She kicked him under the trestle. But her grin smeared away almost immediately, and she grew serious again.
“This Takavach. You say he wore a leather cloak and a brimmed hat.”
“Yeah. Always does, it’s in all the stories. He’s from, uhm.” Egar frowned, groping for a decent translation from the Majak. “ ‘All the places the ocean will always be heard.’ Something like that. Cavorts with mermaids in the surf and so forth. Cloak and hat’s like a symbol for it; it’s like a northern ship captain’s rig.” Egar propped himself up a little in his seat and peered at her. “Why?”
Archeth shook her head. “Forget it.”
“C’mon. Why?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. Just, the day Idrashan got better, got back on his feet again, one of the stable boys swore to me he’d walked in on some guy in a hat and cloak like that. Apparently, he was leaning over the rail of Idrashan’s stall and talking to him in some weird foreign language. And I remember now, there was some talk of the same figure walking the streets at evening in Beksanara when we first arrived. Thought it was just the usual swamp horseshit at the time.”
They looked at each other for a few moments in silence. For Archeth at least, it seemed that the breeze chose just that moment to chill the air, and a cloud wiped out the sun. But Egar only shrugged.
“Sure, could have been.”
“Could have been what? Horseshit?”
“No, could have been that fucker Takavach.”
Archeth blinked. “You believe that?”
Egar leaned forward a little. “Look, if he took the trouble to save my arse and magic me all the way down to Ennishmin, just so I could procure our old pal Angeleyes for the battle of Beksanara . . .” A shrug. “Well then, he’s certainly not going to balk at feeding your horse a few rotten apples to keep you pinned there for the same reason, is he? Or are you going to tell me you don’t believe in gods and demons and dwenda?”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” she muttered.
“Believe it, if it’s cruel and unjust and brutal on the weak,” said a somber voice behind her. “That way, you won’t be far out.”
They both turned to look at him, and it was still a struggle for Archeth not to catch her breath at the sight.
He stood in the knee-deep grass of the garden, clad mostly in black that made even his southern-blooded skin seem yellowish pale. His right arm was bound up in a gray cloth sling, the black cotton stitches were still in the wound along his jaw, and the other bruises and scrapes on his face had not yet faded fully away. But mostly, it was the eyes that told the story, that made her think Ringil Eskiath had not, after all, survived the dwenda encounter at Beksanara the way she and Egar had.
The pommel of the Ravensfriend jutted up over his shoulder like a spike driven into him.
“All set?” she asked, with a breeziness she didn’t much feel.
“Yeah. Sherin’s with the horses. Turns out, she’s pretty good with them. Used to keep quite a stable apparently, back before Bilgrest pissed all their money away.”
“You—” Archeth stopped herself. “She going to be okay?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“The doctor says she hadn’t been harmed physically, at least not in the recent past. He’s a good man, Gil, I know him. I asked for him specifically when we sent to Khartaghnal. If he says she’s unharmed—”
“He’s used to dealing with soldiers.” There was a floating emptiness in Ringil’s tone, as if none of this really mattered anymore. “With men grateful just because they can still walk out of his tent on two feet. Doesn’t matter how good a man he is, his opinion’s not going to be worth a harbor-end fuck. Sherin screams in her dreams, all the time. She flinches at the mention of Poppy Snarl’s name, which I imagine means it was Snarl’s company that bought her at the Chancellery clearinghouse. She’s been a slave, Archeth. I know you imperials don’t think that’s any big deal, but—”
“Hoy!” She stood up to face him. “It’s me you’re talking to here, Gil.”
The confrontation lasted a couple of moments longer than it should have. She felt a faint chill on her neck as she stared into her friend’s eyes. Then he looked away, past her to the road and the hills it led into.
“Sorry,” he said quietly. “You’re right, of course. You’re not like the rest of them.”
But Ishgrim’s lush pale form floated through her mind, and Archeth was suddenly terrified that Ringil could see into her head and know what she was thinking.
“Don’t suppose the swamp time did her any favors, either,” Egar rumbled with what was, for him, an oddly deft diplomacy. “Stuck out there with the dwenda and those ruins and all those fucking heads fencing her in night and day.”
“That won’t have helped,” Ringil agreed quietly.
She heard the damage in his voice.
The heads were too much for most of them. The few Throne Eternal survivors of the Beksanara encounter, the war-hardened levy reinforcements from Khartaghnal or the Ennishmin scavenger toughs hired to guide them, even Egar, it made no real difference. Men stumbled away, sick-faced and shaking, after the few seconds it took to understand what they’d walked into. For quite a while, the stillness of the swamp was salted with the repeated sounds of Archeth’s forces retching.
Ringil just stood immobile and looked on.
“Risgillen” was all he said.
It wasn’t the ring of failed escapees beyond the fence that he’d described, not anymore. The dwenda had pulled out and whether for warning, ritual, or revenge, they had left nothing in their wake to be salvaged. The stable-type housing had been reduced by some process no one readily understood to a scattering of wet gray mulch, and out across the pools and soggy ground of the swamp, there were more than a hundred living heads, a more or less evenly sown crop, all carefully supplied with the depth of water that apparently served to keep them conscious.
While Archeth’s men braced themselves against fallen trees or boulders, and trembled and cursed or wept as was their inclination, Ringil went quietly about, lifting each head from the water and placing it gently on raised ground, where the roots of the sorcerous trunks could not get sustenance. Behind the thick swatches of bandage masking his face, it was hard to know what his expression might have been. He grimaced occasionally, but that might have been the pain in his injured arm.
After a while, some of the other men regained enough self-possession to help.
When the heads were dry enough that life seemed to have left them, when the eyes had closed and the tears dried, and when they’d scoured the vicinity to be sure that there was not one single fucking possibility they’d missed any, Archeth drew axmen from the levy and had them split each skull apart.
That took quite awhile.
When it was done, they gathered what dry fuel they could find and built a pyre, then seeded it with some of the new oily wax cakes the levy carried for starting campfires. Archeth lit the pile and they all stood in silence for the time it took to catch. At Ringil’s insistence, they pitched a camp down by the creek and waited for the pyre to burn down. Archeth found tasks to keep her men busy, but still the acrid smell drifted through the winter trees and found them, and men stopped what they were doing and swallowed hard or spat when they caught the scent.
Later that afternoon, Archeth missed Ringil and, following a not particularly inspired hunch, tracked him back to the pyre. By then, it had burned down to embers and bone fragments and ash. He stood in front of it in rigid silence, but when her foot cracked a rotten tree branch behind him, he whipped about with inhuman speed.
That was when she saw it for the first time—the thing in his eyes that still chilled her now.
“Always something worse,” he’d murmured when she moved closer.
“Perhaps they don’t just fall down like men, perhaps they are men. Or they were once.”
She stood beside him and watched the ashes smoke. She put a hand on his arm, and he turned to look at her, and for just a moment it was as if she was a total stranger touching him.