by Julia Knight
He found Scar trying, with the help of four of her crew, to get on Kass’s horse, which they’d liberated in the ambush. The beast, and beast it always had been, rolled its eyes and lashed out with a hind leg at the same time as its teeth arrowed for the nearest man. The hoof cracked a woman on the knee, sending her howling across the cleared area Morro had made in the snow, while the teeth gripped an unwary set of furs and lifted the wearer up before dropping him on his face. Petri would have sworn the damned horse was laughing.
Scar wasn’t. She yanked on the bridle–no one had managed to get near enough to untack the thing, and they’d only barely managed to get it back to camp–and was rewarded only by its ears going back as it noticed something new to attack. Meanwhile, it stamped on a foot, seemingly without even noticing.
“Scar—” Petri began, but she wasn’t having any of it.
“She rode it, so I will,” she said. “Help me up.”
Petri shook his head but moved forward anyway, just in time to dodge as the bastard thing broke free and made a break for the end of the valley, flashing teeth and hooves at anyone within distance.
Until Morro stepped out in front of it. He raised a hand and spoke some words that Petri didn’t catch, and the horse stopped dead in its tracks, eyes rolling and nostrils wide and red, its breath coming in great foggy bursts in the cold air. Morro took a step towards it, within range of the teeth, and Petri suppressed a smile, thinking of the damage it would do to him. Maybe even kill him.
Only the horse just stood, flanks heaving, sweat foaming at its neck and froth at its mouth as it chewed so hard on the bit that Petri thought it must break. Morro reached out a hand, perfectly placed for the horse to relieve him of it, but it only trembled at the magician’s touch, seemingly struck immobile. After a moment Morro swung awkwardly into the saddle, turned the shaking horse around and brought it back to them at a steady walk that looked like clockwork under skin.
“This horse needs more control than most,” he said to Scar. “Perhaps you’d be better with one of the others.”
Scar opened her mouth to protest, but something flickered between the two of them and she relented, taking Vocho’s indolent if impeccably bred chestnut which shivered under a blanket.
Petri mounted too, a rangy bay that moved under him like a skittish crab but responded well enough to his one hand on the reins.
Without a backward glance, Morro kicked his mount into a shaky trot on the business of finding and killing Kacha for whatever twisted end was in his head. Petri had no allies now who were not under Morro’s control, only people who had been friends and more but were now blinded by the markings on the magician’s hands.
All he could do was follow and hope that he could do something before Morro spelled the end of all of them.
Chapter Twenty-five
Several hours into their trek across the snow-draped landscape Kass wished she hadn’t said a damned thing about carrying on. They hadn’t gone more than a mile or so, and she was ready to drop.
That magician had really done his job, if he wanted them kept close by. Drifts of snow were feet thick in places, and even moving a few yards was exhausting as every step resulted in sinking up to the knee or further.
Danel guided them towards a rock slope where the wind keened down and had scrubbed away the worst of the snow, but here the wind itself became the problem. “It’s a killer and no mistake,” he said as they halted for a rest behind an arm of rock that sheltered them from the worst of it.
At least they weren’t far now, Danel reckoned. Just as well. Kass was hungry enough to actually want some more of Cospel’s cake; her face alternated between numb and aching needles, and she couldn’t recall when she could last feel her feet.
Her head snapped up as the wind dropped abruptly, letting her hear the sound of hooves on rock. Danel signalled them to be quiet and stay where they were while he took a look.
“A dozen, riding this way,” he said when he got back. “Can’t see who though–they’re all bundled up.”
Kass looked about. If they rode past the arm of rock, they’d see the three of them without a doubt. The slope in front was open, with only a few strewn boulders to hide behind. Below lay only more snow, so thick she’d probably drown in it, where they’d show up a treat against the unremitting whiteness. Above… Above was almost a sheer climb, a steep slope rising maybe twenty feet. At its top she could just make out a thick covering of snow, the edges of which whirled in the wind that was suddenly absent below.
