by Mike Shel
This other highwayman was just a boy, a lad no older than fourteen. He was seated atop Agnes’s mount now, hands bound behind his back. Kennah was tying a noose with rope from his pack as he spoke to the boy. “The man over there,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion, tilting his head to the tree near where Ruben lay, “was like my brother. We met in the streets of Aulkirk as fatherless boys, scrabbling for food and shelter from the elements. One day, we decided that we would walk on foot, all the way to the capital, and present ourselves at the doors of the Citadel, to join the Syraeic League. When we finally arrived, we stood there each morning for a month, presenting ourselves for review. At last, a preceptor finally offered to accept him in. Just him, not me. But Ruben stared that woman in the face and said he wouldn’t join the League unless they took me in, too.”
“I’m sorry!” whimpered the boy, eyes red with tears, the crooked teeth in his mouth chattering as though it was midwinter rather than the height of summer. “It was supposed t’be a warnin’ shot! Raego told me to send it near his head! I’m sorry, sir!”
Kennah looped the makeshift noose around the boy’s scrawny neck, tightening it slightly, then letting it rest on his shoulders. “Well, I’m gonna hang you now, boy,” he answered, matter-of-fact, smoothing out his bushy beard with a big hand. “I’m gonna throw this rope over the fat limb of that tree Agnes just cut with your friend Raego’s sword, and I’m gonna yank you up with it and watch it choke the life from you, slow.”
“Don’t kill me, sir!” the youth begged as Kennah took hold of the dappled horse’s reins and led her over toward the other oak, ideal for his purpose.
Agnes knelt next to Ruben’s body and grabbed hold of the killing arrow, steadying herself on his shoulder with the other hand. She grunted pulling the missile free. Gore clung to its steel head. She patted Ruben’s shoulder, then broke the arrow over her thigh as she stood. She flung the two halves at the boy, striking him in the chest. They fell to the ground, but his tattered, filthy shirt now bore a new stain left by Ruben’s lifeblood.
“The penalty for brigandry is hanging, lad,” growled Agnes. “No exceptions. You ambushed us, two grown men and a woman, each of us armed, armored, and mounted. If you had stuck to easy pickings, fat merchants too cheap to hire an escort, maybe you wouldn’t be where you are now. There’s a price to be paid for murder, but there’s a steeper one for stupidity.”
“Do you know where that man you killed has been?” barked Kennah as he heaved the other end of the rope over the tree limb and caught it as it came back down on the other side. “He’s crawled in Busker tombs in Bannerbraeke and the Karnes, fought wights and hollow men. He cut down a gods-cursed demon that prowled the halls of an old sea cave temple in Warwede. It was eight feet tall and had the head of a crocodile, claws like a tiger! And why is this brave, good man dead now? He’s dead, boy, because you have shit aim.”
The boy’s lips quivered and tears coursed down his soiled face. His eyes pled with Agnes, begged her. Kennah pulled a dagger from his belt with sudden violence. Agnes grabbed him by his armored leather sleeve. “Hanging, brother,” she said firmly. “The penalty is hanging.”
Kennah scowled at Agnes, his face boiling with righteous fury. “I’m not gonna gut him, Agnes! I’m gonna cut his bonds. That way, it’ll take him longer to strangle. I wanna watch him dance and claw with that rope ‘round his neck. I want to watch him shit himself while his lips turn blue.”
“This is by law, Kennah,” Agnes answered, looking her Syraeic brother in the eye, “not vengeance.” Kennah jerked his arm away from Agnes’ touch and sawed at the rope binding the whimpering lad’s hands with the knife.
“There’s nothing in the law that says it needs to be quick or that his hands hafta be tied. By Marcator’s Oath, he’s not gonna die quick!”
The second the boy’s bonds parted, Kennah, a big man who outweighed the lad by a hundred pounds, seized the rope with both hands and stepped back and pulled. The lad shot out of the horse’s saddle so quickly that his cry of “No!” was choked off before it was out of his mouth. His legs kicked, his hands grabbed with fruitless urgency at the noose. The crackling sound of the rope tightening about his neck mixed with those of the boy’s frantic terminal struggles. Kennah put his full weight into it, grimacing with the effort, a hateful glower on his quaking lips. The boy’s face was soon red like a beet, his eyes bulging from their sockets, wild and desperate gyrations of his body taxing Kennah’s muscles.
