Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (44 page)

    
They were an interesting people.  They lived more in the trees than on the ground.  Thorn knew the Aschire, his tribe having traded with them on occasion.  They were light-skinned, high-cheeked and willowy.  Arms like sticks, legs less thick than my arms, long fingers and aquiline noses; their eyebrows were permanently arched, giving them a continued look of disbelief.   They had the reputation of being the second-best archers in the world, after the Scitai, and we hadn’t thought to bring any.  I found myself looking down the shaft of an arrow pointed at my eye, not five feet away. 

    
We needed to talk.  That fell to Ancenon.  He held up his hands, away from his weapons, drawing more arrows toward himself.  A good tactic on their part: take out the obvious leader.  A bad tactic on ours: giving them that.

    
“We bring no harm with us,” Ancenon said.  “We are merely passing to Eldador.”

    
They were quiet for a moment, obviously less willing than we were to distinguish a leader as a target.  Finally, one spoke in a trilling, almost musical voice.

    
“Go back,” he said.  “Take a ship from Talen instead.  None pass through the Aschire.”

    
I sighed to myself.  That had been my idea when I had learned how inhospitable these people were.  We
did
, after all, buy an interest in a shipping company for just that reason.  This way might be a little faster, unless of course the Aschire killed us for taking it. 

    
“We are able to pay our passage,” Ancenon pressed.  I hoped he knew what he was doing.

    
“Payment is in gold,” the leader, or speaker, said.

    
“Or blood,” said another.  Lucky me – he had an arrow pointed at me. 

    
“I think gold, then,” Ancenon said calmly.  “What is the price?”

    
“Ten gold Tabaars,” the leader said.  I thought that pretty steep.  Tabaars referred to the coin of the Eldadorian realm.  It cost a silver coin to take the boat.

    
“Done,” said Ancenon, reaching for his belt pouch.

    
“Each,” said the man sighting me.  “And that includes the horses.  They foul the land.”

    
Shela and Thorn both straightened, and I guessed that the comment had been directed at them.  The demand was extremely high, and I doubted that they would take it, even if we accepted it.  More likely they made the offer to find out if we were worth robbing.

   
“That is entirely too much, friend Aschire,” Ancenon said, painting on his best political smile.  I had already picked up Genna to one side with her cross-pistol out, sighting the man sighting me.  I wondered who hid behind her, sighting her, but I didn’t want to appear to be looking.  Instead I rested the hilt of my sword on the pommel of my saddle.  Nantar had taught me the move: I appeared to be resting a weak wrist when, in fact, this made it twice as easy to strike to either side.

    
“We are not friends,” the one sighting me said.  He had seen too much of my face, especially the eye he seemed eager to relieve me of.  I wondered if I could move fast enough to get out of the saddle and get to him before he could get off a second shot.  Probably not.

    
Shela finally broke the stalemate.  A busty plains girl in a skimpy top, maintaining the horses did not inspire one of them to bother sighting her.  Why waste your time on a camp slave?  If they knew the Andarans, they knew that their women didn’t fight.

    
Shame on them!  A sneeze disguised her breaking some sort of birch-bark string she had been palming, and then a word of Power, and every bowstring within fifty feet of us snapped.  Our opponents transformed from commanding the situation to harmless.

    
They still had their swords, so I didn’t wait.  I pulled my feet from my stirrups, swung my left leg over Blizzard’s rump and had my feet clear in one move.  Gripping the pommel of my saddle with my sword coming up, I balanced on my breastplate and, rather than hitting the ground, both feet landed square on the chest of the Aschire who had been sighting me.  He went down with a grunt, me on top of him.

    
Nantar, Arath and Thorn were no slower.  Abandoning their horses as well, both attacked the Aschire as quickly as I.  Nantar had their leader and another’s throat in each hand, holding them so their toes barely touched the ground.  Thorn had leveled one with the same maneuver I had used.  Arath punched one of the Aschire in the chest and side-kicked another in the stomach.  Thorn and I were each looking for a second, Arath for a third.

    
Drekk surprised me by joining the fray, dropkicking one man while he stared at his broken bow and then pinning him to the ground.  Two ran right into Genna, letting her kick one in the face and hold the other against the edge of her dagger.  The rest were about to engage us when the leader gave a strangled shout and called them off.

    
“Enough,” he gasped.  His face turned red as a beet from Nantar’s grip on his neck.  “Enough of this – our original price stands!”

    
“Fair enough,” Ancenon said.  Neither he nor D’gattis had budged from their saddles while the whole affair had gone on.  I left a foot on the chest of the man I had knocked over, letting him feel the heavy weight of my armor.

    
“I trust we have the word of the Aschire on this?” he continued.

    
The leader paused, then nodded.  Nantar gave him a shake, and he finally said, “My word, given for my people.  Safe passage if you pay, and if you follow a straight path out of the Aschire woods.”

    
“Done,” Ancenon said, “and done.  You have the word of the Free Legion. We will treat the woods with respect while here.

    
“Release our hosts, my friends,” he said, smiling that same politic smile.  “Let us be good guests, after all!”

