Northlight (20 page)

“How are your feet?” Kardith's voice jolted him out of his thoughts. He hadn't noticed her drop back to run beside him.

“My what?”

“Any blisters?” The Ranger's cheeks were flushed, her coppery curls slicked to her skull.

He stared at her reddened, sweaty face. “I don't...think so... Not sure...yet.”

“Good!”

“I didn't think...after yesterday...there was...any...new place...to hurt...but...I was...wrong.”

“Nothin' wrong...with your sense...of humor.”

 Terricel kept running. Although it seemed they ran for hours, in reality it was only for a half-hour at a time, alternated with riding. It didn't take too many repetitions before he learned to settle into an even pace, his shoulders relaxed and his knees taking much of the jarring shock. His thighs and chest would ache and burn each time, but he knew it wouldn't last forever. And he understood, without having to ask, the point of constantly changing the way he used his muscles. Running was a very different activity from riding, and he couldn't know which he'd need once he got to the Ridge.

They slept that night at another inn, smaller and emptier than the first. Although there was no sign of the man on the black horse, they avoided the public areas. In their single room, Terricel ate a surprising amount of the unsalted bean and potato stew before applying Kardith's liniment to an entirely new set of sore muscles and falling into a dreamless sleep.

The next morning made Terricel's previous agonies seem like mere twinges. Somehow he managed to climb on his horse without screaming. They left the main road, which swung south toward Haycarp, and took the smaller, northeastern fork. They passed that night in the barn of a small farmstead. Here Kardith bargained and Terricel paid for a sack of coarse flour, some salt-cured mutton, and additional grain for the horses. The farmer, looking pleased to have a little unexpected cash, added a loaf of stale bread and a double handful of last year's dried apples.

They led their mounts into the snug-walled barn and Kardith turned on her pocket-sized battery lamp. A sturdy horse, little bigger than a pony, and two milk-sheep stood tethered along the far wall, contentedly chewing. The air was warm with the heat of their bodies and sweet with the smell of alfalfa hay. With a sigh, Terricel threw himself on a pile of bedding straw.

“No matter how tired you are, you always take care of your horse first,” Kardith said sternly. “And since you have so much of your misspent youth to make up for, you can do both of them.”

Biting back a curse, Terricel heaved himself to his feet and in a few moments was deep in learning how to take off the horses' gear, pick out their hooves for stones, and check for minor injuries. The gray mare snorted and tossed her head as he slipped off her hackamore.

“Why do you use this thing instead of a regular bridle?” he asked Kardith.

Kardith picked up a handful of straw and began plaiting it into a thick strand. “See the scars around her mouth?” she said without looking up.

Terricel saw the mare, her ears pinned back along her lathered neck, her eyes white-rimmed. Ropy, red-streaked foam hung in threads from the shanks of the steel bit. He heard a man's rough voice cursing as he yanked on the reins. Whip leather cracked the air like a split of lightning. The bright smell of the mare's blood mingled with the stench of her terror.

Quickly Terricel thrust the images from his mind. The gray mare was watching him, nostrils wide as goblets. He murmured to her as he had to Etch's mare and held out a handful of the dried apples. She sniffed his open palm suspiciously, her ears twitching. Then she gathered up the fruit in a single mouthful. Her lips were soft and nimble against his skin. He patted her neck and laughed when she nuzzled his chest for more.

Kardith shoved the plaited straw into his hands. “This is called a wisp,” she said. “You use it to rub your horse down. Like this — ” She grabbed his hands and demonstrated with a grip powerful enough to make him wince. “Hard! It helps both circulation and digestion.”

“Mine,” he muttered, “or the horse's?” But he bent to the task with a will, leaning all his weight into each stroke until his arms and shoulders ached as much as his legs.

Over the next days, Terricel began to adjust to long periods of riding, until he no longer felt uncomfortable in the saddle. The road dwindled into a trail, snaking up through steepening hills. What farms they passed looked poor, the pastures dry and rocky. For long distances they rode or walked over terrain too rugged for a trot. Scrub gave way to scraggly groves of softwood-ash and willow, weedy marginal trees, and finally to forest.

