Tasks
They were, Allystaire believed, the longest two miles he’d ever walked. They felt every step of twenty, with painful fatigue dragging him towards the ground at every step. Halfway there, Torvul offered up a flask of something. Uncharacteristically, he took it without asking, had a swig, and felt a brief flush of energy flow into his limbs.
That rush faded quickly, though. So quickly that Torvul grumbled incomprehensibly in his native language and had a sniff at the flask himself.
Allystaire ignored the dwarf’s gimlet eye. He had no attention for anything but the setting forward of one foot after another, the brute forcing of it. The pain was shoved aside along with every other thing that might otherwise have preyed upon his mind: the crippled veteran he hadn’t finished healing, the riots, where they were going, how to get there, how to guard the woman, the boy. What the boy meant, who he was. Allystaire had suspicions.
Or he’d had them, before life had become one step. Then another step. And another.
Idgen Marte, who’d ranged ahead as they walked, reported knots of green-cloaked men here and there, fleeing the city in all directions, some halting as the energy of the mob began to desert them.
She began to ask him a question, something about cutting branches for a litter. He waved her off with a curt gesture, and grunted out a single word. “Ardent.”
“Your horse?”
“Get me to him. Sleep in the saddle.”
She nodded and disappeared again, only to return in moments and confer with Torvul, their words reaching his ears only distantly.
“Men with bows guarding a cluster of buildings ahead.”
“That’ll be our innkeep. And his sons, I expect,” Torvul said.
“How d’ya know?”
“What did I say about faith in my ability to read people? And, ah, to read the insignia on the matching tabards they’d all hung on the wall. Baron’s Own Bows, or so it said. Seems to be the first stage of the family business. Followed by the inn, of course.”
Sure enough, they crested a rise and in the earliest of pre-dawn light, they could all make out a pair of figures holding bows, arrows nocked, patrolling casually along the edge of a fenced enclosure. Within the fence sat a number of buildings, one three-story central frame that was the largest on the plot save the stables, with a scattering of sheds and outbuildings. Torches burned at regular intervals, giving the walking archers light to shoot by.
“Ware the ‘stead,” Torvul called out in his booming voice. “I left links on deposit with the master of the house.”
One of the bowmen seized a torch and came forward, swinging open a gate. “Come along. We can see if food is to be found,” he called as he approached. “Thanks for the advance warning of trouble in the night. We’ve got beds.”
“We’re unable to stay, goodman,” Torvul said. “Unfortunately. Of course, the silver I left with your father is yours to keep.”
The dwarf’s voice droned on, with Allystaire losing the thread of what he said. Then Idgen Marte was at his side, propping him up. Without her arm around his back he surely would have fallen to the ground.
“Ardent,” he mumbled, then fell to a knee.
He heard footsteps rushing, Torvul growling out requests. His mind swam right to the edge of unconsciousness. For how long, he didn’t know.
Then Idgen Marte was gripping him under the arm and helping him to his feet and he heard the stamp of a horse’s hooves and someone cursing. The hooves pounded closer, pulled up, and he felt Ardent’s huge muscled shoulder suddenly there, beneath one outstretched hand. Where he found the strength to haul himself up, he didn’t know, but he was sitting in the saddle, finally able to let go. till he remembered the Delondeur signet ring, heavy gold and emeralds, they’d carried with them out of the city.
“Torvul,” he said. “The ring. Give it to them. They will know what to do.”
Then Allystaire slumped forward across the neck of his enormous grey destrier and finally, blessedly, slept.
* * *
He snapped awake in the saddle, aching more than usual. The sun was well overhead and they moved at a slow pace along a well-kept baronial road. Heading east, he judged.
“How long,” he asked, his voice emerging as a croak from a painfully dry throat.
“Only a few turns,” Idgen Marte said. She sat her brown courser next to Ardent, the two horses moving calmly along the road. Without a word she held out a bulging skin, which Allystaire took and drank deeply from.
The water took the edge off his throat. “The boy? The woman?”
“Sleeping in the dwarf’s wagon,” she said. The wagon rumbled along ahead of them, powered by Torvul’s placid and tireless team. “Her name is Bethe, by the way.”
“And the wounded man back in Londray? What of him?”
“Tibult,” she said. “His name is Tibult. And I had to leave him.”
“How much had the Healing done?”
“I couldn’t tell,” she admitted.
“What will become of him, if he is found to have spread the rumors?”
“Folk like him are invisible. Everyone has made a practice of not noticing them. Believe me.”
“That is not the point,” Allystaire said, his voice on edge. “We do not use people for our own ends and then leave them behind.”
“I had no choice,” Idgen Marte said. She gave her horse a nudge with one heel and it trotted a few feet ahead.
