He wheeled on Gestana and pointed the tip of his sword at the man. "The decision is yours."
"Take them!" shouted Gestana. "Now!"
About half of the guardsmen, including Gestana, came forward. The others hesitated, only briefly, but it was enough. Silverdun leapt from the saddle and drew his weapon, swirling it in the air. Raieve and Honeywell followed suit. Satterly remained mounted, looking frightened.
Gestana raced at Mauritane, sword and dagger drawn. He led with a clumsy attack, lunging low at Mauritane's belly, dagger up to parry an overhead blow. Mauritane riposted, pushing Gestana's blade out of the way with an ugly scraping sound and thrusting at his midsection. Gestana's sword lodged in the cobblestones at Mauritane's feet and he stumbled. Mauritane lodged his sword in Gestana's belly and dragged upward, putting all his strength into the effort. An artery in the guardsman's chest burst, gushing a fountain of blood onto Mauritane's fur cloak. Gestana grunted and choked. He waved his hands, trying to rear back. A thin trickle of blood escaped his mouth and Mauritane dropped him.
Only a few of the other guardsman made it into the fray. Some of the remaining men were stuck in place, watching Mauritane disembowel their leader. The rest of them, overcome with fear, took a few steps back, then ran. The militiamen, apparently rethinking the efficacy of their knives, followed them.
When only five of the guardsmen remained, desperately trying to wield their cumbersome poleaxes against Raieve, Honeywell, and Silverdun, who had closed with them as promised, Mauritane stepped into their sightline and waved his sword.
"Enough!" he shouted. "Drop your weapons and go home. You're not soldiers and you don't deserve to die like soldiers."
The fighting stopped and the guardsmen noticed their fallen leader as a unit. The fight went out of them and they ran, saying nothing.
"Come on," said Mauritane to his people. "Get mounted and go. Don't give them time to think about it." He dropped his cloak on the ground, exchanging it for Gestana's. "I grieve at your death," he whispered into Gestana's ear. "You were a worthy adversary." Using Gestana's dagger, he cut a length of the man's hair from the back of his head and tied it in a loose knot, stowing it in his sabretache.
"What's Mave doing here?" said Silverdun, pointing at the former guard, who retrieved his horse from the alley and joined them.
"Coming with us," said Mauritane. "That's the errand I mentioned earlier."
Mauritane climbed onto Streak with a sigh and led the way toward the gate. No one stood in their path, and the gate was already open when they got there.
They took the Hawthorne Road at a gallop, heading toward Crete Sulace. "They'll be expecting us to turn south toward Colthorn," Mauritane shouted. "So we'll take the Longmont Pass instead. They'll assume we're avoiding the prison."
They made Crete Sulace by nightfall. From the road they could just make out the torches moving along the perimeter walls; Mauritane imagined he could hear the bell for the Night Watch ringing over the wind that sighed through the hills and bent the thinnest branches of the gnarled trees in a ghost dance. In the sky, a waxy moon lit the ground with an almost witchlit glow. There were no other riders on the trail. They were not being followed.
Mauritane slowed to a trot and fell back among the others. "We'll keep going for another few hours. Once we're through the pass, we can cut south and camp in the foothills there."
Satterly groaned. "I thought we were staying at an inn tonight."
"Not anymore," said Silverdun. "When the good folk of Hawthorne recovered their wits, they no doubt sent message sprites to Colthorn and Miday. We'll have to cross the river on the other side of the Longmont Pass and continue south around Miday. That means sleeping on the ground."
Satterly furrowed his brow. "Can't you just glamour us into a caravan of desert gnomes or something? Then we could go wherever we want."
"A glamour would be detected around here," said Mauritane.
"In these parts," said Silverdun, "only criminals wear glamours. They'll have deglamouring wards at every guard post. Better to just avoid cities altogether for a few days."
"Looking forward to a comfortable bed, Satterly?" laughed Raieve. "A few nights on the ground will do you some good."
"Ah," said Silverdun. "There's something else." He looked at Mauritane with a scowl on his face.
"What is it?" said Mauritane.
