by K. Eason
Hadn’t worked for—“You remember his name, Istel? Rurik’s brother?”
“Kenjak. Part of Salis’s squad. She took a knife wound, up at the old temple. They found a couple people hiding up there. She killed one. The other ran, and Ollu and Kenjak went after her.”
“How the hell do you know all that?”
Istel shrugged. “Men talk.”
Kenjak. Dekklis tried to summon a face for the name. Couldn’t. So fill in a new recruit, wide-eyed and too green for the Sixth, here on his brother’s reputation and his mother’s connections.
She hesitated at Rurik’s tent flap. Boot-scuffs from the other side. Audible profanity that swelled and receded. Good guess that the First Spear was pacing, stalking. Impatient, famously, among his troops.
And waiting for her. Hell and damn. Rurik didn’t mind running his soldiers on winter roads all the way to a town he couldn’t save; damn sure he wouldn’t mind sending a pair of scouts out into bad weather.
Dekklis glanced at Istel, and sighed, and peeled the flap aside. “First Spear? It’s—”
“First Scout Dekklis, yes, about fucking time.”
Terrified, that’s what she was. Good thing no one was asking.
Awareness returned to Kenjak in stages.
He wasn’t dead. That came first, with a small rush of pleasure. Then: heat on one side of him. Cold on the other. Wet all over. Sound tunneled in next. Hissing and spitting nearby. Flame-snap and pop. Thick silence just beyond those things, as if the whole world held its breath.
His toes were warm. He wiggled them. Pulled a lungful of wet air. Tasted burnt hair on the back of his tongue, burnt leather and charred wood and oil. Metallic stink under that, like old iron except it wasn’t, he knew that, and knew he should remember why that was bad.
Davni had smelled like this, but this wasn’t Davni. Wasn’t anywhere near, he was certain, although he couldn’t summon up reasons for that conviction. And that should scare him, but it didn’t. He was in no danger here. Was warm enough, even with the snow
denaelikk
falling on his face.
Snowdenaelikk. Wait. Blue eyes, Alviri eyes, in a Dvergir face. Half-blood. The skraeling, tall and pale, furs and leather and the axe
dull flash as it fell
slapping his flesh so that the bones bent.
She must have
saved my life
drugged him. Must have
saved my arm
done something to him.
He realized, abruptly, what was burning. Who was.
He managed not, somehow, to vomit. Gagged and choked and coughed instead. He tried to sit up. Red and white fire lanced from wrist to shoulder so that he wished he might die right then.
He didn’t, for the second time. This time he wasn’t as happy with living. He opened his eyes, though, first a crack and then wider when his nausea stayed manageable. Bright flames, snow falling thick and constant, catching the light and sparkling before it melted. He turned his head, and yes, that was Ollu burning. Facedown, which was a mercy—except the shape of his body was wrong, somehow, the slope of shoulder to neck.
Oh. Oh.
His belly knotted again, and he looked somewhere else. There weren’t many options. His choices were either
Ollu
the fire on his right, or the steep-sided bank on his left that he could barely see through the snowfall. He wouldn’t be climbing it one-armed. Wouldn’t risk a walk up or down the riverbed, either, until the snow stopped.
Wouldn’t walk anywhere if he didn’t sit up first. Rurik wouldn’t lie flat like this, wouldn’t be afraid of a little discomfort.
Kenjak held his breath and tried to sit up again. Succeeded and spent another forever blinking and swallowing bile. His arm hurt. But it was better now than it had been when freshly broken.
And yet. Kenjak picked at the knots and the binding around his right arm. Wiggled those fingers and—foremothers, that hurt, but not as bad as it might have. The line of the limb was straight. The half-blood wore Academy rings in her ears. The fat silver one meant Chirurgeon, First Class, master bonesetter and apothecary. He’d use the arm again. He might not have, if the skraeling had struck with the edge of his axe and not the flat.
So. Mercy from the skraeling, and healing from the half-blood, and neither one with a reason to help him. She’d spared him. Repaired him. Wanted him to remember her, yeah, and he would. Kenjak held his breath and looked at Ollu. Really looked. Ollu was charred bloodless now, as much smoke as fire, and still too much himself. Ollu was also in two pieces.
