“Don’t be an ass! That’s a ridiculous question.”
“No, it’s ridiculous to even think about this ‘no man can be best every day’ crap, you nasty-ass sack of horse balls.” I frowned at her as if she were a toddler painting the wall with her own excrement. “Worry about being better than the one you’re fighting and forget all this bullshit swordplay philosophy.”
Leddie’s eyelid twitched three times. Then she laughed at me again. “Well, how does that help me? It doesn’t. Not at all.”
Halla gestured around us. “You have fifty men here to help you. Or, you could hire a bodyguard.”
Leddie snarled up into the sky. “Gods, am I the only one with a brain here? Guards leave. Soldiers die. Then you’re stuck with nothing but your own skinny butt.”
“Hell, Captain, what are you afraid of?” I didn’t think I’d get a real answer, but asking cost me nothing.
The woman’s face rewarded me by going pale. I saw the pulse in her neck speed up. “Nothing.” Then she reached her hand out to me.
I glanced at Halla, whose face didn’t offer me a twitch of help. I gave Leddie my hand, and she kissed the back of it, leaving a good smear of spit.
Leddie dropped my hand and grinned. “You’re a lamb, Creaky, just a lamb. I’ll remember that you cared.” She kicked her horse and rode toward the head of the column.
I lowered my voice. “She looks terrified when she’s not afraid.”
“I should have killed her.” Halla grunted. “These men would not expect it. We could escape.”
“She’s spun so tightly she’ll fly to pieces soon.”
“Before sunset would be nice.” Halla replaced her knife in its sheath, which turned out to be behind her back and under her tunic.
The short, green hills seemed to stretch forever, but I knew we were less than a two-day ride from the ocean. I spied a dark-green spot in the distance, farther than most individuals could see. “Look at that.”
Halla shaded her eyes with her hand, pretending to wipe off sweat. “Yes, something is there.”
I knew she damn well couldn’t see it. I could hardly see it myself. “How far do you think it is?”
She grunted and kept examining nothing.
“It sure has grown, hasn’t it?”
Halla faced me and stuck out her chin. “Fine! Describe this tavern, or brothel, or whatever it is that thrills you so much.”
I lowered my voice. “Don’t ever call me old again, you towering twat. That’s the southern end of the Graplinger Bog. I think it is.”
Halla paused. “Then the sea is not that far now.”
“And the bog stretches a fair bit of that distance. If we keep on this heading, I think we’ll skirt it.”
“Have you ever crossed it?” Halla asked.
I shrugged. “Not all the way through.”
She nodded. “I have never put a foot inside it, either.”
“Smartass.”
I heard hoofbeats closing from behind, and Whistler rode up to pace me. He glanced back and murmured, “That soldier finally stopped bragging about his dick’s adventures and left me alone. I was an imperial soldier once.”
I glanced at him. “Good for you. Do you want to reenlist or something?”
“I’d rather have my head sliced off. But listen, imperial horse soldiers are prissy about their looks. They always tuck their cuffs into their boots.” He nodded toward one of the riders off to the left.
I glanced at the man, and then I checked the soldiers ahead of me. I didn’t see a single tucked cuff. “This outing has become much less entertaining. I can’t think of any nice motives for pretending to be soldiers. We should thank Leddie and leave.”
Halla had stopped searching for the distant bog and was examining the head of her spear. “For a farewell gift, we should kill her.”
“That right there is why people don’t invite you places. Whistler, stay ready to break to the left and ride like a wild man. It’ll happen close to sunset. Be good till then. No singing songs or playing grab-ass before the escape.”
Whistler rolled his eyes, nodded, and dropped back.
I evaluated various plans against the meager facts I knew about Leddie. Maybe she was just pretending to be a rollicking madwoman and really was no more disturbed than my horse. She gave a fine theatrical performance, but she didn’t act crazy every minute. It would be easy to underestimate her.
I chose a plan and I hated it. Its main flaw was that all of it depended on me. When I had asked Halla how she could contribute to the escape, she shrugged and turned away. Then I asked Pil how she could help, but her answer was less encouraging than Halla’s. She rested her forehead against my back and sighed.
When I dropped back to confer with Whistler, a soldier whom I had pegged as a sergeant charged up and whipped me with a coil of rope. He shouted, “Get the maggot-screwing hell back up there, you asshole-licking pot of piss! I saw you with that galloping ballsack, with your heads mashed together like two horse turds full of rot and bloody oats!”
The man pulled in a breath and kept yelling. “I’ll be fried like a goddamn diseased chicken before I let that flesh-sack of tears, snot, and bile that is your pathetic self talk to that pig-screwing, overripe man whore again! So get back into place! Into your pissing-precise, straight-as-the-Emperor’s-dick, unmistakable-even-to-blind-cockroaches place in the line of march, assigned to you by the wretched weeping gods themselves! Or by their all-seeing, baby-eating, pissant-crushing, destroyer-of-whimpering-dreams representative on Earth! Me!”
The man was a credit to sergeants everywhere. However, because of him, I could no longer chat with Whistler, and the escape’s hard parts fell to me whether I liked it or not.
My other qualm was that the plan was cruel to horses, or at least it might be. I didn’t expect any injuries, but what I expected was rarely the same as reality.
We
