Riven (The Arinthian Line Book 2) (18 page)

“Aug?” she said as he dug for the mirko meat with numb hands.

“Yes?”

She smiled. “Thanks …”

“You’re welcome, Miss Stubborn.”

Her cheeks colored a little. She glanced at the cloudy skies. “Sun’s going down. Have to be careful.”

He didn’t reply, choosing to save his energy. He ripped a large chunk of mirko meat off and handed it to her.

“Let’s keep going,” he managed to stammer. Stopping had cooled them down and it was too dangerous to linger in the fading light.

They resumed their eastward plowing, forced to lean into an increasingly bitter wind.

Leera pointed at a spot to their right. “Stop! Tracks …”

Augum’s hand reflexively went to Burden’s Edge. Upon closer inspection, they turned out to be sled, dog, and human tracks, and from the looks of them, there must have been three or more people.

People were better than sticks—as long as they weren’t the Legion, that is.

They followed the tracks eastward, something that became difficult as night descended and the wind gained in strength. And with no stars or moon, it soon became pitch-dark.

Augum stopped, realizing he’d gone off course. “Where’re the tracks? Shyneo,” but the light of his palm did not penetrate the hide of his mitt.

The wind gusted violently, drowning out Leera’s reply.

“What—!”

“Over here!” She was somewhere behind him. Eventually the two found each other using their voices, though it was disturbingly obvious that there was next to zero chance of them going on without a light source. And should they get separated …

“We have to take turns casting Shine.” Leera’s trembling was now so bad he barely understood her.

He removed his right mitt. “Shyneo,” but his hand would not light. He focused, realizing he was stuttering from the cold. “Shyneo. Shyneo!” with the last attempt, his palm finally lit up in an electric-blue glow, though his hand started hurting from the cold almost immediately. Great. His chest was already giving him enough trouble.

Thirsty, hungry, and shivering, they plowed on, following the tracks, Augum’s arcanely lit palm illuminating the trees in a way that turned branches into creeping fingers. Unable to see much, he tried not to think about skeletal figures creeping up on them. His ears were hyper-tuned to any sound resembling a clacking.

After a short while, Leera took her turn with Shine, having similar trouble lighting her palm. Luckily, the glowing arcane water didn’t freeze like normal water would have.

Meanwhile, Augum carefully stuffed his painfully tingling hand back in its mitt, wondering just how long they could keep this up. Sydo better show some gratitude,
he found himself thinking, pushing one numb foot in front of the other. They traded back and forth like this countless times, each also taking a turn at leading.

Suddenly he spotted dark glistening mounds ahead in the snow. He stopped, gestured for Leera to draw Burden’s Edge as he did not want to take time to extinguish his palm. She gripped the pommel with her mitts and unsheathed the blade from his hip.

The wind howled through the branches, the trees creaking as they swayed. The duo slowly approached, spotting dogs lying beside a sled filled with casks, snowdrifts piled up against their stiff bodies. A bloodied man lay close by.

“What …happened—?” Leera asked, voice slowed by cold.

He pointed at stick-like tracks. “Walkers. A bunch of them.” He examined the man. It wasn’t the trapper, maybe a trader though. The blood had well frozen over, and estimating by the pile of snowdrift, he guessed it happened only a few hours ago.

Seeing bodies in the dead of night, in the middle of nowhere made him feel colder. Life was so fragile, so lonely. What a miserable end. Will the trader’s family ever know what had happened to him?

“I wouldn’t want to die like this,” Leera whispered. “Awful.”

Augum could only stare at the unmoving mounds. Now what would they do? Wolves might come at any moment, if not the walkers. It was dangerous to remain yet dangerous to continue, since the sled tracks stopped here.

Leera rummaged through the contents of the sled. “Catch!” She threw him a long fur coat. He immediately put it on, placing the blanket around her shoulders. He helped her search.

Hidden in a compartment underneath, they found a small hooded lantern, flint, steel, ten copper coins, and five silvers.

He held up the lantern. “Finally some luck.”

“We could use the coin to barter for food in town—”

“—and now we can keep our hands in our mitts.” He lit the lantern, no easy task with frozen fingers and a strong wind. Soon it swayed in his hand as the pair searched the area, finding two sets of tracks going in opposite directions.

