The Blacktongue Thief

15 The Charcoal Makers

Norrigal walked out of the Snowless Wood with us, carrying a pack that looked half again too large for her but doing so without complaint. We passed a section of forest where a copse of youngish trees stood near the road, and I noticed old bronze swords planted near many of them, greening where they stood.

My first thought was that swords, even old swords, were like to be stolen, left out in the trees like this, especially in poor country where most folks defended their sheepcotes with axe and pitchfork. Then I remembered the farmer folk at the table, and it occurred to me the witch was a sort of duchess or countess here—the lord on the hill, the queen in the Downward Tower. People knew her; some loved and feared her, doubtless some hated and feared her, but they would no more pluck an old sword from this wood than the people of Cadoth would pry the gold lion coin off the Takers Guild sign. There are things worse and more vigilant than worldly justice.

“Are those grave markers?” I said to Norrigal.

“Maybe. But not for anybody yet dead.”

The hairs on my nape had been standing up so constantly I wasn’t noticing anymore. Strong, strong magic here. The strongest I’d been near in my life.

Galva had been silent this whole time. I think it had something to do with the girl—the Spanths had been among the last to start to recognize female property rights and to allow the practice of arms by women. They hadn’t liked sharing, those manly horsebreakers lording over their serfs and vineyards on their proud brown hills. When the horses went and the battles turned to slaughters, though, the only way to keep the goblin Horde from marching all the way to the capital was to breed up corvids and teach their girls the sword.

Women of Galva’s age would’ve had it hard, proving themselves first to their swordmasters, then to the white-bearded old horselords, and then down in the mud of Gallardia with the biters, as they call the goblins. Now, here was a girleen of twenty years who took it as her birthright to go on quest with us, trudging a pack half the size of her, walking so hard and fast we had to step long to keep pace with her. Norrigal fair reeked of confidence and privilege. It wasn’t that Galva disapproved of her, I suspected, but I don’t think she knew quite what to make of her or how to speak to her, so she kept her peace.

That there was more to Norrigal than met the eye was clear, but that was true of all of us. Knowing what Galva’s horse-staff could do made me wonder what the piece of birch Norrigal carried was capable of, but I doubted she would betray its secrets to me at this early stage of our acquaintance.

All I know is we were a quiet bunch as we came to the glorified oxpath they called the Salmon Road. This road led through cold pine forests and a few river hamlets known for good salmon, and then joined up with a branch of the White Road that made for Pigdenay, the big port town on the northwest corner of Holt.

It was near the end of the first day’s march that we found the bodies.

We saw a marker telling us we were coming up on a village, so we left the road, looking for a place near the river to spend the night, maybe catch a fish in the morning. We saw smoke coming from a copse near where we’d hoped to camp ourselves, so Galva sent me to have a quiet look at who our neighbors might be. I kept to the long shadows and stepped even and quiet, but it turned out there was no need for stealth.

The boy and two women by the fire wouldn’t be hearing anything but the pipes of Samnyr Na Gurth, the god who leads souls to the cold wood. The boy had his head the wrong way round, and the women had kissed swords or axes, it was a terrible mess. The fire they were tending wasn’t just a fire—it was a charcoal mound, and they had been about the dull, days-long business of watching it smolder, which would take three days. The mound was about my height, and still smoking proper. A smaller fire near at hand still smoked a bit but had been out an hour or more. Near it, a turned-over cookpot that still smelled of chicken soup and mushroom. One woman clutched an ancient, graying wooden bowl. A piece of bread too badly muddied for eating sat near the dead man’s boot.

They had just been trying to eat their supper, and they were killed for their food—not proper at all in a wood so full of fish, game, and berries.

Just next to the backward-head charcoal-lad, I saw a mash of footprints, some of which were as long as my hand and forearm together. When I brought the others to see it, I asked Galva, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

She made a fist with the two outside fingers sticking up like horns.

She was thinking what I was thinking.

“And what exactly is that?” asked Norrigal.

I told her about the baroness on the mare, about her hundred speardams, and about their quarry.

“Hornhead,” she repeated when I said his name. “I imagine there’ll be quite a reward for whoever takes him.”

“As there should be,” I said, looking at that head twisted as easily as a robin’s.

“And if it is him?” Galva said.

