.XV.

Green Cove Trace, Gray Wall Mountains, Province of Glacierheart, Republic of Siddarmark

“Your Eminence, you shouldn’t be up here!” Byrk Raimahn glared at Zhasyn Cahnyr. “That bastard Fyrmahn has small parties creeping all over these mountains. Can you think of a single person they’d rather kill more than they would you? I only ask because I can’t, and what they may do doesn’t even count broken necks on miserable trails! With all due respect, Your Eminence, what the Shan-wei were you thinking?”

Archbishop Zhasyn only leaned on his staff, returning the younger man’s glare with mild eyes. Cahnyr was much frailer than he’d been when he set out from Siddar City, mostly because he’d refused a ration any more nourishing than they could feed anyone else, but his thin face was calm and the constant shivering of his starvation-gaunt body was scarcely noticeable under his thick coat and gloves. It was as if the power of his spirit was substituting for the flagging energy of his flesh, and Raimahn’s obvious anger glanced off the armor of his serenity without so much as a scuff mark.

“You’re not saying a single thing Father Frahnklyn and I haven’t already told him, Captain Raimahn.” Sahmantha crossed her arms and turned her own glare upon the recalcitrant prelate. She, too, had lost weight. It was readily apparent, despite her fur-lined parka, but her face wasn’t as gaunt as the archbishop’s. Partly that was because she was less than half Cahnyr’s age, but the archbishop and her husband had also managed to bully her into accepting a slightly larger ration in recognition of the endless hours she spent hiking from one refugee tent or jury-rigged hut to another, caring for the sick and dying.

“No, you aren’t, Captain,” Cahnyr agreed. His voice remained stronger than his body, and he tilted his head to one side, considering Raimahn much as a bird might have considered a particularly tasty worm. “And since it didn’t do Sahmantha any good, and she’s known me a great many years longer than you have, young Byrk, perhaps you might save your energy and spare both of us a great deal of wear and tear.”

“Your Eminence!” Raimahn began, then threw up both hands.

“I give up,” he told the mountainside. “The man’s obviously a dangerous lunatic!”

“I assure you, I pose no threat to anyone,” Cahnyr replied with a small smile, clenching his teeth to prevent them from chattering in the sharp-edged, icy breeze.

“You mean you don’t pose a threat to anyone else,” Raimahn said grimly. “And the truth is, Your Eminence, that you do. Pose a threat to someone else, I mean.” He jabbed an index finger at the archbishop. “As long as you’re up here, I’m going to have to assign an escort to you, and you know perfectly well that if anything looks like happening to you, whoever that escort is, he’s going to jump straight between it and you. I hope you’ll still think this trip was worth it if that happens, Your Eminence!”

Cahnyr winced at the underhanded blow, and Raimahn noted his reaction with a certain satisfaction. He didn’t really think he could convince the archbishop to take himself back to a safer position, but it would seem he’d found an argument which might make the crazy old man exercise at least a trace of caution while he was up here!

“I assure you, I’ll be as careful as humanly possible,” Cahnyr said after a moment. “And I’ll even promise to obey any orders my escort might choose to give me.”

“And you’ll take Madam Gorjah with you, just in case.”

“No, I won’t,” Cahnyr said firmly. “There’s no point and no reason in allowing Sahmantha to endanger herself up here. Quite aside from any other factor, she’s far too valuable for that, especially considering Father Fhranklyn’s immobility.”

Father Fhranklyn Haine had suffered massive frostbite to both feet struggling through what everyone hoped had been one of the winter’s last blizzards in a vain effort to save a half-starved young mother from appendicitis. He’d lost most of his toes and half of his left foot, which had hurt him far less than losing his patient had. Nonetheless, the injury had confined him to the “hospital” in Green Cove, a hundred miles south of the ruins of Brahdwyn’s Folly. He really should have been two hundred and fifty miles farther back, at the hospital in Tairys, the provincial capital … but, then, so should Cahnyr. And as the Pasqualate had pointed out, there was nothing wrong with his hands. All he really needed was someone to wheel him from patient to patient, and half the time he had some orphaned waif tucked in his lap, making the huge-eyed child laugh at least briefly as they raced down the Green Cove clinic’s crowded hallways shouting for people to get out of the way.

