choice of words, stayed down where it was. Darting eyes found the movement that was the second creature hovering among the hanging boughs. Tilda lay perfectly still but the thing was already drifting on beating wings in her direction, sharp snout swinging this way and that until it snapped to point at Tilda on the ground. Red wings beat harder and it came at her fast.
Tilda tried to move but found that she scarcely could, having more or less pinned herself by her twisted cloak. Her feet scrambled across the soft carpet of the forest floor kicking needles everywhere, and both hands scrabbled though she could get them neither to the dagger in her boot nor the one at the small of her back. The thing was already around the nearest tree and diving at her, shaft level as a lance to stab her, all four claws extended to dig in and hold on as it fed.
All training aside Tilda did begin to scream, but it caught in her throat as someone vaulted over her prone struggles to stand facing the diving thing. Captain! Tilda thought at first, but the man was a full-sized human. Muscled calves bound across with cords to the knees, sandal lacings over cloth leggings, landed at what was presently Tilda’s eye-level. The man swung a length of branch like a Miilarkian boy, or girl for that matter, playing stick-ball between the passing carts and wagons on a street of the capital city. He connected for what surely would have been a good hit.
The flapping thing made a flute-like hooting through its snout as it tumbled through the air and bashed off the nearest tree trunk. It fell twitching to the ground and the man made another bound, coming down on it squarely with all his weight on both feet. Feet in the thick-soled, round-toed marching sandals of a Legionnaire of the Empire of All Lands Under the Code. There was a crunch of bone, and the man quickly spread his feet apart as the ruined creature between them began to ooze.
Tilda lay as though paralyzed and the man was stock-still as well, makeshift club before him in a two- handed grip, head tilted as he listened intently. Tilda did not need to be told to hush, and made no sound anyway. Besides the sandals laced up his calves, the fellow wore a rough cloth tunic, belted at the waist and falling skirt- like down to his knees. The rough garment had no sleeves, but he had a blanket wrapped around his broad chest, fashioned like a Doonish serape. His back was still to Tilda and she could not see his face, but his hair was dark as the gloomy shadows and cropped very short, which made sense. Legionnaires cut their hair almost to the scalp, but the men of the 34 ^ had been under arrest and then renegade for a month. Discipline, not to say grooming standards, had certainly been eroding.
“I don’t hear any more of them. No god loves a stirge.”
The man’s voice was startling in the silence. It was deep as befit his physique, and had the flat Beoan accent all legionnaires tended to acquire in time, no matter from what part of the sprawling Empire they originally hailed.
“Loves a what?” Tilda asked from the ground in her smallest voice.
“Stirges.” The man poked his club at the wreckage at his feet. “Blighted, blood-sucking trouble they are. A flock will drain a horse or beeve dry in an hour. Less for a man.”
The man turned to face Tilda, and her eyes flicked to the fat blade of the legionnaire short sword thrust naked through his belt on his left hip.
“Are you all right?” he asked, reaching Tilda in a stride and kneeling close enough for her to perceive his features in the gathering gloom. Her spirits were divided by what she saw.
First, the fellow was quite handsome, which was a good thing in and of itself. Legion regulations tolerated no facial hair but this fellow had a beard and mustache coming in along with the hair on his head, still short but black and thick. It framed rather than hid what were good features. Strong jaw, high cheeks, and a brow that was a bit on the thick side, giving neat dark eyebrows a slightly forward-thrusting look of intensity. His deep-set eyes in the plunging shadows looked to be a murky shade of brown however, which, while not unpleasant, were certainly not emerald green.
But really, odds of 500-to-1 against had been far too long to bet.
“I think I need to burn my cloak,” Tilda said, and indeed the man’s nose wrinkled as he got a whiff of the gore from Tilda’s garment.
“You fell on one?” he asked with a note of amusement, obviously having missed Tilda’s haphazard acrobatics. “Come on, let’s get you on your feet.”
Tilda accepted the offered hand and felt the rough calluses of practice with weapons. Her hands were much the same, though she still had her gloves on. She let the man help her up and gave a shudder and a groan as the bloody mess of the first stirge slid out of her cloak and plopped to the ground. She had almost straightened fully when her long braid swished loose over her shoulder in what was rapidly becoming only moon and starlight. Tilda felt the man’s hand tighten on hers and then suddenly release, and she pitched forward off-balance to fall headlong back to the ground as he danced several steps away. He cast aside his branch, gripped the hilt of his sword, and snarled.
“You are a Miilarkian!”
Tilda, with the wind knocked out of her, groaned neutrally.
“What in the hells are you doing out here? And alone?” The man barked with the voice of command, surely as he would have were he still a soldier of the Legions. Before Tilda could muster enough breath to answer the fellow said, “Or are you alone at all?” He drew his sword cleanly while taking several more steps away to put his back against a tree trunk.
Horses approached at a trot and swiftly appeared, dark shapes that were the Captain on his pony, leading the mare. Both animals hung their heads in a manner distinctly sheepish for horses, but the dwarf’s hood snapped about as his shadowed eyes raked the surroundings. His gaze passed over Tilda with nary a pause, then locked on the legionnaire. Block was out of the saddle quick as thought, advancing on the man and striking a spark from a flint in one hand. The oil-soaked head of a torch bloomed and the Captain thrust it toward the legionnaire’s face. The man scowled and squinted in the sudden light, teeth and sword bared, but Block stared only at his eyes.
Brown.
“Damn your eyes,” the dwarf growled, sounding both angry and suddenly tired. The man only stared back, blinking, and Block shifted the torch so the light fell on Tilda.
“Are you alive?”
Climbing back to her feet, Tilda felt like she had fallen off the Ghost Mountain, bouncing the whole way down.
“Mostly.”
The torch swung back to the gaping legionnaire. He had recognized Tilda for what she was by her braid, but seemed utterly dumbfounded by a likewise braided, beardless dwarf. Tilda could scarcely blame him, for the Captain was one of a kind.
“Soldier,” Block barked. “What was your company of the 34 ^ Legion?”
The staring man answered by rote.
“Second Century.”
That was at least something. Tilda felt a flutter of hope in her chest, which at this point only made her ribs ache worse.
“We seek your commanding Centurion,” Block said, his voice suddenly quiet. “The man called John Lepokahan.”
The word gave Tilda a twinge, for le po ka han was a biting oath in the old language of the Islands. It was also the name that luck, or else some subtle magic inherent to the Captain, had led them to discover that their quarry had assumed when he enrolled in the Codian Legions, six years ago now.
The renegade just went on staring. The mare and her pony had been moving toward Tilda, but they stopped short as if even they were anxious to hear the man’s answer. The crackle of Block’s burning brand was the only sound in a moment that lingered on toward painful.
“Soldier…”
“Lepokahan was not his real name,” the bedraggled deserter of the Legions said softly. “He said it was John Deskata, before he was exiled from Miilark.”
Chapter Four
