No Quarter (27 page)

Edko wrinkled his nose. "Better tell someone to heat up the bathwater, too."

Kiril took another long look and nodded. "Good idea."

As his father turned and ambled inside, Edko trotted toward the fenced pasture and the waiting cattle. He sang as he ran, his pure soprano wrapped incongruously around a disgusting ditty involving cow patties in the spring. Because he was moving, he didn't realize that, for the first time in his life, no breeze answered his song.

"Bartek Springs?"

"Uh-huh." Magda pulled a damp curl from the corner of her mouth. "Kind of pretty, isn't it? Pity we're not going in."

Vree turned her gaze from the town—they'd arrived at dusk, just as lamps were being lit in the windows of half-timbered houses—and looked at the healer. "We're not?"

"If they're going to stop us anywhere, they're going to stop us here. You know that as well as I do. If you planned on going in, you planned on getting caught and then leaving without me."

*I thought she didn't read minds,* Gyhard grumbled.

Magda smiled sweetly at them. "I have an older brother. I'm harder to ditch than that."

"And you're exhausted," Vree told her bluntly, not bothering to deny the accusation. "You need to rest."

"Have I slowed you down?"

Vree sighed. "No."

"Then I think it should be my choice, whether I go on or not. Don't you?" She rested her elbow on the saddle horn and her chin on her cupped hand. "Well?"

"Yes. It should be your choice…"

*Vree.*

"… but I think you should stay here."

"No. Everything I said back at the Citadel still stands. You're my patient and I won't abandon you. Kars needs healing, and I won't abandon him either."

*Vree!*

*You're the one who said she has an answer for everything. You want her to stay here so badly, you come up with a good reason.* "So where do the good people of Bartek Springs put their dead?" she continued aloud when Gyhard remained silent.

Looking worried, Magda straightened. "Their dead?"

"Tombs or graves or something. If Kars is making the dead walk, he needs fresh bodies."

The younger woman winced at the matter-of-fact reference. "According to the bardic maps I studied back in Elbasan, there's a cemetery on the far side of town."

"Then let's get going." Guiding her reluctant horse off the main track, that would very shortly become the town's main street, Vree nudged him with her heels until he lengthened his walk.

"But it'll be dark by the time we get there," Magda protested.

"So we'll get an early start tomorrow morning."

"We're spending the night in the cemetery?"

"It's okay. The bards said that Jazep took care of what Kars did here."

Magda urged her horse after Vree's. "Yeah, but…"

"Unless you'd rather go into town?" When Magda muttered something Vree couldn't quite catch, the ex-assassin almost smiled.

*You're mean.*

*She's a healer, Gyhard. She's going to have to learn to deal with dead bodies.*

*Try to see it from her side. A dead body means she failed. For you, dead bodies meant success.*

*And for you?*

She felt herself sigh; knew it was his reaction. *Only that I was still alive,* he said softly.

Wishing that there was a little more light, Vree dismounted and stretched. She could just barely make out the dark on dark slabs of gravestones on the other side of the low stone wall and she wondered just what it was the Shkodens did for their dead. In the Empire, army dead were most frequently buried in mass graves with the rites performed once for the lot and their only memorial in the memories of their surviving comrades. The rich stacked their dead in stone tombs along the Great Roads. She didn't know what the poor did.

"It's spooky," Magda whispered, pressed tightly against the comforting bulk of her horse.

"Without the kigh, there's nothing left but meat."

"I know."

"Meat can't hurt you."

"I
know
."

*You have such a comforting way with a metaphor,* Gyhard noted as Vree unbuckled the saddle girth.

Hobbling the horses—fortunately, they'd been able to water them on the way around town—the two women ate quickly and settled down for the night, wrapped together in their blankets to conserve warmth.

"You know, this close to Third Quarter this far up in the mountains, we could
easily
have a touch of light frost before morning."

Vree tucked her chin closer to her chest. "I'm so thrilled."

