Blorys sighed faintly. “It’s a point,” he conceded.
“We’ll post three men for watch,” Jerdren said mildly and glanced at the nearest of his hired men. “Pick two fellows with good eyes and make sure no one’s sneaking up on us. Can’t leave all these dead men on the road for the next party to find. Rest of you, help me and Blor get ’em a ways off the road.”
“Search them?” the armsman asked.
“Search? Look at them,” Jerdren replied sourly. “Poor ragged brutes—well, get ’em moved and search ’em if you please. We’ll split anything that’s found Make a pile of their weapons, though. We’ll take what we can of those. Keep men can always use the metal to melt into new blades, if not the weapons themselves, and they’ll pay well for that kind of thing.” He raised his voice slightly as the men began to move off. “Remember, main thing here is we clear away the bodies and get moving again! I want to make the Keep well before midday!”
Men scattered. Blorys went with three of their hired men to get rid of the footmen, while three of the others dealt with the dead and dying riders, and fastened the two remaining hill ponies to the back of the last wagon. Jerdren squatted down next to the two prisoners. Behind him, mercifully, the woman’s weeping died away, and it was quiet in the carts.
Two rough-looking men stared back at him. One whimpered, clutching his upper leg. Someone had wrapped a length of cloth around it, but blood still seeped around his fingers, and both the fabric and his breeches were soaked. The other sat cross-legged in the road, his face blank, fingers clinging to a broken bow.
“Well,” Jerdren said finally. “I wonder what we do with you two. Suppose we could gut you, same as we did for your friends, here. Or maybe you’d prefer to run for it? Of course, you’d have to go now, before I change my mind.”
The second man laughed harshly and indicated his wounded fellow with a jerk of his head. “How far do you think he’d get? How far’d I get, for all that, until you ran me down?”
Jerdren shook his head. “He’s no threat to me or those who hired me. Take him if you like, leave him if you’d rather. But go, and take a message with you for any of your kind still alive out there and thinking caravans like this one are easy pickings. Tell them how many dead men you left behind.”
“Hah.” But the bandit got stiffly to his knees and leaned over to speak quietly against his fellow’s ear. The second man simply clutched his leg and watched blood seep between his fingers. His eyes were half-closed, and his face deadly pale. After a moment, the first man got himself upright, with the help of his shattered bow, and glanced at Jerdren.
“I’ll tell ’em. They won’t listen, but I’ll tell ’em.”
“Do that,” Jerdren said evenly and stood to watch as the bandit limped up the road and into the dry creek bed. He vanished into the shadows of the burned forest some distance north.
Jerdren walked to the head of the wagons, turned to look back along them, then bent his gaze to the blood-smirched road to find any arrows that were still whole and true. He pocketed three arrowheads that could be remounted on new shafts and shoved a nasty-looking, well-balanced, broad-bladed dagger into his belt. Something like that would do a lot of damage, no matter where you stuck it in a man.
Most of the dead and dying robbers were well away from the road. One wounded hill pony lay thrashing feebly in the ditch south of the road. “Save poor Blor the pain of this,” Jerdren muttered as he found the big neck vein and drove his dagger in deep. The animal fell back and lay still. His brother hated seeing a horse suffer but hated having to dispatch one even more.
“And how we’re to get you moved,” the older man told the dead beast, “I don’t know.” A dead horse wasn’t as nasty a mess as ten or more dead men, but he’d rather not leave any bodies behind.
He climbed back onto the road. The hired men were making a pile of swords, daggers, spears, and the like behind the last wagons, and one of the hide merchant’s apprentices was helping stow the cache. Jerdren wiped his short sword and sheathed it, then checked his bay gelding over carefully before mounting. Blorys rode up to join him.
“Ready, Blor?” he asked.
Blorys shrugged. “Almost. Lhodis and his woman will probably have bad dreams for a while, but they didn’t actually see anything, and they weren’t hurt.”
“They’ll be fine,” Jerdren said shortly and gave the sign for the wagons to start. “I warned that man about bringing his woman.”
“He’s no worse than most of the merchants, Jers,” Blorys reminded him. His gaze stayed on the north side of the road, searching as they rode. “One reason they hire men like us for journeys into the wilderness. Like this one, remember?”
“Yeah. I know.” Brief silence. “There’s blood on the road, but there’s not a thing we can do about that.”
Blorys grinned briefly. “Pray for rain.”
“Hah. By tomorrow, it’ll be buried under dust anyway.”
“That pony—”
“Be realistic, Blor. The dead men and horses will all be gone before we reach the branch in the road at the foot of the Keep. Captain of a band that ill-manned won’t last long as captain if he doesn’t bury his dead, and they’ll want the horses for the meat.”
His brother merely nodded.
Perhaps another hour of steady riding, with no sign of pursuit or another ambush, and the lead men relaxed a little, slowing the pace to give the horses some rest.
“You owe me a pair of silver pence, Brother,” Jerdren finally said. “Remember? You bet me we’d never see a fight the whole way to the Keep, with all the men we hired.”
“Hah,” the younger man replied sourly. “You owe me a silver. For throwing yourself into the thick of things back there and trying to get yourself killed.”
Jerdren eyed him sidelong.
“I keep telling you, Jers, I like being a younger brother. I’ve gotten used to it, nearly thirty years’ worth, and I don’t mind if you leave me behind when we’re tottering, white-bearded old men, but—”
“What? You think I was in any danger from those footsore… those hacks?”
“They had the advantage of numbers and a sneak attack, Jers. Some of them were pretty good—how do you think I got cut?” The cut on his face still seeped a little blood, but it wasn’t deep or very long.
Jerdren grinned. “All right, a few of ’em. For the most part, they were underfed, scrawny brutes, probably not much good at hitting a standing target and lousy at moving ones.”
“So what? Men like that hunt in packs, Jers! To make up for the lack of skill! If there had been another twenty waiting out there—”
“Well, there weren’t,” Jerdren broke in. He glanced sidelong at his brother and grinned. “Besides, you were close enough, guarding my back, right?”
It was an old joke, but Blorys wasn’t smiling.
“You know not to count on that, Jers. I had my hands full—we all did.” He touched the drying cut, winced.
“I’ll clean that when we get in,” Jerdren said.
“I can manage.” A tight little silence.
Jerdren turned away from him to look out across the southlands, beyond the frost-killed meadow to the thick forest, the steep hills and the purplish hint of mountains beyond. Same unchanging thing day in, day out. Year in and year out. He sighed faintly.
“I’ll be glad to see the last of this one,” he murmured to himself.
Blorys heard him of course. The man’s hearing was extremely keen. “Glad? Why, brother? It’s a long ride, but we have decent horses, and this time at least the clients are friendly folk—unlike some we’ve guarded. It’s good pay, and Lhodis didn’t even argue the additional coin for the extra wagon and for the hired men. And he suggested the hazard fee, which we just earned, I think….” His voice trailed away. “You’re bored again, aren’t you, Jers? Like back home in Sedge when we were growing up, and later in the army.” He waited. His brother shifted his gaze from the south hills to the road and said nothing. “Jers, I thought we’d worked it out. There’s enough variety in hiring out, we take different routes—I thought this time you’d last at something.”