by Jon Kiln
Motion drew his attention off to the left.
Nisero crouched in the saddle and stared into the shadows, but saw no one.
“Get ready to ride hard,” he instructed.
“In the darkness? On this trail?” she asked in surprise.
Nisero showed his teeth. “What did I say before we took this spur, woman?”
Nisero was jerked backward off the horse so hard that he thought he had run into a catch wire strung across the trail. It was a common tactic of bandits and his only thought as he fell was that he hoped it had missed Arianne.
But Nisero realized as he landed on his hip and the horse reared ahead of him that he had been seized and yanked down from behind. He felt the hands of his attacker close around his neck in the darkness.
“Ride, Arianne!” he shouted as he turned the bandit’s wrist and twisted around inside his grasp. He tried to spy others but could not make out other men in the darkness.
His own arm twisted up behind him and he took a knee to his gut driving out his air. Nisero flipped over and landed on his back with his arm extended above him and his wrist pressed back the wrong way. As he stared up into the treetops, he saw that Arianne was still on her horse and watching with eyes wide instead of riding away. He tried to yell at her to go, but he could not find his air. Nisero tried to sit up, but a boot pressed his throat and chin and drove his skull back against the ground.
Nisero blinked against purple stars in his vision and clawed for the hilt of his sword.
“Father!” Arianne exclaimed. “It’s Nisero. Let him up!”
Captain Berengar growled, “I know who he is.”
Nisero stopped with his hand on his sword, but did not draw it. “Berengar? Good to see you, old friend.”
Chapter 6: Want You Dead
Berengar kept his boot on Nisero’s throat and the lieutenant’s arm torqued and extended. “Why did you bring her with you?”
Nisero had to rasp out his reply. “She gave me no choice.” The strain caused by the former captain’s unforgiving hold on his airway and muscle joints was becoming painful.
Nisero saw that Berengar wore a broadsword with a black hilt in a plain leather sheath on his belt. It reminded Nisero of the swords of many bandits they had fought together in the past.
Captain Berengar spoke through his teeth down at him. “There is always a choice.”
“Father, let him up and listen to what he has to say,” Arianne pleaded.
“The Elite Guard is dead,” Nisero groaned from the ground.
“I know,” Berengar said, “and they are looking to you for it.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“I know you didn’t. But you brought my pregnant daughter with you and have involved her in the search. You should have insisted that she send you alone. You should have after all we did to rescue her and bring her back to safety. For the sake of my unborn grandchild, Nisero, why would you involve her in this after all I have lost?”
“I’m sorry,” Nisero whispered. “She is stubborn and I had to find you.”
“I insisted,” Arianne added. “You made yourself impossible to be found. I had to come to be sure he found you.”
“I’m not talking to you, Arianne.”
“Well, father, you better let him up and start talking to me, or I’m going to have my horse kick you in the head to get you off him. You had better believe that.”
Berengar glared at his daughter, who met his intense gaze as best she could. Eventually he released Nisero’s arm and took his boot off the lieutenant’s throat.
Nisero bent his arm back into his chest tentatively and coughed several times. Arianne dismounted and ran to Nisero’s side. Berengar reached for her, but she side-stepped him. She took Nisero’s shoulders and hoisted him up to a sitting position. Nisero stood on his own from there and stepped away from her.
He rubbed his throat and looked Berengar in the face. His former captain looked older and haggard. The lines over his skin and along his face were deeper, and made him look far more elderly than not that many years before. The scar along his cheek left by Berengar’s final battle with Solag looked like an ancient marking, as old as a rune upon the wall of a forgotten temple. Gray had set deeper into his hair.
Nisero had no doubt that Captain Berengar still possessed very near his full measure of strength and skill. His own inability to counter the captain’s attack gave him great assurance, through his pain, that Berengar was exactly who he needed. He just needed to direct the older man’s rage away from himself.
“If I could find you,” Berengar said, “then others will be able to as well.”
“I am deeply sorry, sir. I have to solicit your aid, no matter how angry you may be at how I went about it.”
“What is it that you expect we are going to do, Nisero?” Berengar took a few paces away, then abruptly turned and strode right up to him. “You, me, and my pregnant daughter are going to storm the capital and demand an audience with the King? We’re going to battle Captain Forseth and the last surviving members of the Guard to prove you didn’t betray them? We’re going to take on the entire army of two kingdoms ourselves. Is that it?”
Nisero held up his hands in a calming manner. “What are you talking about? Forseth is still alive?”
Berengar stared for a moment and narrowed his eyes in the darkness. “That is the report that has come north. Him and a few others… not many.”
Nisero staggered back and bent over clutching his knees. Arianne tried to steady him herself.
“I thought they had all died,” Nisero said, shocked. “We were separated before the ambush and everyone around me was cut down. I barely escaped from the attackers by the slightest of chances and the cover of darkness. The Eastern prince was cut down along with his men. I fled. I should have remained and tried to help Forseth. I did not think about it until later and by then, the attackers were searching for me.”
“Where was Forseth?”
