by Colin McComb
“Right. And why’d you bring these two along?” I said, gesturing to his companions.
“They came with me because they’ve been forced out of their homes. You know them, and you know what happened to their land and who owns it now. Now you know where they’ve got off to. Better this life than the almshouse.” They nodded, agreeing.
“All right. Say I sell everything and just move somewhere else.”
“And do what? Work on someone else’s farm for a pittance? Go and turn tricks in an Imperial brothel? You’re too proud to take direction on farming from someone else, and forgive my saying so, you’re too old for the whorehouses.”
“You ain’t earning yourself any points with me,” I said.
“I know, Dor, and I’m sorry. Look, I didn’t come here tonight thinking you’d make a decision right away. I just wanted to plant a few seeds, to turn a phrase.” He pushed back from the table and stood. “Just think about what I’ve said for a few days.”
“How do I get hold of you?”
“I’ll be around,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone what we’ve talked about here tonight, all right? I know I can trust you to keep quiet about me and these two. We don’t want to see bounty hunters after us just yet.”
“Fine,” I said, and I was a mite ungracious about it. “I’ll keep it in mind. You all have a good night now.”
They walked to the door and pulled on their hoods and masks again. Laz turned to me before he opened the door, and said, “Think about it.”
They disappeared into the night, and I sat down to do some thinking. But not too long, because I had to get up with the cattle before daybreak. I thought about what it’d take to survive as a farmer, about how much I cared for this life, and what my chances were of ever passing it on to my children—if Johnny ever got home to help me make some.
Two days after that, I went looking for Laz. A day after that I had sold everything but some clothes, a bedroll, a keepsake to Johnny’s memory, and my crossbow and hunting knife. The bank had no more claim on me or my husband, and I had no more claim to my land. As consolation, I had some coins keeping each other company in my purse, but barely enough to survive on my own. Years of backbreaking work had earned me about enough to stay at a poor traveler’s inn for a month. If by some stroke of luck Johnny came home, well, I’d hear about it and find him. I hoped he’d understand.
The first camp I slept in was in deep woods, about three miles from the caravan road. There were about twenty in the camp, and they kept as low a profile as they could. No smoky fires, no loud conversation, lookouts posted, and so forth. This was the place where they’d teach me woodcraft, mostly covering tracks and moving quietly across this terrain. I’d always been a pretty good shot with my crossbow, and I proved it to their satisfaction when I put three bolts within a handspan of each other from fifty feet.
Even though I was still angry about what’d happened to my farm, I didn’t really think about what I was getting into here. It seemed like games in the forest. I was hunting and training and hiding, but it didn’t seem like I was doing it for a purpose, if that makes any sense. The woman training us claimed to have been one of the King’s Foresters before she fled the service, a woman named Mishi. She knew her woodcraft, that much was plain to see. We could hide ourselves as carefully as we wanted, and she’d still beeline to our hiding spots. She tried not to get angry with us, but sometimes we’d catch her muttering about clod-stompers not being worth a goat’s piss in the woods. Still, every once in a while we managed to surprise her with something, and after a month or so of training under her, she grudgingly admitted that there might be some hope for us someday if we kept at it.
Mishi was taciturn at the best of times, never talked about herself. We all assumed that she was wanted, and that’s why she was out here, and it seemed kind of pointless to ask questions of a woman who clearly wasn’t going to answer them. We never did find out the truth.
She taught us how to lay traps, how to plan ambushes, and how to converge in force on a target and disappear. She knew how to move through thick underbrush and open forest equally, and she passed on what she could to us.
She wasn’t the leader of the group, though. There wasn’t really a single leader, more like a council. Laz was on it, of course, as the recruiter and spokesman, and he was convincing enough to us that he could have been the leader if he’d wanted—but he didn’t. The thing was, none of us in the camp wanted to be under someone else’s authority anymore, at least not an authority we couldn’t touch. We’d had enough of high-handed decisions and rulings that broke our backs. The council came up with ideas and put them to us, and we agreed or didn’t. It’s not like we had much to discuss anyway—mostly matters of camping, moving, and what we were going to do next. Every once in a while, we’d break camp quickly and quietly, and there was no discussion when we got urgent news. We did what needed doing and argued about it later.
Some of the others took lovers. Nobody got too attached, and we’d all have discouraged jealousy anyway—life was hard enough for us without people inventing their own problems. Some of the men liked to lie with men, and some of the women with women. On occasion someone might put the question to me, but I never felt that itch needed scratching. I was keeping true to Johnny.
After a while, we were told it was time to practice some of what we’d learned. Turns out the council’d had word of an unguarded merchant’s caravan (two carts, really, but they were loaded) coming down the way, and they wanted us to relieve it of anything valuable. We moved about ten miles from our camp, set an ambush in a hollow along the caravan road, hooded ourselves, and let the merchant—Crenshaw, one of the traveling merchants of the area—and his driver enter the ambush zone. We rolled a log across the road in front and behind them, and they surrendered as soon as they saw there were more of us than them. We didn’t even have to show off our full strength, and that turned out to be for the better as well. We let them go after threatening them a bit. If you’re going to be a brigand, you’ve got to threaten people.
