Oath Bound (Book 3) (22 page)

“Somebody’s gotta.”

“You’re proving me wrong
when I call you boy. I’m not going to order you around like you’re a ship rat,
except right now. Go lie down. You’ll get sick, you have big blue moons under
your eyes.”

“I’m fine,” Dingus said.

“I can help you if you
only let me, but you have to let me.” The sailor patted the battleaxe slung
over his back. “I’ll keep you safe while you rest, you and these little ones
you love. Nothing bad will happen to them while I watch. I promise.”

Dingus said nothing. He
shook his head. He couldn’t trust anyone, even if they said they were from
Vandis, and charmed the hell out of everyone, and didn’t even look twice at
Kessa
that
way.

“You don’t trust me.”
With a grunt, Haakon hunkered next to him, propping his back on the same rock,
and Dingus’s nerves prickled. “That’s smart, but I can tell you I’ll never let
anyone hurt these tiny ones. At home in Rodansk, I have three little boys. When
you’re a father, you can’t look at a little one without seeing your own child
in his eyes.”

“I like kids.” Tai let out
a cheeping, blissful sigh and snuggled against his jerkin. Kids judged you
different. It wasn’t so much what you were as who you showed you were, and they
didn’t assume things quite the same way.

“They can tell. They call
you
Kunu,
these ones. To them, I can see how you’re that.”

“I don’t know what it
means.” He’d forgotten to ask Tai.

Behind the rock, the fire
spat, and Haakon chuckled. Shadows danced in the pines in front of Dingus, and
he was so god-awful tired. Tai made a warm spot over his heart. His lids felt
heavy, and he squeezed them shut and dragged them open again.

“It’s a shaman,” Haakon
said. “A magic man. I can see how they think it.”

Dingus gazed into the
shadows. He didn’t have any magic. All he did was give a shit.

“I have one question for
you, though.”

“Hm.”

“Has Yatan come to find
you yet?”

A hot wire ran up
Dingus’s spine. He stared at Haakon.

Haakon frowned. “I hope
you’re not thinking not to pay him, because if that is so, I can’t do much for
you. If you don’t have the money, I can—”

“Even if I had it, I
wouldn’t pay him.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“It’s not right.”

“You’re a good man,
Dingus, but like many good men who’ve died before you, you act the fool. Your
honor swamps your reason like the wide open sea swamps a little canoe. Go to
sleep. Maybe in the morning the waves will have calmed.”

“Not likely,” Dingus
said, but he rose, cradling Tai, and went to lie down. He curled around his
tiny friend and pulled the blanket over them. He’d been determined to stay
awake, no matter what, but he fell asleep before the warmth reached his
toes—too tired to dream.

Fort Rule

The gates almost never
opened to let anyone out. Usually, the great portal at the front of Fort Rule
only admitted, never emitted. Even the guards who kept watch over the great
Stone in the field used one of the posterns when they went out on a shift.
Today was no exception, and though the gates swung wide, it was only to grant
three people entry. The moment they cleared, the high, heavy doors ground into
their places on the sweaty backs of the garrison. Two men swathed in bandages
escorted the most singular figure—singular, he’d be, anywhere but Fort Rule.

The boy was about
fourteen, nude, and hairless, without so much as an eyebrow, let alone a
short-and-curly, to cover his nakedness. Krakus noticed that first thing, and
only after he’d finished his slack-jawed stare—how dare they humiliate a child
this way?—did he see the fire. Flames, translucent in the beating sun, rippled
over every inch of the boy’s skin, toes to crown, and where he stepped, he left
sooty footprints in the dust. Plants withered and crisped in his wake. He
walked with agonizing care up the long path to Section Two, and the two
bandaged men followed.

Krakus rose from the
middle of the garrison’s kitchen garden, where he and Fillip had been helping
the cooks to harvest tomatoes and summer squash, a bumper crop in spite of the
dry weather they’d had lately. “I should go,” he said, brushing his palms
together.