“Speaking as the military commander the Lord Protector and Madam Pahrsahn sent out here to hold this pass, I respectfully disagree, Your Eminence,” Raimahn said flatly. “You don’t quite seem to grasp how central you are to our defense of this province. Fortunately, some of the rest of us do, and we’re not taking any chances we can avoid with you. In other words,” he looked the archbishop squarely in the eye, “when we can’t stop you from doing foolish things”—it was obvious from his tone that he really wanted to use a word considerably stronger than “foolish”—“we’ll just have to do our best to minimize the consequences. And that, Your Eminence, means sending a trained healer to keep an eye on you. At the moment, we only have one of those available. So either you take Madam Gorjah with you or else you admit neither of you has any business up here and go back at least as far as Green Cove.”

Cahnyr opened his mouth, then closed it again as he recognized the unyielding light in Byrk Raimahn’s normally mild eyes. The archbishop fumed, but the truth was that however little he wanted to admit it, he knew Raimahn was right. His presence, his return to Glacierheart, had been met by the starving people of his archbishopric with cheers, and not simply because of the food he’d brought. They’d cheered him as the living proof they hadn’t been abandoned, that the lord protector and the rest of the Republic knew about the stand they’d made—were making—and that if they could just hold on long enough, help would come. And he was also the focal point of every Reformist hope in Glacierheart, the archbishop who’d been outlawed by the Group of Four for his stance against their corruption yet returned, despite the condemnation to the Punishment of Schueler which hung over his head, to lead their fight to return Mother Church to what she was supposed to be.

No one had to know how unworthy of all that hope and faith and trust he truly felt, yet he couldn’t pretend the people of Glacierheart didn’t feel it. And because it was his responsibility to live up to that hope and faith, somehow he’d do it. He didn’t know how, yet he knew he would, that God would show him the way to do it. But he couldn’t ignore his pastoral responsibilities in the doing. He was God’s priest before he was anything else, and his heart wept when he read Raimahn’s messages, realized the grim brutality of the struggle raging back and forth across the hundred-mile stretch of narrow, icy roads and even more treacherous mountain paths between Brahdwyn’s Folly and Fyrmahn’s Cove on the Hildermoss side of the Gray Walls. These were his people, too, the ones dying up here in the snow—the ones killing up here in the snow … and sacrificing bloody bits and pieces of their own souls in the process.

The truth was, although he would never have admitted it to a living soul, he had to make this trip now. His strength, his stamina, was fading more quickly than he thought even Sahmantha realized, and if he’d waited as little as another five-day, he would have been physically unable to make the arduous climb even this far. A part of him had almost been seduced by Sahmantha’s cajolery—and threats—into coming no farther than Green Cove, or even returning to Tairys. After all, young Raimahn was probably right about the effect his death would have, not just on the fighting men resisting the unremitting pressure from Hildermoss but on everyone else in Glacierheart as well. But he was an old man, and if he was going to die this winter, he would do it among the people fighting to protect their families and their beliefs and their faith, not under a pile of comforters in the archbishop’s palace in Tairys.

He wondered again if his determination was some bizarre form of penance, an act of contrition for having survived the slaughter of Samyl Wylsynn’s Reformists. Was he trying to expiate some self-guilt? Or was he actively seeking the release of death to escape his heartsick grief at the ghastly deathtoll Glacierheart had suffered through this bitter, bitter winter of starvation and privation?

Oh, don’t be foolish! he scolded himself. Do you really imagine all of this revolves around you, whatever young Byrk or anyone else may believe? You’re one man, Zhasyn Cahnyr, one archbishop. One servant of God and the archangels. If you should happen to die up here, God will find someone else to take up your burden. And as for owing Samyl and the others some kind of death debt, or being personally responsible for all the suffering of Glacierheart, just how big an ego do you have? It’s your job to do something about it, not to find some reason to justify feeling responsible for every bit of it!

“Very well,” he said, his testy tone and the glitter in his usually mild eye an admission Raimahn had found an argument that would actually make him exercise caution. “Since you intend to be unreasonable about it and I’m merely an old and feeble man who no longer possesses the strength and intestinal fortitude to resist your autocracy, Sahmantha may accompany me. I trust that will be satisfactory?”

