‘Cheating the tithe? That’s pathetic.’
‘Sometimes it’s that. Sometimes it’s just people who don’t want to be seen.’
‘What kind of people?’
Beyond the boulders, Ribs vanished between two sheer outcrops.
‘We’re at the trail now,’ Rancept said. ‘Time for the talking to end. Night carries voices, and the hills can channel sounds a long way. If you need my attention, just tap my shoulder. Otherwise, we move quietly now.’
‘This is ridiculous — I can still see the keep’s light from here.’
‘If we’re going to argue, milady, we can turn round right now. But I’ll tell you this. Look at Ribs.’
The animal had reappeared and was seated just ahead. ‘What about him?’ Sukul asked.
‘Strangers in the hills, milady. That’s what Ribs is telling us.’
To her eyes the animal looked no different from any other time she’d seen it. There was no way to tell where it was looking with those crossed eyes. But as Rancept moved forward, the dog wheeled and raced up the trail again. Tugging tight her slightly oversized gloves, she followed.
For all his size, the castellan moved quietly, not once glancing back to see if she kept pace. This latter detail irritated her and she wanted to hiss at him, since she was getting tired and the trail seemed to go on for ever. Her boots pinched her feet; her nose was running and she’d begun using the back of one hand to wipe at it, and that was staining the fine leather of the glove. Even more annoying, there was nothing bold in this venture. She’d wanted a dozen well-armoured and grim-faced riders at her back, each one ready to give up his or her life at her word. She’d wanted the thunder of horse hoofs and the clatter of iron and wooden scabbards.
Beneath all of this was the conviction that an innocent little boy was lying dead somewhere ahead of them, killed for no good reason but the silence his death would ensure. She’d taken enough hints from Hish Tulla that there was trouble in the realm. The whole thing seemed ridiculous. Peace had been won, but she knew that the hunger for fighting was not yet done with. It was never done with, and there were people in the world who wanted nothing else, since lawlessness was their nature.
Sukul did not have to look far to see such people; she counted her sisters among them. They delighted in all manner of lusts, and the wilder their environs the more base their desires. If she was honest with herself, there was something of that in her as well. But the reality — including this cold, night-shrouded ordeal — was proving more crass than what the imagination offered in all those idle moments when boredom was a shout inside the skull.
She’d made promises to that boy, to that lost bastard of the Korlas line. They seemed both empty and wasted, and the rush of secrecy she’d felt, looking upon his wide, innocent eyes, was now a source of guilt. She’d played at being grown-up, but it had been a childish game none the less. What if they’d tortured Orfantal? Was Hish Tulla now in danger?
Half the night was gone, and still they padded along. All Sukul wanted to do now was stop, rest, even sleep.
The swirl of stars had spun half round when she collided with Rancept’s back — she’d not been looking ahead, eyes instead on those now-dusty boots that were torturing her feet. Grunting at the collision, she stumbled back, but a hand snapped out to right her, and then that hand drew her close.
She smelled the lanolin of the thick sheepskin jacket he was wearing, and somehow the familiarity of it steadied her.
He leaned down. ‘Riders ahead,’ he said in a whisper.
Sukul looked past him, but Ribs was nowhere in sight.
‘No questions,’ he continued as she started to speak, and his other hand pressed against her mouth, but just briefly — before panic could take her. ‘We wait for Ribs.’
Bandits had carved out numerous hidden trails through these hills, and Risp led her dozen soldiers along one of them that would bring them out on to the road close to where they’d seen the smoke. The old Denier camps they’d come across were abandoned, at least a season old, but she knew the cause of that: the Hust Forge’s demand for ore had grown prodigious of late, for reasons not one of Hunn Raal’s spies could glean. In any case, banditry had been given up and now those miners were growing wealthy with Hust coin.
Thoughts of the Hust Legion — perhaps soon to be bolstered by new recruits — left her disquieted. Every cry for peace was echoed by the beating of iron into blades. No one was fooled unless they willed it upon themselves. Civil war was coming. Hunn Raal meant it to be short; necessarily bloody, true enough, but short.