Behind them on the road came the Drover’s household, a dozen mounted carls with heavy axes on their shoulders. Thanks to Tom, they rode instead of walked. They wore full mail and gleaming helmets, some of apparently eldritch design with tall peaks and long bills and scallops and whorls. Hillmen were much given to display. Gold glinted from their belts and harnesses.
Bad Tom made no move to ride up and join either Sauce or Mag.
“You going to speak to Tom about your Sukey?” Sauce asked.
“No,” Mag said, in a tone that suggested that no further discussion needed to be had on that subject.
Sauce considered riding out and inspecting her outriders.
She tried a different approach. “You ever consider what the captain’s actually after?” she asked Mag.
Mag smiled. It was her warmest smile of the day so far. “Yes,” she said softly. “All the time.”
Sauce shook her head ruefully. “I just want it to go on and on. Adventure after adventure. But he’s after somewhat, ain’t he?”
Mag nodded. “Yes, dear.”
Sauce turned and looked at the older woman. “Don’t patronize me,” she spat.
Mag rolled her eyes. “No. Sorry, sweet. But none of you think about it much. You just swing your swords and ride on, don’t you?” She looked north. “He’s made himself the Duke of Thrake.”
“But that’s not for real.” Sauce looked up at the older woman. “He’s not going to sit at Lonika and administer justice and be a great lord, is he?” In fact, she realized, she’d watched him do so for five days after the battle at the crossroads. As if he’d been born to it.
Which, of course, he had.
“Shit,” she said aloud.
“I think it is for real,” Mag said. “I think he’s made two fortunes in three years, and then he’s added a great principality which will, at least for a few years, pay his taxes-a steady income so great I can’t really imagine how much money he’ll have. And he sank his claws into the fur trade. He’s getting a tithe on the imperial tax on furs. He and his father now-literally-own the entire border with the Wild.”
“He hates his father,” Sauce said.
Mag looked interested. Everyone in the company knew that Sauce went way back with the captain, but few had the spirit to question her.
“Hate’s too strong,” Sauce admitted. “But his father and mother did something-awful. Rotten. An’ he ran away.” She looked at Mag. “He’s not just going to share the wall with them.”
Mag looked ahead at the line of trees. “Never is a long time,” she said slowly. “And power is even thicker than blood. Ser Gavin is in contact with Gabriel’s mother. I know.” She smiled fastidiously. “Gabriel’s mother is the most powerful of her kind I’ve ever encountered.” She frowned. “Except the former Richard Plangere. As great as Harmodius, but all green.”
Sauce frowned. “You mean all this-riding on errantry and rescuing princesses and getting contracts-it’s all just another play at power?” She spat. “Fuck. I don’t believe it.”
Mag laughed. “For the life you’ve led, child, you can be naive. What else is it all for, to the likes of them?”
“He’s not one of them!” Sauce said.
Mag sighed. “I suspect I like him as much as you do, sweet,” she said, as she might to a child who’d just had her first courses. “But this is what they do. They are not like you and me. They’re like animals in the Wild. They play for power.”
Towards evening, the pace picked up, and they moved quickly. Sauce knew from her outriders that they were passing through the battlefield where the drove had been massacred by Outwallers last year, and that no one wanted to camp among the bones and the ghosts. The column began to string out, and a mist rose out of the deep valley of the stream.
Sauce left the column to check her outriders. Many of her Moreans had never seen woods like this-great beeches and oaks seventy feet high, with a few birches interspersed, the boles so big that two men couldn’t pass their hands around them and the undergrowth almost non-existent, especially under the oaks, although there could be tangles of blown-down limbs or even whole trees uprooted. Maple trees like green cathedrals rose above the beeches. It was beautiful, if you let yourself look.
Besides the woods, she was still grimly pleased with what she found. The Morean stradiotes knew their business, and their pages were mostly tenants and what an Alban would have called sergeants and what they lacked in experience they made up for in caution. Sauce moved along their line, pleased that each man-no women-kept his partners in sight. Evening made the woods noisy, and there were enough large animals moving to keep the vedettes awake.
Sauce wished for Gelfred, but the green-clad huntsmen were away. On another mission. Not to be discussed.
He was playing for power. She saw it now, and it pissed her off. He was doing something he knew the rest of them wouldn’t approve of-which was why he’d split the company. She knew that Ranald and Gelfred and the loathsome Kronmir had all gone somewhere. She had her suspicions that they’d gone south to Harndon.
These were surface thoughts, because the caution her outriders were showing was infectious, and because she had enough experience of the Wild to know that something was wrong.
She cantered up behind a pair of her men, Spiro and Stavros, both watching the woods across a glade to the south. Both had their bows in their hands.
Sauce reined in. “Stavros, back to the wagons, tell Mag we have something-not an alarm, but time to be careful. Then up the column, find the captain and get his arse out here. With my compliments.”
The man snapped a crisp salute, turned his horse on its hindquarters and raced away.
Spiro frowned. “Could be a deer,” he admitted.
Sauce nodded. She was still on her riding horse and sorry for it. “No self-respecting deer would be this close to a moving column,” she said.
She felt foolish, having ridden out of the column without a heavy lance or her fighting helmet. She loosened her sword in its sheath.
Something moved across the clearing.
And the mist was rising. The sun was just on the point of going down to the west-they were late on the road.
About another hour of light.
“We’re too exposed here,” she said calmly. “Back away.”
Spiro was delighted to concur, and they backed their horses among the trees-from copse to copse, one turning and then the other, covering each other.
Her opinion of Spiro went up and up. She’d barely met him, but he was solid and dependable and his head was everywhere. He was clearly shit-scared, and equally clearly good at dealing with it.
She saw movement to the west, and then a flash of reassuring scarlet. At the same time she saw her next pair of outriders waving, and she and Spiro bore west and north through a tangled thicket and emerged into another glade. Count Zac was there with four of his men.
She was so glad to see him that she felt a moment’s disorientation, and then she realized how much terror she’d felt-
“Ware!” she shouted. Its approach had been gradual, but now she knew the feeling. She’d felt it at Lissen Carak. Some of the creatures of the Wild exuded terror.
Spiro looked over his shoulder-raised his bow-
Sauce dragged her sword clear and cut-
The thing leapt. Sauce smelled the burned soap smell and saw the bright red crest. Her blow was parried with the bronze haft of a heavy stone axe-a magnificent weapon of polished lapis that came back at her like a nightmare.
The daemon sprouted a feathered shaft. She got her sword on the haft and let the weight of the blow slide off her like water off a roof as her riding horse panicked between her legs-and bolted.
The daemon-twelve feet of muscled armour and blood-red webbed crest and gills-slammed his lapis axe into Spiro, killing him instantly, crushing his ribs into his heart. Then it rotated its hips, pointed the elegant bronze staff of his axe and a beam of coherent light blew Count Zac out of his saddle. The little man landed like a sack of wheat.