“I’ll meet you at the
office later,” Brother Fillip said, and he nodded. The knees and calves of his
white breeches shed yellow dirt as he picked his way over rows of snap beans
and bell peppers.

“Ho there!” he called
when he reached the broad path, raising a hand to hail the little group. The
gates to Section Two had already begun to open. Krakus jogged to catch them up,
and slowed to fall into step with the boy. “Afternoon. I’m Father Krakus,” he
said, as if this were nothing more than an after-dinner stroll.

Up close, he saw better
what was going on, the hurt branded all over the boy’s face and the smudges of
ash where his clothes might have been, the salt crust on his cheeks. “Oh,” he
said. “Oh. I’m Jan, Father.”

“We’re down from Number
One Cloister,” said one of the men, in a voice sore and raspy from breathing
smoke and ash. “The boy was a novice.”

“And then,” Jan said,
savage with pain, “I killed Kas.”

Krakus glanced back over
his shoulder.

“His Brother,” the other
man said.

“I burned him.” The heat
from Jan’s body flared. Flame licked at Krakus’s tunic sleeve, but he didn’t
flinch away, no matter how he wanted to. Instead, he smothered the little
tongue with his palm.

“You didn’t mean to,
though,” he said.

“How would you know?”

“I have a feeling.”
Krakus smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “You must’ve been about to take
your vows.”

“Next summer. I’m
supposed to—was supposed to next summer.” Jan turned big brown eyes onto him,
sad-rabbit eyes that stabbed into his belly. “I’m not going to now, am I?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

They walked on in
silence, until they passed through the gates between Four and Three. “What is
this place?” the boy asked.

“Fort Rule,” Krakus said
at first, but it didn’t seem like quite enough. Prison, maybe, a prison for
everyone even a little bit magical, but that wouldn’t be of any particular
comfort. “Home,” he decided. “You’ll see. There are other people like you.
People who can do things like you can.”

“All I can do is burn.”
It came out in a whisper, and when he looked over his shoulder, Krakus followed
his eyes to the trail of footprints in the dirt. When Jan took a step, the
print would smoke briefly behind him.

“We’ll work on that.”

Jan let out a sound, half
laugh, half sob: all the answer he needed to give.

“You don’t believe me,”
Krakus said. “That’s all right. We’ll get there. Can you rein it in at all?”

“Sometimes,” the boy
whispered.

He nodded. “Listen,” he
said to the two monks trailing them, “I’ll take him from here. You boys go
relax.”

“Yes, Father Krakus,”
they said in unison, and peeled off toward the commissars’ barracks, leaving
Jan and Krakus alone. Jan watched them go with his sad-rabbit eyes, translucent
flame leaping off his head.

“We’ll get there. Don’t
be afraid, if you can help it,” Krakus said. “Come on. Almost home.” He patted
the boy’s shoulder with his ring hand, tried not to let the pain of touching
open fire show on his face. Thankfully, the fairy ring made an empty space on
Jan’s skin, pushing that fire away, but his palm came away blistered, and he
forced himself to remain nonchalant while he extinguished his sleeve again.

“How did you do that?”
Instead of sad rabbit, Jan’s expression was fishy and curious, and he rubbed at
his shoulder, which the flames had already covered again.

“Did it hurt you?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

Krakus took him to
Section One and introduced him around while a quartermaster and a sergeant
rushed to try and fill the needs of a burning boy. Except for little Pete
Zielski, whose falcon wings were molting again, nobody batted an eyelash at
Jan’s nakedness, and Krakus was proud of them. Even for strange people like
these, dressing only in fire was a bit of a stretch.

They didn’t have much for
Jan, as it turned out, and in the end they wound up dragging a spare stone slab
that hadn’t been used for repairs yet into Section One for the boy to use as a
bed. They put it in a corner of the section, up against two of the walls, and
tried to rig a curtain around it. Krakus watched out of the corner of his eye
and made a note to talk to the armorers about chainmail screens. At dinnertime,
Jan couldn’t sit at the table with the others. Krakus sat on the ground with
him, and Eddie and Danny joined them. Danny seemed to enjoy the heat radiating
from Jan’s thin body.