Motion at the riverbank caught his attention.
Kenjak snapped his head around. Strained for detail. Told himself it was nothing, nothing. A lump of snow on the riverbed where there hadn’t been a moment ago.
A second lump of snow followed the first. A third. Kenjak glanced up, found a tree clinging to the edge of the bank, half-rooted and tipped almost horizontal. Another lump slid the length of a branch and fell.
A fox. A squirrel.
And what animal’s out in this weather?
He willed himself calm. A soldier did not panic about falling snow. A soldier did not panic at all. He spotted his sword, sheathed and resting near the fire. He stretched for it, drew it one-handed and awkwardly into his left fist. When he got back to Cardik—when, not if—he would train with both hands. For now, he gripped the sword steady. Stood, very carefully. Angled so that the fire was behind him, lighting the shadows.
And then he saw—vaguely, barely—a silhouette on the bank that did not match tree or stump. Head, shoulders, a cloak over all of it. A shape, no details.
Kenjak’s heart slammed into his ribs. The cloak might be a wet-darkened legionnaire red, but it might not be. “Ho!” he shouted. “Identify yourself!” and staggered to the firelight’s limit. Jarred the broken arm, and this time he did retch.
When he recovered, the head and shoulders had vanished.
Weak winter sunlight dribbled through clouds and branches and blasted the world all to white, except for the pole and
K’Hess Kenjak
the body impaled on it, and the spreading red below. He hadn’t been dead all that long. The blood hadn’t frozen yet. And he’d been alive when it happened, because that much blood did not come from a corpse.
Dekklis knelt beside the sad ruin of Rurik’s younger brother. Gagged her breakfast into the snow. She had expected, when she joined the legion, that she might have to kill people. She had expected that she might be exposed to bodies hacked by sword strikes, or prickling with javelins and steel quarrels. She had prepared herself for blood, and shit-stink, and a body’s insides on its outside. The reality had, over time, matched up well enough. There were only so many ways one person could kill another. This was new.
Dekklis settled back on her heels. Scooped a mouthful of clean snow and chewed it to liquid and spat it out again. The stake had entered between Kenjak’s legs and exited through his mouth, jutting between his lips like an obscene tooth. Must’ve clipped his heart on the way through, hope that it had. His face, though, hell and damn, said the dying hadn’t gone quick enough. Terror and pain and wide eyes gone gelid in the cold. At least the crows hadn’t gotten him yet. At least he still had his motherless head.
Her stomach heaved again. She fastened desperate eyes on the—pyre, yeah, call it that, Ollu’s pyre. A miserable thing, broken javelins and a few scraps of wood. Amazing it’d consumed as much of the man’s corpse as it had. Almost as amazing as why someone would dismember and burn one soldier and stake the other still living.
“Dek.” Istel didn’t look much better than she felt. Wax-faced, grey where his skin stretched tight over bone. “Tracks, heading north up the riverbed. Two people. Looks like at least one dog, maybe two.” He hesitated. Squatted beside her and poked a fingertip into the snow.
“What?”
“They look older. The tracks. Mostly full of snow. Like,” he added when she said nothing, “like they le
ft before the storm really got bad.”
“I understand that.”
He nodded. Stared bleakly at Kenjak, at the failed pyre. “You can get drifting, in a ravine like this. Strange wind patterns. So they could be fresher, too. He hasn’t been dead that long.”
“I understand that, too.” She lurched to her feet. Ignored Istel’s hand on her elbow, rot him anyway. “Anything else?”
“I don’t see any matches to those tracks around here.”
There weren’t any tracks near the bodies, as happened, but the wind and the blizzard could account for that, too. It was harder to imagine that only two people could have done this. A band of Taliri, yeah, but bands of Taliri left tracks and hell if the blizzard could’ve erased that many people.
“Let’s find them.”
“Dek.” Quietly, even for Istel.
Hell. He was going to argue with her. “What?”
Istel jerked his chin. “Who doctored Kenjak? That’s a splint on his arm.”