I thought about the great, jingling bag of coins we’d likely have if we could get his mixling’s head off him, then consulted my luck. My heart felt bathed in warm water. I didn’t particularly want to fight the beastie, nor his mates, but they were the sort to kill peaceful people, it seemed, and I could almost see the glow of the money, feel the gold queenings and silver knaves in my hands. This money wouldn’t have to go to the Guild, as I was paying them with service. My share of any reward would be mine to keep. A few good takes like that, and I could build a fine house on a cliff and fill it with books and money.

“It’s Hornhead,” I said. “And I think we can pull that big bull down.”

Tracking them was an easy matter at first, what with that heavy bastard’s foot making a baby’s grave with every step, but, as I suspected, the tracks soon disappeared. They had some magic to hide them. Whatever it was, was too faint for me to detect—but not too faint for Norrigal, who from the depths of her rucksack produced a sort of false nose of wood she fastened around her face with a leather cord. She looked ridiculous, but the thing worked.

“This magic smells like salt and shoe leather. I’ll bet he’s got sandals charmed not to leave a mark so long as he steps light. Light for him, anyway.”

“You look like a fucking heron,” I said, trying not to laugh. I also managed not to squawk when she pinched me.

We followed halfway through the night. They were keeping just west of the Salmon Road to stay hidden, making for the port of Pigdenay, second biggest city in all the Holtlands, but with a deeper harbor than Lamnur, the capital. Convenient for us, as that was our destination as well, but I doubted the bull-man wanted to be seen in any city. They would double back or cross west to lay in ambush on the road.

Exhausted at day’s end, we made camp. We chose a knobby hillock with more trees atop it than skirting it and settled in there, Galva watching little yellow birds, finches maybe, fly about the top branches. She wore the closest thing to a smile I’d seen on her face in some time.

We made no fire. I hadn’t any cantrips for making warmth, but Norrigal did. She pulled an acorn from one of her bewildering array of pouches and breathed on it and rubbed it, saying words I didn’t recognize over it until it began to warm noticeably. It built up heat until it was very like a piece of coal, then a whole brazier, though it only gave off the faintest glow.

“Nice, that,” I whispered, though she paid me no mind.

Soon, we three lay down near the fire-nut, which Norrigal set on a rock, and Galva said, “I’ll watch first, then I’ll wake you.” I guessed she volunteered to watch because she was rationing her wine and wouldn’t sleep well, if at all. Not that I was like to sleep any better with the neck-twisting soup thief about. Still, my watch was coming, and I had to try.

I lay there and counted girls I’d kissed, but that didn’t take long and only provoked an uncomfortable physical condition in myself I hadn’t the privacy to attend to. I started cataloging all the girls I wished I’d kissed and got morose thinking if they had a battle with the ones I had done, they would have rolled over them in an utter, humiliating rout. Not least because the ones who’d turned me down thought better of themselves than the ones who consented, with one or two exceptions, and self-esteem is very important in a fight. That began to ease the condition I mentioned, and the condition went away entirely when I realized my blanket was on fire.

“Foth Fuckannon!” I said in a hoarse whisper, throwing dirt on it, but the flames were magicked and wouldn’t easily go out. Galva tried to help, stamping at it, to little effect. Norrigal awoke then, saying, “Shyte! Shyte!” to see how badly she’d managed, and searched her pouches for some remedy. By now my poor blanket was half a torch and starting to touch the trees near us, but Norrigal found a bag of frost sand and scattered two pinches of it, dousing the flames, yes, but setting the hillock a notch colder than it had been when first we sat down shivering. Galva looked at the witchlet and shook her head. Abashed, Norrigal sat and looked at her hands, which lay in her lap like dead birds.

“Could be worse,” I said. They both looked at me now, the witch hopeful, the knight weary. “We could have been on a ship. Carrying a load of hay.”

“No ship carries hay,” Galva said, disgusted.

“It does if it’s got livestock aboard.”

“Then you say the ship is carrying animals. The hay is…” She searched for the word. “Incidental. No ship carries only hay.”

“What are their cows eating now, I wonder, in hayless countries,” I said, and the girleen laughed, which was what I wanted, and to hell with ten grouchy Spanths.

Now Galva seemed to remember herself and where she was.

“We are leaving this hill now,” she said, her normally decent Holtish faltering with the force of her anger, “since this pruxilta made a fadoran of it.”

“Witch, lighthouse,” I translated.

