The Silvered (20 page)

“How do I deal with the silver?” Leaning back against the rock, Mirian concentrated on putting her boot back on. It was more difficult than she expected. She
knew
where her foot was, she shouldn’t have to see it.

“You’re a mage.”
Don’t be so stupid,
added his tone. “Melt it out of the air or turn it to lead or whatever a Metals-mage does. I don’t care.”

Fingers through the side loops, she shoved her heel down. “I’m not a Metals-mage.”

“What?”

Mirian sighed and crossed her legs, the childish position hidden by the darkness and her skirt. “After a year at the university, I had first levels in every discipline but metal-craft.”

“But you removed the shot.”

“Yes, I did. It seems I’ve finally completed the set. But I have no second levels.”

“You said the sleep thing was second level. So you’re a Healer-mage?

“No. I’m not an anything mage.” In memory, silver ran warm and liquid over her finger. Not only identified, but called. Two second levels. Still, that didn’t change anything. How could it? “I suspect any advance in ability arose in reaction to an extreme situation.” She tried to sound surer than she felt. “There’s no guarantee I could do it again.”

He did nothing but breathe for a moment, then he growled, “So if you’re a nothing mage, why did they want you?”

That shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. “I told you, they wanted
a
mage, not me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Lord Hagen…” Rolling up onto her knees, she reached out, touched his shoulder, and used his position to find the slightly less dark line of the cave’s exit. He flinched away from her touch, or maybe the title, but that only made it easier to get by him. When halfway out and slightly stuck, she kicked and her foot impacted with something solid but not hard enough to be rock; she half hoped she’d hit him hard enough to raise a bruise.

Eyes squinted nearly shut against the gray dawn light, she crossed the small clearing and went into the underbrush, trying not to leave a trail a blind, one-legged priest could follow. Although, given that there were no blind, one-legged priests around and there
was
an annoyingly bloodthirsty, junior member of the Hunt Pack, most of her attention went to listening for his approach.

It wasn’t until she was returning to the clearing that she realized she should have been listening for the Imperial soldiers, not for Tomas Hagen.

He was leaning against the rock face, arms folded. Mirian locked her eyes on his face, and waited.

After a moment, his nostrils flared, he drew in a deep breath, and sighed it out again. “Can you light fires?” he asked quietly.

It wasn’t an apology but, in fairness, he’d only stated the truth. In truth, she wasn’t much of a mage. “Small ones,” she told him, matching her volume to his. They wouldn’t be hard to find if the soldiers could hear them talking. “Candle fires.”

“A fire in an ammo pouch would throw off their accuracy. There’d be no explosion without the constriction of a barrel, but the gunpowder would ignite,” he added when she frowned.

Apparently, he believed a lack of mage-craft meant a lack of functional intellect. Mirian folded her arms as well. “What about Lady Hagen?”

“After we deal with…”

Mirian cut him off. “They’re taking her, all of them, to the emperor. You don’t think they’re going to walk all the way to Karis, do you? They’ll have coaches waiting on the other side of the border, fast ones.” She frowned, thinking of maps and of what she’d read in the newspapers. “If he wants them badly enough to send soldiers into Aydori with ancient artifacts, he’ll have sent mail coaches. They’ll be able to stop and change horses at every posting house and get from the border, the old border, to the capital, in four days. You can add an extra two days to cross the conquered duchies, but if the soldiers reach those coaches with Lady Hagen, we’ll never catch them.”

“You’ve thought about this.” He sounded suspicious. Like she’d been privy to the emperor’s plan all along.

“I may not be much of a mage,” she snorted, “but I’m not stupid. And you have to decide, which is more important: revenge or rescue?”

He stiffened. “They’re Imperials. It’s not revenge, it’s war.”

“There’s at least a dozen soldiers with Lady Hagen and the others. If you want to make war, make war with them.” She didn’t know them. Not their names, not the dumb jokes they told each other, not what they believed about the Pack.

Tomas’ eyes were very dark and his skin very pale, as though he only went out into the sun in fur, giving it no chance to darken. After
a long moment, he unfolded his arms and pointed. “The Imperial camp is there. The quickest way to the border is that way, due south. We were moving toward it last night before I left you to find shelter, following the trail the five of you made yesterday. Hopefully, they won’t notice where we left it, and they’ll think you’re still heading home. It’s the
sensible
thing to do.”

“
Are you a Soothsayer?”

“
No, I’m sensible
.”

“That way…” He turned and pointed past the rock. “…to the northeast, the way your Imperials were taking you, a Pyrahn logging trail goes nearly all the way to the border.

About to ask how he knew, Mirian bit the question off. He was Hunt Pack. Hunt Pack patrolled the borders. And they weren’t
her
Imperials.

“The Teryn Valley juts out of Aydori into Pyrahn. It’s one of the few places there’s no natural demarcation. The entire valley used to be part of Aydori, but about a hundred years ago when they straightened the border in return for building up the road into Bercarit, well, Ryder says…said…” He stopped. Swallowed. Continued. “You could get a coach down the trail if you needed to. It has to be where they’re taking the Mage-pack. We’ll stop them there.”

