wrists, leaves them to
rot and die, and calls it a cleansing. One that burns villages, abuses women, and locks down High Haldia like a jail. Fear is their master, not Lord Radas.'
'Lord Radas's pleasure is fear. That's why he commands the army.'
'Who commands Lord Radas?'
'She is very old, although she doesn't look it. What she is truly, I do not understand.'
'But she wears a Guardian's cloak.' She thought of the night she had watched a woman walk out of the forest and, without touching them, kill two reeves. 'A cloak of night, spanned with stars. She — whoever she is — and Lord Radas discovered how to kill Guardians, and then took their cloaks for their own. Find out how to kill a Guardian, Hari, and tell me, and then I promise you, if it's still your choice, that I will release you if it is in my power. After I have destroyed them.'
'You'll never manage it.'
He walked farther into the night, until she could not see him. Trees sighed in a wind out of the south, running up the river from the distant ocean, carrying the promise of more rain. They had camped on a stretch of beach where a bend in the river had led the current to undermine the far shore and smooth this one. Thorns bristled in plenty to shelter them from patrols, and stands of smoke tree and northern pipe separated them from the Istri Walk, a screen against prying eyes.
She walked back to the fire.
Without looking up, the spy said, 'Folk are saying the Guardians were murdered. That demons took their place for the power they could wield.'
'It's an explanation,' she agreed.
After a while, he spoke again. 'My name's Miken. Toskala's council sent me and four others to spy out Walshow, but I was caught in High Haldia. I don't know what became of the others. It's true I have a sister in High Haldia. That's why I went there.'
The truth stings.
She looked away, reaching for the bag of provisions. 'You want more rice? Maybe some wine to wash it down?'
LWhy did you save me?'
He had a cautious gaze, and she found that if she struggled to
draw an imagined curtain between her and him, his thoughts did not overwhelm her. He had nice eyes, but his face was thinned with hunger and hollow with the pain he still endured from the aftermath of beatings and then the final hanging, for he'd told his captors everything and they had laughed at his weakness.
'I was a reeve, once. In my heart, I'm still a reeve.'
He indicated Hari's presence beyond the light. 'What about the outlander?'
'Listen, Miken. You can go free now, make your own way. You can travel with us, pretend to be my prisoner or my hireling. We're headed for the army. I'll try to get you back into Toskala, but there's no guarantee I can manage it.'
'I'll never know if it's true or not, what you're saying.'
'No, you won't. But I give my oath as an apprentice to the Lady, where I took my year's service, that I'm telling you the truth. It's her honor I hold in my hands when I tell you that if I can bring them down, I will.'
'You alone? That one seems to me a bit of a coward and an outlander besides, which might account for it.'
'I can't stand aside and do nothing.'
He was seated on a log, hands laid loose in his lap and arms slack, everything still too sore and abused to work properly. But he was stronger than he'd been when they'd cut him down.
'I know the back routes. I'll make my own way to Toskala.'
'We'll leave you provisions then, if you can carry them.'
He closed and opened his right hand, face scrunched up in pain, but he managed the movement, and then closed and opened his left hand to show it could be done.
'Tie the bag to my back, and help me shove this log into the river. They can't see me at night, and we're past the cataracts. It's smooth water more or less downstream.'
'A reasonable plan, if you can hang on.'
'I've hung on this long. I endured worse.' He rose. 'No point waiting. The council needs my report.'
She rigged the provision bag around his torso, then dragged the log into the river. 'You're sure?'
He flexed his shoulders, tested his range of motion. 'My thanks lo you for rescuing me. What's your name?'
The streaming current rushed, louder than the wind.
She smiled sadly. 'Ramit.'
He hooked himself into the fork where a branch had grown out from the bole. 'My thanks, Ramit. May the gods honor you.'
His words brought tears. 'May you find a safe haven, Miken.'
She shoved the log onto the river and watched until she could no longer see it on the dark waters. Then she walked back and sat by the fire, contemplating the lick and simmer of flames and the occasional spat spark. Was there a pattern to its burning, a truth in the way flames ran merry along a charring log or glowed in a blue-white shimmer where coals burned dense and hot?
If Guardians can be made, then they can be unmade.
If Lord Radas and his ally can kill, then so could she.
A branch snapped. She grabbed her sword.
Hari strolled into the light. 'So you didn't trust him either. Wise of you, my sweet.'
'When did I become your sweet?' She sheathed the sword.
He braced a foot on another drift log and stared at the sky, but it was overcast and thus starless. Ripples of firelight seemed to work through the fabric of his twilight cloak. Her own had a stubborn bone-white gleam, as pure as death.
'Two times I took off my cloak,' she said, 'and I couldn't breathe, and then it wrapped around me, and took me back, like it refused to let me die. So you can't just remove a cloak and kill them that way. You'd have to bind the cloak as well.'
'You can't kill what is already dead. Anyway, if a living person touches the clasp which binds a cloak, their skin burns and blisters just as if they were touching fire.'
'How do you know that?'
'Yordenas does it, if a person angers him. Makes them hold the clasp until the skin burns off their hands.'
Marit shuddered. 'Where is he now?'
'He was sent south to take charge of Argent Hall, and I was sent south with the army.'
'Then you both failed.'
'And I'm pleased to hear it!' His grin made her laugh. 'I did my best to do as little as possible with my command. I marched as a mercenary with the Qin for a while, and I saw how disciplined their
troops were, and how certain men could not bear the discipline. I was given the dregs, the criminals and the insane, I swear to you, and I let them give in to the worst that drove them. That's why they were so easy to defeat at Olossi.'
'Whose side are you really on? Had you ridden them harder, you'd have led them to victory.'
He bent to grab a stick, and poked into the fire until, with an oath, he flung the now-burning stick into the river. 'Let's ride. No use lingering here.'
She raised her arms, stretching. He watched her in silence, but she did not need the sense granted by her Guardian's cloak to recognize a stirring of arousal in his body.
'Harishil, eh? Hari being your short name. You're not Water-born?'
'I don't know what that means. Although my brothers complained that I was always too full of hot air.'
She smiled, not wanting to think of Fire-born Joss. 'Air, then. Which suits me. I can think of a reason to linger here, where it's quiet and isolated.'
He sucked in a breath, moving neither toward nor away.
