The Soldier King

by Violette Malan

  Avylos bit back his irritation. How dare the man question him like this?

  “Do not concern yourself unduly. Kedneara the Queen’s Messengers will be sent out tomorrow to inform the country of this tragedy, but there may yet be a service you can perform in the meantime.”

  “Name it, my lord.”

  That was better. “It concerns the two Mercenary Brothers who were said to have taken the prince. If they should appear, you will arrest them in the queen’s name.”

  “I do not understand, Lord Mage. If there are any to be trusted out of hand, surely the Brotherhood—I did not understand the Nisveans’ declaration, though I passed it along to the queen, of course—and now you say the prince is dead—”

  “Enough. The queen has banished the Brotherhood from Tegrian. See that you make this generally known.” The man was a chatterer. Not for the first time Avylos thought how lucky it was that the writing did not remain permanently on the pages.

  “Of course, my lord Mage.” Now the writing appeared hesitant, as if the man on the other end was not very confident in what he was saying.

  “My magics tell me there is some deep deceit afoot,” Avylos said. “Some plan of which I see only the edges. If you should see the Mercenary Brothers, they may well have a young man with them, a man they will say is the prince, but you will not be deceived.” Avylos waited, but again, the reply was slow in coming. He placed the fingertipsof his left hand on the edge of the blank page. “I say that you will not be deceived.”

  “I will not be deceived.”

  “The young man they have with them is not Edmir.”

  “The young man they have with them is not Edmir.”

  Did the writing seem to be in a different, yet very familiar hand? Avylos smiled.

  “You know Edmir well, have known him from a child, and you will not be deceived.”

  “I will not be deceived.”

  “Mercenaries who have killed a Prince of Tegrian, even accidentally, would wish to make themselves appear innocent. Clearly the person with them is not Edmir.”

  “Clearly. The young man they have with them is not Edmir. I will not be deceived.”

  “Excellent. It is a comfort to be counseled by someone so able as yourself. You will inform me, if you have occasion to arrest these people.”

  “At once, my lord Mage.” The subtle difference in the writing was gone.

  “At my command,” Avylos said, and closed the book.

  “We’ll saddle these three,” Parno said, turning to Edmir and indicating the gelding, the gray mare, and the sturdy bay. The Mercenary had returned alone, silently, and in answer to Edmir’s questioning had told him that they could now move on.

  Edmir was just tightening the girth on the smaller horse he took to be his own when Dhulyn Wolfshead suddenly materialized on the animal’s far side. The horse merely rolled an eye at her, but Edmir had taken a step back and put his hand to his belt before he registered who it was.

  The Wolfshead smiled, the small scar making her lip curl. “At least you were going for your weapon, my princeling,” she said. Edmir opened his mouth to reply, but she had already turned to the spotted mare, picking up the saddle pad and slinging it over the mare’s back with a practiced flick of the wrist.

  “I took the horses into the wood on the far side from the bodies, and told them not to worry. They’ll work themselves free when they feel like it.” Edmir looked from one to the other. Parno Lionsmane had finished with his gray gelding and had turned to sort through the packs that were still on the ground. Apparently nothing more would be said of the five horsemen on the road. Dhulyn Wolfshead was studying the ground in front of her, frowning, but it was the frown of decision making.

  “We were heading for the Eagles Pass,” she said, taking up a bit of broken branch lying to one side and beginning to draw on the dirt in front of her. Edmir recognized the curves of the Limona River, and the road they had been following. “The one on the north road from Limona, and the one that would take us most quickly to Beolind, and your mother.” She nodded to Edmir. “And that is where they will look for us again. The pass of Limona itself—” she drew in the road that Edmir’s army must have followed. “Clearly we cannot retrace our steps and use it. But there is another.” She cast a lightning-quick glance around the clearing. “We won’t be able to take everything with us, however. The horses must be lightened.”

  “There’s no other pass,” Edmir said. “Not in this part of the border.” He hadn’t spent all that time with his tutors for nothing.

  Dhulyn Wolfshead didn’t look up from her drawings. “None on any maps, no. But a pass there is, nonetheless.”

