Blood Ties (37 page)

Hodge smacked a hand flat against his thigh. “Bramble on Thorn! I saw that race, saw her take the Kill’s banner — as neat a thing as I’ve ever seen. What’s the matter with her?”

Leof paused and weighed his words, then spoke slowly. “She’s defied my lord Thegan. He wants her back to train his horses. If you find her on your way to the Last Domain . . . take her somewhere safe and send word to me. I’ll be riding the border until she’s found. If you find her on the way home, bring her back with you.”

Hodge whistled. “Wouldn’t like to be in her shoes, eh, if Thegan’s got it in for her.”

Leof frowned sharply. “Who?”

“My lord Thegan, I meant, of course, sir.”

Hodge’s back down was complete, but unconvincing, Bramble thought.
He
seemed to have Thegan’s measure, at least. By the horses, Bramble saw that Horst, the archer who had helped bring her to Thegan’s fort, was whispering to the other men. He was probably telling the full story.

“She might be making for the border,” Leof said.

The archer returned to the fire and eased a log farther onto the blaze with his toe. “She’s cunning,” he said dispassionately. “She’s disappeared off the face of the world.”

“That’s a good trick,” Leof said, smiling tightly. “There’s times I wouldn’t mind trying that myself.”

Hodge grinned at him with easy familiarity. “Aye, we’d all like that now and then, sir.”

“I’ve checked the other roads leading to the Lake,” Leof said, “and no one’s seen hide nor hair of her. We’ll rest here tonight. The Lord Thegan wanted Horst to go after you and ask the Lord Arvid to return her if she makes it that far. But there’s no need for three of you to go. Hodge, you can deliver that message.”

Horst spoke up. “My lord Thegan told me to take that message, lord.”

They stood in silence for a moment, each of them weighing his words.

“Yes,” Leof said slowly. “All right, then. You and Sully can take the message to the Last Domain. Hodge and I will go on to the border tomorrow. She has to cross it somewhere.”

Hodge scraped a thumb down his cheek, rasping stubble. “She’s the Kill Reborn . . . maybe she has ways we don’t.”

“She’s just a woman, sergeant,” Leof said. “I’ve . . . raced against her, I know. But she’s a woman with three horses, so if we can’t find her, Thegan will have our thews for bowstrings.”

“Aye, he will at that.”

The men chuckled and settled down at the fire. Bramble waited until they were eating and slithered backward until she was completely screened by the undergrowth. Then she picked her way back to the horses. It was the firelight, she told herself fiercely, that had made her eyes ache as though she wanted to cry.

Horst’s Story

T
HIS IS
how it happened. The old warlord, Wyman, was weak. I’d served him since I was ten, when my granda’s wife sold me into tax bondage for five years, to pay off the debts my parents had left. The fever had got them, both at once, and me and my sisters were sent off to Granda’s house. Might have been different, I reckon, if my grandam were still alive, but she weren’t, and the new wife couldn’t see any percentage in looking after young ones who were no blood of hers.

That’s what she said, “There’s no percentage in it, love,” winding her arms around his neck, and my granda, old fool that he was marrying a chit half his age, just nodded and did what she wanted.

So I was sent to the old warlord’s fort and my sisters, older than I was, were sent to be chambermaids and drudges at one of the inns in Sendat. One got pregnant by the ostler and married him; she did all right, seems happy enough. The other died of a cut that went bad. The shagging innkeeper didn’t even get a healer in for her. Too tight with his money. I got him, though. I got my lord to fine him for losing me her wages, because by then I was a man, sixteen, and what she earned belonged to me, not to my granda. My lord backed me full and the innkeeper didn’t argue it.

I gave some of the money to my other sister, though she had no claim to it under law. But then, our mam never liked that law. Said a woman’s wages were her own in other Domains. That Central was the worst place for a woman to be. Da just laughed and said, “You do all right,” and she’d look in the direction of the altar stone as if to ask the gods to witness his foolishness. But I reckon she did all right, too. Da never laid a hand on her unless she answered him back, and he never had a fancy woman. He kept a roof over her head and food on the table, most nights. But farming’s a hard business when the rain is scarce and the taxes are high, and after they were dead there was nothing left.

So I went to the fort and was put to be the fletcher’s boy. Making glue — gods, the headaches I got! — and plucking fowls. It wasn’t just chickens, but the big birds, too — ravens, hawks when we could get them, grouse, pheasants. But never owls. Owls are unchancy birds and should be left alone. An arrow fletched with an owl’s feather can’t be trusted. That life wasn’t too bad. I was fed and had somewhere to sleep, on the floor of the fletching shed. And old Fletcher didn’t thump me unless I made a mistake.

