They are messengers too, she realized.
Shortly after completing her first assignment as a Binder, she had given up on the idea of family, hurling herself completely into the roles offered to her as a roaming messenger. She made no attachments, avoided falling in love with any boy, and never let herself be drawn into local politics. She delivered her messages and kept moving. She had seen a great deal of the world, and every once in a while wondered if there was a Binder who had traveled farther than she. She had chosen this life, and had reveled in the freedom such a decision had granted her.
And yet, listening to the Shield-Brethren, she began to realize how lonely her life truly was. Few of these men knew each other well before they had begun this journey, but now, they were tightly bound. Even Istvan, as much as the others expressed a near constant dislike of the mad Hungarian. They were-for lack of a better word-family.
Yasper was telling the story of the fight in the tunnels at Kiev again, though no one seemed to mind. Cnan smiled as he pulled at his face and waved his arms, imitating the gibbering priest with the flaming staff. He was exaggerating, of course; the alchemist had a natural penchant for embellishing details that made even the most mundane aspect of an event seem exceptionally heroic. She recalled slipping in the corridor and nearly dropping her knife, but in Yasper’s version, her clumsiness became a clever tuck-and-roll that saved all of them.
And Finn. Yasper lingered long on Finn’s valiant spear work. The hunter, more terrified than any of being caught underground and burned alive, held off a dozen of the crazed and raggedy monks with graceful precision. His spear, a serpentine extension of his hand, darted back and forth-piercing throats, slashing cheeks and hands. The filthy monks were forced to climb over their dead, and for all their efforts, each man only added to the pile of bodies choking the narrow tunnel.
Somewhat drunkenly, his words disjointed and slurred, Istvan told them of Finn’s bloody work in the Mongol camp. The Hungarian was not as good a storyteller as Yasper, and his memory of the raid was spotty at best, but he spoke with some admiration of the hunter’s swift knife and sure hand among the sleeping Mongols. Six, Istvan claimed. Finn slew six, before any of the enemy even realized death was among them.
Feronantus told them the story of how he met Finn. Following the Livonian defeat at Schaulen, the commander of the Livonian presence on the island of Saaremaa sought to be named the new Heermeister. He thought the best way to rally support for his claim was to keep the island under Livonian rule, thereby enabling his decimated order a safe haven from which to rebuild. The islanders resisted, and since a fair number of sons of the island’s gentry were apprenticed at the Tyrshammar, the Shield-Brethren were pressed to take a side in the conflict. Feronantus resisted, stating such involvement was akin to allowing the Shield-Brethren to be nothing more than hired mercenaries. The men of Tyrshammar must remain aloof from this local conflict.
However, small raiding parties began to whittle down the Livonian ranks. These guerilla-style attacks were successful for two reasons: the islanders were intimately familiar with the local terrain; and, given the relatively wild nature of the landscape, a number of men used to such conditions proved to be exceptionally useful. They wore no insignia that could connect them to Tyrshammar, of course, and in the end, their presence was overshadowed by the exploits of a single man. A hunter, who was neither one of the Shield-Brethren nor a native of the island. His prowess and zeal were so great that his exploits were already immortalized in song and drunken tale-telling before the last Livonian had fled the island.
The hunter’s name was Finn, and he never spoke of why he had devoted himself to the islanders’ cause, and Feronantus never asked. When the Shield-Brethren longboat returned to Tyrshammer, Finn had been seated on the oar bench with the other men. He pulled an oar as an equal, stayed for a fortnight at the Rock as a guest, and then vanished one foggy night.
When Feronantus and the rest of the Shield-Brethren landed at Stralsund to come to Legnica, Finn had been waiting for them. Without a word, he had joined the company as if no time had passed.
“You always leave out the best parts,” Yasper groaned when Feronantus finished his story. “Who was the woman?”
Eleazar lowered the satchel of arkhi. “What woman?” he asked, wondering what part of the story he had missed.
“The whole reason he was on Saaremaa in the first place.” Yasper smacked his forehead with one hand. “You don’t think he was up there because the hunting was good!”
Cnan glanced at Feronantus, who met her gaze briefly, his lined face giving nothing away. Then he leaned back, and the firelight no longer reached his eyes.
“It’s not always about a woman, Yasper,” Raphael observed as he returned to the circle, Percival not far behind him.
“Is that so?” Yasper retorted, making a big show of leaning forward and glancing in Vera’s direction. He had drunk more arkhi than the rest of them, and even though he wasn’t standing, he nearly toppled over. Eleazar reached out a large hand to steady the slight alchemist. When Yasper had recovered, Eleazar shoved him, knocking the Dutchman sprawling on his ass.
“Excuse the wretch,” Eleazar said to the circle at large. “His tongue has come loose in his head. Hopefully, he’ll get it tightened before he joins us again.”
From his supine position, Yasper raised a hand and made a rude gesture in the Spaniard’s general direction. The company laughed, forgiving the Dutchman’s momentary enthusiasm; and as Raphael and Percival sat back down, Cnan caught the glance that went back and forth between Raphael and Vera.
Vera noticed her watching, and suddenly embarrassed to have been caught spying on a private exchange, Cnan leaped to her feet. Waving everyone to silence, she launched into her own story about Finn. She was flustered at first, stumbling over the tale, but after a few seconds, she stopped thinking about Vera and Raphael-and Percival too; how had he managed to get in her thoughts like that? — and sank into her role as bard.
It was a simple story. One that had little room for embellishment the way Yasper would have told it, and none of the romantic gravitas of Feronantus’s, but it was her story. She prided herself on her woodcraft: on her ability to read the trails; to know where water and fruit-bearing plants could be found; to move so silently through the woods that the birds never betrayed her position with warning calls to another. Yet, compared to Finn, she was a large cow, blundering through the heavy brush.
No matter how far she ranged ahead or behind the company during their journey, she invariably found sign that Finn had already been there. At first, she thought he was clumsy in how he hid his passage, and then she allowed herself to think she was actually sharp-eyed enough to notice the tiny marks of the hunter’s trail. When they had been traveling in the forests of Poland and Rus, she would find tufts of hair from the pelts he wore caught on the unruly bark of the black alders. She would find the occasional boot print-usually only a partial print, at that-on boggy ground. His marks, tiny chips cut out of tree bark high above ground, indicated the presence of water, wildlife, and possible ambush sites; over time, she deciphered them all.
“I thought I was being clever,” she admitted to the company, “but I was only learning to see the signs Finn was leaving for me. I know he understood Latin better than he ever admitted, but out in the woods, it didn’t matter. He told me everything I needed to know without saying a word.”