She’d caught him above the knee, a shade too far forward for the large veins that could let a man’s blood out in moments. He’d live. He wouldn’t be a threat, and he damned well wouldn’t be going anywhere for the next few minutes.
“Be quiet,” she said, “or I’ll gut you right now.”
The man clamped his teeth down on his lip. Moiread could hear the sounds of movement from down the ridge, and then words, though she couldn’t catch the sense of them.
She left the wounded man with the corpses and began moving through the woods as quietly as she could manage in haste.
* * *
With neither rope nor a second pair of hands, and not inclined to let his advantage slip nor to wait while Moiread fought the other brigands, Madoc settled matters the only way he could see.
“Kneel,” he told the assassin, “hands up.”
When the man complied, Madoc hit him neatly at the back of the head with the hilt of his sword. Such an injury could kill, he knew, but it was as much mercy as he could offer under the circumstances.
He heard footsteps from behind him and spun, suddenly glad he’d opted for the quick method. He was immensely relieved to see a tall, slim, familiar figure pushing her way through the undergrowth.
“I see I’m no’ needed,” Moiread said, her eyes running up and down Madoc’s frame. “You look well.”
“You look—” He peered at her. Blood stained her wrists and spattered across her armor. Still, she moved as she always did, and he could see no injuries. “None of that’s yours, is it?”
“Only by right of conquest.” A killer’s smile flickered across her narrow face. “Let’s pick up and grab the living, aye? I’ve a few dozen questions in mind.”
Sixteen
Since they had no rope, Moiread slashed the sleeves off her good tunic and used them to bind each of their captives’ hands together, then cut strips off the tunic itself for their feet. She shrugged at Madoc’s surprised expression. “We’d have to leave it behind in any case,” she said. “Only the one horse. Or none, if Shadow doesn’t come back.”
The mare had died during the fight, probably soon after it started. Two bolts to the chest killed quickly. Moiread was glad of it for Madoc’s sake. She thought it would have pained him if he’d had to slit the beast’s throat.
Indeed, as she spoke of the horses, he sighed, then squared his shoulders. “If you can spare me, I’ll see if I can find him. If there were any more of these”—he cast a contemptuous eye on their attackers—“about, they’d likely have come to help their fellows, so I should be safe for a while yet.”
“Aye,” said Moiread, “but don’t go too far, and take care.”
She stood over the bound men, cleaning first her sword and then herself. In war, she’d gotten used to the feel of blood and the smell of death. She’d never grown to like it. The sooner they could mount up and get away from the corpses, the happier Moiread would be.
Granted, the proximity wasn’t helping the assassins either.
Moiread examined the men. One had lank blond hair coming down to his shoulders and a sparse beard. The other, shorter and thinner, was bald as an egg and missing three teeth. Another section of Moiread’s tunic bandaged his thigh, and the final scrap bound the blond man’s shoulder. Neither looked wealthy, clean, or reliable. Moiread had, in her time, known mercenaries one could trust, and Cathal had spoken of them as well. These weren’t that sort of men.
They wore the kind of clothing she’d expect of men in their position, nothing close to a uniform, but as Moiread watched them, she noticed one common point. Each man had a leather thong around his neck, his tunic covering the object it held.
“What’s this?” Moiread bent forward and grabbed the thong off Blondie, ignoring his yell of protest. Jerking it up, she saw a small yellow-green stone in a crude tin setting dangling from the end. “You don’t seem the sort for jewelry. Let me see.”
When Baldy’s necklace proved to be the same, she jerked it off his neck, snapping the leather cord. He stayed silent. Getting stabbed in the leg didn’t leave a man much energy for protest.
“Huh,” Moiread said, and when Madoc came back leading Shadow, she held the pendant up. “What do you make of this?”
“Very little. I’m not a jeweler.” His smile was quick, but it set her at ease. In their travels, she hadn’t thought to ask if he’d killed men before, or to wonder until recently how he’d react to it. Either he’d more experience than she’d thought or he was resilient, and either way Moiread thanked God. “The man who poisoned you had a chain around his neck. Should we check the bodies?”
“Fair thought. These won’t go far.”
Crows took off at their approach. Scavengers moved in quickly, once the fight was over. Moiread hummed a few bars of “Twa Corbies” as she knelt and examined the men. The fellow with the crossbow had an amulet like the others, as well as two shillings, three pence, and a grimy rosary. The other, the one with the ax, had a chain around his neck. His stone was larger, and the setting, also tin, was better crafted.
“The leader, I’d think,” said Madoc. “He fits the description I had from the girl at the inn, though many men would.”
“And these?”
“I don’t recognize them, but keep watch and I’ll see what I can find. Visio dei.”
* * *
Death stained the land—shades of red and gray and black, shadows that were too thick, but all of it part of the world, all a thread in the greater whole as it was, if perhaps not as it should be. Madoc found he could look squarely around him, and even at the bodies themselves.
The amulets were a different matter. Before the attack, Madoc had briefly seen them as blurred spots on the edge of his vision. Closer, with more time, they still were blurry—and so was everything immediately around them, as if Madoc was seeing it from under not-very-clear water. Moiread’s hand on the chain was a beige sort of blob, her face hazy and indistinct.
