The laugher from Pedoon’s men was harsh barks. Looking at them, Darin could well believe that they found little humor in jests about hunger.
“Will you be content with bread and salt and hunting rights thereafter?” Pedoon said.
Darin nodded. Whether bread and salt bound Pedoon against all treachery as they would have many humans, he did not know. Much depended on where Pedoon had been raised, whether among ogres or among humans, but there was a question to be asked when the chiefs were alone.
The bread was barely half-baked, of flour made from some plant surely never intended for that purpose, and the salt was the coarsest of rock salt. But with the eyes of both chiefs on them, Darin’s men dared not refuse, particularly when they saw Darin himself eating the bread and salt.
They had just finished their ritual, and some were reaching for their water bottles, when a man three paces to Darin’s left rose to his knees. Then his mouth opened, and he began to claw at his throat. Mucus ran from his eyes and his nose, and it seemed that he wished to spew.
A small figure at the right of the line leaped up and ran into the darkness, where the horses and their guards stood. Pedoon shouted, and half a dozen of his men leaped up and followed Darin’s runner.
“Hold!” Darin shouted. One man was well out ahead of the rest, and as Darin turned, he raised a spear.
Darin was not wearing his gauntlets, but the strength of his arms was the same, gauntlets or not. He gripped the shaft of the spear as it thrust at him, jerked it from the man’s hands, and slammed the butt end up under the man’s jaw. He crashed backward into the midst of his comrades-and all the men on both sides rose to their feet as if pulled by a single cord.
In the next moment everyone had a weapon in hand.
In the moment after that, a bloody slaughter would have begun, except that out of the darkness, the small figure returned. Now he was carrying a staff, from whose head an unearthly blue light shone, faintly but visible to all even in the glare of the campfire.
“Hold!” Pedoon shouted, and Darin echoed him. Sirbones hurried over to the choking man, who had now fallen on his side in convulsions. He laid the staff on the man’s throat, then on his belly, then on his chest, and finally stepped back, singing in a voice that sounded like a giant earteaser in full cry.
It seemed that the man emptied his stomach of everything he’d eaten since he left the stronghold. Sirbones and two of his comrades helped drag him to clean grass and wipe him clean with leaves and water. Then they laid two cloaks over him, and Sirbones stepped up to Darin.
“Most of the poison is out of him, and my healing will fight off what may remain.”
“What kind of poison was it?”
“In that kind of bread, you could hide a dozen at once without tasting any of them,” Sirbones said. “Ask the poisoner. Or I can-”
“No!” That was Pedoon, now standing beside the man who had tried to spear Darin. “He has violated the laws of the gods and of this band, and was a fool and a traitor as well. But you shall not enter his mind.”
“Will he be the better if you thrust hot coals into his body until he loses his voice from screaming and dies without speaking?” Sirbones snapped.
Darin stepped between the priest and the half-ogre chief. “Will you answer Sirbones? There will be no war between us over this, but you will not be called our friends without some fit answer.”
Pedoon shrugged massive shoulders. Even his shoulder blades sprouted hair, though much of it was gray. “Ansik always walked a little apart. I don’t know where he obtained the poison. I trust that any of his comrades who do will see that nobody else is as stupid.”
Pedoon’s hooded gaze swept the ranks of his men like a fire spell. “As for why he did what he did-there is a price on your head, Heir to the Minotaur. All men know it. Some are less honorable about how they try to collect it than others.
“Does that content you?”
Darin looked at Sirbones. The little priest shrugged. His face said that the answer might not content him, but they had small chance of getting a better one.
Darin nodded.
“Then may I have Ansik’s spear?”
Darin handed Pedoon the captured spear, butt first, while keeping a hand on his own sword hilt. But he had no need to fear. Pedoon stood over Ansik, who had barely recovered his senses, and drove the spear down into the fallen traitor’s chest with all his strength.
Ansik hardly even twitched before life left him.
Silence enveloped the camp, as complete as if every man there had followed Ansik into death. Pedoon broke it, with a long, harsh, wailing cry.
The rest of the band took it up; plainly it was a lament for the dead, neither ogre nor human but partaking of the ways of both. Darin signaled to his men to listen in silence, until the lament was ended.
When the night birds and insects stunned into silence found their voices, Pedoon stepped close to Darin.
“Will you walk apart with me, Heir to the Minotaur?”
“Gladly.”
Darin was not happy with the dark trail where Pedoon chose to lead him, but followed in silence. If death by Pedoon’s treachery was his fate, he could not turn it aside by seeming a coward or refusing to give ear to the chief.
“It would be as well, I think, if our bands did not unite,” Pedoon said. “Hunger and hard beds are easier than worrying every day about treachery, from one side or the other. Tempers grow short that way, steel flies, blood flows, and in the end we all have less than we did.”
“I was thinking the same,” Darin said, and those words would have passed the test of a high-level truth spell. “I had not thought your-you-”
“You hadn’t expected such good sense in an ogre?” Pedoon said, laughing. In the dark woods, an ogrish laugh was an uncanny sound. “Shame on you, who follow a minotaur.”
Darin could think of no reply. Pedoon laughed more softly.
“I owe you, though, for not treating Ansik’s foolish treachery as cause for blood. And I can pay this debt, at least. There was a man who spared me and my band over by the bay, some ten years ago, whom I’ve never seen again. I’ll probably die with that debt weighing on my spirit. But you I can pay.”
Pedoon explained how he and several other chiefs of small bands had agreed to warn each other of hostile visitors to the land. He would swear, and ask the others to swear, that anyone who came against Waydol and his heir would also be cause for warning.
“Not fighting, unless they are few or we can band together faster than we ever have before. But warning-on this you can trust us.”
Darin gripped Pedoon’s knob-knuckled hand. “And you can trust my huntsmen to share whatever they bring down before we leave your land.”
They walked back to the camp with silence about them save for the night sounds of the forest.
* * * * *
“Any room at this table?” came the voice from behind Tarothin.
The Red Robe remembered to look owlishly about him before focusing slowly on the bland-looking man standing behind his chair.
“Suppose so,” he said. The slur in his words was just a hint. He was supposed to have emptied only three cups of good wine, which would barely fuddle a hardheaded drinker. No one would take him on if they thought he’d turned sot over his broken heart.
The man sat down without further invitation and signaled the serving maid for another jug of wine and a plate of sausages. Tarothin had to let his cup be refilled when the order arrived, but it was no hardship not to drink the wine.
He was able to pretend to drink, and to let the drink work on him, until the man leaned over and whispered, “Do you want back at those people who left you?”
“What people?” Tarothin said.
The man started to say something loud and out of character, then took a deep breath. “You know which ones. The tale’s all over Karthay by now.”