She peered around the rock sheltering them. Ahead, snow lay thick and unbroken, piled in rumpled dunes, sculpted by the wind. Except in front of the riders–there it steamed, melted into nothing, letting the riders move easily across the terrain surrounded in streamers of fog, that sadly wasn’t thick enough to hide Kass and the others. The fog was proof enough that a magician was present. Hadn’t Petri had enough of the bastards? She’d never thought him so stupid to throw in his lot with magic again. She’d rather hoped not to get entangled with it again herself.
She turned back to Cospel and Danel. “Nowhere to go except up that slope.”
Danel swore under his breath, but Cospel rolled his eyes and got to it, pausing only to say quietly, “You sure you’re up to it, miss?”
“No, but we don’t have much choice, do we?” She took a look over her shoulder at how close the riders were getting. “Didn’t Eder have a bit of trouble with an avalanche?”
Cospel looked up at the teetering banks of snow riding the lip of the slope and grinned. “Come on then, miss. Last one there’s a ninny.”
Petri kept his head down against Morro’s mocking smile. They’d searched in a growing spiral around their camp, looking for any signs of movement, for tracks or trails of smoke, but had yet to come up with anything. Morro had taken the opportunity to show Petri just how powerful he’d become.
He and Scar passed the hours discussing their plans, plans that Petri had known little to nothing about, ones that the Scar of old, before Morro had come, would have laughed at, dismissed out of hand as grandiose and ridiculous. Now she looked at Morro with something approaching worship and said nothing to every poisoned barb he sent Petri’s way.
“Of course,” he was saying to Scar now, with the scent of cooking blood wafting through the fog that shrouded them before it tore to tatters on the wind. “Of course, we’ll need to take care. But a resounding success here, a sign to Bakar and to the new Ikaran queen that we are not powerless, that we are not defenceless or useless, and then you can carve out your own niche here and I can be on my way in the thaw. You can take the mines by force if guile doesn’t work. Hold both countries to ransom for the iron and coal they need to survive, threaten every village and town within reach. They’ll regret shunning you and those like you.”
Scar nodded at his every word. Not just her now either, as Morro had promised. Kepa muttered dire threats to some unnamed person he blamed for his presence here, out on the edge of nowhere. They’d have to take notice now, wouldn’t they? Others listened with a sort of stunned attention that Petri had seen before on the faces of men and women seduced by soft words and cooking blood.
“You’ll need to bring some sort of order to your crew,” Morro went on in a voice so reasonable only a madman would doubt it. “A hierarchy–someone to look over your fighters, someone to take care of provisions, someone to advise you. Others beneath them, to do what needs to be done.” His eyes slid to Petri. “And some you’ll need to be rid of, those who threaten the order of your new realm, those who speak against it, against you.”
Scar let her own gaze go to Petri, a slow and thoughtful glance, absorbing what Morro said, and what he inferred.
Petri held his peace and kept his eyes forward. Later he’d get Scar alone, he’d talk to her without Morro’s influence, make her see. Try to get back the old Scar, who thought not for herself but for those in her charge. A magician’s influence could be broken, though it was difficult. He had to try, despite
what she’d become–had to make the attempt for the woman who’d given him a second chance. Else, what was there for him? A return to stares, to whispers, to beatings down on the plains, a lifetime of pain and regret. Not again.
The fog cleared, and he caught a movement in the corner of his eye. A tumble of boulders, a steep slope behind. Something had moved. A head, perhaps, darting back behind a boulder. Or maybe just a bird or one of the rabbits that changed colour with the seasons and fed the eagles that nested even further up the mountain.
“Scar!” Seemed like Petri hadn’t been the only one to see it. Kepa had too. “Up ahead, I seen something moving. By them rocks.”
Scar kicked her horse on recklessly into snow that Morro had yet to clear from their path. More movement, this time along the slope above the boulders. Petri peered but could make out nothing definite. With the rest, he kicked his horse after Scar.
