Lady Knight (24 page)

Kel and Hoshi chose the shelter of a cluster of rocks hemmed by mountain laurel bushes. Soon they heard the approach of horses. Here came the patrol, as Kel had guessed, a squad of soldiers and a knight -Quinden of Marti’s Hill, one of her year-mates. They should have scouts in the woods, Kel thought. If we were Scanrans, they’d be dead in moments. She stifled the urge to grab Quinden and tell him so. He would have to arrest her, and she had no time to deal with that.

Once the patrol was out of hearing, she signalled her men to move out. As they mounted and headed back to the refugees’ trail, riding in the direction opposite the patrol’s route, Kel noticed that Tobe shook his head. She nudged Hoshi closer to Peachblossom - she still rode the mare, who was fresh from her night’s rest, leaving Tobe on Peachblossom, who’d been going all night. “What is it?” she asked the boy softly.

“They shoulda had scouts, lady,” he replied, just as quiet. “If we’da been the enemy, they’d be dead now.”

Kel smiled ruefully. What a grand world, when boys understand the tactics of war, she thought. “When we come back, we’ll tell their commander,” she assured him.

The sun was halfway up the morning sky when sparrows came in, signalling the arrival of even more friends. “Go back,” Kel snapped when Neal, Merric, Seaver, Esmond, Connac, his squad and her six remaining convict soldiers were within earshot. “Have you lost your minds completely? You’re needed at Mastiff!”

“We’re needed more here,” retorted Seaver, his dark eyes level. “You’ll have a fight on your hands when you reach your people.”

“I have warriors, and my people can defend themselves, given weapons. You have an oath to the Crown!” Kel shouted, tested at last beyond the limits of her patience. “This is treason, you sapskulls! You can’t just decide when you’re in service to the realm and when you’re not!”

“Like you have?” Neal asked sweetly. The young knights halted in front of Kel.

“This is different,” Kel snapped.

“Of course it is,” Esmond said, leaning on his saddle horn. “That’s why we’re here.”

Kel scrambled for another argument, any argument, she could use. She looked at the white-faced, swaying Merric. “He should be in bed still!” she cried. “You had to tie him to his horse to get him this far!”

Merric smiled. “But I’m really well tied,” he explained in a tone of utmost reason. “I slept most of the way here.”

“Why are you upset?” Owen came up beside the mounted soldiers. “It’s going to be a jolly scramble now.”

Kel gathered her breath and wits to argue, then surrendered without a word. There was no point to it. They had made their choice, as she had. She would just have to do her best to make sure they came home alive, if they had a home to return to.

“Hey, Sir Meathead,” Dom called, riding up to them. “You took long enough to get here. Sergeant Connac, good to see you.”

“Sergeant Domitan,” replied Connac with a grin and a bow. “Good to see you again, sir.”

Kel fumed silently. I never asked for help, never wanted to ruin anyone’s life but my own, she thought wrathfully. What is the matter with them? Can’t they see we’ll die if this goes wrong? Don’t they care that we’ve earned a warm and lasting reception on Traitor’s Hill, if we choose to return? Why do men always have to complicate life?

“She’ll be all right,” she heard Owen say confidently. “She just needs to get used to things.”

What I need is a barrel full of dreamrose to dose your supper with, she replied silently. Then, while you slept and maybe came to your senses, I’d get so far ahead of you that you’d never catch me. You’d give up and go home, if you’re all as sensible as I used to think you were!

They set out again on the trail of the refugees. A mile down the road, Kel spotted a bit of gaudy red on a bush. She reached down and picked it up: red yarn. Someone was taking Meech’s doll apart to leave a sign for pursuers. Kel tucked the yarn into her belt pouch.

Maybe having company isn’t so bad, she thought, more relaxed now. After all, if the Haven folk are making it easy for us to follow, then they deserve a proper rescue. She glanced back at the two columns that rode behind her and Neal. And at least I have a better chance to save them than I did all by myself.

She turned her face up to the warm early summer sun. If we were going to risk our necks and ruin our lives, at least we chose beautiful weather for it, she thought, and smiled.

14
VASSA CROSSING

Five miles down the road they found other, less heartening signs that the refugees had passed that way. A woman lay crumpled at the roadside. At first Kel thought her skirts were dull maroon until she saw that they were stained with blood. She knew the woman, the young, pregnant wife of one of the Hanaford loggers.

