The Bear

TEN

"Is it that you wish to embarrass me? Or anger me?" Bannagran said to Bransen, who was walking in his Highwayman outfit and not wearng the brown robes Reandu had given him.

"You employed the Highwayman, did you not?" Bransen asked a bit too innocently.

"Or like a child, you wish to see how far you may stray before the paddle is applied."

Bransen's bored look almost taunted Bannagran to try just that.

"I am not your subject, Bannagran."

"Laird Bannagran!" one of the Pryd nobles insisted, but Bannagran himself held up his hand for the man to shut up.

"You claim that you wish to make your home in Pryd Town," the laird reminded. "That would make you my subject indeed."

"On this march, I am your…" Bransen paused and considered his words carefully here, finally turning to Reandu as he finished, "your mercenary. Yes, that is a good word for it. I found your soldier in the forest and saved his life, so perhaps we should discuss my payment."

Bannagran's grin was not one of agreement, Bransen knew, but he pressed on anyway. "You wish me along because you fear Affwin Wi, as well you should. I wish me along because I have unfinished business with Ethelbert's murderess. That is the extent of my intended service, and truly you have asked no more of me. But there is more, perhaps."

"I have little time for your riddles," said Bannagran.

"I am your mercenary," Bransen explained. "Affwin Wi I will defeat because I must and for my own selfish needs, but I bear no antipathy to Laird Ethelbert's soldiers or to the old fool himself. One laird is as awful as the next, after all. That ambiguity is double-edged, however. I'll not work toward Ethelbert's defeat out of any sense of loyalty to you or to that idiotic Yeslnik, surely, but that does not mean that I will not work toward Ethelbert's defeat."

"Loyalty to Pryd Town, then," Master Reandu said. "It was ever your home, Bransen, and certainly that means some-"

"It means nothing," Bransen harshly interrupted. "It was the place of my torment and my indenture."

"I don't believe you."

"You hold many false hopes, brother, not the least of which is reflected in those atrocious robes you wear so proudly."

Reandu merely shook his head and sighed.

"So you will not serve laird or king, but will do battle against Ethelbert," Bannagran clarified. "For gold, I expect."

Bransen smiled. "Do you wish their left ears, or the whole head?" he asked. "A king's gold coin for each I deliver. Do not look so sour at the notion, Bannagran. Consider instead the value I bring to your ranks."

"Why would not every man in the ranks demand the same terms?" asked the same noble who had earlier scolded Bransen.

"Why would I care if they did?"

"You are truly a wretched creature," said the noble.

"I?" Bransen asked innocently. "Am I the man who trampled the fields south of Pryd, driving the villagers to the foothills and an existence of sheer savagery? Am I the man who has claimed the land as my divine right, marching armies over folk who want no more than to fill their bellies on occasion and find a warm bed at night? Am I that man?"

"You have not the couth to be called a man, any man!" the noble retorted.

Bransen laughed at him. "Then I am an animal. Do you fear animals?" He stopped when he noted Bannagran scowling at him.

"Consider my terms, Laird Bannagran," Bransen said. "I promise you, it will be the best expense of your campaign."

To everyone's surprise Bannagran did not dismiss the notion outright, and his expression and posture revealed his intrigue. Clearly, he was considering how he might best utilize this mighty weapon known as the Highwayman.

Bransen nodded and started away, but the nobleman stopped him short. "Laird Bannagran has not dismissed you!" he scolded.

Bransen swung about. "Every time that fool speaks to me, add a silver coin to the bounty," he told Bannagran. "Or I will cut the bounty in half if you allow me to deliver his head for the first payment."

An exasperated Bannagran motioned the nobleman to silence and waved Bransen and Reandu away. On the word of Laird Bannagran himself," Bransen insisted, holding out his hand.

Master Reandu stared at the hand, then back at Bransen, while several other brothers whispered in small groups all about them.

"A sunstone, a malachite, a lodestone, a soul stone, and a cat's-eye," Bransen reiterated when Reandu didn't move.

