by K. Eason
“You are blind,” said the skraeling.
Kenjak gagged up bile and nothing, because he’d already heaved out everything. Coughed and spat and expected the dogs to rush at him, or the axe to cleave his skull, or—
The half-blood cleared her throat. “At the moment, yes. Briel, please? Ah, thank you.”
“You talk to the bat-snake? Does it understand?”
She laughed. Improbable sound. Startling. The dogs’ ears swiveled, and their heads. Heat started in Kenjak’s belly, a tiny coal. Spread fast as flames in dry leaves. He lay with his cheek pressed into the snow, his blood leaking pink and the torn flesh stinging, and he listened. To her. Laughing.
“Yes to the first. When she pleases to the second.”
The woman raised her right arm, and the svartjagr keened again, right overhead. It struck the woman’s back and shoulders, claws first, and wrapped its tail around her waist.
And chirped. Like a bird. Like a pet. Like it hadn’t just torn a man’s face open.
“Kenjak.” Ghost-whisper, barely louder than Kenjak’s own heartbeat. He dared a side-eye at Ollu. Swallowed hard as the acid boiled up in his throat. Ollu’s mouth looked raw and round as his eye sockets. Ollu’s fingers stretched toward—him, maybe, or the javelin lying between them. Both out of reach.
“Boy,” Ollu whispered. “You . . .”
Whatever else he said got lost under a pair of deep barks and a svartjagr’s hiss, the skraeling’s sharp “Logi!”
And in the echoes, the woman’s voice.
“So, you talk to the dogs, do you? Do they understand?”
“Sometimes.”
Ollu had slumped silent again. His fingers curled over his outstretched hand like a dead spider’s legs. And maybe Ollu was dead, too,
please
and past pain. But he’d wanted something from Kenjak. Wanted—well, it didn’t take much to guess it. Same thing Salis had wanted. The same thing Rurik expected.
Do your duty, little brother.
Kenjak wanted to tell Ollu he couldn’t, because the half-blood wasn’t alone now, that she had a svartjagr and a big skraeling with an axe and two dogs, while he had only a legionnaire’s sword. She could conjure, too, and what chance did he have against that?
Ollu couldn’t advise him. Kenjak stared, horrified, as the breath steaming out of the older man trailed to a tendril and stopped altogether. Soon the snow would begin to collect on his skin. Would bury him.
The javelin lay between them. Kenjak’s sword, only a little farther. It would only take a little effort to reach one of them, only a little more to cross the snow and get her. Kenjak was that quick. He could do it. And maybe Rurik would find his corpse beside Ollu’s, but Rurik would find the half-blood there with them. He’d know what happened.
I did my duty.
Kenjak surged to his feet.
Her sight was creeping back, dragging a headache behind it, when the dogs growled. Sudden sound, savage, competing with Briel’s violent wingbeats. Snow bit back a very undignified squeak. Nothing she could do if the dogs jumped her, except die. And then, next moment:
“Helgi. Logi.”
Sharp syllables, accent like an axe chipping cold wood. Not-A-Tree wrenched her blade nearly out of her hands. She held on to the hilt, only just, as he brushed past her in a gust of leather and dogs and woodsmoke. The snarling boiled around her knees as she squinted into the snowfall, and yeah, there, maybe those were body shapes in the white-grey blur.
Red and black haze, that was an Illhari soldier. Winter-colored, that was Not-A-Tree. Something in his hand, slim and grey, with a darker steel blot on the end. Not a sword, no. Laughing God, was that an axe? She blinked. The world smeared into focus.
It was. An axe with a seax-sized cut in the shaft. The dogs, she realized—they were big animals, like wolves—had gone quiet. Briel, too.
The soldier had his weapon drawn and pointed. “Stand aside, skraeling, in the name of the Illhari Republic. That woman”—she could make out more details now, the boy’s handsome highborn face and his terrible youth—“is a criminal, and by the authority of the governor of Cardik she is mine.”
“No,” Not-A-Tree said levelly. His Dvergiri sounded stiff and formal. “She cannot defend herself.”
