Midnight tides

No, no, it’s hard as an anvil. I’ll be fine. See, I’m getting up… oh, why bother. It’s nice here in the sun. This shirt smells. Like the sea. Like a beach, with the tide out, and all the dead things rotting in fetid water. Just like the Inside Harbour. Got to stop the boys from swimming in there. I keep telling them… oh, they’re dead. All dead now, my boys, my apprentices.

You’d better answer me soon, Mael.

‘Withal?’

‘It’s the tent. That’s what the Nachts are trying to tell me. Something about the tent…’

‘Withal?’

I think I’ll sleep now.

The trail ran in an easterly direction, roughly parallel to the Brous Road at least to start, then cut southward towards the road itself once the forest on the left thinned. One other farm had been passed through by the deserters, but there had been no-one there. Signs of looting were present, and it seemed a wooden-wheeled wagon had been appropriated. Halfpeck judged that the marauders were not far ahead, and the Crimson Guardsmen would reach them by dawn.

Seren Pedac rode alongside Iron Bars. The new stirrups held her boots firmly in place; she had never felt so secure astride a horse. It was clear that the Blueroses had been deceiving the Letherii for a long time, and she wondered if that revealed some essential, heretofore unrecognized flaw among her people. A certain gullibility, bred from an unfortunate mixture of naivete and arrogance. If Lether survived the

Edur invasion and the truth about the Bluerose deception came to light, the Letherii response would be characteristically childish, she suspected, some kind of profound and deep hurt, and a grudge long held on to. Bluerose would be punished, spitefully and repeatedly, in countless ways.

The two women soldiers in the squad had dismantled a hide rack at the first farm, using the frame’s poles to fashion a half-dozen crude lances, half again as tall as a man. The sharpened, fire-hardened points had been notched transversely, the thick barbs bent outward from the shaft. Each tip had been smeared with blood from the breeder and his family, to seal the vengeful intent.

They rode through the night, halting four times to rest their horses, all but one of the squad managing a quarter-bell’s worth of sleep – a soldier’s talent that Seren could not emulate. By the time the sky paled to the east, revealing mists in the lowlands, she was grainy-eyed and sluggish. They had passed a camp of refugees on the Brous Road, an old woman wakening to tell them the raiders had caught up with them earlier and stolen everything of value, as well as two young girls and their mother.

Two hundred paces further down, they came within sight of the deserters. The wagon stood in the centre of the raised road, the two oxen that had been used to pull it off to one side beneath a thick, gnarled oak on the other side of the south ditch. Chains stretched from one of the wheels, along which three small figures were huddled in sleep. A large hearth still smouldered, its dying embers just beyond the wagon.

The Crimson Guardsmen halted at some distance to regard the raiders.

‘No-one’s awake,’ one of the women commented.

Iron Bars said, ‘These horses aren’t well trained enough for a closed charge. We’ll go four one four. You’ll be the one, Acquitor, and stay tight behind the leading riders.’

She nodded. She was not prepared to raise objections. She had been given a spare sword, and she well knew how to use it. Even so, this charge was to be with lances.

The soldiers cinched the straps of their helmets then donned gauntlets, shifting their grips on the lances to a third of the way up from the butts. Seren drew her sword.

‘All right,’ Iron Bars said. ‘Corlo, keep them asleep until we’re thirty paces away. Then wake ’em quick and panicky.’

‘Aye, Avowed. It’s been a while, ain’t it?’

Halfpeck asked, ‘Want any of ’em left alive, sir?’

‘No.’

Iron Bars, with Halfpeck on his left and the two women on his right, formed the first line. Walk to trot, then a collected canter. Fifty paces, and no-one was stirring among the deserters. Seren glanced back at Corlo, and he smiled, raising one hand and waggling the gloved fingers.

She saw the three prisoners at the wagon sit up, then quickly crawl beneath the bed.

Lances were levelled, the horses rolling into a gallop.

Sudden movement among the sleeping deserters. Leaping to their feet, bewildered shouts, a scream.

The front line parted to go round the wagon, and Seren pulled hard to her left after a moment of indecision, seeing the glitter of wide eyes from beneath the wagon’s bed. Then she was alongside the tall wheels.