"I read the laird's note," Reandu replied dryly.

"And yet you hesitate."

"No good will come of this," Reandu said as he fished in his belt pouch for the desired gemstones.

"Was it the mountains of dead soldiers and townsfolk that convinced you? Or the razed villages and ruined fields?"

"Your insufferable sarcasm tries my patience."

"Sarcasm or truth?" Bransen retorted. "Is it that Master Reandu hasn't the heart to open wide his eyes, preferring instead the somber reassurances of chapel artwork?"

"I was not speaking of the war," Reandu said. "Perhaps we are closer on agreement on that matter than you might believe. Nay, I was speaking of your evil pact with Laird Bannagran."

"Evil?" Bransen replied, feigning hurt. "If the laird heard your term for his decision, you might find yourself at the wrong end of a swinging axe."

"Enough, Bransen! I said evil because that is the word I meant to say. You fancy yourself an assassin now? The man I knew in Pryd Town was no assassin."

"And yet I killed men in Pryd Town."

"You defended Cadayle. That is not the same thing."

"And now I will kill enemy soldiers," Bransen reasoned. "Is that not the point of war?"

"That is not the point!" Reandu's volume brought several gasps from the gathered monks and Reandu turned on them angrily and waved them away.

"Then it is the means to the point, yes?" Bransen said more quietly as the others shuffled away.

"It is one thing to do battle on the field of honor-"

"A most stupid description," Bransen interrupted.

"And something completely different to go hunting for victims," Reandu finished.

"As Ethelbert sent his assassins to kill Laird Delaval?"

"Yes! I knew then, immediately so, that the assassin could not be Bransen Garibond, even when convincing evidence and King Yeslnik's declaration all pointed your way. I knew immediately that Bransen, the boy I knew as the Stork, the young man who grew strong and sure, could not have done such a thing."

"If I thought it would end the war, then I would kill Bannagran, or Reandu, right now," Bransen argued. "If I believed it would end the war, I would kill myself!"

"Ah, then you do care!"

The logic trap put Bransen back on his heels for a moment, but he settled quickly and replied, "Nay, brother, I care only about that over which I might have some control. I cannot end this war, and so I care nothing about it-other than to secure my own future with the gold I intend to collect."

"It is only about Bransen, then?"

"Yes. Only about Bransen and Bransen's family. I cannot stop this madness and cannot save the villagers from the stomp of armies. I cannot return civilization to the now wild southland and cannot breathe life into Jameston Se…"

Bransen stopped and closed his eyes and had to work hard to keep himself steady. Master Reandu put a hand on his shoulder. "Is it guilt that drives you to this evil pact with Laird Bannagran?" he asked gently, softly, as if he was again talking to that awkward boy who had carried chamber pots for Chapel Pryd those years before.

Bransen shrugged the man aside. His thoughts were on Jameston, though, on the man who had cared enough to walk beside him down a dangerous road, the man who had mentored him, albeit briefly. The man he had come to call a friend. He thought of Jameston's life story. Jameston had used his great skills in the forest to collect bags of gold in Vanguard and Alpinador. The man was possessed of knowledge valuable to noblemen of great means, and so they paid and paid well. Was Bransen doing anything different than that, truly? And if he had not devised this mercenary plan, would he have gotten the gemstones he needed to have a chance of defeating Affwin Wi?

"The world is at war," he said, his voice steady once more. "Men die in war. I cannot stop that, and so I shall not try to. But if they are to die anyway, then better by my hand, that I might collect some gold for the sake of my family. You are wrong, then, for something good will come of it. I will fill my coffers with gold and will care for my wife and her mother and my unborn child. I'll not live the life of a peasant. Nay, and my family will not be crushed by the march of armies, for those with wealth rarely are!"

Reandu tried to slap him across the face, but Bransen caught the monk's hand and easily held it back.

"Are you any better?" Bransen said through gritted teeth. "Will your brothers not heal Bannagran's warriors so that they can return to the field to die or to kill? Will you not throw bolts of killing lightning at the enemy on behalf of Laird Bannagran?"

