Paladin's Strength

by T. Kingfisher

  Draw your sword, whispered the tide. Draw your sword and strike and…and…she will block with the sledge, and if she strikes hard enough, it will drive your arm upward and the blade will break and if she hits your hand instead, it is your fingers that will break. Go for the face with your other hand, sacrifice the sword hand, get the eyes and then the throat.

  He did none of these things. He would do none of those things. Instead he slid his gaze down her arm to her weapon. “You are skilled with a hammer.”

  “Not particularly,” she said. “I use strength and reach to compensate for too many things. A swift opponent with a dagger could come up in my guard easily enough. But in the first shock, hardly anyone tries.”

  “And because you are large, people think you are slow.” He heard his own voice warming, just a little. He understood that all too well. “I thank you for your aid, Domina. I should not have assumed that you could not defend yourself.”

  She accepted that as it was meant, as a peace offering. “It’s all right. I did not exactly explain that I have a history of bashing people over the head.”

  “Do you?”

  “On occasion. I prefer not to. I am not a trained warrior, I have simply learned a few things, working alone.” She inclined her head. “There is a certain sort of man who feels that a woman larger than he is a challenge.”

  “Are the other women of your order warriors?”

  “Not in the sense that you mean.” Her voice grew cool again. Whatever she was hiding, he was getting too close to it.

  “You are not telling me all the truth, Domina.”

  “No.”

  The bald admission surprised him, and the Saint help him, twinged his sense of the absurd. The tide receded. He had always been at the mercy of his sense of humor. He huffed a laugh. “Well. At least you are not lying to me outright. What are you not telling me?”

  “I am not a spirit or a djinn, Captain Istvhan. Asking me a direct question will not get you answers if I choose not to give them.”

  He snorted. “And if I decide you are dangerous, and choose to leave you right here at the side of the road?”

  “Then you have made your choice.” She seemed unconcerned.

  “Answer me this honestly, I beg of you, Domina. Are you a danger to me or my men?”

  “No.” Her response was swift and immediate. “Never.”

  Strangely, he believed her. He would never step aside from someone asking for aid, particularly not a nun. But now he was starting to think that he could not turn away because of the mystery. What was going on? What secret was she keeping? And why?

  The sound she had made toward Galen had been very strange. Not a scream. Not a shout. Something else. His senses had prickled when he heard it and he had come at a dead run, just in time to stop Galen from continuing his attack.

  Looking down at the sledgehammer, it occurred to him for the first time that perhaps she might have held her own.

  Some secret technique? Could the nuns be skilled in some peculiar magic? You heard about such things sometimes, training grounds that purported to teach secrets both martial and mystical. Istvhan had never encountered one that was anything more than plain military discipline, but merely because he had never encountered it did not mean that it did not exist.

  Was what felt like anger coming from her actually something like his own black tide?

  He realized that he was staring, and that Sister Clara was meeting his gaze gravely. There was a bloody smear across her cheekbone. He had a sudden urge to lift his hand to her face and wipe it away.

  “Let me know when you decide to confide in me,” he said quietly.

  “Likewise,” said Clara. Their eyes met again, and his dropped first.

  “Boss,” said Galen.

  Istvhan started. His second-in-command had climbed out of the wagon. Clara was standing behind him, looking exhausted. Her hair fell into her eyes and she flipped it away impatiently. Saint’s teeth, how could he have thought she’d want him? She can’t want anything right now but to collapse.

  Come to think of it, I’m not much better, no matter what my cock is trying to tell me.

  “Boss, we can’t go any farther. Haller is in a bad way. The mules are completely wrecked. Brindle’s walking them, but they’re not going to go anywhere in a hurry. Let’s make camp here.”

  Istvhan sighed and looked both ways down the road. “I don’t see we’ve got any choice, do we? Let’s get up the big tent and we’ll treat the wounded. If there’s more of them, we’ve got no chance.”

