Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Can you pick up their trail, Grant?’
He never really smiled much, but there was grim humour in his gaze now. ‘Oh, there’s precious little I can’t track, after twenty years on the estate, ma’am.’ His
reins hung loose in his hands and he guided his steed with his knees. Emily’s own mount, a chestnut mare that knew her well, tagged docilely along behind. Emily rode astride like a man, her
dress hitched up on both sides. The place and time did not lend themselves to the social niceties of side saddle, and privately she was proud of the approving look Grant had given her. He
worshipped practicality, did Grant.
Their horses were taking them down the old path towards town, Grant’s narrowed eyes darting left and right.
‘Grant . . .’ Emily paused before asking it. ‘How old are you, exactly?’
He gave a gruff little laugh. ‘If the recruiting sergeants come asking, I turned fifty-one two years back.’
She frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound very patriotic.’ Grant was fit and strong, whatever age he was. If he had asked, as Poldry had asked and been refused, the army would
undoubtedly have taken him.
‘Maybe I’m not, then, ma’am.’ Grant reined his mount in, staring keenly at the trees alongside the road. This limb of the forest was all new woodland, planted in
Emily’s grandfather’s day, but towards the Wolds it was thicker and older, a deepwood that the brigands had once frequented, before they were driven away.
‘Don’t you love our King, Grant?’ she asked. She had never really spoken much to him before. He was a simple, silent presence, always a reliable pair of skilled hands.
‘As much as the next man,’ he said. ‘I did my fighting years ago. Overseas, against the Hellics. I got no wish to go playing that game again, ma’am.’
‘What . . . what was it like?’
His expression was unreadable. ‘Like hundreds of men I didn’t know were trying to kill me, ma’am.’ He urged his horse off the trail and in between the trees. ‘Looks
like they came off here. Weren’t that long ago, either, for your sister always did dawdle. I reckon it’d be best to have the guns out, ma’am.’
Emily nodded, and watched him slip down off his horse to load them. The long musket came first, which he handed to her after setting it with ball, wadding and powder. After that he primed the
blunderbuss, filling the flared muzzle with a handful of birdshot. Last came the sleek, vulpine horse pistol; its stock engraved with gold, it was a present from some long-ago business associate of
her father’s.
She could not take her eyes off it, as Grant’s slow, sure fingers tamped the ball and wadding down the barrel, and tipped a measure of powder into the pan. This weapon had a presence of
its own. It gleamed darkly with memories and family history.
When he was done, he tried to hand it to her, too, but she would not take it, so he thrust it through his belt and got back into the saddle, holding the blunderbuss barrel-up, like a lance.
‘Reckon we’re ready, ma’am.’
‘How far ahead are they?’ she asked as they got underway.
‘At a good pace, we’ll overhaul them in a half hour, ma’am. No more.’
Please, God, let her be safe. Stupid, foolish girl, please let her be safe.
She remembered the Ghyer. Before his infamy had become known, when he had still held on to his double life as a ranger and tracker, the Ghyer had once visited her father. He had been all smiles,
a lean and handsome man with long, flowing locks and a neatly pointed goatee. He had spoken with her father of the emerging bandit problem, and Emily and Mary had peeked at him over the tabletop
and thought him very good-looking and graceful.
She summoned the scene back now – or as best she could through the clouding years that stood between. There was the Ghyer leaning back in his chair, with a glass of wine in one hand. There
was her father, his stern and regular face nodding carefully, a smoking pipe raised to his lips. It had been a long time, shockingly long, since his living face had intruded into her thoughts.
She had beaten her demons, she believed, driven them away, but instead they had been waiting inside her, all this while. They had known their time would come.
They were much deeper into the trees, where the land began to rise up in the undulating curves of the Wolds, when Grant reined in again and tutted at the ground.
‘What is it?’
‘The black’s taken a thorn. Bloody fool doesn’t know how to ride a good horse,’ the big man muttered, hurriedly adding, ‘begging your pardon for the language,
ma’am.’
‘You use whatever language you feel appropriate,’ she assured him. ‘So what does that mean?’
‘It means he’ll ruin the horse if he takes her much further.’
