by David Keck
And the man moved on.
And soon, the man’s captain let them ride away.
Durand gripped the saddlebow like a drunken man, feeling eyes on him from every side.
The watch fires must have been well behind them when Berchard dropped through the ranks.
“All right?” he said. “We’d best do this.” He nodded their farewells to the rest while they stopped between broad Silvermere and black Warrens. A wind shoved Durand’s hair.
“You think they knew us?” he asked.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Berchard pulled the patch out of his collar and cinched it round the bad eye. “I’m too old for that kind of game so soon after supper. Coensar and I are going to have words.”
Durand hauled in a deep breath, eyeing the dark and knotted hills. “You reckon they’d see us if we steal round through the hills?”
The land mounted against the sky as jumbled as heaped boulders. Berchard grimaced at the great bales of juniper and thorn on the high stones by the track. They could never get through on horseback. “We’re not carrying the horses,” he chided, “so put that out of your head.”
Durand managed a grin. “We won’t get far scouting on foot. We’ll have to see if we can’t lead them through.” He hopped from the saddle.
Berchard swung his leg over and grunted to the ground in a jingle of mail. “They say there are a thousand paces between West and Dukes’ Bridges—though they’ll be counting by road. Come on.” With that, he took the reins and suddenly took the lead.
With a headshake, Durand followed.
The two men pitched and scrabbled through the granite hills, finding deadfalls or cliffs up every blind ravine. Berchard grunted curses, but sometimes a laugh or oath would shoot over the hills to freeze them both. Durand kept his eyes on the trees and hilltops. He flinched at the passage of an owl. Berchard’s every slip clattered like a tinker’s cart.
Durand considered his spot with Deorwen and her husband. He wondered if it might still be possible to get out from between them. If not now, then after Radomor’s fury was spent. Gireth’s allies would sit the man down—dukes did not wage war alone and Abravanal had friends. He could see that, with one thing and another, Lamoric and Deorwen had hardly had a chance. There was plenty in each of them that was good. They needed time and peace to find it without some fool crowding in.
Yet his heart would not be ruled; he wanted to get her out.
They had walked an hour or more of bramble and briar. Durand shot a whisper over Berchard’s roan. “Should we cut back?” He was not sure how far they’d come. “That might still be firelight up there, but I can’t be sure.” Something glimmered in the highest branches down where the road must lay. “There could be two hundred soldiers right over the hill.”
“If we feel the bolts raining down, I suppose, we’ll know—Uh, Host of Heaven!”
“Berchard?” Durand spun, searching the trees, sword in hand.
The old man’s breeches and leggings came down as he squatted. Struggling with flaps of armor, Berchard forced a wet flatulence into the bushes. “Oh, such relief, despite the timing.”
“Hells, Berchard.”
While his comrade strained, Durand put his eyes on the hills off toward the road. The river was out there, and he could still see light among the branches.
He weighed the rusted armory sword in his fist. But as long as Berchard strained, the shadows held their places. No one came.
Berchard stood, tying his waist cord. “Ah, I’m all crossed up,” he whispered. “Thirty years, this gear always goes on the same way.” He squinted up at Durand. “Leggings first . . .”
Durand loomed in the dark, teeth clenched.
“It’d be tempting fate,” Berchard tried.
“If I have to watch you taking all that gear off,” Durand said, “you’ll ride the rest of the way in your breeches.”
“Ah . . . If there’s no help for it. I must simply hope for the best.”
He stuck his foot in a stirrup, and hauled himself into the saddle. “This ravine’s wide enough to ride, I think. These two brutes have eyes like foxes. Little, whatsit, Almora? She pointed them out.”
Durand grunted surprise. “And the crossbows?”
“We must be a league past them, and those boys’ll be looking for us on the bridge.” With a wet tsk tsk, the man rode off.
And with hardly another step, they dropped into the road—not a league past Radomor’s guards, but scarcely twenty paces from sixty armed men in Yrlat Green. Here was the great span of the Fuller’s Bridge with a mighty inn presiding. A caravan yard called Tenter’s Field stretched where daylight traders would wait to pay their tolls. Every inch was alive with bonfires and voices.