After a couple of years Fletcher put me to making arrows, and that’s where it all came apart. My eyes, now, they don’t work so well up close. I can tell a hawk from a kite a mile off, but anything closer than my outstretched arm’s a bit blurry. Arrow making, it needs good eyes for near work. So I got thumped a lot until they figured it out, and then, as I had my growth early, they put me to be boy to the warlord’s men.

Looking back, I can see it was a bad time to be put there, but then I didn’t know any better. The men were drunkards — rowdy, slovenly, no discipline, no pride. No purpose. I wasn’t big enough to stand my ground, so I got what any young one got from them, and not just the shit work. The casual thumpings, the being pissed on, the insults. I didn’t know then that the drunkards were the ones who should have been shamed by all that. I didn’t know how real men should behave.

Then came the day my lady Sorn got married. I hadn’t even seen her husband, just heard he was a lot older than her, and from the mountains. All it meant to me was that the men were drunk for days after the wedding, and I had a lot more vomit to clean up than usual.

But a week after the wedding, he came into the guardhouse. My lord Thegan. He stood at the door, with the sun behind him. One of the men had just emptied a chamber pot over my head and I stood there with the piss running down my face. Just piss, thank the gods. They were all laughing. He stood at the door, all clean and neat and . . . perfect, like, and looked around at the men. Half of them tried to straighten up but the other half were laughing so much they didn’t even notice he was there.

He looked at me. I was cherry red, expecting him to laugh, too, and feeling like I couldn’t bear it if he did.

He smiled at me. A real smile. “What’s your name, boy?”

“Horst,” I said.

He nodded. “Is this the way they normally are, Horst?”

I shrugged. But he kept looking at me and smiling as though we were friends, as though he understood everything that had ever been done to me. And I think he did. So I nodded. “Mostly. A bit worse than usual, because of the wedding drink.”

“The wedding was a week ago,” he said softly.

And just from the note in his voice, suddenly all around the guardhouse men were standing up, trying not to fall over, trying to look sober.

“The wedding was a week ago,” he said again, and the scorn in his voice was like acid. “I am ashamed of you.” He spaced the words out slowly, and looked each man in the eyes as he said them. By the end of it, we were all looking at the floor, ashamed of ourselves, too.

Then he came over to me.
To me.
And he clapped his hand on my shoulder and he said, “But not of you, lad. None of this is your fault. Go and get cleaned up.”

I turned to leave, lifted up by his words. My heart was flying.

“And Horst,” he added, remembering my name as though I were someone who mattered. “Tell the sergeant at arms to get down here now.”

That was the first order he ever gave me. I ran to do it.

Now I’m his man, and part of the best disciplined, most skilled, most dedicated force in the Domains. He made us. Like he made me. He was the one who saw that my long-sightedness made me a good archer. But he had the real long sight. He’s the only man I ever met who sees past the next meal and the next woman. He’s the one with the vision to see how the Domains could be united, made one country the equal of any —
better
than any in the world.

He’s a great man, my lord, a great man. He’ll take us all to greatness. And I’ll be one of his men helping to bring his vision to life. Following him, no matter what. Because on my life, I am Lord Thegan’s man.

Bramble

S
HE FOUND
the horses again half by chance and half by smell: as she got closer she could trace the faint scent of fresh horse dung. The relief almost brought her to tears. This place, so different from the forests she had known, sapped her strength. She had never felt so alone, as though she had been traveling among the creaking pines for weeks instead of days. The earlier panic had left her, but a deeper sadness grew in its place. The elements closed in around her: dark forest, heavy pine scent, the soughing of the branches above her as a wind picked up, the still, foreboding air hanging quiet below, surrounded by enemies, nowhere that was home. Again she thanked the gods for the horses. Without them she might have handed herself over to Leof and his men, just to have someone to talk to.

She shook her head briskly and gathered up the leading reins, murmuring softly to the horses, “come on then, come on then,” to reassure both them and herself.

They headed west, as far as she could reckon it. She planned to move back on Leof’s tracks and cross the border halfway between his resting place and the next border post.

She fondled Trine’s nose and pulled her hand away before it could be bitten. “With luck, we’ll be across before morning.”

Four hours later, with dawn filtering down through the dark branches, she cursed herself for having said it out loud, positively inviting the forest spirits to lead her astray.

