His Own Good Sword (The Cymeriad #1) (31 page)

The young Cesino laughed at his looking.

“Your people have no skill with tracking, Vareno,” he
said.

He was speaking in his own tongue still; quite possibly he didn’t
know Vareno. Morlyn did. He spoke up from behind them and the words
were meant for Tyren.

“He thinks you were with the pursuit, searching for us—thinks
you got yourself separated from your troop. I’m not so sure.
It’s been Souvin at our heels, not Rien. But that leaves the
question, Lord Risto, of what you’re doing in the Outland.”

Tyren didn’t say anything. The words confused him. Did Morlyn
mean there’d been no activity at all from Rien? Surely there’d
have been pursuit by now. Surely Luchian would have ordered pursuit
the moment he learned of the escape—Aino had hinted as much.

Morlyn said, “Give me the truth of it, Risto. You were running,
I know that—and not from us. Tell me why.”

He kept his mouth shut, his teeth clenched. Morlyn didn’t press
him. They went on in silence a while. From time to time Morlyn veered
from their trail and went off into the heather and bracken on his
own. He seemed to be searching for something. He squatted on his
haunches here and there to look at the ground, searching through the
underbrush with his hands. He must have found whatever it was, at
length. He stood up, depositing something into the pack under his arm
as he did so. He caught Tyren’s eye as Tyren looked back to
him. He smiled.

“Comfrey,” he said, coming up behind the horse again.
“It’ll make a good poultice.”

When they’d gone a little further Morlyn said to the young one,
“We’ll rest here.”

The young one held the colt’s head while Tyren dismounted. Then
he took Tyren by one elbow and pushed him down against the base of a
tree trunk and crouched beside him, warily. Morlyn laughed as he took
down his pack from his shoulder. “Calm yourself, Bryn. He’s
no threat now.”

“You should have dealt with him when we found him,” said
Bryn. There was sudden raw anger in his voice. “He’s the
one who killed Mægo, Morlyn. You should have opened his throat
when we first found him.”

“That isn’t my decision to make,” said Morlyn,
quietly. “You know that.”

He came close and held out a water-skin to Tyren. “You need to
drink, Risto,” he said, in Vareno. “To bring the fever
down.”

Tyren made no move to take it. Morlyn waited a while. Then he
crouched down and took Tyren’s chin between the thumb and
forefinger of his left hand, pushed Tyren’s head back and put
the skin to his lips and forced the water down that way. Tyren choked
on it, gasping and coughing, but he got enough of it down, finally,
for Morlyn’s satisfaction, and Morlyn tied up the skin again
and sat back on his heels.

“Can’t have you dying yet, Risto,” he said,
amiably.

They rested perhaps a quarter hour and then they went on again, due
west now, weaving through the pine trees. They went west a long time.
He didn’t pay much attention to where they were going, after a
while—didn’t put the effort into keeping his head up, his
eyes open. He was aware, eventually, that the ground was sloping
steeply up beneath the colt’s hooves, that they were climbing a
sheer-sided hill. Ahead of them now were broken stone steps leading
up through the pine to the crest.

Bryn stopped the colt before the steps. “You walk from here,
Vareno,” he said.

Tyren dismounted. He wavered on his feet when he’d gotten to
the ground and Bryn reached, from instinct, to take his left arm and
steady him.

“I tell you we shouldn’t have come back here,” Bryn
said to Morlyn, when Morlyn had come up to them—the
continuation of some earlier argument, it seemed. “They’ll
be coming to this place, surely.”

“We’ll have fair enough warning if they do,” said
Morlyn.

“No, we should start back south. The others have probably done
it already. Foolish to stay here with so many Vareni crawling about.
Deal with this—” Bryn’s fingers tightened round
Tyren’s elbow, “—and let’s go back south.”

“This was the arranged place,” said Morlyn, easily. “See
to the horse, Bryn, and give me some peace a while.”

Bryn hesitated. He seemed ready to argue it; his shoulders had
stiffened and he’d stuck his chin out again. But he let go
Tyren’s arm without another word and turned to lead the colt
away.

Morlyn came over and unsheathed the flint knife from his belt. He
took Tyren’s wrists in his left hand and cut the bow-string
from them. Then he nodded towards the steps. They climbed, Tyren
going first, Morlyn coming behind him. Tyren went haltingly because
of the knee. He stumbled now and then and each time Morlyn put out a
quick hand to hold him up, keep him going forward.