Neal dismounted to examine her. “Dead over a day,” he said, his green eyes dull as he looked up at Kel. “She lost the baby. I’d say she haemorrhaged - bled out. It happens, sometimes, if there’s no healer.”

A hundred yards down the road they found the woman’s husband hanging from a tree. His hands were marked with bruises and cuts. Kel guessed that he’d fought the disposal of his wife, and the Scanrans had hanged him for it.

Biting the inside of her lower lip to stop herself from crying, Kel rode over and stood in her stirrups, wrapping her arm around the dead man’s legs. Flies, disturbed at their business, buzzed around them. With her right hand she took her glaive from its saddle holster and cut the rope. As the man’s weight fell on to her shoulders, hands reached to take him from her. She glanced down: it was two of the convict soldiers, Jacut and Uinse.

“Give ‘im to us, lady,” Uinse told her gently. “What was you wishful of doing?”

Kel fumbled her glaive back into its socket. The buzzing of the flies gave her the shudders. “Place him with her, please,” she replied. “We - we haven’t time to bury them, but at least they can be together.”

“Aye, lady knight,” replied Jacut. He and Uinse took the dead man back and laid him gently beside his wife, then bowed their heads. Kel bowed hers, too, saying a prayer. She’d known them both, their names, their families, their hopes for the future. Now their future lay in some other realm than the mortal one. All she could give them was her word that she would try to send those who had killed them to the Black God’s domain, where his judges would punish their crimes.

Sunlight glinted on steel. She looked up, and saw a female Stormwing, freshly streaked with blood and flesh. It was the same female who had talked to Kel back at Haven.

“Rot your eyes, they didn’t die in battle!” Kel shouted. “Leave them be!”

The Stormwing licked a wing feather. Her metal parts seemed as flexible as her human ones. “Mortals,” she remarked. “Always jumping to conclusions.” She took wing and flew in circles over Kel’s head. “I’m just hoping you’ll provide us with a meal soon. With Scanrans all over this border country, the least you could do is give us a snack.”

Kel took up her longbow, braced it against her stirrup to string it, then grabbed one of her griffm-fletched arrows. “Why don’t I turn you into someone’s snack?”

She put the arrow to the string and raised the bow. The Stormwing was nowhere to be seen.

“Don’t take them so personally,” Neal advised. “They are what they were made to be.” When Kel glared at him in reply, Neal smiled crookedly. “I’m sorry - I forgot,” he admitted. “You are what you were made to be, too.”

They rode steadily through the morning, taking their noon meal in the saddle, stopping only to water and rest the horses. As the animals relaxed, the men and knights would pair off to spar with weapons or fight hand-to-hand, keeping their bodies ready.

As scouts, the dogs, cats and sparrows were priceless. They gave Kel’s people a degree of safety they couldn’t expect with two-legged scouts. Humans missed things. Daine’s wild magic had transformed Kel’s animals until her concerns were theirs. They missed nothing and they could pass unnoticed through the forests between the old Fort Giantkiller and the Vassa River. They warned their humans of a column of Tortallan soldiers heading west, and steered Kel’s people around them. Kel silently promised the sparrows that if she lived through this, they would have dried cherries every day, and the dogs and cats fresh meat.

Five miles from the river, the refugees’ trail turned due north. Their tracks went down gently sloping ground to the shores of the Vassa, where flat-bottomed boats left distinctive marks in the stone-and-mud shore. The boats were gone. Kel used her spyglass to look across the river. They were beached on the far side. Beyond them the captives’ trail began again.

Dom reined in beside her. “Rafts, do you think?” he asked, blue eyes measuring the far shore. “Or Fulcher and I can swim across, and start bringing those boats here.”

Kel grimaced. The Vassa was no Olorun, flowing calmly to the sea. It tumbled and roared in spots, rushing along its bed. The waters were icy, even this late in the year.

“Swimming that is just mad, Dom,” she replied.

He dismounted and stuck his hand in the water. Pulling it out, he winced. “I’d cramp up ten yards out. Doesn’t this river know it’s nearly summer?”

“Even if it could be swum, does anyone know how to use one of them boats?” asked Connac, scratching his head. “They got to be poled across, fighting the current all the way.”