“You cannot put others at risk for our purposes.”
“I will do what I must,” Idgen Marte calmly replied, without turning her horse.
“Men died because of your plan. Men who were not our enemies, who would otherwise be heading to their homes for the winter,” Allystaire yelled. “They, their families, that is who we are called to defend!”
“I know very well who I am called to defend,” Idgen Marte said, reining in her horse and turning in the saddle. She raised a hand and pointed a finger at Allystaire. “You.”
“I can defend myself!”
“No!” Idgen Marte spat. “You can’t. You pick a direction, usually one bristling with people that want you dead, and you go straight at it, blind to everything beside you. It almost got you killed this time. What happens, then, when it does kill you? What happens to the Goddess, Her Temple, Mol?”
Allystaire couldn’t find words, but he glared daggers at her as she spoke, one hand opening and closing around his reins. “It would go on,” he said, finally.
“No, it wouldn’t,” Idgen Marte insisted. “You’re the one they’ll make songs about, Allystaire,” she added, more quietly, turning her horse and trotting it back to his side. “You’re the Arm. The Knight. The Paladin. You’ll walk in Her sunlight and then be illuminated forever in memory. I am the Shadow. If that means I have to live in yours, well, I made my peace with that the day She Ordained me. It is my task—one of my tasks—to see that you live to do the things you must. If that means I must do things you can’t, or won’t, then I must.”
“It is our task to help men like Tibult, and his kin.”
“And I did, as best I could,” she said. “Don’t presume to tell me what my tasks are,” she added. “Because I’m going to do them, whether you approve of them or understand them. One of them is to keep you alive, no matter how stupidly and stubbornly you try to get yourself killed. Nothing you say is going to deter me from that, any more than what I might say would stop you.” She nudged her horse again and pulled up alongside Torvul’s wagon.
This time, Allystaire let her go without comment.
* * *
After another turn or two of riding in relative silence, Allystaire trotted Ardent alongside Torvul’s wagon. As if he could anticipate the question, the dwarf spoke before Allystaire had even formed the words.
“Yes, I gave it back, but I can’t understand why. In a day I could’ve made a copy that would pass for the genuine article, according to the uneducated fools you folk called gemmarers.”
“We have not the day to spend. And what is wrong with our gemmarers?”
“Do you know what one of them told me a few years ago when I asked him where his diamonds came from? From the belly of a great snake, he said. He said they lived in a valley far to the west, past Keersvast, on a land at the other side of the sea. He said the floor of this valley was the source of all diamonds in the world. That the snake-tenders, this was the word he used, snake-tenders, would lure the beasts to the edge with food, and then pluck the stones from their bellies while they slept.” The dwarf spat. “Primeval ignorance.”
Torvul turned to look back at the distant speck of the city walls as if he could take in its many lights, its shadows, the stink of the sea that lofted over it. He took a last deep breath, closed his eyes, murmured a few deep and rumbling words.
The boy had quietly climbed out onto the buckboard next to the dwarf. He’d remained silent for the entire flight from the keep, through the riot and beyond the walls. Now he swung his head towards Torvul. “What tongue was that?”
“Eh? Dwarfish.”
The boy cleared his throat. “What did you say?”
The dwarf shrugged. “Not sure how long it’ll be till I smell that much weight in one place again. I was…acknowledging it.”
“Weight?” The boy’s head tilted to one side, quizzically.
“Gold. Silver. Even copper or bronze. Steel. Metals. The valuable and useful kind.”
“Ah.”
Idgen Marte walked ahead, leading her brown courser while the village woman rode upon it. Allystaire sat slumped and quiet in Ardent’s saddle.
The day had dawned cold and seemed to be growing colder. Everyone occasionally, furtively glanced over their shoulders. There was no pursuit, and after they had moved east along the road for more than half the day, towards the looming shadows of the mountains that cut Barony Delondeur in half, the tension eased. Finally, with night coming on, Allystaire looked back once more and hoarsely said, “Looks as though Chaddin was as good as his word. I suspect we are safe.”
“Well,” Torvul said, “as safe as we can be in a barony where everyone with any power likely wants us dead.”
“There is more than one kind of power,” Allystaire replied.
“Aye, and they’ve got all of them. Magic, gold, religion, swords. That about covers it, I’d say.”
Allystaire merely grunted in reply. Torvul tried a different tack. “Speaking of magic and power—now you know I’m not one to get between a man and his holy rage, least of all when that man is you, Ally, but…” The dwarf let the ‘but’ hang in the air for a moment. “When you were healing that sorcerer, couldn’t you have left him alive? Tamed, he might have been turned to our benefit. Learn from him. Maybe he could’ve been a hostage—”
“He needed killing.”
