“Nope. Whistler there is twice as crazy as you. Compared to you, Halla is a screaming maniac.”
I explained to her my theory that our connection was causing both her undesired honesty and her flood of drivel. I thought the explanation might comfort her, but she blamed me for the whole situation and didn’t stop shivering for quite a while.
We halted half an hour before sunset. Our evening consisted of the same arguments Halla and I had engaged in during the day, but with more fatigue and less patience.
The next morning, Pil tried to mount her own horse, panicked, and was thrown when the horse spooked. Before anybody could reach her, she jumped up, ran, and threw her arms around me, trembling the whole time.
Halla retrieved the spooked horse and brought it to Pil. “Listen. This problem will go away and you will be fine, so stop making so much noise. Noise is dangerous. If you keep making noise, I will break your jaw.”
“That’ll calm her right the hell down,” I said.
Pil ignored us both and mounted behind me for what looked to be another beautiful, chilly morning. The grassy hills had become steeper and dotted with small stands of rangy trees. We traveled through the valleys as much as possible to avoid climbing up and down hills.
After midday, six horsemen came into sight just a hundred paces away as we rounded a hill. They wore red and silver, the Empire’s colors, and one of them waved as he rode toward us. Another of them hung back and sounded a horn. The call didn’t sound like a “charge” to me, but I wasn’t an expert on imperial battlefield communication. It could as easily have meant “find people to torture.”
The horsemen trotted toward us, so we matched their gait until we reached speaking distance. The men rode decent mounts, and they carried curved swords and long spears. Not one of them had blond hair, the mark of a true Empire dweller, but that didn’t surprise me. The whole area had been conquered by the Empire just a century earlier, and these dark-haired, light-skinned locals had been imperials ever since. They worked in all parts of the Empire’s economy, becoming soldiers, boot makers, tax collectors, prostitutes, and blackmailers.
A blocky soldier with a mustache like a squirrel’s tail nodded and then coughed. “Corporal Hullet, Fourth Frontiers, making the roads and lands safer . . .” He faded off into mumbling so quietly that I couldn’t hear the rest, although he behaved as if we could hear everything he said. He kept a gentle nod going the whole time.
I waved and pushed my smile up near the point of ridiculousness. “I’m Elder Fank, patriarch of my family here, the Fanks. We are in search of a new farm.”
Hullet raised his bushy eyebrows.
“Our old farm burned down. We couldn’t pay the taxes, so the baron burned it and ran us out, may he eat fish heads in hell.”
Three more horsemen rode over the hill to our right. Hullet waved at them. To be polite, I waved too. Then ten horsemen cantered around the hill behind us, boxing us in. Hullet waved at the new bunch.
I turned back to Hullet, who pointed at the hill to our left with no horsemen on it. “That’d make a good farm, right? Unless in winter you like your ass in the . . .” He trailed into a mumble.
One of the three soldiers above us on the hill, a woman, called out, “Corporal, don’t talk to people anymore. I warned you, you’re terrible at it. Go help your trumpeter clean his horn. Maybe you can run your mustache through it.”
Hullet looked down, nodded, and turned his horse back toward his men. The woman examined us while scratching her blonde hair. Her whole family was probably blonde and came from the original lands where the Empire began. Everything about her seemed stretched. She was thin and tall. Her face was narrow and long, and it opened in a huge grin that seemed to cut her head in two.
The woman yelled, “Aren’t you going to thank me?”
I waited a moment, but she appeared to be serious. Maybe it was some sort of strange Empire test. “I would love to thank you, General. Thanks for the beautiful day, and for not ordering your men to kill us, and for letting us continue our journey a couple of minutes from now.”
“No. No! Thank me for saving your lives!”
I glanced at Halla.
The woman pressed on. “From the bandits! We killed ten of them just a few miles from here. You’re making me wish I hadn’t.”
Halla shrugged. “Thank you.”
The woman rubbed one of her eyelids. “That’s all I get?”
“It’s all you asked for,” I snapped. “We appreciate not needing to slow down and kill those bastards ourselves, but we didn’t ask you to save us. I wouldn’t have asked unless we faced more than that. Maybe . . .” I shrugged at Halla.
“Sixteen.” Halla didn’t look away from the blonde woman.
I nodded. “Unless there were sixteen of those criminals. Even seventeen.”
The woman smiled like a girl with a new puppy. “You should escort us, then! I’m Captain Leddie. What are you talking about, me being a general? Although I could be, if I wanted. Yes, you come along and escort us, that’ll be fine.”
Despite our big talk about killing sixteen or maybe seventeen bandits, escaping these soldiers would require hard fighting. We wouldn’t all survive. Maybe none of us would. I should just cut off Bea’s head the first thing and save time. I felt a bit responsible for her, since I had allowed her to come with us. Also, until Pil stood on her own, I had a shade of responsibility for her.
Before I could suggest alternatives, Halla said in an even voice, “We will protect you from bandits. We will protect you from wild dogs and fish too,