“She . . . you.” For a heartbeat Snow thought the soldier would back down, walk away, declare defeat, and go home. He rocked back and started to lower his blade. Then he lunged at Not-A-Tree. Legion-standard maneuver that would have worked against an average bandit, a typical outlaw, someone who waited to meet steel with steel.
Not-A-Tree folded sideways, one neat step, as the sword stabbed past him, and swung the axe. Steel whistled, ending in the dull crack of breaking bone. The boy’s blade flickered like a fish in the river and buried itself in the snow. The soldier himself crumpled where he stood. He curled around his arm and moaned.
Not-A-Tree stepped back. Lowered the axe. Breathed audibly for the first time. It sounded to Snow like a sigh.
Snow sheathed her blade. Managed not to slice off a finger. Blind and waving metal was one thing. Hands shaking like this, she was safer unarmed.
Not-A-Tree shifted stance and attention as she drew even with him. Staring down at her, yeah, and there weren’t many men taller than she was. Well. Dvergiri men, which he wasn’t, clearly. One of the northern tribes, whose names no one knew. Blue eyes, bright as witchfire, gone narrow and wary in a face not much past twenty.
The words spilled out of him like stones down a rock face. “You were blind. Now you are not.”
Her throat felt too small. “It’s temporary.”
“That is fortunate.” Suspicious. Foreign. Hell, no, alien, and holding an axe that could sever a limb as neatly as it broke bones.
If he meant to kill her, well, he could. Not a toadfucking thing she could do to stop it, yeah?
The Laughing God loves the bold, Snow.
Right.
She raised her chin and made herself step past him. Past his dogs, who lifted their muzzles and sniffed. One of them—the smaller one, fox colored—flattened his ears and whined. Friendly now, or curious.
She edged around and stopped closer to the soldier. He stared at a spot just in front of her boots, braced, dear Laughing God, like he expected torture, or brutality, or
what he’d do to me, if he could
a boot in the face. Anything but meet her eyes. Highborn habits broke hard. Insult her, sure, but he didn’t want to lock eyes like an equal. Thank the old ways, and highborn conservatism, if it made her job easier this once.
She squatted and folded her arms on her knees. Made a show of looking at the bands of color on the top edge of his uniform. “Second Mila, is it? You seem young to be in the Sixth. What’s your name?”
Silent. Defiant, this one, grant him that. Maybe grant him brave, too, although that looked a lot like stupid most times.
She peeled back a smile. “All right, Second Mila. Kenjak, yeah? That’s what he called you. Your partner.”
Now she had his attention. Horror in his eyes. “You. Killed. Him.”
She glanced at the corpse. “No. That was Briel.”
His mouth worked around something sour. “Half-blood.”
“Yeah.” Old anger in her guts, like shifting coils. “That’s not a crime.”
“Conjuror.”
“Neither is that.”
Tsabrak would’ve gutted the boy already, left him for the storm and the crows. Which she should do, too. Two soldiers meant more on the way, and Tsabrak’s toadfucked courier was still out there. She came back without a new source of rasi, yeah, Tsabrak might leave her for the crows.
The snow squeaked a warning. The skraeling loomed suddenly at her shoulder, dull distressed leather breeches and oiled boots. Kenjak flinched.
“What,” the skraeling asked, in his dusty, precise Dvergiri, “are you doing?”
She twisted her neck and peered up at him. Fuck and damn, tall man, and that axe too close to eye level
for comfort. “Having a friendly chat.”
He snorted. “He is no friend of yours.”
“Noticed that, did you? Was it the sword gave it away? Or the threats?” She raised her hand, half surrender, half apology. “This one’s highborn,” she said. “From Illharek. Likely his mother’s important.”
Eloquent silence.
She sighed. Expect a skraeling to understand politics, yeah, expect the sky to rain cats. “Best we don’t leave him like this, yeah?”
The skraeling squatted beside her. He studied Kenjak, narrow-eyed. “What do you intend to do with him?”
“Well. I don’t think Briel will eat him. Do your dogs like fresh meat?”
“They will eat anything.”
Laughing God, the skraeling had a sense of humor.
