Soulblade (7 page)

Aware of the woman watching him, he shook his head. Just because she said they were in the Ice Blades did not mean that was true. The tall peaks
could
belong to the rugged range. He would have known for certain if he had been flying above them, but one mountain looked much like another from halfway up the side of it. Besides, the Cofah had a couple of rugged, glacier-capped ranges too. And this woman had an accent.

“You must be wondering who I am,” she said, lowering the jacket.
His
jacket. “I’m Mara Trembuckle. I grew up around here. My mother is—was—a mercenary before she fled trouble back home and settled out here.”

“Your mother.”

“She was from Cofahre.” The woman’s—Mara’s—gaze lowered. “I hope you won’t hold that against me. I know you’re a hero and usually fight the Cofah.”

A hero. He didn’t feel like a hero standing there naked and barefoot.

“My mother was an outcast here because of her heritage, but I’ve never known anything except for these mountains. She’s gone now, and I have little left.” She gazed sadly out at the valley, her shoulders slumped.

Ridge wasn’t certain he believed her—would someone who had grown up here have an accent? Even if her mother had possessed one, would it have influenced her language skills?

You can trust her
, the voice in the back of his mind said.

Oh? Can I trust
you
?

Of course.

Why don’t I believe you?
Ridge rubbed his temple. Maybe the voice would go away once his head stopped hurting.

She spent much of her youth alone or with only her mother to talk to. She is shy and awkward with people. She doesn’t always say the right things, but it’s not a sign of dishonesty.

How do you—we—know that?
If this was his own voice speaking to him, how could it know things he didn’t know?

You don’t seem to know much right now.

He snorted. That was the truth.

Mara lifted her gaze and met his eyes, her own eyes imploring. An urge to comfort her trickled through him, an urge to trust her.

“I’m sorry you lost your mother,” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive me for being self-centered, but I have a duty as an officer—as a general, apparently—to report in as soon as possible. Can you tell me how I came to be here with you? I can’t remember.”

“You hit your head. You should see the crash site.”

Ah, he
knew
there had been a crash.

“You tumbled down a slope and into a river. I thought you were dead, but I was able to reach you, so I checked on you and pulled you out of the water.”

Ridge looked down at the stream meandering through the valley. It wasn’t large enough for him to have tumbled into without breaking every bone in his body. And how had she hauled him up the slope to this cave? He wasn’t the brawniest man in the army, but he was six feet tall and certainly not scrawny.

“Not that stream. A river at the end of this valley that it merges into.” Mara pointed downstream, toward a bend.

She
definitely
could not have carried him that far. He opened his mouth to ask, but she continued first.

“I found a couple of trappers, and they helped me carry you up here.”

Strange that she’d seemed to guess what he had been wondering. Or maybe it was an obvious question.

“They had their trap routes to attend to, so they left a few days ago.” She rested her hand on his forearm and gazed up into his face, smiling. “I’ve been taking care of you. I never would have thought I’d get to meet the great Ridgewalker Zirkander. It’s been an honor to tend your wounds.”

Her flattery almost distracted him from the rest of what she had said. Trappers. He had doubted his ability to tell the seasons, but he was positive it wasn’t winter—at this altitude, the valley would be smothered with snow if that were true. But didn’t trappers work in the winter? When animal fur was thick? Lieutenant Duck would know.

“Uhm.” He debated questioning her, questioning her
story
, but maybe he had better keep his mouth shut until he had more of a feel for what had happened. Besides, he was a city boy. What did he truly know about trapping or the ways of mountain folk?

Very little
, the voice said agreeably.

Ridge supposed it was reasonable that the voice of his madness would be as sarcastic as he was.

“Mara, thank you for helping me,” he said, aware of her watching him. “I’m sure I would have died without you.”

She nodded solemnly.

“Would you mind showing me the crash site?” His aching head protested the idea of a tramp across the boulder-littered landscape, but he had to see for himself what had happened. Maybe his memory would come back once he saw his flier. Also, maybe it could be salvaged, and he could get back into the air, return home, and report in.

“I wouldn’t mind, but you should rest for another day.” Mara lifted the hand she’d had on his arm up to the bandages on his torso, studying them, or maybe studying his chest. She wouldn’t be the first woman to do so, and he had the sense that more than medical needs were prompting her to stand close and keep touching him.

“Probably so,” he said, stepping back so that her hand dropped, “but I’m not good at following doctors’ suggestions. Or anyone’s suggestions. I don’t suppose my boots came down the river with the rest of me?”

She hesitated, a hint of disappointment in her eyes, then nodded. “I have them back here.”

“Good. I appreciate your help,” he said, hoping to take the sting away from what she might see as a rejection. Besides, he
did
appreciate her help. Even if he wasn’t positive he believed her story yet, if she truly had saved his life, he owed her something. What he could offer, he didn’t know, but he would figure it out. Maybe the same time he figured out what he was doing out here.

Chapter 3

R
idge squinted at the distant mountainside, little more than rocks covering the steep slope. “Are you sure?”

“Here.” Mara handed him something.

To his surprise, it was an Iskandian military-issue collapsible spyglass. Though she carried only a small pack, she was well outfitted for the mountains. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised if she had grown up in the area. Still, he wondered where she had gotten the spyglass. The majority of Iskandia’s military forts lay along the coast. With the exception of the clansmen up north, internal strife was rare within the country. All those Cofah attacks over the centuries had helped his once fragmented people unite, to fight off their common enemy.

“It’s about a third of the way up the slope, below that point on the ridge,” she added, watching him study the spyglass.

Assuming she had traded something for it along the way, he lifted it and scanned the landscape until he saw what he sought, the wrecked remains of a military flier, one wing torn off and the tail missing. A boulder hid half the fuselage, but he could tell the craft had struck so hard that all form had been smashed out of it.

