They rolled in the dirt for what felt like hours. Swearing, kicking, punching. It didn’t matter how hard Tamas hit Gavril, nothing seemed to stop him. Even without a powder trance, Tamas still considered himself a pit of a fighter. Gavril broke his holds. Absorbed his punches. And he gave as good — or better — than he got.
Tamas climbed to his feet and kicked Gavril. His brother-in-law shoved him backward, and Tamas felt his back hit the rocks of the cairn.
“Stop!” he said.
Gavril looked up, his face bruised, one eye blackened and his nose bloody. He saw the cairn behind Tamas and lowered his fist.
Tamas limped away from the cairn and lowered himself against an old fallen log.
He felt along his ribs. One of them might have gotten cracked. His face felt like a rug after the housekeeper had beat it for an hour. The back of his jacket had ripped — he could tell just by moving his shoulders. One of his boots was on the other side of the cairn, and Tamas didn’t even remember it coming off.
“You want to know what happened to me?” Tamas said.
Gavril grunted. He lay on the ground across from Tamas, legs splayed.
“That night we buried Camenir is the night I decided to kill Manhouch.” Tamas gathered up a wad of spit and hawked it into the dirt. It was red. “I decided to start a war. Not for the people’s rights or because Manhouch was evil or any of the other drivel I tell my supporters. I started a war to avenge my wife and my brother.”
Tamas took a deep breath and stared at his stockinged foot. His sock had ripped a week ago and his big toe stuck through it. “I couldn’t do it in a world of grief. I had to feel out my friends. Charm my enemies. That was the first step: to convince them I was still Adro’s favored son. Manhouch’s protector. The next step was putting Manhouch’s head in a basket.
“Then, of course, the war. Which” — Tamas held up one finger — ”I almost didn’t go through with. The earthquake and the royalists nearly knocked me off my course. My heart bled when I saw the shambles in which Adopest had been left. But Ipille sent Nikslaus and put me back on my path to vengeance.”
Tamas let his finger drop. “The path will end when I cut out Ipille’s heart for taking my family.”
The air was still. The only sound that of the water where the two rivers met.
“That was a nice speech,” Gavril said.
“I thought so.”
“Had that memorized long?”
“Most of it for years,” Tamas said. “Had to do a little improvising. Never thought I’d be giving it to you.”
“Who, then?”
Tamas shrugged. “My grandchildren? My executioner? Taniel’s the only one who knew the real reasons I planned the things I did.”
The sound of a horse whinnying brought Tamas’s head around. Up on the bluff, perhaps a hundred feet away, were two riders. He squinted into the afternoon sun as his fingers looked for his pistol. It had come out of his belt and lay a dozen paces to his left.
The riders began to head down the bluff toward him. The glare of the sun lessened, and he recognized two familiar faces: Olem and Beon je Ipille.
“Company,” Tamas said.
Gavril craned his neck and looked toward the bluff. “Is that Beon and Olem?”
“Yes.”
“I could break Beon’s neck. Bury him next to Camenir. Would be poetic justice in that.”
“My — our — quarrel isn’t with Beon. It’s with his father.”
“I’ve heard Beon is Ipille’s favorite.”
“Ipille’s ‘favorite’ son changes every six months or so. Beon just lost a major battle with me. I think if we killed him now, Ipille would say he deserved it.”
“Not a loving father.”
“No.”
Olem and Beon came to a halt some dozen paces off. Olem looked down at Tamas’s dislodged boot, then around the gully. “Seems there was a fight,” he said.
“Ambushed. We dumped the bodies in the river,” Tamas said.
“Of course,” Olem said. He didn’t sound convinced.
“I thought that you were given orders to stay in the camp?” Tamas said to Olem.
“Sorry, sir,” Olem said. “The general here asked me to accompany him as his chaperone so that he did not break his word of honor in leaving the camp.”
“And why did you feel the need to follow me?” Tamas turned to Beon.
Beon frowned toward the cairn. “I have heard a story,” he said. “Regarding a powder mage, and two huge brothers with great strength.” His eyes flicked to Gavril. “An old story, passed around in my father’s court. One that my father has taken great pains to stamp out.”
“So?” Gavril said, his tone petulant.
Beon seemed unperturbed. “The story caught my childhood imagination. It comes to an end when an entire company of my father’s Elite disappeared in the Fingers of Kresimir. Some of their bodies were found. Some weren’t. I always wondered if that was really the end of the story.”
Tamas and Gavril looked at each other.
Tamas asked, “And you thought you might find the end of the story by following us out here?”
