Company of Strangers, #1

by Melissa McShane

  The forest dwindled as they walked northward until they were once again in open land. Now, however, instead of flat, grassy plains, low hills spread out as far as Sienne could see. The five trudged up and down the gentle slopes as the sun sank in the western sky and their shadows pointed eastward like sundial gnomons. Sienne’s legs ached worse than they had the day before with all the up and down movement. She tried not to look at Alaric, which was difficult because he was enormous and right in front of her. The hilt of his sword bobbed over his right shoulder. She wished it would smack him in the head. He needed a good head-smacking, and she was too short to do it properly.

  The spot Alaric chose for that night’s camp looked no different from anywhere else, but it was at the bottom of a slope between hills and concealed from any prying eyes, or so Dianthe told Sienne. “There’s no water anywhere nearby,” she added, “so we’ll need your magic.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Sienne said bitterly.

  “Sienne, he’s just…we’re protective of each other, and he has good reason to hate magic.”

  “That’s irrational. Magic is as good or as bad as the wizard using it. It’s not inherently evil.”

  “Still.” Dianthe handed her the cook pot. “Try to feel some…I don’t know. Compassion?”

  Sienne glared at her. “Did you give him this lecture?”

  “Yes, actually. His version had more swearing. And…thanks. In case nobody else said it. You really did save our lives.”

  Sienne turned away and set the pot on the ground, trying to hold onto her resentment as she summoned water. That was unfair. It wasn’t Dianthe’s fault. She lugged the pot over to the fire where Alaric crouched, laying on sticks Button had been carrying all afternoon, and set it over the flames without a word. Alaric ignored her. That was fine by her.

  They found no fresh meat for the pot and had to make do with the dried stuff they’d eaten at noon, soaked in boiling water until it was almost tender. The rich broth it produced was salty, but delicious, and Sienne drank hers down and felt invigorated. She drank her fill of water, then produced a thin stream that poured into her waterskin until it was fat and sloshed pleasantly. Nobody paid any attention to this minor piece of magic. That, too, was fine by her.

  “Sienne, you’ll take first watch,” Alaric said. He was staring at the fire, not looking at her, and she felt a moment’s irritation that he couldn’t even bring himself to address her directly. “Then Kalanath, me, Dianthe, and Perrin.”

  Nobody said anything. Alaric rubbed his face with one enormous hand. “Sienne,” he said, startling her, “I owe you an apology. You made a decision that turned out to be the right one. The truth is, I failed to get us to act as a team, and I blamed myself, but I took it out on you. I’m sorry.”

  Sienne gaped. “I, uh, accept,” she said. “But you were right, I was careless, and Dianthe—”

  “Accidents happen,” Dianthe said. “Once a fight begins, it can be over in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds, and it’s hard to keep track of the enemy, let alone four other people all trying to defeat them. But we could have been better coordinated.”

  “I do not know what I could have done differently,” Kalanath said. “Not without a blade.” He sounded very distant.

  “There’s a reason I wanted you along,” Alaric said. “Every fight is different. Different strengths, different weaknesses. There will be fights in which swords are useless. The important thing is to recognize what else you can do that isn’t a direct attack. You flung those splinterfolk in Dianthe’s and my direction so we could destroy them, and those ones were too stunned to effectively fight back. And Perrin—that defensive shield was extremely effective. You just need practice in where to put it.”

  “Very true,” Perrin said, sounding a little more cheerful than he had earlier. “I am afraid some of these blessings are ones I have never been granted before. But I will not always have the luxury of testing them before they are urgently needed. I will find ways around that.”

  “I was thinking,” Sienne said, “if we’d all been behind the shield…I’m pretty sure I could cast that spell outside it, and we would have been protected from the blast.”

  “I can picture it,” Alaric said. “What in Sisyletus’s name was that? I didn’t think—sorry—you were that experienced.”

  “I’m not. It’s just a simple break spell. It really only works on fragile things, or things that are intended to break. It wouldn’t damage your sword, or the cook pot, but those splinterfolk were made to shatter, I think. So it was luck that it worked so well.”

