Another figure loomed out of the mist-like rain at his low-voiced call.
“Hírvegil. Relay this. The Folk of the West need this information. Tell Lord Hordle and Lady Eilir that they’re to send the first boat on with it. Maximum priority. They’re to follow with the second if we don’t rejoin within an hour. The third to wait for us until the morrow.”
He handed over the message. Hírvegil disappeared, quiet as a ghost, and the paper went with him.
Ritva’s right about Uncle Alleyne, Mary thought. About what she sensed at Aunt Astrid’s funeral pyre.
They were speaking Edhellen, of course, but there had been a subtle shift in the way the Lord of the Rangers used it; not as those raised to it as a cradle-speech did, but also less like a running translation from the English he’d used for his first twenty-odd years. More in the manner of the Histories, or the way his wife had taken the Noble Tongue.
He’s going to live her dream for her and do it perfectly. That’s his grave-offering.
Uncle Alleyne was very much Sir Nigel Loring’s son, so reserved and self-controlled that if you didn’t know him well you could think he wasn’t a man of strong passions at all. But Mary knew him very well indeed.
The rain built from a drizzle to pouring for a few moments, a hiss that cut hearing in a burr of white noise. The horse was almost on them before they heard it.
“One up,” Alleyne said calmly. “Two down and then in.”
The two young women took a dozen rapid paces away, fanning out on either side of the approaching rider, and sank down as they gathered in their war-cloaks. It was amazing how much like a rock you could look in the dark. A man on horseback appeared out of the wet blackness, muffled in his own cloak against the rain and swearing under his breath.
“Goddammit, it just doesn’t feel right,” she could hear him say in the peculiar tone you used talking to yourself when you were all alone and the rather harsh accent of the far interior. “We’re missing something and I don’t know what.”
Not a cavalryman, though he rode with a careless ease peculiar to those raised on horseback; there was a traverse red crest on his helmet, and in his free hand was a swagger stick, a vinestock about three feet long, gnarled and twisted. A big oval shield was slung over his back, and she could just make out the brass thunderbolts-and-eagle on it.
US of Boise officer, she knew. Maybe the one I saw earlier. Some conscientious type working a hunch. Too bad for him.
Alleyne stood and reached over his shoulder to draw his longsword, the steel a bright streak in the rainy dimness; if someone was going to see you anyway, you controlled how they did it. That way you held their eyes. To an experienced man, the way he set himself and held the blade and the way his left hand stripped his round buckler off its clip on his belt would hold the attention. They all marked someone you didn’t turn your back on if you wanted to live.
The Boisean flipped the vinestock to his left hand and drew his own short gladius with smooth speed; he didn’t shout for help, which meant he really had come alone. Alleyne was probably smiling behind the cloth mask as the Boisean raised his sword for a moment in salute and then prepared to charge. He and his father had both been soldiers before they came to Montival-to-be, but of a particular sort-SAS, it had been called before the Change and still was, over there in the Empire of Greater Britain. So had Sam Aylward been. They’d taught the Clan and the Rangers still more.
“Take him down,” he said in a conversational tone.
Mary and Ritva moved in like the chucks of a drill-bit tightening, Ritva moving a fractional second first to draw the man’s eye. The Boisean shouted and cut to his right, leaning over to reach with the short sword.
Mary leapt, her long legs taking her to the horse’s side in six bounding strides. Her hands clamped on the man’s foot at heel and toe, and she ducked, heaved and twisted with all the strength in her five-foot-nine of lean muscle. Steel split the air a fraction above her head as he cut left and backhand frantically at the last instant; the man was fast. But the point of the sword just tugged at the tip of her hood rather than striking the steel cap beneath.
And the shove shot him out of the saddle and off to the right like something launched from a catapult. The horse started to bolt forward with a whinny of alarm, and Mary dove through the space where it had been. That was just in time to see Ritva landing on the man’s back in a cat-jump, something flashing in her hand-a length of linen bandana, doubled and with a gold coin in one end to give it weight. The wet cloth whined through the air as she flicked it forward in the same instant as her feet left the ground.
The man had lost his sword as he fell, possibly deliberately; it was all too easy to come down on the edge when you pitched over like that. The strap holding his shield broke, and it went away end-over-end like a flipped coin. Both his hands flashed up to grab for the bandana as it struck his neck and whipped around snake-swift, the coin slapping into Ritva’s gloved right hand and the cloth making a complete overlapping circuit of his throat. He was too late; she already had her wrists crossed and wrenched them apart, driving the fabric into the flesh under his chin with terrible leverage as she grappled him around the waist with her legs.
The twin assaults of the rumal-noose and a hundred and fifty pounds of Dúnadan on his back toppled him forward onto the muddy ground. Half a second later Mary landed on his kicking legs, wrapping her limbs around them, snatching the dagger out of his belt and tossing it aside before he thought to draw it.
“Quiet!” Ritva hissed in English. “Or else!”
He went limp in acknowledgment of defeat, wheezing in a breath as she slacked off a very little. Mary’s fingers did a light flickering search for holdout weapons. If there had been anyone close, they could have cast their cloaks over him and done a fair imitation of a lump in the ground within moments. Instead Ritva came up as Alleyne approached, with one leg out and a knee planted between the man’s shoulder-blades.
“Hîr?” she said. “Boe?”
That meant Is it necessary, lord? It was probably fortunate that the man they’d defeated didn’t understand either that or the unspoken codiciclass="underline" to kill him?
“It’s a girl?” the man under her knee choked out in surprise. “I got dry-gulched by a girl?”
“No, it’s a woman Ranger,” Ritva snapped in English.
“Two, actually,” Mary added.
“So no dhínen! Which means shut up,” Ritva finished.
He made a gagging noise as her hands poised for the second twist that would snap the neck. Mary could feel the tension in the man’s body through his legs and hips as he strained up with his neck creaking.
The Hîr Dúnedain swept his hood and face-mask back with the same motion. His handsome face and trimmed blond mustache were blurs in the rainy night.
“Do you yield yourself?” he asked the man softly, going down on one knee as he sheathed his sword without looking back.
“I yield,” the man grunted, slapping one palm on the ground in a wrestler’s gesture of concession. “Obviously!”
“Let him live,” Alleyne said softly, with the very slightest hint of a smile, and in English.
Shifting back to the Noble Tongue: “We’d have to carry the body out anyway. Better not to kill without need and he might be useful one way or another. Make him safe, though.”