“Hells,” gasped Berchard, and they froze in the lucky few shadows that held them concealed. Dice clicked while the fires crackled. Men debated which whore was best in Ferangore. Durand fought an impulse to jam the spurs in and ride for it.
He waited another heartbeat.
“Quietly, I think, eh?” Berchard concluded. A breath.
With the least nudge, Durand started the dun walking westward. With every heartbeat, he waited for a clatter of crossbows.
Slowly, the darkness stretched behind them. They heard less, and, finally, Durand let himself exhale. He made to jam his sword back down his scabbard’s throat, but a kink caught it.
“Hells.” He felt very shaky. It had been a long day; there had been many long days.
Berchard slipped his roan alongside Durand, smiling. “You shouldn’t throw a good sword away.”
Durand gave the blade a twist and the thing shot home. “When I plucked you from Radomor’s men, I can’t remember if I hooked you with the shield or the sword hand.”
“Don’t mock your elders. It remains wise practice to hang on to a sword. You never know.”
“You never know?”
“Well, you might not think it, but this blade of mine’s enchanted.”
Durand laughed. “Look here.” Berchard swished the wide blade into the moonlight where it shone like a weave of gray syrup. “It’s welded. Old, old, old. Those old smiths used to knit a blade from bits of stock, tasted and chosen for bite or bend. It’s all lost now.”
“Proper steel likely helps.”
“I won this one from the last scion of a noble house. One of them families what have every dusty ancestor since old Saerdan a-moldering in the family vault.”
Not so very unlike the Barons of the Col.
“The way I reckon, this sword’s kept me alive since I won it from the last man who owned it.”
“What happened to this onetime master, then?”
“I’ve given the matter a thought or two over the years, and I’ll tell you: I think the blade has a taste for blood. The last owner wasn’t worth much in a fight, and before him it’d been hanging on the wall since before the Crusade. Generations, waiting. Think of it. My only worry is that, just maybe, it’s the reason that I can never quite get out of fighting. It’s been thirty years since it came to me.”
He held up the blade once more, letting the moonlight curl in the liquid weave of the steel. “They tell me they used to name these . . .” He pointed at the stitched metal. “These patterns. This one was the ‘ladder’—helps a man up to the Bright Gates.”
Durand laughed.
For a league, they traveled the narrow way between Banderol and the looming Warrens, their road cut below the roots of bushes.
Cautiously, they entered a crossroads where their track met a similarly deep channel. Something foul hung on the air. Above them, a shape dangled over the road. As they plodded near, Durand tried to make sense of what he saw. Ropes creaked. There was a long form in strap-iron. At the bottom jutted what seemed to be the root-ball of a fallen tree. He was very near before he saw fingers and the white ring of a hollow eye.
He grimaced. The reek stirred in the passages of his lungs, and dead limbs seemed to sway toward living horses and riders: reed
s in some invisible current.
“Wise to hang a man at the crossroads,” pronounced Berchard.
Durand looked from the reaching hands and let the crossroads fall behind.
“ ‘Specially if he died innocent. The Lost can’t find their way to your throat. But a man’s got to be careful. Crossroads ‘re in-between places. You hang a man at a crossroads, he’s neither here nor there. Not one road or the next. Seams like that will let things in.”
Durand threw his cloak around himself. “Wonder what brought them to this.”
Berchard turned in his saddle, smiling archly. “Spies, likely. Sneaked past the sentries at the Fuller’s Bridge. No mercy on spies!”
The Warrens drew back from the Ferangore Road, and Durand guessed that they had left the no-man’s-land: this was Yrlac rolling under the vault of Heaven. Silent cots and hamlets lay in the distance.
Soon, they saw a black copse of trees squatting like an island in the fields to the south. A track forked from the road, offering a route.
Durand kneaded his shoulder. “Know anything about the wood?”
