Northlight (21 page)

A spark lay deep within in the embers and he didn't have to restart the fire from nothing, which was fortunate because his hands were shaking badly. By the time he'd coaxed it high enough to see by, Kardith had laid the two bodies out and was arranging their possessions in an orderly row.

“No papers, but that's to be expected,” she commented. “Two knives each, pretty decent. And this.” She held up a slender parcel the length of her forearm.

It was wrapped — not sheathed like an ordinary dagger, but carefully wrapped in layers of supple leather. It was never intended for use in a fight. Yet it had a purpose...

“It's the boy we're after.”

Without a word, Terricel took it from her. As soon as he touched it, his stomach gave a lurch. His heart slowed, beat by chilling beat, and his hands turned as steady as marble. Hardly breathing, he untied the corded lacings and lifted the dagger to the flames. With his eyes, he traced the slender blade from the heavily ornamented bone hilt to the pointed tip.

He knew what it was, what it was for, what it meant. He'd felt it in the pit of his belly the moment he touched the filthy thing.

Why had he thought he was of no importance, a mere shadow of his mother, or that he could just disappear? Why had he thought he could go running after his Ranger sister and in the process find his own life? Everything was tied to everything — Esmelda, Montborne, Pateros, the Rangers, the north. He was part of it all and had been from the moment of his birth.

A shiver went through him. Maybe the fight in The Elk Pass, the one in which he'd almost been knifed, had been no accident but a deliberate attack, a prelude to this one.

“What's the matter?” Kardith said.

He shook himself back to the present. The carved bone gleamed in the firelight. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“It
looks
like norther work. But I couldn't swear...I've seen more of their weapons than I ever wanted to, but this one...” She took it from him, weighed it in her hand, ran her fingertips over the decorative motifs. “I don't understand. No norther would ever use this.”

“Why not?” he asked, startled.

She frowned and rocked back on her heels. The flames burnished her hair and skin to the color of her eyes, turning her into a woman of gold, but her voice was human and troubled. “Northers may look the same when they're raiding Laurea, but in their own country they're as territorial as they come, and they don't mix clan signs. This curlicue on the tang is Cassian, but then it turns into a stylized Huldite dragon. What norther would carry such a thing? It'd be like shouting ‘I'm a traitor' to anyone he met.”

As Terricel listened, each word reverberated through him like the tolling of the Laurean river bells. “There's more,” he said, and told her.

Kardith touched the tiny pin with her fingertips. A section of ornamented metal fell away, disclosing the reservoir of liquid. She whistled in astonishment.

“Neuropoison,” he said. “Designed to flow down a channel in the blade. You wouldn't have to stab deep or hit a vital organ. Just a scratch would do it.”

“How the hell do you know?” Kardith's voice shook. “You only held it a moment, and you don't even know which end to hold a knife by!”

“That...thing is an exact duplicate of the dagger used to kill Pateros.”

She stared at him, mouth open, golden eyes wide.

“I saw the first dagger up close,” he said. “In Orelia's office. Esme was part of the investigation and I went along as her adjutant. I may not know the first thing about knife fighting, but I know what I saw. They're the same.”

“But northers don't use poison.” She sounded puzzled. “They do plenty of other nasty things — barbed spearpoints, hooked knives — but never poison. They would think it shames their manhood.”

“Which means the northers didn't kill Pateros, any more than they came after me.” His next words were the same Esmelda had used. “Somebody wanted us to think they did.”

“Talk sense!”

“This dagger and the one that was used in the assassination are identical, and they're not norther. Both the poison and the mixed decorations prove that. I couldn't understand how the northers could do such fine smithing, but now it all makes sense.”

As he spoke, Terricel gestured with his hands as if he were marking an unbroken chain of logic, building his argument point by point. The blood had dried, leaving a mottled pattern like a scholar's age marks. Like Wittnower's hands, which he'd thought one day would be his own.