  Five

  EDMIR WINCED, SUCKING IN his breath. When she heard it, Dhulyn Wolfshead called out to her Partner to stop and, scrambling around her mare on the uneven ground, had the back of her hand against his cheek before Edmir could move out of her way.

  “Fever, for certain,” she said, shifting to touch his forehead with the backs of her long fingers. “How much pain is there?”

  “Not much.” The next thing Edmir knew his chin was being held in a grip that felt like iron and the Wolfshead’s gray eyes were boring into his soul.

  “What a liar you are,” she said. “Your breath is short, your skin is white around your mouth, and there are lines on your face where there were none before. You are not yet in so much pain that you cannot move, but it grows.” She nodded. “And it brings fever.” The two Mercenaries exchanged a long look.

  “He should not be afoot.” Parno Lionsmane said finally from his position in the lead. “It will slow us, but he should mount. And the sooner we find shelter . . .”

  “The better it will be,” Dhulyn Wolfshead finished.

  Any protest that Edmir thought of making died before he could open his mouth. One moment he was standing, the reins of the small horse, Stumpy, in his left hand, the next Dhulyn Wolfshead had grasped him by knee and elbow and he was in the saddle, Stumpy steady but snorting under him. He still had the reins in his hand.

  And the Mercenaries were right. Sore and aching as his leg now was, the pain was nothing compared to how he’d felt walking on it. He realized, now that his weight was off it, that he could not have gone very much farther.

  Dhulyn Wolfshead took Stumpy’s reins, and let her own horse, the mare Bloodbone, follow of her own accord. Ahead of them, Parno Lionsmane led both his horse Warhammer and the packhorse, burdened now only with their travel food and what extra weapons the Mercenaries could not do without—which seemed, to Edmir, to be all of them. He would have preferred they pack a few more blankets, but everything else, including the much sighed over tent, had been left hidden—hoisted up into the trees—in the clearing in the woods where the horses had been the night before.

  “No way to know if we can ever come back for it,” Lionsmane had said as he’d hauled on the rope. “But we’ve at least a chance that anyone looking for Jedrick and his boys won’t find this as well.”

  The sun had now been up for some hours, and they had been leading their horses up increasingly steep hills, jagged and treeless, since they had left the main trail. The trees had changed from the oaks of the forest below to pines and the occasional aspen. They were still climbing, and as far as Edmir could tell, they’d left any real path behind. Between the trees there was nothing but rocks, tufts of dried grass, and hardly a flat spot at all. His head felt heavy. There’s no pass here, he thought. Stumpy shifted abruptly to the right, and, jolted, Edmir looked up, aware that he had started to doze in the saddle. Parno Lionsmane had stopped, and was looking upward, as if the rocks around them could speak to him.

  “Are you sure of the way?” Edmir asked, unable to keep a note of irritation from his voice. The light seemed much too bright.

  Dhulyn Wolfshead pointed. “We are now.”

  Edmir followed her pointing finger to where the silhouette of a bird hung in the sky far above their heads, the shape of its wings marking it for an eagle of some ki
nd. As he watched, the bird stooped, falling so sharply that Edmir exclaimed, certain that it had miscalculated and would dash itself to pieces on the rocks.

  Instead, it pulled up in the last possible second and landed, talons outstretched, within easy bowshot of where Parno Lionsmane stood. Warhammer only tossed his head, backing a pace, but the packhorse shied, its hooves sliding on a patch of loose earth, and Dhulyn Wolfshead dodged forward, grabbing its mane and placing her hand over its eyes as she crooned into its ear. Thank the Caids, Edmir thought, that Stumpy had only wiggled his ears. If the short-legged beast had so much as tossed its head, Edmir was sure he’d have fallen straight off.

  Instead, Edmir reached for the crossbow that hung from his saddle, but found his wrist suddenly engulfed in Parno Lionsmane’s rough hand. “Wait,” he said. “It’s a Racha bird.”

  Edmir’s mouth fell open and Stumpy took a grudging step forward before deciding to ignore the involuntary tightening of his rider’s knees. A Racha. Edmir had read of them, companion birds to the Cloud People of the Letanian Peninsula. He had even seen a Racha once, as a child in the public square in Beolind, his mother’s capital, but he had never seen one so close. If, that is, the Mercenaries were not mistaken. Though large, this bird seemed very much like an ordinary eagle to him.

