LEOF TURNED ARROW to the road and trotted sedately into Bonhill like any normal traveler. It wasn’t a large village, but it had an inn. He called up the ostler and handed Arrow over to her with strict instructions about water, feed and grooming. Before he let her be led away he patted her and told her how marvelous she was. She knew it — tired as she was, she tossed her head and flirted with him.
Then he found the innkeeper and ordered a message be sent to… He hesitated for a moment. The enchanter had moved in a serpentine route. Although finding him had taken many hard riding hours, they were not that far from Carlion. Sendat was further, but he was sure that Thegan would not want to take the garrison out of Carlion. Two messages, then, one to Sendat and one to Thegan. While the best horses the inn had — sturdy little cobs which usually pulled the wagon — were being saddled, he wrote quick notes to Thegan and Sorn.
This was the first time he had written to her, and he reflected that he should take a lesson from the circumstances — the only communication between them should be like this, an officer’s note to the warlord’s wife. He signed it formally: “Thy willing servant, Leof son of Eric.” He wrote with truth that he would be her servant, if nothing else.
Sendat was a day’s march away, and they couldn’t wait for the foot soldiers to catch up. He asked her to send the mounted troops, and to double each trooper with a pikeman. Hard on the horses, but it wouldn’t be a long campaign and the roads were good.
Thegan had put a lot of silver into repairing roads when he first came to power in Central Domain, as he had done in Cliff Domain, and for the same reason. The people thought it was to improve trade and connection between towns, but Leof knew it was in preparation for moments like this, when he needed to move large numbers of men quickly.
Once he had sent the messages and checked on Arrow, he grabbed a piece of cold roast chicken from the flustered cook in the kitchen and went out the back way, taking a threaded, concealed path to where he had seen the wraiths hover.
Farmland wasn’t ideal for stalking, but Leof had been well trained in scouting and by the time he had finished the chicken he had managed to worm his way to the side of the hill near the enchanter. He kept well back, away from the circle the wind wraiths were endlessly tracing above the rise.
He had been half-expecting Thegan to be right: to see the white-haired man from the pool. In any event, he was expecting such a powerful enchanter to be old. Perhaps very old. But the man who was digging and sorting out the bones he unearthed was around the same age as Leof: twenty-five, twenty-eight, no older than thirty.
Leof was tempted to simply kill him before he could raise more ghosts. He didn’t look like a warrior — he was tall but had no muscle, and his mannerisms were nervous. Leof suspected that confronted unexpectedly with a sword, the enchanter would have no defense.
Two things stopped him. If he failed — if the enchanter had protective spells of some kind, or if the wind wraiths protected him — Thegan would have lost any chance of surprise. And the other thing: he just didn’t know enough about the spell on the ghosts. Maybe the enchanter kept them under some kind of control, and if that control disappeared… Leof shuddered at the thought of the Carlion ghosts let loose on the rest of the Domains.
So he just watched. The enchanter was afraid of the wraiths. Leof had assumed that the wraiths were his servants. But judging by the looks he cast over his shoulder as he worked, he didn’t trust them anymore than Leof did. They were circling and calling to each other in a language he had never heard; half wind noise and half speech. Occasionally, they darted at the enchanter and laughed when he flinched. But they seemed to respect his right to work, and they were interested in what he was doing.
He worked without pause, following a strict routine. He dug a new section, taking the turf off in squares with a sharp spade and laying it aside, then digging deeper until he found bones. Then he put the spade aside and took up a spoon, loosening each bone carefully and laying out skeletons. From each skeleton, he took a bone — a fingerbone, usually. He bent his head over this bone for a moment. Sometimes it was a long moment, sometimes short. After this, he either put the bone and its skeleton carefully back in the earth and buried it, or he put the bone even more carefully into a sack, and then buried the rest of the bones. The work was painstaking, and for a while he seemed to become unaware of the wind wraiths.
After a couple of hours, Leof realized that he urgently needed to piss. He eased back from his vantage point, losing sight of the enchanter, and retraced his path step by careful step until he was hidden in a dense coppice of willow trees and it was safe to relieve himself. He stood in the green shadow for a while, trying to decide what to do. The enchanter was so caught up in his work and, from the size of the hill, had a lot more digging to do. Leof decided he was better off going to meet Thegan and guide him to the spot.
So he left the willows and made for Bonhill, not sure whether he was deserting his post. The wind had risen as the sun began to lower; every gust or wuther made him look behind him, in case the wind wraiths were following.