“‘Satisfactory’ would be me standing here looking at your backside headed down the trail to Green Cove,” Raimahn said inflexibly. “Under the circumstances, however, and bearing in mind what an ‘old and feeble man’ you are when it comes to having your own way, I’ll settle for what I can get.” He looked over his shoulder and whistled sharply. “Sailys!”

“Yes, Sir?”

A shaggy, brown-haired fellow in a hard-used parka materialized out of the straggly evergreens which provided the illusion of a windbreak for Raimahn’s small fire. It took Cahnyr a moment to recognize Sailys Trahskhat behind the thick beard blowing on the wind. The Charisian’s right cheek was badly mottled by frostbite, making him even harder to recognize, but he smiled in welcome as he saw the archbishop.

“Don’t smile,” Raimahn told him sternly. “The last thing we need is to be encouraging this … this old gentleman to be wandering around up here amongst the mountain peaks!”

“As you say, Sir.” Trahskhat banished the expression instantly.

“That’s better. Now, I’m putting you in charge of making certain he and Madam Gorjah don’t get into any unpleasantness while they’re here. Take one of the ready duty squads with you, and be sure you keep an eye peeled. That bastard Fyrmahn’s out there somewhere—I can smell him—and I don’t want him getting a shot at His Eminence. Is there any part of that which isn’t clear to you?”

He kept one eye on Cahnyr as Trahskhat shook his head firmly.

“No, Sir. I think I’ve got it.”

“Good. Because—I don’t want you to take this wrongly, Sailys—but if he doesn’t come back, you’d better not come back. I don’t think either one of us would like to explain to the rest of Glacierheart how we came to mislay him.”

*   *   *

Zhan Fyrmahn lay very still under the white canopy which had once been a bedsheet. The cold wind billowed the sheet, whispering knife-edged secrets, and its bitter kiss sank deep into his bone and flesh.

There wasn’t much of that flesh left, and his belly had stopped snarling and retreated into sullen, aching silence five-days ago. Without the food Wahlys Mahkhom and his men had stolen, over half his own women and children had perished. They’d finally gotten the surviving gaunt-faced mothers and hollow-eyed children out of Fyrmahn’s Cove, passing them up the high road through Heatherton towards safety under Mother Church’s protection in Tarikah. Fyrmahn wouldn’t be surprised if they lost half the remaining survivors before they ever reached Tarikah, and it was all that bastard Mahkhom’s fault. His and all those other heretical, Shan-wei-worshiping traitors who’d betrayed Mother Church in her hour of need.

He’d tried, for a time, not to think about the empty cottages in the village his great-great-grandfather had established over a hundred years ago. About snow blowing in under doors and lying in herringbone patterns across floors where no hearth fire would melt it, drifting ever higher against doors and shutters no hand would open with the coming of spring.

About the bodies hidden under that canopy of white because the ground was too frozen to bury them, or because no one even knew where they’d died.

Oh, yes. He’d tried not to think about it, but he’d failed. And a part of him was glad, for the rage gave him strength when the food ran out. It burned at the heart of him, like a furnace, and he raised the edge of his canopy to peer down the long, steep mountain flank at the trail below him.

He couldn’t see the four men who’d accompanied him, no matter how hard he looked, but he knew they were out there … unless the cold had claimed them. That could happen too easily to men weakened by starvation, and the journey to get here would have been grueling even if they’d all been well fed and in good health. The mountain snowpack was even deeper than usual this year, though the smell of an eventual thaw was in the air. That air was still so cold it squeaked in a man’s lungs, yet he sensed a damp edge behind it, like the breath of that thaw sighing in his ear. When it hit, the snowpack would turn treacherous and mountain streams would become rivers while rivers became torrents. Travel would be almost impossible for several five-days, and he wondered if it would be possible for any of them to return the way they’d come.

We won’t be “returning” anywhere if we don’t capture at least some food, he reminded himself harshly.

The thought held curiously little terror, although he’d insisted to his companions that they planned on returning—that this wasn’t some sort of suicide mission. Yet deep inside he’d always known better, whatever he’d told them. Just as they’d known, whatever they’d told themselves. None of them had anything to return to.

