Honor among thieves

Chapter Eighty-Seven

Bethane slumped down to sit on a rock and rub at her feet. If she had as many blisters as he did, Croy thought, every step must be torture to her. He wished he could carry her on his shoulders, but even his strength had flagged over the last few miles. The wound in his side was festering and he could barely lift his left arm. So instead he knelt before her and carefully unwrapped the rags he had wound around her feet. The rags stank and were blotchy with blood and pus. He used some of their precious water to wash her feet, then wrapped them up again in the same dirty rags because he had no fresh cloth. Eventually she managed to stand again, and start shuffling forward, again.

Neither of them said a word the whole time. It was not the first time he’d washed and wrapped her feet. It would not be the last.

North of the orchard where Croy had been wounded, the Whitewall Mountains curled to the west and shrank to rough hills, their tops cluttered with wind-slumped trees. It was bad country, dry and cold, and in many places snow gathered in ravines and defiles deep enough to swallow a man whole. That snow was their only source of water, but to get it he had to make a fire, and every fire they lit was a beacon to their enemies. There was no food to be had there at all.

The hills were going to kill them, Croy believed. He would gladly have turned south, turned away from that desperate country. But the hills also represented his only hope. They formed a natural border between Skrae and Skilfing, the closest of the Northern Kingdoms. If he could cross that treacherous land, he would have fulfilled his duty and delivered Bethane to some kind of safety.

Then, he thought, perhaps he could lie down and die. If not for Cythera.

His betrothed was in his thoughts at all times, though such fancies tortured him as much as they spurred him onward. Cythera. The Lady had brought her into his life, surely. No one else could have done him such an honor. His mind kept casting back toward the day in Ness when she had almost signed the banns of their marriage. When, but for a bottle of spilled ink, she would have been his. Instead they had postponed things and raced off to the Vincularium for one last adventure before they entered a new life together.

He had laughed so much back then. He’d had a fair hand to kiss, and a lady’s kerchief to tie around the end of his lance. It had made so much sense.

Now Cythera was hundreds of miles away, if she wasn’t already dead. He had no way of knowing whether the barbarians had taken Ness yet. He was certain that if they had, Malden would never have allowed them to take Cythera alive-the thief was a good friend, and would know what he would want done if things came to that pass. That was the true reason why he’d given Acidtongue to Malden.

He’d told and convinced himself that Malden could someday be an Ancient Blade. That the thief had the potential to be something more. No one had taken the idea seriously-not even Malden himself. Croy persisted in this folly because he knew on some level Malden cared for Cythera almost as much as he did himself. He had treated Malden like a knight because he wanted the little man to act like one. He’d wanted someone to take care of Cythera when he couldn’t.

He hoped he’d made the right choice.

Ahead of him on the path, Bethane tripped over something and fell forward on her face, barely catching herself with her hands. Croy rushed to her side and helped her sit up. The palms of her hands were scratched and filthy. She made no sound of pain or discomfort, though. Both of them were well past feeling small scrapes. Croy brushed as much dirt off her hands as he could and helped her stand.

He looked back idly, trying to see what had snared Bethane. An exposed tree root, probably, or maybe just a rough patch of ground. He did not expect to see the haft of a poleaxe lying astride the trail.

Bethane didn’t even look. She started hobbling forward again, one small step at a time. Croy didn’t tell her to stop-every foot of ground they covered was precious.

Bending as low as he could without groaning, he studied the forlorn weapon lying on the ground. The wooden haft had once been polished to the point of smoothness, but this was no parade weapon straight from a cobwebbed arsenal. The polish had been worn down by long use until the wood was dull. He ran his eyes along the length of the weapon to the massive blade, a wicked-looking axe head with a recurved tip. Quatrefoil holes had been drilled through the blade to lighten it. It was not a barbarian weapon-it was too well made, perhaps even dwarven in manufacture. The thing that worried him the most was that the blade shone with luster. There was not a spot of rust on it. Someone had maintained the weapon with care. And recently. This was no long-lost souvenir of some ancient battle.

Croy closed his eyes and tried not to panic. Then he stood up, opened his eyes again, and hurried as much as he could to catch up with Bethane. She had walked twenty feet in the time it took him to inspect the poleaxe.

Together they walked another half mile before the sun set. They made camp in the shelter of some trees, with a rock wall behind them to lean against. He balanced caution against the threat of freezing to death and made them a small fire, and they sat back-to-back quite close to it, greedy for its warmth.

Bethane picked at the rags on her feet, perhaps for lack of anything better to do. Croy sharpened Ghostcutter, rhythmically drawing his whetstone along the iron half of the blade, letting it slide free at the point, bringing it back down toward the hilt.

Between the sound of his whetstone and the crackling of the fire, he expected to hear nothing else. Yet when a twig snapped somewhere out in the darkness, every muscle in his body jumped.

Bethane noticed his alarm, but she had learned over many days of travel not to react or ask questions. He held his left hand low, palm toward the ground, to tell her to hide herself and be still. She did as she was ordered, whether or not she was his queen.

Rising stiffly, Croy stepped away from the fire until his eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond. He could see little of the rocks around him-there was no moon and clouds hid the stars. A little light, just a dim glow, outlined the tops of the hills, so he looked up there-and saw it.

A man sitting a horse. Very far away. Too far away to be the source of the noise he’d heard. So there were more than one of them out there.

He hurried back to the camp and kicked out the fire. Bethane had taken shelter under an overhanging rock. The rock hung so close to the ground she’d had to cram herself inside. Croy shoved himself in after her, his greater bulk making it difficult. He ignored the way the rock scraped at his back and shoulders and squeezed himself inside.

In the last embers of the fire he saw Bethane’s eyes, and the fear there. It seemed she was still capable of feeling something, then, if only terror. He placed a finger to his lips, and she nodded in response.

He heard no more sounds that night. Whoever had come looking for them in the dark didn’t find them-or didn’t think the game worth dragging them out of the rock. Croy spent every moment of the night watching anyway, watching and listening, his ears straining to pick up the slightest noise.

Eventually gray light streamed along the world outside their hiding place and dawn lightened the sky.

Though they had slept not at all and Croy’s body had become as solid as the stone around him, he managed to haul himself out of the crevice and then pull Bethane out after him. They had nothing with which to break their fast, so they just started walking again.

Less than an hour later Croy saw the rider once more. This time he made no attempt to conceal himself-standing at the top of a hill, he was hard to miss. The other pursuers, however, were harder to find, though he could hear them moving through the trees.

They could be hillmen, the notorious savages of these untamed rocks. They could be bandits or deserters or highwaymen from Skrae. They could be barbarians. Croy had no way to tell.

Bethane looked at him with eyes she kept barely under control.

He nodded, and pointed at the trail ahead of them. She kept walking.

He drew Ghostcutter from its sheath and held it close to his leg. His one comfort just then was that he knew exactly what to do. If the rider’s men attacked, he would try to fight them off. If there were too many of them, though…

For one of royal blood like Bethane, there were fates worse than death. He could not let her be captured. If it came to that, if honor left him no other choice He thought he could do it.

Cythera, he prayed, for he could think of no words the Lady would like to hear. Cythera, forgive all my sins. Remember me fondly. I did my best.