That was still taking him some time to get used to, but he figured he’d always had an edge. It was only recently, exposed to Kard’s magic and the stress of his new life, that it had grown as sharp as it was.
The magical link that made him Kard’s Bondservant helped as well. He knew exactly where the El-Spehari had gone to rest—and that Kard had swiftly gone to sleep, the habits of an old soldier.
He was the only one still up, listening to the soft burble of the stream downhill and the whistle of the wind around them. He could hear a few different animals in the distance as well, but these prairies were sparse. Just like the ranch where his mother and Hardin had raised him and taught him to be a ranch hand.
Thankfully, those skills were still useful in his new life.
Teer caught a different sound, almost hidden under the stream, and turned to try to figure it out. It sounded alive…and it was.
He sighed. Despite the hard-bitten angry face she’d been showing them all day, he could hear Lora crying now that she figured they couldn’t tell. They were quiet sobs, likely almost silent even to her, but Teer could hear them.
It was a chill night with autumn beginning to sweep over the plains, and he had a spare blanket. Cursing in his own head, he grabbed it and crossed to where Lora was lying.
“Here, it’s cold,” he told her, spreading the blanket over her.
“What do you fuckin’ care?” she snapped, swallowing the sobs she hadn’t wanted him to hear. “You drag me back in chains and get paid, you win.”
“Doesn’t mean we need to be cruel or leave you to suffer,” Teer said. “You’re our charge till we reach Carlon; we’re responsible for you.”
“Responsible,” she said. “Responsible. You’re paid kidnappers, nothin’ more.”
“And if you hadn’t beaten Carind to the edge o’ death, no one would be paying us,” he reminded her. “We was to head north to Kodiz. Half a dozen men with Writs for ’em are figured to be there. Even if only half were, decent money if we found ’em.”
“All about money.” She spat at him.
“No.” He shook his head. “I figure for some, but not me and not Kard. We’re trying to make the Territories safer. Make sure people don’t end up beat bloody and left for dead.”
Lora was silent for a moment, but something in her silence made him figure she didn’t actually want him to go away. Teer took a seat against the tree, watching her.
“You’ve been watchin’ me,” she finally said.
“To make sure you don’t run,” he agreed. He figured what she meant, though—and she wasn’t wrong.
“More than that. I lived with workin’ girls and workin’ boys, Hunter; I know that look.”
He shrugged uncomfortably and said nothing.
“Untie me and I’ll give you what you want,” she whispered. “Let me go and you can have me while your friend sleeps.”
Teer stared at the woman, stunned. He figured she couldn’t make out much of him, even under the light of two moons, but he could see her clearly enough.
“That’s…not going to happen,” he said. He was surprised by how much he wasn’t even tempted. “What part of making the Territories safer makes you think I’d go for that?”
“I seen you watchin’ me,” she repeated. “Better to bed you than hang.”
He shivered and rose from the ground. He was still leaning on the tree as he studied her.
“Won’t happen,” he repeated. “I won’t take advantage of you and you won’t hang for assault. Hard labor or the army, not a rope.”
Teer would admit he wasn’t entirely clear on the scope of punishment for crimes in the Unity. He was working on it—he’d picked up a recent copy of the legal code in Carlon—but he was a slow reader.
He did know that the Unity was generally willing to hang people over wardstones to charge their towns’ defenses, but they also had mines and mills that could always use cheap labor everywhere.
“You don’t know my town,” Lora told him quietly. “Or men like Carind. He owns a quarter of the barges that travel the Carahassee, Hunter. Won’t matter what he did. You take me back to Carlon and he’ll have arranged the speakers, the magistrates, everything.
“I’ll hang over the wardstone inside a tenday. If you think different, you’re a fool.”
She was right in one aspect: Teer didn’t know Carind and he didn’t know Carlon well. He wanted to think that Alvid, the town Hardin’s ranch had been next to, would have been fairer…but he’d been faced with that fate for attacking a Spehari without even injuring Kard.