  Clara cleared her throat. “There’s a stream just over the rise. Brindle can smell it. If you can spare someone, we’ll go get water.”

  He nodded. “Galen, go with her.”

  Galen’s eyes flicked over him briefly, but he nodded. Both he and the nun loaded themselves up with canteens and went forward, holding weapons free. Istvhan itched to go with them, but his duty was to protect the wounded. If there’s any bandits left, they’ll come for the wagon, where our supposed riches are.

  Anyway, Clara would no doubt be glad of the chance to be away from him. Galen might be an unpredictable berserker, but he wasn’t inclined to kiss unwilling women. Or willing women, for that matter.

  He shoved it all out of his mind and looked in on the wounded. Marli was still patchy and confused from the blow to the head. Colt had a broken arm, which wasn’t great but was at least a simple break and could be set and put in a sling. Nils had taken a couple of savage blows to the ribs but would heal. Haller…Haller was dying and there was no point in sugar-coating it. He knew it. Everyone knew it. The blow had taken him in the gut and it was going to be a long, miserable, horrible death. The stench of a gut wound was already starting to fill the wagon.

  “I’m giving you something for the pain,” Istvhan said. He rifled through the medical chest and took the tiny vials of poppy milk from their hidden box. Haller made a sound, barely a grunt, more of a modulated breath.

  He poured two vials of poppy milk down Haller’s throat. It was a recklessly high dose, but if Haller died a kinder death because of it then Istvhan would take the stain on his soul. The gods knew, there were enough stains there that one more would hardly be visible.

  Outside the wagon, he could hear Thorn and Brant talking. If any of the bandits had been left alive, Thorn had dealt with it. The irony of that was not lost on him.

  He rolled a blanket up and slid it under the dying man’s head, then went to go assist with the bodies.

  Eleven

  “I’m sorry,” said Galen.

  Clara paused, mid-way through filling the canteens. “Eh? For what?”

  “Earlier,” said the redhead, his voice clipped. “I threatened you. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have reacted as I did.”

  “No, but your reaction didn’t end up with a lot of people dead.”

  Shows what you know, my lad. “Well. Neither did yours.”

  “Only because Ist—the boss stopped me.”

  Clara gazed across the thin band of water. The stream was so small that it went barely twenty yards and then vanished into a mud puddle. Spring was entirely too generous a term for its source. I’ve seen seeps twice this size. Still, it’s water.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You did stop. That’s the important bit. And you would have stopped yourself if I hadn’t shouted at you.” Shouted was also entirely too generous a term, but there was no point in getting into details. She sank another canteen into the water and watched it slowly fill. “Look, Galen, we’ve been attacked by bandits and two of your men are dead and one is going to die pretty soon and my sisters are being taken somewhere in cages. I just can’t care about this very much.” She stoppered the canteen and started the next one. “Would it be okay with you if we just agree that we’re both sorry and then skip to the bit where we’ve forgiven each other and stopped feeling awkward about it?”

  He stared at her while his own canteen overfilled and spille
d over and then started to smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I would be okay with that.”

  “Thank St. Ursa.” She slung the last canteen over her shoulder where it banged against the others. “Let’s get back to camp.”

  Camp was also a generous term. They found a place with a rock face on one side of the road, and there they stopped. Everyone stood watches, even Clara. Istvhan did not protest. The situation had too much potential for disaster to stand on ceremony.

  “Do you think they’ll attack again, Captain?” Brant wrung his hands and looked around for a place to plant a soothing acorn.

  “I wouldn’t,” said Istvhan. “On the other hand, I wouldn’t have attacked the first time, either.” He glanced into the rapidly growing dusk, to where grey-headed vultures were beginning to form a gyre overhead. He was glad they’d gotten away from the bodies. He’d seen scavengers work on men plenty of times, but it was still grim business.

  “So they still might attack.”

  “They might do anything. They might grow wings and drop on us from above. You can’t expect people to act logically.”