He thought again about Father Failyx. The Schuelerite was a hard man, he thought approvingly, a good hater. Lowlander he might’ve been born, but he had a Highland heart when it came to vengeance. He’d known what Fyrmahn intended when he set off into the mountains, and he’d only gripped the mountaineer’s hand tightly and squeezed his shoulder in silent blessing. One or two of Fyrmahn’s men had muttered that there might have been food enough—if only barely—to have made it through the winter after all, if not for Father Failyx and the lowland troops he’d brought forward. Perhaps they were even right. But without those trained troops, the bastard Reformists with their rifles and bayonets might well have driven Mother Church’s loyal sons completely back out of the Gray Walls. As it was, despite months of bitter fighting which had dyed the snow crimson, the line between Hildermoss and Glacierheart had moved barely thirty miles north.

And even with the food they stole, the heretic scum’s rations are almost as short as ours, he comforted himself bitterly. We’ve whittled them down to the bone, too. If there’s any truth to the rumors about what’ll be moving south when the snow melts, Mahkhom’s and “Archbishop Zhasyn’s” remaining men will never be able to stop it.

The thought gave him bleak, bitter satisfaction, even if he wasn’t likely to see it happen. And in the meantime—

His thoughts broke off and his single eye narrowed as he saw movement.

*   *   *

Cahnyr considered asking for a halt to catch his breath. Accustomed as he was to Glacierheart’s altitude, he’d seldom been this high, and the thin air was a scalpel in his lungs, despite the muffler wrapped across his mouth and nose. His legs ached, the pernicious weakness which had become an inescapable part of him turned his knees to rubber, and he knew the unsteadiness of his footing came from more than just the ice and snow underfoot.

If you ask them to stop, they’ll turn around and head back, even if they have to bind you hand and foot and drag you behind, he told himself. And the fact that you know as well as they do that it would be the smart thing for them to do only indicates what a sound point young Byrk had about the state of your so-called sanity.

He grimaced at his own perversity behind the muffler, but they had only one more stop before they all turned around and headed back to the ruins of Brahdwyn’s Folly. The outpost ahead of them—the support camp for the advanced pickets covering the approaches from Fyrmahn’s Cove—consisted of barely sixty men, but according to the senior man at their last stop, at least a quarter of them were ill. Even a minor sickness could be deadly dangerous to men whose resistance had been undermined by hunger and cold, and he’d known from Sahmantha’s expression that the healer in her needed to do what she could for them. He’d seen that need warring with her concern for him, and he’d felt the same need himself. Not to heal their bodies, for that skill wasn’t his, but the need to minister to them, to hear their confessions, grant them absolution and blessing … that was even more his duty than healing was hers.

He started to ask how much farther they had to go, but asking that would be as good as asking for a halt. And unless he missed his guests, Sailys Trahskhat would be calling another rest break soon. The man was watching Cahnyr like a hawk; it couldn’t be much longer before he insisted on resting the archbishop’s aged legs.

Of course, the problem is that if we stop to rest them, they’re likely to freeze solid, Cahnyr thought wryly. Either that or just fall off. Maybe it would be better that way. I could sit on my episcopal arse and let them tow me like a sled.

His mouth twitched in an exhausted smile and he tightened his grip on his mountaineer’s staff while he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

*   *   *

Fyrmahn studied the moving figures. This far south, any man he saw was a legitimate target, but there was something about them.…

His jaw clenched as he made out the rifles slung over their shoulders. There were ten of them with the weapons—six carrying them slung, and four with rifles at the ready. Three of the ready quartet broke trail ahead of the main body, while the fourth tagged along behind, watching their rear. They were obviously alert, and their wariness—and their weapons—would make things tricky.

He chewed on his thoughts, watching them come closer. He hadn’t really planned on locking horns with so many men, and especially not so many riflemen. The object had been to creep around behind the heretics’ line, pick off couriers and messengers, wring any information they could out of anyone they managed to take alive, and—hopefully—live off their enemies’ captured food while they spread panic and confusion. But ten of them, in one party, all armed with those infernal rifles … that was more than he and his companions had counted on tackling.