  Scrambling around the horses, Dhulyn Wolfshead reached a rock outcrop about half the distance between them and the waiting bird. She faced the Racha bird, but turned slightly, so that Edmir had her in profile. And so she can see us in her periphery, he realized. She was a Mercenary Brother, after all.

  “I am Dhulyn Wolfshead,” she said, pressing her tongue to her top lip before continuing. “The Seer.”

  Fingernails bit into his palms as Edmir tightened his fists. A Seer. By the Caids, was she really? Or was she something else? The Marked were rare in this part of the world, though not unknown. But Seers were rarest of all. Edmir couldn’t even think of anyone who’d ever met one, though there was supposed to be one in Delmara. He shivered, suddenly feeling cold despite his fever. Why had they not told him before?

  The Wolfshead turned her head as the Racha bird shifted and the light caught her hair, the color of old blood.

  The color of Avylos’ hair. And she was pale like Avylos. And an Outlander, like Avylos. Was Dhulyn Wolfshead also a Red Horseman, or was all this just coincidence?

  And was it coincidence, then, that these particular Mercenary Brothers had been among the Nisveans? The only time that Avylos’ magic hadn’t worked? Coincidence that they were bringing him back to Avylos now? Edmir swallowed past a lump in his throat. He lifted a hand that weighed like lead and rubbed at his damp brow. Why couldn’t he think?

  Surely, he was concerned for nothing? Outlanders were not so very uncommon—nor was red hair. And even if Dhulyn Wolfshead had been a Red Horseman, Mercenary Brothers had no pasts, no lives before the Brotherhood; everyone knew that was their Common Rule. Besides, Edmir rubbed at his face again, he needed them, he could not even get down off this horse without help. He had to trust them. He had no choice.

  But his brain kept arguing. What other magics were they hiding? He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “I was Schooled by Dorian the Black Traveler,” Dhulyn said to the waiting bird. “And I have fought with my Brothers at Sadron, at Arcosa, where I found my Partner, Parno Lionsmane, and with the armies of the Great King at Bhexyllia. We have come from the battle of Limona, where the forces of Nisvea have triumphed over the invaders of Tegrian. We have with us a charge of honor, and we seek help, shelter, and passage.”

  The Racha had watched her while she spoke, turning its head from side to side as it looked first from one bright golden eye and then the other. When she fell silent, the bird waited a moment, as if to be sure she had finished, before bobbing its head, shaking out its wings, and launching itself into the sky. It did not fly immediately away, however, but hovered and beat its wings once, twice, three times, and was gone.

  Dhulyn turned, feeling two days without sleep in every tired muscle, and in the grit in her eyes. “Clearly we are to wait.”

  “Wait for what?” The words were bitten off and spit out of a tight mouth.

  Dhulyn glanced at Parno, but her Partner only raised his eyebrows. She turned to the prince, schooling her face to serenity, her lips to a smile.

  “The Cloud People, of course.”

  “Cloud People? There are no Clouds in Tegrian.” The prince’s voice shook.

  “Is your pain worse?” Dhulyn took a step toward him.

  He shook his head, leaning away from her. “There are no Clouds here. What really comes?” Dhulyn would not have thought it possible that a person could sound both angry and resigned, but somehow Prince Edmir was managing it. She rubbed at her face, but the gritty feeling never left her eyes. She rubbed at the pain in her lower back and stretched, exaggerating the movement as much as she could, loosening the muscles in her shoulders, before looking around her, and finally sitting down on a nearby outcropping of rock.

  Prince Edmir yawned, his body responding to the messages of fatigue and exhaustion hers had sent it.

  What was biting the boy? He was looking at her as if she’d threatened to kill his dog. Parno looped the packhorse’s lead around his wrist and, as if aping her, rubbed at his own eyes, and in that gesture, she understood. Had it frightened the boy to know she was a Seer? Was that it? True, the Marked were rarer as you went farther west, but their skills were valued the more for it—any Mender, Finder, or Healer could set their own prices, though most followed the rules of their Guild. She had never heard that there was any particular prejudice against the Marked in Tegrian. She glanced at Parno, scratching her nose using the fourth finger of her left hand. Let him be wary.

