Wheezing, Caisel staggered back, hands cupping his groin. Rathe stalked after him, mind afire with a hundred ways to destroy his enemy. Caisel made a whimpery noise and fled. Rathe followed a handful of paces before convincing himself that slaughtering idiots was not his purpose this night.
Turning back to the wagons, he sheathed his dagger, and wiped Caisel’s blood off his brow and cheeks.
“Have you come to free us?” the dark-haired woman asked. The others, all pressed against the bars of their rolling prison, gazed at Rathe in varying states of bewildered madness.
“What’s your name?”
The woman gazed at him in confusion. “Erryn.”
“Well, Erryn, why would I free a traitor?”
“I am no traitor,” she snarled. “None of us are.”
“Then how did you end up here?”
“Mitros decided that if I would not bed him or his pet wolves, then I was not worth keeping in Valdar. These others are here because they are witless, and so a burden. If Sanouk had not ordered us brought to Hilan, we were to be hanged.”
“Tell me about Valdar and Mitros,” Rathe invited.
“Are you mad? Caisel, that goat’s festering bunghole, will already be back at the barracks, telling how you attacked him. There’s no time. Free us!”
Rathe tapped his toe, waiting. She might be right about Caisel, but he hoped the man was proud and shrewd enough to decide that it was better to keep quiet about how one man had bested him and Gadein.
Erryn shoved her face as far as it would go between the iron bars, trying to see up the road. Nothing stirred. She sat back with a disgusted oath, lines of dirty rust running up her cheeks. “What do you want to know?”
“I have been in many villages,” Rathe said, “but I have never been to one quite like Valdar-”
“I was a child when Lord Sanouk came north,” Erryn interrupted. “Until then, Valdar was like any other village, save that we serve Onareth by mining gold, rather than growing turnips. After Lord Sanouk came he named that pig, Mitros, Reeve of Valdar. Since then, we have been slaves to the brigands we once helped defend the north against.”
“You are saying that Mitros conspires with brigands?” Rathe asked, considering what Aeden had told him and Loro outside Valdar.
“No, you fool, I am saying Mitros is a brigand. Him and all his men once skulked in the forests, preying on shipments of ore when they could, and raiding caravans when they could not.”
“And the people of Valdar?”
“Mitros made whores of the women and girls. The men and boys, he forces to work the mines, day and night. All this he does on the authority of Lord Sanouk.”
Rathe inclined his head, indicating the others. “What afflicts them?”
“Joshil went mad after Mitros forced him to watch the rape of his wife and daughter-her crime was refusing to sell herself. Karmath, there, is the lucky one. He was born simple, and used to help the blacksmith. The rest of the women, Mitros broke in the same way he broke Joshil’s wife. Seems neither Mitros nor his men enjoy bedding insane women.”
“And how did you manage to avoid such a fate?” Rathe said. He could not understand what was afoot, but without question it had nothing to do with traitors receiving justice.
Erryn’s eyes fell. “I didn’t avoid anything … until this last time,” she said, face reddening in the wan moonlight. She looked up, hatred burning through the tears in her eyes. “Are you going to let us out, or not?”
“No,” came a hissing rasp. “He’s about to join his fellow traitors.”
Rathe faced Treon. Before he could challenge the captain, Erryn shrieked a warning. Rathe turned at a flicker of movement off to one side. Caisel, lips and chin still coated in blood, swept toward him, while another shadow closed from the other direction. Rathe’s sword whispered out of its scabbard as he stepped toward Caisel, preparing to relieve the fool of his burdensome head.
“Behind you!” Erryn cried.
A cudgel slammed into Rathe’s back, driving him to his knees. He tried to bring his sword to bear, but Caisel and some other brute fell on him, using fists and boots. The cudgel fell again, smashing his sword from his grasp, then again. Erryn screamed, and Treon laughed.
Rathe blocked a boot swinging toward his face, but another stomped his head, and yet another slammed into his ribs. When the cudgel fell again, it brought a throbbing darkness filled with a woman’s screams.
Chapter 22
Flat gray light streamed into Rathe’s eyes. His head felt cracked, swollen, muddled. The rest of him fared no better. He had come awake before, but this was the first time he felt lucid. It took a moment to realize the squealing racket stabbing into his ears was not the voice of a demonic harridan, but wagon axles wanting for a coat of grease.
Wagon …? The thought drifted, unanswered.
Eventually things started coming back. Arriving in Valdar, drinking ale with Loro in a raucous tavern, beating two guards, speaking with a woman … Erryn. For a long time, that was all he remembered. Then he recalled someone’s hissing laughter, and a trio of men battering him senseless.
A cool hand touched his brow. “Not much of a champion, are you?” Erryn said with a smirk.
Rathe squinted at her, realizing that she cradled his head in her lap. “How long since we left Valdar?”
“Three days and nights, and now most of another day.”
“Help me up.”
“Rest easy,” Loro said. “Those bastards beat you near to death.”
Rathe craned his neck, wincing at the stiffness. Loro rode beside the wagon, his bulk hidden under a heavy woolen cloak. Disregarding the man’s suggestion, Rathe sat up with a groan, ignoring a wave of queasiness. He had less success pushing aside the pounding in his head.
Gingerly, he probed his ribs, back, arms, and anywhere else that had suffered from the beating. Of pain, there was plenty, but he found no broken bones. The worst was his swollen sword hand. He flexed it, gritting his teeth against the silvery bolts of agony that ran from his fingertips up through his forearm. If trouble came, he would have need of that hand. He kept opening and closing his fingers, warming and loosening them.
“What’s the mood of the men?” Rathe asked.
Loro shrugged. “First off, they griped, as men will after a night of heavy drinking. Now, I expect they just want to get back to Hilan and a proper bed.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Rathe said.
Loro faced him, stubbled jowls waxen and eyes tight in the muted light. “As to you, most doubt you are a traitor, and name it folly that Treon has locked away the Scorpion. Their favor won’t help you any once we reach Hilan. If I do not miss my guess, your days as a soldier are over. If you are lucky, you might squash turnips for his lordship’s supper until the years are through with you. If not, an executioner will be sharpening his axe for a bite at your neck.”
Rathe could not argue those points, which meant the last decision he wanted to make, must be made. Envisioning his head falling free of his neck and plopping into a bloody basket was almost as terrible as imagining a life spent in Sanouk’s kitchens. In the end, he decided that he had no real choice … and maybe he never had one, if what Nesaea foretold about the Khenasith, the Black Breath, held any truth.
“Can you break us free?” he asked.
Loro’s eyes went wide in mock surprise. “You no longer want to shame Treon by becoming the captain of Hilan? You’d rather shrug off the chains of honor and duty, and ride free as a brigand?”