Yet even as he considered, he was watching, wondering what they were doing out here. And as he wondered, his eye was drawn to the two figures at the center of the riflemen.

Neither of them was armed, as far as he could see. And one of them … the shorter one.… That was a woman, he realized abruptly, and what in Shan-wei’s name was a woman doing this deep into the Gray Walls at this time of year?

He scowled, but then, suddenly, his eye widened as he saw the bag slung over her shoulder—the one he was suddenly certain bore the caduceus of Pasquale—and remembered the reports. Could it really be…?

His gaze went back to the taller but bent figure in front of her, the one slogging through the snow wearily yet with a sort of granite determination, leaning heavily on his staff. If one was a woman, the one in front of her was old, it showed in the way he moved, and only one old man would drive himself along such a bitter trail accompanied by a woman healer. And if they were who Fyrmahn thought they were, no wonder they were escorted by an entire squad of riflemen!

His hollow eye glittered with sudden, burning determination, and he pursed his chapped and bleeding lips. His whistle was barely audible above the sigh of the wind, but he heard it repeated back a handful of seconds later, and he bared his teeth.

Then he slid his already cocked arbalest into position and checked the quarrel with loving care before he set it to the string.

*   *   *

All right, Cahnyr thought. You win, Sahmantha. I’ve got to take a break, no matter what opportunity it gives you to browbeat me for my foolishness. But at least we’re probably close enough to camp for me to convince you to drag me the rest of the way there instead of turning around and heading back down the mountainside to—

The arbalest bolt came out of nowhere. He never even saw it before it drove into the great muscle group on the front of his left thigh. Agony ripped through him and blood sprayed as the quarrel drove clear through and out the other side. He went down with a cry of pain, and even as he fell, three more quarrels ripped into their party.

One of Trahskhat’s riflemen collapsed without a sound, his body pitching silently over the steep edge of the trail, plummeting into the shadowed depths below. Another staggered, stumbled, and went to one knee, swearing viciously as a quarrel slammed into his right shoulder joint, staining his parka with a sudden flood of crimson.

And Zhasyn Cahnyr’s heart seemed to stop as he heard a sound like a line drive in a shortstop’s glove and saw Sahmantha Gorjah go down.

*   *   *

Fyrmahn cursed aloud as the man who had to be the heretical archbishop Cahnyr went down. The range had been less than a hundred and fifty yards, and the quarrel should have gone straight into Cahnyr’s belly. But however fiery the spirit might be, it couldn’t simply ignore hunger and cold, and his convulsive shivering had thrown the shot off. Almost worse, there’d been only three other quarrels to accompany his own, which meant the cold had claimed at least one of the others while they waited. He wondered who they’d lost, but the question was distant, unimportant under the lava of his rage and the frustration of having missed his mark at such short range.

It might still do the job. If he’d managed to sever the artery the apostate bastard would bleed out in minutes. Even if he hadn’t, out here in the middle of ice and snow on a narrow, slippery trail, Langhorne knew they were likely to kill him simply trying to get him back down … especially with the Shan-wei-damned healer already down. But if that truly was Cahnyr, this was no time to settle for “might.” If there was one man in all Glacierheart who needed killing even worse than Wahlys Mahkhom, it had to be Zhasyn Cahnyr, the heart and soul of the heresy.

He unfolded the crank from the side of his arbalest and began respanning the steel bow. It wasn’t easy in a prone position, even with the built-in crank’s mechanical advantage, and he swore again, quietly, as the clicking sound of the cocking pawl taunted him. He was well hidden, but the heretics on the trail were survivors, graduates of a hard school. They’d dropped prone themselves, and their heads were up, the rifles ready, as their eyes searched the slope above them. If one of them—

A rifle cracked viciously, and Fyrmahn heard a shrill, ululating scream from his left. He didn’t know how Dahrand had drawn the heretic’s attention, and he clenched his teeth, trying to ignore his cousin’s agonized sounds as they slowly, slowly faded. He turned the crank harder, faster, keeping his own head down under his sheet, and cursed savagely as another rifle cracked.