The boy’s eyes darted toward his fallen sword, and she saw despair as clear as sunlight. Then he recovered his sneer, turned it fully on Not-A-Tree. “Skraeling,” he spat, and this time found liquid to go with it. No range, fortunate for him. Briel hissed anyway, and the grey dog, the bigger one, growled. The skraeling said nothing at all, but those witchfire eyes burned holes into Kenjak’s hide. Credit the boy, he tried to meet and match that stare. No shame that he failed.
Snow coughed a second time. “Second Mila, I don’t mind your insults. My companion might. Or do you want us to kill you?”
Kenjak didn’t move at all when she reached for him, when she pulled down the edge of his collar and exposed the House sigil inked into the skin under his collarbone. Fuck and damn. That wasn’t just highborn; that was political. His mother was a senator. Killing him would have consequences. Sparing him, though—that might be worth something.
“K’Hess,” she said. “That’s an honorable House. Means you should’ve at least called warning. Asked surrender.”
Sullen now and shivering, with cold or shock or both. “You attacked Salis.”
“The soldier with the crossbow? That was Drasan, and she paid him for that.”
She pried his fingers away from the wounded arm. Controlled her own wince. Visible bend between wrist and elbow, both bones snapped clean. She ran her palm over the sleeve. Felt the wound’s heat like live coals through layers of leather and cloth. Blood spread dark on the fabric, which meant broken skin to go with the bones.
“You’re lucky. That axe could’ve sliced just as easy. Broken arm, I can help. Severed, I can’t.”
The boy glared somewhere sideways of her. “I don’t want your help.”
“And I don’t want to help you. But listen, Second Mila Highborn, I leave you like this, you won’t fight again. If the wound rots, you’ll die a lot slower than your friend. The poison on a svartjagr’s tail-spike works fast. The poison your body makes, you’ll die for days.”
His pupils pooled black. She answered the question he hadn’t asked, the one probably lodged in his throat.
“Hurts a lot, I think, dying like that.” She twisted, looked up, caught the skraeling’s witchfire stare. He hadn’t moved. Watched her and waited. “Borrow your hands? He’ll probably pass out, but I don’t need a brawl if he doesn’t.”
The skraeling stared at her as if she’d just announced her intention to wear a cat on her head. “You will help him.”
“I intend to set the bone, yeah.”
“I do not understand.”
No, he probably didn’t. Tsabrak would’ve called her softhearted and sneered about charity. Asked if she liked the boy’s face, was that it, and refused to help. But Tsabrak would not have cared what her reasoning was, either. So.
“Two reasons, yeah? His mother’s a senator. Important woman. He survives this, House K’Hess might remember who saved him. Might repay the favor someday. Second reason: there’s a First Spear in Cardik named K’Hess. So if this boy dies out here, like this, troops will scour this forest looking for revenge.”
Blink. Nod. First time she’d seen his eyebrows settle back where they belonged. Not-A-Tree knelt beside her. Set the axe aside, deliberately and easily one-handed, and close enough to grab in a hurry. “What shall I do?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Veiko pressed his body weight against the boy and tried not to listen to tearing cloth and wet flesh. Tried to ignore the screaming and kept his eyes fixed on the dead man, who had screamed, too, before he died. Long and loud, yes, but not so close to Veiko’s ear.
Illhari soldiers, he decided, did not handle pain well.
You think you’d do better, skraeling?
A whisper, that, which Veiko should not have been able to hear. But he had, clear as if there were no sounds but snowfall and wind in the pines.
How many battles have you seen, skraeling? How many wounds?
The dead man’s lips appeared to stretch in a smile that wasn’t, Veiko knew, real. Shadows and storm, that was all. Just an accident of light.
Tell yourself that.
There were tales, stories—angry ghosts might haunt their death sites, it was said, refuse the peace of their graves. There were rites one could perform. Prayers and bindings. But Veiko wasn’t a noidghe, and this was a Dvergir spirit. The ghost road’s secrets belonged to the noidghe, and Veiko was a crofter’s son, a hunter, an outlaw—
“Hey.”
The woman’s voice, her hand on his shoulder; her face dipped between him and the dead man. Abruptly he realized the screaming had stopped. He thought he had another corpse under him, until he marked the steady in-and-out of ribs against his own. The woman’s hand patted reassurance, same as he might give his dogs.
