Crel stood at attention, spear slanted outward. Malachi stopped in front of him, holding his hands open for the spear. “Present arms!”
“Sir!” Crel said, and presented the weapon point first, straight into Malachi’s ribs.
Malachi’s scream broke into a gurgle even as his bodyguard shouted and fell upon Crel. The young man went down under a wave of men while the captains ran to cradle the general in their arms, arguing furiously about whether or not to pull out the spear. They closed around him, hiding him from view, and Gar stood paralyzed, hearing the thoughts of a dying man and his last guttural words: Kill him!
Then the captains stood, moving away from the corpse, and Major Ivack came over to the soldiers who had yanked Crel to his feet. The youth was bruised and bleeding but still alive enough to spit in Ivack’s face.
The major backhanded him casually, then caught his hair and yanked his head back, demanding, “Why?”
“Because you burned my village and slew my friends,” Crel gasped.
Ivack digested that, holding the youth’s head still, then snarled, “Who put you up to it?”
“The Scarlet Company!” Crel shouted.
Furious, Ivack backhanded him again, then said to his captors, “Torture him until he tells their names.”
“Quince the Potter in Cellin Village,” Crel said through swollen lips. “Ivor the Cooper of Cellin. Joco Smith of Cellin.”
“You won’t escape the torture that way,” Ivack snarled, then called out to all his men, “What kind of loyalty is this? He names his cohorts in an instant just to save himself a little pain!”
None of the soldiers answered, none breathed even a word. All knew that the pain would not be little and knew the legend even better—that the Scarlet Company’s people always gave names readily.
Ivack swung back to Crel. “You’ll die in agony for this, laddie.”
“Stopping Malachi is worth my life,” Crel retorted. Ivack backhanded him across the mouth yet again. “We’ll see if you still say that when we’ve used you for a threshing floor.” He turned to Crel’s captors. “Throw him down and beat him with flails.” Doom-faced, the soldiers hustled Crel away.
Ivack turned to a captain. “Send twenty riders to Cellin and bring those men.”
The captain turned away to shout orders. The rankers stood frozen, faces expressionless, all with sinking spirits. They knew that the riders would find the potter, the cooper, and the smith fled, all gone on sudden errands. In fact, given the reputation of Malachi and his band, they might find the whole village deserted. They might burn it for revenge, but no one would die.
Except Crel.
Major Ivack came back from the interrogation in the middle of the day, his face thunderous. The soldiers gravitated to the men who had given the beatings, who were swilling ale after their hot work and more than willing to talk about the horror they had visited.
“We beat him to pudding,” said the one Gar found, a stocky bandit named Gorbo. “He told us his name right off—Crel, it is—but we beat him for it. Then Ivack asked him what else he knew about the Scarlet Company. He told us that the cooper, the potter, and the smith had all taught him ways to kill with one blow, but that he’d only needed the smith’s way—one short stab with every ounce of his strength behind it. Major told us to beat him after the answer, since we hadn’t needed to beat him before it.”
“Who gave the orders to the potter, the cooper, and the smith?” someone asked.
“That we could beat him for,” Gorbo said, “because he didn’t know.”
“They never do,” another soldier muttered.
“He told us he had joined the Scarlet Company only for the privilege of killing the general,” Gorbo went on. “That’s what he called it—a privilege—and he didn’t know nor care who’d guv the three their orders. We gave him a privilege of another halfdozen blows, we did.”
“Who told him how to get in among us?” a soldier asked.
“The cooper, he said,” Gorbo answered. “The cooper told Crel that the Scarlet Company had known some young man would come along with a lot of hatred and nothing to lose, that he would be the one to slay the bandit chief. We beat him another dozen blows for that one, too.” He took a swig of ale, stared off into the distance, then delivered his judgment of the ordeaclass="underline" “That didn’t make him know nothing more about the Scarlet Company, though.”
“There anything left of him?” Gar asked, already planning a rescue.
“There’s some life,” Gorbo allowed, “and we didn’t break his legs. Major Ivack wants to hang him fancy. Something about drawing him and quartering. Don’t know how he means to do that.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” another soldier said. Gorbo shook his head. “Before sunset. The major wants to chop him while General Malachi’s ghost is still around to see.”
The men shuddered, looking around them, and making signs against evil.
Then you had no time to save him, Alea thought, her heart breaking.
I didn’t need to, Gar said, and let her remember the rest with him.
Major Ivack had taken command. He didn’t seem to be aware of any increase in status, didn’t puff himself up or strut, only strode angrily about the camp looking for objects on which to vent his wrath, giving orders in short, clipped phrases. Nonetheless, Gar had the feeling he was about to promote himself to general.
The most pronounced order had been to throw a rope over a tree limb and lay a workbench before it. Gar wondered where the man had heard about drawing and quartering but realized that this was the sort of gruesome tale that passed down from generation to generation without any planning—and resisted efforts to weed it out. Major Ivack looked like the sort who would have listened to such tales with avid attention. Gar didn’t like him.
He liked him even less when Ivack took up station before the table, surrounded by the bodyguards who had been General Malachi’s. The sergeants bawled orders and marched their men into place around the ancient oak with the noose hanging from its limb. The soldiers stood at ease, glowering and somber, as Gorbo and another ranker frog-marched Crel out of a tent, face dark and swollen with bruises. Up to the oak they hauled him, hands tied behind his back, and stood him with his back to the trunk, facing Ivack. They set the noose about his neck, then snugged it up. “Do you have any last words?” Ivack snarled.
Crel managed to cough the words out of a swollen mouth. “Death to the brutes who kill the innocent!”
“Hoist him up!” Ivack roared, and the bodyguard nearest him pivoted, jamming his dagger into the major’s heart.
17
The whole company was silent, shocked at the suddenness of it, and they all heard the bodyguard say, very clearly, “Malachi was too careful. You weren’t.”
A captain found words. “Wh-why?”
“He led the troops who conquered my village.” The bodyguard lifted his head, glaring around. “All right, they’d cast me out, but they were mine, damn it! That’s when I joined the Scarlet Company.”
“Grab him!” the captain roared.
The bodyguard brought his spear to guard. “You really want to?” He turned to the captain. “Come and take me! But remember—I may not be the only one here from the Scarlet Company. I was waiting my moment—who else?”
The whole company stood, wavering, irresolute. Gar could feel fear balancing outrage, saw each bandit glancing at the men to left and right of him, saw the twitch of the head as each tried to look behind without others seeing—and felt the moment when fear won out and men eased back just a little.