“I’ve not seen anything similar,” said Madoc. “I would think they’re for concealment, that a man could wear them and blend into his surroundings, perhaps make little sound and give little scent as well, but they’re new to me. Shall we trade off?”
“May as well,” Moiread said, and invoked the vision while Madoc dismissed his.
She came out a moment later, cross-eyed and shaking her head. “Never seen the like myself. Could be the men will tell us more.”
Before they left, she bent and closed the dead axman’s eyes, putting a penny from her own pouch onto each lid. Once Madoc knew what she was about, he followed suit and did the same with the crossbowman he’d killed, a man who wore the same rough amulet as the others. He offered a quick prayer for their souls as well. All men fell in the end. Even if he’d not been feeling compassionate, he wanted no ghosts on his trail.
“You want yours or mine?” Moiread asked as they headed back to the road. “Best split them up for questioning, I think.”
“Ah, yes,” said Madoc, “and I may as well take the one who fought me. Familiarity may count for something, mayhap.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” said Moiread.
It didn’t, but Madoc wasn’t sure in the end that much could have hurt. The blond man was ready enough to talk, having neither fear of nor loyalty to his employer, but that was because his employer, as far as he knew, was dead.
“John picked us up back in Perth,” he said, his accent marking him as Scots. “Said he’d a job needed doing, paid decent. Didna’ say anything of why, but he never did. Better not to ask, I always thought.”
“And the amulets?”
“The what? Oh, the stones?” When Madoc held up one of the pendants, the mercenary shrugged his uninjured shoulder. “He had four of ’em, plus the one he wore himself. Said they’d make us harder to spot. And they may have worked, though we’d only caught up to you a day back, and it too
k us this long to find a good spot.”
“I’m sorry it was such effort,” Madoc said dryly. “Had you known John before?”
“A bit. Killer for pay. Usually he worked alone, but now and then he’d have need of men, and he’d come to me if I was around. Wandered.”
“Could he have made these? Was he a scholar, or did he have any sort of powers?”
“Him?” The man snorted. “If he could read the name on a tavern sign, ’twas as much as he could manage. As for powers, he’d a good right arm and a nose for a paying customer, but this was the first time I ever saw anything as might be uncanny. Perhaps he shouldna’ have meddled with it, considering.”
“Perhaps not,” Madoc agreed.
* * *
“Unless they got their story straight between them,” Moiread said, talking to Madoc after a quarter hour’s questioning, “they’re telling the truth. And they’re neither of them helpful about it. Yours at least knew the leader. Mine just followed the sound of coin, from what he says.”
“It’s a pity, but it’s true. You’ve killed the one man who might have told us more…not that I blame you for it, you understand.”
“Well, there’s a weight off my mind.” Moiread smiled back at him. “Should this happen again, I’ll be sure to ask how much a man knows before I run him through. I’ve got an arm and a leg to spare, you know.”
Madoc held up a hand. “No, no, I think the loss of information is by far the best of the possibilities. They wouldn’t grow back, then?”
“No. Killing us takes some doing, and we heal fast, but once a bit’s gone, it’s gone…at least in all the generations I know. My grandfather said his father could reattach most limbs if he could find them quickly enough, but I never knew the man.”
Madoc took in this information, blinked, and then shook himself back to the task at hand. He glanced past Moiread to where the bound men sat several yards away. “What shall we do about them?”
“Could slit their throats,” Moiread said. She didn’t like killing men in cold blood, especially without last rites, but she’d never heard she had to like a thing to do it. “Saves the hangman’s wages and the cost of the rope.”
Madoc shook his head. “Mine asked for mercy, and I told him he’d have it. Or I implied as much.”
“Not one to split the difference, are you?” Moiread said and gave him another smile, all the more so because she knew Artair and Douglas both would have used exactly such an opening. “Well, ’tis a large road, and it could be the next travelers will take pity on them. Meanwhile, they can repent or the like.”
“There is always that hope,” Madoc said with an unhopeful little laugh. “And what of us, now?” He glanced over toward where his mare lay, and his face tightened.
Moiread put a hand on his shoulder. Not a horsewoman herself, she remembered the hound she’d had as a child, faithful and eager and killed, in the end, when they were hunting boar. The loss of beasts hit harder than that of people, at times. “We can try to bury her, if you’d like.”
“We’ve no time, and I doubt the ground here would bear it,” Madoc said and placed his hand briefly over hers. “But it’s a kind thought.”
“In that case, we’ll ride double for a while. Shadow’s a sturdy beast, and we should be able to buy another before too much longer. We’d best leave plenty behind, if we can.”
They kept themselves to two saddlebags. One held Madoc’s treasures. In the other, they kept a spare shirt and a set of hose. Rain was common, and Moiread had found nothing like riding long hours in wet clothing to wreck a man’s health. She, who didn’t get sick, abandoned hers and resolved to grit her teeth and bear the discomfort if she had to. That left room for a small loaf of bread, a skin of wine, and a few carrots.
