10.

 

After Bueralan organized for Elar’s ashes to be shipped back to his children—he could not bear to send them his body—the job took another two months. As the morning’s sun rose nearly five months after Bueralan had first ridden across the border, Dark rode out of Ille, leaving one hundred and twenty-three men and women to be executed, their pound of flesh bitter black.

Deanic had not ridden to the coast with them. He had parted from them two days after they left Ille, and the rest headed, tired and broke, to the small town of Asli. There, they would spend a single night in a cheap inn before finding a ship to take them to Yeflam. After that, they would ride up to Mireea, where the work offered by Captain Heast waited. The job had come in the final days of the revolution against Lord Alden and there was no mention of his cousin in the short note, but Bueralan had not expected there to be: Heast’s letter alone said that he knew.

Now, one night out from Mireea, one night and seven months after Ille, the camp Dark made was a quiet affair, Bueralan the somber heart of it.

“You have been quiet all day, Baron.” Samuel Orlan was seated across from him, on the other side of the smoldering campfire, an old man who had missed nothing. “Does something about this work bother you?”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“So you did.”

A thin trail of smoke rose between the two, the smell of cooked meat clinging to it. “Why are you here, Samuel?” Bueralan asked, after a moment. “Why are you not back in Mireea?”

“My shop has been burned down,” he replied. “My apprentice attacked. I would like to know why.”

“Revenge?”

“Don’t you feel as if something is not quite right in these mountains, Baron?” Between the two men, the rest of Dark watched silently. Bueralan saw Zean shift slightly, so that his body was turned toward the cartographer. Kae’s three-fingered hand placed the plate he had been eating off on the ground, near the hilt of his sword. Aerala fed a long stick into the ash, heating the embers, while Liaya’s hand dropped slightly to the outstretched body of Ruk, whose steady breathing altered to her touch. Without concern, Samuel Orlan continued, “You have been beneath the city, you have seen the temple, you know what I know.”

“Which is?”

Orlan’s smile was faint in reply.

Bueralan thought of the presence he had felt before the temple. He picked a piece of fat from the plate beside him, cut from the meat provided by Lady Wagan, the first and last of the fresh meat they had been given. He flicked it onto the dying fire, and said, “Do you know what happened to the last man who thought he could play us?”

“I heard that the Lord of Ille was hanged on the gallows his grandfather and father made,” the small man replied. “I had heard that you were employed by him.”

“We were,” Bueralan admitted. “He had an armed revolution building, one that he believed we were not motivated enough to stop. He did not doubt our loyalty to our word. We have earned that in our work. But he did doubt our dedication to our word, and he thought he could motivate us if something personal was at stake. He killed one of us and it did motivate us all, but not in the way he had hoped. See, he overplayed his hand. Lord Alden was a man who loved detail. He kept records of stock, land ownership, taxes, population, all of which fell under his control—including the details of life and death. He reveled in the details a little too much.”

“So you took him to his family gallows?”

Aerala’s stick snapped, sending up a cloud of dying cinders.

“No,” Bueralan said. “The people of Ille did that. We found the head of his revolution a week after Elar died. The young woman responsible had made a mistake earlier, and that led to her. She was quite an intelligent individual and, after introducing ourselves, we made sure that within the next two months, all of Lord Alden’s finances were directed to her, from his investments, to the land that he owned. More important, we made sure the neighboring kingdoms recognized her and her new government. Then we helped organize the night that she and her friends could enter Ille and take Lord Alden and his remaining loyalists, including, you will be surprised to learn, his gardener. In the morning, they were all led onto the floorboards of the gallows that his father had laid.”

“If the moral of that story, Baron, is that you are not to be trifled with—” Orlan held up his empty hands “—rest assured, it never crossed my mind.”

“Take your mule back to Mireea, Samuel.”

“He is a pony.”

“I could have my soldiers stake you down in the dirt, leave you here until the morning.” Bueralan saw Zean shift straighter, the movement mirrored by Kae; in his periphery, he saw the remains of Aerala’s stick drop, saw Ruk’s legs shift slightly and heard Liaya’s bag clink, once, but loudly through the silence of the camp, as if it were a bell, announcing the start of a race. “You should not doubt it.”

“I do not. Nor should you doubt that after I freed myself, I would ruin you,” the cartographer said with no trace of anger in his voice. “All of you. In many ways, I am similar to all of you, and I can do what you did so well in Ille. But I would do it in all the cities you have been to, in the places where your reputation matters, where you ply your trade. I would do it where you were born, and where you lived now, and I would be able to do it because, my dear, exiled Baron of Kein, I am the eighty-second Samuel Orlan and I am not a common man, nor even a lowly lord like the late Alden of Ille. I am something else entirely.”

Across the dying fire, the saboteur met the other man’s gaze and held it for such a time that when he blinked, his eyes stung.

“I once had trouble imagining what Heast thought when you stood in his office,” Bueralan said quietly. “Once.”

“I do like you, Captain,” Samuel Orlan said, smiling as he did. “I do hope, sincerely, that you do not die any time soon.”