The False Martyr (93 page)

He pulled the saddle out
and inspected the tooled leather. It felt good in his hands,
smooth, strong, supportive, the one lover he would never leave. It
smelled of oil, leather, horse, and sweat and home. He did not even
realized how much he had missed it over the past two weeks –
probably the longest he’d been away from horses in his
life.

The thought took him back
to his childhood, to the stables where he had grown up. Those were
good memories: caring for the tack, oiling saddles, brushing
horses, even sweeping the dung. His father had been a different man
there, jovial, confident, respected. He had been king in those
stables, and Cary, his only son, the prince. His father had always
been good to him, had spoiled him really, had taken the time to
teach him his craft, given him duties far beyond his age, let him
warm up the noble’s horses or take them out when they needed
exercise. He had dreamed of his son racing those horses, had
trained him to ride before he could walk and let him practice more
than he should have on the beasts in his care, the finest horses in
Liandria, if not the world.

It was only when they
returned home that things changed. His father always seemed to
shrink when he walked through that door, when his wife started in
on him, when the bottle was in his hand. And when their mother left
for the kitchens in the small hours of the morning, he changed
again.

Cary shook off the
thought. Why had he been remembering that? Noé, he knew. Though the
Order knew he tried, he could not separate the Morg girl from
Allysa, could not keep his mind from mingling them, from
complicating everything he thought and did.
Some girls fuck you here, some of them fuck you
here
, his father had told him when he
caught his adolescent son doting on a noble girl as he saddled her
horse.
And the only fucking that one will
be doing with you is with your head. Trust me, fucking with your
cock is a whole lot better.
Even though
he’d hated his father for it at the time, Cary always remembered
that. Beautiful women fucked with your head. He’d made it a habit
to find the ones that fucked with their bodies. So which was Noé?
he wondered as he hoisted the saddle onto his shoulder.

#

Not only were the rangers
slowing him down, they did not give Cary any time to think. When
he’d asked for Yerl and Pence to accompany him, he’d thought only
of their riding, not their personalities. He regretted that now.
Yerl was a taciturn old bastard, the oldest of the rangers but
somehow still a private. If not for the uniform and clean shave,
you’d have thought he’d spent his life as a hermit in some mountain
cave. Pence was his opposite. The boy, and he was still a boy,
never stopped talking. Cary hadn’t noticed before because the young
ranger had been constantly on patrol ahead of the main party. Cary
had mistakenly thought he had been given the role because he was
the best rider; now, he wondered if it was his mouth that had
earned him the solitary honor.

“
So you saw some of the
women, then?” Pence asked. It must have been the twentieth variant
of the question, though they were certainly not all unique. Cary
had been dodging them all day, but now that they were settled at
their camp, it was going to be impossible to find a reason to ride
out in front or point to something on the horizon that might be the
prince. The sun was still an hour from setting. The horses were
tended, tied on long leads and chewing at the grass. They’d just
eaten their meal. The pots were clean. They had water and wood for
the fire. There were no excuses remaining.

“
Yeah, I saw them,” Cary
admitted.

“
Dog!” Pence exclaimed and
pounded his hand on Cary’s knee. Even Yerl seemed to take notice
over the stem of his pipe. “You have to tell us everything.
Everyone in Holden knew where we were heading, I can’t go back and
tell ‘em I didn’t see a woman this whole time. Are they huge like
the men? Do they have beards?”

“
They look like women,”
Cary stopped the boy before he could go any farther with his
ridiculous conjecture. For some reason, he found that thinking
offensive, though he’d have said the same two weeks ago.

“
What’s that supposed to
mean? Come on, tell us the truth. Did you see any of them . . . ?”
Pence’ whole face lit. “You did, didn’t you? You saw them fucking.
I bet it’s like watching a couple of bears go at it or something,
all hair and muscles and claws.” He waved his hands around and
bared his teeth, drawing a chuckle from Yerl.

