soaking.’
At this point, the captive good-naturedly interrupted. ‘A storm won’t hurt. The tarps are new enough not to leak.’
‘Quiet!’ Idrien glanced around in fresh worry. ‘Too much chatter will fetch the scouts.’
Their captive considered this, his long, lean legs quick to compensate for the buckskin’s short-strided trot. ‘Young raiders don’t have their own scouts?’ He might have been laughing; or not, dusk had deepened too much to tell.
Jieret skinned his knuckles in a belatedly frantic search, but found neither socket nor driving whip. He tried to hasten the pony’s pace by flapping his arms. The buckskin snapped up its round quarters. Hooves banged vengefully against the buckboard. Smacked through the soles of his boots, and stinging mightily, Idrien scowled.
Jieret clung grimly to propriety. ‘Our scouts are off to find other marks,’ he lied grandly. ‘If you hope to stay alive to be ransomed, keep silent.’
For all their unplanned excitement, the boys guided the little cart swiftly through the darkness. In a natural declivity between chalk bluffs they ordered the pony unhitched. Idrien held the old man at stickpoint, while Jieret piled brush to conceal their booty. Then, smothering back whoops of exhilaration, the boys chivvied their captive through the forest to the clan gathering they had forsaken to seek adventure.
Control broke on the camp perimeter. Jieret burst into shouting, while Idrien startled the dancers into uproar by casting his toy javelin straight into the central fire. Sparks flew; the celebration unravelled in confusion as leather- clad scouts scrambled to grab weapons, and others on guard patrol converged from the wood with drawn steel.
Blinking against the shifting glare of torches, the captive stumbled to a halt. Jieret braved the buckskin’s teeth to grasp a fistful of black and gold cloak and drag his catch a reluctant step closer to the fires.
‘Here!’ He waved to the tallest of the approaching men. ‘A sure ransom we’ve brought, father, and a pony for Tashka.’
Steiven, reigning regent of Rathain, was a hard man to miss, even in uncertain light amid his pack of leather- clad scouts. Lanky, dark headed, he ran with the grace of a deer. His eyes, deep hazel, were wary as any forest creature’s whose kind has been too long hunted. His hands were large and strongly made; his clean-shaven chin was square. The bones of his face hinted at a rough-cut, handsome beauty, an impression spoiled at first sight by a scar that grooved his cheekbone and jaw to end in a ridged knot of flesh above his collarbone.
A wild boar’s tusk might have ripped such disfigurement; in fact, Steiven’s looks had been ruined by a harness buckle heated red-hot by a caravan master when, at ten years of age, he had chased the wagon that carried his brothers’ scalps for credit as a bounty hunter’s kill.
He had been fortunate to escape with his life.
The sight of his half-grown son gambolling into camp with a captive clad in town clothes gave Steiven a start that had much to do with memories that recurred in nightmares. Yet he was a man for listening before action; half a lifetime of chieftaincy had taught him to be exactingly fair. Though his heart beat too fast and he wanted to strike his boy for this latest insanely foolish prank, he forced himself to think and to walk; and then the captive raised his head. Spaced front teeth flashed in a smile and a snag of white hair escaped his hood.
Steiven stopped cold, the drift of Jieret’s chatter disregarded. His fists uncurled. ‘Bare your head,’ he commanded.
For answer, the old man half-turned.
The clan chief’s ruddy complexion turned pale. ‘Dharkaron, forgive us.’
At his tone, Jieret faltered into silence. Sweating, aware he had earned himself a hiding, he stared wide-eyed as his father drew his dagger and with shocking diffidence toward a townborn, cut the ties from the captive’s wrists.
The elder raised his freed hands and pushed back his hood. Black cloth lined in yellow silk fell away to expose a knife-blade nose and a spill of shoulder-length silver hair.
‘Grant us pardon, master,’ Steiven said softly. Then he rounded in fury on his son. ‘You captured no merchant, foolish boy! Shame you’ve brought your clan, not ransom. You stand before the Masterbard himself.’
‘Him?’ Jieret’s insolence rang defensively loud as he gestured with his sharpened stick.
Steiven ripped the makeshift weapon out of his child’s hands. ‘Didn’t you find the lyranthe when you reviewed his possessions for arms?’
Jieret started to tremble.
‘Ah,’ said Steiven. He caught the Master bard’s desperate attempt to hide amusement, and regained his own equilibrium. He effected a ferocious scowl anyway. ‘Not only did you raid the wrong man, son, you also kept slack discipline!’
Somebody giggled on the sidelines; Jieret’s older sister Tashka. Humiliation would serve the boy better than a strapping in private. Steiven decided to pass off the affair as a stupidity beneath the notice of grown men. ‘Apologize at once and offer Halliron your hospitality. Or else amend your insult by meeting his demand for honourgift, and give him escort back to the road for the stupid bit of nuisance you’ve caused.’
Jieret looked wildly around but Idrien had seized his chance to vanish. Crestfallen, but still brazenly unapologetic, he straightened before the tall minstrel.
‘Don’t speak,’ Halliron said with a wicked twinkle in his eyes. ‘Instead, I’ll thank you to care for my pony and fetch back my lyranthe from the cart.’ Solemnly, he surrendered his buckskin’s hacked-off reins into the hands of the miscreant.
At Jieret’s first tug at the headstall, the pony snapped back black-tipped ears. A forehoof flashed up in a snake-fast strike and the boy, yelling curses better suited to a caravan drover, jumped back to escape getting whacked.
‘He can handle cross-grained horses, I trust?’ said Halliron to the father, only to find the huge man sitting down without warning in wet leaves. Steiven’s arms were clutched to his ribs as though he might tear a gut stifling laughter. ‘Fair punishment,’ the regent of Rathain snorted between wheezes. ‘A pony for Tashka, indeed! That
