning back and forth to get through the forest. I’m not even sure we’ve been making as much eastward as I wanted. From what we first heard, we should’ve passed the calls by now, be hearing them behind … but the last three times they’ve been abreast of us.”
The woods had thickened again, what seemed a large area of dense pines and spruce with barely room for the horses to pass between them. No wonder this area had never been farmed, Beclan thought. It seemed colder and dimmer here; the crisp tree shadows that had lain on the snow earlier, making it obvious which way was sunward, were gone. When he looked up, the sky had hazed over; the low winter sun could not be seen at all for the height and density of the trees.
“We should turn south,” the sergeant said. “Sword-hand, and sharply.”
“Help! Help! Please help!”
Beclan glanced back at the others; all were staring into the trees on the heart-hand side, their faces, in that shade, pale and pinched. He shuddered, suddenly afraid, ashamed of that fear, but still … “Yes,” he said to the sergeant. “Sword-hand, and now.”
The sergeant nodded and reined his horse to the right … but there was no space between the trees that way. He gave a hard kick; his horse took two nervous steps forward, then snorted and threw up its head, backing quickly.
“Let me try,” Beclan said, but his horse, too, would not push through the snow-covered branches no matter how he kicked. Nor could the others. Behind them, the trees had closed, a solid mass of green.
“Magery,” the sergeant said. “It has to be. We got in and can’t get out—it’s a trap of magery, with tree magic. Means a Kuakgan, I’ll be bound. We must have stumbled into a Grove. But a Kuakgan who could do this wouldn’t be calling for help. Happen it’s another trespasser. If we find the Kuakgan and explain, we’ll be safe.”
Beclan’s heart hammered in his chest, as the skim of clouds overhead thickened and it seemed darker every moment. “But if we can’t find a way …”
“We can probably go onward. Kuakkgani tree magic shapes Groves to maze trespassers and prevent them doing harm to the Grove itself. If the Kuakgan’s gone visiting somewhere, we might be stuck here several days, but in winter they usually stay close to their Groves. Funny that a Kuakgan settled on Verrakai lands … I’d have thought the Verrakaien would drive one out.”
“Could they?”
“Oh, enough of them, probably. But there’s a feel of Kuakkgani magic about this, now we’re in it. A friend of mine, back in the Duke’s Company, was kuakgannir and told me a lot about what a Kuakgan does. However, whoever’s calling for help won’t be a Kuakgan and could be dangerous, so best be alert.” He had raised his voice so the others could hear; they all nodded. “If we’re lucky, the Kuakgan will find us soon and give us a meal and a night’s shelter even before setting us on our way.”
As they rode on, it was clear that the opening in the trees now formed a narrow trail that curved more and more, so they could not see far ahead or any opening to either side. Gloom deepened, but although the clouds now formed a solid gray lid overhead, no wind stirred the branches. Another cry came, sounding a little closer, but still off to the heart-hand side.
“It’s a spiral,” the sergeant said over his shoulder to Beclan. “Leads us in, won’t let us out. We could stop, camp here overnight, have better light to meet whoever’s in there.”
“Do you think there’s an open space ahead?”
“Almost certainly. What Kolya said was that these Grove traps led to a clearing.”
“This trail’s narrow,” Beclan said. “We’d be separated, each with his horse, and no clear sight from back to front, if we camped on the trail. Wouldn’t it be better in the clearing?”
“That’s true, sir. It’s just that we don’t know what we�
��ll meet.”
They came out of the trees suddenly, into a clearing perhaps ten horse-lengths across, surrounded by dense trees; Beclan’s horse pricked its ears and trotted a couple of strides, then stopped. Beclan felt dazed, as if he had come out of a cool house into hot sun. Was that the Kuakkgani magic?
Across the clearing, two men crouched over a third beside a makeshift shelter of old branches and leaves. They looked like most winter travelers, bundled into heavy clothes and winter cloaks, not like Pargunese soldiers. Beclan relaxed; his sergeant did not. “Who are you?” he called.
“Travelers in distress,” one of the men called back. “And I see that you, too, have had trouble—is that not a man’s body on that horse?”
“The horse fell with him,” the sergeant said. “Broke his neck and back.”
“We’re trapped here,” the other man said. “Can you help us? We’re out of food now, and our friend’s hurt.”
Beclan realized that the man had not needed to shout. They were closer … he didn’t remember walking closer … he looked at Sergeant Vossik. Vossik stared ahead, his body rigid. Beclan glanced behind; the other four were walking forward slowly, their gait awkward and their expressions blank. He touched his sword-hilt and drew it out slowly.
Even as Beclan thought magery, Vossik drew his sword and lunged forward, stopping as suddenly as if he’d run into a wall, shuddering. Then he turned slowly, jerkily, and Beclan saw that his face was contorted.
“Run, lad,” he said in a hoarse voice, as if he had been hit in the throat. “Run!”
Beclan stared—remembered his promise that he would run—remembered also Sergeant Stammel, met at Dorrin’s city house. Was Vossik being invaded and resisting? He could not leave Vossik to that horror … he had to help him.
As he hesitated, Vossik lurched closer, his eyes desperate. “Go!” Then, as if realizing Beclan would not or could not, his expression changed to determination.
Echoes of Betrayal Page 12