Madoc’s formal clothes—as well as those of Moiread’s that hadn’t gone toward bonds and bandages—made a small and sadly bright heap by the roadside. “With luck,” she said, “we can buy more when we get the second horse. Our next hosts must forgive our circumstances if we’re not as fashionable as they’d like.”
“I’m sure they’ll understand,” said Madoc. He sounded confident, or was putting on a good show of it.
At last, Moiread settled the packs on Shadow and climbed back up into the saddle. Madoc mounted easily behind her. Suddenly the smell of him was strong around her, drowning out the stench of blood and death. The fronts of his legs settled lightly against the backs of hers, though he sat far back enough for the rest to be decorous—disappointingly so, if better for her concentration on the road.
“If you feel the need to hold on, do,” she said and added, “but you’d best use my shoulders if anyone’s about to see.”
She felt his laughter behind her.
Seventeen
If riding beside Moiread had been tempting, riding behind her was an extremely pleasant form of torture. Madoc kept his hands to himself—it was easy enough to stay mounted with legs alone when the horse didn’t go any faster than a quick walk—yet their bodies brushed against each other at every turn in the road. The slim strength of Moiread’s frame was only a whisper away; the heat of her body radiated through her clothing and Madoc’s; and every vibration of speech or breath sent corresponding sensation through Madoc.
Before they’d been riding for an hour, he was uncomfortably aroused, swollen tight against his braies and thankful that his tunic was loose, long, and heavy. He tried to keep his breathing regular—no call to go panting in the lady’s ear like a drunken lout with a tavern maid, even if she was right there and lovely and, at least theoretically, willing.
He looked off to either side of them, forcing himself to focus on any signs of danger, any of the underwater blurring that had marked the assassins before. The process helped with his self-control. Madoc couldn’t be glad that men with magical talismans were trying to kill him, but they did say that every cloud had a silver lining. This one was that he was less likely to be found by the side of the road ravaging his apparent squire, which probably would go some way toward preserving him from an unpleasant death.
“We’ll be crossing the border soon,” Moiread said, “if we havena’ done it already. The lines shift in this part of the country.”
Indeed, in the visio dei, the land they were crossing appeared looser, the lines and shapes a shade less clearly defined. Madoc said so and got a startled, thoughtful huh from Moiread in response. “Do you think the country’s that way because we’re so unsettled about it, then,” she asked, “or the other way ’round?”
“I’m not sure,” Madoc replied, glad in equal parts of the uncertainty, the chance to discuss it with another who had at least a passing familiarity with magic, and the chance to further turn his mind somewhere other than his loins. “It could be either. One thing oft partakes of the nature of another, if they’re in long association, and I have noticed that the connection is especially strong when human beings are a part of it.”
“We do leave our marks, don’t we?”
Madoc looked ahead of them at the road, built in the days of the Romans and still cutting a wide and clear swath through what would have been coastal forest. “That we do,” he said, and was about to ask if she considered herself part of humanity, when an idea struck him. “If we come upon a town tonight,” he said, “I might be able to find out more about the men who attacked us.”
“The amulets?” Moiread asked.
“Just so.” Madoc smiled at the quickness with which she caught on. He ought to have expected it, but it was still a pleasant surprise. “I’ll need privacy, of course, but I’d also like you to guard me while I cast the spell. It’s not likely I’ll provoke an attack, especially not an immediate one, but it’s always best to be safe.”
“That it is,” she said with feeling, and then her voice took on a lighter tone, even as it dropped in pitch. “And I’m verra much inclined toward privacy as well, if we can
manage that.”
With those words, low and sensual, and a quick look over her shoulder, she undid all the good that an intellectual conversation had done.
* * *
Assassins kept making life difficult, even after one had killed most of them.
In the ordinary way of things, Moiread thought that she and Madoc would have reached a town before nightfall. Mayhap it wouldn’t have been a large one, but it would at least have had an inn where they could purchase the use of their own room. With the ritual to add to her own sensual urges, she could easily have justified pushing themselves a fraction later than they otherwise might have.
But they’d stopped to fight. They’d spent more time cleaning up, questioning their prisoners, and getting their belongings packed onto Shadow. Shadow himself, burdened with two people and their baggage, wasn’t walking as quickly as he had been. Sunset fell without any sign of civilization greater than the occasional woodcutter’s cottage, and ere much longer it was getting too dark to keep traveling safely, especially when they had only the one horse.
When Moiread realized that, she could have gone back to the men they’d left bound and kicked them in the ribs a few times.
Instead, she cursed inwardly, did her best with the heat that had been growing between her legs all day and the way Madoc’s breath ghosted along the skin of her neck, and made for the next lit house they saw. By the time they’d dismounted, she’d forced herself to a philosophical acceptance, one that let her negotiate cheerfully with the woman who owned the house and smile at her three children, then listen to the stories Madoc told them over dinner.
They were good stories, like those he’d told when she was delirious with poison: Welsh myths and the local tales he’d grown up with. Through dinner and after, they made a decent distraction…but when they lay down in front of the fire that night, Moiread heard every breath Madoc took, felt every hand’s-width that separated them, and wished everyone else in the house on the other side of the world.
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