“Survivors,” Leera said.

“But they were chased.” He pointed at stick-like tracks. He guessed the second set was only one man with one walker trailing, and so he chose to follow it, hoping the man had run in the direction of town.

The tracks went on and on. It appeared neither the man nor the walker wanted to give up. Augum tried to keep his mind off the cold by pondering if walkers got tired, if they lived forever, why it was they appeared here and now, and who exactly was bringing them back to life. Was it Sparkstone, or were there other necromancers now? The thought of his father so close made his heart thump a little faster.

He knew the Legion was looking for them, so whatever happened in town, it might be best to go under a false name. He thought of the trapper’s grizzled face. Did the man know? Was he leading a slew of Black Guard back to the cabin at that moment?

There was faint light ahead, blinking through branches.

“Aug, the lantern—” Leera whispered.

He snuffed it out. She nudged him with the pommel of the Dreadnought blade and he took it back. Hunching down, they carefully made their way towards the light, forgetting about the tracks. As they neared, it became apparent it was a long series of torches ringing a village.

“Tornvale?” Leera mouthed.

Closer still, they heard voices and could just make out the outline of two figures between the torches and the forest. Leera put a finger to her lips as a man’s voice spoke in authoritative yet irritated tones.

“… tolerating the failed experiments of the necrophytes—greener at their arts than you are with that crossbow, son.”

“Yes, sir,” replied a higher-pitched voice. “Perhaps if we—”

“I do not care for your opinion,” the deep voice interrupted, sounding bored.

“Yes, sir. Sorry sir.”

“And we are supposed to raise an army of them. An
army
. The sheer logistics. We cannot even get the damn things to keep away from our men. You saw how that one came tearing into here. That lucky sack of ale and flesh barely made it. Gone are the days when honor meant meeting your enemy in the field, sword to sword, or bow to bow. Now we raise our enemies to do the fighting for us. And do not even get me started on warlocks.” The man sighed. “All I ask of my great lord is to do my duty—my
duty,
son.”

“Sir, duty unto death—”

“Yes, yes. You mark my words—the days of honor and truth are
over.
”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is a waste of my time. Keep watch. Stay alert. Expect more.”

“Yes, sir!”

With that, the man with the deep voice walked off. Augum gestured for Leera to back off. A distance away, they crouched down and strategized in quiet whispers as the wind rattled the trees.

“… but they might
recognize
us,” Leera finished saying.

“You heard what Mya said though—he’ll die if not attended to by a healer. He might drive me as crazy as he does you, but what choice do we have? We at least need to ask them for one. Who knows, maybe they’re a different sort than the kind we bump into up north.”

“Aug, even if they
do
accept, they’d probably just send us some necromancer or something.”

“Isn’t that better than nothing?”

She gave an exasperated sigh. “If the town wasn’t occupied, then maybe, but now it’s impossible—they’re the
Black Guard
—”

“Not if we come up with a good story. Maybe we can try bribing them using the sled.”

“I sense a crazy idea coming.”

“You saw it yourself—casks of ale. Look, we can do this, all we have to do is play dumb,” and playing dumb was something he had plenty of practice doing at the Penderson farm. “We’ll pretend we’re brother and sister from a poor family—I’ll be Jared and you can be Wyza.” Jared and Wyza were the names of two of the Penderson brats. They were the first names that came to mind, as much as he hated them.

“Wyza? Forget it, I’m going to be Jezebel—!”

“Shh. You can’t be Jezebel, it’s a highborn-sounding name.”

She crossed her arms. “Fine, Wyza then.

“All right. We’ll tell them we live in a cabin west of here and we can pay for the healer’s services with the location of a sled full of ale—”

A twig snapped and they froze. Something was moving nearby in the snow. Suddenly a lantern was uncovered, throwing yellow light on the both of them.

“Don’t move or I’ll split your head in two with a bolt!” shouted a squeaky voice. The lantern only threw light forward, so the figure was cloaked all in darkness, except for the front of a crossbow, aimed directly at Leera’s head. “Got me some runaways here! Send for the commander!”

Augum’s heart hammered as he heard voices shout from the village.

“Please, sir—” Leera began, putting her hands together in prayer, but the man took a step forward.

“Quiet you! Don’t say nothin’ unless I say so.”