They had a good time.
Eddie and Jan were just about the same age, and laughed at each other’s jokes
after a few awkward, initial stabs at interaction on Eddie’s part. By the time
Krakus needed to go to his office—he had to spend
some
time there, much
as he hated it, and make himself available to the commissars—he felt
comfortable leaving Jan with his two favorites. Before he left, he made sure to
press the new boy in a hug, as natural as he could make it; the ring helped,
but he still came away with charred clothes and reddened skin.

Krakus didn’t mind. The
thunderstruck expression and hard return squeeze from Jan was payment enough
for a hundred burns.

He whistled tunelessly to
himself on his way back to Section Three, happy in spite of the burnt holes in
the front of his whites and the pain in his right palm. Before he went into the
office, he stopped in his bedroom, changed clothes, and buckled on his sword.

When he got to the door,
at first he reached for the knob with his right and hissed, releasing it to
examine the burn. One of the blisters had already popped. Clear fluid oozed
down to his wrist, and he took out a handkerchief to wipe it clean, knob and
hand both. He thought maybe he’d better go over to the hospital and get a salve
and bandage from Doctor Kuskov.

Inside, Lech talked to
someone whose voice Krakus didn’t recognize, the words muffled by the wood of
the door. He was on the point of turning aside in favor of treatment for his
hand when he heard a third voice, and that one, he would’ve known in the deepest,
darkest part of a four-day bender.

Droshky.

Krakus wrenched the door
open, forgetting his burnt hand entirely, even when he tore half the skin off.
He saw that Prince Vlad was in there, too, but he didn’t spare much thought to
wonder how the Prince had gotten in without anybody knowing it. “Tadeusz
Droshky!” he bellowed, and pain slammed into his head as the sword cleared its
scabbard. He reeled back against the doorjamb, bounced off, fell to his hands
and knees in a black-and-red whirl; his sword clanged on the floorboards and
slid away.

“Vlad!” Lech cried, from
far away, while Krakus clutched at his skull, unable to move or think. “No!”

“Why not, Father?” Vlad
said, coldly. “You’ve said yourself that lately Father Krakus is acting the
fool, have you not? Prowling the Fort, poking his nose into how training’s
conducted for the Special Units…”

“Distracting himself.” He
thought Lech moved; he thought he heard the chair scrape back over the wooden
floor, the heavy rub of wool vestments against themselves, and the sounds tore
into his ears. He screamed. “He’s useful to me. Don’t kill him. Make him
forget—surely that’s easy enough for you to do.”

“Easier to kill him,”
Vlad said, with a three-year-old’s petulance.

“If you do,” Lech said,
“rest assured that I can find an excuse to excommunicate you on a moment’s
notice. Don’t kill…”

Krakus slumped to the
floor in a dead blackout.

When he woke in a
hospital bed with a poultice on his right hand and a ravening monster of a
headache, he didn’t know how he’d gotten there. “You collapsed, Father Krakus,”
Doctor Kuskov explained, in a voice so quiet it was hardly even a whisper.
Krakus wanted to tell him not to bother. The hospital already rang with moans
and heavy breathing, and it didn’t make much difference whether Kuskov
whispered or shouted.

“…how long?” Krakus
asked.

“Less than half a day,”
Kuskov said, as if to reassure him. “It’s late night just now. All the same,
I’d like for you to stay at least through tomorrow. I’m not sure what’s
happened to you, Father.”

“All right.”

Kuskov nodded and bustled
away to see to someone else. He left Krakus staring at the candlelit ceiling,
hurting all over, but mostly in his head.

He had the awful,
frustrating feeling that something vital had slipped his mind, and he couldn’t
think what the hell it was. Something about the boys? The more he tried to comb
through his memory, the more his brain throbbed, ’til he couldn’t think at all.
Finally he shut his eyes, but even sleep eluded him. Krakus groaned, and he tossed
and turned until Doctor Kuskov came by and gave him a sleeping draught.