“Just a thicket, I suppose. But I tell you, I’ve had enough riding for one night. There’s something . . . I don’t know—What say we go that far and then head back?”
They’d spent an hour beyond the Fuller’s Bridge and seen nothing but hanged men. “Coensar should know about the men back on those bridges, but aye. That far.”
Slowly, they closed the distance to the bristling gloom. On its threshold, elms billowed overhead like a storm. Within, thornbush stood taller than a mounted man, but the track led straight in.
Berchard looked up at the trees. “We said we’d come this far, yes?”
“Aye.” There was something about the dark.
“Bugger it,” said Berchard and nudged his mount under the trees.
As Durand’s dun stepped under the first bough, Creation heaved once more. Even with the branches bare, the forest was black as a well. The air sopped with mold and last year’s leaves. Durand clenched his teeth against the urge to haul Berchard out. The pale backs of his hands were nearly invisible on the reins.
“Blast.” Berchard cursed from somewhere ahead. “Let’s hope the horses know the way back home.”
Durand nodded. He put his hand on the hilt of his sword—the borrowed sword’s pommel had petals like a blunt iron flower.
“You remember that madman at that village?” said Berchard. “What was it? Ydran? Where they’d all gone off and left him.”
“The Steward.” He remembered a man with long mustaches in a village where no one lived but a few pigs.
“And the whole village’d gone off into Hesperand. They’d had a look at what was coming.” Durand heard the man sniff. “I wonder how the village fares.”
He felt uncertain distances opening up around them. They rode into wood smoke.
“Berchard!” Durand whispered.
“Shh.”
Durand listened. The smell of a recent fire was strong and mingled with soft horse dung. He heard nothing.
“Berchard? What?”
For a moment there was nothing, then Berchard’s voice said, “Never mind. I thought I heard something shift. Scream if something drags you off.”
Durand eyed the blackness, hoping that anything lurking would be as blind as they were.
“When we come back, let’s see if we can find a few more midnight woods to traipse through. Yes? At my age, I need a little excitement after dark.”
“As you please.”
He heard Berchard’s tsk tsk, and the man’s stolid roan clomping away. He followed.
They plodded through the disorienting blackness, smelling horses, green timber, and even excrement. Finally though, they had a bit of clear heaven overhead. Durand could see Berchard’s silhouette hunched in its saddle.
“That’s better,” Durand sighed.
“Aye . . .” Berchard sounded distracted. He dropped into the track with a jingle of armor, squatting low over the road.
“Hells,” he said. “Hells!” And he turned his wide, good eye to the wood.
“What’ve you seen?” said Durand.
“Here. Tracks.” The trail under Berchard’s hand was churned and rutted. He scrambled up a low bank into the glade. “Everywhere.”
Durand swung down. In the slanting moonlight, he could see dozens of tracks. Hundreds. A multitude had trampled the mud.
“It’s all fresh,” Berchard breathed.
“Travelers to the festival?”
“There were never this many people at that festival, Durand.” His eye was on the wood, and he hardly breathed the words. “If I were hiding my army near my neighbor’s city, I’d keep a cold camp: no fires.”
“Word would get out.” He heard sounds around them as if the trees were drawing breath. “It would have to.”
“It’s not a secret that would keep long.”
But nothing had passed them. Nothing had left the wood, Durand thought.
“And you’d have to shed an awful lot of blood,” Berchard murmured.
“—Oceans,” said a voice—a slithering voice, like a tongue darting in Durand’s ear.
A figure had stepped into the clearing: a man in short, black robes. His face was the pale round of a skull; sleeves dangled to his ankles.
His twin bobbed into view, a long finger over his lips: shh!
And now a soldier—a sword flickering. The darkness throbbed with deep-throated laughter—hundreds of voices. Thousands. Here was Radomor’s fist and fury, curled in the darkness, and they had blundered right inside. They had ridden into an armed camp.
Durand pulled his sword, but the two Rooks only grinned. At a tilt of their heads, a hundred soldiers stepped into the glade. Durand heard the idiot laughter of carrion birds.
