Four of the five men turned and ran back up the lane. One left a tumbled pair of wooden clogs behind.
Their leader paled but held his ground. Or froze in place, too terrified to move; Mirian wasn’t sure.
Tomas stepped forward, stiff-legged, and snarled again.
A dark stain spread on the front of homespun trousers. He turned, fell, scrambled to his feet, and ran after his friends, keening in fear.
“If you see an enemy run, you can’t stop yourself from giving chase.”
Mirian grabbed a handful of Tomas’ fur, imagined a candle on the end of his nose, imagined blowing it out with air warmed by her body and hoped that would be enough to direct her scent over Tomas’ face. A handful of fur wouldn’t stop him. “Tomas! He’s not worth the delay.”
He jerked free of her grip, took two steps, and changed. “My clothes,” he said, reaching back without turning. His voice sounded rough. Given the snarling, Mirian wasn’t surprised.
She scooped his shirt and trousers off the ground and pressed them into his hand. He had a scar just under his left shoulder blade, enough muscle that his spine was in a shallow valley of pale flesh, and dimples…She jerked her gaze back up to the scar. “Why aren’t they in the Pyrahnian army? They seem like they’d enjoy shooting people.”
“If they were in the army, they’d have retreated to Aydori.”
“You’re right. We don’t want them there.” She twitched her jacket into place, smoothed her skirt with both hands, checked that the bedroll was still, well, rolled, patted at her hair…
“Mirian?”
He’d turned without her noticing and was staring at her, one hand clutching the hem of his shirt. There was a dusting of fine black hair on the back of his knuckles. She hadn’t noticed that before. “What?”
“Are you all right?”
“Of course.” She let the bedroll slide off her shoulder, hitched it back up, and smoothed her skirt.
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine. If we were staying around here, I’d be worried. Big-and-ugly doesn’t strike me as the sort who takes embarrassment well.” Her laugh sounded a little stretched, even to her. “And that’s all that happened. You scared him. He ran. They all ran. Fortunately, we’re just passing through. But he had a point. Well, not really a point.” Words slipped from her mouth like beads sliding off a string; unstoppable now they’d started to fall. All she seemed to be able to do was send other words after them. She followed the bedroll to the ground. “People judge you if you’re barefoot, don’t they? Shoes seem to be the dividing line between worthwhile and wretched.” One boot already out and in her hand, she looked up. Tomas had moved closer. “Not if you’re Pack, at least not in Aydori. If you see a well-dressed person without shoes in Aydori, you know they’re Pack. And even in shoes, Pack wouldn’t wear these.” She waved the boots. “Too slow to get on and off. But we’re not in Aydori, are we? They saw your feet and didn’t know you were Pack. This will keep happening.” The leather had dried and stiffened, but she sat back, skirt billowing around her, and worked the boot open, one foot stretched out, ready to receive it.
“Mirian?” Tomas’ hand closed around her wrist. She needed to pay more attention; she hadn’t seen him drop to one knee. Then his other hand gently cupped the unbruised side of her jaw. “Tell me what to do to make it better.”
“You don’t…It isn’t…” Mirian pressed into his touch, chasing the warmth, then pulled away and watched his hand fall slowly back to rest on his knee. She clenched her teeth against the spill of words, breathing through her nose while she forced herself to recognize that nothing had happened. Nothing they couldn’t deal with. After a moment, she swallowed, took a deep breath, and met Tomas’ worried gaze. “It didn’t occur to me that we couldn’t just rescue the Mage-pack. That we’d have to deal with all sorts of other people on our way to defeating the Imperial army. Stupid, right?”
Tomas thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “How would you know? We’ve never done it before.”
To his surprise, she started to laugh. He’d said the only comforting thing he could think of. He didn’t think it was funny.
“We’ve never done it before?”
Maybe it was a little funny.
“You have a place on a wagon heading out tomorrow afternoon, Captain Reiter. It will take you to the garrison at Lyonne where these orders will procure a seat on the first available mail couch. If all goes well, you’ll be in Karis in a week.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.” Reiter accepted the paperwork, nodded, and left the office. He’d learned not to argue with military bureaucracy years ago. A ride on a nearly empty supply wagon had taken him from the battlefield to Abyek—a dawn-to-dark trip that suggested even the old Duke of Pyrahn hadn’t wanted his cities too close to the Aydori border and the beastmen who were his allies. He then cooled his heels for twelve hours while his orders were processed. Reminding the most officious major he’d ever met that they came directly from his Imperial Highness the Emperor Leopald by way of General Loreau had no effect. The major had merely sniffed and pointed out in return that this was the Imperial army and all their orders came from the emperor.
There were days, Reiter thought, when hurry up and wait should be made the army’s official motto. Not that he was in a hurry to get back to Karis. While his loss of the sixth mage was a direct result of the artifact malfunctioning, facts often were ignored when it came time to place blame. And Lieutenant Lord Geurin would have placed plenty of it before Reiter caught up.
His time was his own for another twenty-four hours, so he settled his bicorn as he stepped out of the only permanent building the garrison yet boasted and crossed between the geometrically precise lines of tents, past the garrison work detail toiling at the perimeter wall. Men, women, and children of Abyek and the surrounding countryside hauled bricks and mixed mortar under the command of an Imperial mason and a guard made up of those not quite functional enough to return to the front lines but not so broken they could be discharged. After a hundred years of expansion, it was an easy position to fill.
The prisoners wore hobbles, their time on the work detail determined by the severity of their crime against the empire. He’d been uneasy the first time he ever saw children hobbled, but after he saw a soldier’s head crushed by a piece of masonry pushed from the roof of a building by a pair of ten year olds, days after the actual battle was over, he learned to just walk by.
Today, he walked by and across the Aydori Road and into Abyek.
Shadows had started to gather by the time they reached the outskirts of the city. Tomas chafed at their pace—Mirian’s insistence on wearing her boots, on needing the social standing they provided, had slowed them considerably. She still limped as they passed between a double line of houses spreading out from the city to meet the farms, but at least she limped faster, the heat and pressure of her feet having softened the leather.
She had also taken the time to retrieve the farm worker’s abandoned clogs, and Tomas had finally, reluctantly, put them on when his own feet had started attracting attention from men and women hurrying home from work at the end of the day. Not the attention he was used to as Pack, but sideways glances that lifted the hair off the back of his neck and kept a low growl rumbling intermittently in his throat.
“They don’t look frightened, exactly,” Mirian murmured, moving close enough they could speak without being overheard. “More like they’re not comfortable in their own skin.”
He’d almost gotten used to his world having been divided into the scent of Mirian and the scent of everything else. Under scents layered on by work and time, the sweat of the people passing by them smelled sharp. Strained. “There’ll be Imperials here. This is the new edge of the empire, so they’ll be building a garrison. I guess it takes a while to get used to being conquered.”