  “There are no Cloud villages here, truly.” She answered the prince’s declaration as if she had not seen the sullen look that made him seem so much younger than he was. “No settlements as there are in the Antedichas Mountains between Imrion and Navra. But there is a small colony of Racha birds here, and where there are Rachas, Clouds will always come for their Life Passage, to attempt to bond with the infant birds.”

  “And that is all that comes now? No squad of the Tegrian Guard? Not . . . not my stepfather?”

  “Your stepfather?” Parno straightened from securing hobbles to the new packhorse against the return of the Racha, and stepped forward so that he stood between her and Prince Edmir. “Are you expecting him?”

  The prince wrinkled his nose and looked away. Sun and Moon. Dhulyn narrowed her eyes. That had not been the look of a young man, a commander of an army. That had been the look of a frightened child, a child whose world had changed under his feet, and not for the better.

  She sighed. “The Racha bond only with Clouds, Lord Prince, as apparently you do not know. I had not heard that the Blue Mage was a Cloud, or had any Clouds among his followers. Am I incorrect?”

  The prince now looked at her with narrowed eyes. “No.”

  “Then I do not know who, or what it is you expect,” she continued. “But the Lionsmane and I expect Clouds.”

  “And a good thing that is, yes? Since that’s what you’re getting.”

  Dhulyn had not heard the woman approach, but iron discipline kept her from showing any surprise.

  “I greet you, Seer.” The raven-haired woman stepped lightly from rock to rock as she came down the slope toward them, the seven gold feathers tattooed on the left side of her face clear in the afternoon sunshine. “I am Ayania, once of Pompano, yes? And now of Hrylesh.”

  “My Partner, Parno Lionsmane the Chanter, and our charge of honor, Edmir of Tegrian.”

  “The Edmir of Tegrian?” Ayania had reached their level finally and, her eyes on Edmir, had tentatively stretched out her hand. Dhulyn touched her own fingers to the Cloudwoman’s.

  “According to my Partner, and to the prince himself, yes.”

  “Who was it you were expecting then, Lord Prince of Tegrian, if not a Cloud?”

  Edmir
studied his hands, clasped together on the pommel of his saddle, and did not speak. Dhulyn shrugged and answered the Cloud herself. “He seems to think his stepfather has something to do with us.”

  “No room for the Blue Mage in our caves, that’s certain, yes? Room for the three of you, however, since it’s not the season for young birds. So long as you don’t mind close quarters, yes? Ho! What’s to do with him?”

  Parno had moved fast enough to catch Edmir before he’d done more than tilt slightly out of the saddle, helped by Stumpy’s shifting over. The beast was well-trained.

  “He’s had an arrow through the leg, followed by hard usage. You won’t have a Healer with you?”

  “Too right, we won’t,” Ayania said. “But we’ve herbs and medicines. Between us and two Mercenary Brothers, we’ll have enough experience to keep him alive and on both feet, yes?” She raised her head and smiled at the bird that hovered high over their heads, almost too far away to see. “We can leave him on the horse if we go ’round the long way. Once we’re in the caves, we’ll see to his leg, yes? And what else did you need?”

  “Sleep.” Dhulyn said. Sleep where it was safe, where there was no need for either of them to keep watch. It wasn’t every Mercenary Brother who could get those things from Clouds. But as a Seer, she could.

  The Cloudwoman smiled. “This way, Seer, if you please.”

  Dhulyn blinked. By the angle of the moonlight coming through the smoke hole in the roof of the cave, she’d been asleep several hours. She could hear three people breathing, Parno right behind her on the soft mass made of their combined bedrolls, Edmir a few feet away on one of the cots, Ayania nearby on the other. The sleeping chamber was otherwise still and silent, with Ayania’s two apprentice Racha Clouds sharing the watch with their birds in the outer cave. Dhulyn shifted, checked that there were several layers of cloth between them before pushing her back firmly against Parno. She shut her eyes again.