And then there was
nothing.

ten days later

Dingus sliced
spoo
and carrots into the bubbling pot from where he sat tailor-fashion on the
ground. The Salmon ladies had been and gone that morning, leaving a load of
fruits, vegetables, and shellfish behind. The Ishlings had already polished off
most of the apples, and now they were playing their favorite game: Teach Dingus
Ishian. Really, though, it was Laugh at Dingus’s Accent. His voice couldn’t do
a lot of the stuff an Ish voice needed to do. For one thing, no way could he
get it to reach that high, and for another, the necessary notes eluded him. He
could
hear
the tones, and he understood a lot more Ishian than he had
when they’d first come here, enough to make out most of what the kids said to
each other, but he couldn’t get his voice to chirp, cheep, or squeal, let alone
do that long, sliding chirr they used sometimes. It sure would crack, though:
more often, and more horribly, than ever. He used to sing, some at least, to
himself, but when his own breaking voice made him cringe, a lot of the pleasure
went out of it.

“Okay, okay, now you say
yeeyus,
”
Jooga demanded.

“What’s that one?”

“Is this,” the little
girl said, picking up one of the crooked purple carrots with her dark brown
hand.

“Carrot,” Dingus said.
“In
hituleti,
that’s
shilan.
”

“Say it!”

He sighed. “
Yeeyus.
”

“Eeheeheeheehee!”

“Now say
veeklootz!
”
Zeeta demanded. That one was a favorite. It was supposed to come out something
like “vee-EEK-loo-tuz,” and it never came from Dingus that way no matter how he
tried.

“Cypress,” he said. “
Lashkehanmayama.
”
Then he grinned. “
Veeklootz.
”

The Ishlings shrieked and
howled, rolling on the ground, over and over each other. Dingus chuckled. They
were funny as hell even if they
were
laughing at him.

“How ’bout you guys try
some
hituleti
words, huh? Then we’ll see who talks funny.”

Tai sniffed and
straightened to his hind legs. He put one hand on his chest, one behind his
back, and said, “
Lashkehanmayama,
” in Dingus’s voice, with Dingus’s
accent just so.

“Not you, you little
aper.” Before Dingus grabbed another carrot, he poked Tai in the stomach.
“Anyways, you ought to talk better. I is this, I is that—you know better by now
and no mistake.”

“Pfft!” Tai said. “Too
hard to remember always to do it.”

“Bullshit it is. You let
somebody else try now. Zeeta, how ’bout you? Can you say it?”

“I isn’t think so!” she
said, eyes wide. “No, Dingus!”

“C’mon.
Lashkehanmayama
—if
I can say it, you can too.”

“
Lashkehanmayama,
”
she said, getting all the syllables in, but mangling the accent.

He nodded anyway. “That’s
a good try.”

“Hmm!” She gave a smug
smile and preened the front of her tunic. “By course it is. I is your smart
chickadee.”

He reached over and
rubbed under her chin. “
Ralimovaran,
you sure are.”

“What is that word?” Tai
demanded.

Dingus picked up another
spoo.
“It’s ‘my little heart.’ Sweetie, for a little girl. If you’re a boy it’s
ralimovaro
.”

“
O
is for boys,
an
is for girls?”

“Most of the time.
Sometimes
on
is for guys and
ua
is for girls. Depends on the word
and what you’re using it for.”

“See? Is confusing. All
the different languages! They is mixing up in my brains!” Tai groaned
dramatically and flopped onto his back, playing dead—except that he cracked one
eyelid to see if Dingus was watching. Dingus pretended not to be. Instead, he
finished the vegetables and talked to the others, who’d gotten bored with Laugh
at Dingus’s Accent and pestered him with questions about what it was like in a
country where they spoke
hituleti
all the time. Thank the Lady Dingus
had learned to edit stories for audience. A lot of his childhood wasn’t
kid-appropriate.

