Sura
The Drovers, Book 3
Prologue
THEY WERE TAKING A RISK. It was late in the day, and Ranoc and Caswal were riding their horses back down the road alone, in the Blight, knowing that any manner of foul creature could burst from the trees at any moment.
Steel, Ranoc told himself and gripped his spear a bit tighter. Show some steel. Now was not the time to quail.
Borros had sent them to make sure none of the traitorous outlaws who escaped the battle two days ago had decided to follow the crew and exact some revenge. But Ranoc wasn’t worried so much about the outlaws as he was the fact that he and the others were two days’ travel into the Blight. Surely, if the evil that lurked here wanted to take someone, now would be a perfect chance.
To make matters worse, Ranoc couldn’t keep his eyes on the woods. Because in addition to looking for vengeful outlaws, they’d been tasked with finding a little spice box that Lagash suspected had bounced off his wagon somewhere in the last mile or two.
The box contained some mixture of rare Sorosian herbs that was supposed to make duck taste like bliss. And so Ranoc’s gaze was directed at the trampled bushes and grass instead of the direction from which his doom would surely come.
“I say let the duck spice rot,” Caswal said. “I say we turn back.” He nervously pushed the fingers of one of his brown leather gloves on tighter. They were weighted-knuckle gloves. With small lead pellets sewn into special pouches covering the knuckles, the backs of his fingers, and the backs of his hands. They were thug gloves that he’d taken from one of the dead outlaws.
“You just keep your eyes peeled for outlaws and slavering Blight creatures that want to devour us.”
Ranoc himself had a sword he’d stripped from one of the dead outlaws belted around his waist. Of course, neither Ranoc nor Caswal were trained on how to use them in battle, but Ranoc figured it was better to have a sharp two-and-a-half-foot length of steel at your side than not.
They also carried their spears, and, yesterday, they’d actually practiced using them from horseback. Borros had found a tall tree and hung a piece of firewood at the height of a man’s chest. Then, as part of the day’s training, he’d had the boys practice raising their spears, riding at a slow trot toward the wood, and striking it.
Such practice didn’t make much sense to Ranoc. He supposed it might come in handy if the enemy was just standing there like a dolt. Or was running away in an open field without any thought of what was behind them.
But who in their right mind would do that instead of dodging or dancing to the other side of the horse? Let the horse thunder past. And while the man up on the saddle was getting the blasted animal to stop and turn, the man on foot could speed away or attack.
As far as Ranoc could see, horses were good for getting you somewhere quickly while you sat on your hind end. Which meant you could leap off fresh and ready to fight. And if you had to run, well, better to have four legs under you than two. But when it was time to use spear and sword, Ranoc figured a man needed to be standing on his own two feet.
Surely, that’s how the Queen’s Rangers did it.
Caswal twisted in his saddle. “These woods are too overgrown to see anything. I think we’re acting more as bait than scouts.”
“Probably,” Ranoc said and scanned the trampled grass for the little spice box. He glanced up at the woods. They were indeed thick. Anything at all could be hiding there. Anything could be lurking just a few paces away. The sun was casting long shadows that reached the whole way across the road and up the trees on the other side, darkening the woods even further.
It gave him a bit of the shivers if he was being truthful, but how could he ever hope to be a member of the Queen’s Rangers if he couldn’t muster the guts to ride into danger?
Caswal shifted in his saddle again, scanning their backtrail. “I’m telling you, I don’t like it.”
Ranoc ignored his feelings of foreboding and turned his attention to the ground again, giving a patch of weeds a hard look, but there was no spice box there. “You know, Ferran walked miles of this road at night without incident. Maybe there’s nothing here.”
“Maybe he just smells bad and looks worse, and whatever’s here had the good sense to pass by that nibble. Besides, he didn’t walk the trail through the actual Blight, now did he?”
Ranoc shrugged. “I suppose that’s true, but it’s not like the Blight is some kingdom with walls which the inhabitants never cross. It’s more like a general area.”
“And we’re at the heart of it.”
“Just keep riding.”
Caswal sighed in objection, nervously pushed the fingers of one of his knuckle-gloves down, but kept moving.
Ranoc tried to distract himself and tongued his snaggletooth, the canine on the left side of his mouth, and tried to hold it in with his tongue. When he’d been caught by the outlaws, one of them had kicked him twice in the side of the mouth. Hard blows that had caused Ranoc’s gums to bleed. Luckily, the blows hadn’t knocked any of Ranoc’s teeth out, but they had loosened a few, including that snaggletooth. And Ranoc figured maybe now was his chance to straighten things a bit, but he didn’t think it was working.
Caswal looked around again fretfully.