There was an ancient stone ruin crowning the very top of the hill. An
old beacon tower—Vareno-built, judging by its sculpted
white-marble columns. The domed roof of the beacon room itself had
fallen away long ago and the thing lay open to the sky now, though
the old flag-stone living quarters adjoining it was still roofed and
in decent repair.

“Give me the truth of it, Risto,” Morlyn said again, as
they came up the last of the steps into the beacon room. “Tell
me why you were running.”

Anger was coursing through him hotly as the pain by now. He spoke
through gritted teeth. “Does it matter to you? Rien wants the
same thing as you in the end. What more do you need to know?”

“I’m wondering what you did to fall so quickly from their
favor. Surely this isn’t how the Empire rewards you for your
glorious victory at Souvin?”

Tyren said nothing. Morlyn shrugged.

“No matter,” he said. “You can explain the thing to
Lord Magryn when he comes, if you don’t wish to explain it to
me.”

Tyren looked into Morlyn’s face at that, startled. “Magryn.
Magryn’s here?”

“He’ll be here,” said Morlyn, “and he’ll
decide what’s to be done with you. For now you can sit down,
and I’ll take another look at that wound.”

He went down into the flag-stone hut with the packs. Tyren slid down
slowly against one of the ruined columns, leaned his head back and
closed his eyes, swallowing to loosen the hard knot of bitterness in
his throat. So this was how it would end. Better to have died in
Choiro than here, like this, after all: at least in Choiro his death
might have accomplished something. Maybe it was just politics, as
Aino had said, but at least in Choiro he might have died and felt it
meant something. Here it was nothing. Vengeance for the Magryn brat
and his ragged band of rebels, that was it.

He heard Morlyn coming back and he opened his eyes to see the Cesino
crouching down beside him with a water-skin and fresh bandages and a
new-prepared poultice in his hands. Morlyn rinsed the wound and
applied the poultice and bound it up firmly, working with the speed
and skill of long practice. When he was done he looked up to Tyren’s
face.

“It would be nothing at all, if you’d get the chance to
rest it fully. Still, as it is—if the poultice is kept fresh,
if we keep the fever down—it’ll heal up readily enough.”

“Should I thank you for that?” said Tyren, tightly.

Morlyn smiled. “You’ve no cause to be wishing for death,
Lord Risto,” he said.

Bryn came back in a little while. He spoke to Morlyn, who was sitting
across from Tyren now with his cavalry sword unsheathed across his
lap, polishing the blade with a woolen cloth.

“The Vareni?” he said.

“No sign,” said Morlyn, without looking up. “Still
stumbling around northward somewhere, most likely.”

“The others aren’t back yet?”

“Not yet.”

Bryn said, “They should have been back by now if they didn’t
go south already.”

“Peace, Bryn,” said Morlyn, with patience.

“It’s dark in an hour.”

“I’ll be worried in the morning, maybe,” said
Morlyn. “Not now. Theirs was the longer venture, and there are
Vareni to mind, as you’ve noted.”

Bryn sat down a little way from Tyren and unbuckled his own sword
from his shoulder. The shadows lengthened into dusk round them. They
lit no fire but Morlyn brought out barley cake from the hut, with the
last of the wine from Tyren’s pack, and they ate. Tyren didn’t
refuse it now. There was no point in refusing; Morlyn was keeping a
watchful, ready eye on him. It grew cold after the meal. The air had
dried since yesterday’s rain. It was crisp and cool now and
there was a sharp wind cutting north-and-south through the columns.
The time went very slowly. Even Morlyn seemed anxious when the
darkness had settled. He hadn’t sheathed his sword. It lay
ready across his knees, and his fingers were drumming a loose rhythm
upon the molded bone grip.

There was no movement beyond the crumbling circle of the beacon room
until the early hours of the morning. Then there was the whisper of
hurried footsteps on stone, and both Bryn and Morlyn sprang up,
swords in hand. But the newcomers, coming up from the darkness of the
steps, didn’t seem to be strangers. They met Morlyn’s
challenge calmly, in hushed Cesino, and then talk ran quickly among
all of them—snatches of explanation, a hoarse, exhausted laugh.
Tyren picked out Morlyn’s voice from the head of the steps, and
a new voice answering: “No, we’ll finish the night here,
move in the morning.”