‘But they’ll go slower, and we’ll catch them up sooner?’
Grant made a non-committal sound in response, as if that was quite secondary. ‘I’ll take it out of his hide, ma’am, if the black goes lame.’
‘If we catch them, you’re quite welcome to. I might take it out of Alice’s hide myself. What can the girl have been thinking?’
Grant touched his heels to his mount’s flanks and they were moving again. ‘Can’t say, ma’am, but she’s not been happy for a while, that one.’
‘I suppose—’ but Emily never got to reveal what she supposed, for a woman’s cry rang out, high and clear, through the trees.
‘Alice!’ Emily gasped.
‘Easy, ma’am.’ Grant stood up in his stirrups, looking first one way and then another. ‘Came from that way, I reckon.’
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded. ‘Round here the hillsides echo it all around you, ma’am. What you hears never coming from where you think. I’d stake my job that it’s this way, though.’
He hunched forward over his carefully pacing horse. ‘Lots of little dells and hollows all around here. Any of ’em would make a good camp, ma’am.’
Emily tried straining her ears, to make out something else from her sister, and it seemed to her that she could. Faint and jumbled, but there were distant words audible through the trees –
and it was Alice’s voice, she was sure.
‘Grant—’
‘I know, ma’am.’ He continued to guide his horse forward, but she noticed he had the blunderbuss resting across the pommel of his saddle now. She tried to get the awkward
length of her musket into the same position, but the barrel seemed terribly heavy, dragging itself towards the ground all the time.
The sound of her sister’s voice continued, in a long, complaining tirade. Evidently she had got tired of Griff, whoever he really was. Emily caught odd words now, and knew that Alice was
demanding to go home, was criticizing her companion and her locale in as many shades of invective as she could muster. There was never anyone like Alice for complaining, Emily thought. If Griff had
known that, then perhaps he wouldn’t have bothered.
They were closer now. Alice’s voice bounced through the trees: ‘. . . and you dress like a beggar, for all your pretensions, and you drag me to this misbegotten spot, this horrible
dank place, and what I was thinking of, I don’t know—’
Quite.
But then Emily heard a man’s laughter and she went cold when she heard other voices joining it. Three at least – or more. Not just one abductor, but a pack of
them.
And Mr Northway’s warning came back to her.
‘Do you . . . remember the Ghyer, Grant?’ she whispered.
‘That I do. I went out with your father that one time. That was a rough business, ma’am.’
‘I remember . . .’ She had only been aged ten at the time, but she remembered clearly. She had been allowed to stay up well past midnight for her father’s return. He had
eventually arrived, flushed with success, leading a troop of eight soldiers behind him (and hadn’t there been twelve when they set out?), and beside him was a Warlock: a wizard of the King.
Together they had routed the Ghyer and smashed his little corps of brigands, but the man himself had escaped.
And now he is back, and he has more men, and he has my sister.
A killer let loose in a land of women and children, the Ghyer’s thoughts would be turning to exacting a slow revenge
now.
‘Reckon it’s him, ma’am?’ Grant asked her.
‘I cannot think who else it might be.’ She tried to take strength from the musket, but it seemed a leaden, useless thing to her.
Grant stopped his horse and nodded to himself. ‘Well, ma’am, it’s for you to say. You want to go on, then I’m your man.’ His glance towards her was nothing but
simple sincerity.
‘I am very lucky to have you, Grant.’
He shrugged. ‘Grammaine gave me a home, ma’am, after I was done soldiering. There’s no easy way some debts can be paid.’
A blur of thoughts, like a flurry of bird wings, passed across her mind. How many men were there? She could not guess. What would they do if they caught her? She could only imagine, and her
imagination surely understated the horrors and the cruelty. What did such men always do to the poor women who fell into their clutches? And yet if she turned back now, then they would do it to
Alice. Vain and foolish Alice. Simple, trusting Alice.
I am stronger than she. I could endure such torments, perhaps, but she never could.
She had no idea in her head of what the next moments might bring, only that she had to act, because knowing she had not would be worse than facing the brigands themselves.
‘We go on,’ she decided, and wrestled the musket into a more comfortable position, virtually resting it atop her horse’s head.