“No one except a Ranger who'd actually fought the northers would recognize the designs,” he continued grimly, “and the Rangers are pretty well tied down. But why? Who stands the most to gain by everyone thinking the northers are behind the assassination? Who stands the most to gain if we go to war...?”

Kardith drew in her breath like a snake's warning hiss. “Montborne?
The general?
He's not been an easy commander, that's sure, but — ”

“Montborne makes no secret that he wants to march up there and beat the northers to rubble! He's fought with everyone about it — Pateros, the gaea-priests, Esme. They all had their different reasons for saying
no
to him. So he had to get Pateros out the way and at the same time stir up feeling against the northers.”

Esme said he was a destabilizing force for all of Harth, not just Laurea. That means there was something besides the risk of war. But he had no time now to consider this further.

“It also explains those orders. They never made sense, not to any of us.” Kardith ran her hands over her face. She sounded shakier than Terricel had ever heard her. “He couldn't risk...he wanted us to pull back so the northers'd think we'd gone soft and attack. Then he'd have another war, sure.”

“Esme still stands in his way,” Terricel said unsteadily. He tried to set things up to replace her with me, but I wouldn't go along with it. Then I conveniently left the scene and headed north with only one Ranger for company...

“I don't know what he was trying to do by killing me,” he continued, “threatening her she'd be the next or trying to undermine her, make her look like a crazy grieving mother, something like that, or maybe simply not tough enough to stand up to the northers.”

“Esmelda, not tough enough?”
Kardith snorted. “That old dragon? Are you concussed or just plain dumb?”

The firelight covered Terricel's flush. “Yeah, that was a pretty stupid idea, wasn't it?” He barked out a short, bitter laugh. “You're right, there just isn't any way he could get at her through me. Not Esme. If she wouldn't lift a finger to help Avi when she's alive, she won't do a damned thing about me once I'm dead. Nor can she be discredited, not easily, not any more than Montborne himself can. If he tries, it could just as well backfire and put her in the Guardian's seat. They're the two great saviors of Laurea — Esme from the epidemic and Montborne at Brassaford.”

Brassaford... Maybe it wasn't Esme that Montborne was trying to get at all. Maybe he picked me because as her son, my murder would be highly visible, even out here....

“You fought at Brassaford, didn't you?” he asked Kardith, and then rushed on before she could answer. “The
Rangers
fought at Brassaford. People talk all the time about it — how Montborne would never have stopped the northers without you. And you know the northers better than anyone...”

Kardith laid the stiletto-dagger on its leather wrappings. “Your body was supposed to be found with this. Probably someplace closer in, where news'd spread real fast. People would think it was northers who did it.”

“Not just my body,” he said grimly. “Yours, too. And they'd wonder how come the son of Esmelda wasn't safe within our own borders, even with you to protect me. They'd think the Rangers had gone soft or weren't so great to begin with. And if the northers did attack because you'd been pulled back, that would only prove it.”

“First Pateros and then you — it would make the northers look damned good. Get people so scared, they'd say
Yes
to anything — give Montborne whatever he wants. Esmelda could get herself named the next Mother-damned Guardian and she still couldn't stop him.”

“He wasn't counting on you.”

“Well, I didn't learn knives in the Rangers, that's sure.” She shrugged and gestured toward the bodies. “These two'll never tell him it didn't work, especially if nobody finds them. Honest thieves I'd cairn, but these — we'll leave their bodies for the wolves. Then what?”

I should take the dagger and ride back to Laureal City,
Terricel thought reluctantly. Give Esme the evidence to accuse Montborne publically, demand justice, open everything up to investigation.

But he had no real proof Montborne was behind the attempt. All he had was the dagger, his testimony and a lot of supposition. Not nearly enough to convict, even though Esmelda would undoubtedly find some devious way to use them.

Terricel's thoughts raced on rebelliously. Esmelda didn't need him. With her network of secret informers, she'd probably hear about the attempt before Montborne knew it had failed. But once Terricel opened his mouth, Montborne would be warned. On the other hand, as long as there was no body with a dagger in it for him to use, as long as the thugs stayed gone with no trace as to what happened, Montborne would wait and hesitate.

