The Silvered (11 page)

If the Soothsayers were right, the carriages they’d stopped had been the last out of the city. If the Soothsayers were right, the only people they’d meet on the road back toward Bercarit would be tired and not likely to challenge four Imperial soldiers even if they were armed.
But
not likely
was not a sure thing, particularly not when Soothsayers were involved, and Reiter wasn’t going to lose a man by assuming the citizens of Aydori wouldn’t fight back. They needed to move fast in order to catch the sixth mage so they’d stay on the road, but they’d keep their weapons ready.

“Shoot if they look at us wrong, Cap?”

“Shoot if they aim a weapon at us,” he snapped. “Musket, pistol, cannon if it comes to it. Otherwise, leave them alone.”

“Crossbow?”

He turned to frown at Armin, who shrugged without breaking stride.

“Da’s got a crossbow in the shop, from
his
days in the army. He’d take it if he had to haul ass out of town.”

Reiter had once seen an old-timer put a crossbow quarrel through a plank. It might take forever to cock it, but a loaded crossbow was as deadly a weapon as a loaded musket. “Fine. If they’re pointing a crossbow, shoot.”

“What about a rock, Cap? You could get killed with a rock,” Chard protested over Armin’s laughter.

“Not if it hit your head,” Best jeered.

“More running, less talking,” Reiter growled.

“But, Cap…”

“A lot less talking from you, Chard.”

None of them seemed to have any trouble with the idea of hunting down another young woman and dragging her back to the empire. She was a mage, she was an enemy, and they were at war. The mages of Aydori lay with beasts and that made them…less. His men had their orders; their only concern was following them.

He gave the orders.

The beast had gold hoops in its ears. Her ears.

You have your orders, too,
he reminded himself. And they were at war.

They heard a child complaining, high-pitched and peevish, as they rounded a corner and that was the only warning they got before coming face-to-face with a small family trudging up the road toward Trouge. Trudging up the road away from the inevitable advance of the Imperial army.

As the closer of the two younger women ran for the cart and the
children, Reiter wished he was still a part of that faceless mass. Killing soldiers was one thing, they knew why they were there, but he had no stomach for killing civilians.

Suddenly in the sights of four muskets, she froze, both hands in the air. Her eyes were brown. No mage marks.

“I can ask her if she saw the mage, Cap,” Chard murmured.

“You speak Aydori?”

“I can say
girl
and
how much
.”

Of course he could. Probably in the same sentence. “Stick with girl.”

The old woman snarled and spat at Chard’s single word. The woman with her hands in the air lowered them, wrapped them around her body, and shook her head. The other one stumbled back, stopped by the crosspiece of the cart.

“They think,” Armin began, but Chard cut him off.

“I know.” He shook his head in turn, and ran in place.

The youngest of the children shrieked with laughter. The two elder all but sat on him to shut him up.

The old woman spat again, but the one by the crosspiece glanced up at the children and pointed down the road.

“Captain, if they have a weapon…”

“You run slow enough you’re still in range by the time they find it and load it, I’ll shoot you myself.” Reiter lowered his musket. Aydori eyes tracked the movement. “Let’s go.”

“I’d do the one on the left,” Chard observed, falling in behind Reiter.

“You’d do a diseased Pyrahnian whore,” Best grunted.

“If the price was right,” Chard admitted cheerfully.

Imperial infantry didn’t run into battle; the empire expanded and war waited for them. Oh, they’d all done some running—toward the front, away from the front, for their lives as one of Colonel Korshan’s rockets went off in a random direction—but Reiter couldn’t remember the last time he’d pounded down a road like a child escaping chores. Breathe in for two strides, out for two. Under his pack, his uniform stuck to his skin.

“We running all the way to Bercarit, Cap?”

“If we have to.”

They had to.

They took a breather on the last rise overlooking the city. It seemed calm, peaceful even. It reminded Reiter of Karis, the empire’s capital, in miniature. Gridded streets with frequent squares of green surrounding the city core—modern, built to design.

Armin snorted and said what they were all thinking. “Not burning yet.”

“Swords must be taking their own sweet fucking time at the bor…Cap!”

A flick of gray skirts against paler gray stone.

“I see her.” Reiter pulled the tangle from his pocket, thought he felt it tug against the end of his finger before it fell to hang and sway. They were still too far from the mage for it to take her. “Come on.”

By the time they reached level ground where the road to Trouge turned into a wide avenue that split the city in half, she was gone.

If she was heading to warn her beast, she was heading toward the fighting. That meant they’d have to cross the city after her.

“Stay close to the walls. Someone heads toward us, you shoot.” The people who remained were likely thieves, taking advantage of the evacuation to fill their pockets and more than willing to take on four Imperial soldiers far from the might of the army.

“What about children, Cap?”

“No one’s left their children behind.”

“But what about puppies? What if they left the little beasts behind to guard…”

“We don’t shoot children!”

Gold earrings…

“Just as glad to hear that, actually. I like puppies. You know, the kind that aren’t likely to turn into a…”

Reiter stopped so suddenly, he felt Best’s musket hit his back before he could stop. When he turned, Best took a step back, Armin took a step away from Chard, and Chard looked confused. “Private Chard.” His voice was a threat he didn’t bother to find words for.

“Captain?”

“Shut up.”

Chard’s default squint widened, and he swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

A quick glance at Best and Armin showed the other two soldiers staring into the city like there was actually something to see.

Drawing in a deep breath, Reiter let it out slowly and…

Honeysuckle.

It was barely spring at this altitude. The honeysuckle on his mother’s cottage bloomed in high summer.

Mage-craft.