By the time they reached the boulders all movement had ceased, but tracks scarred the snow, depressions where someone–or at the least something–had clearly rested for a while. Kepa dismounted to take a look, Scar peering intently at his side. Petri watched from his horse.
“How many, do you think?” Scar said.
“Three, maybe four.”
Morro nudged his twitching horse forward. It tried to resist, flared its nostrils and stood stilt-legged and braced against his urgings, but in the end even it had to relent. As many had previously found to their cost, stubbornness was no defence against magic. Morro slid down next to Scar and took no more notice of the beast. Petri did.
While they debated whether the marks had been made by Kass and Cospel and looked to see where they led, Petri watched the horse, released now from the torment on its back. It trembled, and froth fell from its neck and lips; it knew something they didn’t. The beast took a hesitant step forward, and another, put its head down and whiffled its lips over the disturbed snow before it gave a soft whicker of greeting.
“Up that slope,” Kepa said. “I think I can see—”
He got no further. The horse brought its head up sharply, kicked its heels–catching some poor bastard in the back–and bolted. It wasn’t the only one. Petri’s horse spun, reared, dumping him off its back into the snow, and followed it, along with most of the rest whether they had riders still atop or not. Half a heartbeat later a white wall of snow thundered down the slope towards them, crashing over Petri like a wave that refused to end. Snow encased him like a tomb, crushed the air from his lungs and swept him away.
Chapter Twenty-six
The camp was almost empty, but Vocho had found no way to use that to their advantage. He and Carrola had watched as Scar tried, and failed, to mount Kass’s horse, and Vocho had thought she’d been lucky to get away with her skin. Someone else had mounted it though, had made it docile if twitchy, which made Vocho even twitchier.
“What’s so strange about that?” Carrola asked. “I mean, I noticed it was a bad-tempered beast, but that’s what you get with these finely bred animals sometimes. A bit like finely bred people, I’ve always thought. All that inbreeding makes them go funny in the head.” They both turned to look at Eder as he lay, sweating and shivering in turns, in the corner. “Sometimes, of course, people are just like that anyway, and horses are mad down to the last one.”
“Bad tempered doesn’t even come close to describing this particular horse.” Vocho shifted position, swore a blue streak when his hip didn’t move with the rest of him, just twanged its pain up his body and seemingly into his eyeballs, and shifted back to where he had been. “That horse is bloody-well possessed. I’ve known it for the whole five years Kass has owned it, and if I come within half a yard it acts like I’m about to murder it so it has to get in first. Even Cospel treats it warily, and he feeds it, which usually makes animals like you a bit better. The only person who’s ever managed to get on, and stay on, is Kass. And that’s down to sheer bloody-mindedness, which being a trait they share is why she and the horse get on. No, I reckon that there is our magician, and he’s magicked the bastard thing into submission.” A thought which gave Vocho a shiver right between his shoulder blades.
They’d watched in mingled horror and wonder last night when the storm had started. A howl of wind that sounded like the screaming souls of the damned, bringing with it what looked like a whole mountain’s worth of snow. It had been no normal, if violent, storm. Normal storms didn’t avoid one valley, so that not even a breath of wind invaded their hut, not a single flake fell on the camp. Yet, beyond some invisible border, snow had fallen in deadly sheets, piled up in monstrous drifts, sculpted into outlandish shapes by the screaming wind. It had cut this valley off–to anyone with more mundane talents anyway–and dashed any hopes Vocho had held about either being rescued or managing to escape. If they did make it out of the hut, they’d not make it out of the valley. Unless they could find some very long stilts.
They were left in no doubt about the magician when he had led the way, and snow had melted in front of him, wreathing the whole search party–Vocho had to assume that’s what it was–in foggy tendrils.