  He heard a familiar snort. Clara ambled over, arms folded over her generous chest. Istvhan studied the sky. “There’s a great truth, Captain. For all we know, they’ve all gone mad from reindeer mushrooms.”

  “Reindeer mushrooms?” asked Brant.

  “Red ones with white spots. The Arral don’t keep reindeer, but they got the name from somewhere.”

  “I wonder if reindeer eat them.”

  “Possibly they make you think you’re a reindeer,” said Istvhan. He looked over at Clara. He’d kissed her and then yelled at her, and it all felt extremely awkward now. You have to look at her sometime. Don’t make it strange. It was your fault, not hers. She had a faint smile but did not look mortally offended. That was a good sign. “Saint only knows what those men were thinking. We’re too heavily armed for a casual attack. They must have thought we were carrying a great treasure. We just don’t know.”

  “We are carrying a great treasure,” said Brant. “But only to one who knows the worth of Emperor Oak.”

  “There’s your answer. The bandits are being paid by an extremely jealous distiller who plans to destroy the competition before you reach Morstone.”

  Brant glared at him and Istvhan wondered briefly if the man was taking him seriously. He does not actually seem to have a sense of humor, or perhaps it’s very well hidden… He glanced at Clara and saw that she, at least, was still smiling.

  Haller died that night without waking up again. That was a mercy, although the poppy milk probably had more to do with it. The wagon stank of shit and death. Brant opened the cloth flaps, not caring about possible damage to the barrels. Istvhan took the small camp shovel for latrines and set to digging as soon as it was light enough to see.

  The ground was hard and cold and stony. It was slow going but damned if he was leaving one of his men to rot on the ground for the vultures to pick at.

  Clara materialized out of the gloom, holding a buckler shield. It was a piece of potmetal taken off the bandits, but whatever its failings as a shield, it worked as a crude shovel. She began dragging dirt out of the hole with it.

  “I should probably say something about not expecting nuns to dig graves,” said Istvhan, “but I’m grateful for the help.” His knees were killing him. He’d done vigil on them, just as he’d vowed, and now it felt like there was a live coal under each kneecap.

  “Births and deaths are what the clergy are for,” said Clara. “I’m a lay sister, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned a few times, so they don’t usually ask me to shrive people. But I’ve dug my share of graves.”

  “And delivered your share of babies?”

  “No, that bit scares the crap out of me. I’m the person you send out to boil water so they don’t faint.”

  Istvhan chuckled. “And here I thought you weren’t scared of anything. My image of you is forever tarnished, Domina.”

  He was facing away from her but he could hear the smile in her voice. “Next I’ll have you admitting I’m not actually a real nun. But tell me, Captain, how many babies have you seen delivered?”

  “Six,” said Istvhan.

  “Six!”

  “Six.” They traded places and she began shoveling out the dirt that he had so painstakingly excavated. “I have many sisters and many cousins, as I said. I am no midwife but I am very good at patting a woman’s hand and telling her that she is doing marvelously well while she attempts to break my fingers.”

  “Better you than me.”

  “Yes, you do seem to have very dainty fingers.”

  She made a noise somewhere between outrage and amusement. “Dainty! I was hiding behind the door when they passed out daintiness.”

  “Compared to me, Domina, everyone is dainty.”

  She turned around to face him and held up a hand. He held his up to meet it and grinned wickedly as her eyes widened. Clara was a woman built to heroic scale, but his hands were still nearly half-again as large as hers. “Well,” she muttered. “Be damned.”

  “Oh, almost certainly.” He tackled another section of the pit. “You dig well for such a dainty person, though.”

  She mock-swung the shield at his head. “Don’t think I’m not willing to dig two graves, Captain.”

  “Just kill me before you start. It hardly seems fair to make me dig my own.”

  She snorted explosively, excavating more dirt with the edge of the shield. Istvhan absolutely believed that she had dug graves before. Not so much because of the digging, but because she was joking about it.

