The Soldier King

by Violette Malan

  “Mercenary Brothers have fought, and killed, to defend the countries of others. As my Brother the Lionsmane and I did yesterday.”

  “And we were glad to have you,” the war commander’s sharp tone brought Dhulyn’s eyes back to his face. “And we will recompense you in the manner agreed upon. But I will have the prince. With him, I can stop the Blue Mage, and that, let me tell you, Mercenary, supersedes your Common Rule, or my own honor, for that matter.”

  Dhulyn nodded. There had only been the slimmest of chances that this could have gone any other way. “As Cavalry Leader Jedrick has pointed out, we Mercenaries have only our Common Rule, and our honor.” Dhulyn drew her sword and held it, point straight up, and directed her words to the patterned blade. “I am Dhulyn Wolfshead, called the Scholar. I was Schooled by Dorian of the River, the Black Traveler. I have fought at the sea battle of Sadron, at Arcosa in Imrion, and at Bhexyllia in the West. I withdraw my service, and that of my Partner Parno Lionsmane, from the Nisvean force following the battle of Limona.”

  She sheathed her sword. “You are Oathbreakers, War Commander. No Mercenary Brother will ever fight again at Nisvea’s call.”

  Kispeko’s lips thinned until they almost disappeared before he spoke. “So be it.”

  Dhulyn turned without salute or reverence and left the command tent.

  Parno fell into step behind her as they made their way across the camp to where their own much smaller and much plainer tent was set up on the southern verge. He watched the muscle jump next to her mouth and judged it was safe to speak.

  “Do you think, one of these days, we might actually get paid for a job?”

  “We were paid in Berdana.” Dhulyn’s voice was quiet, but tight, as if she spoke through her teeth.

  “Very well then. Would being paid for two jobs in a row be too much to ask?”

  She stopped and faced him, the small scar on her upper lip turning her expression into a snarl. “Blooded, inglera-spawning House lordling—spit on our contract, will he? Blooded amateurs.”

  Parno knew the final remark wasn’t aimed at him, but he grimaced just the same.

  “What about the Tegriani? What if what Kispeko says about saving his country is true?”

  Dhulyn’s face was stiff. “Do you believe it?”

  It took Parno only a moment to consider everything they knew of the Blue Mage. “No, my soul. No. And we would have sold our own honor for nothing.”

  “Not just our own, but the honor of our whole Brotherhood. ‘Trust one, trust all.’ If we do not hold to our oaths, if we cannot be trusted, we are not Mercenary Brothers, we are just killers.”

  Parno nodded. A few of the soldiers nearby had stopped in the middle of afternoon tasks and were looking in their direction.

  “Calm down,” he said. “You’re attracting attention.”

  She stepped in until her nose was almost touching his.

  “Am I not acting naturally, given the circumstances which will, as you well know, be all over the camp in twenty more heartbeats?” Though the corner of her mouth twitched, Parno could see the cold light of rage was still in Dhulyn’s eye.

  He took his Partner by the elbow and started them back toward their tent.

  “You have a plan?” He used the nightwatch whisper, hardly louder than breathing.

  “You think I’ll let him get away with this?”

  “And the Tegrian invasion?”

  “What invasion?”

  Parno found himself standing still as the full meaning of Dhulyn’s question struck him.

  “Your Vision said the Nisveans would win. Against all odds they would win,” he said, his voice still nightwatch quiet.

  “Was that the Tegriani force the world has been led to expect? The troops that never tire? Whom weapons do not touch? Against that force we should not have won. Regardless of any advice or help we gave, against the army of the Blue Mage, the Nisveans should have lost—” Dhulyn broke off her whisper to nod at the cavalry’s head stableman as he passed without stopping. Evidently news of the events in the war commander’s tent hadn’t traveled far enough in the camp to reach the old man’s ears. “As Balnia lost last season.”

  “And Demnion and Monara the season before last,” Parno agreed, taking Dhulyn once more by the arm. When they were again on their way, he continued. “The Nisveans are being used. The prince was meant to lose, maybe even to be captured or—”

  “Or worse,” Dhulyn said. “Remember that Tegrian arrow.”

