Chapter 3
Chapter three
Petur
There was no question that Petur’s people heard them coming from a mile away.
Shifters, especially his squad, were experts at tracking.
He didn’t have to call out and let them know that he was bringing a second person back to camp.
They could sense Deyvid’s approach as easily as Petur could, but finding out exactly who—or rather, what they were sensing—took them far more by surprise.
Petur strode into camp confidently, Deyvid a few paces behind him.
Deyvid Cleareyes, a person more myth than man, yet here he was in Petur’s grasp.
He couldn’t help but feel a little excited about the whole thing.
No one in his company, as far as he knew, had ever seen a High Harrier before, and here he was bringing one for them all to view.
The things they might be able to learn from him, it was really very exci—
“What the hell?” Brannan, one of Petur’s better scouts, said the second they stepped into the light. He got up from the fire in the middle of the clearing, his face beginning to contort into a snarl. “What is this filthy piece of—”
“Mind your tongue or I’ll remove it for you,” Petur said coldly, staring Brannan down.
He tolerated a lot from the people under his command.
It was only right, given the intimate nature of what they went through together.
You couldn’t stand on ceremony very well with someone who had once literally stuffed part of your intestines back into your abdominal cavity after a fight, but now wasn’t the time for them to be getting in their heads about the situation.
“This”—he indicated the man beside him—“is Deyvid Cleareyes. He’s going to be traveling with us as we hunt down the rest of the mages causing trouble along the border towns. ”
“Sire.” This was Lise, who was treading the fine line between sounding respectful and verging on disobedient. “Am I to understand that you’ve brought a Harrier into our midst?”
“A High Harrier,” Deyvid clarified before Petur could get around to it. Damn the man. “So if you’ve got a problem with me, you’d better get it out now.”
“A problem,” Brannan sputtered. “Yes, I’ve got a problem with you. My problem is that you’re alive and standing. Sire, why didn’t you—”
“He saved my life,” Petur said bluntly. It wasn’t an entirely true statement. He was willing to bet he would have survived the mage’s arc-light blast, and yet he was also very glad that he hadn’t had to. “I was on the verge of being burned alive. My friend here intervened.”
“Mm-hmm.” Lise nodded slowly. “And your gratitude made you decide to allow him to accompany you into our very midst?”
Petur’s gaze and voice went from frosty to solid ice. “I don’t recall needing your permission to bring whomever I want into my camp,” he said, with a hint of growl at the back of his throat.
All of his people immediately dropped their heads.
“My apologies, sire,” Lise said, and Brannan murmured the same.
Everyone else had had the good sense to keep their damn mouths shut, but he saw doubt and fear in their faces.
“If you say it’s for the best, then it’s for the best.” Lise looked him up and down.
“Would you at least care for a change of clothes, sire?”
“Ah, right.” Petur had walked to camp in the same state that he’d found Deyvid in, which was to say, naked.
He was barely cognizant of it. Shifters quickly learned to disregard their nudity, but Deyvid appeared to be more of a prude.
Even now, the other man was carefully avoiding looking at Petur, and Petur didn’t like that.
He wanted Deyvid’s eyes fixed squarely on him.
“Yes, and get a dry set for our guest as well,” he said.
“Yours won’t fit him, sire,” Lise pointed out.
“You two are much the same size,” Petur pointed out right back. “I’m sure some of yours will do.”
She bowed again. “Yes, sire,” she murmured, then set about doing his will.
Petur, not one to let a bad mood grow worse, grabbed Deyvid’s hand and tugged him over to the fire.
He sat him down on the large log that had undoubtedly been placed there for Petur himself and said, “Warm up, all right? You look positively freezing.” Then he turned to Brannan.
“Talk to me. What do we know in the aftermath of the fight?”
“Two mages down,” Brannan replied, clearly feeling more comfortable now that they could speak of military matters. “We swarmed one of them, and the other was killed by a blade. I assume his,” he added, pointing at the Harrier in their midst.
Petur smiled. “You assume correctly. Continue.”
“They were only a piece of the rest of the group,” Brannan said. “We were able to track the others for approximately a mile before … well …”
“Stink bomb,” one of his other people put in.
It was Ginnie, a bear shifter. She had the second strongest of all the shifts besides Petur and was an impressive hand-to-hand fighter.