"In all the excitement I forgot to mention it. When we were arrested by the constabulary, the first thing that odious man did was take my purse."
"How much of our traveling money was in that purse?" said Mauritane.
"All of it," Silverdun sighed. "In addition to being fugitives, we are now destitute as well."
The wind tore at them as they crested Longmont Pass. It had shifted as they'd climbed toward the narrow opening and now pressed at their faces, feeling its way into their clothing and their ears, noses, mouths. They clutched at their cloaks and bowed their heads. The horses fought every step of the way. Mauritane led them single file, taking the worst of it on himself.
Beyond the pass, the land flattened and gently descended toward the River Ebe, a silver strand glowing gently in the distance. The road wound downward toward the river through a dense clutter of scrub brush, bent trees, and smooth rock formations that were twisted and warped in impossible shapes. Beyond the Ebe, past the horizon, lay the Contested Lands and, somewhere past them, the walled city of Sylvan.
Mauritane rode a bit down the trail until the wind calmed enough for conversation. "Did any of you get spellrested while we were in Hawthorne?" he asked.
They all shook their heads. "We were busy being apprehended," said Raieve.
Gray Mave raised his hand, the gesture barely visible in the darkness. "I had a few hours of sleep last night. I don't mind taking the first watch."
"Well, you are Low Chief of Watch," said Silverdun, sounding tired. "I suppose it's fitting."
They rode off the trail and followed a rocky declivity that paralleled a shallow stream. The stream rounded a short outcropping that would protect well enough from the wind and would hide the light of a small fire from the road.
With the horses watered in the stream and tied, Honeywell broke out rations of dried meat and flower petals and passed them around while Mauritane built a fire. "I picked these daisies up in Hawthorne," Honeywell said.
Satterly passed on the daisies, contenting himself with the dried venison that had served as the basis for any number of meals at Crete Sulace. After a day of painful riding and the scene in Hawthorne, he found himself ravenous, if a bit queasy.
After a few minutes, Honeywell, Silverdun, and Raieve lay beneath their cloaks and turned their backs to the fire. Eventually, Honeywell began to snore. Gray Mave took his sword and climbed to the top of the ledge above them to keep watch.
Satterly looked at Mauritane over the fire. Mauritane was staring into the flames, pulling strands of his long hair out before him and twisting them into a braid.
"I'm sorry," Satterly said after a long pause.
"For what?" asked Mauritane, not looking up.
"For freezing today, in Hawthorne. I just sat on my horse like an idiot while you guys did everything."
Mauritane looked briefly at him. "I didn't recruit you for your fierceness in battle," he answered after a breath.
"Well, that's just the thing," said Satterly, wringing his hands. "I felt totally useless back there. I just hope that's not an indication of things to come."
"You'll prove useful yet, I've no doubt," said Mauritane, returning to his task.
Satterly watched Mauritane create his victory braid, taking the knot of Gestana's hair from his sabretache and weaving it carefully in with his own in an intricate pattern. "How many braids do you have?" Satterly said.
"It's my fifty-first kill," said Mauritane, without altering his expression. "Each of these," he said, holding out a row of braids on the left side of his head, "counts for five."
"You just… killed him," said Satterly.
"What?"
"You just ran him through. That guard in Hawthorne. You didn't even think about it. Doesn't it bother you?"
Mauritane looked at him quizzically. "What did you expect me to do?"
"I don't know. I mean, couldn't we have talked our way out of it or something?"
"Would you rather be sitting in a cell in Hawthorne right now, awaiting your execution?"
"They wouldn't have. I mean, they would have contacted the prison and…"
Mauritane raised an eyebrow. "And Crenyllice would have told them that we were escaped prisoners, just as they suspected. They hang escaped prisoners in the courtyard by the South Tower."
"I just can't believe that you killed that guy. Don't you wonder about who he was? What kind of person he was? What his life was like? Don't you ever feel bad for their families or anything?"
"Life is fragile," said Mauritane. He returned to his braiding.
Satterly sat and thought for a while, watching individual fingers of flame merge and separate in the fire.