“I survived that?” he breathed. It did not look like the kind of crash a man walked away from. It didn’t even look like the kind of crash a man could be carried away from.

“I saw you come down. You flew out of the cockpit when it struck, slid down the rocks, and fell into that canyon and into the river.”

From their vantage point, high on a goat trail on the mountain opposite the one he was looking at, he could not see the river, but he had glimpsed it along the way. It meandered through the canyon until the walls widened into a valley farther downstream. It wasn’t that deep. He judged the fall from the lip of the canyon to the bottom to be close to two hundred feet. Water was more yielding than land, but he knew from jumping off cliffs into the sea north of the capital that a fall from even fifty feet could mess up a man if he didn’t land well. To have survived a drop from four times that height after having already crashed... It was hard to believe.

Do you not believe in miracles?
the voice in the back of his head asked, the tone dry.

Like the kind where gods pluck you from certain death so they can then use you for their own purposes? I’ve only heard of that happening in legends.

Legends often have a seed of truth about them. Perhaps the gods are once again returning to a more active role in the world.

Uh huh.

This voice that his subconscious had conjured had strange ideas. Ridge couldn’t imagine where they were coming from or what they meant. Aside from his impending madness.

Mara was looking at him. Ridge smoothed his face, not wanting her to know he was chatting with himself.

“I didn’t have a parachute, did I?” he asked. That might explain things.

To the best of his recollection, the flier parachutes he’d seen and tested were extremely experimental and weren’t safe enough to be distributed yet, but he also didn’t know how much of his memory was missing. A year? Five years? More? He shuddered. He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror—or even a pool of water—yet, and he reached up to touch his hair, afraid he might have gone gray and not even remember the years that had led to it.

“A what?” Mara asked after a puzzled second.

Ridge thought about explaining it, but she would have guessed what he meant if she had seen it. Too bad. That might have solved part of the mystery, or at least convinced him that the landing had been survivable. As it was now, the math didn’t add up for him.

Gods
, the voice said blandly.

You’re not one of these gods, are you?
Ridge asked it in jest. He’d never seen anything to make him believe that the gods were real or that, if they were real, they cared overmuch what happened to humanity.

Would you believe me if I said yes?

No.

Then, no.

So, what are you?

An adviser.

An adviser that I, in my encroaching madness, made up for myself?

Perhaps.

I would have preferred it if you were a god.

“It’s nothing,” Ridge said. Mara was gazing at him with a concerned expression. Whether she was concerned for his health or his sanity, he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t going to ask—or mention the voice chatting with him. “Where did you pull me out of the river?”

“Down there. Where the canyon opens up.”

“The trappers were with you then?”

“I found them later and asked them to help. We carried you to that cave together.”

Once again, Ridge’s senses twanged, finding implausibility in the story. Was she strong enough to have fished him out of the river and up onto land? And what odd chance had led her to be here to see him crash and fall in?

He studied his young companion, her blonde hair falling about her shoulders, her face and body more what he’d expect from a dancer in a men’s club in the capital, not from some mountain woman who led a hard life. He supposed she was young enough that the demands of a rough life wouldn’t have taken their toll and affected her beauty yet.

As he returned the spyglass to her, he caught her right hand and rubbed his thumb along her palm to see if she had callouses. He half expected to find soft hands that never did any manual labor, but her palm was indeed calloused, including a ridge of rough skin that ran from her index finger to her thumb. Any tool might have accounted for it, but Ridge’s old friend Abagon Mox had belonged to a saber club and dueled in competition. Ridge had shaken his hand often and remembered his callouses, similar ones to these. Odd. He looked down to her waist. She carried a utility knife there, but that was her only weapon, unless she had a pistol in her pack. That was odd too. They were high up in wild country, where big cats, bears, and wolves lived. A lone woman might make an appealing target for a pack of hungry animals.

Realizing she must be wondering why he was fondling her hand, Ridge let her go with a, “Sorry.”

He looked at her face warily, worried she would have more reason to think him crazy. He caught her gazing up at him, her lips parted slightly. When he met her eyes, she cleared her throat and looked away, pocketing the collapsible spyglass.

Well, at least if his hair had gone gray, the rest of his face must not have gotten too bad. He’d been the recipient of the dreamy look from women often enough to recognize it. It was surprising, given that he hadn’t bathed in a few days, but he’d been told he looked better than average, even with beard stubble and dirt smudged on his face. He didn’t want to do anything about her attraction, even if she was a beauty. Too many things didn’t make sense, and he had a hard time stowing his suspicion. Now that he’d had a good look at the peaks around them, he did believe they were in the Ice Blades, but he couldn’t imagine what he had been doing out here.

“I must thank you again for rescuing me,” Ridge said, smiling and trying to keep the suspicion off his face. “Did you see what caused the crash? Was I in a battle?”

As hard as it was to imagine Cofah airships this far into his country, his ego refused to accept that he might have simply been flying across the mountains on some errand and crashed of his own volition. He wished he was close enough to see if the sides of his flier were riddled with bullet holes. He was tempted to try to get over there—if nothing else, he might be able to retrieve the power crystal. General Ort would have his hide for losing one of the valuable energy sources. But the terrain looked inhospitable, if not impossible to traverse. At the least, he would need a climbing harness and tools to get up there. He made a note of the surrounding terrain so he could return someday to retrieve the crystal.

Mara hesitated before answering. “There was a big storm that night. I think you might have been hit by lightning.”

Lightning? He supposed that was better than simply crashing because of some stray wind, but what would he have been doing flying into a storm? And for that matter, why would he have been out here in a military craft by himself? If he had been hunting down enemies, he would have taken a couple of his pilots with him, if not his whole squadron.