Of course we celebrated our little victory. Even better, Crenshaw had a cask of beer in his cart, and that made for a merry night when we finally got back to camp. Let me tell you, it’s slow going, concealing the tracks of a twenty-person raiding party and their ill-gained treasure. But we made it back, and we tapped the cask, and for the first time since I lost the farm, I was happy. Or at least I was content, and that’s almost as good.
Over the next few months, we worked the area. Our raids didn’t go much farther than fifty miles from our camp, and we had a variety of other campsites. We hunted in the woods for meat, bargained with traveling farmers, and hit unguarded caravans hard. We didn’t do too many of these raids, though. We wanted to hit the wealthy, but we didn’t want to draw Imperial attention. Taking too many shots at the Empire’s toll roads was a sure way to pull the guards down hard, and sadly for us, too many of our targets took their goods by toll road only. The army was busy with its wars—either defending the Empire’s borders or invading others, depending on who you asked—but that didn’t mean law in the Empire’d broken completely. There were still plenty of guardsmen and peacekeepers, and we wanted to stay small enough to avoid their company.
Even more to the point, we were practically operating under the nose of Magus Underhill, and we wanted his attention least of all. We heard some of what he was doing for the people of his town—curing the sick, chasing off ruffians, and the like. He was turning into a hero to the Pippens, least as much as a magus could be. His floating metal balls were getting talked about. We didn’t want to be on the wrong end of those. So we kept our operations small.
Like I said, we worked the area for a while. Maybe a year. Maybe two. I won’t bore you with the details. Everything was working out just right into those months of ‘95. We were working well as a group, we’d had nothing but success, and maybe we were getting too cocky. That’s the only reason I can think of for the way that raid went so, so wrong.
/> We’d caught a five-wagon caravan at the ford. One of our in-town informants, a drunk named Corneil, told us it was coming, loaded with high-end luxuries like liquor and tobacco and textiles. The boxes were big, and we’d already arranged for a distant buyer because there was no way we could fence this stuff in the area.
We had the usual drill of four in front, four in back, covering the drovers, with the rest lying in wait. Most of our hidden raiders weren’t paying much attention—nothing had gone wrong before, so why should it now? We had the usual exchange of greetings and insults, and our victims started climbing down from the wagons. That’s when everything went wrong.
One of the boxes in the back of each wagon kicked open. Men armed with crossbows leapt out, and they fired at our guards. They were excellent shots, and five of ours went down with wounds that took them out of the fight. The carters drew bows of their own from under the seats, and our lazy watching was fatal for two more of our people.
We rained hell down on the carters, arrows and bolts striking flesh hard. But we made another mistake—we didn’t leave any of them alive for questioning. I mean, one of them was alive when we cleared the rise, but Kal, one of the newest recruits and eager to prove his mettle, took care of that before the rest of us could stop him. When we jimmied open a crate to make sure it was worth our dead bodies, we found litter. We’d been set up, and the only thing that had saved us was that our enemies didn’t know how many we had in our band.
We pulled everything from the road, stacking the dead in the wagons, and covered our trail. We headed to one of the caves deep in the wood and set up a funeral pyre for our companions. We didn’t want smoke marking our position, but we didn’t want to bury our dead for fear they might be identified. We used the litter from the carts as tinder, and we closed off the cave with heavy boulders, letting the fire burn itself out in its own time.
The bodies of our attackers, we left those out to rot in the open air. Let the crows take them. We didn’t care who found ‘em.
We regrouped at our first camp and sat down to talk about how this had happened. There was some speculation, and I finally broke my silence when they wasted fifteen minutes of talking without going anywhere.
“You’re not getting anywhere closer to the answer, and we’re not going to get it with this kind of talk,” I said. “We don’t know who hired these people, but we know who passed the message to us.”
“Corneil,” said Laz. His face was grim. Corneil had been a friend of his back in the day.
“Corneil,” I agreed. “He’s marked you. You and whatever family you’ve got in the area. Who else knew Corneil?”
A couple other hands went up: Whitey and Piller.
“All right,” I said. “You three ain’t going into town anymore. If you’re not wanted now, you will be when those hunters don’t show back up. In the meantime, I’m going to visit our friend Corneil, and I’ll want a couple volunteers to back me up. The rest of you, strike this camp, cover it up, and make for the second camp.”
“Who put you in charge?” asked Kal, angry.
I waited. Everyone looked at each other, and then back at me. I shrugged. “Anyone have a better idea on what we should do next? Anyone? No? All right, then. That’s why I’m in charge now. We’ll talk about what to do when we’re done with Corneil, but right now you’ve got to trust me.”
The meeting broke. I took Jensen and Tink with me to town. We got there just after sundown. Laz had told us that Corneil would be at the Green, the cheapest tavern in town. That’s where the two of them used to chum around even when they had money because they could drink longer, if not better.
Jensen and Tink sat on the porch outside, Jensen smoking and Tink whittling. They knew how to keep from being noticed without looking like they were trying to avoid notice, if you know what I mean, and they did it well that night. Me, I went into the Green to look for our man.