“Now he’s frozen them to death,” Eder said from his sweaty pallet, “he’s going to find them and gloat over them before he sends their heads to Bakar. Then he’ll have no use for you, because all you’re good for is bait. It’s all you’ve ever been good for. You’re a dead man, Vocho. You should have taken their side when you had the chance.”
“Shut up,” Carrola and Vocho said in unison.
Now the camp was all but empty. Just not empty enough, because Petri had been very explicit about how many men and women should guard this hut. Vocho sat back, carefully. “There has to be a way. I just don’t know what it is.” He took a look at Carrola, who was still studying the camp’s comings and goings, such as they were. “I’m more of a let’s-go-and-hit-things-with-a-sword type of person, but we need a plan, and plans aren’t my forte.”
She snorted her agreement with his assessment of himself. “What to do once out of the hut, that’s the problem,” she said. “Eder’s right. We’re no use to them now. I’m surprised they let us live this long. We have to get out, and soon, and chance our luck with the snow.” She peered over at what was left of the breakfast they’d been given. It hadn’t been much to start with, and now it was just crumbs. “We save whatever food they bring today. We’ll need it. And they took my sword, but I’ve got my fire strike.” She pulled out a little clockwork gizmo like Cospel had, only instead of duellists a cantering horse struck sparks with its hooves as it galloped. “We take whatever small things will burn, for tinder.”
“Planning ahead. I like it. I can’t do it, but I like it when others do. But how do we get out of this hut and past the guards? I can’t fight worth a damn like this, or run very fast if at all. Let’s face it, I can barely manage a stagger.”
He liked watching her think, imagining he could see cogs and gears whirring behind those grey eyes of hers. Actually, he just liked watching her.
“Why are you looking at me like a lost puppy?” she asked.
He could feel himself blush and shifted again so that he could cover it with a yelp of not-faked-at-all pain. The almost empty bottle pressed against his chest, and he took it out and looked at it longingly to distract her. “I suppose I might have enough here for one short burst of being marvellous.”
“Vocho…” She hesitated, and that didn’t seem very like her. “You said what Eder told me about you was true. All of it?”
He looked over at Eder, who gave him a sneer in return. “Sort of. Yes. Only not exactly like that. I killed the priest, but I didn’t know I was doing it. Under the influence of a magician, see. Didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”
“And trying to drown your sister?”
“I wish I knew how he found that out. I tripped her. I didn’t mean for her to fall in the river. She was just so bloody perfect all the time. We were young, and her being the oldest, she was better than me. I wanted to beat her, just the once. It
’s the only thing I’ve ever had, that I could be better than her at one thing.” He sloshed the dregs of the jollop sadly. “Can’t even do that now, not without this stuff.”
“Which you’re hiding from her.”
“Yes, though I don’t doubt she’s figured it out by now. She’s irritatingly good at that.”
“I’m sorry I told Eder about that–I mean he sort of knew anyway, I think, spotted you drinking it probably. He was watching you all the time, him or one of the others for him. But he’s my captain, and when he said all those things…”
“You believed him. Quite rightly, because they are true, and besides you believe what your captain says usually, because your life might depend on it. One reason Eneko got away with so much in the guild, I think, was that unthinking obedience was pretty much built into the training. Kass and me were rubbish at that, her the unthinking bit and me the obedience part. And I am every one of those things he said about me, though I do try not to be. I’m just not very good at that part. I’m not very good at anything now, really, without this.”
Her frown grew indignant. It quite suited her.
Vocho glanced out of the crack in the door. “Well now, I wonder what she wants?”
Maitea was walking up the path to the hut, back straight and head high. It was impossible not to see her mother in her studied poise, that cool face. Vocho thought back to when she’d cut Dom’s bonds and cut him too with her words, told him she hated him and to get out. He didn’t think she took after her mother only in looks.
The guards let her in without a murmur of protest, and she came through the door like a queen attending her coronation.
“Gosh, well this is an honour,” Vocho said and got a sharp poke in the ribs from Carrola’s elbow.