There was no answering scream, but the rifleman wouldn’t have fired if he hadn’t thought he had a target. He might have been wrong, but the heretics weren’t in the habit of wasting powder and shot on targets they weren’t certain of. And—

A third shot cracked and echoed, and this time there was a scream—a choked off, chopped short scream that told him he’d just lost a second kinsman.

*   *   *

Cahnyr rolled over onto his belly, teeth clenched in anguish, dragging himself through the snow towards Sahmantha. There was blood on the hood of her parka, and his soul froze within him at the thought of facing Gharth. Then he shook his head, fiercely, banishing the thought and forced himself to crawl faster.

“Lie still, Your Eminence!” Sailys Trahskhat shouted. “Mahrtyn, get a tourniquet on the Archbishop’s thigh and then get him the hell out of here!”

“Aye, Sailys!” another voice responded, and the corner of Cahnyr’s eye saw one of Trahskhat’s men crawling towards him.

The archbishop ignored him, just as he ignored Trahskhat’s repeated order to lie still. He had other things on his mind, and he struggled towards Sahmantha, lips moving in prayer.

*   *   *

Fyrmahn’s arbalest string clicked over the roller nut, and he yanked the crank out of the spanning gear and shoved it flat once more. He groped in his quiver for another quarrel, fitting it to the string, and even as he did, he heard two more rifle shots. He didn’t know if they’d hit anything, but if they’d actually seen a target before they fired, his last companion was undoubtedly pinned down, if not worse.

It was up to him, and he set his jaw, glaring down the steep, white slope. His target was dragging himself grimly towards the fallen healer, leaving a trail of red in the snow as proof of his own wound. Fyrmahn could almost taste the traitor archbishop’s anguish, but the man wasn’t slowing down, and his progress had carried him out of Fyrmahn’s line of fire. The arbalest was a long, heavy weapon, with a two-hundred-pound pull and a twelve-inch draw; under the right conditions, he could make a killing shot at six hundred yards. But along with that length and power came clumsiness, and he couldn’t lower his point of aim enough to hit the crawling archbishop.

Or not from a prone position, at any rate.

His nostrils flared, but the decision was remarkably easy to make. After all, his family was already dead; he might as well join them, especially if he could send that bastard Cahnyr to hell along the way.

He drew a deep breath, settled himself for just a moment, then pushed up onto one knee in a single, flowing motion, and the arbalest’s butt pressed his shoulder.

*   *   *

Sailys Trahskhat saw the sudden motion, saw the red-haired, red-bearded figure throw aside the white fabric under which it had lain hidden. He saw the arbalest coming up, and he knew—knew—who that hard, hating man was.

He twisted around, bringing his rifle sights to bear, but not quickly enough. The arbalest rose to Fyrmahn’s shoulder even as his own finger tightened on the trigger, and the roar of his rifle and the snap of the arbalest string were a single sound.

*   *   *

A hammer pounded a fiery spike into Zhan Fyrmahn’s chest. The rifle bullet shredded its way through his right lung, missing his heart by less than an inch, mushrooming and ripping and tearing as it went. The impact drove him back, slammed him into the snow, and he felt his life soaking into his parka on the scalding tide of his own blood.

His left hand groped towards the anguish, already feeble, his strength already failing. He didn’t know what he hoped to do. It was simply instinct, the body’s futile effort to somehow stanch the blood. If his brain had still been functioning, he would have known it was useless, but it wasn’t working—not well, not clearly enough to understand.

Yet there was room in his fading mind for one last, clear thought.

I got the bastard. I got him.

It wasn’t much, there at the end of all things, but for Zhan Fyrmahn, it was enough.

*   *   *

“Shan-wei damn it, Your Eminence! If you don’t lie still, I swear I’m going to—!”

Sailys Trahskhat made himself close his mouth, clenching his teeth against quite a few rather disrespectful and irreligious but undeniably pithy comments.

Archbishop Zhasyn ignored him, continuing to struggle towards Sahmantha.

“Damn it, Your Eminence! Let me at least get a dressing on your thigh before you bleed to death!”

“Don’t worry about me,” Cahnyr panted. “Sahmantha! Take care of Sahmantha!”