Agnes looked from the strangling boy to her Syraeic companion, feeling that soft part of her well up with pity for the lad, with horror at Kennah’s enthusiasm for the task. In her mind’s eye she saw herself draw her sword from its scabbard and sever the taut rope, allowing the kicking lad to plummet to the ground. Somehow, she would convince Kennah to let the boy go and the little fool would run off into the woods, the burn of the noose on his flesh there as a lifelong reminder. But the hard part of her, the part that had trained with men like poor, dead Ruben, whom she had counted on to have her back, that part said, watch Kennah throttle the life from the stupid bastard. And that part of her won out.
When at last the youth was dead, tongue protruding from his mouth obscenely, eyes bloodshot, and flesh like the skin of an eggplant, Kennah marched the rope around the trunk of the tree and tied it off. He got a bit of charcoal and sheet of parchment from his saddlebag and scrawled a word on the page. He reached up and shoved a wadded corner of the paper into the dead boy’s gaping mouth, deep enough for the parchment to stay there for the world to read what he had written. Anyone who passed by as the dangling body rotted over the coming weeks and months would read: HIGHWAYMAN.
“Hanging by law,” he said, spitting at the base of the tree. He looked at Agnes, his expression daring a rebuke.
They rode the rest of the day in silence, in part because Ruben had been the author of most of their conversation since leaving Boudun behind. But there was also a lingering tension, Agnes thought, Kennah reading judgment in her earlier call for restraint. The big bearded man, short brown hair cut by what must have been a drunken barber, rode with Ruben’s body strapped behind him, across his mount’s rump. Agnes held back her own horse’s penchant for speedier travel to accommodate the other horse’s double burden. It was while they set up camp for the night that Kennah finally spoke, gruff and irritable.
“Thought I’d stick a bound man with my knife? What do take me for? Some alley thug?”
“I apologize, brother. I misread your gesture in the heat of the moment.”
“I’ve known Ruben since we were both eleven,” he continued while hobbling his mount, doing his best to hide the tears welling in his eyes. “He saved my life at least twice. In the same goddamn Busker tomb.”
“It was idiot chance,” Agnes offered. “It’s part of what makes it so galling. Some half-wit peasant boy, half-starved and frightened…” She wasn’t sure how to finish her thought.
“That demon, with the crocodile head? We were in one of those sea cave temples, near the edge of the Urwyd Swamp—you know the kind: constant sound of surf boomin’ through the rock ‘til you’re ready t’ bust your head against a wall? The thing, the demon, it had bulging, blood red eyes, saliva dripping from teeth this long.” He held out a hand, thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “Ruben drove his sword right into the thing’s mouth, his arms were elbow deep in the beast’s jaws! Gave the blade a nasty twist. It howled and dropped t’ the ground like a sack of stones. Thing took a chunk out of a merc we had hired before that. We didn’t have a priest with us on that run and the wound festered. Killed the woman before we were halfway back to Mache. Probably had some sort of venom in its saliva. Ruben was elbow deep in its mouth. If just one o’ those fangs had grazed his skin, he’d’ve been a goner.” He untied his sleep roll and threw it on the ground. He let out a long sigh and covered his face with both hands. His next words were muffled. “Fucking warning shot.”
/> Agnes fought an impulse to put a hand on the man’s back. He didn’t seem the type to welcome comfort from another, especially someone he had only met a few days before. She may have chanced it several months back, when she was still enamored with her newfound notoriety, had let it go to her head a bit. Though she was younger than both Kennah and Ruben, now just turned twenty-two, Agnes had some fame in the Syraeic League for the role she played in combating the devilish plague that had so devastated the Citadel a year ago. Of course, her father and his cohorts were the most celebrated heroes, having brought an end to the pestilence by slaying its author, a so-called god who lurked deep in the bowels of the Barrowlands. To retrieve her father was the purpose of their present mission.
