by Court Ellyn
He rolled low. The chain emerged from thin air, cutting free of the veil, and whirred inches over his head.
“What do we do?” cried Tarsyn.
“Back to back!” Laral ordered. “Kalla!”
They met shoulder to shoulder, blades poised outward, a deadly pinwheel spinning slowly, slowly. Drys confronted the wolf-master, but where was the other? Laral searched the ferns for unnatural movement, patches of sun for wayward shadows.
Drys rolled to his feet and his arms and face disappeared as they crossed into the veil. The wolf-master brayed, but the war cry ended on a flat, blunt note. He reappeared suddenly, the veil gone, his entrails spilling under him. Drys leapt away from the toppling corpse, armed with a dagger taken from the ogre’s own belt.
“Where’s the other one, damn it?” Laral demanded.
Drys whirled, searching, then raced toward the stream, short legs and stocky arms pumping. “Shimmers! I see you!”
Perhaps in a panic, the slender ogre dropped the veil. He ran only a few strides ahead of Drys. Tarsyn darted after them, then Kalla. Laral sheathed his sword and followed at a more leisurely pace. By the time he caught up, they had the ogre surrounded in the streambed. It knelt in the water, hands raised, pleading in that guttural tongue.
“Drys, ask him where the prisoners were taken.”
“She,” Kalla said. “We think this one is female.”
“Ask her, then.”
Drys glowered. “Just because I can see them doesn’t mean I speak their damn language.”
Laral scrubbed a hand over his face. Right, this creature was no help. He stepped into the icy water and unsheathed his sword. The ogre loosed a shrill cry. One stroke put an end to it. Tarsyn jumped away from the spray of blood. Drys watched the head swirl in an eddy, then climbed out of the water. He and Laral started for the horses. The animals had scattered across the valley. Kalla pursued the men. “Why did you do that? She was no threat.”
“No?” Laral’s long stride forced Kalla to double-time it. “If she owned anything resembling loyalty to her own kind, she would’ve told others. The last thing we need is a war band chasing us.”
“But—” There were no ‘buts.’ Kalla resigned herself to disgruntled silence.
Laral caught Tarsyn’s black pony, met him on the trail, and extended the reins. Tarsyn took them with his good arm. His left sleeve was shredded and slick with blood.
“Let’s see it,” Laral said.
Tarsyn tried to tuck his arm out of sight. “It’s nothing.”
“I’m not asking.”
Tarsyn raised his arm. The flesh inside the sleeve was just as badly torn. “I know, I know, stupid bastard, right?”
Laral turned and waved for Kalla. She brought her horse and the pack of medical supplies. “Go hold it in that cold water for a bit.” While Tarsyn was dunking his arm in the stream, Laral fished out a jar of antiseptic salve, a box of silverthorn powder, a needle and thread, and a roll of bandages.
“You don’t have to do this,” Tarsyn said as Laral began cutting away the ruined sleeve. “I won’t be a bother.”
“You mean to stitch it up yourself?” Laral snapped. Once cleaned of blood, the punctures didn’t look so bad, but the tender part of the muscle near the elbow was opened by long, jagged gashes. Laral debated whether to stitch the flaps of skin back together or snip them off.
Tarsyn drew back. “Maybe Kalla should…”
“Hush,” Laral muttered as he concentrated on threading the needle. “You don’t squire for arrogant knights like Kelyn Swiftblade without learning how to stitch a few wounds. He pissed off a woman once. She left his face a bloody mess. Whenever he looks in the mirror, I doubt it’s me he thinks of, but it’s thanks to me his scar isn’t worse. Vain bastard. Always was. Hold still.”
Tarsyn took another mouthful of the silverthorn powder, just to be sure he was sufficiently numb, then turned his face away.
Sometime later, Drys came hobbling back, leading his horse and cursing the animal to the Abyss. “This pile of dog fodder was halfway back to Locmar. He musta tripped on something, and now look. Limping. I’ll be lucky if he ain’t lame completely.”
Laral didn’t look, but Kalla fussed appropriately over the horse’s leg, easing Drys’s mood. In no time at all, he had forgotten the horse and was leaning over Laral’s shoulder, inspecting Tarsyn’s wounds. “Scared of a spider but picks a fight with a wolf.”
Tarsyn laughed.
