Tyrant

II

They rode slowly out in line abreast, well spaced. Brennan strung his bow as they went. He was still somewhat clumsy and unpractised at it. The whole notion of using a bow on horseback was new to him. Like several of the Free, he had been learning from Hamdan, a Massatan whose people knew the skill from birth as best Brennan could tell. It would never come as naturally to him, he imagined, but then it hardly needed to. There were few other horse archers in the Hommetic Kingdom. Having even a handful, late learners or not, gave the Free another small claim on the fear of their enemies. One among many.

‘Anyone looses a shaft without my word, I’ll make you walk all the way back to Yulan to explain yourself,’ Lorin said.

Brennan tugged at his bowstring, testing it. He steered his horse with his legs and his weight just as Hamdan had taught.

The sun was off on their left, high and hard. At least it would not be in their eyes. He had no sooner thought that than he had cause to doubt whether the sun’s place in the sky mattered.

As the distance closed between them and the staggering, stumbling figure and the riders further out, that figure stumbled once too often. Fell to the ground. And the riders beyond, dark shapes all but obscured by their own dust and the heat shimmer, appeared to draw to a halt. Brennan did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed at that.

Lorin kept his horse to the same steady pace. The three of them advanced upon the fallen man. The other horsemen-there were half a dozen of them, Brennan could see now-remained still. They held at a longbowshot’s distance. Brennan slid an arrow from his quiver and set it to the string. There was no harm in being prepared, but he did not draw the bowstring back. Not yet.

The solitary figure rose, not far ahead of them now, and Brennan realised with an involuntary grunt of surprise that it was a woman. She came unsteadily towards them. Her hair was matted and lank; her clothes dirty and ragged. She was dressed as any villager might be, in a long, heavy skirt and a light cloth jacket. To Brennan, she certainly looked as someone might after they had been seized from their fields by raiding slavers.

She almost fell once more as she drew near, but kept her footing. She showed no sign of injury. It was exhaustion, perhaps the weakness of hunger and thirst, which made her so unsteady.

Lorin drew his horse to a halt and Brennan and Manadar did likewise, flanking him.

Brennan made to dismount, ready to help the woman. Lorin forestalled that, not sharply but firmly.

‘Keep your saddle, boy. You don’t go to ground when there’s folk with blades sitting on horses close by. Let her come to us, if that’s what she wants to do.’

‘Help me,’ the woman called out, almost as if answering Lorin’s words.

Her voice was a cracking, crumbling rasp. Brennan doubted any water had passed her lips in a long time.

Manadar beckoned her.

‘Come to me; I’ll lift you up,’ he told her.

They watched in silence as she staggered to his horse. She took hold of the arm he reached down much like a drowning woman grabbing hold of a branch. Manadar hooked his hand under her armpit and swung her up. It was clumsy and far from elegant, but she ended up slumped at his back, sitting on the bedroll tied across the horse’s rump. She clung to his shoulders.

‘Where are you from?’ Lorin asked loudly, keeping his eyes on the six riders.

She did not reply at first and he asked again, louder.

‘Wyven Dam,’ she murmured.

One of the two Hommetic villages the Imperial slavers had despoiled. Thirty or so folk had been taken from there, as best Brennan could remember. The same again from the other hamlet. Torn from their huts and hiding places and carried away into the Empire of Orphans. Those who were not killed, in any case.

The Free had ridden through Wyven Dam at the very start of their hunt. A few days after the slavers had come visiting, and still there were some corpses on the ground. There were too few left there to bury or burn all the dead quickly. Those dead were mostly old men who had tried to defend their people and had no value to slavers alive. And old women.

‘Wyven Dam,’ Lorin repeated. ‘Good enough. Well, we can’t be sitting out here trading stares with slave-takers all day. Too hot for that. Send an arrow down their necks, Brennan. I imagine, one way or the other, that’ll move things along.’

Brennan did as he was told. He aimed high, breathed out a long, slow breath and sent the shaft arcing across the blue sky. It fell short by perhaps ten yards.

‘Lucky Hamdan’s not here to see that,’ chuckled Manadar.

Brennan grimaced. It was not a terrible shot by his own standards, but Manadar was right. Hamdan did not approve of misses, no matter how hard the target. Still, the attempt had the desired effect. Without any show of alarm, the six riders wheeled their mounts around and began to move away.

Like scattered fragments of shadow, the birds circling above did the same. Understanding somehow that the day’s promise of food had come to nothing, they slid away across the hot sky.

Manadar cocked his head and frowned at the backs of the horsemen as they sank away into the haze.

‘Didn’t ride very hard to catch her, and they’re not riding very hard now,’ he grunted.

‘Perhaps they’re not as stupid as we’d like them to be,’ said Lorin. ‘Riding hard out here’s a fast way to kill a horse.’

‘True. They must know who we are though. You’d think they’d ride at least a little harder to get out of our reach. I feel… slighted.’

Brennan smiled to himself. Manadar was not entirely wrong. Half the Free’s battles were won before they began, by the reputation those who had gone before had built. Their band of swords had existed for decades, surviving as all the other free companies dwindled away or were destroyed. Overcoming all enemies, great and small, until they stood alone. Alone yet so potent that their name was enough to breed fear.

He watched the woman at Manadar’s back. He might have thought she had fallen asleep or into unconsciousness, but for the slight trembling and shifting of her hand.

‘Retrieve your arrow,’ Lorin said.

Brennan blinked. The slavers were almost lost to sight now. Swallowed up by this hateful emptiness. Lorin was right. No sense in letting the arrow go to waste. Here in the Empire, there might come a day when he needed every single shaft in his quiver.

Brennan rode out slowly. The sun beat at his bare head.