Augum’s mind raced. Even with Centarro, the most potent spell he could cast, that bolt would be through Leera’s head before he even finished speaking the arcane words, and his Telekinesis was nowhere near powerful or fast enough to wrench the crossbow from the man’s hands.

Commands were issued from the same voice they heard earlier. Soon a slew of black-armored men grabbed them roughly and dragged them by their arms, facedown.

Augum, who had to bite his lip from calling out from the pain in his chest, caught glimpses of dark peat homes, muddy snow-covered yards, and wooden troughs.

They were dragged in through a doorframe and thrown onto a dirty plank floor. The room had a shuttered window on the side with a cabinet underneath, a hearth at the far end. A wooden campaign desk sat in the middle strewn with parchments, quill and ink. Torches flickered in sconces mounted on the log walls.

A man with close-cropped gray hair wearing ornate black armor patiently washed his hands in a basin. He dried off with a cloth, adjusted his black surcoat—belted in the middle and emblazoned with the burning sword of the Legion—and began pacing before them. A crimson cloak trailed the floor, linked by a collar chain that danced against his breast with every step.

He stopped abruptly and fixed them with pale gray eyes. “Search them,” in that deep voice they had heard earlier.

“Yes, Commander,” replied a pair of burly guardsmen with stern yet youthful faces. Soon Burden’s Edge, coins, hooded lantern, flint, steel, and the remains of mirko meat lay before them on the floor. The commander stepped on the meat, making a show of grinding it underfoot.

Augum’s heart ached as he recalled Bridget tenderly wrapping it in linen for them. “So it stays fresh longer,” she had said with that affectionate smile of hers.

The commander snapped his fingers and one of the guards grabbed the back of Augum and Leera’s necks and thrust them forward, noses to the floor. Leera gasped while Augum let out an involuntary grunt from the pain in his chest.

The man casually kicked the rest of the items. “Quite prepared the two of you were.”

“Please, m’lord,” Leera began in a commoner accent, “our brother’s sick—ow!” The guard holding her neck had squeezed.

“Hand me that short blade.”

“Commander.” The guard that wasn’t holding their necks picked up Burden’s Edge and passed it over.

“Now what would peasant rats be doing with such a fine blade?” He let that thought linger as he continued pacing, turning the Dreadnought blade over in his hands. “Do you know what we do to thieves?”

“We ain’t—” but Augum’s words were cut off by a vice-like squeeze on his neck.

“Why would I care about your little brother? Is he old enough to join us? Hmm?”

“He is, sir,” Augum said, wincing, “but—”

The commander unsheathed Burden’s Edge and tapped Augum’s head with it. “Well then, do tell us where he is so we may send our healer along and help the poor child.”

Better alive and taken prisoner than dead, Augum reasoned. Now it was his turn to mimic the trapper’s twang. “M’lord, me sisters are taking care of me brother in me father’s cabin, a days’ walk west o’ here.” A poor impression at best.

The commander stood there a moment before chuckling mirthlessly. “Good, because when we find him, we shall cut off his head for desertion, then put your sisters to work.”

“NO!” Augum struggled, but the guard that had him by the neck slammed him into the plank floor. His nose immediately began gushing, the iron taste of blood filling his mouth. Leera started to shout but the other guard kicked her to a coughing and writhing halt.

“Please don’t harm them,” Augum managed to say, dizzy from the blow. It hardly helped the guard seemed to take pleasure smearing his face into the bloody planks.

The commander crouched down, grabbed Augum’s hair and lifted his head. “Then will you kindly explain why else your brother is still in his cabin, if not hiding from his required service?” Those pale gray eyes were as empty as any Augum had ever seen, reminding him of Sir Jayson Quick, the Nightsword.

“Speak up, boy.” He shook Augum’s head back and forth like a doll, with no thought as to the hair he ripped out. Augum grit his teeth, refusing to cry out despite the pain and nausea.

The commander scowled, released Augum’s scalp, and dusted his hands. “I think I know what happened here. Everyone in Solia received the order for men to join the Legion. You simply chose to ignore it, and now your poor little brother is sick. So that peasant rat brain of yours thought, ‘By golly, let us have a good jest an’ rub one over on the ol’ commander—he’s too darn stupid to tell the difference!’ ”