* * *

He hadn’t thought he’d sleep, but he came awake in the
morning to the jangle of sword-belts and of packs being buckled, the
murmur of voices. He was slumped down against the base of the column,
his chin turned onto his left shoulder, and there was a stiffness in
his neck from having slept like that. But his head had cleared a
little; the fever had left him, and the hot pain from the wound.
Morlyn’s poultice had done its work. He sat up, slowly. Bryn
and another man were sitting at the head of the steps, bags readied
at their feet, their backs to him, watching the forested land to the
north while they ate their morning meal. Morlyn was coming out from
the hut with a fourth man beside him, and Tyren saw, in a startled
glance, this other was Ryn Magryn.

He’d changed since Tyren had seen him last, white-faced in the
thick of battle under the gate at the Souvin fort. He looked older
now, grimmer—looked tired and thin. His tunic and cloak were
worn, ragged, his dark hair in need of a trimming. There were hollow
places in his high-boned cheeks from hunger. But it was his eyes had
changed the most. They were old eyes now, weathered eyes with an ugly
steel hardness in them. They came to rest on Tyren and Tyren wondered
absently, as he met the gaze, if there were the same look in his own
eyes. Probably there was. It was the same look he’d seen in
Luchian Marro’s face that day in Rien—he remembered,
suddenly. He’d thought it was just the weight of command then.
But it was a heavier weight than that, a more bitter weight than
that: the weight of Souvin for all of them.

Magryn spoke to Morlyn in Cesino without taking his eyes from Tyren.

“Bring him. I’ll deal with him alone. Bryn, Ceryn—get
the horses ready, in the meanwhile. We ride out after this.”

He went back into the hut. Morlyn came over to Tyren and clapped
strong hands on his shoulders and pulled him up. When he was on his
feet Morlyn hastened him firmly over to the doorway of the hut and
let him go. Tyren stood in the doorway a moment, his right hand on
the jamb. The hut was windowless and he couldn’t immediately
distinguish Magryn from among the shadows within. Then he saw Magryn
had sat down with his back against the westward wall, was holding a
pack across his knees as he tied up the straps.

Magryn spoke in Vareno now. He spoke it carefully, formally, as if
he’d let it go unused a while and was only slowly bringing it
to mind again.

“You can sit, Lord Risto,” he said.

Tyren went down into the hut and sat stiffly down across from him,
cross-legged, his hands clenched into fists between his knees. There
was a tightness in the pit of his stomach, dryness crawling up the
back of his throat. He looked at Magryn and waited.

“The wound’s giving you much pain?” Magryn said,
watching him sit.

“No.”

“Your own people did the thing, Morlyn told me—though he
couldn’t tell me why.”

“Maybe because I didn’t tell him why.”

“Have you turned traitor, then, that you must run from Rien?”

“I wasn’t the one who did the betraying,” said
Tyren.

Magryn studied him silently a while.

“Certain of my people,” he said, at length, “would
expect I order your death.”

“Do it, then,” said Tyren.

“I’d like the truth first. I know some things about you
I’d like to better understand—two things in particular.”

“What is it you know of me?”

“That you spared Mægo’s life once, when you’d
the opportunity to end it—when you might have saved yourself
some hurt if you’d ended it.”

“It was a mistake to do. I paid dearly enough for it.”

“And that you’d friendship with the priest, Muryn,”
finished Magryn.

Tyren didn’t immediately reply.

“What of it?” he said, finally—said it harshly, to
mask the unsteadiness in his voice.

Magryn looked away from him as though he were searching round the
little dark room for words.

“He told me—the day we first attacked the fort—he
told me you’d give us justice, if we’d be willing to have
it. If we’d be willing to have peace that way. He told me that
was what I should want for Souvin, for my people. Even if it came of
you, of the Empire—that was what I should want for my people.
Mægo wouldn’t listen to him. I regret, now—I regret
I didn’t, Lord Risto, because I think he was right. We should
have been willing. I should have been willing. But it’s too
late for that now.”

Tyren said, sourly, “You’ve found out there’s no
justice under the Empire, I take it.”

Magryn looked back to him. “You’ve heard of what’s
being done in Souvin?”