"We will heal the wounded-of both armies," Reandu replied.

"You will heal those Bannagran brings you to heal, and they will not be men of Laird Ethelbert unless he wants to torture them when they are whole once more! Your actions support Laird Bannagran and so they support King Yeslnik, who has declared the leaders of your order to be heretics. So in truth, Reandu the coward, you will use the gemstones of Abelle to support the cause of Father De Guilbe, and even by your order's guttural standards he is not a man of character, wisdom, or mercy."

Reandu's mouth moved as if he was trying to find some retort to the hard claims, but Bransen cut him short.

"That is the truth of it, and you cannot deny," Bransen said. "Out of cowardice or moral indifference you have chosen the side that opposes Father Artolivan, and while you convince yourself that you will only be acting as Father Artolivan long ago decreed, you know the truth of it. Your march beside Bannagran aids his cause, aids Yeslnik's cause, and aids Father De Guilbe's cause."

"This discussion is not about me," Reandu insisted. "It is about you and your choice."

"Only because Reandu hasn't the courage of his espoused convictions."

"You are no assassin!"

Bransen stared at him for a few moments, then chuckled wickedly. "Count the ears in the sack before you make such a claim," he said as he walked away. He moved through the branches like a whisper of wind, running along limbs and lifting himself into great, near weightless leaps to land lightly on the branch of the next tree in line. The night was dark about him, but he could see well enough with his intimate knowledge of the cat's-eye agate. The gemstone's magic magnified the starlight many times, and Bransen quite comfortably ran along the tree branches.

Near the top of a tall pine he came to a high ridgeline, a wide valley opening before him to the south. He spotted the light of a campfire, then another.

"Refugee peasants," he whispered to himself. "Or Ethelbert's scouts?"

A twinkle came to Bransen's eye. He looked back to the northwest, marking his position. It wouldn't be wise to be caught out here alone and lost. Bransen turned back to the south and the valley far and wide below him. He reached into the malachite, seeking its levitation powers. He leaped out from the tree and drifted on the night breezes far, far into the distance.

Sometime later, the Highwayman caught hold of the high branches of a tall oak, pulling himself in close to the trunk and sending a shower of acorns bouncing below him. Several small animals skittered through the nearby brush, but the Highwayman took little note of them, confident that he had floated down here unseen.

He stayed in the trees for some time, again running from branch to branch. Soon after, he spotted the soft orange glow of a dying campfire. He noted a sentry, a woman clad in leather and holding a long-handled, small-bladed axe. She leaned against a tree not far from the one he stood upon. Bransen smiled wickedly. Soldiers, not peasants.

He moved past the woman, giving a little shake to the high branches as he did, just enough of a commotion to get her attention but not enough to alert her to any danger, but just so that she would think it a gust of wind or a squirrel, perhaps.

The sentry's interest passed quickly as Bransen knew it would, and the Highwayman glided past, coming to a perch overlooking the small camp. He noted four soldiers-two men and two women-some clad in pieces of leather armor, one man stripped to the waist, milling about the small fire. One sipped gruel from a bronze bowl; another sat on a log, running a whetstone along a dull and chipped blade.

The Highwayman moved along, walking a high perimeter of the encampment, seeking more sentries. He came back to his original perch, confident that there were only five enemies total.

Five gold pieces.

He moved back into the forest, coming to a branch-silently this time-above the woman sentry. She was still leaning against the tree, half-asleep. Bransen thought back to the Book of Jhest, to the lessons of the assassin, the quick and silencing blow.

He dismissed the malachite fully before he dropped from the branch, wanting to come down hard and fast. He could have cupped his hands before him, down low at his waist, to hook the woman's forehead and drive her head backward with enough force to snap her neck, a quick and easy and very quiet kill.

But he didn't. He landed behind her instead, startling her, but before she could cry out the Highwayman, still carrying the momentum of his fall, drove his middle knuckle hard into the base of her skull.

