I smiled at him and he dropped in beside us. Tosten, when Oreg is not around, usually knows how to charm people into doing what he wanted them to. It came from being a bard, he claimed, but I thought it might be a bit the other way around. Charm, good voice, and clever fingers made for good bards.
As we neared Atwater's farm, the land told me death had visited here recently. Death was no stranger to Hurog—its mortal residents came to an end on a regular basis—but I had to assume that this death had something to do with my being summoned here. Whoever had died was not of the earth of Hurog, which meant it wasn't Atwater or his people. It must be the bandits.
Nevertheless, when we passed the boundary at the edge of the farm, I drew my sword. Tosten (who'd let us gradually catch up to him) and Oreg drew steel likewise. The path we'd taken approached the farmhouse, which from the rear was more of a fort than a house, but a lookout spied us riding down into the valley and let out a series of notes on his hunting horn—Atwater's own call. The tightness eased in my shoulders.
A moment later the unmistakable form of the holder, himself, came around the corner. Seeing us, he whistled an all clear, so I sheathed my sword.
The boy heaved a great sigh of relief and nudged his mare into a gallop.
When one is a grizzled old war lord or the younger son of a holder, one may gallop as much as one wishes. Since I was a young lord who was trying to live down various reputations, I slowed my horse to a walk.
Mounted on my father's old war stallion, walking was sometimes adventurous. Pansy knew better, but I let him snort and huff and generally announce to everyone watching that he was dangerous and would be much faster than that little mare if I would just let him go.
Atwater nodded at me when we got close enough to talk. "Thank ye, my lord, for coming. But the problem of bandits has been dealt with. I've the bodies if you'd like to look at 'em."
Atwater was a mountain of a man, approaching my height and build. His pale blond hair fading unnoticeably to gray was braided in old Shavig style—unusual now, but not worth commenting about. His beard, however, was a magnificent thing. Fiery-red, it covered his face and a fair bit of chest. A little barbaric by proper Kingdom standards, but my Hurog folk were beginning to exhibit a pride in our Shavig heritage.
Like many of the older men at Hurog, Atwater had fought to put down the rebellion in Oranstone at my father's side. Sometime during the campaign, Atwater had conceived a dislike for the previous Hurogmeten. I hadn't been fond of my father for my own reasons, but even I had to admit there weren't many men who could fight as well as he had. Most of the men who fought under him wouldn't hear a word against him. I don't know what my father had done to Atwater, but it had taken me the better part of two years to make him see that I was not the man my father had been.
Tosten, Oreg, and I followed Atwater and his son around the building into the chaos of children and relatives who helped him farm and protect the land. At the center of the fervor were three dead men, covered decently for the sake of the children.
I dismounted, handed my reins to Oreg, whose gelding Pansy tolerated, and pulled the blankets aside to look at the dead men's faces. I took care to keep the blankets arranged so the children couldn't peek. I'd seen one of them before, but it took me a moment to remember where.
"Mercenaries from Tyrfannig," I said, dropping the cover over the last man's face. Tyrfannig was the nearest seaport town half a day's ride to the south. Hurog bordered the ocean, but her shores were too rocky for ships to harbor in. "They must not have caught jobs with the merchants going south and decided to become self-employed." Sometimes mercenaries didn't see the difference between looting on a battlefield and looting from anyone they could. "I'll see if anyone in Tyrfannig wants the bodies. Otherwise we'll bury them ourselves, eh?"
"Yes, my lord."
I started to turn away, then realized something about the wounds I'd seen on the bodies. "Who took them down?" Atwater was famed for his bow work and could use an ax on people as well as wood, but he'd never have taken on these bandits armed with nothing more than a knife. Yet the two bodies with the most obvious death wounds had been killed by a short blade, not an ax. I didn't know about the third—and wasn't about to examine the bodies more closely with all the children milling about.
"No, sir. My oldest boy, Fennel, saw them coming in time to warn us. I sent Rowan to you, and we waited. After a bit I tracked Fennel's trail to where he'd seen the bandits. And I found them three dead, sir. And I found what killed 'em, too. You'll never guess."
As we'd spoken, Atwater's wife had come out of the house with a little sprite of a girl about six.
"It was a girl," the child caroled in satisfied tones. "A girl killed them bandits all by herself."
Atwater's left eyebrow buried itself in his hairline. His wife shrugged.
"My aunt could have killed them," I said. "Why are you so surprised a woman took care of them?"
Atwater shook his head. "Maybe Stala could at that. But I'd be surprised if a man in this woman's condition could have walked from where we stand to my home, let alone killed three healthy men with naught but a puny knife. Would you come look at her?"
Bemused, I nodded at Oreg. "Stay out here and keep the babes out from under Pansy's feet, please?"
Tosten gave his reins to Oreg, too.
Atwater's house was dark and close, insulated for winter with dried grasses and straw. I had to duck my head to avoid rubbing the ceiling.
The fire in the hearth was more for light than warmth—that would change as winter approached. One of Atwater's older daughters sat on a nearby bench sewing, a bucket of water by her feet should a spark fly out and touch either fur or straw. She nodded at me, but turned shyly back to her work. I didn't know how she could sew in the dim light. Even with the fire so near, I could barely tell there was a person buried in the furs in front of the hearth.
But I could smell the distinctive odor of rotting flesh. I knelt beside the furs and touched the skin on the back of the unconscious woman's neck, feeling the dry heat.
"She hasn't moved since I found her, my lord," said Atwater. "Her weapon's on the table. After seeing the bodies, I thought I'd better get it out of her reach."
I got up and looked at the knife on the table. Not a hunting knife—the blade was too short, not even a full finger-length. A skinning knife, I thought, but not a common one at all. The metal was worked like the finest sword, the pattern of its folding visible even in the darkness of the house.
Tosten whistled softly. "She took out three mercenaries with that knife?"
"They underestimated her," I said, setting the knife back on the table. Stala said that men tended not to take her seriously because she was a woman, and that gave her an advantage that more than made up for the difference in size and strength. "Tosten, would you go hold the horses and send Oreg in to look at her wounds?" I'd done some field surgery, but the smell of flesh-rot told me we'd need more than that here—and Oreg, among other things, was an experienced healer.
Tosten nodded and turned on his heel without comment.
When Oreg appeared in his stead, the atmosphere in the house changed. No one in the house acted like they were afraid of Oreg, but they set him at a distance due the Wizard of Hurog.
Oreg's dark hair made him stick out among the fair-haired Shavigmen, but his purple-blue eyes, duplicates of Tosten's, proclaimed him a Hurog born and bred. In the past few years, unbound by the spells that had held him, he'd begun to look more like a man and less a boy, but he, like Tosten was slight of build. He didn't look like someone to be afraid of. Still less did he look like a man who had arisen from the dead.