Egar jumped, and nearly fell down with the sudden release of the pressure on his arm. He cleared his knife from its sheath, belatedly, whirled about. The figure was nowhere to be seen. It was gone, into the chill of the air and the long grass, like memory of the voice into the wind, like the acrid chemical tang into the sweeter smell of wood smoke from the fire. Like the fading pressure on his wrist.
He wheeled about once more, breathing tightly, knife balanced on his palm.
Quiet, and thickening gray gloom across the steppe.
The band like a hoop of blood. His father’s cairn, the emptied flask laid beside it. The blackening silhouette of the tree.
“My brothers are in Ishlin-ichan,” he told the silence. “Getting drunk.”
He jerked his head westward, roughly the direction you’d take. Threw a glance out to the setting sun.
Saw silhouetted riders there, approaching.
Ringil tried, just the once, on fading hope, for the outrage of imperial nobility.
“Just what is the meaning of this? You intend to
Terip Hale shook his head. “Let it go, friend. I don’t imagine that accent is any more real than the rest of this charade, so drop it, why don’t you. This is going to be painful enough for you as it is. Now, like I asked you before, who the
“All right,” Ringil said, because he guessed he had perhaps another half a minute, at most, before Hale did the obvious thing and had them all disarmed.
Ringil measured the possibilities. Eril and Girsh had both frozen when the trap was sprung, arms well out from their bodies so as not to invite a crossbow bolt for twitching a hand the wrong way, faces taut with concentrated tension. They looked like men wading belly-high across an icy river, like adults caught out midstep in a children’s game of closer-closer-statue. They would have already assessed the odds. Now they watched for Ringil’s lead.
There were three crossbows leveled at them, as far as he could see. The rest was hand-to-hand cutlery.
“All right
“All right, you win. I’m not Laraninthal of Shenshenath, and I’m not an imperial. My name’s Ringil Eskiath.”
Hale blinked. “
But Ringil had seen how that same taken-aback flinch ran around the armed men in the alcoves. He felt the way their casual thug focus gave way to curious stares. He saw a couple of them mutter to each other. The siege of Trelayne was eight years in the past, the triumph at Gallows Gap a year older than that. The war itself had been over now for more than half a decade. But the stories lingered on, attenuated maybe, yet still there in the city’s consciousness.
“Eskiath died at Ennishmin,” someone sneered. “Fighting imperials.”
Ringil forced a calm he didn’t feel.
“Heard that one before a couple of times,” he said lightly. “And it’s almost true. Still got the scars. But it takes more than three Yhelteth sneak assassins to put me away.”
Another of the men voiced a faint cheer. His companion elbowed him savagely to shut up. Ringil pushed as hard as it would go. He raised a cautious thumb, well out from his body so it wouldn’t be misinterpreted, gesturing up at his left shoulder.
“This is the Ravensfriend,” he said loudly. “Kiriath steel. Forged at An-Monal for the clan Indamaninarmal, gifted to me by Grashgal the Wanderer. Rinsed in lizard blood at Rajal Beach and Gallows Gap and the siege of Trelayne. I
Another voice from one of the alcoves. “He does look kind of—”
“Yeah?” Terip Hale wasn’t having this. “Well, you know what I heard? I heard Ringil Eskiath was a fucking queer. That true as well?”
Ringil bent him a smile. “Would I have come to you looking for slave girls if it were?”
“I don’t know why you’re here.” Hale nodded at the muscle with the flail. “But we are going to find out. Varid.”
The big man moved across to Ringil, stepped in close enough to block any attempt to bring the Ravensfriend out of its scabbard, far enough off to beat a grapple move. It was done with sober professional care—no grin like the doorman’s, no jeering. Just a custom-hardened watchfulness in the eyes. Chances were that Varid had been a soldier once.