As sleep claimed them, the night seemed to take on the rhythm of their breathing. Leaves danced with the breeze to the same slow time; the thousand and one noises of the creatures who made the darkness their own became a gentle harmony. At first, the music was only an extension of the breathing, the breeze, the creatures, but then it took on a definition all its own. Promising security, it lay over the sleepers like another blanket.

When it finally trailed off, the other sounds went with it and the night was, for a moment, perfectly still.

On the far side of the graveyard, Celestin pulled her fingers from her ears and yawned. "Is that it, then?"

"That's it." Marija Sang a quick four notes and a kigh danced on the wick of the lantern she held. "I can't guarantee it'll hold them until morning, but we'll have time enough to lock them safely away."

The priest shook her head as she beckoned her nephew and three other men forward into the light. "I don't much like this."

Marija shrugged and rummaged a bit of hard candy out of a pocket. "You won't have to not like it for long. According to the kigh, they'll only be our problem until noon tomorrow."

Clean and fed, dressed in a borrowed robe better than any he could remember wearing, Kars lay on a pallet by the hearth and listened to the sounds of people sleeping. Tomorrow, they'd told him—speaking slowly and loudly for he understood very little of the language—the cutters would be coming in and everyone would be home for the festival.

Everyone would be home.

He would wait.

Eyes still closed. Breathing regular. If anyone was watching, they'd think she remained asleep. She was in a building. A small building. She was alone—or at least Magda was no longer with her—and her weapons had been removed.

*Vree?*

*Quiet.*

The urgency in the command and the surge of adrenaline accompanying it penetrated Gyhard's usual waking fog and he found himself completely attuned to Vree's senses.

It wasn't a stable, although it had held an animal. She could smell a faint hint of musk behind an overlay of soap. The pallet beneath her was clean. The blanket, the one she'd fallen asleep under.

She could hear dogs barking. A rooster crow. Farther away, a baby cried fretfully. She could hear only her own breathing.

She opened her eyes. Before her lids were all the way up, she stood, hands out from her sides, in the center of the shed.

Logs as big around as her thigh had been sunk into the ground to make a square, each wall a little longer than the pallet they'd laid her on. Light and air came through a multitude of tiny chinks. Something large and angry had gouged lines of parallel claw marks into the wood. The roof had been built of more logs with sod laid on top. The door dragged open outward on bullhide hinges and had been braced or barred. The dirt floor showed signs of having been recently repacked around the base of the walls. There was a jug of water by the bed and an empty, covered pot in the opposite corner.

A cautious look outside showed a field, a dirt yard and a fence, the back of a building, and the side of what smelled like a cow stable.

Moving back to the center of the floor, she drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nose, teeth clenched too tightly to allow even the passage of air.

"What happened?"

*Offhand, I'd say there's a bard in Bartek Springs.*

*A bard did this?*

*Probably Sang us a lullaby.*

Vree flexed her fingers around an invisible throat. "I'm beginning to understand the Cemandian attitude."

"So you stuck her in a shed that used to hold a bear? You locked her up like an
animal
?"

Marija was beginning to regret ever having mentioned the shed's previous occupant. "She's an Imperial assassin; I doubt very much Celestin's house would hold her."

Eyes blazing, Magda stomped across the room and jabbed her finger at the bard. "You have no business holding her at all! For that matter, you have no business holding me!"

"Her Highness commanded…"

"What? That you break your vows and use the kigh against an innocent pair of travelers!"

"I haven't broken anything!" Astonished to find herself shouting, Marija took a deep breath and regained a measure of control. "You know as well as I do that Singing a lullaby involves no kigh."

Magda smiled triumphantly. "Does, too. Fifth kigh. And you can't argue with that because I know."

"I was just following orders…"

"Oh, sure, convenient excuse. If they'd ordered you cover us in honey and stake us over an anthill, would you have done
that
, too?"

Marija sighed. "Maybe not yesterday."

"What's
that
supposed to mean!"

Raising both hands, palm out, the bard stood. "Look, Magda, as much as I personally find it difficult to understand, the powers that be want you back in Elbasan. They also want your companion, an Imperial assassin with two not entirely stable kigh, back where she's under some kind of supervision."