As long as they'd been passing farms and pastures, the land had looked familiar to Terricel. He'd traveled through similar country on picnics with friends or visiting Gaylinn's family in Raimuth, in the fertile valley along the Vision River. But the woods were another experience entirely, something almost alien. The trees and underbrush vibrated with colors he'd never seen before, hues of green so deep they looked almost blue. The air was cool and tangy with the odors of wild herbs, fungi and years of dense, moldering debris.

The trail, winding up hillsides and down clefts where tiny swift streams bit deep through the sandstone, often seemed to Terricel to be little more than a product of Kardith's imagination. As the gelding slipped and scrambled, Terricel developed new skills in the saddle.

Kardith pointed out the signs of animal and human traffic, dangers from fire and mud slide. She told Terricel about the medicinal uses of rosemarie, bat-bane and feverfew, the deadly ropeweed that could kill a man in only a few minutes, the soapy, cleansing root of the corrisenth, the edible greens and tubers. Gradually Terricel began to recognize some of the things she showed him.

Kardith nodded her approval of his selection of a campsite, a fairly level clearing on top of a little rise, yet surrounded by thick, low bar-brushes to give shelter from wind, with stones and dry wood for a fire. He unpacked the horses, watered them from the creek that rushed through the gully to the west, and spread out grain for them on their saddle blankets.

“Leave the tent,” she said. “It's mild enough, and you should get used to the feel of the forest at night. Let's see your fire.” She watched him build it as she'd described earlier, then rearranged the whole thing and proceeded to cook dinner.

Terricel sat down and pulled off his boots, inspecting them for wear. “Tell me,” he said, “do I stand any chance at all?”

“Chance, he asks? Hunh!”

“So I've learned how to unsaddle a horse and to pick a site for tonight. That doesn't mean I know what I need to.” He put the boots back on.

Kardith handed him a plate of panbread laced with

salt-mutton. “Want to know what I think? What I think doesn't matter. You want to go running back home? Fine. There's the trail. You want to find Avi? I'll teach you what I can. Like I said, what I think doesn't matter.”

“I had no idea how much I didn't know.”

One corner of her mouth twisted upward. “That's half of what you've got in your favor.”

“What's the other half?”

She shook her head. “You don't
have
another half. Not yet, anyway.”

Nothing, there was nothing. None of the normal night noises Terricel had learned to listen for — no high-voiced twitterbats, no moonflies, no small creatures grubbing about in the undergrowth. He lay motionless in his sleeproll, straining for a trace of whatever jarred him from sleep. Above him, outlined by the starkly silhouetted branches, Harth's twin moons floated serenely in a haze of their own milky light.

Yet something had woken him, perhaps the unnatural silence. He lifted his head for a better look. Then he froze as his ears caught a hushed crinkle of dry leaves underfoot.

A whispered voice, male and harsh, cut through the darkness. “...both asleep...”

Terricel slowly lowered his head and tried to think — anyone with honest intentions would have hailed the camp openly. What should he do?

A weapon, he needed a weapon! His single-edged utility knife was stowed in his travel pack with the rest of his gear, for all the good it would do him. Yet he had to take some action. What action? Leap up and confront the intruder with his bare hands?

“It's the boy we're after,” said a different voice. There were at least two of them, then.

“Better take the Ranger out first.”

Kardith!
Terricel's eyes darted to the spot where she'd laid out her sleeproll. He could just make out a long, rounded form. It looked natural enough, but he sensed it was only wadded blankets. Kardith herself was somewhere close, waiting and watching.

He forced himself to lie still. If he moved, if he seemed to be anything but sound asleep, if he even breathed too hard, he might alert the men and Kardith's advantage would be gone.

Seconds stretched by, marked only by the cadence of his heart.

This can't be happening.
But it was happening. It was happening to him as he lay alone in the moonlight.

Out of the corner of his eye, Terricel caught a shadowy figure as it breached the perimeter of the camp. He held his breath. Unlike at the funeral riot, when things had happened so fast he didn't see them until they were over, every movement seemed exquisitely prolonged.