She kept a very narrow focus on his right arm from biceps to wrist. A broken arrow framed the forearm in two halves, tied in place with strips of a uniform sleeve. Black linen, red wool, a livid puckering of flesh in between. “Ollu must’ve treated the injury.”
“If Ollu had this sort of skill, he never told anyone.”
“Meaning?”
Istel’s gaze skipped off hers, apologetic. Embarrassed, maybe, to see something she hadn’t, to tell her what she should have noticed herself. Istel didn’t like to do better, damn him anyway, because she was the
woman
senior of their partnership, leader and officer. He took the boy’s hand gently, lifted the arm. “Meaning. This was a chirurgeon’s work. Professional. Look at the splinting. It doesn’t make sense that the ones who did this to him would’ve bothered with setting bones first.”
It didn’t, no. Dekklis stood up and gritted back another heave. “You’re saying . . . what? That we shouldn’t follow those tracks? They didn’t do this?”
“I’m saying I don’t recognize this fletching as Taliri, either, and the sky is clearing. There’s not much wind. We’ve got time to report to the commander.”
She closed her eyes. Let the watery sun glow red through her eyelids; let herself pretend it was warm. What was she going to tell Rurik, anyway? Sorry, sir, your brother’s dead, except in a way that makes Davni look like a midwinter festival? Kenjak was fourth son of K’Hess. Word and details would get back to the Senate in Illharek—and then debates, again, about the provinces and how to handle the Taliri and how a senator’s youngest son had died badly under her third son’s command. And locally, in Cardik—hell and damn, when the praefecta heard about it, she’d strip Rurik back to mila and put him into the ranks just for spite.
If, whispered her grimmest self, if the ones who did this don’t get you, too, yeah?
That chill had nothing to do with early morning, or the weak sunlight, or the exhaustion of a whole night’s cold hunting. Had everything to do with patchy shadows among the trees, and the steep sides of the riverbed, and two bodies that said the last pair of soldiers here hadn’t survived this patch of ground. Istel was right. Tell Rurik, collect a detail to bring Kenjak and Ollu back for proper burning. Collect Teslin and Barkett to follow those tracks. She’d rather she and Istel do it themselves, go another half day into wilderness and away from this—maybe catch up with the makers of those tracks and drag them back. Have something to show the commander, some report other than sorry, sir, but your brother’s dead.
But Rurik needed to know about this, first priority. Needed to see it and realize what they had loose out here. Taliri raiders, same ones who did Davni. Except the Taliri were nomads who sent their spare men out raiding, and raiding meant bringing back goods and leaving people alive to make more for the next raiding season. There had been no stakes and dismembered bodies at Davni. All right. Report first, but she and Istel could get the kid down, at least. Cover him so that the crows didn’t get him, or the foxes, or whatever else scavenged the dead. The legion took care of its own.
“We get him down,” she told Istel. “Then we go back.”
As if she knew how to start. The stake had been recently set—so reckon, with the ground frozen, it hadn’t been set too deep. Wouldn’t be hard to get it out. She locked her jaw against bile and a slowly rising anger. Reached for the base of the stake. Stopped.
Symbols, carved into the wood. Curves and lines, dots and geometrics. She followed them up the shaft. They stopped at Kenjak’s body. No stains on the pole itself, when Kenjak’s bowels and bladder had loosed. Only blood, and only in the carvings, as if it had run in channels.
Her lungs were too small, suddenly. The forest, too quiet.
“Istel.”
He peered where she pointed. Shook his head. “What am I looking at?”
“I don’t—” Know, except that wasn’t quite true. Flash to childhood and Illharek’s witchfire daylight; flash to a man in robes who parted the market crowds like water around a stone. He hadn’t walked like men did, in child Dekklis’s experience. Straight-backed, chin level, bold-eyed and fearless. He’d had a staff, and child Dekklis had wanted it, oh yes, because there was witchfire at the end, blue and bright, but when she tried to read the markings on that staff her head had ached and her eyes had watered and her stomach had gone all funny.
Who, she’d asked, and tugged Nurse Pasi’s fingers. Who is that?