He was sitting in the corner, looking anxiously at the door, waiting for someone to come in. I figured I knew who: either his paymaster or his hunters. I went to the bar and got myself a mug of beer and took it to the table next to his. I drank quietly for a while, pretending not to see him fidgeting, until finally I said, “Think a drink would calm you down?”
“Thanks, miss, but I’m waiting for someone.”
“Wife?” I asked, with just the right hint of disappointment.
“What? No, no! No, I’m not married,” he said. “This is just business.”
“Then there’s no one to object to a quick drink while you wait, right?” Cruel to play on a drunk’s love for drink, but then what he did to my band wasn’t exactly charity. We got comfortable on the bench, I pretended to match him drink for drink, and I got him stinking wasted. After a while, he forgot that he was waiting for people, and he started wondering out loud if maybe we could go someplace “privater,” he said.
We left the Green, and Jensen and Tink followed us. As soon as we left the light of the lanterns hanging out front, they put a gag in his mouth and a bag over his head. We tied his hands behind him, fetched our horses, and rode out into the woods. He didn’t really even struggle. When we got back, we found that he’d passed out on horseback and soiled himself to boot. So we waited for him to sober up before we started in questioning him.
I won’t say how we got the information from him. For some reason he felt like he had to hold out, like he had some sort of loyalty to the people who gave him coin. We weren’t gentle, and he was spitting blood from the inside by the time we were done. He was bleeding from more cuts than I could count, his cheekbone was broken, making his face look more sunken, and I don’t want to remember what we did with his hands. I let Whitey, Piller, and Laz decide what to do with him since he used to be their friend, and they killed him quick. They felt bad about it, or maybe they just felt sorry for him. But hell, we were all soft then.
This is what Corneil told us: turns out Crenshaw’d been bearing us a grudge for losing his load to us so long ago, and the other merchants we’d hit didn’t feel much better about their losses. The magistrate told ‘em that they hadn’t suffered enough losses to justify calling out the militia, not when there were criminals near town to be caught and reavers to be dissuaded, nor when Mulvrain kept calling militia to bolster his forces. Magus Underhill told ‘em that he thought they should handle it on their own because he was working on healing Pippen’s sick, dealing with his peers, and making magic. So the merchant league went out and hired some bounty hunters and brought them in a few at a time, hiring them on as drivers and such to avoid suspicion.
All right. So the merchants had already gotten together to stop us, and they wouldn’t stop just because their first try failed to get us all. Likely they’d get some help from hunters and trappers in tracking us down, and from what Corneil said, they were taking our raids personally—as in, they’d keep hunting us even if we ran.
“That leaves us one choice,” I said. “We’re going to have to persuade those merchants we ain’t worth the trouble.”
“Persuade?” asked Laz. “Doreen, you mean kill ‘em.”
“Not necessarily,” I said, “but I wouldn’t mind getting some skin out of Crenshaw for his part in this. We can put them out of business, scare them off of trying to stop us, like that.”
“How?” They all asked me, and I told them.
Oh, Johnny... I never meant to turn into a person like this, but the banks just didn’t leave me a choice.
We got greedy, I guess.
“Remember the dead,” I said to Kal. He nodded tersely—he wouldn’t be caught sleeping on this ambush. He hadn’t been for the past three months, either, but we said it as a constant reminder to keep ourselves alert on these raids. I tested my crossbow’s string and stepped lightly out from behind the downed tree and into the road. I held my right hand out, waving for the driver to rein in. She didn’t have much choice, what with the tree blocking the road and all, but it’s always better to make them feel they’ve lost control right awa
y. It’s a little power game—rattles them and helps shake their confidence.
She was quick. Quicker than most of ‘em were. Not quick enough, though, and because of that she got buried with no one even knowing her name. The other three drivers behind her weren’t near as fast as her, and she had five arrows in her before they’d managed to pull half a blade between ‘em.
“You,” I said, pointing to the second driver, “whose convoy is this?”
“Squire Lohan’s,” he said.
I shook my head, and the arrows flew. When the barrage of arrows stopped, we cleaned up the mess and took the goods to our cache. We ate the oxen for dinner and stored the carts in a cave.
I hated doing this. Hated myself for doing it. We all hated it because sometimes we had to kill people we’d known before. But those were our old lives, lives we’d left behind when we took up outlawry, and there was no question that they’d have turned us in if they could. Hells, if I’d been in their places, I’d probably have done the same because I didn’t know desperate then. I knew it now. So we couldn’t break from our plan. It was simple enough, as plans go: we’d harass only the merchants of the coalition trying to kill us, and we’d drive them out of business and out of town. We’d keep ourselves out of town, beyond the jurisdiction of Magus Underhill. But Baron Mulvrain had taken another tenth of the men in his barony, and that meant fewer guards for the roads, and that meant that our enemies didn’t feel safe in West Beldin. They hired more guards for months on end, and for those months we laid low and let the extra expenses chew at them for a while. We let ‘em think that we were gone, and when the guards left, we came back. Hells, we couldn’t really work in winter anyway.