“Do you mind not breathing down my neck?” Laral said as he tied off another stitch. “Keep an eye out for more elk hunters, why don’t’cha?”
Drys’s shadow receded. “Keep an eye out, keep an eye out,” he grumbled as he went.
Laral smeared salve over Tarsyn’s forearm, then wrapped it in linen. “Well, it won’t be pretty, but you’ll have one swell scar to show Lesha. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.”
“Are you saying—”
Laral rose before Tarsyn could spit out his question, shoved the medical supplies back into the saddlebag and bellowed, “We lost hours of daylight, people. Let’s move.”
They rode cautiously through the trees. As the trail climbed, spruce and aspen gave way to black fir. The pillars of evergreen grew shorter as the afternoon waned. Soon the trees were no taller than shrubs. Near sunset they ended altogether, and bare rock thrust skyward to mate with the heavens. Dark clouds rolled over snow-laden summits. Thunder echoed. “We’re gonna get wet again,” Drys groused, breathless. “It’s a cruel jape, work this hard only to end up soaked and freezing.”
Camp, they decided, was better set up a quarter mile back, where the trees were large enough to offer shelter. “No fire tonight,” Laral said. But Kalla tugged his sleeve and nodded toward Tarsyn. He moved slowly, wincing as he tried to unsaddle his pony one-handed. Laral recognized an odd color about his cheeks and feared he was turning feverish. “All right,” he told Kalla. “A small one.” While she built the fire, Laral cut branches from the fir trees and piled them in a circular wall, to keep the light from traveling too far.
Hard biscuits and salt pork made the rounds, then Kalla tended to Tarsyn. He choked down a mouthful of silverthorn. “I wished it was poppy wine,” he said.
“Hurts that bad?”
He shrugged, playing tough, and hunkered down inside his bedroll. “I’ll be fine by morning.”
Across the fire, Drys glowered. “Hey, Kalla? Those ogres mighta cracked my skull with that chain, and you’re fussing over that kid.”
She shoved the medicines back in the pack and retorted, “I doubt your skull would crack if one of these mountains fell on it.”
Tarsyn chuckled softly. The bright note of laughter tried to rise from Laral’s belly as well, but he didn’t give in to it. He curled up inside his blankets and cursed his chain-mail. Boiling hot in the lowland sun and cold as ice in the highlands. It was rusting beautifully. He needed Haldred to roll it in a barrel of sand. Or Sedrik. Or Andy.
A whimper broke through vague nightmares. Laral stirred, listening for wolves or some strange nightbird. He heard it again, coming from the bedroll. Tarsyn twitched and muttered. The words, swathed in sleep, sounded like pleas for help.
Laral eased out of his blankets and shook the boy’s shoulder. He startled awake, eyes wild. “Wolves! They’re everywhere.”
“Shh. There are no wolves.” Laral pressed a hand to Tarsyn’s forehead. Fire had unfurled inside his skin. Laral fetched the pack of medicines, laid everything out in the dwindling red light of the campfire. Nothing for a fever.
In the meantime, Tarsyn freed his wounded arm from the bedroll and unwrapped the long strip of linen. With a sigh, he stuttered, “B-better. They were t-too tight. It will be all right n-now.”
Laral knew how to wrap a wound. The linen hadn’t been too tight this afternoon.
“I c-can’t make a fist.” Tarsyn clenched his jaw against the chills. “S-soon as I get warm, I’ll be all right.”
“Stay bundled up,” Laral sa
id, tucking the bedroll tight around his shoulders, then added another stick to the embers. Resin popped and flared with white flame. While he poked at the red coals with a twig, he came to terms with a new plan. They had to take Tarsyn back to Locmar. Climb the same damn mountains again. Fall farther behind the prisoners and their captors.
“You’re good people,” Tarsyn muttered. He lay curled on his side, shivering and watching the flames flicker. “Haven’t known too many good people. Lesha is lucky to have you for a father.”
The words were a stab to an open wound. His beautiful little girl with pink ribbons in her golden hair, and what could he do to save her?
“I’m told my father was a horse trader from Mahkah,” Tarsyn confessed. He spoke more quietly than the hissing flames. “Once, I heard someone say the Mahkah-pi aren’t even human.” More audibly, he asked, “What do you think?”
“I think you shouldn’t worry about it tonight and go to sleep.”
“I need to know what you think.”