  Parno gave a silent whistle. “And the commander either knows or doesn’t want to know.”

  Dhulyn was nodding like a Schooler pleased with her student. “Which tells us what?”

  Parno grimaced, tasting acid in the back of his throat. “Nothing is as it appears.”

  “Except our oaths and our honor.”

  They reached their tent, a gift from their grateful employer in Berdana, and Dhulyn stepped ahead to lift the flap and duck inside. It was larger than they needed, but they’d put it up nonetheless. As the only Mercenary Brothers with this portion of the Nisvean soldiery, they had reputations to maintain, and that could be done as much with a show of wealth as a show of skills.

  Once they were inside, the flap down and tied, Parno acknowledged Dhulyn’s signal and sat down cross-legged facing her, close enough for their knees to touch. Dhulyn was frowning, her eyes focused on the heavy silk-lined bag that held Parno’s pipes. He laid the tips of his fingers on her knee and waited for her to speak.

  “Turned your heart a bit, did it, when Kispeko spoke of saving his homeland?” she said, without turning her head. “Took thought for your own House and Imrion there a moment, didn’t you?”

  Parno smiled, shaking his head. “It was only the once I wanted to visit my home and family. But if you’re truly asking me whether I’d put the safety of Nisvea before our Brotherhood . . .” He shrugged. “I’ll be honest and say I’m glad that breaking our Common Rule and letting them keep Prince Edmir would change nothing for the Nisveans. It makes what we have to do easier for me.” He caught her chin and turned her head until they were eye to eye. “But I would do it, easy or not. Set your mind at rest.”

  “I believe you.” Dhulyn sighed. “But consider this. Kispeko is no fool, when all is said and done. He knows the truth of things as well or better than we do—he’s had the Blue Mage on his doorstep all this time, while you and I have been to the East. So he must know that returning the boy will do nothing. And yet he insists on doing so.”

  “As you say,” Parno said. “There is more here than meets the eye.”

  “Which changes nothing for us.” She pressed her lips tight, fingers tapping on her knee. “This is going to take us even farther out of our way.”

  Parno studied her face, unable to decide whether she was annoyed or merely stating a fact. They had been on their way to Delmara, where a traveler they’d met in Berdana had told them there was a Seer, perhaps even more than one. Seers were the rarest of the Marked, far rarer than Healers, Menders, or Finders. Everyone thought the Mercenaries were going to Delmara to consult the Seer—and they let everyone think so. What they told no one was that Dhulyn was a Seer herself. Since she had lost her Clan before her Mark had shown, however, she’d had no one to train her, and her Visions were erratic and unreliable. Even with the ancient set of vera tiles she’d acquired in Imrion—Seer’s tiles used like a Finder’s bowl to focus the Mark—she still needed training. They’d been working their way west to Delmara when they’d run into War Commander Kispeko’s recruiters.

  Dhulyn had turned her eyes away again, and Parno saw that she hadn’t been looking at his pipes after all, but at the olive-wood box lying in the center of her bedding. The box that held the vera tiles. She had a way of blaming him for it whenever he suggested she use them. Still . . .

  “This might be a good time to try the tiles.”

  A warm breeze blows from the east, making the banners and pennants flutter, the stiffened cloth rattling softly with a soun
d like a flock of birds taking flight. There’s a mixed crowd of people before her, some wearing the longer gowns of nobility, many in shorter, more workmanlike dress. Most stand, though there are a scattering on horseback, looking over the heads of the rest. Prince Edmir sits on a thronelike chair on a raised platform, the focus of the crowd’s attention. He is wearing robes the brilliant blue of the sky in winter, there is a circle of leaves shining gold against his dark hair, and he holds a long two-handed sword across his lap. A fair-haired woman, expensively dressed in a cloth-of-silver gown with a smaller, jeweled circlet around her head stands to Edmir’s left, and an armsman in chain mail to his right. Edmir begins to speak and the crowd hushes. . . .