Good thing nobody had
ever seen a sheep. He had them all giggling, and Kessa too, so much she fell on
her face in the middle of a one-armed push-up. “They are very stupid, though,”
Haakon put in from the other side of the fire. He’d spent a lot of time just
sitting, and somehow contrived never to be nearby when Captain Dar visited. “If
they were smarter, I think maybe sheep would rule the world, but they are so
stupid they can’t even find their own way home.”

“That’s right,” Dingus
said. “You gotta count ’em at least once a day, and if any are missing you
gotta go find ’em, otherwise you won’t get ’em back.”

“This is why it’s so
important to have a good dog. They mostly keep the stupid sheep together, and
if—ho!” Haakon rose.

Dingus followed his eyes,
and gulped. Yatan stood between two pines, flanked by four goons this time, two
on each side. Someone, Dingus didn’t know who, let out a tiny cheep of fear.

“Time to pay up,” Yatan
said, no pleasantries, no kindness in it.

Dingus got slowly to his
feet, adjusting his grip on the knife he’d been using to slice vegetables. His
hunting knife. “Not in front of the kids.”

“You don’t have my money,
do you, Dingus?”

“I said, not in front—”

“Get me the right hand. I
want the one with the leaf.”

Dingus’s stomach flipped
and took a dive for his toes, but he tried not to let it show. “Come take it.
If you can.” He let the sunlight flash off his knife.

A hand came down on his
shoulder, and he damn near stabbed Haakon in the ribs, he was that jumpy.

The sailor caught his
knife wrist like it was nothing. “Come on, Yatan,” Haakon said, moving the
weapon aside. “This isn’t necessary. We—”

Yatan snapped, “What are
you doing here?”

“My job,” Haakon told
him, sounding easy, but he gripped Dingus’s shoulder hard.

“You’ve no right to operate
in my territory!” Yatan shrilled. Behind Dingus’s back, he heard Kessa
whispering, and a rustling in the pines: the Ishlings climbing up.

Haakon made an apathetic
gesture. “I’m not earning. My boss sent me to watch over the boy. How was she
to know you had a bone to pick with him?”

“She should know better
than to send her little messenger boys to dick with my income stream!”

“He’s not acting for
Wynn. She sent me as a favor to a friend—but I’ll write her. Maybe she’ll come,
or I’ll sit down with you. Let’s clear this up now, between us.” Haakon went
into his purse and brought out a handful of tiny coins.

Dingus couldn’t stand
it—that all this was happening in front of the kids like he’d said he didn’t
want—that he’d been cut out of the discussion, dismissed as “the boy”—that
Yatan was getting paid at all. He pulled free of Haakon’s grip and slapped the
money out of the sailor’s hand. Silvery disks scattered onto the pine needles,
the real thing, shining platinum emperors. “He’s not owed a damn thing!”

Yatan hissed. “I don’t
want your cunt boss’s money. I want yours, boy. It’s a matter of principle.”

“Then you should
understand why you won’t see shit from me! Even if those kids were making
money, it wouldn’t be yours to take! You can’t—”

“I have many fine things
that say I most certainly
can
.”

“No, you can’t!” Dingus
yelled. “I won’t
let
you!” It was hot all of a sudden, so hot, and his
feet carried him forward to lean over and roar into Yatan’s wizened face. “They
don’t know how to tell you no—so I’ll say it for ’em! You—”

“Hey, fuck off the boss!”
said one of the heavies, and made a grab for him. Dingus stepped back quick,
into a springy stance, with the knife ready in his hand: blade out, pointing to
the ground. Sweet fire raced along his veins from the base of his neck. His
muscles screamed for air. His chest worked like a bellows, and there was Yatan
with lips peeled back off his teeth.

