Ritva nodded, and muttered:
“Oltho vae,” to the prisoner, which meant sweet dreams, or close enough.
She let the rumal drop. The man went on his face, choking and gasping for a moment. Before he could recover Ritva had a sealed container opened, and another cloth in her hand; that she clapped across his nose and mouth, holding them firmly and planting her other hand on the back of his head. There was a moment’s sweet smell, and she removed it as soon as he went limp. It was rather too easy to overdose someone on chloroform, given that the stuff had to be made out of seaweed by a complex chemical process and that you never really knew for sure how strong any batch was.
No point in sparing someone and then having him die of heart failure, Mary thought as she helped bind and gag the unfortunate Boisean.
Or extremely lucky Boisean, she thought.
Her snicker and Ritva’s came at the same instant, and Mary knew they were sharing a thought:
He’s obviously brave and that means he leads from the front. Thousands are going to die before the next sundown, but now he probably won’t end up on the receiving end of a lance or an arrow or a roundshot. As opposed to say, the blameless and far more deserving personal me, who’ll have to go through the whole ghastly damned thing from beginning to end doing Rangerishly dangerous damned stuff to live up to our doubly-damned reputations.
That sort of mental communion had been happening between the Havel twins all their lives.
CHAPTER SIX
HORSE HEAVEN HILLS
(FORMERLY SOUTH-CENTRAL WASHINGTON)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
NOVEMBER 1ST, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
Half a dozen more Rangers were there around Mary and Ritva and the Lord of the Dúnedain by now, kneeling silently in a half-circle about them with arrows on the string, bows hidden by their cloaks to keep the rain off the sensitive recurves until the instant they had to draw. Wax and varnish did a good deal, but it wasn’t wise to count on them.
Another had caught the Boisean’s horse, gentling it and offering it an apple while two more quickly went through the saddlebags and the bedroll strapped behind the saddle for anything that might be documents or maps. It shifted and laid back its ears, backing its stern in a half-circle, then consented to take the fruit, though its eyes still rolled nervously. Horses were conservatives who thought a strangeness probably meant something wanted to eat them.
“Rochiril, novaer,” the Ranger crooned softly, stroking the mare’s nose. “Be good, horse-lady.”
“Imlos,” Alleyne said to him. “Mount. Ride east; abandon the horse where you can make your way to the riverside about ten miles east of here without leaving a trail. Take his sword, shield and helmet and drop them somewhere along the way where there are plenty of tracks. You know the Ranger shelter.”
“I know it, lord,” the young man said; it hadn’t been a question. “I helped build it.”
Well, alae, duh, Mary thought. Why do you think he picked you?
They’d all memorized the hideouts and blinds the Dúnedain had established along the river before and during the war; most were merely small camouflaged dugouts with supplies…often including an inflatable boat. Still, there was knowing and knowing.
“Rejoin when you can, Imlos, but don’t take unnecessary chances,” Alleyne said. “Go!”
The man nodded, bowed slightly with right hand to heart and vaulted into the saddle amid murmurs of galu-good luck-from the rest. Even as the hoofbeats died away in the hiss of rain, the others were examining the surroundings, blurring footprints with careful speed. One flipped the Boisean’s broad-bladed dagger to Mary, and she tucked it into her boot-top. The captured officer was stripped of his sword belt, tied into his cloak and slung between two rangers. One of them flashed Ritva a thumbs-up sign as he helped carry the prisoner downslope.
That was not a Ranger gesture, but Ian Kovalevsky was from the Dominion of Drumheller. Originally the slim fair young man had been a liaison between the Questers as they passed through on the last stage of their journey back to Montival and the Force, a red-coated equivalent of the Rangers which helped keep the peace in the Dominions. He’d ended up as Ritva’s new boyfriend, and might well drift into the Rangers as well-it wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened when an outsider fell for a member, and Mary thought Ritva was serious about him. He’d been along on the rescue mission in Boise, too, for which Mary rather envied him.
Though getting snatched off a roof in the middle of a hostile city by an airship that almost missed, with the usurper’s troops closing in all around in a shower of crossbow bolts, then getting tossed hundreds of miles in a thunderstorm with lightning crackling around the highly-inflammable gasbag…that sort of thing was a lot more fun in retrospect. On a cold winter afternoon in Stardell Hall back at Mithrilwood, say, lying back in one of the big leather chairs in front of the fireplace and roasting chestnuts, with the carved timber of the walls all dim up by the banner-hung rafters, a mug of mulled cider in your hand, a cat in your lap and a bunch of kids and noobs gathered around, sitting on the floor and listening with that is just so cool expressions on their faces.
They went down the slope faster than they’d climbed it, doing their best to leave minimal tracks; as they cleared each party of two or three the little groups would cover trail as they fell back. Two light galleys were still waiting in the little cove, but they’d been pushed back into the water and the camouflage netting removed, their oars waiting ready in the locks like the legs of a water-spider. Both were fragile-looking things like racing shells, with aluminum masts folded down and stored in the well between the oar-benches.
John Hordle and his wife, Eilir Mackenzie, were there; this was a very important mission, enough that all three of the remaining founder-leaders of the Rangers were on it. Uncle John was six-foot-six and broad enough to seem squat, built like a hobbit crossed with a troll, with a face like a good-natured ham. He leaned on the hilt of his sheathed greatsword and chewed a grass stem with his graying reddish-brown hair gleaming with raindrops as the rest came up, his shrewd little russet eyes missing nothing. After a few mugs of shandy at festivals and feasts, one of his party tricks was to bend horseshoes straight and then toss them to the unsuspecting, who then howled and danced after they’d gripped the torsion-heated metal.
Aunt Eilir was Juniper Mackenzie’s eldest child, black-haired, pale-eyed and slender-strong and just short of forty. She had a clipboard and was checking people off as they arrived, soundlessly…which was appropriate, given that she’d been deaf from birth and was one of the reasons Rangers used Sign so much. No matter how well-trained and experienced troops were, it was always shockingly easy to lose someone in the dark if you weren’t very careful. Eilir and Astrid had re-founded the Rangers a few years after the Change, and a few years before John and Alleyne and Sir Nigel had arrived from Greater Britain fleeing Mad King Charles.
Mary had always thought it was all madly romantic, especially the part where the two young comrades had courted and won the anamchara-sworn Ladies of the Dúnedain. Though she knew Uncle John had always quietly considered Aunt Astrid barking mad and wouldn’t have had her on a bet. And she suspected that Uncle Alleyne had thought she was crazy too, but just didn’t care, the way Uncle John didn’t care that Eilir was deaf. Both of which facts were romantic too, when you thought about it, in a more grown-up way.