“Are you watching the horses’ ears?” Ranoc asked. That’s what Borros had told them to do. Horses had good hearing and vision and would direct their ears toward threats.
“I’ve been watching. But I can never see what they alert to. I’m telling you, these woods are too thick.”
Too thick, too dark, too overgrown. A land of twilight. Ranoc hoped they found the small spice box soon for, despite his best attempts, he was becoming increasingly spooked. He shouldn’t be, but he was. That was the truth of it.
He sighed. Some Queen’s Ranger he’d be. He pressed his snaggletooth back again, tried to hold it in place with his tongue.
“At least we’re not the only ones scouting,” Caswal said. “If there is something out here, maybe it will go for Ferran and Winwallom instead of us. And what a double blessing that would be.”
“You know,” Ranoc said, scanning another patch of weeds, “Ferran did save our hind ends.”
“I don’t know about that,” Caswal said reluctantly.
“What do you mean? He walked back along the forbidden road to the Blight. At night. And he did it after we’d treated him like an enemy.”
“It’s not our fault we thought it was him that stole from us. He’s a notorious pie thief. A food filcher. How were we supposed to know there was someone else following us?”
“True, but he deserves some credit. Would you have come back to save a bunch of fools who’d falsely accused you and tried to beat you?”
Caswal scowled at Ranoc. “What, are you falling in love with him?”
“I’m just saying. Maybe he’s not as bad as all that. Many others would have left us to our just desserts.”
As far a Ranoc could see, and as much as he didn’t like it, Ferran had shown some steel. He’d walked that dangerous road at night to warn them about the band of outlaws that were coming to murder them and take the cattle. And that was after they’d misjudged him.
Ranoc was determined to prove he possessed an equal measure of steel, even if he did end up in the clutches of some horror of the Blight.
He ran his gaze up the road and saw something in a cow pie swarming with flies. Was that the corner of something boxy? His spirits rose.
“Ha!” he said.
Caswal startled and jerked his spear point to the ready in alarm. “What? What is it?”
“The box.”
“Queen’s eyes!” Caswal cursed. “Do you have to be so loud? I just about filled this saddle.”
Ranoc rode up to the cow pie, reined in his horse, dismounted with his spear, and plucked the box from its ignominious bed. Three sides of the box glistened with a smear of green and yellow manure.
“He’s not going to like that,” Caswal said.
“I don’t know,” Ranoc said brightly. “It’s still closed. The spice inside should be good.” He stooped, laid his spear on the ground, and grabbed a handful of clean, tall grass. He wiped the glistening muck off the box. Then he grabbed more clumps and rubbed until it was clean. Parts of the box had darkened where the juices had seeped in, but it was still a pretty little box with a checkered pattern along all its edges. Ranoc grabbed his spear again and stood.
“There,” he said and held it up for Caswal to view. “Just like new.”
“Great,” Caswal said. “We rescued the duck spice. Stuff it in your pocket, and let’s go.”
Ranoc did stuff it in his pocket and mounted his horse, but they weren’t going back. Not yet. He was going to prove his steel.
“Let’s go another quarter mile. The last thing we need is men coming to murder us in our beds.”
“A quarter mile?” Caswal said in dismay.
“You think we should go a full one?”
“I’m thinking I didn’t know what I was thinking when I took this job.”
“Yeah, but you now own horses and a sword and a good pair of boots,” Ranoc pointed out.
“A dead man’s boots.”
“I don’t think the boots care. And they were your rightful prize anyway.”
Caswal sighed. “We have made out well, haven’t we? And we haven’t even been paid by Borros yet.”
“So let’s make sure we don’t lose what we’ve won. Another quarter mile.”
“Fine,” Caswal said.
They traveled another quarter mile, and then another quarter, watching the woods, scanning the slopes of the valley, Ranoc working on his rogue tooth. They saw nothing. At that point Ranoc figured they’d gone far enough, and so they turned back. And they hadn’t gone very far when Ranoc spotted a pattern of turned earth in the leaves off the side of the road.
He peered closer. They were hoof prints that ran up a little swell into the trees. From this distance he couldn’t tell if they were from cattle or some other beast.
It was odd he hadn’t seen the prints before, but sometimes that’s how it was. Going one way, you could walk right past things that were glaringly obvious coming the other way.
He turned his horse to get a closer look and wondered if some cattle had strayed, and they’d missed it? He rode over to the prints, and saw they were not the prints of a cow. He used the blade of his spear to move some of the leaves aside to see the prints more clearly.
Caswal rode up behind him. “What is it?”
“A shoed horse, going into the woods.” Ranoc urged his horse forward and followed the tracks a few more paces. “Did we lose a horse?”
