Fool’s Quest

He coughed. “It could have been so good. If not for that stupid woman. That stupid woman. She had the real prize. That boy that could cloud minds. But she didn’t use him as she could have. She wanted . . . your son.”

I didn’t correct him. “What became of the captives? The woman you took, and the child?”

“Disrespectful little rat. I knocked him down. Ugly little bastard. Those staring eyes. All his fault that it fell apart.”

It took everything I had not to shove my knife in his eye. “Did you hurt him?”

“Knocked him down. That was all. Should have done more. No one speaks . . . to me . . . like that.”

He took a sudden gasping breath. His lips were going dusky.

“What happened to him?”

He laughed. “I don’t know. That night it all went wrong. That damned Hogen. Whining and sniffling for a woman like some table-fed lapdog. So I gave him one. One he deserved. She screamed a lot. Someone brought the magic-boy over. He stared. We asked if he’d like a turn. Then that woman. Dwalia. She came running over, shouting that we had no honor. That we were not men at all.” He rolled his eyes toward me. “I could stomach her no longer. Two of my men seized her, for she came at me with her claws out. And I had to laugh at her, held between them, struggling, those plump breasts and that round belly jiggling like a pudding. I told her that I thought we could prove to her we were men. We began to strip her. And it all . . . went bad. The fear. I think it was the boy. He was more tightly bound to her than we thought. He swamped us with his own fear. Fear everyone felt. The pale folk were screaming. They scattered like rabbits. That Dwalia. Shouting at them. Shouting at her magic-boy. Telling him to forget everything we’d promised him, to forget me and return to the path.”

He turned his whole head to look at me. His graying hair had come free of his wool cap to hang in wet locks around his face. “My men forgot me. I stood and shouted my orders, but they ran past me as if I didn’t exist. They released Dwalia. Perhaps they could not see her anymore. She called to the magic-boy and he went to her like a whipped dog.”

He shook his head against the snow that pillowed it. “No one heard me. A man crashed into me, picked himself up, and kept on running. The men chased the pale folk. They were like mad things. The horses broke loose. Then . . . then my men began fighting one another. I shouted my orders. But they did not obey me. They did not hear me. Or see me. I had to watch. My men, my chosen warriors, brothers-in-arms for more than four years . . . They killed one another. Some of them. Some ran. The boy drove them mad. He made me invisible to them. Maybe Dwalia and the boy didn’t realize that I was the only thing keeping my men in check. Without me . . . Dwalia fled and left the others to their fate. That’s what I think.”

“The woman and the child you took from my home. What did they do? Did the pale folk keep them?” He smiled at me. I set the edge of my blade to his throat. “Tell me what you know.”

“What I know . . . what I know very well . . .” He fixed his eyes on mine. His voice had fallen to a whisper. I leaned closer to hear him. “I know how to die like a warrior.” And he surged suddenly up against my blade, as if to cut his own throat. I pulled my knife clear of him and sheathed it.

“No,” I told him pleasantly. “You don’t die yet. And you don’t die like a warrior.” I stood and turned my back on him, leaving him trussed like a hog awaiting slaughter.

I heard him take in a great breath. “Hogen!” he roared. I stood up and backed away from him with Verity’s sword in my possession. Let him shout as much as he wanted. I wagged a remonstrating finger at him as he yelled again and then turned back to my second target. Sword or axe? Suddenly it seemed as if Verity’s sword was the only choice for this.

Hogen had lifted his head and was looking through the forest toward the distant road. So he expected the others to return. No sense in waiting until I was dealing with more than one person.

My years of doing quiet work had convinced me that surprising my target was most often my best technique. Sword drawn, I approached him stealthily. What made him turn? Perhaps that sense that many warriors seem to develop, an awareness that might be a touch of the Skill or the Wit or both. It mattered little; my surprise was lost.

Perhaps my second best technique was to challenge a man who could not stand without leaning on the sword he had looted from my wall. Hogen saw me, dropped his hatchet, seized the sword that he had planted in the snow, and challenged me with it. I stood still, watching him balance on one good leg, holding the sword at the ready. I smiled at him. He could not fight me unless I brought the battle to him; he could neither advance nor retreat on his injured leg unless he used the sword as a cane. I stood and watched him until he lowered the sword to touch the snow. He tried not to lean on it too obviously.

“What?” he demanded of me.