Restless, Terricel got to his feet and strode to the edge of the camp, staring into the darkness as if he might find answers there.
Going back means forgetting about Avi and handing myself over to be Esme's pawn all over again. Just like the ‘no show' on my proposal — everything I've done on my own will be for nothing.

But what if she needed him and the information only he could give her? What if he were abandoning her just when he might make a difference?

The truth...what was the truth? That he was behaving like a spoiled child deprived of his holiday outing? That he simply didn't
want
to go back? Or that he could not abandon his search...that there was more at stake here than just a single Ranger, no matter what she meant to him?

And how did he know with such certainty that there was more at stake?

“You may be feeling pretty puny right now,” Etch had said to him. “But what you've got to do, it's not a puny thing.”

Something stirred deep within him, pushing upward through the layers of his mind like a leviathan surfacing on the western seas. No clear pictures rose before his eyes, only the wordless certainty that the search was about more than Montborne's plots, more than Aviyya, more than breaking free of Esmelda's webs of intrigue.

The dagger would have to wait.

Carefully Terricel made his way down the slope to wash the dead man's blood from his shirt.

Let Montborne and Esmelda fight it out between them. They deserve each other!

He grinned up at the twin moons, his lips stretched thin and wide like a death rictus, and felt no pity at all for the general.

They had just broken camp but had not yet mounted up when they heard another horseman moving through the forest and making no attempt to disguise his presence. Noiselessly Kardith drew her long-knife. Terricel clamped his hand over the sorrel gelding's nose to keep it from nickering in greeting to the other horse.

“Who's there?” Kardith shouted.

“Halloo the camp!” came a man's voice, relaxed and friendly. A few moments later, a man on big roan mare came into view, leading two saddled, riderless horses, a nondescript brown and the rusty black.

It was Etch.

“Halloo the camp!”

“Who's there?” I slid the long-knife out, solid and ready in my hands. What kind of fool, I wondered, comes barging through the forest like that, making more noise than a bunch of cider-drunk brush-sheep? Not northers, that was sure. Not Rangers, not even Montborne's assassins...

The man from the Blue Star stables, that was who. He rode up on a rangy, flea-bit roan and for a moment I just stood and stared at him. I couldn't think what he was doing here, since he had nothing to do with Avi or the Rangers or the kid or Montborne. When he saw me, his whole face lit up.

“Etch!” Terris pushed past me and ran up to him. “Etch! You came after me!”

What the hell is going on?

I started sweating, about to jump out of my skin and a whole lot madder than I'd thought. I wanted help for Avi, a way around Montborne's orders, not some Mother-damned plot with Esmelda's finger on every turning, a war with the north and the Rangers caught in the middle of it all.

The man swung down and gave Terris a slap on the back that half knocked him down. “Couldn't let you ride off, get yourself into Harth's own sweet mess, even with the magistra here” — a lop-grinned, twinkle-eyed glance in my direction that only made me madder — ”to teach you a thing or two.”

His face sobered when he noticed the bodies. “Seems I'm a bit late.”

These two know each other?
It took me a moment of pissedness to find my brains again, and pissed is the worst thing you can be in a tweak. It makes you feel instead of act. Now I knew how the kid found me so easy and where he got that nice-moving sorrel, him without the sense to know one end of a horse from the other.

I shoved the long-knife back in its sheath. “You coming with us?”

“I meant to,” he answered quietly, turning back to the kid. “After you left, I couldn't stop thinking. Thinking about all those years since I lost the ranch, patching up other men's horses, selling them again, one day no better than the next. That mare — the one you helped me with — she died the next morning. Some kind of internal bleeding. The vet said he couldn't have saved her, she should never've been bred again. And that crapping contaminated owner, all he said was he wouldn't pay the vet bill.” His face clouded over, remembering. “So I told him to take it out of my last pay.”