  “I’ll take that kind of luck,” Alaric said with a wry smile, and to her surprise, Sienne returned it.

  “The truth is, we haven’t been behaving like a team,” Dianthe said. “We ought to understand each other’s abilities and know how to work with them under pressure. This won’t be the only challenge we face, even if the keep is unprotected.”

  “Is it?” Kalanath asked.

  “It was when we were there before, scouting. But you never know what creatures might come calling.” Dianthe stretched, and her back gave out a long string of staccato pops. “Kalanath, is there any reason you can’t do your morning exercise where the rest of us can watch? To get a feel for your fighting style?”

  Kalanath nodded. “It is not private. It is just easier to focus without a watcher. But I think you are right.”

  “I anticipate the show with great enthusiasm,” Perrin said.

  Kalanath reddened and ducked his head. “Is something amiss?” Perrin said.

  “I do not understand your words many times,” Kalanath said. “What is ‘anticipate’?”

  It was Perrin’s turn to blush. “That had not occurred to me,” he said. “You speak Fellic so well…it simply means to look forward to. Is that why you never speak to me?”

  Kalanath shrugged. “I have little to say.”

  “Well, that can’t be true,” Dianthe said. “I don’t want to pry, but you’ve had an interesting life, as a foreigner in Fioretti, and you’ve had two years’ experience as a scrapper. Scrappers always have stories to tell.”

  “I choose not to speak of myself,” Kalanath said. Then he sighed, and added, “But if we are to work together, we must know each other. It is simply not my way.”

  “Nobody’s going to pester you for your secrets,” Sienne said.

  “As we all have secrets of our own, no doubt,” Perrin said. He cast a quick look at Sienne that startled her with its calculated appraisal. Surely he didn’t know her secret? He was Fiorettan, not Beneddan, and not noble…and Sienne wasn’t an uncommon name…probably it was nothing.

  “But trusting each other begins with understanding,” Alaric said, “and Kalanath’s right, we need to know each other.”

  “Just not tonight, all right?” Dianthe said. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Fair enough,” said Perrin. “Good night to you all.”

  Sienne banked the fire while the others disappeared into their tents. She was bone-weary, but her mind was sharp and excited. Alaric had actually apologized to her. They’d all talked frankly about the battle—encounter? It hadn’t seemed big enough to be called a battle. For the first time, she felt like part of a team.

  A brisk wind had come up, and she rubbed her arms. Her shirt was thin enough to be comfortable during the day, but right now it didn’t feel warm enough. She paced the outer perimeter of their camp and watched the stars in the cloudless sky, black and distant as the lidless eye of a serpent. She had studied astronomy during her fosterage at Stravanus, but with ready access to a little magic that let her find true north, she’d never needed to know more than the basics about the sky. She could identify constellations, though. There was the Sailor, just coming up over the eastern horizon behind the Lovers, and the Bull, poised to gore his neighbor the Queen of Stars.

  The men’s tent rustled, and a large form emerged. Sienne turned her back in case Alaric intended to relieve himself—there wasn’t any priva
cy on the hills—but instead heard him approaching her. “You know when to wake Kalanath?” he said.

  “I have a pocket watch.”

  “Good.” He stood silent for a moment, and Sienne thought he might be watching the sky. “Try to sleep soundly. We’ll reach our destination tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I will.”

  There was another long silence broken only by the hiss of the wind over the grass covering the hills. Finally, Alaric said, “I don’t like how easy it is for wizards to cause untold harm with their magic. I’ve seen it happen—oh, it doesn’t matter how often. Enough to make me wary. And you’re enthusiastic about it—no, I’m sorry, I don’t mean that as a criticism.” He sighed. “I mean the possibilities for evil inherent in your magic don’t seem to occur to you. That’s dangerous.”

  “Isn’t it a good thing, though? That I would never do evil with magic?”

  “It only means you wouldn’t intentionally do evil. If you aren’t aware of the possibilities, you can’t guard against them.”

