Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar (31 page)

The camp, when they found it, looked almost familiar. Jors checked his mental maps. Unless they’d traveled a lot farther from the village than he thought, they were still some distance from the border, but there was no mistaking the pattern of fire and picket line and the way the weapons had been set, butts to the ground, points crossed.

:They’re army, or ex-army. Hardorn lancers.:
Bow in hand, he moved closer carefully.
:I’m betting some bright officer came up with a way to use their troublemakers to their advantage. It’s why they took the girl. Why they’ll want their man back so badly. I bet their first order was not to get caught.:

He lifted a foot and set it down again as a rough voice growled, “I may miss you in this light, but I’ll not miss the big white horse. You keep him calm and you do what I say, and you might just survive this.”

Companions were fast and moved in ways a man seeing a horse wouldn’t expect. But were they faster than a finger tightening around a crossbow trigger? Jors couldn’t risk that.

Not so much
ex-
army that they didn’t have a man on watch.

“Let me kill him, Adric.”

“He’s a Herald, you idiot.” Torso bare but for streaks of blood and a field dressing on his shoulder, Adric scowled down at Jors, who struggled up onto his knees. With Gervis’ life in the balance, he’d walked into the camp and been slammed to the ground with the butt of a lance. The point of that lance was now centered in his chest. “Kill one and they all come down on you.”

“Then we tie him and leave him here,” the first man grunted. “Take the horse with us, probably get a pretty penny for it.”

:I’m okay.:
More or less.
:You?:

They might not understand what a Companion was, but they’d dealt with Valdemar enough to know Jors wouldn’t provoke the shot.

“We’re not,” Aldric growled, “going anywhere without Lorne.”

“And that’s why we have the girl.”

Eyes adjusted to the firelight, Jors could see her now, sitting on the ground with her knees drawn up, gaze locked on his face. Fifteen maybe, no older, on that cusp between girl and woman. She looked frightened but determined. A boy, not much older, stood behind her, arms crossed, and a man with his breeches cut away and a bloody dressing on his thigh—the man who’d spoken—reclined beside her.

“Not the only reason, mind you,” he added reaching over and lightly smacking her cheek.

Bardi jerked away from his touch, provoking a shove from the boy behind her, but as near as Jors could tell, it hadn’t yet progressed beyond touching and threat. They’d got there in time and had provided, if nothing else, a distraction. Now, they just had to get away.

He’d seen six of the eight men—Adric, obviously their leader, the one who spoke first, the one with the lance, two by Bardi, the one with the crossbow on Gervis. The other two had to be behind him, but the point of the lance kept him from turning to make sure.

“You know, I’ve heard stories about Heralds. This one ... “A boot impacted with his thigh without much force, making the point that Jors was there to be kicked. “... isn’t much.”

Seven.

“He tracked us over rock in the dark,” Adric snorted. “What more do you want?”

“He got caught.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t sneak for shit wearing all that white. Get the rope, Herin, and tie him. We’ll leave him here when we move out,” Adric added as the kicking man moved toward the piles of gear, “but we’ll kill the horse. Drive it off a cliff. Everyone knows who the damned things belong to, and we don’t need that kind of trouble.”

“If you don’t need trouble ...” Jors forced himself to look in control regardless of position or lances or crossbows. “... then you should pack up and go now. You don’t think I came out here alone, do you?” He added as Adric’s brows pulled in. “You don’t think Valdemar is going to ignore Hardorn violating the border, do you?”

“I’ll give him violating,” the man with the thigh injury snarled, reaching for Bardi.

“Leave her be!” Adric snapped. “I want to hear this. Go on.”

Jors met his gaze and held it. “We were already on our way out to deal with you. When you took the girl, you just hastened the inevitable. Lorne is in custody, all you can do now is run for the border.” He was giving them an out. If they thought they were cornered ...

“All I see is you,” Adric told him.

“I was out front, tracking. I’ve marked the trail for the Heralds following behind me.”

He could hear men shifting position nervously, but he kept his eyes on Adric’s face. He thought for a moment he’d done it; then Adric shook his head.

“I think you’re telling me a story.”

“He isn’t!” Bardi tried to stand but the wounded raider dragged her back to the ground. “We sent for the Heralds after you burned down Kirin’s barn!”

Adric stared at her for a long moment. “How many?”

“Heralds?” She rolled her eyes. “How should I know? I was with you when they arrived!”

:We
will
free her.:

“Two lies,” Adric growled, “do not make a story true.” He turned, firelight painting orange streaks on his torso. “Herin, the rope!”

“Got it.” Herin straightened, coil of rope on one shoulder, started back and paused, head cocked toward the surrounding woods. “There’s something out there!”

“Animal.”

“Something big.”

