Chapter 33
Edmund woke with his head pressed against the side of the carriage and his tongue feeling like old mothballs. He swallowed a few times. His throat was sore and his head ached.
He could just barely remember people … the scholar …
someone with her … who had given him something to drink.
No, not given, exactly. Said, “Drink this or I’ll make you drink it.
” His past self had decided that drinking it was probably the wisest option.
His memory was hazy around that point. Then there had been a carriage and wheels rattling over cobblestones, and he couldn’t seem to stay awake, despite all the jarring …
“Eat this,” said the same voice who had told him to drink.
Edmund looked up blearily and saw a man with biceps the size of his thighs and no appreciable neck.
The man filled most of the carriage. What he didn’t fill was taken up by Scholar …
whatever her name was. Who wasn’t a scholar, but only pretending.
“I am in fact a scholar,” she said, sounding annoyed. He must have said the words out loud. He couldn’t really tell what was inside his skull and what wasn’t at the moment. “I just don’t serve the Forge God. Now eat your food. You’re no good to me if you starve.”
Edmund took the food that the man handed him. Bread and a wedge of cheese. His hands were tied together with a strip of cloth which, though not rope, still made eating difficult. His mouth was too dry to swallow.
“Here.” The neckless man handed him a flask. Edmund drank gratefully. The water had a bitter aftertaste but it slid coolly down his throat and soothed parched tissues. He sat up a little straighter, feeling a touch better, and had another bite of bread.
On the third sip of water, it occurred to him that the bitter taste was poppy milk and that he was being drugged again. He spat the water back out and tried to fling the flask away.
The neckless man caught it before it could spill. “Don’t get smart.”
“You’re trying … trying to…” He took a deep breath, forcing the words into their proper marching order. “Trying to drug me.”
“Yes. We are. And you’re going to keep drinking it, one way or another.”
“I don’t—”
The man sighed and bent one of Edmund’s fingers backward. Edmund shrieked in pain that was not dulled nearly enough by the poppy milk. He writhed on the seat, trying to move his hand into a position where his finger wouldn’t get broken, until the man released him.
“There,” the man said. “That’s what happens if you don’t cooperate. You’ll end up drinking it, and this way is better for everybody. Now eat your food.”
Edmund stared at the food and then at the flask that the man held out to him. He wanted to be brave and fight back, but he couldn’t think of anything that would gain him. I couldn’t fight that fellow even if my hands weren’t tied.
“No, you couldn’t,” the scholar agreed. “Now be sensible and eat your food.”
Shame engulfed him. Edmund managed another few bites of bread and swallows of water, and then the world began to get small and far away, as if he was looking at it through the wrong end of a spyglass, and he wasn’t sad to see it go.
The Dervish was used to riding hell for leather. He’d done it more times in his life than he’d been able to count.
This was more … heck for leather. Mild unpleasantness for leather. Something like that.
Both Halla and Zale could stay on a horse, but it clearly was not among their favorite activities.
Not that either of them complained. They clung to the beasts as stoically as martyrs undergoing torture, either bouncing violently in the saddle or sitting like sacks of wet cement, depending on the gait.
It was painful to watch, and yet the Dervish couldn’t look away.
“Believe it or not, this is better than she was two years ago,” Sarkis said, at one of their frequent stops. “I’ve been teaching her. Before that she’d only ever ridden a donkey.”
He’d been worried about Greathoof keeping up with the others. Draft horses were built for strength, not speed. Now he was thinking of sending Dog Violet ahead to the next post to wait for them.
Nevertheless, they were still moving faster than he would be on foot, and there was another reason to be grateful for the company.
At some point, midafternoon, Edmund was in pain and the space next to his heart sparked with urgency and the Dervish launched himself sideways off the saddle and into the field beyond.
His feet left deep hollows in the newly plowed earth as he ran.
When he finally fought himself under control and stood bent over, hands braced on his knees, gasping for air, it was Sarkis who walked out to meet him.
“Someone’s hurting Edmund,” the Dervish rasped.
Sarkis nodded, clearly intimately familiar with that frantic drive. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll make them die slow.”
Still bent double, the Dervish got enough breath to laugh. “Ancestors. I’ve missed having someone bloodthirsty around. Edmund would try to talk me out of it.”