Laral stifled a sigh. “I saw a man from Mahkah once. He was part of the embassy that delivered the king’s new horse to Brynduvh.” The dark man had stood straight and stoic as he held the reins. His broad face was so still and unimpressed by the grandeur of the royal city that Laral had wondered if he wore a mask carved from mahogany. The stallion clearly trusted him with all his great, proud heart, stepping forward when the man did, stopping when the man did. The reins were for show. It seemed that only men from the north needed reins to control such an animal. As soon as Arryk approved the stallion and claimed the reins for himself, the Mahkah-pilo turned and left, with neither a word nor a bow. Laral had the distinct impression that, if anyone bothered asking, the man would explain that it was beneath him to speak in such barbarous company. “I thought him proud. Clean. Noble. Extraordinary. He knew no fear. And, for that, I do not think I would want to face him in battle.” Yet Laral knew of highborns living near the Galda River who found great sport in slaughtering entire villages of Mahkah-pi.
“Clean?” Tarsyn chuckled. “You thought him clean?”
Laral shrugged. “You heard the Mahkah-pi aren’t human. I heard they’re filthy. That man had been fastidiously clean. I felt shabby in comparison. I believe I even checked my fingernails.”
“So you admired him?”
“I did.” It wasn’t Tarsyn’s heritage that Laral held against him.
The youth nodded. “My mother must’ve thought the same. At least, I hope she did. I hope it was by choice. Who wants to be the offspring of a rape? But those aren’t the rumors I hear. I hear she was a woman of lax morals, that she collected men like exotic birds. Somehow that doesn’t fit her.”
“Don’t you know her well enough to know?”
Tarsyn snorted. “We’ve written letters here and there, but I haven’t seen her in ten years. Even when I was a boy, my audiences with her were rare. Audiences, can you believe that? My mother, and they were called audiences. Always supervised, too, as if I were a scorpion that might poison her. I dreaded those visits. She’d cry. The whole time, she’d cry. And I knew it was my fault. It was my fault she never left the castle, my fault that people gossiped about her, my fault that her husband took mistresses because he wouldn’t have her in the same room with him anymore, my fault that she cried.”
“What if she cried because she loved him?” Laral said before he realized he meant to. “The horse trader, I mean. And sight of you reminded her.”
A frown pleated Tarsyn’s brow. “That’s kind of you, m’ lord. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Silence descended between them as the fire crackled and the moon crept past. Tarsyn’s voice swam out of the dark at last, groggy now. “Lesha is the happiest person I ever met. You know what I noticed about her first? Er, never mind. You don’t want to hear that.”
Laral bristled, though he couldn’t decide if it was because Tarsyn was right or because he was being presumptuous. “Tell me.”
After a while, Tarsyn admitted, “It was her laughter.”
That, Laral hadn’t expected. The classic line was ‘her eyes,’ but it was rarely the truth.
“At the Turning Festival. You know how crowded, how chaotic those banquets are, and there I was gossiping about people I didn’t know, faking that stupid nasally laugh that courtiers seem to think behooves their mediocre rank, and over it all I heard the sound of true happiness. Everything seemed to shatter. Several people turned to look, not all of them in approval, and I remember thinking, ‘That poor girl. She’s disgraced herself.’ But Lesha didn’t notice any of them. She was on your arm, and absolutely invulnerable. All of a sudden, she was the only person at the banquet. The only one.” Tarsyn shuddered mightily, clenched his teeth as muscles cramped. How flushed and shiny his face was. If only he’d break into a sweat. “I’m sorry, m’ lord. I shouldn’t have told you. I’m out of my head. My eyes feel funny. Like aching glass.”
“Close them.”
He did. “We’ll find them. Tomorrow. We’ll find them.”
“Don’t worry about tomorrow. Just get some sleep, son.”
By morning, clouds had settled over the mountains, hiding the dawn and casting a damp blanket over everything. Gray shrouds of mist masked the trees beyond the outskirts of camp. Tarsyn shivered in his bedroll. His forearm had swelled to twice its normal size and was an alarming shade of red. Several of the bite marks were white with pus. Kalla poured some concoction down his throat, while Drys tried to convince him his arm didn’t hurt as bad as he imagined. Laral saddled the horses. “We’re going back,” he announced.
“No!” Tarsyn cried. “You have to find them! I’ll stay here. Right here. You can come back for me, once you’ve found them.”