When the bloodlust came upon her, it was almost impossible to turn her aside without doing, or taking, serious damage.
“The stench was truly something. Made my eyes water, it did.”
“So what you’re telling me,” Petur said, “is that the job isn’t done yet?”
“No, sire,” Brannan agreed, “not yet.”
“They’re a sizable group,” Deyvid said suddenly, and Petur watched as several of his shifters startled. “And they’re not amateurs. I’ve been chipping pieces off of them for weeks now. They’re well organized, spread out, and have a magical means of communication, so it’s hard to stay ahead of them.”
“How would a High Harrier know if they’ve got a magical means of communication?” Brannan asked. “Magic doesn’t work on you people, does it?”
“It doesn’t,” Deyvid said, keeping his own voice light and level, “but I have working eyes. And when I see someone speaking into a stone and listen to that stone seem to speak back, I assume that either they’re crazy, or they’re having a conversation with someone.”
“So you can see magic,” another person said. It was Rhys, one of the youngest of the group and certainly the most curious.
“And you can hear magic,” Brannan went on.
“I can see and hear the results, I suppose,” Deyvid clarified, “but the actual magic itself, not really.”
“I don’t understand,” Rhys said. “What do you mean by the results? You just said you could hear the voice, so the magic was affecting you?”
Deyvid shook his head. “Being able to hear the person speaking was the result of the magic. The magic itself was the spell laid on the stone that was carrying their voices to me. It looked like …” He shrugged.
“Nothing but a piece of granite. To you, it might have looked like something completely different. I don’t know. ”
“Fascinating,” Brannan, poking the fire aggressively. “Great, just how I wanted us to spend the evening—discussing magical theory with one of the greatest enemies Riyale has ever faced. You do know that a clan of Harriers were responsible for the loss of Gemsmit on the border last year, don’t you?”
“I do know that,” Petur said, intercepting the question before it could provoke an argument. “I was, in fact, there, leading the people who fought to get it back. You were posted in an oceanfront city at the time, I believe.”
Brannan flushed but continued doggedly, “Sire, I’m just saying—”
“I’m not interested in anything you have to say right now,” Petur snapped. “I’ve offered my hospitality to this man, and I expect my offer to be respected by all of you. Is that clear?”
One by one, they murmured their assent. Petur wasn’t sure whether or not he should press the point home when, suddenly, Lise returned with clothes for Petur under one arm and a set for Deyvid tucked under the other as well as a soft pair of moccasins.
“Your boots are soaked,” she said, laying the new ones down in front of Deyvid. “These should do well enough to get you back to the spot where you stored your equipment.”
Deyvid raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to let me go back and get my things?” he said to Petur.
“Of course,” Petur said, internally smacking himself. He should have thought of that. “I can’t leave you to try to keep up with us with nothing but a brace of knives. An incomplete one, in fact.”
“Well, that’s your fault,” Deyvid pointed out.
“How dare you accuse our prince of—”
“Brannan,” Petur said. “Enough.”
Brannan subsided once more with a grumpy frown, and Petur turned back to Lise. “That’s a good idea. As soon as he’s changed, escort him there and back again, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
It was actually a good opportunity to learn about Harrier methods of concealment, Petur reflected as he began to pull on his dry clothes.
They tended to cache weapons along the edges of the forest at the northern border of Riyale, but even with their enhanced senses, it took guidance from the three and the devil’s own luck to find where they hid all of their—hmm. Wait a second.
“Are you going to change?” Petur asked Deyvid pointedly, nudging the dry things in front of the man with his foot.
“I’d rather not do it with an audience,” Deyvid said through gritted teeth.
Brannan brayed with laughter. “Oh, we have a shy Harrier. That’s new. What, when you’re not shooting arrows through people’s throats or setting their houses on fire, you like to conceal yourselves behind folding fans and twitter to each other like a simpering group of maidens?”
“Something like that,” Deyvid replied. Petur admired his inability to be riled even as he wished for the tenth time that Brannan would learn to hold his damn tongue.
“Go thirty feet in that direction,” Petur said, pointing over to where he knew they didn’t have a lookout. “No one will see you, and no one will watch you. My word on it.”
“Your word,” Deyvid muttered as he got to his feet, grabbing up the clothes. “Yes, which is worth so much.”