  Hands that are her own push back the lid of a plain wood chest small enough to stand on a tabletop. Inside, resting in a bed of pale silk, is a blue crystal as long as her forearm, and perhaps as thick around. It shines blue like the deep ice that has trapped the glow of the stars. Dhulyn reaches down. . . .

  At first Dhulyn cannot see what it is that disturbs the forest. Small animals scatter away. A crashing noise to her left and she turns her head, expecting to see perhaps a deer, perhaps even a small bear. There is too much noise for a forest cat, who even in desperate flight makes no more sound than the wind in the branches. Instead, a young boy—younger than the prince, yet taller, thinner, with long hair the color of old blood escaping from his braids—comes stumbling onto the narrow path, almost falling when his feet find the leveled ground. Dhulyn puts her hand up to her own blood-red hair, and her lips part, but she does not speak. The boy, clearly an Espadryni like herself, would not be able to hear her. He looks up then at a noise that only he can hear, whites clearly showing around the sharp blue of his eyes. There is the mark of an old bruise on the left side of his face. He tries to slow his breathing, taking a deep breath, but his diaphragm spasms, and he cannot manage a second one.

  His left hand at his side, the boy sketches a complicated sign in the air with his right hand. There is a tug at Dhulyn’s memory and she knows that she is frowning now, knowing that something should follow, but cannot think what it might be. Nothing happens, and the boy turns and runs toward her on the path, chest heaving just as Dhulyn catches the sounds of the men hunting him as they too crash through the forest. . . .

  “You sure it was Edmir crowned and on his throne? It wasn’t some naming day ceremony?”

  Dhulyn stopped rubbing her temples and took the cup of warm water Parno handed her. “He was older than he is now, that I’m sure of. And he’d have had his naming day already, surely?”

  Parno nodded, his eyebrows drawn together as he concentrated. “What about the other boy? Do you think he made it? Some other of your kindred must have escaped—you can’t be the only one.”

  Dhulyn shrugged and drained her water cup. “That event might be years old, there’s no way for me to be sure. Fashions don’t change much among Horsemen.”

  Parno studied her face, but she seemed at peace. “And what he was doing—” Parno mimed the movement Dhulyn had described. “You don’t know what that was?”

  “It seemed familiar,” she said. “Something should have happened, but I don’t know what.” She looked up, her blood-red brows drawn down in a vee. “And I don’t know why.” She raised her hands to her forehead.

  “The prince on his throne, though, that seems pretty clear.” Dhulyn stopped rubbing her temples and looked up at him. “That’s what you always say. It never seems so clear afterward.”

  Parno grinned. She’d already found a way to blame him. “So the only question is, do we make a great show of leaving and then sneak back into the camp? Or do we decide to leave in the morning and make off in the middle of the night?”

  “That is not the only question, my heart, but it will do to begin with.”

  Parno returned to the tent some hours later carrying a freshly filled wineskin over his shoulder, bought from their friend the old stableman. As he pushed aside the flap, Dhulyn was setting the bright red cavalry cloak down on the battered, leather-covered chest they used as a table, next to his unwrapped pipes, a bright metal flask, and two Tenezian blue-glass cups.

  Parno pursed his lips and looked from one side of the tent to the other. Everything his Partner considered essential—except his pipes— had been packed into two sets of saddlebags, and two largish packs that would ride on their horses’ cruppers. That still left a considerable pile of bedding, extra clothing and weapons, to say nothing of the tent itself.

  “I hadn’t realized we’d accumulated so much,” he said, frowning.

  Dhulyn began rolling up a piece of thick canvas sewn with little pockets that held a set of knives. “Lucky for us, as it turns out; it explains the need for the extra horse.” Dhulyn eyed both saddlebags before choosing one and stuffing the roll of canvas down one side of it. She hefted it and nodded, satisfied that the weight was balanced.

  “Which I’ve bought.” The twist to her mouth told Parno how unhappy she’d been with the bargain she’d made, but an extra horse they had to have. “And I’ve moved all four of them over to Randle’s tether.”

