Fugitive Prince (48 page)

“Fatemaster’s bollocks!” The stout guardsmen peered past the sloped neck of the gelding. “Is every living one of you also related to the priggish family of the mayor?”

Mearn smiled, sly in malice as a weasel. “Thick witted, are you, to take so long to notice the connection.”

The pair crossed inside the camp perimeter, the alleged Hanshire courier all peevish-sharp nerves, and the heavyset soldier tagging his heels in contrasting, subservient awkwardness.

No torches burned, even damped behind canvas. Those men who had not turned in for the night hunkered down in small groups, conversation held to low whispers. They blended into the pitch shapes of the shadow, faces and hands stained with walnut dye to mask the pallor of bare flesh. Their shelters were sturdy and weatherproof, showing the odd scuffs and mends of hard use, and a layout taken from a headhunters’ practice, with tents placed in rows of predictable width to allow ease of movement in darkness. Mearn lightened his tread, made cautious by the lethal stamp of competence reflected in every salient detail.

This camp was laid out for instantaneous action, from swift relocation to surprise attack. Men called to arms from the deepest of sleep could move, fight, and organize without tripping over tent pegs and ropes. No clutter lay about, no stray gear or strings of washed clothing. At a table with camp seats placed near the center, three wakeful officers clustered in conference, a tight-shuttered lantern between them. Yet no gleam of flame gave their presence away in the faint, mottled fall of the moonlight.

Led into their presence, Mearn used the snagged hair of the gelding’s mane to obscure direct view of his face. His posture stayed straight, every inch of him arrogant. At length the camp watch captain broke off discussion and issued a testy inquiry. “Don’t stand there dumbfounded! If you have any purpose here, state it.”

Since the uppity Hanshireman deigned not to speak, his disgruntled escort was forced to step up and explain. “Here’s a courier, bound north bearing urgent dispatches.”

A drawn pause; the watch captain waited, braced on mailed elbows. His expectation made the silence unbearable. Red-faced, the sentry resumed his report, unable to refute the implied chain of command. “Yes, he needs food. Care and grain for his horse.”

Mearn forced his breath steady as the lamp was raised up, and a cautious, brief finger of light flickered over his cloak and the Hanshire blazon on his saddlecloth.

Blunt as the mace he wore at his belt, the watch captain pressed his gruff inquiry. “You know him?”

“Sithaer no! Thank the power of Light for that blessing.” The soldier glared with pure rancor at Mearn, who gave back a smile full of teeth.

Across the table, one of the subordinate officers clapped a hand to his beard to mask humor. The duty captain noticed, and snapped, “Swellhead or not, he can’t stay in camp unescorted.”

The guard braced his posture in bitten-off protest. “Respectfully, sir, I’m posted on the inner perimeter until midnight. Since this dandified errand boy requires a servant, will you hear my advice? Assign him somebody’s unseasoned page. Preferably one with an insolent tongue that’s deserving a stiff round of punishment.”

“Just make sure he knows how to clean a man’s boots,” Mearn remarked from the sidelines.

The watch captain lost his breath to astonishment, then struggled not to laugh at the stilted discomfort of the soldier caught in the breach. “I understand your position,” he said, straight-faced. “By all means, we don’t pander to mincing state guests.” He nodded dismissal to his disaffected veteran. “Return to your post with my compliments. ”

Relieved at vindication, the heavyset guard grinned in parting. “Be sure the daisy attends his own horse. He’s already told me our grooms aren’t fit to pluck the arse end of a goose.”

Left with the watch captain and two inimical senior officers, all of them thankfully strangers, Mearn held his ground, wary. His airs and affectations in fact bought no immunity. This strike force was not warmly disposed toward strangers, nor did it welcome unannounced couriers who impinged with a claim of hospitality.

“You will leave all your weapons with us,” the watch captain instructed, stretching the hard muscles of his forearm. Moonlight snagged on the links of his mail as he leaned his massive weight over the table. “No one here knows you. We don’t leave men armed who aren’t vouched for.”

Mearn said nothing, but yanked loose his sword belt. He knotted
the ends of the leather around the scabbard and, in masterful presumption, pitched his offering toward the seated officers; as if all his life, any man near him would naturally scramble to vie for the favor of his service. To judge by the fast reflexes of the brute who received the catch, his best chance was to stay on the offensive and discourage too close a scrutiny.