“
Idiot,” Cary scolded.
He’d have laughed too if not for having actually seen the act and
never wanting to see it again. “I was a spy, not some peeper.
Besides, the only men in the lodge were old enough to be our
gran’dads. I wouldn’t watch old people fuck if it were the king and
queen. I’m tellin’ ya the truth. Their women look just like ours.
If they swapped clothes, you’d barely know the difference. It’s
only the men that are big.”

“
You . . . are . . .
fucking . . . with . . . us,” Pence insisted, emphasizing each
word. “Even if that were true, I can’t say that to the boys back
home. They’d know I was lying.”

Cary sighed. What was the
point? “You’re right, Pence. The women are bigger than the fuckin’
men. Some were ten feet tall. They walk around bare breasted and
fuck anything that moves. The men stay in their own sections
because they’re exhausted from all the fucking.”

Pence was awestruck. “No
shit!” he gasped, missing the irony completely. “That’s exactly
what I thought.”

Yerl laughed, flashing the
first honest smile of the trip, and pointed the stem of his pipe at
Cary in appreciation. Cary accepted the silent compliment with a
nod but couldn’t muster a smile to go with it. His mind was solidly
on those Morg women, but it was their politics, not sex, that held
him. “How long before we find the prince, do you suppose?” he asked
no one in particular, hoping to change the subject.

“
Got ta be close,” Yerl
mused. Cary hoped for more but did not get it.

He supposed he should be
thanking the rangers. They had already saved the mission from
certain failure. Left on his own, Cary would have gone to search
for the prince, his hundred guards, and twenty wagons along the
same path he had taken with Ambassador Chulters to reach the Fells.
The rangers had wisely directed him away from the mountains to the
south toward the open plains to the west. Though shorter, there was
no chance that the prince, his wagons, and entourage could make it
through the mountains. As Yerl had said at the time, the very fact
that there were no roads running through the Fells would restrict
the prince to the plains.

Cary hoped that Yerl was
right, that it would not be more than another day or two. He was
anxious to get back to Noé, to make good on the promise his kiss
had implied. He had no doubt now that it was an offer that she
would accept. But he was also anxious to get things finished here,
to ensure that the Thull and Callik went as expected even as his
intuition told him that they never would.

“
How do they do it?” Pence
asked, seemingly just now getting his head around Cary’s
exaggeration. “I mean, if the women are that tall, how do the men
fuck ‘em?” He seemed to be thinking through all the possibilities
and dismissing each.

The line of questioning
was one that Cary was intimately familiar with, though it was
strange to hear it directed at someone other than himself. “You do
know how it works, don’t you, Pence?” he asked, mocking. The kid
couldn’t have been shaving for more than a couple of years, and the
look on his face made Cary wonder if he really didn’t
know.

“
Of course I do. I got a
girl back in Holden that’ll see me any time I want.”

Yerl scoffed. “When yir
pocket’s full of pay and there ain’t no one else in
line.”

Pence shot him a look, but
the older man just held it until it fell into a smirk. “She’s worth
every cent,” he admitted. “But she ain’t no giant. However we do
it, she’s just the right size. I can’t imagine if she were a head
taller than me.”

Both the men looked at
Cary, Yerl with amusement and Pence with real curiosity. He
couldn’t decide if it was because he’d seen the Morg women or
because he was most likely to have experienced the situation
personally.

“
You’ll have to use your
imagination.” Cary reached to the bag at his side and pulled out
the fur he’d taken from the lodge. The rangers gawked then glanced
at their own cloaks. “One of the women gave it to me,” Cary said as
he adjusted his saddle bag beneath his head, pulled his hat over
his eyes, and covered himself with the fur. “She didn’t have to use
her imagination, and neither’d I. Night, gentlemen.”

Pence stammered, asking
questions, demanding answers. Cary ignored him, thoughts on making
the lie into the truth when he returned to Torswauk.

