They watched in silence as she staggered to his horse. She took hold of the arm he reached down much like a drowning woman grabbing hold of a branch. Manadar hooked his hand under her armpit and swung her up. It was clumsy and far from elegant, but she ended up slumped at his back, sitting on the bedroll tied across the horse’s rump. She clung to his shoulders.
‘Where are you from?’ Lorin asked loudly, keeping his eyes on the six riders.
She did not reply at first and he asked again, louder.
‘Wyven Dam,’ she murmured.
One of the two Hommetic villages the Imperial slavers had despoiled. Thirty or so folk had been taken from there, as best Brennan could remember. The same again from the other hamlet. Torn from their huts and hiding places and carried away into the Empire of Orphans. Those who were not killed, in any case.
The Free had ridden through Wyven Dam at the very start of their hunt. A few days after the slavers had come visiting, and still there were some corpses on the ground. There were too few left there to bury or burn all the dead quickly. Those dead were mostly old men who had tried to defend their people and had no value to slavers alive. And old women.
‘Wyven Dam,’ Lorin repeated. ‘Good enough. Well, we can’t be sitting out here trading stares with slave-takers all day. Too hot for that. Send an arrow down their necks, Brennan. I imagine, one way or the other, that’ll move things along.’
Brennan did as he was told. He aimed high, breathed out a long, slow breath and sent the shaft arcing across the blue sky. It fell short by perhaps ten yards.
‘Lucky Hamdan’s not here to see that,’ chuckled Manadar.
Brennan grimaced. It was not a terrible shot by his own standards, but Manadar was right. Hamdan did not approve of misses, no matter how hard the target. Still, the attempt had the desired effect. Without any show of alarm, the six riders wheeled their mounts around and began to move away.
Like scattered fragments of shadow, the birds circling above did the same. Understanding somehow that the day’s promise of food had come to nothing, they slid away across the hot sky.
Manadar cocked his head and frowned at the backs of the horsemen as they sank away into the haze.
‘Didn’t ride very hard to catch her, and they’re not riding very hard now,’ he grunted.
‘Perhaps they’re not as stupid as we’d like them to be,’ said Lorin. ‘Riding hard out here’s a fast way to kill a horse.’
‘True. They must know who we are though. You’d think they’d ride at least a little harder to get out of our reach. I feel… slighted.’
Brennan smiled to himself. Manadar was not entirely wrong. Half the Free’s battles were won before they began, by the reputation those who had gone before had built. Their band of swords had existed for decades, surviving as all the other free companies dwindled away or were destroyed. Overcoming all enemies, great and small, until they stood alone. Alone yet so potent that their name was enough to breed fear.
He watched the woman at Manadar’s back. He might have thought she had fallen asleep or into unconsciousness, but for the slight trembling and shifting of her hand.
‘Retrieve your arrow,’ Lorin said.
Brennan blinked. The slavers were almost lost to sight now. Swallowed up by this hateful emptiness. Lorin was right. No sense in letting the arrow go to waste. Here in the Empire, there might come a day when he needed every single shaft in his quiver.
Brennan rode out slowly. The sun beat at his bare head.
III
They settled by the skeleton of a horse as dusk fell. Or perhaps it had been a mule. It was impossible to tell from the cage of bleached bones its ribs had become, or from the skull lying there in the dust, so perfectly stripped of flesh and hide it looked almost polished.
Manadar stood some twenty paces from the skull and threw knives into it. He held his five blades loosely in his left hand, plucked one after another with his right and sent them spinning straight and true to lodge in the old bone of the skull’s forehead. He never missed. There was a rhythm and precision to his movements which Brennan envied. Each blade, glinting as it tumbled through the air, followed almost exactly the same path. They clustered tightly together in their bone bed, like a clump of metal grass.
When all five were thrown, Manadar would walk slowly forward, tug them out and return to his mark. Then begin again.
He did this most evenings, in the last light of the day. This or playing his little reed flute. Lorin had forbidden any music out here on the hunt, since he worried that the sound would carry too far, so Manadar threw his knives instead.
Lorin was giving the horses handfuls of grain, patting their necks and checking for signs of hurt or weariness as they ate noisily from his palm. Brennan sat with the woman, watching as she drank thirstily from his water bag.
‘Not too much,’ he said.
There was a moment’s reluctance in the way she looked at him, but she lowered the bag from her lips and handed it back to him.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.
‘Marweh.’
‘I’m Brennan.’
She was too tired to really be much interested in his name, he supposed. It was hard to tell her age, with the grime and exhaustion masking her features. He would guess at near thirty years. Close to a decade older than him. She could pass for much older, hunched down, almost folded in on herself, as she was. They had given her a blanket and she had it draped about her shoulders. It got cold quickly once the night came on here.
She had hardly spoken all through the long afternoon. Only once, really. When they came across a sad, solitary corpse in their path. The birds-the inevitable attendants upon the dead, out here-told them what to expect from some distance away. Crows and vultures and buzzards that abandoned their feast only reluctantly, at the last moment when the riders were almost on top of them.
It was a woman, but the attentions of beak and claw had made it hard to tell much of her age and appearance. Marweh knew though.
‘It’s Astera,’ she murmured, before averting her eyes.
Astera’s throat had been cut. Neatly and precisely, from hinge of jaw to hinge of jaw.
‘She wasn’t strong,’ Marweh said, staring off into the distance. ‘That’s what they do with those who can’t keep the pace.’
And after that, she had said no more.
‘You escaped from them,’ Brennan said now, thinking it a foolish and pointless thing to say even as the words emerged.
She nodded, too kind or too tired to mock him for it.
‘Can you take me back?’ she asked him. ‘Home.’
Her voice was less brittle than it had been when she first came to them, but still weak.
‘Please?’ she said.
It was a good question. One that Brennan knew had occurred to Lorin and Manadar, though they had not discussed it. Yulan, their Captain, had given them a task: to keep close on the trail of the slavers and their captives so that some storm or wind did not erase it before they could be brought to battle. It would be hard to do that with an unplanned companion adding weight to a horse’s back, drinking an extra share of water.
They had pushed on through what remained of the afternoon after Marweh found them, cautious and slow. Lorin did not want to lose any time, especially now that the slavers knew precisely where they were, and how many. But that would have to change in the morning, Brennan imagined.
Lorin confirmed it as he scratched, hard, at his horse’s mane.
‘Brennan there’ll take you once the light returns,’ he said. ‘There’s more of us just a few hours behind. They can care for you.’
Brennan’s heart sank. He knew it was childish and futile. Even so, there was a part of him that was desperately disappointed at the notion of being separated from these other two. It was not just that it felt important and exciting to be out here in the van of the Free, on the sharp edge; Lorin and Manadar were, of all the Free, the men he felt closest to. There was no man or woman of the company he would not gladly fight alongside, or die for if he had to-that was the bargain and the commitment required of anyone who rode in their ranks. He could not honestly call every single one of them a good and true friend though. Not the way he could Lorin and Manadar.