“It’s that or build rafts,” Esmond pointed out wearily. “I doubt we’ll be any better with rafts.”

“More like have ‘em bust up mid-river,” grumbled one of Connac’s men.

“If we string ropes across, we could pull the boats over. The horses might swim it,” offered Jacut. “Maybe it takes us all night to get there. We sure don’t want to do this in the daylight.”

“Military folk,” Neal said with exaggerated patience, shaking his head. “The only way you know to solve problems is by beating them with a stick.”

“And you’re not military folk?” asked Seaver. “Oh, I forgot - you’re a mage. Mages think, if you can’t twiddle your fingers at it, what’s the point?”

“Lads,” Kel began, “this isn’t valuable in the least.”

“I wasn’t referring to magic,” Neal said loftily. “I was referring to a scholar’s way to solve problems. When a situation arises, rather than bungle it yourselves, call in an expert. Follow me.”

He said it, but he and everyone else waited for Kel to speak. She shifted in her saddle, not sure she liked the way they looked at her, as if she knew things they did not. “Will your solution get us across sometime before next week?” she asked Neal.

“Considerably,” Neal assured her, his tone serious, not mocking. “It’s not entirely legal, but I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”

Kel bit her lip, but her need to reclaim her people was stronger than her need to find out which law Neal intended to bend. “Let’s go, then.”

Neal rode down a track that followed the high ground as it rose above the Vassa, until they rode single file along the edge of a forested bluff. Kel was fascinated: the path looked like a game trail until she noticed the hoofprints on the edges. The path was also beaten down at the centre, as if it were used regularly by heavier animals than deer. By the time they had ridden three miles, fording the Brown River in the process, she knew they had technically crossed the border into Scanra. Fortunately, no one lived in these surroundings to tattle. Every farmhouse and woodsman’s shack was either smashed and empty or burned and empty. No one stayed to see if they could survive in border country when two lands were at war.

The trail rose, taking them out of sight of the river, and then it descended into a broad clearing. At the far edge stood a cluster of Scanran-style longhouses inside a log palisade. Chimney smoke rose inside the palisade, a hint that this place, unlike others, was still occupied. The noises of goats, chickens and geese added to the impression that peaceful life continued behind the wall. Kel would bet that the residents were either Scanran allies or smugglers.

“Wait,” Neal told their companions. “String out along the trees so they can see how many we are. Kel, you’re with me.”

“How did you know this was here?” demanded Seaver, his dark eyes suspicious.

Neal smiled crookedly. “You meet the most interesting people, riding with the Lioness,” he replied. “They’re usually friends with her husband. Kel?” He urged his mount down the track.

Kel told Seaver, “Relax. He’d never risk his own skin, let alone ours.” She rode after Neal. Double fistfuls of sparrows, as well as Jump, five dogs and three cats came with her.

“No!” someone protested. She turned. Tobe and Peachblossom broke away from Dom’s restraining hand and followed her.

“Tobe, Neal said just me,” Kel told her young henchman.

“He can come, just be quiet,” Neal called over his shoulder. “Act like we know what we’re doing.” The palisade gates swung open. Four men and three women, all of whom looked Scanran, walked out, armed with crossbows.

Air rippled behind them. Kel drew the griffin feather band down closer to her eyes and saw a tiny old woman doddering in their wake, using a cane to make her way. She was a mage, concealed by spells which made her look like the background against which she stood. “Neal!” Kel whispered. When he looked at her, she hand-signalled a warning about the mage.

“Fine,” he whispered. “Now, you and Tobe stay here, and look serious.” He rode up to the local people, Kel, ten yards back, couldn’t hear what he said, but she saw its effect. The man who led the group stepped back as if startled, then grinned, and walked forward to slap Neal familiarly on the leg. His companions lowered their crossbows.

Neal twisted in his saddle and waved Kel and Tobe closer. As they advanced, Kel heard him remark in Scanran, “…brisk of late.”

The man shrugged as he surveyed Tobe, then Kel, with the hardest blue eyes Kel had ever seen. “Business is always brisk, one way or another,” he replied, also in Scanran. “We survive.”

Kel propped herself on her saddle horn. “Were you part of that interesting business two or three miles downriver?” she asked in Scanran, her voice as cool as she could make it, despite the furious pulse beating in her throat. “The very noisy and complicated business, with nearly five hundred captives?”