“Just like that?”

“Or we could argue some more until your Imperials show up and shoot us both,” he said, and changed.

She could finally stop looking at his face. “They’re not
my
Imperials.”

“She’s definitely heading back toward the border, Cap.” Chard pointed down the trail the girl had left the night before; crushed undergrowth, broken branches, the occasional bootprint, all obvious in the dim gray light of dawn. “She’s heading right back the way we came. How could she find that in the dark?”

Reiter glanced past Chard to Armin, yawning but finally awake. One hand holding the net, the other his musket, he didn’t have a hand to spare to close around the lock of hair in his pocket. “She’s a mage.”

“Can she see in the dark, Cap? Because if she can…” Chard shrugged. “If she kept moving all night, we’ll never catch her.”

“She was exhausted,” Reiter reminded him. “She wasn’t faking that.”

“And me and the captain heard her crashing through the brush,” Best added. “Then we didn’t. She went to ground.” He stopped and waved a hand.

If she hadn’t been a mage, if they’d had more than one tangle or any other guaranteed way to subdue her, he’d have already sent Best on ahead with it, full speed along the back trail to the border while the rest of them spread out and searched more slowly. But she
was
a mage, and they had only one tangle.

And it was broken. Reiter had no idea if it was functional. Or if it ever was. He did, however, have a very good idea of what would happen if they just let her walk away.

They were soldiers. The Imperial army had trained them to shoot and march and follow orders and give orders and kill and die, but it hadn’t trained them to track a single woman through the empty lands buffering the border between Pyrahn and Aydori. They’d been lucky finding her yesterday and they’d only managed it because they’d known if she was heading for the border, the river limited the possibilities.

She had to be going back to the border today.

Back home.

Back to safety.

If they didn’t find her asleep behind a fallen tree or hiding in a hollow, they’d catch her at the border. Her mother had told them the mage was looking for her beastman. If the black creature was a beastman, he wasn’t hers or they’d all be dead—their lives the best argument he hadn’t been a beastman at all. She had to still be looking for
hers
, heading back across the border and toward the battle.

Where else could she go?

Best to his left, Armin, then Chard to his right; he thought they’d covered the ground he and Best had covered last night, but nothing looked the same as it had in the darkness and the four pairs of boots—
five pairs
, he amended silently—had made enough of a mess he couldn’t tell for certain if the girl had gone back over it in the other direction.

“Cap, if we see the dog…”

“Best, if you see the dog, shoot it.”

“Yes, sir.” Best didn’t sound happy as much as justified.

“But, Cap…”

“Shut up, Chard.”

The emperor expected six mages. Reiter had his orders.

He wished he’d asked her for her name.

“The emperor knew you’d be returning with women.” Six women. Six pregnant women given the Soothsayer’s rhyme, but Danika had no intention of letting Lieutenant Geurin know she’d overheard that. “The emperor is married, I’m sure he knows that women take longer to perform certain tasks than men. Especially if their hands are tied. And they have an audience.”

The lieutenant leaned toward her and smiled. “I don’t care if you piss yourselves. My orders are to get you to Karis alive; they say nothing about how you’re to smell.” He pulled out a pocket watch and made a show of snapping open the ornate case. “You have three minutes. I suggest you stop wasting time.”

Danika had never wanted to throw up on someone so badly in her entire life, but, this morning, her stomach had settled.

Tomas could move faster without her. Why hadn’t he said that? Without her, the odds of him reaching the border before they piled Danika and the others onto coaches were considerably higher. He could avoid people—not that there’d ever been many people in the borderlands—and even if he were seen, any Pyrahnian who lived this close to Aydori knew better than to take potshots at something that could be Pack. Or their neighbor’s dog. He’d never been able to decide if the big dogs they preferred in this part of the duchy were intended as flattery or protection, nor had he ever much cared.

Harry, who’d actually taken the time to read
Mind and Matter
, a book by a popular Traiton doctor making the rounds of Aydori drawing rooms and lending libraries, said it was a subconscious way of dealing with the Pack.
See, we leash things that look like you here.
Tomas had almost believed Harry’d taken that bullshit seriously, then he’d burst into laughter and…

Died. Harry had died.

He wanted to run full out. Away from the place where Harry and Ryder and so many others had been killed. Run to a place where he could make a difference. The odds of anyone shooting him while he ran were slim to unlikely and it was less unlikely the Imperials searching for Mirian Maylin…Mirian.
“A little respect, Tomas.”
His mother’s voice in memory.
“You do not refer to an unmarried woman you are not related to by her first name without her permission.”
It was unlikely the Imperials searching for Miss Maylin were following. Anyone with half a functioning brain would assume she’d head back to the border instead of heading off to help rescue five people she didn’t know with only first level mage-craft to call on. Of course they didn’t know she had only first level mage-craft. They thought she was one of the mages they’d been sent to capture, thought she was Mage-pack, which was a stupid case of mistaken identity since they couldn’t catch her scent in a bucket.