The shouting grew nearer and Rudolfo pressed his opponent, bringing his dominant, left-handed knife to bear after setting him up to follow the right. The Entrolusian lieutenant adjusted fast, and Rudolfo felt the skill and strength in his opponent’s two hands.
He is better than me, Rudolfo thought, the realization hitting him as solidly as any fist. And he’s trying hard not to show me?"3" that.
The tent flaps rustled, and two soldiers entered. They were down before Rudolfo could blink, their throats cut with expert precision. He smiled at the work of his Gypsy Scouts even as he cursed their disobedience.
We must flee.
And as if the Entrolusian heard him, he suddenly opened himself. It was not much of an opening-and one that someone less skilled than Rudolfo or his Gypsy Scouts might not have noticed. But it was an opening, and Rudolfo took it even as he wondered why it was offered.
He put the first knife in through the man’s kidney, and because it was Gregoric at his feet, he twisted it until the man cried out and dropped his blades. Then he put his other knife into the man’s heart, and as he fell, brought the first up and swept it quickly across his throat.
Before the man fell, Rudolfo clicked his tongue and heard three tongues click in reply. He followed the sounds of Gregoric’s labored breathing, and sheathed his knives. “Guard me,” he hissed to his men.
More soldiers entered the tent, and his Gypsy Scouts dispatched them with quick brutality.
His hands scrambled for Gregoric, found him and lifted him. He couldn’t tell if his first captain was conscious, but he found his arm, wet and slippery with blood, and pressed words into it.
Hang on, friend. I’ll see you safely home.
Slinging him over his shoulder, bent beneath the weight of him, Rudolfo left through the back of the tent.
He ran as fast as he could, his tongue clacking lightly against the roof of his mouth. The three scouts who’d stayed behind with him spread out so that two were ahead to clear their path and one was behind to guard their flank. They weaved a shifting line, moving to the left, circling back, then moving to the right. It was a chaotic pattern of movement following a path that few could predict.
When they left the camp and slipped into the forest, they were on the southern side of the camp. When they breached the perimeter, outward bound, they were on the western side. Along the way, the forward scouts had killed six and the rear guard just two.
They stopped at the edge of the forest to bandage Gregoric’s wounds as best they could.
When they laid him out on the pine-needled floor, the First Captain of the Gypsy Scouts stirred, clutched the front of Rudolfo’s scout tunic, and pressed a message into the Gypsy King’s neck.
Leaveeoma th me. I’m finished.
Rudolfo found his shoulder. Nonsense. You’ve a war to win for me.
Gregoric lapsed back into unconsciousness. When the other scouts tried to lift him, Rudolfo’s voice was harsher than he intended. “I have him,” he said.
His legs and back ached from the run. Even with the magicks, his strength was not sufficiently enhanced to compensate for this. Still, he crouched, rolled Gregoric up and over his shoulder, and lurched to his feet. They ran west along the edge of the forest, cut north and ran along the base of the foothills, then broke cover and ran the open, snow-crusted plain.
They did not stop running again until they reached what had once been the center of Windwir. The Rangers of Pylos stood watching the south, bows drawn, not expecting them from the west. Rudolfo whistled, high and shrill, and other whistles greeted him.
“I’ve a wounded man,” he said as he crested the edge of crater. He shrugged off the rangers when they tried to lift Gregoric from his back, laying him down himself. “Do we have a medico?”
But Rudolfo didn’t need a medico to tell him that somewhere along the way another part of the light had been lost from his world.
Jin Li Tam
Jin Li Tam read the note a dozen times before she finally burned it. And even after she burned it, it stayed before her eyes.
It had arrived early that morning on the bird her father knew could always find her, and she was not certain what it meant until she saw the long faces of her escort.
He will need you now, the coded note read. Comfort him and you will be his right hand. Then, buried in a deeper code: Grieve your brother’s sacrifice for the light.
When she asked the Gypsy Scouts about their downcast countenance, they told her of Gregoric’s death, and suddenly the meaning of her father’s note struck home. She’d gone to her tent then, and for the first time she could remember, she cried silently in the manner becoming of a daughter of Vlad Li Tam.
She had no grief for her brother. Instead, she felt a rage that spilled over to flood her entire family, her father most of all. The strategy was clear to her, certainly. A man is shaped by the events of his life. The Francines taught this and it made sense, just as they also taught that a man or a group or even a nation could be moved by stimulating their lives in the moments that they needed it. A bit of grief to build their compassion, a bit of loss to instill a value of gratitude, an opportunity for vengeance to temper wrath.
And yet, despite the clarity of strategic intent, she found herself suddenly full of doubt. Her father’s work consisted of dozens of living, breathing games of queen’s war, the move in this game connected in some way to the move in another. And she had believed-had been taught to believe-that his work was in service to the light, darker in many ways than the work of the Androfrancine Order, but critical for the Named Lands to never go the way of the Old World.
But now, for some reason, his work enraged her. And at the heart of it, it was the perception of Rudolfo’s mistreatment at her father’s hands.
Is this what love is? If so, she struggled to find anything useful in it. Love, she thought, should be whatever strategy best protected the greatest good. And who was she to question her father’s will? For all she knew, he merely added to a work his own father had carried forward. Who was she to question the work of House Li Tam?
This work will keep light in the world. And before she’d seen that pillar of smoke what seemed so long ago, she would’ve said without hesitation that the nobility of that end justified any and all means. Now, though, she hesitated.
When she knew Rudolfo was a few hours away, she cleaned herself and washed the red from her eyes and dressed in simple woolens and boots. Tonight, she would do her work-her part in her father’s work-but she would not dress it up.
Jin Li Tam went to the edge of camp with the others, including Isaak, and watched the line of metal men running in perfect synchronicity across the white ground. Alongside and behind them, as if riding herd, the Gypsy Scouts rode their horses hard. For the first time since meeting him, she could not pick her betrothed out of the group of riders.
Even when they pulled up, she did not recognize him at first. When he slid from the saddle and handed his reins to a waiting aide, she finally spotted him. But she stayed at the edge and watched him, gathering what she could.
He was not himself. He walked more slowly, his shoulders slouched, and his face was hard and tired and unspeakably sad. His eyes were rimmed red with exhaustion, and the line of his jaw was tense. He wore the winter woolens of a Gypsy Scout, and the dark clothes were stained with darker patches that she knew must be blood. She wondered if that blood was Gregoric’s.
She watched him pass instructions to another captain, and finally she could wait no longer. She walked out to him, and when he looked up at her, his expression stopped her in her tracks.