Caswal furrowed his brow. “No, we counted them. Just like we count the cattle every time we put them in. None of our horses were missing.”
“These are relatively new,” Ranoc said. “The earth is still dark. I’d say not more than a day old.”
“If that,” Caswal said.
Ranoc peered into the woods. Had the outlaws found horses somewhere? Were these the prints of someone that had followed them?
“We should go back and report,” Caswal said.
“And tell them what? That we found tracks? Borros will then ask for more information. And when we don’t provide it, he’ll send us back. We need to follow the trail a bit.”
“Into the woods? Here?”
“Well, we can’t follow them on the road, can we.”
“Queen’s eyes,” Caswal cursed.
“Yeah,” Ranoc agreed. “But what can we do?”
“We can avoid dying.”
“We’re not going to die.” At least he hoped they weren’t. “Come on.” And before he could change his mind, Ranoc urged his horse forward.
They followed the tracks into the trees, up over the swell, down again, and then through a relatively flat piece until they came to the overgrown remnants of another old road. One that joined up with the main road they’d been traveling. This road, like the other, had bushes and saplings growing up in it. But that wasn’t why they’d failed to see this track when herding the cattle past it.
The cause of their oversight was visible from here. A large tree close to the intersection of the two roads had been blown half over, probably a few years back. It leaned so far out over this road that its branches touched the ground, completely obscuring the fact that this road existed.
“Where do you think this leads?” Ranoc asked.
“I don’t think I care,” Caswal said nervously.
Steel, Ranoc thought. A man wanting to join the Queen’s Rangers needed grit and plenty of steel. “Let’s go down it just a bit.”
“Are you mad?”
“Borros will just send us back.”
“Fine, you go. I’ll stay right here.”
“You want to stay here on your lonesome? While I go up around that bend?”
Caswal cogitated on that for a moment. “You’ve always got to push it, haven’t you?”
“We’ll just go up around the bend.”
“Fine,” he said.
And so they went. About a hundred paces later, down around the bend, they discovered an additional set of hoof prints next to the first. Ranoc and Caswal both searched around to see where the second set had come from, but they just appeared from nowhere.
“This is bad,” Caswal said.
“It’s impossible,” Ranoc said. “Keep searching.”
“It ain’t impossible,” Caswal said, eyeing the woods, a little bit of fear in his voice.
“The track’s got to be here somewhere.”
“Not if they’re ghosts,” Caswal said.
Ferran raised his eyebrows. What kind of nonsense was that? “Ghosts can’t make prints.”
“They can if they’re riding horses.”
“Since when do ghosts go gallivanting around on horses?”
“Have you forgotten the tales of the lich king?”
“They rode ghost horses,” Ranoc said. “Not flesh and blood. Not mounts that made prints.”
“Who says?” And then Caswal’s eyes went wide.
Ranoc turned to see what he was looking at. “What is it?”
Caswal pointed into the woods.
Ranoc looked. Trees. Trunks of trees. Bushes. And then something in the woods moved. Something large. Something massive. Something dark that blended well with the trunks of the trees.
Ranoc thought of lumbering morkins and his mouth went dry.
It moved again, revealing horns. A huge rack of them. And then Ranoc realized what it was. A massive red deer. Huge. As big as a horse. And there were two more with it.
Relief washed over him. “It’s just a deer,” he said.
“The queen’s eyes,” Caswal said. “The queen’s goat-loving eyes.” He blew out a breath. “I think we go now.”
“I agree,” Ranoc said. Because while steel was good, there was no sense in tempting fate.
In the back of his mind, Ranoc knew Borros would probably send them back, but surely he’d send a few of the others with them. Make a proper band for scouting.
He turned, and came up short. There on the road, not two paces away, stood a brutal-looking man. A big man. His face was tattooed in a manner Ranoc had never seen. He wore a jerkin lined with fur. At his waist was belted a sword and an axe.
Ranoc’s heart jumped. His horse startled.
The man stepped forward toward Caswal.
Caswal shouted in fear and stabbed his spear down at the man, but the man just swatted the spear aside and grabbed the horse’s bridle.
Ranoc lowered his spear to help, but another man was suddenly at Ranoc’s side. He yanked Ranoc violently off his horse, yanked the spear away, and struck him so hard in the face his vision began to swim.
One of the horses whinnied. Caswal cried out. Someone spoke in a language Ranoc had never heard before. Ranoc tried to free himself, but the man holding him clobbered him again, and suddenly Ranoc’s world began to tilt and slide, and all he knew was the blue sky, and the wind sighing through the branches of the sun-brightened trees, and the fleeting thought that at least he’d shown some steel.
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