“He went to the manor house where we were supposed to stay,” Nisero replied. “Forseth and some others went to announce our arrival. We stayed on the road awaiting his return.”
“With the prince?” Berengar asked.
“Yes.”
“In the dark?”
“Yes.”
Berengar furrowed his brow. “On the exact spot where the attackers ambushed you once Forseth and the others left.”
Nisero stood up straight again. “What are you getting at, sir?”
“Your orders were to stay on the road.”
Nisero licked his lips. “Yes.”
“Why did Forseth leave you all to go to the manor house where you were expected?”
Nisero rubbed at his face as he tried to pull up the exact memory from the haze of that night. “He said it was late and he did not want the lord’s men to fire on the prince by accident, if we surprised him.”
“But then you were fired upon on purpose.” Berengar scratched at a gristle of whiskers over his chin and then rubbed his fingers at the deep pits of the scars along his cheek. “Every man that was with you died? You are sure?”
Nisero stared at the ground for a few beats. “I am certain. I thought Forseth and the others were waylaid upon their return.”
“So, all the survivors, including Captain Forseth,” Berengar concluded, “had to be among those that left you on the road, where you were told to stay.” Berengar crossed his arms across his broad chest. “He knew that exact manor and that exact spot where he insisted on stopping for the night. There and nowhere else.”
Nisero nodded slowly. “He did.”
“So you suspect him, father?” Arianne injected. “You think Captain Forseth conspired with the attackers against his own Guard?”
“I can’t imagine it,” Nisero whispered.
“I’m surprised it didn’t cross your mind sooner.”
Nisero turned away. “I had no reason to think there had been any other survivors before now. I had considered that there had to be po
werful men behind the assassination and the framing, but I never considered such a betrayal.”
“I don’t know how we go about refuting the kingdom wide call for your capture or death,” Berengar said in concern. “Those that want you dead, and thought you guilty, only want it more with every passing moment. Fear of war is spreading through the land. On my way here, I heard talk that handing you over to the grieving king in the east might buy forgiveness and avoid bloody conflict.”
“The people clearly have no understanding about how kings operate or think,” Nisero remarked.
“They never have and never will.”
“How did you know to come down this way looking for us at all?” Arianne asked. “We took the spur and we are still some distance from the message drop.”
Berengar rubbed at his chin. “It is a wonder you two did not get yourselves captured or killed.”
“We came close with one bounty hunter,” Arianne confessed, “but Nisero choked him out and we escaped.”
Berengar stared at his daughter for a moment and then affixed Nisero in his glare. Nisero found himself wishing that Arianne had not mentioned the close call to her father.
Berengar took a deep breath and then said, “At any rate, word of the two of you traveled up the trail and reached the towns north. The fact that they continued to search farther north and you had not reached the message drop, led me to believe that you had been captured and were on your way back to the capital. Or, you had broken off on a side route that they had not searched. I came down this way first and then was going to track you back along the main roads until I found who had claimed your bounty.”
“By the gods,” Nisero uttered, “we avoided disaster again by mere chance.”
“You give yourself so little credit.” Arianne huffed in annoyance. “But more importantly, you give me so little credit.”
Berengar exhaled slowly, looking up into the trees. “I think he gives himself plenty enough credit, for the circumstances.”
“Father,” Arianne said, “we need to get off the trail. Can we reach your hidden cabin in the foothills?”
“There are already men searching and guarding there.”
“How did they even find it?” Arianne asked in surprise.
“You greatly underestimate the depth of trouble you two have waded out into.”
Nisero looked around him. “Were you possibly followed out this far?”
“No, I know how to avoid detection.”
“Then I’m again reassured that coming to you was the right choice.”
Berengar huffed. “There is a place nearby that we can rest for one night at least. We’ll need to move on after that though. Where from there, I don’t yet know. We will be getting Arianne back to her husband and clear of this business as soon as possible too. Trying to swim against the tides of two kingdoms that want you dead is impossible enough without a pregnant woman in tow.”
“Easy, father, I got us this far well enough, did I not?”
Berengar smiled patiently at her. “My horse is off the trail ahead of us here. I’ll retrieve it and then we are traveling through the woods. It will be a difficult ride in the dark. We will be going slow. No one gets hurt even if it takes us all night to arrive.”
Berengar marched ahead of them. Arianne mounted her horse and Nisero walked along between, holding the reins of both horses from the ground.
“I have greatly angered and disappointed him,” Nisero said quietly.
Arianne sniffed. “I’ve done so plenty of times myself. Believe me. He will get past it.”
“You are his daughter.” Nisero stared at Captain Berengar’s back. “He would forgive you from necessity, if no other reason.”
“You underestimate what you mean to him, Nisero. He thinks of you much like a son. He will be angered and forgiving toward you in equal measure.”
Chapter 7: No New Position
“I’ll need to make contact with a few people still within the military before we can proceed,” Berengar explained.
Nisero sat up on his pallet in the back of the inn. Light filtered gray through the dusty windows and empty corridors. “Contact them to what end?”