And so it was that the two of them rode into the camp of the Ghyer.
The brigand had made his resting place in a hollow within the woods, where generations of woodcutting and charcoal-burning from the hill farmers had eaten a great bite into the
trees. It was in this bite, ringed on three sides by looming forest, that the Ghyer lurked. On the fourth side, a winding track led up into the woods, and then off towards Chalcaster, taking in a
score of farms and shepherds’ cotes on the way.
There was a flurry of startled movement as Emily and Grant emerged from the trees, but it could have been worse. That was the thought that occurred to Emily only later:
It could have been
worse.
Here was not the army of bad men and villains that the Ghyer had once amassed, that her father and the King’s wizard had destroyed.
There were seven men encamped in the hollow, slouching around the scattered ash of a dead fire. Beyond them, the two Grammaine horses shared a hobble with a bent-backed farm nag. Emily’s
eyes were only for Alice, though, and there she was, in her patriotic red dress.
Her sister’s face was so racked with emotion when she saw Emily that for a second it was impossible to read. Had she been ravished? What had they done to her? Then Alice gasped loudly, and
Emily saw pure and utter relief there, magnified to such a size that it had been briefly unrecognizable.
I am in time
, she thought.
Just in time.
Alice was not tied, but there were men close on either side of her. A purpled bruise was starting across one of the girl’s cheeks. Emily found that her musket, of its own accord, now
pointed in the direction of her sister’s captors.
Only then did she spare the men themselves any attention.
There was Griff, she saw, on Alice’s right. The others were men of similar stamp: ragged runaways, refugees from the war. A pack of wretched criminals who had nothing to lose and for whom
begging was too lowly an occupation.
Two of them had muskets, now pointed at Grant and herself. Against them, the muzzle of Grant’s blunderbuss seemed broad enough to take in the entire clearing. Knives had sprung into the
hands of some of the brigands, and a woodsman’s long-hafted axe to the grip of another. One only had not drawn a weapon, although there was a pistol thrust into his sash.
‘Well, now, you have your father’s face, in a certain light, and obviously his bravery, although not his wisdom or his friends. What do you hope to gain?’
She studied his features, recalling the smooth and charming man her childhood recalled to her memory. He met her eyes a moment, then perhaps he saw himself through them, for suddenly he looked
away again.
He had been the king of the woods, the lord of brigands, notorious outlaw and highwayman. There had been ballads, plays and stories about him. The Ghyer, deadly and delicate as a spider, fierce
as a mad wolf, clever as a weasel. But that had been fifteen years ago and more.
He was still lean, gaunt even. His cheeks were hollow, and his lithe frame was all angles. His face was pocked and dashed with scars, all the baggage of a long life spent amongst rough company.
He still had that spike of a beard that, together with his cropped hair, was now white peppered with grey. There were liver spots on the backs of his hands. Were he a respectable citizen, they
would not have drafted him for the army.
The corner of his mouth twitched, and she knew that her thoughts must be plainly visible on her face. His expression was not of anger but of pain.
‘Not so very much to look at, am I?’ he said, and his voice sounded as old as he, not the easy lilt remembered from her childhood. It made her wonder what her father would have
looked like now, had he lived. Such was her shock that she had no sense of the danger here, of the guns. A fraught, wire-taut stand-off was strung out between them like a tightrope, and she walked
it without even thinking.
The Ghyer made a gesture, almost dismissive, to take in his men and his camp, with just an echo of the grace that she remembered. ‘It’s not the band I had when your father came down
on me with his dozen and some, and his wizard’s fire, and put paid to all my little dreams of empire.’
She said nothing, but her musket was now pointing at him directly. He looked at it and sneered disdainfully. ‘It is enough,’ he said. ‘In a land where all the men have gone to
war, my half-dozen is all the army I require.’
‘You are despicable. How can you do this to your own country in its time of need?’ she asked. A quiet current of laughter passed through his men.
‘Lascanne has never needed me,’ he replied. ‘Now put your toy away before you break it.’
She tightened her hold on the musket, wondering how it would feel to fire. Grant’s horse stamped nervously, but he kept his own aim steady, his solid face expressionless. The two brigands
with firearms shifted unhappily.