"And they don't consider
me
sufficient supervision?"

"Apparently not." With one hand on the door, she cautioned the young healer against approaching any closer. "I've done what I was told to do and in a very short while you won't be my problem. The kigh say your brother and her brother are a very short distance from town."

"Her brother?"

"His name is Bannon. He came into Shkoder with Prince Otavas and was recruited to help out. That's all I know." Nodding at the table she added, "Try a little jam on the oatcakes, they're really good." Then she left.

"Oh, sure." Magda slapped a spoonful of jam on an oatcake with one hand and dashed away angry tears with the other, "I'm not sufficient supervision for an Imperial assassin, but Gerek
is
? Like
that's
fair."

"Magda is locked in the priest's spare room, Your Grace. We felt her companion…" Under the intensity of Bannon's stare, Marija cleared her throat and began again. "That is, under the circumstances and considering everything we'd heard about her ability, we felt her companion should be put someplace a little more secure."

As Gerek translated, Bannon shifted his weight forward and flexed the muscles across his back. Although he looked ready for a fight, all he said when Gerek finished was, "Where?"

*Someone's coming.* Vree rolled up onto her feet and held her breath as she sifted the quiet sound of approaching footsteps from the sounds she'd been listening to all morning. Whoever it was, was walking softly. Not furtively, as though expecting to reach the shed unnoticed but with a sure and quiet tread that kept the weight balanced and the noise to a minimum.

Whoever it was…

*Vree! Are you all right?*

*No…*

*Vree, breathe!*

She jerked and sucked in a frantic lungful of air just in time to expel it as a name when the footsteps stopped. "Bannon."

"He's made you weak, Vree. These people should never have been able to catch you." His voice dripped disdain; for Gyhard, for her, for the people who'd caught her.

"Their bards don't exactly fight fair."

"What was it Commander Neegan used to say? The survivors determine what's fair?"

"Things are more complicated now," she said, turning to follow the sound of his movement as he circled the shed. "Survival isn't everything."

"Does
he
think so, too, sister-mine?" He used to say it like an endearment. Now, it was more of a reminder. "Remember what he's done in the past to survive."

"We remember."

"We?" His voice picked up an edge, just as arrogant but a little less certain.

"You'll never share his memories the way you shared mine, Vree, because you'll never share his life the way you shared mine."

"What makes you think I want to?" She watched his shadow flicker silently past the chinks between the logs.

Finally, it stopped, a hand's span to the right of the door. "So it's like that, is it?

I might have known. Do you let him use your body? Does he touch you with your hands?"

Vree rolled her eyes. "Is that all you
ever
think about?" she demanded.

"Bannon, what are you doing here?"

"I've come to take you back to Elbasan."

"By whose command?"

"As a favor to the crown of Shkoder."

"Then as a favor to me, let me go."

Bannon laughed. "That'd be a favor to
him
, not to you. It isn't you that's running after Kars, it's him. It isn't you that needs to be stopped, it's him." His voice grew slightly shrill. "It isn't you who left me, it's him!"

"I chose."

"NO!"

His pain ripping great holes in her heart, Vree took a step toward the wall. He was the younger brother she'd loved and protected her entire life, and she wanted to destroy the thing hurting him so.

*Vree.*

*Not you; me.*

*I know.* He gave her his strength and was surprised when she used it.

"Bannon, even if I'd let Gyhard die, things could never have been the same between us. We can't go back into the past."

"I know that. I'm not stupid, Vree. But why can't we go into the future together?

"

She laid her hand against the logs. Saw bits of him mirror the movement on the other side. "Because we'd drag the past with us and it would drag us down. I'm not going back to Elbasan with you."

"Yes, you are." His hand fell away. "If I have to knock you out and tie you to the slaughtering horse."

*Can he?* Gyhard asked as they listened to the footsteps move away.

Trying to remember if her palms used to sweat, she dried them on her thighs.