“You can get off now. He’s not going anywhere.”
Veiko did, careful to avoid the dead man’s stare. The wounded Dvergir’s scent clung to his skin and clothing. Sweat. Pain. Fear. He clenched his fists and did not indulge the urge to brush at himself like a child who’d discovered an insect clinging to his shirt.
The woman seemed unaffected. Hadn’t reacted to the screams or the thrashing. But she paused now to look at him. To frown.
“You all right?”
His stomach tightened. Settled as he pulled a deep breath.
The dead man laughed, a sound Veiko felt more than heard, like fishhooks in flesh.
Feeling a little sick, are you? Some warrior.
His skin prickled. He would not argue. It was unwise to encourage the angry dead. “I am fine.”
“All right.” She pointed her chin at the remains of the soldier’s uniform. “Think you could cut that sleeve into strips? We’re almost finished.”
And what after that? Veiko did not ask. Did as she wanted him to, yet again. He’d already sacrificed one of his arrows for a splint. A small matter to hold the pieces against the boy’s broken arm. Pay no attention to the grind and slip of what should be solid, no. Tie this. Pull that. Once she’d had him retrieve an herb—
“The mossy stuff, purple, little green bag—yeah, that one.”
—from a pouch on her belt. He leaned in close and told himself that the Illhari had different customs, that was all. No Alvir he’d ever met, no trader or hunter or woman in the tavern, would have let a
skraeling
stranger so close. He tried not to notice the warmth and solidity of her, nor recall how long it had been since he’d touched something living that was not Helgi or Logi. He couldn’t smell fear on her, only a faint sweet-sharp smokiness that he didn’t recognize.
She’s a conjuror, skraeling. You know what that means?
He would not look at the corpse. Found the moss and tried to give it to her, and found—
“Tuck it in there, yeah?”
—himself stuffing it into the wound instead. The boy’s raw flesh steamed in the chill. Salt and metal stink that couldn’t quite smother the stone-and-earth scent of her.
Ask why she isn’t afraid of you, skraeling.
Because he hadn’t wanted to harm her. Perhaps the bat-snake had communicated, somehow, his intentions.
Maybe she reads your mind, skraeling. Her kind can.
Her k
ind. Half-blood, the soldier had named her, and conjuror. Not a crime, she’d said to both.
The ghost laughed.
Don’t believe that. Might be your bones here with me next. Think she’s safe, skraeling?
No, he did not, but it was far less safe to speak to the dead. Veiko squeezed his eyes closed. Sudden chill, a lessening of snowfall, that meant the storm had finally dragged itself over the mountains. Close to sunset now, and that meant the spirit world would draw even closer. He wanted to be long gone before that, didn’t want to see the ghost rising up and pulling its flesh after it, growing solid, growing real.
I am not a noidghe, and I do not see spirits.
Which would not save him if the dead man walked.
“Hey.” The woman frowned at him. Asked, a second time, “You all right?”
He flushed. Lied, a second time. “I am fine.”
One fine eyebrow arched. Almost white, stark against Dvergiri skin. “It’s one thing to butcher an animal, yeah? Another thing to cut on something still living. I’m a chirurgeon. Most times I do this, there’s drugs. Too hard to work on a thrashing body.”
She paused. Waiting for a response, Veiko guessed. Some indication he’d understood that sudden flood of language. Which he had. Mostly. Except:
“Chirurgeon?”
“Trained in the Academy. You have no idea what that means, do you?”
It was like trying to run up a snowslide. “No.”
A tiny smile curled the corner of her mouth. She plunged her hands into the snow and scrubbed it pink. “Means I know how to mend wounds, yeah? We’re done here, soon as I build a fire. Can’t have him freeze before help arrives. But he’ll use that arm again. Hold a sword.”
“He will not thank you.”
“No. But he’ll remember who saved him. Might be useful, someday, some highborn owes me a favor. And more important for you and me right now—whoever finds him won’t waste time hunting for a murdering half-blood and a—”
“Skraeling?”
She flashed him a look as pointed as arrows. “Why didn’t you kill him?”
“He was.” Veiko paused. “Not a threat.”
“To you.”
“Yes.”