“Bring him back to us, Agnes dear,” aged Lictor Rae had told her from her sick bed. “Things are happening of which he must be apprised.” The old woman’s face had grown sallower, she seemed dreadfully frail. Despite the lictor’s great age, Agnes had never thought of her as elderly or infirm. But the past year had seen a decline, one that even the healing priests of Belu couldn’t halt. She would be dead before the year was out, Agnes was certain. Pallas Rae had pushed herself tirelessly to help the League recover from its great losses suffered during the plague, recalling many from the field to train a crop of aggressively recruited novices to replace the scores of agents that the insidious contagion had ferried to the grave.
“Can you get us some wood, Peregrine?” Kennah asked as he gathered stones at the perimeter of the clearing to encircle a campfire. The use of her Syraeic nickname signaled that the gruff man had forgiven her. She was christened with that name as a novice, her first week at the Citadel: her prominent nose reminded her cheeky fellow initiates and preceptors of a falcon’s beak. It bothered her at first, but now she knew it was used with affection. She had taken her lumps and earned the respect of her peers and preceptors in short order, a scrappy, serious girl of sixteen when she entered training. Her father was a Syraeic agent of some reputation. That had given her a leg up on many of the others, who had entered training without knowing what lay ahead. Agnes had a far better understanding of the League’s especial education and what trials to expect. It was her father who had given her both her nose and the stories of adventure that led her to the Citadel, much to her poor mother’s chagrin.
Agnes gathered kindling, sticks, and a couple larger scraps from nearby and began her meticulous construction as Kennah placed the last stone in the circle. For Agnes, assembling a campfire was an art: dry leaves and other bits that would catch easily gathered at the base, thin sticks carefully arranged above the tinder so that they held one another up at the center, followed by larger sticks, and more sizable pieces of wood forming a pyramid hovering above the rest, plenty of gaps for the air to steal through. She had a proper blaze going to cook their meal mere minutes after she set it alight with her tinderbox.
Kennah had downed a plump hare with his bow only half an hour before they stopped for the night. It would have been Ruben’s turn to prepare the meal. Agnes took that duty as well rather than discuss it with Kennah, still sullen despite his forgiving address. She skinned the hare with an expert hand and cleaned it, stuffing the cavity she had made with wild mushrooms and herbs she found growing at the base of an old grandfather of a sycamore opposite their horses and Ruben’s body. She propped it over the fire and sat back.
Agnes decided she was tired of the quiet. “Mushrooms and herbs,” she said, staring into the fire. “My godmother Lenda taught me that. It’ll take the gamey edge off the meat and you’ll think we were in Boudun, eating a feast at the Wild Rose.”
“So, tell me about your famous old man,” queried Kennah, sitting across from her. The big man employed his dagger in an absent fashion to send shavings from a hunk of wood into the fire. “I’ve heard tales.”
Kennah makes conversation, thought Agnes. She figured she’d have to chatter on for a while before he finally spoke. He must be feeling some guilt, she concluded, about snapping at her, or more likely the way he had made the boy suffer. She decided to let him dangle a bit.
“He’s a swordsman, retired a few years back.”
“Yes, yes,” Kennah responded, sour and frowning. “I know that much. Everybody knows that much.” He adjusted the hare over the flames and a few mushrooms fell into the fire. Agnes resisted the impulse to scold him.
“What do you want to know? He was a swordsman, he spent his early career in the eastern empire, in Busker ruins mostly, some in the Sea Lord caves in Warwede. Then he graduated to the Barrowlands.”
“You still haven’t told me anything I don’t already know,” said Kennah, adjusting the hare again at the cost of another mushroom. “What’s the man like?”
