follow, as while it kept to a typically thin path in the Orstavian grass their passage had trod it into a wider way littered with refuse that someone had thought would be a good idea to bring along when the march began, only to drop miles and even days later. There had been cookware, bedrolls, blankets, spare shoes, extra packs and clothes, and every time Captain Block had spied any of this garbage alongside the trail he had ordered Tilda off her mare to look it over. Block would canter on ahead with both horses, leaving Tilda to jog until she caught up. Every time. This exercise served no purpose that Tilda could divine other than to keep the Captain mildly amused, which was why she had not reported the discovery of one silver coin, a Codian Swan, in the bottom of a pack. The coin was in her pocket and Tilda periodically held it in a closed hand when the Captain was trying her. She liked the weight of it in her fist.
Tilda took a bit more time to inventory the saddle and other left-behinds in the clearing, including the torn half of a very prettily-embroidered horse blanket with a pattern of sparrows in flight along the border. She had finished and was looking at the ground by the time Block made one circuit of the clearing and asked her a question. His earlier words had all been in Codian, but this was in Trade: Shto zinat? What do you know?
“The fresh prints are the charger and one person, a man by the size. They are atop a great mess of tracks from a day or two ago. The reins and rigging are all here, stripped and dropped, and the saddle is for fighting, not riding.”
“Mounted for a lance?”
“Yes. It has ties for saddlebags but there are none here, though there is loose gear that came this far in them. Tack hammer, extra buckles and stirrups. Nothing someone would need once they went to foot. But first he tore up the pretty kit to scrub and bind up the horse. The other half of this blanket is on its haunches now. There are round rust marks like it was worn under barding.”
Tilda glanced over toward the white horse, which had lost interest in her and moved off to stand closer to the mare and pony.
“What else about the footprints?”
Tilda frowned at her Captain, his heavy dwarven features expectant and his thick, dark eyebrows together. She looked down at the nearest clear mark for a moment, then put her own foot down beside it. Her riding boots had a pointed toe to slip easily into and out of stirrups.
“Rounded toes, from a shoe or sandal.” Tilda looked back up at the Captain. “The man who rode the horse here was not the knight to whom it belonged.”
Block gave a soft grunt of grudging approval, which Tilda had learned was the extreme upper limit to his expressions of praise. The nicest thing he had said to Tilda in three months was that she might have a bit of brain in her head. Along with the rocks and shiny bits of ribbon.
“We were wrong,” Block said, throwing Tilda completely.
“ Tizalk?”
Captain Block rumbled a low growl in his cavernous chest and glared off to the south, down the way they had been going these last three days toward the faint smudge of distant mountains on the horizon.
“We thought to overtake the slow marchers well before they reached Duke Gratchik’s town. Before any battle might be fought. But we did not consider that the Duke might hit Nyham first, at the edge of his lands, only half a day distant from here.”
Actually, we thought nothing of the sort, Tilda thought now. She said something different.
“You think a battle has already been fought?”
Block nodded toward the charger. “That wound on the arse is long, from a big blade. Spear or a pole-arm. But the holes on the ribs are high, and the rags jammed in them poke out and up. Arrows shot from distance, on their downward path.”
Tilda felt cold, and not just from the drear air. The man they had come here to find – all the way to Noroth and to Codia and to Orstaf – had marched with Nyham. If there had been a battle, he had been in it.
“Should we not hurry on, Captain?” she said. “I mean, he could…we have to find out what happened.”
“We know what happened,” Block growled. “The baron got whipped. A footman jumped on a knight’s horse and rode it back to here. That beast was not going any further today, and the man would not wait. The fellow went to ground and kept moving. And look here.”
Block turned and stomped to the southwest edge of the clearing no longer minding the marks on the ground, so neither did Tilda as she followed. At the edge of the tall grass Block pointed at a last shoeprint on the soft mossy ground, then out into the grass.
“Broken stalk, bent stalk, another bent further along, in a dead line southwest. Southwest. Not back north, toward Nyham’s lands. Not the direction a fleeing peasant or manor man would have gone to get home.”
Of Nyham’s seven-hundred men, two hundred had been such locals. The other five-hundred, only one of whom Tilda and her Captain were interested in, were recent legionnaires of the Codian Empire. They were deserters from the 34 ^ Foot, hired by the baron to visit vengeance upon his Duke, apparently without success.
“One of the renegades,” Tilda said, and Block nodded.
“I don’t know where the man thinks he is going now, but he is in a hurry to get there. Can’t be more than eight hours ahead.”
“So what?” Tilda said, and Block raised a dark eyebrow touched with gray at her.
“I mean, in that case…I mean it seems to me…”
“Spit it out, girl.”
Tilda took a breath, and realized her heart was pounding. The last three months of her life seemed to be crashing into this moment from behind.
“Captain, we need to be on that battlefield, now. If, if our man is dead, we need to know it. And if he is captured we have to get there before he is hung for desertion, or for bearing arms against the Duke, or whatever. Right now, sir. Lol hique.”
Block was again staring to the southwest, in the direction that the last mark of a legionnaire’s marching sandal pointed.
“Or maybe he escaped the battle. Made a run for it.”
Tilda did not like where that was going. “Then our best chance of learning where he might have run would also be at the battlefield, no? With any captured legionnaires, who themselves may be strung-up before much longer.”
Block did not seem to be listening. He was still staring off across the burry tops of the tall grass as the stalks waved gently in the chill breeze.
“Unless this is our man,” he said.
Behind him, for just a moment, Tilda dropped her jaw and glared disbelief at Block’s wide back. She reined in her face before stammering one question in two languages.
“I’m tizalk…sorry… spahalo what?”
“Five-hundred-to-one odds against it, I know,” Block said, still staring away. “Bit long to wager much. But the pay-off…”
Tilda wanted either to jump up and down, or else kick her esteemed and honorable Captain in his wide hindquarters. She managed to do neither. Just.
“Forgive me, Captain, but I think at the Island Stakes they call that a misag uyak. A Fool’s Bet.”
“Not if the race is rigged.”
Now Tilda could only stare. It was not her place to question the Captain, and even if it had been, she had no idea of what she could possibly say to that.
Block hitched back his black half-cloak, reaching inside to pluck something from a pouch at his belt. He extended an arm and opened his palm. Tilda saw a coppery gleam, and inwardly groaned.
The Empire of the Code minted as its smallest denomination copper pennies modeled on those of the old Kingdom of Tull, now an Imperial province for some hundred-fifty years. Popularly called “thumbs,” each side showed a fist with the thumb extended. Lucky side up, you could see the folded fingers against the palm. Unlucky thumbs-down showed the back of the hand.
Block balanced the coin on his own bent thumb. “Your call?”
“Lucky side to the battlefield.” Tilda said quickly, then muttered under her breath. “Nothing else makes sense.”