"I don't know if I can do that," said Satterly. "I don't know if I can just kill someone like you can."
Mauritane tied the braid off with a length of silky black thread that shone in the firelight. "Then pray to your god that you never have to," he said.
Chapter 10
an empty jar/the danger of talking trees
The next day dawned gray and cold, smelling of dissipating smoke and old ice. Mauritane rose at the first dim light and climbed the embankment to the bluff where Raieve kept watch. She sat perfectly still, staring into the distance beyond the River Ebe. In the growing light the valley was barren and inhospitable, gray and white slopes marked with evergreen stands and the bizarre rock formations that sprang irrationally from the otherwise even ground. Far beneath them the river seemed frozen in time, its green ice dull and somber.
Mauritane sat next to her and looked out over the valley, following her gaze. "You fight well," he said, for lack of anything better.
Raieve turned her head slowly and eyed him sharply. Years in the sun had dusted freckles over the bridge of her nose and drawn thin lines from the corners of her crystalline blue eyes. Her hair moved in the morning breeze, wanting to take flight but refraining.
"For a woman?" she countered, eyebrow cocked, daring him.
Mauritane shrugged. "A dead man isn't any less dead if it was a woman who ran him through," he said.
Raieve thought this over, then laughed out loud, a short husky laugh. "True," she said.
"How many women, then, do you have in the Royal Guard?" she asked.
"None."
There was the eyebrow again. "Aha. Why not?"
"None have applied. It's considered unladylike."
Raieve gestured to herself with mock courtliness. "Am I not the very picture of a noble lady?"
Mauritane grinned, the first time he could remember doing so in months. "Would you want to be?"
Raieve leaned in toward him but kept her eyes fixed on the valley below. "I do not think you are a man who has much truck with noble ladies."
Mauritane winced. His wife the Lady Anne-a noble lady if ever there was one-waited for him back in the City Emerald while he sat flirting with a woman he barely knew. It was wrong.
He stood, clapping his hands together against the cold. Raieve stood as well, sensing something amiss but saying nothing.
"How did you come to be at Crete Sulace?" Mauritane asked, regarding her with what he hoped was a professional distance.
"You read my file, certainly," she said, glaring. "You know why."
"Reports contain facts, not motivations. I know what you did, but I don't know why you did it."
Raieve picked up a handful of rocks and hurled one over the edge of the bluff. "I was chosen by my clan as an emissary to your government. In the wake of the Unseelie invasion, the Concordat crumbled, leaving the clans to fend for themselves. Many of the clans were left with nothing after the war and turned to raiding for survival. Others have taken advantage of the chaos to settle old grievances."
She hurled another stone, watching it fall before she continued. "The Heavy Sky Clan wishes to reform the Concordat, but without weapons and battle thaumatics we don't stand much of a chance. We believed," she paused to chuckle ruefully, "that the Seelie government would see the value in supporting a unified Avalon. Trade between the two worlds has slowed to a trickle, and more than one Fae merchant has been slaughtered within a day's ride of the Gates."
"Did you speak to the Fae ambassador at Tiripali?"
Raieve laughed. "Oh, yes. In one of his rare moments of sobriety. He intimated that the Seelie government did not take sides in foreign disputes but that I was free to discuss the matter with the Foreign Office in the City Emerald. But only after taking any number of bribes.
"The Travel Office, however, refuses to take Avalona currency as payment; they require their fee in gold. I sold a portion of my ancestral lands in order to raise the money.
"In the City Emerald I waited for three weeks for an appointment with an Assistant Minister of the Foreign Office, a conniving bastard named Olifen. That appointment required even further bribes."
Mauritane sighed. "I knew Olifen, though not very well. He is a political appointee, a nephew of some lord or another. A nobleman's son dallying in governance. A fool."
"You don't seem to think much of noblemen."
"Not the incompetent ones. What transpired between you and Olifen?"
"He sympathized. He made a show of raising money for arms and claimed to have contacted the Seelie Army for the loan of a detachment of battle mages. Then one evening he invited me to his private apartments. There was a bright red dress laid out, a bottle of rose wine. He told me that all would be arranged, but that I-how did he put it-might "show my gratitude" first."
