“It’s definitely warmer,” Tel said, disregarding the way his breath fogged in the air. “I’m not even sure that the ground has frozen.”
“Ground around here won’t freeze until after Darknight,” Ker said. “That’s when the cold’s really going to hit.”
I can’t believe we’re talking about the weather, she thought. Were they clinging to the normal, to balance what they’d been through? Still, she might be able to turn it to her advantage.
“So where you come from the ground should be frozen in Windmonth?” she said.
“I’m from Orrin Province,” he said, over his shoulder.
“Oh.” Ker frowned. Orrin was off to the east and north, she thought. “I didn’t know they were admitting people from Orrin Province to the Wings.” And wasn’t that a tactful thing to say. A province normally had to be part of the Polity for three full generations before its people could be considered for citizenship.
“They aren’t,” Tell said. “But it’s only my dad’s from Orrin. He was a Lion’s Wing auxiliary. My mother’s a Lion, a Cohort Leader. So I can claim full citizenship on her side. She’s from Andal Province.”
That made more sense. Andal was actually part of the Peninsula, one of the original five provinces. It explained why a military career was open to Tel Cursar, and might even explain his rank. Only citizens could be in the Wings, though there were auxiliary units made up of non-citizens. In fact, that was often how citizenship was won early.
Now that they were on the road, Tel fell into the measured marching stride that all troops were trained in, regardless of rank. That pace, and the roads that made it possible, were what accounted for the Wings’ uncanny speed, to say nothing of the Polity’s rapid communications, since the roads were also used by Polity couriers wherever they ran. A road meant not only that she and Tel could make better time, but it relieved the strain on ankles and leg muscles that couldn’t be avoided among the roots and rocks of the forest.
Ker staggered a bit at first, but she soon fell into old habits, and matched her stride to Tel’s, keeping pace with him without even being aware of it. The steady monotony was helpful, in that it gave her time to think, and to prepare what she was going to say to the Senior at Temlin Hall. Temlin’s Senior was a man, unusual, but not unheard of. Women in the Polity did tend to live longer than men, but it wasn’t that kind of seniority alone that gave a Talent administrative rank.
She glanced at Tel Cursar. He’d have to come into the Hall, to resupply if nothing else. If he agreed to be examined, his testimony and evidence would add valuable detail, but . . . Ker took a half step and almost stumbled before resuming her pace.
“You can’t be examined,” she said. “The Feelers—”
“Would be exposed.” He nodded his understanding. “What about you?”
“They’ll believe me without examination, but if they want all the detail . . .” Suddenly Ker almost choked on an unexpected bark of laughter. Thanks to Barid, that kind of discovery wasn’t something she needed to worry about. The block he’d taught her, the one that was to keep Inquisitor Luca’s secrets safe, could now be used to keep the Feelers’ secret as well. There was irony for you.
“I’ll be all right,” she told him. “All we have to do is stop them from examining you.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.” He shrugged. “They can’t force me, and there’s no senior officer to order it—well, what do we have here?” He stopped and peered at the road surface, pointing out a track. Roads were maintained by the Polity, but locals did use them, and there were always tracks crossing and meeting them along their routes. This one showed more use than any of the others they’d passed already.
“Does this look like a hoofprint to you?” Tel asked, squatting on his heels.
“Well, if it doesn’t, this certainly looks like a horse dropping.” Ker pointed to another spot on the road. Tel trotted over to take a closer look. Ker knew there were soldiers who could tell from the size, shape, and temperature of droppings how old they were and what the horse had eaten, though it was never something she herself had been called on to learn. She scanned the road surface around them. The hard-packed gravel showed dirt from the track, maybe some marks where snow had taken longer to dry—
“Kerida.”
She turned her attention back to where Tel still looked down on the horse dropping with a peculiar expression on his face. He glanced back up at her, and lifted his brows.
“Oh, no,” she said, raising her hands and shaking her head. “You’re joking, right? You can’t mean it.”