  “I…think I understand. But I don’t deserve to be blamed for other people’s sins.”

  He laughed, a low, deep chuckle. “That’s what Dianthe said. She’s smarter than I am.”

  “You make a good team.”

  “We’ve had many years to get used to each other. This team will come together. It just takes time.”

  Sienne tried to see his face in the gloom, but the moonless night made even his fair skin dark and unreadable. “I didn’t think you wanted a team. Not the kind where it matters if we come together.”

  Alaric was silent for a moment. “Maybe I was wrong about that.”

  She didn’t know what to say. It had sounded too honest for her to challenge him on it, to point out that he had a policy of not working with wizards, that Kalanath never stayed with one team for very long, that Perrin was only sober because he’d run out of liquor. “Maybe,” she managed.

  Alaric clapped her on the shoulder briefly, a comradely gesture. “I am sorry for what I said to you,” he said. “You’d be within your rights to belt me across the ear.”

  “If I thought you’d feel it, I would,” she retorted, making him laugh.

  She watched him return to his tent, then went back to pacing. He was nothing like she’d thought. Maybe they could be friends, after all. If she could be sure his change of heart was permanent.

  She walked until she began feeling sleepy, then checked her pocket watch by the glimmer of a magic light. One of her teachers at Stravanus had had an artifact, a watch whose dial gleamed in the dark with a light that never faded. What a useful thing that would be. It was a pity no one today knew how to create magic artifacts. Of course, if they did, scrappers would have no purpose.

  She put her watch away and woke Kalanath, then climbed into her bedroll and fell deeply asleep.

  9

  The next day’s journey took them through the hills and up onto a grassy plateau, from which Sienne could see for miles. At their noon rest, she walked up a short rise and surveyed the landscape. The forests they’d left behind were dark smudges against the pale gold of the grasses. Far to the east lay other dark smudges, these barely visible as mountains. The Bramantus Range, dividing Rafellin from the eastern desert and Omeira.

  “What do Omeirans call those mountains?” she asked Kalanath.

  Kalanath looked where she was pointing. “Ikhshuvaan,” he said. “Though each mountain has its own name. I do not know them. When I crossed them, I cared just that I did not die.”

  “They’re dangerous?”

  “Very steep. There are many…I do not know the word. Ditch? But very deep.”

  “Crevasse,” Perrin said.

  “And many creatures,” Kalanath said with a nod, acknowledging Perrin. “Most of them not friendly.”

  “They’re higher than the Pirinin Peaks in Ansorja,” Alaric said. “Or so I’ve heard. The Pirinins are also dangerous.”

  “You must have crossed them, coming south,” Sienne said.

  Alaric frowned. For a moment, Sienne thought he wouldn’t answer, and she wondered what had disturbed him. “I came south in the summer,” he finally said. “In winter they’re nearly impassable.”

  “They make a good natural border for Ansorja,” Dianthe said, “just enough of a deterrence to make sure people who go there really want to.”

  “There’s probably a lot of unexplored ruins, too,” Sienne said.

  “They can stay unexplored, as far as I’m concerned,” Alaric said, his eyes grim. “Let’s get moving. We’ll be at the keep in a couple of hours.”

  Sienne felt rebuffed at his abruptness, but she shouldered her pack and fell into line behind him. Whatever had brought him south, through the hazards of the mountains and the Empty Lands, had been serious enough that he didn’t want to discuss his past life. Well, she didn’t want him to know her secrets, so she wouldn’t pry into his.

  She fell into a routine of trudging along with her eyes on the ground ahead of her, watching for anything that might trip her up. The alternative was looking at Alaric’s back, which was familiar after two days of travel. He had shoulders like an ox, and the back of his neck was burned a reddish tan where it wasn’t covered by his short hair. Watching him made her uncomfortable, so she went back to looking at the ground. The plateau was covered with short, fine grass like a dusty green carpet. Occasionally their passage disturbed a small animal, a mouse or a rabbit, that went bounding away into the distance, and she watched that until it disappeared.