Conjuror, Nurse had hissed, and jerked Dekklis away. Don’t stare, Dominita. They’re dangerous.
Grown Dekklis could not have sworn that the symbols matched that remembered conjuror’s staff, could not have sworn her stomach wasn’t already fragile—but her head ached and her eyes watered, and that was proof enough.
“This is conjuring,” she said grimly. “We go back to Rurik now.”
“Chrrip.” Followed by a bump of a bone-hard muzzle in a harder-than-bone skull. “Chrrip?”
Snowdenaelikk knew better than to answer. Tugged the cloak a little tighter around herself, pushed her face a little deeper into the crook of her elbow. Not the most pleasant aroma, wool and leather and days of unwashed self, but preferable to a faceful of svartjagr and woodsmoke.
A sensation like knuckles on her skull, rap-rap. Like her first-year tutor come back to haunt her, minus the breathy, Pay attention, Snowdenaelikk, and again—what is the formula for—
“Chrrip.”
Making a svartjagr vanish into smoke, yeah. Wish for something that useful.
The chill at her back said that Veiko was already awake, already moving. Damn sure he’d made breakfast, damn sure he’d shared some with Briel.
“You aren’t hungry,” she said into her elbow.
“Chrrip.”
“Liar.”
Another nudge. A hard, beaky muzzle needling under a fold in the cloak. Determined little motherless wretch.
Snow rolled away and sat up and pushed the cloak back onto her shoulders. Could have, in the next beat, dropped a dagger into her palm—if she’d had a dagger, that is. Had been a time she’d kept blades in her sleeves, yeah, when she’d slept with them. Now her daggers sat beside her seax. Laughing God. Getting complacent, that’s what she was. Years in Cardik, on the northern frontier, with a garrison more worried about bandits than what the gangs did in the Warren.
Made a woman soft, that was what. Slowed her down.
Or not, if the dogs’ expressions meant anything. Ruffs prickling, tails stiff, startled by her sudden burst upright. Helgi muttered disapproval and sat down. Logi whined. Veiko merely raised an eyebrow from his place across the fire. Veiko’s face did most of his talking. A lot like his dogs, with their ears and tails and eyes. Of course he didn’t have a tail, did he, had eyebrows and lips and all the same features she did. Had a voice, too, that he didn’t use much. Didn’t use it now, no, answered her like big grey Helgi might, with a slight narrowing of eyes. Logi, at least, made noise.
Briel crawled into the space she’d v
acated, oozing satisfaction warm as wax. Little monster.
Laughing God, she was tired. And cold. And lost, still. She had no reliable notion of how far they’d come since the riverbed. She reckoned she should’ve died again when the storm got bad, with her feet soaked and numb and the wind chewing through wool and leather and flesh. With no fucking idea where she was, except following Veiko.
Who’d brought her here, to what Briel thought was safety. Shelter, anyway: a massive spruce, with branches that skirted out and left the space around the trunk needle-carpeted and snow-clear and reasonably warm with the tiny fire. Safety that really meant Veiko, with his axe and his bow and his dogs, with his spare blankets and his winter wisdom. Safety with someone else, rot it.
Someone else who was better with the cooking, too, who’d made use of her motherless iron pan. He plucked a flatcake out of it. Offered it to her. Golden on the edges, where hers would’ve been black as her skin.
She took it. “Thanks.”
“They are not difficult to prepare.” He prodded the pan around in the ashes. “It was more difficult to defend it until you awoke.”
“Dogs?”
An almost-smile. “Briel.”
“Of course.” She poked the svartjagr—asleep now, or damn near—with a fingertip. “Toadshit.”
Briel cracked an eye and hissed unconvincingly. Dragged a wing up over her head.
“She sleeps later than you do.”
“Svartjagr are nocturnal.”
Veiko’s left eyebrow climbed toward his hairline.
“Nocturnal. Ah . . . means she likes the night better.”
“Like an owl.”
“Yeah. Like an owl.”
Grunt, which might mean oh or why not just say that.
Snow carried the rest of her cake to the evergreen border and pushed the boughs aside. The sun stitched a path through a patchwork sky, blue and grey and occasional flurries.