“Polity soldiers travel on foot,” Tel pointed out. “And Polity cavalry travel in troops. This is a single rider. We need to know whether this is a courier, or a noble, or a farmer—or something else entirely. We need to know how safe it is for us to be on this road.”
Ker huffed out her breath. He was right, of course. They’d been assuming they were safe in Bascat Province because the pass was snowed in, but the Halians had landed in more than one place in the Peninsula. What if they’d landed outside of it as well?
“It’s not like it’s fresh,” he said as she still hesitated. “It’s practically frozen.” It helped that Tel wasn’t smiling. If he had shown the least sign of laughter . . .
“Oh, sure. That makes all the difference. Stand away from it.” Ker waited until he’d backed a few paces off and then crouched down next to the dropping. She made a face, clearing her throat. According to the stories the Tutors had told them, Full Talents were called on to Flash much worse things than days-old horse excrement.
Paraste. The first thing she Flashed was Tel’s aura, three colors beautifully bright and clear, but not overwhelming—perhaps because there was only one of him, or perhaps because the griffin wasn’t here as well. Ker took a breath and refocused.
“It was a Polity horse,” she said. “But the rider—” She frowned. “The rider was a Halian. The horse was heading back toward the pass. Two days ago.”
“Blast. I thought you said the pass was closed.” Somehow, even his aura seemed to be frowning. “Are there any more on the road?”
Ker straightened to her feet, stung by his tone. “How much do you think I can tell from one horse dropping?” Ker had a sudden image of Tel looking around for more droppings for her to Flash. “Or more than one, for that matter? There’s a limited amount of information involved, and most of it’s about the horse. I was lucky to get what I did.”
“No, of course, well done.” But Tel was looking up and down the road. It didn’t take a Talent to see indecision in the way he was standing.
“We have to go on, Tel,” she said. She bent and scrubbed her hand on the surface of the road, though she knew that wouldn’t make it any cleaner.
“Then we should get off the road,” he said. “It might take longer—what?”
Ker had frozen, her hand still on the gravel. She was Flashing the road itself.
“Tel.” Her voice sounded far away. She looked up at him. He really was impossibly tall. “Tel, the Hall.” She licked her lips. “Something’s wrong.” She turned away, but Tel grabbed her arm.
He scanned her face. “No running,” he said. “A good steady double time. Kerida!” Her name was like a whip. “Are you listening? Double time. Nice and steady.”
Ker took a deep breath and let it out slowly, though it didn’t slow the beating of her heart. “All right.” She nodded. “You lead.” If the Hall actually connected to the road, she might have been able to Flash more. As it was . . .
They set off again, and Ker focused on the familiar rhythm of double-time pacing, tricking her mind into shutting down her thoughts. And it worked, until an odor drifted past her and she stopped dead, feet automatically falling into the correct stance.
Tel Cursar took several more steps before realizing she was no longer trotting behind him. He stopped, crouching slightly, hand on the
hilt of his sword. Scanning the edges of the woods, he spoke without turning to look at her.
“What?” His voice was pitched not to carry.
“Did you smell that?” she said, her head up and her nostrils wide. “Something’s burning.”
Tel tilted his head back and sniffed. Ker had the horrible feeling she was going to giggle. To anyone looking at them, they must resemble a pair of dogs.
“Not burning,” he said. “Burned.”
Ker wasn’t aware she’d started to run until she felt Tel’s painful grip on her arm, holding her back. “Let me go,” she said.
“Let you go where?” he said, his voice hard and cold as steel. “If that smell means what we fear it means, then running there won’t help. We’ve got to go slow and easy, careful and measured.”
Ker knew he was right. But she wanted to smack him anyway.
He must have read that in her face, but he also saw she was listening because he let go of her arm. She could still feel the pressure of his fingers. His voice wasn’t the only steely thing about him. She straightened her pack and set off once more.