“We need information. We need a path that at least has some potential to move us forward. At the moment we have no such thing.”
A chicken walked past the doorway to the storage room where they had slept. The bird was lean, with a crimson crown and grand emerald feathers cascading out behind it. Nisero smelled eggs and meat cooking from around the corner. The bird seemed unimpressed and undisturbed by the implications of those smells and the sounds of sizzling oil.
“What is this place?” he asked.
Berengar looked toward the door, but the chicken was gone by then. “It was a very fancy tavern for very fancy people. Now it is part of a farm and no one has gotten around to knocking it down. Is it not up to your standards?”
“You and I have stayed in worse.”
Berengar pursed his lips and nodded. “This is not new to us, to be sure.”
“You trust the people who possess this land then?”
“I trust the ones that know. No one attacked us outside while I was bringing us in, so it is already better than your previous safe places.”
Nisero let out a long breath and bowed his head. “I can’t believe that Forseth would betray me. We fought in defense of the kingdom together in numerous battles. You know what that means. You find out about the nature of a man in those moments. You and I both served with him for many years before he was promoted. He pulled us out of the fire in the mountains in a near hopeless war with the bandits. Did you ever see a possible traitor in any of those moments?”
Berengar seemed to look through the wall, thinking of times long past. The sizzling sound around the corner died off and the sounds of plates and pans clinking followed.
Captain Berengar finally said, “Man is capable of anything under the right circumstances.”
Nisero stared at the captain. “Did you ever entertain the idea that I might have done what they accused me of?”
“Not for a moment,” Berengar said without a pause. “Perhaps Captain Forseth had no part in orchestrating the destruction of the Elite Guard and the assassination of a foreign prince. Someone benefits, though. I need to put us on a course to finding out what happened, why, and how their plans are to be undone.”
“Seems to be an easy three step plan.”
Berengar smiled, one said of his mouth twisting up the scar on his cheek.
An old lady with white hair sticking out in every direction leaned into the doorway. She clutched a robe around in front of her. “Breakfast is prepared, gentlemen. You want me to set you up a knee table here from some old pallets, or will you come out like proper guests?”
“We’ll come out. Thank you, Gorma,” Berengar said to her.
“As you wish, master.”
Nisero tilted his head. “Master?”
“I may own this farm,” Berengar disclosed. “I may have bought it in Gorma and her husband’s name so that they would not lose it and no one would know that I owned it.”
“Not even Arianne,” Nisero said. “Impressive.”
Arianne spoke from under her covers on her pallet in the corner. “I can hear you both. Keeping secrets from your family is none too impressive. Every man does it.”
Berengar shook his head. “Every man, huh? Where does your husband think you are right now, daughter?”
“Don’t start with me,” she said. “Help me up. I need to go relieve myself before I wet this pallet.”
He crossed the room and helped Arianne to her feet. Nisero looked around thinking that it would be hard to tell the room had been further fouled even if she did urinate in the corner.
A pig hobbled by the doorway on three legs, missing one of its front feet.
Arianne held her back gingerly as she exited the room. From the hallway, she called out to them. “Don’t go on any grand quests without me.”
He
r shadow broke the light coming from the foyer of the old inn, and then the light of morning returned once she was outside.
“Will she be okay out there?” Nisero said, worried.
“You can go ask her, but I don’t think she’d appreciate it,” Berengar responded. “You brought her in riding on horseback. I’m sure she can handle this. We are isolated enough on this property.”
Captain Berengar stood and Nisero followed him out into a banquet hall on one side of the building. Large holes opened through the wood paneling and stone. Some of the openings ran nearly from floor to ceiling. Nisero saw weeds lining the property and scant corn fields beyond that. The stalks and leaves were drawing yellow and crisp, indicating time for harvest.
A cow lifted its head from the weeds and peered through at the old woman plating out fried eggs, boiled chicken and ham hock.
She looked up as Berengar approached. “I hope this is sufficient, master. I did not know how many were coming when you sent word.”
“This is a king’s breakfast, Gorma. I would not ask for any more.”
As Nisero took his seat and Gorma poured him wine from a pitcher, an older man in drab leather walked up and lifted a few pinches of meat from the table, before continuing on.
“Are you not joining, husband?” Gorma asked.
He spoke as he walked toward the front of the ruined inn. “No, excuse me, master. The corn requires my full attention this day.”
“Of course,” Berengar said.
Nisero looked out at the cow bowing its head to chew up the weeds again. He wasn’t sure why everyone still insisted on using the door when so much of the wall was missing.
“Who are you going to contact?” he asked Berengar.
“I’d rather keep that close to breast until I have some answers,” Berengar said between bites. “It will be better if you don’t know them. I’m going to travel out to meet with a few contacts and then return with whatever I find.”
“When you say you will go, sir,” Nisero looked up from his plate, “it sounds as if you intend to go alone.”
“Traveling with you and getting spotted before we have a destination might end our efforts before they begin. Arianne will stay here with you until I return. Then we need to deal with reality of her situation too.”