She dropped straight to the ground with no more than a slight whimper.

Not enough to alert the camp, the Highwayman believed, so when he made his way to the perimeter he was not surprised to see the four milling about exactly as they had been, except that one of the women had crawled into her bedroll.

He scanned quickly, trying to discern the most dangerous of his opponents and to plan an attack route. He stepped back into the woods, closed his eyes to picture the appropriate attack routines, given the position and number of his enemies, as described by the Book of Jhest.

Three running strides later the Highwayman leaped up high and grabbed at the power of the malachite to lift him higher and longer.

The woman sipping gruel cried out and dropped her bowl. One of the men, moving off to the side to relieve himself, stopped in mid-stride and glanced over his shoulder. The other man looked up from his sharpened old sword just in time to see the Highwayman land before him. He flipped the blade up to catch it by the hilt but caught a foot instead… with his mouth. His head snapped back and he flew, landing on his back at the edge of the fire. How he yelped as flames bit at him!

The Highwayman was already gone, sprinting toward the seated woman. She leaped up, her dagger out in a flash, and she stabbed ahead.

But the Highwayman had gone to the side suddenly, cutting fast and diving into a roll. He came around, not only back to his feet, but springing into the air. Again the malachite gave him lift. He released the magic as he arced toward the woman in the bedroll, who was fumbling with her covers. She managed to throw her arms up defensively over her head as he crashed down upon her, his knees blasting the air from her lungs.

A rain of blows poked through her blocks, slamming her about the face and head with sudden and vicious fury. When she tried to punch back, to simply push him back and slow the assault, he caught her extended arm, squirmed about to plant his leg behind her upraised arm, then drove hard against her wrist, cracking her elbow.

Up he went to his feet, spinning to meet the other woman's charge, but so pained was the shriek of the poor woman he had just attacked that Bransen's knees wobbled and almost buckled beneath him.

"You are no assassin!" he heard Master Reandu scolding in his mind.

The thrusting dagger nicked his forearm, drawing blood, and the Highwayman backed instinctively. And the woman, hearing the wails of her companion, came on ferociously, stabbing again. But before her dagger got close, her opponent somehow kicked his leg straight up, smacking her weapon hand and sending her dagger high into the leafy canopy above.

Still his foot went up until it was directly over his head. The woman warrior really didn't comprehend the significance of that, charging in, growling and shouting for her companions.

Down swept the Highwayman's foot right before the woman's face, the scrape of it stealing her momentum. She brought her hands in to block, but the Highwayman kicked straight up again with only a slightly altered angle, and his foot swept up under her blocking hands and cracked against her chin. Her teeth chomped together hard, several chipping, and blood erupted from her bitten lip.

Dazed and staggering, the warrior fought hard to keep her balance and her hands before her defensively, but she could hardly follow her attacker's movements as the Highwayman slipped his punches through one after another.

Three hard left jabs rocked her backward, stumbling. She caught her balance and punched out hard but hit only air, for the Highwayman was gone. He had dropped to the ground before her in a low, one-legged crouch. He swept his other leg across, catching the woman on the back of the ankle and sweeping her legs out from under her.

Up went the Highwayman, leaping high into the air above her, and he descended to land on one knee atop the woman, blowing out her breath in a great rush.

The Highwayman couldn't finish the move, though. Hearing movement behind him he threw himself back to a standing position and spun about, his hand slapping across before him just in time to knock a thrown knife aside. The man came in furiously behind the throw as if to tackle the Highwayman, who bent to the side at the waist and snap-kicked out to halt that charge with a stunning blow to the ribs. Wincing, the man staggered back a step and lifted his fists as the Highwayman came in.

A left jab led Bransen's way. The man punched both his fists, his hands closing together to block the blow. A second jab brought the same response.

The Highwayman sent out a third, loping left hand, and out came the block. With a brutal and sudden twist the Highwayman put a right hook in hard behind those extended hands, smashing the man across the jaw, his head snapping to the side. He straightened and stumbled back and to the side a step, as if the vicious blow was still exerting force upon him.