It didn’t take long to find the spray of flowers dipping over the wall and less time for the four of them to climb it and drop down the other side. Last time Reiter had gone over a wall, enemy soldiers had been shooting at him. This time, they found a woman’s bootprint heading toward the water. It could have belonged to anyone—there’d probably been women in the house that morning—but the honeysuckle suggested otherwise.

They reached the dock in time to see a small boat bob out of sight around one of the larger river wharfs. The person in it appeared to be attempting to steer with a single oar.

“Why’s she not using mage-craft, then?” Armin wondered.

Best snorted. “She’s Earth-mage, idiot. Made the vine blossom, didn’t she? Nothing she can do about water. A boat that small in water running that fast, that’s like a leaf in a fucking gale.”

“What do we do, Cap?”

Reiter touched the tangle, shoved back into his jacket pocket. “We follow the river.”

The oar twisted and bucked in her hands, dragged left then right by the river. Mirian fought to keep the tiny boat from running into the end of wharfs, from being smashed to pieces by a log nearly as big around as the boat—escaped from the lumberyards above the town, the deeper part of her mind observed while the surface bits jumped frantically from dealing with one near disaster to the next.

Finally, curving past the center of Bercarit, the river slowed and the oar stilled. Arms and shoulders aching, Mirian relaxed her grip enough to get blood flow back to her fingertips. On the shore to the left, the Lady’s Park slipped past and she realized, given the distance she’d covered, she couldn’t have been traveling as insanely fast as it had felt. As she watched, the rough land beside the park that gave the Lord his due became warehouses, each with their own pier and some with broad double doors that came all the way down to the water and likely hid interior lagoons…ponds…catchment basins?
She had no idea what such a thing would be called and, right at the moment, didn’t care.

She jerked as a voice yelled out from the shore, and flattened against the seat as far as her grip on the oar allowed, then straightened, calling herself an idiot. An Imperial soldier wouldn’t call out to her, he’d shoot. Stupid of her to think the city had completely emptied, that all the thousands of people had left. Scanning the line of buildings, she couldn’t see anyone and, whoever it was, they didn’t yell again. If she could have spotted the warehouse worker or even an owner foolishly staying to try and protect his property against Imperial might, she would have landed and told them what she’d seen, and she wouldn’t have been alone any longer with the knowledge that the Mage-pack had been taken.

Except she had no idea how to get the boat to shore.

Tightening her grip on the oar, she swept it back and forth as hard as she could and managed to turn the bow slightly. Relieved by this small indication of control, Mirian sagged on the seat, breathing heavily. It would take some work, but she could…

Three huge, wooden squares rose out of the river in front of her.

The forms for the new bridge.

The newspaper she’d read—had it only been yesterday morning?—said that, with the rough work finished on the piers, the stonemasons would begin laying the dressed stone as soon as the spring runoff ended.

Her boat was at the forms between one breath and the next. Mirian pushed the oar hard to the right. The boat twisted, kept twisting, and slammed into one enormous upright, the impact knocking her from the seat. Struggling against already wet skirts made even heavier by the water sloshing around the bottom of the boat, Mirian heaved herself up onto her knees, grabbing for the wildly swinging oar.

It clipped her on the bottom of the chin. Her teeth slammed together, and she dropped back to the bottom of the boat.

The boat spun again, wood scraping against wood, then bobbed free.

The oar swung past Mirian’s vision one last time.

She thought she heard the splash as it hit the water. Might have been the sound of the water rushing past the cradles.

It seemed hard to care.

Mirian made a face as she swallowed a mouthful of blood, then blinked up at the sky, knowing she needed to sit up but not entirely certain why.

The thing she was lying on dipped suddenly sideways and she got an unexpected face full of icy water.

Boat!

She was in a boat, on the river, on her way to the border and the battle to tell Lord Hagen about the Mage-pack. And she’d lost the only way she had of controlling the boat’s progress. And her head hurt. Gingerly moving her jaw, she swallowed another mouthful of blood, unable to overcome society’s stricture against women spitting regardless of how unobserved she might currently be. The wave that had brought her back to herself had soaked the last dry bits of her clothes. Scrambling back up onto the low seat, Mirian noted how heavy even the finest wool got when wet and how unpleasant it felt against the skin.

With nothing to do but hope, she stayed afloat as the eastern half of Bercarit slid past and tried to make sense of what she’d seen that morning.

She’d heard the empire—so omnipresent almost no one bothered with the full name—had begun accepting women in the ranks because of its need for a constant supply of soldiers. Caught between expulsion from the university and her mother’s social expectations, she’d somewhat wistfully thought that joining the army would solve all her problems. But women of Aydori didn’t go to war. The female half of both Pack and Mage-pack were the last line of defense. In a worst case scenario, she’d been taught that the function of the Aydori military was to delay the Imperial army long enough for the women to get to Trouge. Carved out of the mountain by ancient Earth-mages, history said the walls of the capital couldn’t be breached. Not only would the unpredictable mountain weather keep sieges short, but there were rumored to be secret ways out of the capital and a besieging army would be whittled away, night by night.

For all the years Mirian had been in school, that worst case scenario had involved the Kresentian Empire and the Imperial army.

If a dozen or so members of the Imperial army captured the women of the Mage-pack before they got to Trouge—and killed as
many Pack as possible, she admitted even as memory skittered past the bodies lying on the road—then the defense of Trouge would be weakened should Lord Hagen have died at the border.

Emperor Leopald wanted it all, Mirian reflected, holding her wet jacket open and away from her shirtwaist in the hope that one or both might begin to dry. Everyone knew the emperor wouldn’t stop until he had nothing left to conquer.