“Big animal,” Adric scoffed. “Now get your thumb out of your ass and get that rope over ...”

The sound of a large animal moving through thick brush was unmistakable.

:What?:
That was all the protest he had time for as Verati charged out from between the trees, screaming a challenge as she galloped through the camp. Gone was the stout old lady who fell asleep being brushed, replaced by a gleaming white dervish ridden by a rider in white whirling a sword above his head.

A man screamed on the side of the camp, going down under her hooves.

Eight.

Diving forward under the lance, Jors took the man who held it to the ground as Gervis answered Verati’s challenge. A crossbow bolt slammed into packed dirt. The distinctive crunch of shattering bone was nearly drowned out by another scream.

Verati charged back out of the trees, closer to the fire, sending the raider with the wounded thigh rolling away from her hooves. Bardi seemed to be dealing with the boy. Jors got his hands on the lance, drove the butt hard into the lancer’s stomach, and twisted just in time to block a blow from behind. Gervis reared. Herin dropped the rope and ran.

“Call them off!”

Jors looked down to see a lance point driven into his stomach, the edge sharp enough to cut through his leathers. Pain caught up a second later as blood began to dribble out of the tear. “Call them off,” Adric repeated. “Or I’ll gut you.”

“It’s too late,” Jors told him. On the other side of the fire, the boy threw himself up onto a horse and rode out into the darkness. Adric was now the last man standing. “You’ve lost.”

“No.”

“It’s over.”

“No!” His eyes were wild. His chest heaved. Blood seeped through the bandage on his shoulder. “Not possible! We were riding against farmers! Shepherds! Stupid villagers!” He spun on one heel, shifted his grip, drew back his arm, and hurled the lance directly at Bardi, silhouetted in front of the fire, snarling, “Her fault.”

Bardi and the lance in flight. Then a white blur. The lance took Verati in the throat. Blood sprayed. She slammed to her knees, Tamis flying over her head.

Jors took Adric down, quickly, efficiently, not even thinking of what he was doing. Gervis was already there when he slid to his knees by Verati’s side. The blood had already begun to puddle, it was pouring so fast from the wound.

The old man lay crumpled, reaching back weakly for his Companion. He still wore his scarf wrapped around his throat, and instead of a sword, his cane lay broken by his side. Jors had seen dying men before, and he knew he saw one now. He moved him, carefully, until he could touch Verati’s face. She sighed her last breath against his fingers.

Tamis smiled. “Every story,” he said, his voice barely louder than the breeze in the surrounding trees, “has to end.”

He moved a finger just enough to wrap a line of silver white mane around it. “Stop fussing,” he murmured. Then he closed his eyes. And never opened them again.

“My fault?”

Jors looked up to see Bardi standing on the other side of Verati’s body, the firelight glinting on the tears running down her cheeks.

“My fault?” she repeated.

“No.” He tried to put all the reassurance he could into his voice. “Not your fault.”

“I just ... I just couldn’t let them ride in and ride away. I just needed to do something. I just needed . . .”

She needed her story to start.

One of the raiders was dead, skull caved in by Gervis’ hoof; the rest they tied with their own ropes, trussed up by their own fire waiting for justice. Only the boy had gotten away, and Jors found himself hoping he made it safely to the border, that he carried the story home of how Valdemar’s borders were defended—farmers, shepherds, villagers not there for the plundering.

Bardi helped him take off Verati’s saddle, then watched as he tucked Tamis up against her side. “What do we do now?” she asked, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“We wait until help comes,” Jors told her, moving to build up the fire. The villagers might not have followed him, but he knew, knew without a doubt, that they’d followed Tamis. One thing to let a young man in Herald’s Whites save the day and another thing entirely to let an old man do it. While they waited, he’d tell her a story. Practice the story he’d write in his report.

It wouldn’t be a big, heroic story, the kind that got put to music to inspire more heroics although, in the end, he supposed, it would be that kind of story too.

“He wanted to be a Bard, but he couldn’t sing. He liked his tea sweet and his beer dark and the smell of apple wood smoke, and he had a friend named Shorna ...”

Passage at Arms

Aellele Calot’s family were smallholders, with a farm in the Sweetgrass Valley, north of the Terilee River and east of the Trade Road. The land there was all farming country, settled and serene (too far north to ever have to worry about Karsite raiders, too far south and east to fear bandits). She was a middle child (two older brothers and one older sister, two younger sisters born a year apart—and a caboose set of brothers) and middling in every way: middling height, middling brown hair, middling eyes neither gray nor blue. She could spin a little, weave a little, play the gittern and the drum, make cider and churn butter, and she had always expected that when she grew up, she would either marry and run a farm somewhere in the Sweetgrass, stay here on hers and help her Ma and Da, or move to one of the nearby towns and become an independent guildswoman.