Well, maybe it wasn’t that. Closer to the Lake, the forest was crisscrossed with streams, small and large, some of them sluicing noisily through deep defiles. She had been forced to detour around two of them for some way before she found a ford, and she had lost her direction. Dawn would allow her to climb a tree and find out which way she was heading.

She tethered the horses, put their nose bags on, and went looking for a tree to climb. It took longer than she had thought. These trees were real giants, so big around the trunk that three men holding hands couldn’t have circled them, and their first branches were far out of Bramble’s reach. She kept looking, getting more anxious, until she spotted light ahead. One of the giants had fallen and created a clearing. The branches of the trees on the edge of the clearing swept the ground, luxuriating in the light.

She climbed up one of the low-hanging branches wearily. It had been a long night. Her hands still hurt from the last time she had done this, and her thighs were shaking with fatigue. Worse, when she got to a branch from where she could look out, she realized they had been heading northwest instead of west, and were probably far too close for comfort to the border post Leof had spoken of.

But she could see the Lake — or at least the huge beds of reed that covered it at her end. It lay only a couple of miles away, which meant that the border had to be almost at her feet.

The scrape of her boots down the trunk was too loud.

“What’s that?” she heard below her.

She froze against the trunk. The voice had come from the clearing. Two men stood up, coming out of the shelter they had formed under the dead tree’s roots. Wonderful. She had chosen a tree right next to the border post. As the men moved forward, she realized it was worse. One was Leof. He must have left the campsite last night and come back here to rejoin his men.

Even in the dull early light, Leof seemed to glow, golden and energetic. He
was
gorgeous. She found it hard to hate him, even if he was a warlord’s man. But his face was more serious than she had known it. He was concentrating, working, looking for her so he could take her back to Thegan to be enslaved. This was his work, to hunt people down, to obey the orders of a killer . . . She thought of the full gibbets outside the fort at Sendat and her heart hardened inside her. She could feel it tighten, feel its stone under her breastbone. She clung to the trunk and prayed that the horses, thankfully out of their sight, wouldn’t whinny or move.

There were four of them. Leof signaled to two to take the other side of the clearing. They slipped into the trees, swords in hand. Leof and the other man came toward her. It was an archer, she saw, the one who carried a bow instead of a sword. The same man who had been with Leof the night before. Leof sent him farther down, toward the Lake, away from her horses. Then he came, slowly, through the trees toward her. He leaned against the trunk of her tree, casually, and brought his boot up as though to get a stone out of it.

Her heart was thumping so hard she thought he would feel it, like a drum, through the trunk.

“Bramble?” he said quietly. “Don’t answer me. Just in case Horst comes back. Are you all right?”

He glanced up at her, like a man judging the time by the sun. Their eyes met. She nodded.

“He — Thegan . . . tried to kill you as you rode away.” The words came out with difficulty, as though torn from him. “Why?”

“I defied him,” she whispered.

“That can’t have been all!” He pushed away from the trunk and began to pace back and forth, pretending to examine the ground. “There must have been another reason.”

“He threatened me,” she whispered. “He said I would train his horses and warm his bed whether I wanted to or not. I said no.”

He stopped, staring at the ground, his shoulders hunched, his hands dangling. He looked like a young boy.

“Found anything, Captain?” Horst called from the clearing.

Leof turned, instantly strong, full of purpose and certainty. “Nothing here. Go and call the others back, Horst. I think we’re chasing a forest sprite.”

“Aye, maybe so.” Horst turned and disappeared into the trees on the other side of the clearing.

“Stay where you are. I’ll move them out straightaway. Which way are you heading?”

“To the Lake.”

“And then?”

She hesitated. Right now his sympathies were with her. But back under Thegan’s eye, who knew where his loyalties would take him?

“Who knows?” she said, reluctant to actually lie to him.

He stood for a moment, then tilted his head back to stare at her. “I could have loved you.”

She nodded. “I know.”

It was all she could give him. What could she say? That maybe, if he hadn’t been who he was, she could have loved him, too? That if he hadn’t pulled on that uniform, they could still be curled up together, making love? The uniform
was
him.

“Take care,” she said. “Don’t trust him.”

He made a gesture as though warding off her words, and moved quickly into the clearing.

“Right, let’s get going. I want to make all the border posts today, starting with the west.”

They went through the business of packing up and loading their horses, which, it turned out, were tethered down by a stream north of the clearing.

Leof was the last to leave. He didn’t look back, but raised a hand as if in salute as he rode out of sight. She could deal with that. It was the sight of his ponytail bobbing up and down in time to the horse’s movement that filled her eyes with tears.