“They’ve truth stones to find the lies and oaths to honor,” he argued, but he knew it was a weak argument. “Unity law ain’t perfect, but…”
Lora laughed at him.
“Don’t matter if they know the lies when one man controls the questions,” she snapped. “I’ve no faith in Unity.”
“Neither do I,” Teer said quietly. “But I have faith in the Merik and Zeeanans and others who make up the courts and magistrates. Let the Spehari drown in the ocean they came out of; I’ve faith in our people.”
“Our people?” she asked. “The slaves, you mean? All of us property, lesser, nothin’ before the feet of our betters? Men like Carind sold out our people for power and comfort. Anythin’ he does is legal—and defending yourself ’gainst him is a crime.”
Teer knew he was going to regret it, but he had to ask.
“Defending yourself?” he said quietly. He sighed. “Tell me, Lora. You may as well. I’m on watch…and I don’t figure you’re sleeping yet.”
“Why bother?” she snapped, turning her back to him as best as she could.
“Because I asked,” Teer said. “And I don’t have to.”
“Fine.” She stayed facing away from him, breathing slowly for a few moments.
“I’m not one o’ the workin’ girls at the inn; I figure you knew that,” she told him. “Da owns it; I run bar, keep books, clean, serve… Whatever’s needed, but I don’t go upstairs for shards. Only ’bout half the staff do.”
Teer waited. It sounded like it was all going to come out now.
“Some men don’t care,” Lora said. “They just tell a girl to come with them and add it to the tab. Most o’ those, I kick out. But Carind…he could break the inn. There’s been others before, mostly men who asked politely, but he could hurt my family.
“So, I went to his room with him.” She chuckled bitterly. “I was goin’ to charge him ten times what the other girls do, but he wouldn’t care. It wasn’t terrible, either.”
She fell silent and he waited again.
“Think he might have drugged me,” she admitted. “I didn’t mean to sleep there, but I did. And when I woke up…”
Kard’s warning to “guard your heart” echoed in Teer’s mind, but he couldn’t help being angry at Lora’s slow, disjointed description. Carind might not have deserved what happened, but he certainly didn’t sound like a good man.
“When I woke up, he was kneelin’ over me with some weird redcrystal thing,” she whispered. “It had legs, blades… He was stabbin’ two of them into my skin when I woke up.
“He didn’t figure I was goin’ to wake; I surprised him,” Lora guessed. “I was bleedin’, but I…I kicked him off o’ me—and he grabbed a knife. All I had was the redcrystal thing…so I hit him with it. Until he dropped the knife…and then I kept hittin’ him until the crystal shattered.
“Thought I’d killed him, so I ran,” she finally admitted. “By runnin’, I could save my family and the inn. Never…never really figured I’d make it.”
“You weren’t headed anywhere,” Teer said. “You were just running.”
She also wasn’t lying. He figured Lora was entirely capable of making up a story to yank on his heart, but somehow, he knew she wasn’t lying.
“Look!” she barked, pulling herself up enough to yank her shirt down and expose the top of her breasts. Even in the moonlight, Teer could see the ugly marks that confirmed he
r story.
She hadn’t properly treated them at any point, which made them look even worse. Two gouges half the size of a finger marked the skin just beneath her collarbone. They’d been scabbed into her undershirt, and yanking her clothes down had freshly torn them.
Blood seeped from the wounds, but the flesh around them was almost worse. The dark shade of her skin was paler there, like the color had been drawn out of it. Right around the wound, her skin looked almost frostbitten.
“I see,” he told her. The moons’ light would have been enough for anyone. “I also see that those need binding. Will you let me?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“What?”
“You have two stab wounds, Miss Lora,” Teer told her, as if she wasn’t aware of that. “They need to be cleaned and bound, but I’m not going to touch you more than I need to without your word.
“Will you let me bind your wounds?”
Lora was silent for several moments, then nodded.