#

Cary and the rangers rode
for the entirety of two more days with no sign of Prince Winslow or
his entourage. Riding as hard as their horses would allow, spread
out, weaving back and forth to cover as much ground as possible,
even Cary was growing tired of the saddle. The rangers,
continuously fighting to keep up, had lost the enthusiasm of the
first day when they were simply happy to be away from the lodge.
Pence had grown almost as taciturn as his fellow, speaking now only
to complain. Yerl’s range of expression had fallen to grunts and
shrugs.

The third night, Cary had
tried to lighten the mood by telling of his exploits: the women
he’d seduced; the fathers and husbands he’d duped or ridden from as
they gave chase, knives or pitchforks in hand; all the places, he’d
had women, stables, smithies, haylofts, fields, forests, and
foyers. For a while, the stories had kept the complaints at bay,
but they had soon been met with snores. Cary had wondered then how
much harder he could push them. The mountain ponies were as sturdy
as any horse he had ever ridden. They weren’t fast, but they never
seemed to tire. The same could not be said of their riders, but
Cary was desperate to get back to Torswauk, to see Noé again, to
see the negotiations completed and all this political intrigue
done.

They just needed the
prince. That is what Cary told himself over and over, but he
somehow didn’t believe it. The benefit of the long search was that
Cary had plenty of time to think, but he had still not pieced
together what was happening in the lodge. He could not help but
think that Zhurn was planning to use Noé in some way, that it
required the Callik to remain in stalemate, that the Mother from
Mehret may be involved, but he could not get past what Juhn had
said. It was decided. The fact that the Callik had not rejected
Liandria only confirmed it. Nyel was always going to win. The
prince was the final piece. The only thing Cary had to do was find
him and return to Torswauk with the news. Then he could make good
on the foundation he’d laid with Noé, and if the negotiations
happened to drag on, maybe he’d be able to make good more than
once.
You’re being
paranoid
, he told himself every time his
mind slid back to thoughts of conspiracies.
It’s all the intrigue and skulking making you see things that
aren’t there
. Still his mind could not
seem to let it go.

#

“
Smoke!” Pence announced
the morning of their fourth day. They had just put out their own
fire and saddled their horses. The boy had climbed a nearby hill to
take a piss and ended up nearly wetting his boots in his
excitement. Yerl joined him and confirmed the smoke rising from the
horizon, a wisp of grey cloud on a cloudless sky. Cary hid his
relief as he finished saddling his horse.
Never leave a horse half-saddled
,
his father would chastise.
I don’t care if
the stable’s burning, you cinch the harness before you run
out.

The rangers were still
admiring the wisps of grey when Cary joined them, leading his horse
by the bridle. Though he’d given up naming horses years ago, he was
fond of the beast. He rubbed its nose and fed it a carrot from the
dwindling supply in his saddle bag – food would have started
running low if they’d spent much more time searching. “You sure
that’s them?” he asked the rangers. It didn’t look like much to
him, a smudge on the horizon that might have been nothing more than
a trick of the rising sun.

“
That’s fires,” Yerl
confirmed. “A bunch of ‘em by the looks of it. Probably still ten
miles off but at least fifty men.”

Cary stared again
wondering how the ranger possibly got that much information from a
smudge on the horizon. He was not sure he’d have even seen it if he
hadn’t been shown where to look. “Alright then, let’s go. They’ll
be riding soon and there’ll be no smoke to guide us.”

That proved to be a lie.
The smoke grew from wisps to a column as they approached. Yerl’s
estimate on the distance proved to be accurate, and it took over an
hour to reach the hill above the prince’s camp. The day was
cloudless but the summer sun lacked the strength here that it had
in the South making for a comfortable ride. At least they’d had
good weather, Cary thought, as he considered the distance they’d
traveled. Rain would have been miserable on the plains. They’d been
lucky to find a tree to tie the horses to at the end of each day,
let alone enough shelter to weather a storm.