    
Nantar dropped the two men.  You could see by the strain on his face that he’d have had to anyway.  Arath lowered his sword; Drekk got up and dusted off his black leather pants.  I stepped off of the one I had been standing on and offered him a hand up, which he refused.  He jumped to his feet from his back in one of those karate-moves you sometimes see on TV, then looked to see if he’d impressed me.  I looked back at Shela, instead, to see she already had her bow in her hand, and strung.

    
“Nice move, sweetheart,” I said, smacking her thigh as I walked back to Blizzard.  I got a kick in the shoulder by way of her appreciation.  Still, she didn’t lower the bow until I mounted.

    
Ancenon paid in Andaran coin and they made a big deal of counting it.  Genna came back and leapt up onto her horse.

    
“Sorry about that,” she said, looking first at Ancenon, then D’gattis, then Nantar and Thorn.

    
Ancenon left his politic smile on. ”Healing takes time, Genna.  One week is insufficient for you to be back to your prime.”

    
Arath looked at me and I shrugged.  He nodded.  I thought that to be particularly harsh treatment of Genna, but I couldn’t do anything about it, and neither could he.  He managed a wink at Shela, who smiled and looked away.  He had obviously caught what she had done, as I had.  D’gattis likely fumed over it.  Their leader turned back to us before we could comment on it any further.

    
“This tribe will walk you to the east side of the Aschire woods,” he said.  His tone brooked no discussion.  “When we are there, you are to go and not return.  None pass through the Aschire.”

    
“I appreciate the escort,” Ancenon said.  They didn’t respond, but melted back into the trees as one.  The one I had stepped on gave me a lingering look before he scrambled up a tree and became lost in the branches.  I wondered how they managed that with the purple hair, but again, they left us no time to ask.

    
Genna rode her horse sullenly, her head down.  I thought for a moment of our wild ride together through the Confluni woods, and wondered if she did, too.  She fell back with Arath and we proceeded through the woods.  The trees grew dense – I recognized mostly birch and oak, and I wondered if the two commonly grew together.  I thought I saw a maple once or twice, but couldn’t be sure.  Botany isn’t my thing.  Leaves lay in a thick carpet on the ground around a scrub type of brush that the horses seemed to like. 

    
I saw D’gattis letting his horse fall back to walk next to Shela, so I brought mine up to her other side.  D’gattis didn’t get a free shot at Shela for acting “out of turn.”  She might not have needed to do what she did, but it turned out all right, and that’s all that mattered.

    
“I had no knowledge of that incantation,” he said, uncharacteristically interested in her.  This surprised me but not Shela.  She looked ahead levelly as we traveled.

    
“I cast a spell, not an incantation,” she said.  “Only one word, and you can cast it on the fly.”

    
“Can you teach me?” he asked.

    
“Not in the saddle,” she said.  She leaned out of her saddle and deftly pulled a strip of bark peeling from an older birch tree.  She split it in two and handed half to D’gattis.  “But I can show you how to braid the bark strip and prepare it.  I suppose we can trade some knowledge.  I have a few questions about Uman-Chi magic to ask.”

    
D’gattis looked past her at me then.  “Something?” he asked.

    
I shook my head and fell back.  Arath pulled up alongside of me, and looked at my profile for a while.

    
“I guess the wonders never cease,” I said.

    
He knitted his brow, and I saw that this expression meant nothing to him.  He didn’t ask so I didn’t clarify.

   
Hours later Ancenon called a halt.  Dusk had come and we had reached a little glen where we could pitch tents and picket the horses.  Again, we had to put Blizzard away from the other horses.  Blizzard had returned to shunning the other animals, and they still seemed to be uncomfortable around him.  One of Shela’s mares had tried to cozy up to him and gotten bitten for the effort.

    
Shela had a leather lean-to for the two of us.  She scowled when I tried to help her put it up, so I went and collected firewood instead.  I found plenty of dead wood, so I didn’t have to go far.  That didn’t keep me out of trouble.

    
I bent over to pick up one last bough and found myself eye-to-eye with a little Aschire girl.  Her eyes were gray, her purple hair down to her hips, held by a leather headband, a birch twig braided into it.  She had a dagger in her hand and twirled the point against the pad of her left index finger, as if she debated putting the thing in my back when I turned.  I didn’t turn.

    
“Well, hello,” I said.

    
“You are bad people,” she said.  Her voice had the same song-quality, though she had a childish lilt to it.  She stood about four feet tall; I thought she must be between seven and ten. Somewhere between her daddy’s lap and her first boyfriend.

    
I sighed.  “And why would you say that?”

    
“You tried to kill our men,” she said, simply.  “You came into our home, and you didn’t ask first.  You wouldn’t pay what Krell said you had to pay, so Evokain had to take what you would give him.”

    
“Well,” I said, straightening, “Krell did ask for an awful lot, and Evokain made his offer first.  We only wanted to pass through your home under your terms, and we would have asked, if we had known whom to ask.”

    
She tilted her head to the side, considering what I had said.  I never figured out why kids do that; I am sure it is some sort of left-brain, right-brain thing.