The Highwayman matched his stare and saw that it was a vacant thing. Bransen turned away with a laugh. He heard the man mumble something, then felt the rush of air as the warrior just fell facedown to the dirt. The man with the sword was up across the way, lurching over to grab across his chest at his burned shoulder. His eyes went wide when Bransen stared at him, and with a yelp, he turned and ran off.

The silver flash of a reflection caught Bransen's attention, and he looked to the side to see the knife he had kicked high into the trees now lying on the ground. He slipped his toe under it and flipped it into his waiting hand, retracting with a single, fluid motion. He sent the knife out end over end, burying its blade into the back of the fleeing man's thigh. With a grunt of agony the man grabbed at it and bent over, swerving unevenly, half falling, half throwing himself into a bush.

Bransen surveyed his work. The woman with the knife moaned softly and almost breathlessly as she tried to suck in enough air to keep herself alive. The man he had hit with the right hook lay facedown, exactly as he had fallen. The woman in the bedroll, though, had pulled herself up to one elbow and had kicked her covers mostly aside.

The Highwayman surprised her when he grabbed her hard by the hair and tugged her head back viciously. Her eyes widened when she saw Bransen's right hand cocked back behind his ear, fingers stiffened for a killing blow upon her exposed throat.

She stared up at the masked face and knew her doom.

"My baby girl," she mouthed silently, for she knew that her life was surely at its end. Her expression reflected that hopelessness, and her whole body just relaxed in the resignation of ultimate despair.

Bransen Garibond saw it and recognized it, and it shamed him profoundly.

He wanted to be callous enough to drive his fingers into her throat and claim his first gold piece. Only then, behind the emotional fence of absolute ambivalence, could he truly be free of his agony and grief. He let go of her hair and stumbled backward, gagging.

"Damn you, King Yeslnik!" he swore, and he spun away, tripped to his knees. He gagged as he caught himself on all fours and threw up. "Damn you, Laird Ethelbert," he coughed and gasped between puking.

"Damn all of you!" he shouted into the night when he stood straight once more. He threw his head back, his arms out wide to the side, and screamed as loudly as he could manage with all the strength of his emotional agony reflected in every note.

He hated them, all of them, for what they had done to his father and his mother and to Garibond Womack. But mostly, Bransen hated them for what they had done to him, here and now, for the insanity of this absurd war that had brought him out here in the unfitting guise of a murderer.

They had made the Highwayman an assassin, an uncaring, unfeeling tool of murder, and nothing more.

"Damn you," Bransen said to the woman in the bedroll, who was sitting up now and staring at him incredulously.

"Damn them all," he said to her.

She shook her head, her mouth hanging open.

Soon after, Bransen Garibond stumbled through the forest feeling more like the unbalanced Stork than the cocksure and powerful Highwayman. In his hand he clenched a gemstone, a soul stone that he had used to minimize the wounds of all five of his "victims."

He hadn't earned his five pieces of gold; he hadn't taken them prisoner, even (for he feared that Bannagran would likely have executed them); he hadn't even robbed them!

But had he done any good, truly, by following his conscience? Wouldn't they just be out there when Bannagran closed in on Ethelbert, ready to join in the fight and die anyway, or to kill some men of Pryd or Delaval, perhaps?

The questions were way beyond him. Sensibility was way beyond him. He was stumbling more profoundly then, walking with an awkward and clumsy gait, falling more than once. At first he thought it was just his confusion, but as he continued on, ever more slowly, it began to dawn on him that something was very wrong here.

His line of ki-chi-kree was not holding. He felt it shivering and splintering. He took a deep breath and stood as straight as he could, and tried to walk.

He was the Stork.

The image of the woman, her head pulled back, her lament for a child she would never again see, haunted him and closed in on him, even as the words of Reandu's protest echoed in his mind.

His personal journey down Jameston Sequin's first road had led Bransen to the edge of a dark and deep hole, and the Stork realized to his horror that he had fallen in.