  The first one you dig in horrified awareness of your own mortality. The second one you add in gallows humor. By the third, you’re positively hilarious. The only exception he’d ever found to that was children. You couldn’t laugh while you dug a child’s grave. Oh, maybe you can, if you’ve dug too many of them, but the gods prevent me from ever acquiring that particular skill…

  “Did you know him well?” asked Clara. “Haller?”

  “No,” he said, grateful for the interruption to his thoughts. “He wasn’t even supposed to be here. The man he replaced, Potts, came down with a case of werkblight and we had to leave him with the healers.”

  “Werkblight. Huh.” Clara shoved more dirt out of the way. “We don’t see many cases up by us. More along the canal.”

  Istvhan nodded. Werkblight had been a terrifying scourge a dozen years back, popping up seemingly without warning, sometimes spreading, sometimes not. Somebody would break out in hives that rapidly turned into massive skin lesions when exposed to sunlight. A person standing right next to them might walk away unharmed, while a person thirty feet away might be the next victim. The usual rules of plagues did not seem to apply. People had panicked, blaming magic or gnoles or foreigners or bad air, setting buildings on fire, all the usual trappings of human terror in the face of disease. And then one day some priest of the Many Armed God with no healer training had figured out that it wasn’t even a plague, it was a severe allergic reaction to something or other, the healers worked up a treatment, and just like that, the fatal plague was relegated to a minor annoyance.

  “We carry the meds like everybody else. Got him dosed as soon as the first sore appeared. He was fine, but we left him at the nearest temple just in case, and picked up Haller as a replacement.”

  Clara sighed. “Isn’t that always the way?”

  Istvhan straightened up. His lower back grumbled at him. “I think this is as good as we’re going to get,” he said. “We’ll pile some rocks over top, but this ground needs picks, not shovels.”

  Clara nodded. She finished shoveling the last of the dirt out and let Istvhan help her out of the pit. She looked tired. Her hair had come frizzling out of its braid and there were blue shadows under her eyes. Her robes were streaked with the reddish clay of the grave. Istvhan wanted very much to put his hand against her face and tell her that it would be all right, that they would live through this. He stifled it becaus
e that was the sort of intimacy you did not take with nuns. Even nuns who had helped you dig a grave.

  Burying Haller was quick and utilitarian. Clara wasn’t judging. It had to be, with the possibility of more bandits showing up at any time. Privately, she thought that it was probably unwise to have stopped even this long, but she wasn’t going to say it. People needed to bury their dead, even mercenaries.

  They wrapped him in his own bedroll and lowered him into the grave. “Does anyone know if Haller worshipped any particular god?” asked Istvhan.

  No one did. One of the mercenaries spoke up. “He didn’t talk about home much,” he said. “None of us had worked with him before.” Apparently he thought that sounded too much like a criticism, so he added, “Good man, though. Kept his kit clean and did his share of work. Never tried to get out of it.”

  “And that’s as good a eulogy as you get in this line of work,” said Istvhan. He bowed his head. “All right. Gods, if any of you are kindly inclined to our fallen brother Haller, look out for him on the other side.” He nodded once, then grabbed the shovel and began filling in the grave.

  The other mercenaries murmured their own words and joined in. Brindle took one side of the pile of dirt and set it flying with his strong hind legs. In short order, the earth was moved and stones piled over the top of the final resting place of a mercenary named Haller.

  “Are the mules ready?” asked Istvhan, wiping red clay from his face. It had dried and flaked like blood.

  “A mule is eager to go,” said Brindle. The gnole’s stripes were stained orange and his fur had stiffened in short spikes that gave him a particularly fierce expression. “A gnole, also.”

  “Right. Let’s move. There’s a town two days from here, and if we make it alive, I intend to sleep for a week.”

  Clara looked back on that declaration with the weight of a promise. They made it to the town alive, but it took three days and all of them seemed to last a century.