“It might not be as bad as you think,” he said, catching up with her.
But of course it was. It was worse.
Tel had not let her run, but he did increase their speed until they were sprinting in triple time. The muscles in Ker’s legs had only just begun to remind her how long it had been since she’d run anywhere at attack speed when the woods opened up to the right.
The Hall should have been easily visible from the road, yet it wasn’t. For the first time in days Ker didn’t feel the cold air, the chill of her fingers. She didn’t feel anything.
Tel was poised to grab hold of her again, but there was nowhere for Ker to run. Temlin Hall had been considerably smaller than Questin, just a regional Hall, serving anywhere that the road reached on this side of the Teeth, whether farms, villages, or towns. It had housed at most twelve people, counting the Full Talents, who would have doubled as administrators, plus their clerks, servants, cooks, and hostlers. Unlike the military, Talents relied on horses to reach the people who needed the Rule of Law as quickly as possible.
But instead of the familiar two-story edifice made from stone and wood, with its central courtyard and its outlying buildings for storage and stable, there was nothing here but the utter and complete destruction that she had not waited to see at Questin.
Charred beams jutted up from piles of stone broken and cracked open. Walls had crumbled from the top as the fire had worked on the mortar. Everything was streaked with soot and ash, except where new snow had fallen—though, judging from the wet and the muck, snow had also fallen while the stones and debris were still warm enough to melt it.
“Careful.” Tel had hold of her arm again. “Some of it’s still smoldering.”
“I don’t feel any heat.” There was something surprising in how ordinary her voice sounded.
“Just the same, don’t touch anything.” Tel released her. “And be careful of the cellar hole.”
The cellar hole. Of course. That’s why there didn’t seem to be enough debris left for a whole building. Much of it must have collapsed into the cellar.
“I don’t understand,” Tel said from behind her. “These are useful buildings. Why burn them? They’ve even pulled the stones apart where they could. Why would anyone do this?”
“You were right.” Ker’s eyes hurt, and she realized she needed to blink. “Don’t you see? You were right all along. They are targeting Halls on purpose. They’re destroying the Law.”
“How did they get here ahead of us?” Tel was focused on the destruction in front of them, as if he wished he could deny what his logic and training couldn’t understand. Finally, he looked down at her. “The snow closed the pass,” he said. “So how did they get here?”
Ker licked her lips. It wasn’t an idle question. They needed to find out if they could. There was no one here to report to, but surely at Oste . . . She shucked her pack and rubbed her palms together.
“No.” Tel held her shoulders from behind. “Don’t do it, Kerida, don’t. Not here. Just leave it.”
She might have listened, but at that moment the breeze shifted and the quality of the burning smell changed from charred wood to something meatier. Ker swallowed, blinking away sudden tears, and hoping her stomach would settle. She clamped her hand over her mouth to stop the whimper she was afraid would escape. She wished she could do as Tel said and just leave it.
“We need to know,” she said, lowering her hand when she could trust her voice. She turned to face him, glad that he still kept his hands on her, kept her steady. “Gather intelligence when you can. It’s what any commander would say, you know that.”
“Of course, but you’re not . . .” Tel let his voice die away.
“Not a soldier.” She gestured at the mess in front of them. “If the Halls are gone—” She shook her head. “That makes me a soldier again. It makes all of us soldiers.” She clenched her jaw. Now, when she no longer wanted it, she would be a soldier again.
She saw comprehension in Tel’s eyes. Until now they had clung to the belief that their world hadn’t really changed, that somewhere, at the next Hall, over the next range of hills, they would find their world intact. What she saw in Tel’s face was the realization that this hope was gone.
“Don’t take long,” he said finally.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and was startled by his sour grin.
Kerida rubbed her hands dry on her thighs, looking around, trying not to see charred beams, blocks of stone, bits of melted glass and fractured tiles, but the item that would best fit her purpose, that would tell them the most. She blew on her fingers. She had to watch her footing; everything underfoot was a soggy, broken mess.