“Zale too. You should have heard how squeamish they were about hiding bodies.” Sarkis got a hand under his elbow and helped him upright. “Would it help if we tied you to the saddle?”
“No!”
The Dervish realized he had shouted and coughed. Sarkis raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment.
“One of the previous wielders,” the Dervish said.
“Ah.” There was a world of understanding packed into that syllable. Possibly, the Dervish thought, the only other person who could understand.
“Yeah.”
“Had one who used to cut out my tongue occasionally,” Sarkis said, as they made their way back across the field.
“Oof.”
“Eh, it grew back.”
“Everything does.”
Halla and Zale were waiting by the fence, taking the opportunity to stretch their legs. Dog Violet held the reins of the Dervish’s horse, while Greathoof was sampling the weeds on the verge.
“That must be incredibly frustrating,” Halla said, patting his arm. Her round face was alight with sympathy.
“They’ve stopped now.” The magic had subsided. The Dervish wondered what exactly was happening and whether they were trying to draw him to Edmund or if they were simply slapping the scholar around for fun.
The thought made him want to scream, but Sarkis’s words came back, soothingly grim. It’s all right. We’ll make them die slow.
It helped. Probably that meant they were both bad people, but at least they were in good company.
They changed horses once. Dog Violet refused to give up Greathoof, and the big horse was beginning to look worn by the time they stopped for the night.
The Dervish was restless and wanted to keep moving, but Sarkis looked him square in the eye and said, “What happens when you have to leap off your horse and start running in pitch darkness?”
“I break my leg,” muttered the Dervish sulkily.
“Yes, you do. And then we put you in the sword to heal up, and it takes three days, during which we don’t have any idea which direction we should go.
” He folded his arms and looked stern. Despite being four inches taller, the Dervish immediately felt like a small child being scolded by Father’s Brother.
Halla came to his rescue. “Don’t lecture him, love. He’s worried about his friend, that’s all.”
“Yes, but—”
“And you aren’t his boss anymore.”
The Dervish straightened up. “Wait, that’s right. You aren’t. The troop’s been dissolved for five hundred years.”
Sarkis gave him a rueful grin. “Yes, but if it keeps you from charging off into the dark and getting killed, I’m willing to pretend it isn’t.”
They got two rooms. The rooms had only one bed, but Zale said, “I don’t care if you don’t.”
“It’s fine. You’re not my type.”
The lawyer gave him a wry look. “What, you don’t actually like gentle intellectual types? Could have fooled me.”
“Edmund’s not my type either.”
“Mm-hmm. It was, of course, an absolute coincidence that he showed up to breakfast three days ago looking guilty as sin and absolutely stinking of sex.”
The Dervish opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally said, “You must be a terror in court.”
Zale smiled like a shark who had just received exceptionally good news. “Yes. Yes, I am.” They patted the bed. “Don’t worry. Your virtue is safe with me.”
The Dervish shook his head and stripped down, sliding under the blankets. “Do you ever have moments where you wonder how exactly your life came to this point?”
“Pretty much any time I go anywhere with Sarkis and Halla. You would not believe … well, actually you might.” Zale reached out and snuffed the candle.
“He said you were squeamish about hiding bodies.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny. Go to sleep. Sarkis is going to get us up at an hour that ought to be illegal.”
Days went by. The Dervish measured time by horses now—six hours of walk and trot and canter, reach a post, change up, start again.
Greathoof fell behind, but always caught up again.
If the giant missed Sweetness the mule, he certainly wasn’t pining, given the vast amounts of food he consumed every evening. Zale put it all on the Rat’s account.
“Why didn’t we use post-horses when we were chasing after Sarkis?
” Halla asked one evening, while the lawyer carefully tucked the receipts away into their satchel.
They had stopped for the night and settled into an inn that the Dervish remembered passing before, not because they’d stopped there but because the name, the Fighting Cock, had struck him as hilarious.
“Posthouses are only along the main roads. Also you didn’t know how to ride a horse, and I hated it.” Zale rubbed their backside surreptitiously through their robes.
“You still hate it.”
“Yes, well. Needs must. At any rate, we’re getting close.”
The Dervish’s head lifted at that. “We are?”
“Yes. The angle you run when the magic hits you has gotten a great deal wider in the last day. Before you always went north-northwest. Now you’re going generally northwest, but this morning, when we were at the spot where the road bends west around that lake, you ran almost due north.”