"And you refused."
Raieve bristled. "Of course! Politely, at first, with all the decorum I could muster. I was the emissary of my people. Lives were at stake. For a moment I even considered it. Given a bit more time to consider his proposal I might even have accepted it. But he forced himself on me and I… reacted."
"You slit his throat," said Mauritane, without emotion.
"I did," she said, hurling the last of her stones, this one farther than the others. "A detachment of the guard arrested me. I was tried in the Aeropagus, if you can call it a trial, and within two days I was in Crete Sulace, sentenced to live out my natural life there."
"It could have been worse. Had you not been a foreign emissary they would have had you drawn and quartered."
"Small comfort," she said.
She looked at Mauritane, her eyes searching him. "You're a queer one," she said. "Not much like the other Seelie I've met."
"Yes," he said, looking back. "And you see where it's gotten me."
They stood there, silently, for a long moment. Mauritane felt a sudden, unexpected desire to reach out for her and draw her close to him.
"It's getting light," she said, finally breaking the spell that was of an older kind of magic than is taught in universities. "We should be on our way."
Silverdun was stirring, not yet awake. The others were still asleep, huddled beneath the thick cloaks they'd purchased in Hawthorne. Streak stood tied near the tiny stream, nodding and chuffing at Mauritane urgently.
Mauritane took a handful of oats from a saddlebag and held them beneath the horse's nose. Streak's thick tongue darted expertly and took the entire handful in a swallow.
"Many thanks, master. Oats are delicious."
"You're welcome." Mauritane patted the horse's neck.
"Master, a man came to me last night. He put his forelegs in my saddlebag. It was not you, master. His smell was not yours."
Mauritane stopped cold. "Was it one of the men traveling with me?"
"Master, there are many smells. I do not know them all. It was not the female smell."
Mauritane looked at the two bags on Streak's left side, casting a glance
at the camp, where no one had yet to rise. He quickly inventoried their contents. Everything was in place: fish hooks, whetstone, flint, and silver. The extra dagger remained in its sheath.
He crossed in front of the horse to the right side, realizing there was only one thing he had that the others did not, only one thing worth taking. He opened the front leather pouch and counted his message sprite jars. One of them was missing.
Quietly, Mauritane circled the camp, searching for the empty jar. He whispered an old finding spell his mother had taught him, a little rhyming cantrip in Elvish that would have made him chuckle under other circumstances. After a few moments he felt a slight tug that drew him across the stream and down a steep slope to one of the strange rock formations, this one vaguely shaped like a woman's body, her arms stretched above her. At the foot of the formation was the missing sprite jar, its lid lying on the ground near it, the sprite long gone, its message and recipient unknown. Mauritane collected the jar and screwed on the lid, placing it in the pocket of his cloak.
He made his way back to camp to find Silverdun awake and washing his face in the stream. "Where did you get off to?" he said, stretching and groaning from a night's sleep on cold ground.
Mauritane looked up and saw Raieve still perched above the camp, her face like chiseled stone.
"Just getting some air," said Mauritane.
It was not a pleasant morning. Neither Mauritane nor anyone else had slept well and the cold which had at first been a nuisance was now becoming a serious problem for all but Gray Mave, who seemed immune to it. The horses were slow to move and stubborn, reacting against their exposure to the elements and their rationed foodstuffs. Keeping enough food on hand for six working horses traveling over frozen soil was an irritating reminder of troop movement tactics from Mauritane and Honeywell's Academy days. Little was said as they mounted and began their descent into the Ebe River valley.
The river always seemed near to hand, but through some trick of geographical perspective, it appeared to grow no nearer, even after a full morning's ride. Regardless, Mauritane's spirits began to lift as the sun rose, taking some of the chill from the air. The wind shifted to their backs. Mauritane began to relax in his saddle, letting Streak find his own way, and the others fell in line behind him. For several hours they simply rode, without speaking, letting Streak guide them toward the ever-distant Ebe.
Midwinter Page 8