Before the captain could phrase a demand for his dagger, Mearn blistered back in disdain, “Since I’m not an assassin, will you insist that I eat with my hands?”

Any competent killer would use a noiseless garrote before steel; a fine point the watch captain was shamed to concede since the dagger remained in Mearn’s custody.

The first throw fell to s’Brydion wiles, that freewheeling complaint proved a grating embarrassment in this bastion of prideful authority. No more argument ensued as a page boy was rousted and assigned the mean task of dogging Mearn’s presence in camp. The steaming horse and its troublesome rider were dispatched straightaway to the picket lines, to long-suffering sighs of relief.

Granted limited autonomy and a precarious state of safe-conduct, Mearn adopted the sneer he liked best to intimidate crews on the decks of his brother’s war galleys. Cardplay had taught him the elegant fine points of intimidation without the crude bluster of exertion. In one withering glance, he sized up his escort, a swaggering, lanky boy of sixteen who tripped over his own feet at each step.

Since braggarts typically feared contradiction, Mearn spun on his heel. He tugged his mount in the wrong direction, his blunder a certainty since the wind in his face carried no tang of manure.

The boy plucked at his sleeve, then flung back as Mearn bristled.

“Don’t touch me, whelp.” In sterling offense, Mearn faced forward and continued on his way. The page followed. Three dozen strides passed before the boy raised the nerve to correct the displaced orientation.

By then, the s’Brydion envoy had finished his count of the tents, and by swift extrapolation, set a crude limit on the strength of Alliance numbers. This force kept no camp followers. Servants and support troops were pared to a minimum, and an overheard scrap of conversation had informed that even the healer bore arms. More than one shelter’s ridgepole displayed trophy scalps, clan braids knotted together like rope, or wound in the blood-crusted thongs the living man’s wife would have tied in before battle.

Enraged and grieving, Mearn came at last to the picket lines. This division was light horse, the animals all prime, kept glossy with grain and condition. By contrast, the hack he tied up and rubbed down was
thin and straight shouldered, an eyesore of a livery horse outclassed by its neighbors.

The page boy fatuously pointed this out.

Mearn ignored him. By clan belief, all things alive were made equal, no animal given more worth than another, and no man’s life valued above either. Moved to cross-grained annoyance for the boy’s townbred ignorance, he fixed his whole attention on tending the tired gelding’s legs.

Just like the chained dog spurned by the free one, the snubbed page inflated his boasting to compensate.

Mearn did not comment. Thin features cast to indifferent disdain, he listened and absorbed each stray fact the boy spouted. By the time the gelding was cooled, fed, and groomed clean of sweat, he had cataloged a major array of tactics used in past raids against Red-beard’s clans in Rathain. When the page boy wound down, he ventured laconic opinion that as yet, he remained unimpressed.

Done with the picket lines, his saddle and the Hanshire horse cloth slung over his shoulder, he pursued his quest for a meal. At the cook’s tent, a well-placed disparagement sent the boy inside to fetch bread and jerked meat. Mearn waited, sharp-eyed and observant on the sidelines, overhearing stray phrases and talk from the men who came and went about unnamed business.

“…give the forest-slinking lizards their comeuppance,” a pikeman said, chuckling.

Through a lull in the breeze, a companion enlarged on the story, his gestures expansive and vehement. “…for what they did in the bogs. Let them suffer Dharkaron’s fell vengeance for all eternity…nothing else but a tenday of sharpening weapons. Have blades in our band could split hairs with a cat’s breath behind them…”

Low talk from another quarter cut in between gusts of wind. “Man, they’ll be swept up like leavings. No chance…other troops moving in through the mountains…them surrounded, and clan scalps enough to make felt to restuff our Lord Mayor’s upholstery.”

Riled as a cat doused in rainfall, Mearn capped the blaze of his temper. Bit by bit, patient, he assembled each garnered fact. Under Alliance orders to sweep northward, these crack Etarran troops held a crown disposition to hunt down free clansmen in Tysan. Stung pride would be vindicated. Having suffered and bled through laid ambush in the wetlands, these men were rested and hot to take down the barbarian vermin who had abetted the Shadow Master’s clean escape. Nor were their officers anything less than prepared for the tricks cornered clansmen could mete out.