“Fine,” she half-whispered.
Teer wasn’t Doka. He couldn’t mix together herbal poultices that were outright magical—and while he had some she’d left with him, he was keeping those for serious need.
He still had cleaning reagents and clean cloth. That was more that sufficient for Lora’s already-scabbed-over wounds. Cleaning them was necessary, to his mind. Left untouched, the wounds risked going foul.
Keeping her tied up, he carefully washed the two stab wounds, first with clean water, then with the reagent-laced cleaning solution. Lora winced away from both swabbings, suggesting that the wounds had already started going bad.
Cleaning away the scabs and dried blood made the strangeness of the injuries clearer. Her skin was normally closer to the shade of stained wood than anything else, but the color was missing around the stabs, and the skin on the edges of the wounds was ice-white.
By the time he was done and had carefully laid clean bandages over the wounds, though, she was more relaxed that he’d seen her so far, breathing slowly and heavily as exhaustion finally took its toll. Rather than waking her, he carefully tucked the ends of the bandages under her to provide pressure without needing to lift her.
Pulling the blankets back up over the sleeping woman, Teer considered her for a long few moments before rising and crossing to the ashes of the fire. He poked at them aimlessly for a few more minutes while his thoughts turned in circles inside his head.
Lora’s story made for one of the better reasons he’d ever heard for beating someone senseless. She could be lying to him, but he didn’t think so. There’d been redcrystal shards across the floor of the room, which fit her description.
And he knew, somehow, that she’d been telling the truth.
He also knew that she believed she’d never get a fair trial in Carlon. He figured her belief wasn’t proof, but…he also figured she knew the town better than he did.
“Iron Pillars,” he cursed, invoking the great artifice of the Spehari.
He’d failed to guard his heart, he feared. He believed Lora’s story, and that meant he couldn’t deliver her to a court that was going to murder her. She’d defended herself against some strange evil, an evil that had left her wounded in ways he’d never seen.
Teer kicked more dirt over the fire and focused on the strange direction sense that always told him where Kard was. This wasn’t his decision alone.
9
Kard was sleeping on bare ground, with his armored coat rolled into a likely-uncomfortable pillow. Even asleep, the illusion around him made Teer’s eyes hurt, but he knelt next to the El-Spehari bounty hunter.
“Wake up,” he said quietly. He figured he didn’t need much more—and the speed with which Kard was half-upright with a quickshooter leveled on him proved out his thought.
“Sea take you, Teer,” Kard said. “My watch already?”
“No,” Teer replied. “We need to talk, Kard. About Lora.”
The older man exhaled a long sigh, then nodded.
“Fine. I don’t suppose there’s tea?” he asked.
“Fire is out. I can start it again,” Teer offered.
“No point. All right.” Kard rearranged himself and his gear into a sitting position as he looked at Teer in the light of two moons. “Sit down, Teer. I’ll break my neck looking up at you.”
Teer obeyed, not even sure how to tell the story.
“You talked to her,” Kard guessed. “And now you’re worried.”
“How’d you know?” Teer asked.
“Only reason you’d wake me to talk about her,” the Hunter replied. “So. What’s the problem?”
“She’s terrified to go back,” Teer said. “She offered to have sex with me if I let her go.”
“Which you refused, obviously,” his partner said. “She’s a criminal, Teer. None of them want to go back.”
“She thinks they’re going to hang her. That Carind can swing the courts so it don’t matter that she defended herself. They’ll hang her over a wardstone, she says.”
“For murder, maybe, but Carind lived,” Kard said.
“Do you really think a Marked can’t get his attacker hung?” Teer asked, softly. Neither of them liked or trusted the Unity, but sometimes he felt that Kard had more faith in the Spehari’s government than he should.
And Kard had served in the rebellion against the Unity.
“No,” the El-Spehari admitted after a minute’s silent thought. “But that doesn’t change our mission, Teer. We’re not her magistrate. We’re her jailers.”