  “I’ve gone around telling people we’re off in the morning,” he said, putting the wineskin down on one of the two large packs. “Anyone asked, I told them we’d be heading down to the Mercenary House in Lesonika to lodge a complaint.”

  “And they believed it?”

  “Why shouldn’t they? It’s on our way to Delmara, more or less. Most of them think we’re complaining of losing our chance at Prince Edmir’s ransom. Even those who know the real reason agree with the Commander. It seems when the subject of the Blue Mage enters the discussion, all minds except ours run along the same paths.”

  “As Jedrick said, it’s not our country. There was a time you would have felt the same about the Mage and ridden against him for your House and for Imrion.”

  “I admit, even now, I wouldn’t like my House to fall, nor Imrion either for that matter. But there’s little chance of that.”

  “I’m sure that’s what Balnia thought two years ago. How goes their thinking now?”

  Parno moved closer to his Partner and dropped his voice to the nightwatch whisper. “They’ve got him in a tent close to Kispeko’s, small enough that there’s only the one guard, walking around it.”

  “Blooded amateurs.” Any other time Dhulyn’s look of disgust would have made him smile.

  Parno shrugged. “They don’t expect anyone here to let him out, and they don’t expect any of his own people to come and rescue him.”

  “They are right about the second, that’s certain.”

  “Making it all the easier for us, so we won’t complain.”

  She shot him a glance out of the corner of her eye even as she agreed. “Getting out of camp with the prince was never the hard part. It’s keeping out of the Nisveans’ hands after that will be the trick.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make sure they’ve no reason to come after us.”

  “Moon rises at the end of the second watch, sets at the beginning of the fourth. We’ll have to be back in our places by then.”

  Parno jerked his thumb at pipes and wineskin. “I’m ready when you are.”

  “Then I shall go and find Cavalry Squad Leader Jedrick.” She picked up the red cloak and frowned at her hands, lifting them to her nose. “Do I smell of blood?”

  Parno reached out and brought her right hand to his lips. Her skin was roughened and cold. “You washed last night, and you smell wonderful. Are you sure you can manage it with Jedrick . . . ?” The words suddenly dried in his throat and he gestured at the red cloak in Dhulyn’s long-fingered hands.

  “You think I can’t?”

  “The man makes no attempt to disguise his dislike of you.”

  She smiled her wolf’s smile and Parno found himself smiling back. “You think that means he actually dislikes me? What he can’t disguise is his annoyance that I bested him at the knife throw. There’s not many see only the woman and not the M
ercenary Brother, but he’s one of them. And it’s for that reason he’ll not forgo what he’ll see as a kind of triumph,” she said. “His ego will play him right into my hands.”

  “I still think we should switch places. You do the horse trick, and I go for the prince,” he said. “An alibi’s all very well, but there’s no one more recognizable in the whole blooded camp than you.”

  And there was no arguing with that, he thought. Even if you set aside her Mercenary’s badge, there was still her height, her slimness, to say nothing of her blood-red hair, woven and tied into tiny braids, and her distinctive dress, loose trousers tucked into the knee-high boots of the Western Horsemen, her vest quilted from scraps of leather, bright velvets, silks and ribbons, leaving her arms bare.

  “You have it exactly backward,” she said to him. “No one will make a wager against me that involves horses—you they’re not so sure of. And it’s my very distinctiveness will help me vanish in the shadows.” She glanced around until her eye fell on the small pile of clothing left unpacked. “Watch.” She picked up what he recognized as an old, dull green tunic of his own and slipped it over her vest. She pulled a brown felted hood over her hair and turned back to face him.

  “I’ll change my trousers, and put on a pair of low half boots instead of these Semlorians everyone has seen me in. It will be dusk by the time I try it,” she pointed out. “And no one will know me from any other soldier walking through the camp at dusk.”

  “By the Caids,” Parno whispered. He wanted to tell her she was wrong, but the truth was . . . even without the boots and trousers, the bulky tunic alone, the covering of her hair—“I think I’d walk past you myself, without a second look.”

  “Then it’s in Battle?”

  “Or in Death,” he agreed.