Dingus lunged. One of the
goons loomed up in his way, screaming monkey sounds. He opened the son of a
bitch, crotch to sternum, one hard upward slash, and when the blood hit his
face, he laughed. Behind him, the low stream of a human voice, angry and
biting. He’d deal with it—Yatan first. He jammed the knife down into the next
one’s face, once, again. Bones split, and he caught that sweetish brain-fluid
smell. Laughing, he flung the knife aside, dug his fingers into the rent, all
unheeding the goon’s last twitches.

He flexed, cracking the
skull wide, and all the brains spilled out and he
laughed,
he licked
blood off his lips. The smell of old-man piss came to his nose. He felt so
fucking good, and, when he pounced and took the next, better still, his whole
body singing with the motion. His teeth sank through fur and skin; his mouth
filled with hot blood. The Ish writhed and shrieked under him, beating at his
head. He tore away the skin, spat, bit deeper. Shivered head to toe with
rapture at the taste pulsing over his tongue.

A hand twisted in his
hair, pulled him away, up. It didn’t hurt, but he didn’t like being controlled.
A hard arm locked around his throat, pressure at the back of his neck. His body
bent, and he fought, clawing desperately at the arm. Panic bolted through his
brain, smashed against his anger. Bloody flesh under his nails. He thrashed,
but the arm held firm, and that man-voice came again, loud. He slammed himself
back and back, but then—

Dingus came to with blood
in his mouth, half on top of a corpse. He smelled death, but the first thing he
saw was Tai, huddled on the ground with his knees up around his ears, and
watching.

“Hi, Dingus,” he peeped.

Dingus groaned. He felt
like shit, but he pushed himself up on the heels of his hands and sat back on
his knees. His shirt stuck to his skin, wet and chilly.

“Why didn’t you tell me
this?” Haakon raged, a short distance away. Behind, in the camp.

“What could you do about
it?” Kessa asked, shaken but reasonable.

“Dammit all to hell!
Nothing!” The heavy footfalls came, Haakon pacing a little. “Your brother is a
fool! Do you hear me, Dingus?”

But Dingus gave no sign
that he’d heard. He laid his hands in his lap, staring at the palms and feeling
all sideways, muzzy, fucked up. The kids had seen him—that was all he could
think. The kids had seen him lose his mind, and now nothing would ever be the
same.

“Your brother is an
idiot!
”
Haakon repeated. “He is fast approaching the end of his road! If he won’t turn
aside, all he’ll find is death. It’s too late already, I’m thinking, killing
Yatan’s men like that!”

“We don’t have any
money.” Kessa’s voice was small and shaky now, like she’d cry, and Dingus’s
eyes burned. What had he done? So much he’d put on her. All he’d wanted to do
was help. He’d wanted to keep his Oath. More than anything, he’d wanted that,
and now everything had come apart in his hands.

He wanted Vandis. Like
never before, he wanted Vandis to come and help him, and now—the thought
pressed him down into a little ball—he’d never see Vandis again. He’d die here,
die failing his Ishlings.

“I know that, girl,”
Haakon was saying. “I’ll make him a loan, but you have to convince him to beg
Yatan’s forgiveness and for pity’s sake,
pay
the old nithing!”

“He won’t.”

Even to the cost of my
life,
Dingus thought.

“Then all of us are as
good as dead!
Talk
to him!”

Silence. Not even the kids
stirred, except for Tai, creeping close. Dingus heard the Ishling move, and in
a moment, felt a tiny hand’s touch on his shoulder blade. He opened his mouth
to say something, but all that came out was a shuddering cry. He wrapped his
arms over his head.

“Guys, we’re moving,”
Kessa said, in a clear voice. “I’ve got something I need to do. When I get
back, I want everything ready to go.”

Zeeta said, “Yes, Kessa,
yes. We is do that.”

“Good.”

Her steps passed him a
moment later and receded off the peninsula. Haakon came close then, and started
dragging something away through the needles. A body.

“Time to clean up your
mess,” he said, his voice a stinging lash.

“You let him go,” Dingus
said dully, and pulled in tighter, ignoring the sounds of Ishlings breaking camp.
He could do no more. Tai leaned a warm, furry back against his side, and they
were there for a long time.