to be punished.'
'Neh, we made them, so leave them be. Anyway, if I were a wagering man, I'd bet you the child will follow us and before five days are out be begging to let it join the company.'
'You think so?'
This was how you obscured your trail. 'I do.'
He scanned the forest. He was used to high-elevation trees, ones that could survive frost and a seasonal dusting of the snow never seen down here. These lowland hothouse woodlands creeped him, for sure, so dense and moist it was like being inside a vast sensate beast. Branches were swaying although the breeze wasn't strong enough to send them rocking like that.
At the ruins of the waterwheel, they carted up their wounded and called in the other companies, leaving behind half-pillaged villages with corpses and burned houses scattered like chaff. There was a decent north-south road here, running roughly parallel to but rather more inland than the famed Istri Walk, the major road that ran on high ground on both banks alongside the magnificent River Istri, whose humble headwaters he had grown up fishing.
Strange where life took an insignificant ordinand. He'd never imagined in his youth that he'd find himself living in a time where he could become a true soldier, just like those who were more reviled than admired in the tales.
By midafternoon they could no longer smell the smoke of their raid, and in the villages they marched through they paused only
long enough to demand coin. In one village, a pair of rambunctious cousins begged leave to join them, and he allowed them to sign on as hirelings mostly because their clansmen were clearly horrified at this desertion. Later, when he halted to allow his men to wet their throats at an inn, a rough-looking traveler named Laukas asked for a hire, saying he'd tend to horses or boots, anything for a meal and a chance at learning how to fight properly. The new men worked hard that evening when they set up camp; they'd either grow tired of the labor, or they wouldn't. Only time would tell.
He made a circuit of the sentry lines and returned to his own fire to eat nai porridge and smoked meat. The sergeants gave their reports, and afterward he dismissed all except Giyara.
'I'm thinking of that child,' Arras said, as if the thought had just leaped upon him and wrestled him to the ground. 'Maybe you could leave a parcel of food and drink out beyond the sentry lines, something the child might stumble upon if indeed it is following us.'
Giyara cocked her head, examining him as if he were crazy. 'As you wish, Captain.'
'I just have a feeling,' he repeated, and shook his head, sensing he was overdoing it. 'What have you heard about the eighteen new recruits we were saddled with?'
She'd known he would want to hear the gossip, so she had already done her talking with the company subcaptains and cadre sergeants. Her analysis was succinct: Fifteen would likely work out, one had died in the raid through sheer idiocy, and the other two were troublemakers he'd need to deal with soon.
'Just kill them,' he said. 'Rid us of the problem immediately rather than let it drag on. You can slot those three new men in, but be sure to split up the cousins.'
He dismissed her, then considered the flames, the pleasant noises of an orderly camp settling down for the night, and the distant scream of a rabbit caught in the dusk by a predator.
'Captain.'
'The hells!' He sprang up, hand on his sword hilt, but it was already too late. A woman cloaked in night walked out of the darkness and captured him, her voice the hook and her eyes the spear. Down he tumbled, his heart and mind laid open to her sight, all his secrets revealed.
He liked Lord Twilight, truth to tell, although he knew a hum-
ble soldier like him hadn't the right to feel any sense of comradeship with a cloak, who was either a holy Guardian or an unholy lilu or some hells-brewed stew of both. Anyway, you couldn't say no to a cloak, even if — especially if — the cloak's orders were likely to get you strung up on a pole.
So he would cover his tracks as well as he could. He would play the game of misdirection. He had crushed a nest of bandits. Nothing suspicious in that. Meanwhile, he would send Sergeant Giyara out with parcels of food every night, ostensibly for a child who might be brash enough to follow, although he deemed that particular child unlikely to have the courage. That was the kind of child who stuck it out in a bad situation, too afraid to bolt, and got itself whipped and eventually, when its own people had come to despise it enough, butchered. Rotten, they would call it, and then they'd fling its spiritless flesh into the woods to be scoured by the Lady's beasts and pretend it had never existed. Every night someone other than him would take out those parcels for a child who probably wasn't following them, while he would hope that a fugitive outlander seeking safe passage to Nessumara had actually been hiding in the forest within hearing of his voice.
She released him.
He fell forward, barely catching himself on his hands, his nose brushing the dirt. 'Do you mean to have me cleansed, Holy One?'
She spoke without anger or sorrow. 'Captain Arras, I followed you because I was curious why three companies stumbled onto the very same bandits I did. It seemed unlikely it was a coincidence. Nor was it. I have a better insight into events now. Yet I do not fault you for obeying Lord Twilight's order. I appreciate your loyalty and your cleverness. You attempt to protect your soldiers as well as yourself. Very commendable.'
'How may I serve you, Holy One?' he said, keeping his head bowed and straining his will to empty his mind. Maybe he had a chance of surviving this.
'Fight well with the army, Captain. When Lord Twilight returns, when he seeks you out, as he will, tell him I have his brother.'
'Greetings of the day, verea. Nice the markets are open again, eh?' Ostiary Nekkar examined a tray of withered caul petals as he crouched on his haunches beside an old woman selling remnants from her garden.
'Generous of you to say so, Holy One. Only from second bell to fourth bell, and then us chased back into our homes.' She was very wrinkled, with many teeth missing, but she had a vigorous heart and was willing to speak her mind.
'Where's your granddaughter, verea? I miss her cheerful face.'
'As if we'd risk her in the marketplace in days like these.' She indicated two soldiers leaning on their spears and two others strolling as they looked over the merchandise. Usually, one bell after dawn, the main market of Stone Quarter was alive with chatter and gossip and laughter. Nekkar never tired of observing people: the blazing health and innocent beauty of the young, the nagging and hopefully jovial complaints of those who, like him, were mature without being elderly, and the enduring strength of folk like Gazara, twice widowed but a great- grandmother, the pillar of her poor but proud clan of day laborers, men and women who dug ditches, cleared canals, and worked on the road beds.
He nodded. 'Is there work for your people? How are you managing?'
She bent over the caul petals to separate the merely withered from the desiccated. 'The soldiers pay coin to anyone who brings them information, so I hear.'
'I remember,' said Nekkar carefully, 'that your clan took in two families of distant cousins some months ago.'
She wiped her mouth with the back of a hand and spoke in a whisper. 'They're with us still, Holy One. We're keeping it quiet, for fear they'll get themselves expelled and us hanged.'
'A dreadful thing, truly. Verea, before the main army marched downriver on Nessumara, I was interrogated, because I went out scouting one day while the curfew was still on. This has been my first chance to get out.'
She measured him. 'You've a few bruises, like fallen fruit.'
'I'm asking around the market for a particular reason.' She looked up, alarmed, but he smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring way. 'When I was roughed up, there was a refugee in the line ahead of me. He was killed later, trying to get back to whatever alley he'd left his children in.'
'Orphans,' she muttered gloomily.
'I'm asking around, if anyone has heard tell of three children being swept up or driven out, or taken in, or glimpsed in the alleys.'
'Those village children were always gawking at the silks and
the noodle sellers.' She cracked a reluctant smile, but it fled quickly. 'The soldiers have been cleaning out the