“The ogres will eat you before then. Get up. Drys, get him to his feet.”
“But it’s Lesha and the others who matter,” Tarsyn argued. “What do I matter? I’ve been a burden all my life. I won’t be a burden. I’ll stay here…”
Drys dragged him out of the bedroll, propped him against a tree. Tarsyn swayed and clung to the trunk as if a mighty current was trying to sweep him away.
Kalla joined Laral as he fastened the buckles on Tarsyn’s pony. “Are you sure?” she whispered.
“If we go on, we’ll kill him.”
“If we don’t, we may never find Bethyn and the kids.”
Laral hadn’t slept a wink, tormented by that possibility. “We could split up.”
Kalla shook her head. “One party would have to do without Drys’s eyes. No, we stay together, whatever you decide.”
Laral laid his forehead against the pony’s neck. How was he to make such a decision? The fact was, he couldn’t. One way or the other, he would have something he’d regret for the rest of his life. The air drooped, weighted, motionless, as if the mountain held its breath, waiting. The mist brushed against his face, and he glanced around the clearing for a ray of light, a bird on the wing, anything that might show him which way to go, but the mist was a gray wall, blinding him.
There was only Tarsyn’s voice. “Please, m’ lord…”
Laral approached him, gave Drys the thumb so he and the boy could speak in private. “Listen, we’re not leaving you. That means we either go back to Locmar or we continue on, and I can’t promise that we won’t end up burying you in a shallow grave along the trail. It’s your life in the balance. What should we do?”
Tarsyn stumbled sideways, blinking against a wave of dizziness. Laral caught him by the shoulder. Tarsyn shook him off. “I told you, I don’t give a shit about my own life. It’s their lives in the balance, Lesha and the others. We cannot stop looking.”
Laral glanced at Kalla, at Drys. It was Drys who confirmed with a nod.
They bundled Tarsyn into his gaudy red coat, wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, and hoisted him into the saddle. Laral rode alongside him to hold him upright. He managed fine by himself for a while, but before they had climbed to the top of the pass, his head started to bob. Laral clench
ed a fistful of blanket so Tarsyn could sag and sleep.
The trail was barely wide enough for both horses to walk abreast. To the left, the mountain reared up into the clouds; to the right, it dropped away into a canyon swimming with rivers of mist. The bottom could only be guessed at. The pony and the chestnut grew tired of the close quarters and began snapping at each other. Laral’s nerves got the better of him; he dismounted, handed his reins to Kalla, and walked alongside Tarsyn instead. The path was bloody steep; his shins ached. Scree slid and rolled under the soles of his boots. The horses didn’t fare any better. They were soon blowing gouts of air, their sweaty necks pumping hard.
“For Goddess’ sake, do you see the top?” Laral called to Drys.
“In this fog?”
A pebble bounced down the mountainside, struck the pony in the shoulder. It shied, pressing Laral toward the ledge. He swore, hurried to step in front of the pony, and quieted it with soft crooning sounds.
“Laral, what’s wrong?” Kalla asked, catching up.
Another pebble rolled down the cliff, stopped amid the trail a few feet ahead. Laral tried to peer up through the mist. “Well, if the mountain collapses, you’ll get to test your theory about Drys’s head.”
Kalla chuckled.
Taking the pony by the bit, Laral started climbing again. Shouts and a rain of stones descended from the clouds. The pony reared, dumping Tarsyn like a sack of potatoes. Laral scrambled to catch him, while reaching for the pommel of his sword. “Drys, damn you—!” he cried.
“No shimmers!” he retorted. A net woven from rope as thick as a man’s wrist dropped over Drys’s head. His horse tried to flee, but its hooves tangled in the ropes and it collapsed onto its side. Drys scrambled free of the animal’s flailing legs, but only ensnared himself deeper inside the net.
“Kalla, watch Tarsyn!” Laral ordered. But as he darted forward to help his friend, the weight of a second net landed across his shoulders and crumpled him to the ground. He had nearly wrestled free when he heard a bloodcurdling scream and something struck him between the shoulder blades. He kissed the ground hard, and he feared someone was hurling boulders at him. Then he recognized a steel-banded boot standing near his face. The other boot, and not a boulder, must have been what pinned him to the ground. He opened his mouth to speak, but the edge of a blade against his throat convinced him to listen instead.