“Us,” Sellis said.
That answer earned a roar of laughter from the assembled raiders. “You?” one asked. “Against all of us?”
“You could try us,” Myrana said. “Perhaps you’ll have better luck than the last army we fought.”
More laughter. The taunts continued, but no raiders ventured through the gate. Myrana and Sellis held their ground, trying to negotiate for the Thrace family’s release with people who had no interest in negotiating.
Which, after all, was the whole idea.
The others, Aric, Ruhm, Amoni and Mazzax, had left their hiding place first, striking far to the west and then working their way back along the base of the cliffs. There, the guards on top of the bluff would have to lean out to see them. Tower guards might have spotted them, but by the time they were in view of the towers, everyone was watching the strange couple’s slow procession toward the gate.
In this way, moving quietly, the four companions made it to the base of the wall, where it abutted the cliff’s face. The hard part would be getting over the wall. Since they had no ladder or means of making one, they scaled the cliff, knowing they would be visible from the towers as they did. Myrana and Sellis kept the raiders occupied, though, and none so much as glanced their way. From his position on the cliff, Aric studied the buildings nearby until he spotted the one with the lichen patch he had seen in the pebble. Then he pointed out the building next to it, in the right place for the view through Rieve’s window.
“That’s the one we want,” he said quietly. When they had all identified the right one, they dropped one by one over the wall and into the fortress.
Aric had barely touched down when he heard a voice shout, “That’s him!”
One of the raiders who had been among those who first captured them was glaring at him and drawing a steel short sword. A new cut traced a line from the raider’s left shoulder almost to his belly; earned in the battle against the thri-kreen or the villagers, Aric guessed, and he was anxious to taste vengeance for it. Another raider had been walking with him, carrying a pike. Both raiders ran toward Aric, shouting an alarm as they came.
This wouldn’t be as easy as Aric had hoped.
At least his new sword would finally be tested.
He whipped it from its scabbard. The blade sung in the air as Aric slashed back and forth, enjoying the feel of it. The swordsman reached Aric first, running with his sword held out before him as if Aric would just stand there and let it pierce his chest.
Instead, Aric waited until the raider was in mid-stride, not quite balanced, and swung his blade into his, from the side. The blow staggered the man. Aric followed up with a lunging thrust, which the man only just parried. The raider took a couple of steps forward, more careful ones now, as Aric recovered from the lunge. The blades clashed together, lightly, each man feeling for the other’s weaknesses. The raider was strong, but so was Aric. And Aric’s blade was a full foot longer than the other man’s.
The other raider tried to intervene with his pike, but Ruhm’s club bashed the weapon away and then, on the return swing, crushed the raider’s skull. He wouldn’t be a problem anymore.
But more raiders were on the way, summoned by the shouts. Ruhm and Mazzax took up positions at the end of a building, ready to fight anyone who came from the front of the fort. Amoni went to the other end, in case raiders came that way.
The swordsman was better than he had seemed at first. Even with his short blade, he parried Aric’s attacks and kept up his own. Two more raiders came up behind him, taking their turns thrusting at Aric and swinging an axe at him, and then Aric was holding off three. They grunted and cursed, and he ignored them as best he could. The raiders had only to delay them long enough, and they would be surrounded, with no hope of getting Rieve and her family out safely.
If not for that urgency weighing on him, Aric would have enjoyed the contest. He had to end it quickly, though, or lose his life here in a raiders’ fort. He could hear his friends engaged with other opponents, so there would be no help from those quarters.
“Rieve,” he shouted, since their presence had already been given away. “Rieve, it’s Aric!”
So distracted, the first raider landed a blow against him. The short sword raked across his left thigh, drawing blood. Sudden, searing pain brought Aric back into the fight. He backstepped, brought his blade down against the other man’s. He slashed at the raider’s collarbone, but his move was blocked, and the two blades ground together, frozen in place for the moment, the other two closing in for the kill.
First blood drawn, and it was his own. Not exactly the progress he hoped for.
When we’re free,” Rieve was saying as she paced a groove in the dirt floor, “I want to raise an army. I want to come back here and dismantle this place, stone by stone. People like this, these raiders, have no place in a decent world.”
Corlan sat on the floor, his back against a corner, knees up with his arms resting on them. He lifted his head. “You might have forgotten where we are,” he said. “I live on Athas, in the city-state of Nibenay, so I’m not sure what a decent world is.”
“You know what I mean!” Rieve shot back. “We’ll never have a decent world if people are allowed to behave like this.”
Her grandmother patted Rieve’s shoulder. The old woman’s eyes were filled with that calm acceptance that never failed to lighten Rieve’s mood. Her face was lined, her hair silver, but her back was straight, her jaw firm, and she remained a rock of solidity in Rieve’s often turbulent life. “This is difficult for us all,” she said. “Nobody likes to be victimized like this, to be held against our will.”
“How do you stay so calm, then?” Rieve asked. “Why aren’t you spitting mad?”
“I suppose I just try to take the longer view. The more spiritual view, in some ways. Things happen in life that are beyond our control. Many of them are good things, and others bad, or at least that’s how we perceive them at the time. Sometimes, later on in life, our view changes, and we realize those things we thought were awful might not have been so bad after all. Perhaps they showed us new directions to grow in. Perhaps they slowed down the pace of life and allowed us to examine our inner selves in some new way.”
“That makes some sense, I suppose. But this? How can this be anything but horrible? Waiting out the rest of our lives in some fortress prison until these thugs decide to kill us? That can’t be good.”
“I’m not saying it is, necessarily. Certainly it’s bad from our immediate viewpoint. And it’s possible, of course, that you’ll do exactly what you say—get out of here, put together an army, and come back to wipe this place off the planet. That would be a good result from a bad situation, don’t you see? The pain you’re undergoing now would lead, eventually, to you doing something for the betterment of everyone.”
Rieve hadn’t thought of things that way, had given no consideration to the idea that anything good could grow from this experience. Of course, for that to happen, first she had to get free somehow. Then she had to be able to access the family fortune, or earn a new one of her own.
But even that, she realized, would be something she had never imagined doing, that she probably wouldn’t have thought of, had it not been for the raiders. To amass a fortune big enough to hire an army, she would have to provide some service or goods that others wanted to buy. In doing so, she would be filling some need.
Grandmother was right. Good could grow from the worst situations, if one only looked at things the right way.
It didn’t make her glad they had been taken captive, but it made her not hate the experience with quite the white fury she had just minutes ago. Maybe there was something she could learn, about herself, her family, Corlan, or the world. She vowed to keep her heart open to that possibility, to observe and take in events as they occurred, rather than waste all her energy resenting them.