“So, we don’t care if her actions were needed?” Teer asked. “We bear no guilt for her fate?”
“You are still a child if you believe the stories the prisoners tell,” Kard warned him harshly. “What story has she told that has you so driven? It’s always easy for the women to claim rape.”
“And what if that claim is true?” Teer said.
“That is for magistrates and Wardkeepers with truth stones to decide,” Kard repeated. “We have no power to prove truth or lies, Teer.”
“I expected that Carind had forced himself on her,” Teer conceded. “But that wasn’t her story. She said she went to his bed willingly enough, but he drugged her and she woke to him pressing some kind of redcrystal thing on her, piercing her skin.”
He shivered.
“I saw the wounds, Kard,” he said. “Her skin around them was white. I’ve seen nothing like it.”
Kard was silent.
“That’s a new one,” he admitted, slowly. “She might have read about it in her books, though. She’s a clever reader, that one, and she has the weight of your heart. I’ve seen this story before, Teer, and watched young Hunters make foolish mistakes.”
“So, you figure Carlon’s magistrate’ll treat her fair?” Teer asked.
The night was silent.
“Man like Carind…he’ll buy the advocates, not the magistrates,” Kard admitted to the light of the moons, looking away from Teer. “Control the questions, limit the answers. Truth stone can’t speak to lies if the lies are never spoken.”
“So, she’s right,” Teer guessed aloud.
“Likely, but…” Kard trailed off, still looking up at the moons. “Those wolfen destroyed her gear, Teer. If we just let her go, she’ll die. Slower and more painfully than if they hang her. We can’t do it.”
“We can give her food and water and a map,” Teer argued. “Won’t cost us much.”
“You still do not fear the wilderness enough,” the El-Spehari snapped. “She would not make it to safety without help—help we cannot give. You see a dangerous line, Teer.”
“You would rather leave her to the wardstones than help?”
“No,” Kard admitted. “But we have no way to know if she speaks the truth. We have no truth stones. We have no voice at her trial. Her fate is what she set into motion herself.”
“So, for being attacked, we leave her to die?” Teer asked. “Could your magic not do all a truth stone does?”
The night was silent again, until Kard exhaled a long sigh.
“It is different,” he told Teer. “I can compel her to speak the truth, as I once tried on you. Your gifts protected you, but I have never met another Merik with them.”
“So, we can prove her words?”
“It is not a pleasant magic,” Kard warned. “And…it is also not a magic I can wield while shielding my appearance. I will not be lost to the Inquisitors for a criminal’s lies; do you understand me?”
Teer looked at Kard and swallowed. He was bound to the El-Spehari by both magic and loyalty, but this was a new side of the other man. He only vaguely knew what the Inquisitors were, but Kard clearly feared the Spehari who hunted his kind.
“I don’t,” he admitted.
“If I work this magic and she is lying, I cannot deliver her to Carlon alive,” Kard said flatly. “We will have to kill her and hope that Carind is prepared to pay for a corpse—because Wardkeeper Ashan will not.”
“You can’t be serious,” Teer replied. “She wouldn’t even have to see you.”
“Yes, she would. The magic requires it.” Kard shook his head. “You know there are trained Spehari mages hunting the remaining El-Spehari,” the El-Spehari warned him, his voice slipping into the precise phrasing of his Spehari upbringing. “The Inquisitors. That I was exposed by your actions in Alvid means I cannot risk leaving them another clue.
“I do not like it, but we have no choice.” Kard turned to look at Teer, meeting his gaze levelly. “So, I suppose I leave it to you. Knowing that I must kill her if she is lying, do you want me to confirm that she is telling the truth?”
“I know she is,” Teer said. “But you don’t trust me.”
“I do not entirely trust your judgment,” the older man said. “You are still very young. To trust easily at your age is expected, if unwise.”
“It’s not trust,” Teer told him. “I just…know.”
Kard arched an eyebrow and raised his hand, palm-up.
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