“Ride!” Durand spat. In a moment, he had thrown himself back into the saddle.
Berchard followed, swearing.
With spurs and a madman’s lashing, Durand stung the poor dun into full flight.
He heard the stuttered snap of crossbows.
Manic hooves pounded.
Someone screamed, but he punched through blades and reaching arms into the thick dark again, shooting like an arrow for the Fuller’s Bridge.
At first, he heard only shouts and Berchard’s hoofbeats behind him, but then a rumble swelled and the whole wood shook under the thunder of hooves. It was so black. He felt as if he and his horse were careering down a swinging wire. A stumble would throw him blind under an avalanche of horseflesh and steel.
But they tore into the fields.
As the rolling swell of open land stretched behind him, Durand twisted to catch Berchard bursting free—and the whole of the black wood rising in a multitude of carrion birds: the smothering leaves of a forest’s empty branches. Under their laughing cloud, a battalion of horsemen exploded into the field. Durand fought for balance and cursed his mount onward.
They must reach Acconel; the city was not ready. Abravanal’s vassals must ride the leagues from their countless halls to answer his summons. Just the horsemen in the track behind him would outnumber the guards on the walls this night.
In heartbeats, Durand hit the Ferangore Road—hanging low as the dun’s hooves bit the bank on the corner.
Somewhere ahead, the crossroad gibbets swung. A league yawned between Durand and the bridge. He glanced back through and saw the horsemen closing around Berchard and the sky full of rooks. The gibbet cage loomed close, and Durand took the only chance he saw: with all the force of arms and back and speeding horse, he swung his blade against the chain or rope that hung the cage.
Blade, cage, and lashing corpse exploded with the shock in Durand’s arm. The blade was broken. The cage was free. Berchard was through. Then hooves and screaming horses met rolling bars of strap iron, and a few hundred paces of darkness opened behind the Acconel men.
A feathered storm swarmed past them.
Durand shot under the shadow of the Warrens, riding hard
and praying his horse could see. He marveled at the brute. The animal he’d taken for a plain workhorse stretched out like a racer, its great lungs heaving between Durand’s knees. Almora had chosen well.
As the road wove between the Warrens and the river, Durand saw the Fuller’s Bridge fires wink across half a league’s darkness. Black wings lashed at him. Every rise took them closer.
“Hells!” shouted Berchard.
Durand remembered crossbows and blades and Tenter’s Field full of soldiers. At the last, he swung the dun onto the verge, hoping to dull the sound of its hooves. The black-feathered torrent burst over the yard ahead.
There were no clever tricks. Radomor’s men were climbing to their feet under black wings, while Durand cursed the poor dun on to greater speed. Behind him, he heard snatches of prayer from Berchard.
And then they were among the villains. Durand shot through firelight, slewing across the yard, eyes on the bridge. Men flew to every side. Crossbows clattered, sending hissing bolts to join the storming wings. Durand’s mount gathered itself underneath him and he shot for the ancient bridge, leaping bonfires and sprawling soldiers.
Into the madness of this moment, Radomor’s battalion exploded. Sentries screamed and fouled the legs of flying coursers. Crossbows snapped at the dark. Durand landed on the deck of the Fuller’s Bridge with Berchard howling after.
They had half-crossed the Banderol before Radomor’s soldiers could muster another shot.
“DURAND!”
On the far side of the Fuller’s Bridge, Coensar reached as if to catch the dun’s bridle. The town of Fuller’s Bridge huddled where a patch of Acconel’s lower city clung to this westernmost entrance of Acconel Island. On the bridge, a score of Acconel’s guards warded off anyone who would continue the chase. “Captain!” said Berchard.
“What have you done?” Coensar demanded.
Durand caught his breath. “We must get men into the Ferangore Road. It may not be too late.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We drive them from the bridge. We make a stand between the river and the Warrens,” said Durand. “Buy time. We might summon help. Mornaway, Garelyn would come.”
Coensar’s mouth opened. “Berchard, how many?”