“I’ll do that if you just settle down and let me bandage that thigh first,” Trahskhat grated. Cahnyr turned his head, glaring at him, and the Charisian glared right back. “Your Eminence, it glanced off her skull!” He shook his head as Cahnyr’s eyes widened. “You think I haven’t seen enough head wounds by now to know when someone’s just been grazed?! I’m not saying she couldn’t have a concussion, even a serious one, and arbalest bolts are nasty, so she could have a skull fracture as well. But it’s still only a grazing hit, and we can’t do anything about it except put a dressing on it out here on this damned trail. And I can’t put a dressing on her until you let me put one on the wound that’s bleeding like a stuck pig in your thigh. Or are you somehow of the opinion that she wouldn’t skin me alive and salt me down if I were to let you bleed to death while I was tying a bandage around her head?”

Cahnyr looked back up at him for a moment, then slumped back.

“All right,” he managed. “I see you aren’t going to give me a moment’s peace if I don’t let you do what you want. So go ahead.”

“Are all archbishops as stubborn as you are?” Trahskhat demanded, stooping over the older man.

He reached down and gripped the arbalest bolt standing out of the archbishop’s parka and yanked. It came free with a tearing sound, and he checked the knife-sharp head carefully. There was no blood, and he sighed in relief. The old man had lost enough weight over the long grueling winter that his coat hung upon him, loose enough—thank Langhorne!—for the quarrel to have punched right into it and never even grazed him.

The thigh wound was another matter, although for all the archbishop’s bleeding, there was no arterial spurt. That was a good sign, as long as they could keep him from going into shock out here on the mountainside, at any rate.

He drew his belt knife, cutting open Cahnyr’s quilted breeches to get at the wound, and pursed his lips as he saw the ugly entry point and even uglier exit wound. Assuming they didn’t lose the archbishop after all, the old man was going to have one hell of a scar, he thought.

He reached for Sahmantha Gorjah’s shoulder bag. He was no trained healer, but after this brutal winter, he’d learned more about dressing wounds than he’d ever wanted to know. He knew how to apply Fleming moss, at any rate, although he wasn’t about to fool around with any of the healer’s painkillers. Still—

Sahmantha stirred. Her eyelids fluttered, and she moaned softly, raising one hand to the blood-oozing furrow the arbalest bolt had gouged across the right side of her head. Her eyes blinked open. For a moment, they were vague, unfocused. Then they narrowed abruptly.

“His Eminence!” She braced herself on her hands, ready to shove herself upright, and Trahskhat put a heavy hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down.

“Langhorne, not you, too!”

“His Eminence,” she repeated hoarsely. “I saw—”

“You saw him go down, lassie,” Trahskhat said more gently, “but it’s no more than a leg wound. Now, if you’ll just bide for a moment, long enough for me to get his bleeding stopped, then I’ll see to you. And if you can keep your eyes uncrossed long enough to play seamstress and stitch him up, and maybe see to Vyktyr’s shoulder,” he twitched his head to where another of his men was applying a compress to the shoulder of his wounded rifleman, “then maybe—just maybe—I’ll be managing to get all three of you off this damned mountain and back to Captain Raimahn still breathing. And as for you, Your Eminence,” he glowered down at the archbishop even as he began tightening a dressing over the ugly wounds, “the next time the Captain tells you you’ve no business doing something, you’d best listen! Damn it, what d’you think I’m going to tell him if I have to come back and admit I lost you! He’d never forgive me—never! Of all the stubborn, stiff-necked, obstinate, pigheaded old—!”

He broke off, blinking on tears, and Cahnyr reached up to pat his forearm.

“Oh, hush, Sailys!” he said gently. “You haven’t lost me yet, and if Sahmantha’s still her usual efficient self, you aren’t going to. In fact, she needs to see to Vyktyr first—his wound’s obviously far worse than mine.”

“But—” Trahskhat looked down at him, and the archbishop shook his head.

“I’ll be fine, my son. And if I’m not, I’ve no one but myself to blame for not having listened to you—and, yes, Captain Raimahn. So let’s see to Vyktyr and to Sahmantha, and then let’s drag my preeminent, ordained, stubborn episcopal arse back down this mountain so all three of you can abuse me properly.”