  The ruins, when they came upon them, were almost invisible. Sienne only realized they’d reached their destination when her foot came down on cracked stone rather than earth. The grasses had taken over there, too, growing up through the cracks in the flagstones and making odd humps where houses might once have been. Anything wooden was long gone.

  She looked past Alaric and saw the large, irregular shape of a stone building some half a mile ahead. “That’s it,” Alaric said. He turned to Perrin. “You have another one of those scrying blessings?”

  Perrin tore a scrap of paper free from the riffle of blessings. His morning prayers had been similar to those of the day before, though it seemed without alcohol he had more trouble getting Averran’s attention. The unused blessings from the previous day had burned to nothing, prompting Dianthe to say, “It seems like such a waste, when you went to all the trouble of petitioning for them.”

  “Each day is a fresh start,” Perrin had said, “and Averran, at least, dislikes looking to the past. And as his blessings are in part a promise of what is to come, it is better not to hold on to a past that did not come to fruition.”

  Now he scuffed the surface of a large flagstone with his toe and knelt to draw a circle with one of the pastels in the packet he carried. Once again, a blue light filled the lopsided circle, and the blessing flared to ash. When the blue light faded, five glowing specks clustered at the center of the circle. “No one,” Perrin said. “But I should caution you that the limit of this blessing means we cannot know for certain that we have not been followed.”

  Alaric adjusted his sword. “We’ll keep that in mind. Let’s move on.”

  Sienne kept a careful eye on her surroundings. The humps of former buildings were too low to obscure her vision, and she could easily see to the horizon, but the place unnerved her. Possibly it was the knowledge that the people who had lived here had had lives so unlike her own she could barely imagine them. The wars that had torn the world apart four hundred years ago had destroyed almost every vestige of that civilization, erasing knowledge both magical and mundane. The one thing everyone was certain of was that the ancients had used magic for everything. Cooking, cleaning, fighting, even travel. Stravanus was an isolated dukedom, but even there Sienne had heard of the carriage that moved without horses, a rare find by a lucky scrapper team. They’d sold it to the duchess of Marisse, who’d made a present of it to the king. Sienne had occasionally daydreamed about finding something as extraordinary as th
at.

  Alaric cursed, and Sienne stopped, pulling out her spellbook. “What?” Perrin asked.

  “That’s fresh,” Alaric said, pointing at one of the humps. Unlike the others, its smooth green sides were torn open, revealing black earth and dirt-covered stones. “Someone’s been here recently.”

  “They are not here now,” Kalanath said.

  “And it’s unlikely they found anything,” Dianthe said. “If they were still here, the scrying would have revealed them.”

  “True.” Alaric turned to look in all directions, his head held stiffly alert like the world’s biggest pointer hound. “We should move quickly.”

  They hurried, not quite running on the uneven terrain, until they neared the stone structure. Sienne slowed to look at it, trying to picture what it had looked like when it was intact. It had once been surrounded by a stone wall, remnants of which still lay here and there, enough to mark out its outline. Beyond the wall, the fortress rose two broken stories into the air, its dark gray stones weathered from centuries of neglect. The wind chose that moment to pick up, threading through the gaps in the fortress wall and making a whistling sound that rose and fell in pitch like a wailing lover. Sienne shivered. It was the kind of place ghosts would love. No such thing as ghosts, she told herself, and followed the others around the side of the fortress.

  The wall to the right had a huge gap where a door should have been. Like the rest of the town, the wood had long since rotted or been weathered away. Dianthe took the lead and waved the others to stay back. “Checking for any surprises,” Alaric said.

  “Hasn’t this place been thoroughly searched?” Sienne said. “What surprises could there possibly be?”

  “If other scrappers have been here since we last visited, they might have left traps for people like us.” Alaric took up a resting position Sienne tried to mimic. It looked comfortable, something a person might maintain easily for hours. “Stupid, really, because it tells other scrappers there’s something worth guarding. But that’s cold comfort if you’re crushed by a rock someone rigged to fall.”