“Leave our dinner be, for Belu’s sake!” she shouted, a bit too shrill. Strange how talk of her father still riled her, even though they had reconciled last year. After her older brother’s death, her father tried talking her out of the League. She had entered the Citadel only a few months before Tomas’s death, crushed by a great stone in some Busker king’s crypt. She had refused, of course, her dream of being a Syraeic agent every bit as powerful as it had been for her brother. Agnes knew her mother had blamed her father for Tomas’s death, railed at him for the stories of adventure with which he had filled the heads of their children. Mother and father both retreated into their grief, and a month later her mother hung herself in the fruit cellar of their cottage on the outskirts of Boudun. Mother had endured her father’s frequent absences by dedicating herself to her children, but the League had taken her son from her, just as it had claimed the devotion of her husband, and eventually her daughter.
After they buried her mother, Agnes returned to her training, her father to his League duties. He was an occasional diplomat now, a senior field agent with a knack for gently, but effectively pushing aside roadblocks to the League’s business imposed by officious bureaucrats and self-important nobles. He even lectured at the Citadel twice, with Agnes herself in the crowded hall of eager students. But soon he and his Syraeic cohorts were taking mission after mission in the Barrowlands without rest, and she saw him rarely. It was about a year at that manic pace before he emerged from a Djao ruin northeast of Serekirk—she had forgotten the subterranean deathtrap’s name. He was the sole survivor of the expedition, bearing with him the head of his closest Syraeic companion, her beloved godmother, Lenda Hathspry.
He arrived back at the Citadel emotionally shattered. For a time, there was whispered talk that her father would end up committed to St. Kenther, the asylum-hospital where the League sent those of its number whose minds were broken. He took to drinking, holed up in a Citadel cubicle, chasing away with profane rebukes well-meaning priests and old colleagues. He allowed her to see him only once during that awful sojourn from the world, and what she had witnessed shook her to the core: her loving father, a brave, intelligent, resourceful man, well respected in the League, sought after for his insight and experience, reduced to a red-eyed wreck with the stink of alcohol oozing from every pore. He had been her idol, she had beamed with pride when preceptors identified her as Auric Manteo’s daughter. Now, this…ruin.
He refused her entry after that disturbing encounter. At last, six months or more later, he found her in a courtyard, sparring with a classmate. Her father was gaunt, but sober and clean shaven, and announced that he was resigning his commission with the League and retiring to the little town of Daurhim fifty miles west of the city. He had bought a small manse there. He left Agnes the Boudun cottage and a fair portion of the wealth he had accumulated over the length of his career. She was shocked, but relieved at least that he seemed cured of the wildness and despair that had so pitilessly ravaged him.
Agnes completed her novitiate training and turned eighteen later that year, and began receiving field assignments, all of them in the Busker sites that littered the Duchies of Bannerbraeke and the Karnes. She found that life in the field was ev
ery bit as exciting as she had imagined as a young girl. Her first foray was into an untouched crypt-complex of a minor Busker named Hanisham the Tin-Eared; she had written her father in Daurhim, recounting the adventure in breathless prose, craving his praise for what she had accomplished, for her daring and bravery. Instead she received a long harangue critiquing her rashness, her failure to take threats she faced with the seriousness and sobriety they deserved. He addressed her as “my girl,” an endearment that felt anything but.
She lashed out at his stern letter with a poisoned response. He had apologized, and the two of them corresponded for a time, at least until she discovered that he had been using his influence to retard her career, keeping her from choice, but dangerous assignments for which she was qualified. Yes, he was seeking to protect her from harm, as though she was still his little girl, who needed someone to shield her from risk. She had poured all of her anger and resentment into a final letter. Had her words been a toxin, the contents of the letter would have felled every beast in the Queen’s Menagerie. She remembered blaming her mother’s death on him and asking that he remove himself from her life utterly. The memory hurt her now, stinging as she recalled the venom in the words she had penned.
Agnes saw that Kennah had allowed her to woolgather and left the hare be, so she indulged his curiosity about her father with a few tales of his exploits that she remembered from her childhood. The swordsman listened attentively, nodding occasionally, asking a pointed question about the challenges and discoveries in this tomb or that temple ruin, like a good Syraeic agent. She talked about her father’s adventures until their meal was finished, but didn’t share any personal reflections with him, not that those bits would truly interest the man. No, those were details she would worry in her mind that night as she finally fell asleep.