Tavi’s sling bullet hit with a dull smack of impact.
An arrow shattered against a tumbledown rock wall two feet behind Maestro Magnus.
The dust-covered woodcrafter took a little stagger step to one side, and his hand rose toward the quiver on his shoulder. But before he could shoot again, the man’s knees seemed to fold of their own accord, and he sank to the ground in a loose heap, eyes staring sightlessly.
From several yards to the north came a ring of steel on steel, then a crackling explosion of thunder. A man let out a brief scream cut violently short.
“Max?” Tavi called.
“They’re down!” Max called back. “Flanker?”
Tavi let out a slow sigh of relief at the sound of his friend’s voice. “Down,” he replied.
Maestro Magnus lifted his hands and stared at them. They trembled violently. He sat down very slowly, as though his legs were no more sturdy than his fingers, and let out a slow breath, pressing a hand to his chest. “I have learned something today, my boy,” he said in a weak voice.
“Sir?”
“I have learned that I am too old for this sort of thing.”
Max rounded a corner of the nearest ruined building and paced over to the still form of the third man. Blood shone scarlet on Tavi’s friend’s sword. Max knelt over the third man for a moment, then wiped his sword on the man’s tunic and sheathed it on his way back to Tavi and Magnus.
“Dead,” he reported.
“The others?” Magnus asked.
Max gave the Maestro a tight, grim smile. “Them, too.”
“Crows.” Tavi sighed. “We should have kept one alive. Corpses can’t tell us who those men are. “
“Bandits?” Magnus suggested.
“With that much crafting?” Max asked, and shook his head. “I don’t know about that third one, but the first two were as good as any Knight Flora I’ve ever seen. I was lucky they were dividing their attention to conceal themselves on those first two shots. Men that good don’t take up work as bandits when they can get paid so much more to serve in someone’s Legion.” He squinted back at the dusty corpse. “Hell, what did you hit him with, Calderon?”
Tavi twitched the hand still holding his sling.
“You’re kidding.”
“Grew up with it,” Tavi said. “Killed a big male slive after one of my uncle’s lambs when I was six. Two direwolves, a mountain cat. Scared off a thanadent once. Haven’t used it since I was thirteen or so, but I got back into practice to hunt game birds for the Maestro and me.”
Max grunted. “You never talked about it.”
“Citizens don’t use slings. I had enough problems at the Academy without everyone finding out about my expertise in a freeholding bumpkin’s weapon.”
“Killed him pretty good,” Max noted. “For a bumpkin weapon.”
“Indeed,” Magnus said, his breathing back under control. “An excellent shot, I might add.”
Tavi nodded wearily. “Thanks.” He glanced down at his bleeding finger, which had begun to swell and pulse with a throbbing burn.
“Crows, Calderon,” Max said. “How many times have I told you that you need to stop biting your nails?”
Tavi grimaced at Max and produced a handkerchief. “Give me a hand, here.”
“Why? You obviously aren’t taking very good care of the ones you’ve got.”
Tavi arched an eyebrow.
Max chuckled and bound the cloth around Tavi’s finger. “Just to keep the dirt out and stop the bleeding. Once that’s done, get me a bucket of water and I can close it up.”
“Not yet.” Tavi pushed himself to his feet and turned in the direction of the pair of archers. “Come on. Maybe they were carrying something that can give us a clue about them.”
“Don’t bother,” Max said, squinting at a point in the distance. His voice became very quiet. “It’ll take a week to find all the pieces.”
Tavi swallowed and nodded at his friend. Then he went and stared down at the man he’d killed.
His bullet had hit the man almost exactly between the eyes, with so much force that it had broken something in his head. The whites of his sightless eyes were filled with blood. A thin trickle of it ran from one of the man’s nostrils.
He looked younger than Tavi had expected, somehow. He couldn’t have been much older than Tavi himself.
Tavi had killed him.
Killed a man.
He tasted bile in his mouth and had to look away, fighting away a sudden attack of nausea that threatened to empty his stomach right onto his boots. The struggle was a vain one, and he had to stagger several paces away to throw up. He calmed himself afterward, spitting the taste out of his mouth. Then he shut his sense of revulsion and guilt away into a quiet closet in his mind, turned back to the corpse, and systematically went through the man’s belongings. He focused on the task to the exclusion of everything else.
He didn’t dare start thinking about what he had just done. There was nothing left in his belly to come up.
He finished and went back to the Maestro and Max, fighting not to break into a run. “Nothing,” he said quietly.
Max exhaled, a trace of frustration in it. “Crows. I wish we at least knew who they were after. Me, I guess. If they’d been here before me, they’d have killed you already.”
“Not necessarily,” Magnus said quietly. “Perhaps someone sent them to track you back to one of us.”
Max grimaced at Magnus, then glanced away and sighed. “Crows.”
“Either way,” Tavi said, “we may still be in danger. We shouldn’t remain here.”
Max nodded. “Kinda works out then,” he said. “The Crown sent me to bring your orders, Tavi.”
“What are they?”
“We’re taking a trip to the Blackballs at the southern tip of Placida’s lands. There’s a new Legion forming there, and Gaius wants you in it.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
Tavi grunted. “That won’t please my aunt and uncle.”
“Hah,” Max snorted. “It won’t please Kitai, you mean.”
“Her, too. She-”
Magnus sighed. “Crows, Antillar. Don’t start him talking about his girl again. He won’t shut his mouth about her.”
Tavi scowled at Magnus. “I was just going to say that she was supposed to come with my family to our get- together in Ceres next month. I’m going to miss it.”
“And missing it is a bad thing?” Max frowned, then said, “Oh, right, I forgot. Your family
“It’s mutual. I haven’t seen them in more than two years, Max.” He shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. I know this is important but… two years. And it isn’t as though I’ll make a good legionare.”
“No problem,” Max said. “You’re going in as an officer.”
“But I haven’t even served my compulsory term. No one makes officer their first tour.”
“You do,” Max said. “You aren’t going as yourself. Gaius wants eyes and ears in the command structure. You’re it. Disguise, false identity, that kind of thing.”
Tavi blinked. “Why?”
“New concept Legion,” Max said. “Aquitaine managed to push the idea through the Senate. You’re to be serving with the First Aleran. Rariks and officers both consist of equal numbers of volunteers from every city. The idea is-”
Tavi nodded, understanding it. “I get it. If there’s someone from every city in the Legion, that Legion could never pose a military threat to any single city. There would be officers and legionares in the ranks who wouldn’t stand for it.”
