remained shadowy.
To my amazement Raven yielded first. “What’re you doing here, Croaker?” I’d thought him able to outstubborn a stone.
“Looking for you.”
“Why?”
“Curiosity. Me and Silent, we got an interest in Darling. We were worried.”
He frowned. He was not hearing what he had expected.
“You can see she’s all right.”
“Yeah. Looks like. How about you?”
“I look like I’m not?”
I glanced at Silent. He had nothing to contribute. “One wonders, Raven. One wonders.”
He was on the defensive. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Fellow freezes out his buddies. Treats them like shit. Then he deserts. Makes people wonder enough to go find out what’s happening.”
“The Captain know you’re here?”
I glanced at Silent again. He nodded. “Yeah. Want to let us in on it, old buddy? Me, Silent, the Captain, Pickles, Elmo, Goblin, we all maybe got an idea...”
“Don’t try to stop me, Croaker.”
“Why are you always looking for a fight? Who said anything about stopping you? They wanted you stopped, you wouldn’t be out here now. You’d never have gotten away from the Tower.”
He was startled.
“They saw it coming, Pickles and the Old Man. They let you go. Some of the rest of us, we’d like to know why. I mean, like, we think we know, and if it’s what we think, then at least you have my blessing. And Silent’s. And I guess everybodys who didn’t hold you back.”
Raven frowned. He knew what I was hinting, but couldn’t make sense of it. His not being old line Company left a communications gap.
“Put it this way,” I said. “Me and Silent figure you’re going down as killed in action. Both of you. Nobody needs to know any different. But, you know, it’s like you’re running away from home. Even if we wish you well, we maybe feel a little hurt an account of the way you do it. You were voted into the Company. You went through hell with us. You... Look what you and me went through together. And you treat us like shit. That don’t go down too well.”
It sank in. He said, “Sometimes something comes up
that’s so important you can’t tell your best friends. Could get you all killed.”
“Figured that was it. Hey! Take it easy.”
Silent had dismounted and begun an exchange with Darling. She seemed oblivious to the strain between her friends. She was telling Silent what they had done and where they were headed.
“Think that’s smart?” I asked. “Opal? Couple things you should know, then. One, the Lady won. Guess you figured that. Saw it coming, or you wouldn’t have pulled out. Okay. More important. The Limper is back. She didn’t do him in. She shaped him up and he’s her number one boy now.”
Raven turned pale. It was the first I could recall seeing him truly frightened. But his fear was not for himself. He considered himself a walking dead man, a man with nothing to lose. But now he had Darling, and a cause. He had to stay alive.
“Yeah. The Limper. Me and Silent went over this a lot.” Actually, this had occurred to me only a moment earlier. I felt it would go better if he thought some considered deliberation had gone into it. “We figure the Lady will catch on sooner or later. She’ll want to make a move. If she connects you, you’ll have the Limper on your trail. He knows you. He’d start looking in your old stomping grounds, figuring you’d get in touch with old friends. You got any friends who could hide you from the Limper?”
Raven sighed, seemed to lose stature. He put his steel away. “That was my plan. Thought we’d cross to Beryl and hide out there.”
“Beryl is technically only the Lady’s ally, but her word is law there. You’ve got to go somewhere where they’ve never heard of her.”
“Where?”
“This isn’t my part of the world.” He seemed calm enough now, so I dismounted. He eyed me warily, then relaxed. I said, “I pretty much know what I came to find out. Silent?”
Silent nodded, continued his conversation with Darling.
I took the money bag from my bedroll, tossed it to Raven. “You left your share of the Roses take.” I brought the spare horses up. “You could travel faster if you were riding.”
Raven struggled with himself, trying to say thank you, unable to get through the barriers he had built around the man inside. “Guess we could head toward...”
“I don’t want to know. I’ve met the Eye twice already. She’s got a thing about getting her side set down for posterity. Not that she wants to look good, just that she wants it down true. She knows how history rewrites itself. She doesn’t want that to happen to her. And I’m the boy she’s picked to do the writing.”
“Get out, Croaker. Come with us. You and Silent. Come with us.”
It had been a long, lonely night. I had thought about it a lot. “Can’t, Raven. The Captain has to stay where he’s at, even if he don’t like it. The Company has to stay. I’m Company. I’m too old to run away from home. We’ll fight the same fight, you and me, but I’ll do my share staying with the family.”
“Come on, Croaker. A bunch of mercenary cutthroats...”
“Whoa! Hold it.” My voice hardened more than I wanted. He stopped. I said, “Remember that night in Lords, before we went after Whisper? When I read from the Annals? What you said?”
He did not respond for several seconds. “Yes. That you’d made me feel what it meant to be a member of the Black Company. All right. Maybe I don’t understand it, but I did feel it.”
“Thanks.” I took another package from my bedroll. This one was for Darling. “You talk to Silent a while, eh? I got a birthday present here.”
He looked at me a moment, then nodded. I turned so my tears would not be so obvious. And after I said my goodbyes to the girl, and cherished her delight in my feeble present, I went to the roadside and had myself a brief, quiet cry. Silent and Raven pretended blindness.
I would miss Darling. And I would spend the rest of my days frightened for her. She was precious, perfect, always happy. The thing in that village was behind her, But ahead lay the most terrible enemy imaginable. None of us wanted that for her.
I rose, erased the evidence of tears, took Raven aside. “I don’t know your plans. I don’t want to know. But just in case. When the Lady and I caught up with Soulcatcher the other day, he had a whole bale of those papers we dug up in Whisper’s camp. He never turned them over to her. She doesn’t know they exist.” I told him where they could be found. “I’ll ride out that way in a couple weeks. If they’re still there, I’ll see what I can find in them myself.”
He looked at me with a cool, expressionless face. He was thinking my death warrant was signed if I came under the Eye again. But he did not say it. “Thanks, Croaker. If I’m ever up that way, I’ll check into it.”
“Yeah. You ready to go, Silent?”
Silent nodded.
“Darling, come here.” I squeezed her in a long, tight hug. “You be good for Raven.” I unfastened the amulet One-Eye had given me, fixed it on her wrist, told Raven, “That’ll let her know if any unfriendly Taken comes around. Don’t ask me how, but it works. Luck.”
“Yeah.” He stood there looking at us as we mounted, still baffled. He raised a hand tentatively, dropped it.
I told Silent, “Let’s go home.” And we rode away.
Neither of us looked back.
It was an incident that never happened. After all, hadn’t Raven and his orphan died at the gates of Charm?
Back to the Company. Back to business. Back to the parade of years. Back to these Annals. Back to fear.