She spotted a squared block of stone, perhaps part of the chimney, and crouched down next to it. When she brushed tentatively at it with the edge of her hand, she could see it was undecorated, too rough to be wall tile, but too smooth to be a piece of the courtyard flagstone. “Paraste,” she said under her breath, placed her left hand on the least cracked part of the block, and found it pleasantly warm.
Nothing. Ker flexed her fingers and concentrated, tried not to be frightened by the fact that her quiet place, the place her mind needed to be for Flashing to begin, wasn’t within her reach. For the first time in two years she found herself cursing the completeness of the block she’d been so happy, at first, to learn.
She slowed her breathing. Focused on her small room. The hangings on the wall made by her mother that shut out all drafts. The wide chair, with all its cushions, and the rug to cover her legs. A small table with one of her mother’s precious books on it. The fire laid in the brazier. She could feel the rough warmth of the rug. Smell the apple wood waiting to be lit. Paraste.
“Ow!” She jerked her hand back, and hoped that Tel hadn’t heard her. She’d felt the fire. The block had been burned, for the Mother’s sake. She took another deep breath and tried again. The stone had been cut from a quarry not far from here, by a man named Dorwod; it had waited weeks for others to be cut, days being placed and mortared by Dorwod and his sons—
“Ker! What’s taking so long?”
Startled, Ker almost fell over backward. “It’s very old,” she said, when her heart was no longer in her throat. “There’s a lot to sift through.” She blinked. Tel’s aura had grown spiky.
“Can you tell when it was burned?”
“Four days ago.” As usual, the answer popped into her head, and Ker sighed. No need to go on touching the object to learn all she wanted to know. That was a mistake she hadn’t made since her first year of training.
“And how did they manage that? How did they manage to be here four days ago?”
Ker shook her head. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that,” she said. “The stone block can only know things about itsel
f.”
Tel looked down at the stone, a vertical line forming between his brows. “It knows things?”
Ker blew out a breath. There really wasn’t any better way to put it. Just for a moment the air around the stone flickered, almost as if it had an aura of its own, or as if one lingered around it, if that was possible, something to do with how the burning had started . . . but the sensation faded before she could Flash anything more than the ghost of a spidery web of . . . red?
“Look around,” she said finally. “See if there’s anything that might have belonged to one of the Halians.” She frowned. “Maybe something red.”
Tel turned away and began to pick his way through the debris. Ker straightened and stood up, but didn’t move at first, afraid of what she would see if she really started looking. Three years ago, she wouldn’t have hesitated to search a battlefield just because there might be human remains about. She swallowed and set off on an angle from Tel. As a Full Talent she might have been asked to Flash bodies, to determine how they’d died. She couldn’t afford to be squeamish now when a great deal more than a case of Law might be at stake.
As her shadow moved off to the right, Ker began to worry that she wasn’t going to find anything quickly enough to do any good. They’d been here too long already, and someone was sure to come back and find them. Would anyone at this Hall have fought the Halians? Perhaps injured one enough that they’d had to take off tunic or shirt to have their injury dressed? Would anyone have left even a damaged piece of clothing behind in weather such as this?
Ker was so sure that the answers to these questions had to be “no,” that it took her a moment to realize she was standing still, staring at a mark on the ground. A boot print. In the mud. Not hers. She glanced around, saw Tel off to her left. Not his either. Someone had been here after the fire. She squatted and placed her hand on the print.
“Tel,” she called, straightening up again. “I’ve got it. Let’s go,” she said as he joined her and handed her the pack she’d discarded. “There was no snow in the pass when these people came through,” she explained. “They must have been another Company, one that didn’t stop at Questin Hall, but came straight along to the pass.” She hesitated. “Nothing to do with the man I killed.” She wrapped herself tighter into her cloak. With all this standing around she’d lost the warmth she’d generated running.
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