His first instinct was to rouse the others, but then he remembered Jael and the captain in their shared tent, and a bitterness rose up in him. He considered running instead, letting them be killed or captured by Lord Blackheart’s men—a savory revenge, yet it quickly turned sour, for what would become of him after even if he managed to escape? He could never return home. Could he even bear a shame so great?
He glanced at the light again—a small, singular thing—enough for a lone man to see only a short way. A lone man, he realized, and I have the upper hand. If I can kill him on my own, he thought maybe he could impress Jael, but can I? The squire looked where he knew his hands to be in the dark, his sword a gray shadow. Before joining the Cross, he’d practiced with a man-at-arms, but never had he fought in earnest. He knew what it was like to cut a pig carcass, but to cut a man. Only then did it strike him that that was the whole reason for their riding west, to aid the Watcher’s Eye, to kill pagan raiders and their women and their sons—and he was fretting over one man. Go, Sylvertre decided, down the knoll, furtively, murderously.
Into the thick of the mist of the sodden shore where the dull, bobbing light drifted steadily for the bank, Ogdon breathed heavily the acrid fumes wafting off the lake as he crept ever closer, the mud sucking his boots with every step. It made his heart race, the smacking sound resonating over the water, over the shadowed boat and into the stranger’s ears—he could see their vague shapes now, and prayed his feet might be masked by the belching of swamp gas, or the screaming of owls, or the racket of frogs and far-off brackdragons. Then there was a thud among the noises of the lake, the sound of a boat shoring, and a tall, broad shadow cast upon the fog. Ogdon’s heart pumped harder, but his breaths grew smaller, the urge to cough filling his lungs like noxious fumes—yet he knew to do so would mean his doom. The shape of the stranger now moving toward him was too stout to be without armour, and he carried a lance that would outreach Sylvertre’s sword. In the mud, he’d be a sitting duck; an iron thrust would punch right through his maille. The thought caught in his chest and choked him, tearing his eyes and stinging his sinuses as a sonorous tone called out from the fog, “Oi, is somebody out there?”
He’d been spotted. The rush was too much. The squire plunged to his knees, hacking and coughing, his lungs struggling to siphon the poison air. “Stay back!” he hissed between mangled breaths, but the shadow kept coming until the glow of its lantern revealed the man.
“What in God’s name are you doing out here?” bellowed the barrel-chested stranger as he studied Sylvertre. He was not what Ogdon thought. He wore no armour, only thick woolen clothing the colors black and crimson, a lynching tree stitched on breast of his cloak. His eyes were small and dark, his hair the same, and his jaw was broad like his hands and his shoulders. And he bore not a lance, but an enormous, two-tined gig.
The squire staggered to his feet and held his sword out before him. “You’re one of Blackheart’s men. Are you here for the bounty?”
“Bounty?” The stranger held his lantern closer to Ogdon. “You don’t look like a poacher to me. That’s good southern steel you got. A smuggler, then?”
“I’m a squire of the Saint’s Cross,” he shot back, offended. “Ogdon Sylvertre, son of Lord Austen. I’m part of a detachment to aid the Watcher’s Eye. They require help fighting off the pagans.”
“Aye, they are in desperate need of swords. I’ve been telling my father the same for months, but he’ll only send them debtors and prisoners.”
Ogdon looked again to the sigil on the stranger’s cloak. “Your father?” he asked.
“Lord Gregander Blackheart… the second,” the stranger added with a smile. “That makes me Gregander the Third, heir of Duskhall; and I suppose that makes you a lucky one. That wasn’t very smart, lad, you telling me who you are. That bounty is backed by real gold. I’ve seen it myself, and so have the trolls roaming the roads and the woods and the ferries on the south bank. If it weren’t me who found you, you’d be tied in knots and tossed in with the brackdragons.” He paused and looked over the lake, then toward the moon, a faint gray gloom in a starless sky. “I’m still curious as to what you’re doing out here all by yourself. But the night’s dying, and I’ve yet to catch myself a new pair of boots. Tell me, lad, have you ever been out on the bog before?”
Sylvertre shook his head, glancing toward the knoll where his companions slept. “I should get back to the others. If the captain were to discover I’m gone—”
“Bah, that’s some shit.” Gregander chuckled. “It’ll be another few hours before the ass crack of dawn, and I’d rather have company if I’m not like to catch anything.”
“How can I trust you won’t turn me in?” It was the last of Ogdon’s inhibitions. He would have accepted any response, yet what he received was more than
