"We get on well, Hunter-Doune. By which I mean we don't kill each other over the big matters, and we feel free to squabble over the small things."
"We?"
He finished off the ale and thumped the mug against his wooden leg. He winced a little when he did that, and I saw that the wood was newly carved. The amputation wasn't old enough to be used to.
"We're awfully close to goblin lands, here," he said. "That's good and bad. Good because it keeps the Kingpriest's spies and casual visitors away. Bad because we have to keep patrols on our borders against the blackhearted goblins. I am — " He ran his palm along the wood again. "I was the one who led those patrols. No more."
"What happened, Touk?"
He shrugged. "Just what it looks like. Lost my leg to a goblin's axe, lay too long for the cleric to heal me. But I'm not here to talk about me, Doune. I'm here to talk about you."
Now, go reckon this — because I can't. There he sat, my old partner whose advice I'd remembered and lived by even all the years after I'd thought him dead, the old friend whose memory I'd sworn by — and I was suddenly angry. Angry and wondering why he'd not found a moment to spare to let me know that he was not dead.
"You want to talk about me?" I said bitterly. "Why, I'm just fine, Touk. Sword-cut, my ribs broken, gnawed by goblins, and the rest of me feeling like I've been run over by a wagon. But otherwise, fine. How've you been?"
"Now hear me, Hunter-Doune," he said. "Hear me."
"Hear you? No, Touk Hammerfell. You listen to me — "
"Hear me!" His dark, blue-flecked eyes flared, as they'd so often done when — as he liked to say — I had the stubborn fit on me.
"It's me who told Kell to bring you here," he said, "and that was a risk. I knew you seven years ago, Hunter-Doune, but I didn't know what you'd become since then. Still I talked Kell into taking the risk. Ah, blackmailed her, I guess you'd say, told her she owed me for my leg."
"Why, Touk?"
He sucked in his cheeks, as he did when he was thinking, then spoke in a rush, as he did when he was trying to get past sentiment.
"I've never forgotten you, Hunter-Doune, and I hoped
… I hoped you'd still be the man I remembered. I'd have gone for you myself, but you see I couldn't. We need someone trusty, and someone keen-witted. Someone who — " He shook his head, then went off on another tack. "They're mostly all farmers here, not fighters. The minotaur wanted the job. He wants nothing more than to be killing goblins every chance he gets. But you know how minotaurs are. Hotheaded and not good at leading men. I'll tell you, he didn't much like being the bait in this game."
"Bait? For what? For me?"
"Well, I've been dead these seven years, haven't I? Caught by some bounty hunter in Xak Tsaroth." He grinned, an old familiar twist of his lips. "I don't reckon you'd have believed it if anyone came to say that your old friend Touk Hammerfell wanted to have a chat."
I gave him that.
"So we used Dinn for bait. A nice big minotaur — worth what, ninety gold these days? — wandering your usual stomping grounds and ready for the taking."
I sighed, and he gave me a sharp look.
"I'm not doing a very good job explaining, am I?"
"No," I said. "You're not."
There came a soft sound, a bare foot whispering against the floor rushes. Alyce stood in the doorway, as bright as a sapphire in a golden fall of sunlight. She came to stand beside Touk.
"Let me try," she said. "Doune, we need a new captain for our border patrol" — she rested a hand on Touk's shoulder — "and you come highly recommended."
"Why did Kell himself — herself — come after me?"
She laughed, her blue eyes sparkling. "I told you when we first met that you were a legend where I come from. Touk insisted that you were the man we need, but I like to make very certain about the people who are going to live here. There wasn't all that much danger for me in Istar. They're too busy spinning up legends about Terrible Kell to know who I really am. So, who better to decide whether you were trustworthy?"
"And if you'd decided that I wasn't?"
"Easy enough to lose our way in the canyons." She smiled, her cheeks dimpling. "They're very twisty and winding. You'd have had no trouble believing that Dinn had lost his way."
I looked at the ceiling, trying to get all this into shape.
No murdered party of innocent pilgrims? I asked. None, she told me. No looted shrines and slaughtered clerics? Not a one, she said. No silver pennies stolen from dead men's eyes?
She shuddered. "I hate that story worst of all. No. I have my ideas about what's right, and I see that they get heard out there in the world. That's all."
I nodded. "No bounty then, I suppose?"
"None. Just a job, Hunter-Doune, guarding good people and keeping them safe. A home with an old friend." She glanced away, her eyes hidden beneath the veil of her dark lashes. "And some new ones. Are you with us, HunterDoune?"
Touk looked from her to me, raised an eyebrow. "Well, well," he muttered. "So that's the way of it, eh? I thought the kender was just making it up."
"Oh, hush, Touk," she said, her cheeks flushing, but she didn't say it very insistently.
Touk laughed and slapped his knee — his good one. "So what about it, Hunter-Doune? Are you with us?"
Once Alyce had promised me a bounty so great that no place I could stash the treasure would be empty. I'd been thinking about gold; she'd been talking about a home, a place of trust, and an old friend. Now, watching her smooth white cheek coloring rosy, I understood that she was offering something more.
I told Touk that I'd sworn a good oath to deal honestly with Alyce, said that I reckoned that the oath held for Kell, too.
Later, when the sky was filled with stars and Solinari's light shone in though the window, Alyce — the terrible outlaw, Kell o' the Vale — brushed her lips against my forehead in such a way that I knew she wasn't thinking about fever.
"Once I thought it would be impossible to fill up those empty places of yours," she whispered. "I thought Touk was wrong, that you weren't the man for us. But when I saw you watching the nomad woman running, when I saw you feeling for her, really feeling so that you wanted to turn away but couldn't — "
She smiled, as she had then, as though she were seeing me for the first time and liking what she saw.
"Welcome home, Hunter-Doune."
She kissed me again, and I felt her lips move in a smile like a promise.
Off Day
Dan Parkinson
In a place of shadows, small shadows moved.
Sunlight filtered among tumbled stone debris, where great blocks of granite lay in mountains of rubble, braced one against another where they fell. The light shone down through cracks and crevices to illuminate the smooth, damp floor of a meandering tunnel far beneath the ground. Here centuries of rainwater had scoured gullies beneath the rubble, gullies that led downward to larger, cavernous sumps below the massive foundations of a great temple.
In the dim light, shadows wound their way upward — small, furtive shadows moving in single file, moving silently… or nearly so.
Thump. The line of shadows slowed, became shorter as trailing shadows converged on those in front. The foremost shadow spun around and said, "Sh!"
"Somebody fall down," a voice whispered.
"Sh!" the lead shadow repeated, emphatically.
Then they were moving again. The source of the eroded gully was a V-shaped opening between squared stones, a seep where stones had settled, pulling apart from one another.