A little later, he tracked his sorcerer out to the field behind the inn, where the man had taken it into his strange head to seize the last light and indulge in a stint of archery. It was not a skill in which town-bred Oswyl had much experience, and he watched with reluctant respect as Penric put a dozen arrows into a distant straw bundle, then sent the inn’s potboy off to collect them.
“Out of practice.” Penric frowned at the straw man, at this range now resembling a pincushion, and shook out his bare hands in turn.
“They all hit,” observed Oswyl.
Penric rolled his eyes. “Of course they did. The target is standing still. If this is to turn into a hunting party in the hills, I need to do better.”
“Have you hunted much?”
“In my youth.” He delivered this as if his youth had been a half-century ago.
The potboy returned with the arrows, and Penric inquired of Oswyl, lifting his weapon in tentative invitation, “How are you with a bow?”
Not good enough to make a fool of himself in front of this fellow. “I’ve not had much chance to handle one.”
“What, did your father never take you out hunting?”
“My father is an Easthome lawyer. He never passes the city gates if he can help it.” Oswyl offered instead, in pointless defense, “I have some training with the short sword.”
“Huh.” Penric looked nonplussed, as if the very concept of a father who did not dash around in the woods slaughtering animals personally was a novelty. “We didn’t hunt for sport, mind you. We needed the game for our table.”
Oswyl allowed himself a trace of amusement. “Poaching?”
“Er, no, they were all our lands. My father was Baron kin Jurald. My eldest brother is, now.”
“Oh.” That was a surprise. It was wrong, of course, to assume that every person of the Bastard’s Order was a bastard or an orphan, or some other odd thing. But it was true often enough. Though this Penric might be one of those acknowledged by-blows with which lords littered the world. Hesitant to pursue that rude curiosity, Oswyl substituted, “How came a kin honorific to be attached to a Darthacan name?” The sorcerer’s light coloration made him look entirely a creature of this craggy country.
Penric shrugged. “Some last kin land-heiress met a younger son with few prospects back home in Saone, some generations ago. His dowry didn’t last, but the name and the land did.” He broke off to send the dozen retrieved arrows flying back into the distant target.
Oswyl wondered if this connection with the minor nobility would give the sorcerer added insight into their outlaw. As the countryside deepened, the palace clerk seemed to be dropping away, to be replaced by… what? Did Penric consider himself a kin warrior, or at least half a one?
Penric might have been entertaining some similar speculation, for as the potboy trotted off again, he asked, “How much of a countryman is our murderer, do you know? Or was he also one of those men who doesn’t pass the city gates?” He narrowed his gaze at the peaks that were catching and reflecting the last high light, looming much larger and closer now than back at Martensbridge.
A reasonable question. The great kin lords had town mansions, as well as distant lands like little realms. Increasingly, they also kept more convenient country estates around the capital, such as the kin Boarford manor where all this disaster had started. “I believe he grew up somewhere on the south slopes of the Raven Range, though he’s been living with kinsmen in Easthome in late years.”
“Hm. I was rather hoping for a city mouse, out of his reckoning in the hills. No such luck for us. A city wolf? Seems a bit contradictory.” He glanced at Oswyl. “Or maybe not.”
Oswyl had no idea how to respond to that. “Have you ever hunted wolves?”
“A few times, when they came down out of the hills in a starving season.”
“Winters like this?”
“Oddly, not so much. Winter is a bad time for the grazers and browsers, weakening them, but for that very reason an easier one for the fanglings that hunt them.”
“Did you get them? Your wolves?”
“Oh, yes. We made rugs of the skins.”
Penric changed his stance, kneeling, moving, turning, as he sent the next flight of arrows on its way. One missed, and he muttered an oath. “I’d have won a cuff on my ear for that one.”
“Your father’s love?” Oswyl asked dryly.
“Eh, or Old Fehn, his huntsman. Who’d trained Father. They were pleased to take turns on my ears. Both very keen on taking down the quarry with a first killing shot, if possible. I thought at first it was pious mercy to the Son of Autumn’s beasts, but eventually figured out no one wanted to chase all over after a wounded one. Not even me, after I’d tried it a few times.”
The foot-weary potboy trudged back, handing over the arrows with a poorly concealed sigh. Penric took his stance and raised his bow once more.
The straw target burst into flames.
The potboy gave a startled yelp. Oswyl jerked back.
Penric merely looked miffed. “Oh, for—! Des, we don’t set game on fire!” He lowered his bow and glowered at the licking orange flicker, merrily glowing in the gloaming.
“What was that?” Oswyl kept his voice level and didn’t let it come out a squeal, barely.
“Desdemona thinks my hunting skills are inefficient. Also, she is bored and wants to go in.” He sighed and returned his unloosed arrow to its quiver. His mouth opened and vented a voiceless laugh. He added, peevishly, “I don’t know how Ruchia put up with you, really, I don’t.”
Penric pulled his purse off his belt, dug into it, and handed over a coin to the potboy, now quivering like a restless pony. “Practice over. Off you go.” The boy absconded the instant his fingers closed over his payment, looking worriedly back over his shoulder a couple of times in his hasty retreat to the inn yard.
Oswyl wondered to what god he should be praying for luck in his chase. Not that any god had ever answered his pleas, whether on his knees by his bed as a boy, or prone in the Temple as a man. He stared glumly at the sorcerer’s braided blond queue, pale in the growing shadows, as the man unstrung his bow and reordered his gear, then followed him back inside.
The village of Linkbeck lay high up its vale, past what seemed to Oswyl’s Wealdean eye impoverished farms, tending to rocky, tilted pastures rather than grain fields. The cows were fat enough, though, the barns big and solid in fieldstone and dark-stained timber, the houses in a like style, with pale stones scattered over their wood-shingled roofs. The excessively tall mountains loured over all, winter white at their tops, while the valley road was still sodden with autumn mud beneath a crunching, frozen crust. The aspiring river ran green and foaming beneath the wooden span that gave the settlement its name.
The sorcerer pushed his horse up beside Oswyl’s as they approached the outskirts, if the half-dozen houses on this side of the river could be so grandly dubbed. “So what is your plan?” Penric inquired—diplomatically, since coming this way at all had been his plan.
Oswyl shrugged. “Start with the local Temple divine. Such shepherds tend to be most knowing of the folk about, and will have what news there is.” In this backwater, not much, Oswyl suspected, but Penric was right that strangers would stand out; a few villagers working around their places turned to stare as the party rode past. The guard sergeant cast polite, reassuring salutes at them.