The man crept toward Kardith's bedroll, closer and closer to where she should have been sleeping. The faintest hairline of light glinted on the edge of his knife.

As lithe as one of the great hunting cats of the eastern steppe, Kardith spiraled up from the earth behind him. Her long-knife curved through the air to slash noiselessly through the tendons behind his knees.

The man screamed and arched backward through the chill night air. Moonlight flashed on the flat of Kardith's blade. She stepped in and thrust upward, toward his heart, in a single swift motion. His scream ended abruptly, a muted gurgle and then silence. He toppled like an axed tree with the long-knife buried in his chest.

 Kardith made no move to recover her knife. Instead, she melted back into the shadows. No whisper of breath or rustle of clothing came from the empty space where she'd been. One of the horses whickered, a thin anxious sound, and swished its tail.

Where the hell was the other man? Terricel dared to lift his head again. Suddenly he heard the whisper of a knife as it pierced the air, and then a thump directly above him. An inert body landed flat across his chest.

For a single horrified moment, he couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't think. He opened his mouth and drew in the metallic reek of fresh blood. Images flooded through his mind — Pateros, Gaylinn, the gray mare...

He clawed at the weight on his chest. He tried to scream, but nothing came out.

Then the suffocating weight was gone and Kardith was hauling the dead man by the legs toward the fire pit.

Terricel rolled on his side, bringing up his knees in a reflexive fetal curve. He gulped ice-edged air through chattering teeth. He wanted to crawl off into the darkness and empty his stomach, but he was too dizzy to sit up. His hands felt wet and sticky. He was glad he couldn't see them.

“It's the boy we're after...”

The whispered words echoed through his bones. He could have been lying beside the banked embers while his life's blood thickened and froze.

He had to make himself move, no matter how he felt. Throat burning, he pushed himself into a sitting position. He clamped his teeth together and breathed hard through his nose. The whirling in his stomach surged and subsided. He dared to look up. Beside the fire, Kardith had pulled her long-knife from the first corpse and was wiping it clean on his shirt.

“I owe you my life,” he said shakily.

“Nothing but a pair of Mother-damned amateurs, if you ask me,” she remarked over her shoulder. “Good enough in the city, maybe, but not trained for the woods and too cock-sure stupid to know the difference.”

“But there were two of them and you're only one. What if they'd been better — or faster — or smarter? What if you'd needed help?”

Kardith walked over to him and crouched down, her expression unreadable. That same quality of deadly stillness clung to her like an invisible mantle. “You're pissed because I had to take them out,” she said. “Because you couldn't have fought them alone.”

“Not pissed.
Scared.
There wasn't a damned thing I could have done. I don't even own a fighting knife.”

She stood up and slipped the long-knife back into its sheath. “Now you'll be wanting me to give you one.”

“It would do for a start.”

“It would do to get you killed! You should never carry a weapon —
any
weapon — you don't know how to use. When you pull a knife in a fight, you up the stakes. Get yourself slashed up good instead of a few bruises. Don't go playing hero if you want to leave the Ridge alive.”

“Kardith.” It was the first time he'd used her name, and he felt her flinch. “It was me they were after. I didn't imagine it.”

Silence, but no argument. Then she nodded and asked, “Why?”

“I don't know. I thought — when you spotted the man on the black horse — it could have been someone my mother sent, someone after you, anyone. I thought maybe you were wrong.” He jabbed a bloodstained finger toward the dead man. “If I'd said something then, this wouldn't have happened.”

“You're too shook to think straight,” she snapped, then paused. “Look, Terris, it's no good guessing. You get the fire back up and we'll search these two jackals before they stiffen. Maybe we'll find something useful, maybe not — we won't know 'til we look.”

Terricel turned his attention to the banked coals with a sense of perverse, almost absurd relief. He couldn't imagine why he'd be a target, so far from Laureal City and with any passing importance he might have derived from being Esmelda's adjutant gone. But Kardith was also right — it was obvious now that he was beginning to think clearly again — what they needed now was more information. He didn't think assassins would be stupid enough to carry much in the way of evidence, but there might be something they'd thought of no importance, perhaps some personal souvenir. ..