“Just think ahead next time. It’s all I ask.”
Allystaire stayed his horse and turned to face the dwarf. “I will think ahead on how to kill any of them that come within my sight. I will think on how to mitigate the kind of horror they can wreak. If you want one alive, you capture him, then hold him till I can kill him.”
“And that’d be the holy rage,” the dwarf murmured. “He would’ve been more useful alive…”
Allystaire was about to respond, and Idgen Marte groaned in exasperation, but the boy spoke again. “What is it you wish to know, Master Alchemist? I have been Bhimanzir’s ward and apprentice for most of my life.”
“Master Alchemist, eh? I like this one.” Torvul turned from Allystaire to the boy next to him. “What’s your name, boy?”
“I haven’t been given one.”
“Haven’t been given one, eh? Take one that you like.”
“It is not done. I must be given one.”
“Well, I’ll give you one. Let’s see now—”
The boy cut him off with a curt shake of his head. “No.” He lifted a hand and pointed to Allystaire, a huge shape in the darkness; his and Ardent’s forms blended into a massive shadow. “Him.”
Idgen Marte halted her courser and spoke up. “Before we settle the big questions—strategy against sorcerers, the boy’s name, what we’re even going to do with him—can we at least decide where the Cold we’re going?”
“Thornhurst,” Torvul answered, even as Allystaire grunted, “Bend.”
Idgen Marte sighed in frustration. “Which is it?”
“Bend,” Allystaire insisted. “I think the Choiron was headed there.”
Torvul drew his wagon team to a halt and shook his head. “Mayhap he is, but I can’t see it’s our problem now. And we’ve got to get the boy and the good woman to safety.”
“I will not leave the people of Bend to the mercy of Symod,” Allystaire replied. “If that fool Windspar broke his Oath and the Choiron himself went to enforce Braech’s vengeance—”
“He’ll wipe Bend from memory,” Idgen Marte said flatly, “and I can’t say I’d miss it.”
“Never been to Bend,” Torvul replied. “Not eager to go.”
“It was the most miserable patch of the world I have ever seen,” Allystaire replied, “and that is precisely why we must defend it.”
“We have to defend them, too,” Idgen Marte said, gesturing to the woman asleep on her courser’s back, and the boy seated next to Torvul.
“We managed with Mol the first time around,” Allystaire replied.
“She managed us, more like.”
Are we forgetting that we cannot return to Thornhurst without the Will? Allystaire tried to direct his thoughts at Idgen Marte.
Are you so sure that we would be?
“Do you mean me? What is The Will?” The boy, once again, had been hearing their thoughts, and responded aloud. “I am sorry if I am rude again, but it did sound as if you meant…”
They paused for a moment, stared through the darkening air at each other, and the boy. In the distance an owl’s cry signaled nightfall.
Allystaire cleared his throat. “Any idea why you can hear our thoughts, lad?”
“I assumed it was some magic the three of you call upon, and my nature and training made it available to me.”
“Speaking of training, there’s a lot of questions I want to put you, when we’ve the time,” Torvul put in. Then, with pursed lips and a delicate sigh, the dwarf went on. “Look, boy. It’s not magic, not in the way you mean. It’s, ah…”
“It’s a Goddess,” Idgen Marte said.
“I have been taught that even if deities exist, they are not as powerful as we believe, nor does their existence matter very much,” the boy began, seeming likely to go on, before Torvul cut him off with a wave of his hand.
“You’ve been taught quite a lot of shit, I don’t doubt. Among it, I suppose, would be the notion that a big dumb man with a hammer poses no threat to a sorcerer. Well, he’s still here and your master’s dead. So it might be best to think on just how much of what your master taught you was wrong.”
The boy furrowed his brow and bit his bottom lip, his back stiffening a bit.
“It is a lot to take in, I know,” Allystaire said, nudging his horse closer. “We have much to discuss. I cannot make you believe in something, but if you trust me, and Idgen Marte, and Torvul, well, all three of us have seen Her, spoken to Her, been touched by Her. She is real as the sun we’ve ridden under today—and that is setting on us as we speak. So rather than sit in the middle of the road and speak of dogma and heterodoxy and heresies and whatever the Cold else people do when they argue about religion, let us look for a likely spot to camp and sleep a few turns. Aye?”
“Every once in a great while you manage to say something sensible,” Idgen Marte replied. She turned her horse and rode off down the track, pointing to a gentle, lightly wooded rise. “There.” She continued a dozen more paces or so down the road before cutting into the grass. “We can all use the extra rest and be up all the earlier on the morrow.”