Mearn had quartered the camp. As s’Brydion knew war, he recognized excellence. After five seasons spent plowing the forests of Rathain for Jieret Red-beard’s unscrupulous breed of scout, they were hardened veterans, lethally practiced at keeping a near to invisible presence.

He ate what the page brought, suborning racked nerves to assuage his body’s demand for replenishment. Emerged from a seamless tempest of thought, he laid down the wild card hand he had cut from the cloth of desperate courage and chance.

“I’m tired,” he announced without preamble. Lest the flustered page seek a superior officer to ask for bedding and shelter, Mearn caught the boy’s wrist with insistent fingers. “I won’t sleep under canvas. Too smelly. Fetch me a blanket. I’ll choose my own place set out of the wind, where I won’t scratch from picking up head lice.”

Once the blanket was found, he crossed the camp again, the saddle and cloth still carried across his left shoulder. He took painstaking minutes to cut and skin a green willow branch. With that oddment in hand, he acquired a seemingly limitless enthusiasm for exploring the brush between tents. He poked under bushes. His vexing, erratic course wound in circles around a structure of tight-lashed canvas, then stalled into another confounding silence.

The page grew rebellious. “That’s the supply and the armory,” he volunteered in exasperation.

“I do have a nose, whelp.” Not to be hurried, Mearn extended his search and turned over each leaf on the ground. “One can’t be too careful. Tracking dogs might have pissed here.”

“They’re kept caged in wicker,” the page disallowed.

Since Mearn had detected neither barking nor whines, he made chill conclusion that this company practiced the headhunters’ cruelty of cutting the dogs’ vocal cords to make them run silent.

Scarcely able to mask his shudder of distaste, he unloaded his saddle, folded his lean frame in the blanket, and lay down full length on bare earth. “Good night.”

“What?”
The befuddled page glowered.

“I said, good night.” As a final eccentric foible of privacy, Mearn arranged the crusted saddlecloth with its bold Hanshire blazon over his exposed head and face.

The page stood at a loss with his mouth open. As Mearn’s breathing steadied, then slowed to soft snoring, the boy paced, kicking stones in bilious frustration. His orders to watch this high-handed courier included no avenue for relief. Nor was an officer nearby to consult or say where his irregular duty left off. The boy stood; he
deliberated; he went foot to foot in sore doubt. Finally, resigned, he sat down in the brush to keep boring vigil. The prospect of watching a prig sleep through the night underneath the ripe felt of a saddlecloth seemed a stupendous waste. Where a man might lodge a complaint among peers, a boy could do little but sulk and endure the injustice.

Hours crawled. The watch changed. The last wakeful men retired to their tents. The courier from Hanshire did nothing but lie in unmoving, oblivious quiet, while the page leaned his back on a sapling. Tired, he dozed once or twice. The final time he opened his eyes, the brush over his head rang with the chirps of spring sparrows. Dawn had broken. Through a pearl haze of fog, men stirred, seeking breakfast or the latrine ditch. The page stretched, rubbed his eyes, and through the complaint of stiff muscles, ascertained his charge had not strayed. The courier’s boots and spurs still poked from the blanket. Naught else had changed; the red-and-black saddlecloth remained creased like a tent over his insufferable, swelled head.

The page endured privation in eye-watering discomfort, then finally gave in to bodily need and relieved himself in the brush. The Hanshireman slumbered on, oblivious. The sun rose, melting the streamers of mist and unveiling a day like a chisel-cut diamond. The camp was fully aroused before an irritable petty officer sent by the watch came inquiring to see why the courier had failed to make an appearance.

“He’s asleep, still.” Grouchy and feeling unjustly martyred, the page boy tossed a pebble just shy of the blanket. “Probably lies in silk sheets until noon in that decadent city he comes from. You kick him awake. He has thankless manners.”

The petty officer stroked his clipped beard. He eyed the manshaped muddle of horsecloth, saddle, and blanket with visible trepidation. Then, touched to a sudden, chill plunge of intuition, he stepped forward and stamped his booted foot with full strength onto the courier’s midriff.

Sticks snapped. The blanket collapsed, sagged in folds that revealed the form underneath to be nothing else but an artful arrangement of twigs and dry grass.

“Murdering
fiend!
” the officer gasped. “The confounded dog was a spy!” He elbowed aside the gaping page and raced headlong to raise the alarm.