“I understood her,” Norrigal said, and we gathered our goods and filed down the hill into the now profound darkness.

It was not an hour later that we found our quarry.

Or rather, that our quarry found us.

We walked north and west, following the sound of the river the Salmon Road skirted, and even crossed that road twice. I had asked Norrigal if I might use the magic-sniffing false nose, and she was tired of the cord chafing her, so now I had the ungainly thing on. That salty-leathery-bully smell, with just a hint of some sort of herb, suddenly gave out. I looked for tracks and saw nothing.

“Damn it,” I said. “They’re onto us. They’ve retraced their steps somewhere.”

“So they are at our rear now?” Galva said. “How close?”

“How should I know?”

“How many?”

“Two, maybe,” I said. “More if they’re good in the woods. I think they’re good in the woods.”

I then noticed Norrigal drawing something on the palm of her hand with a bit of waxy black stump. I moved closer to it and looked at it.

“The fuck’s that?” I whispered.

“S’an ear. Now quiet. I haven’t used this spell before. Not when it counts.”

She whispered some words into her hand, then her eyes got wide. She pulled us both by our shirts to stop. Pointed behind to our right and held up one finger. She pointed behind us and held up three, shook her head, held up four, then shrugged as if she weren’t sure of that. She tilted her head, listening. Then she whispered to us, cupping her hand over her ear, wincing a little as she spoke.

“The one to our right is fast. Doesn’t mind the dark, near running, getting in front of us. The ones behind are slower. Our bull’s back there, one or two of em’s large.”

“How do you know?”

“Stop shouting.”

“I’m not.”

Galva pointed left, where the river was, and we moved toward it. We were hemmed in, but at least they couldn’t surround us. I took my bow out, but it was dark enough I wondered what good it would do. One shot, then maybe I’d drop it and pluck out Palthra. Have I mentioned I’m good with a knife? Once we got to the river and put it at our backs, Galva stripped off her shield and pack, then her shirt, then her chain mail.

I looked at her as if to question her sanity, but she couldn’t see me in the dark. She took back up her shield and put her hand on the spadín’s hilt.

“The fast one’s just there,” Norrigal whispered, nodding at the trees to our left. “Walking now.”

I put myself behind a knobby young pine tree that painted my shirtsleeve sticky with sap while I unstrapped my fiddle and nocked an arrow. I remembered the charcoal makers wrecked and murdered on the ground.

“Someone’s about to tell a lie,” Norrigal said with eyes half-mad.

“Friends,” a reedy voice said from the dark between the trees. The witch winced at the voice.

We kept quiet, watched as a thin, dirty, straw-haired woman in deerskins with an axe at her belt seemed to form from the very night. Just enough moon and starlight shone on her so I could see she was smiling. I kept an eye to our right, where I thought the others might come from—she was the distraction. I’d have used her the same way; she had a good smile.

“Would you have any food with you?” Deerpants said.

I remembered the soup bowl in the dead woman’s hand and got a shiver. These were the killers, and no question. I cut my eyes to Galva, but she just knelt there, shield ready, watching.

“We have only enough for ourselves,” I said. “Now in the name of peace, go on your way.”

“Peace?” she said. “Who speaks of peace thinks of blows. Do you mean me harm?” She was moving closer. I remembered what the witch said about how fast this one was, shifted slightly so my first arrow would go at her.

“I don’t,” I lied. Poor Norrigal’s teeth gritted against the noise of my words—our sound was beating her brains.

I watched the blond woman with the axe and the sharp smile.

“I don’t mean you harm, but I don’t want you closer,” I said. “Stop walking.”

She didn’t. “Are you so scared of a lone lass in a forest?”

“Many tales start just so and end in blood,” I said. “And you’re not alone. Now stop walking.”

“I’m stopping,” she said, but she wasn’t.

“Fucking stop.”

“I have. Why are you so scared? You who put yourselves in our way. You who followed us.”

She hadn’t stopped. She kept walking like she was creeping up on a sleeping babe.

I was going to have to feather her. I didn’t want to, even though that’s why we were here, and she knew it and was using it against me. I was good enough in a fight, but it was hard for me to start one. The Guild had tried to beat that out of me and had mostly succeeded.

Mostly.

One more step and I’d do it.

I would.

Fothannon, steal some courage for me.

Norrigal, still gritting her teeth, pointed at the trees to the right now.

Everything happened at once.