Deyvid didn’t wait. He lunged forward and brought his sword down hard on the mage’s neck. One second later, she was decapitated, and he was fending off an attack from Petur’s second, Brannan.
Deyvid did his best to block the blows coming from the sergeant without injuring him with the edge of the blade. It was harder than it looked, though. The sergeant was pushing it, and a few seconds into the fight, his hands went into a semi-shifted form, claws appearing where nails used to be. That was a worrying escalation.
“Enough!” Petur shouted, but Brannan kept attacking.
Deyvid was going to have to do something rash soon—rash because he knew he couldn’t count on these shifters not to turn on him if he hurt one of them, but it might be the only way he’d survive. A judicious cut, somewhere nonessential, before Brannan could overwhelm him. Just as he turned the edge of his blade, an enormous hand grabbed the neck of Brannon’s chain-mail shirt and yanked him backward.
Petur, in his warrior form, full-on roared in his second’s face. Deyvid lowered his blade and made an effort to catch his breath as Brannon protested, “But sire, he could have killed you!”
“Did you not notice the part where his blade was aimed at her, not me?” Petur demanded. “Who’s dead on the ground, hmm?”
“He went against your word, your instructions.”
“She was on the verge of setting me on fire. What do you think I’d prefer?” Petur demanded.
Brannan sagged. “Sire, please, I’m only looking out for you.”
“You don’t need to look out for me,” Petur snapped before letting Brannan go. “Triple gods, what a mess.” He looked over at Deyvid, who eyed Petur warily. “Go through their things,” was all the prince ended up saying. “We’ve got bodies to burn.”
Burning the bodies was a precaution against tracking spells. They’d learned after the first few days in that leaving the bodieswhole was an invitation to ambush if they were anywhere near the corpses. These mages were well connected to one another, and although none of the group had identified anything singular in their possession that linked them, that therewasa link was undeniable. Burning seemed to take care of it, though.
Deyvid left them to it as he began to root through the bags of the three people he’d just dispatched. Their rucksacks were near the place the trio had set up with their campfire. A pot was still on the coals, bubbling merrily, and Deyvid could smell something rich and fragrant within it. Carefully, he took the pot from the fire and set it aside. What was fragrant now would be burnt in short order, given that there was no one left to tend to it.
He opened the first rucksack without much hope that there’d be anything of note. Clothes, reagents, paper and ink, and a small statuette of the goddess of magic, Hralle. It had clearly been used as a prayer stone, meant to be held between cupped hands and rubbed over long periods of time as prayers were made and answered.
Like rubbing at an old wound, Deyvid wondered what it felt like to be blessed by a god or goddess. It must have happened to him back when he was still young, before he’d been turned into a High Harrier. But he couldn’t remember the sensation. Was it warmth? Was it love? Was it light? Was it a refreshing chill that spread through your body, like dipping yourself into a cool spring? He wished he knew, but that was impossible now.
He moved on to the second pack, then the third. That one actually might have revealed something of interest—a map, or at leastheinterpreted it as a map. There were no recognizable features on it, but when Deyvid stared at the dots that decorated the piece of paper, the part of his brain that recognized patterns immediately correlated them to distances that they had traveled, and people they had fought in each location. One group, two, three, four … and one left, just to the north. Five blinds, fivelocations, where mages from Mersaighe were wreaking havoc in Riyale.
Just one group left.
“What have you found?” a cool, feminine voice asked from behind him. Deyvid turned to look at Lise. He liked her, insofar as he could like any of these people given the ancient enmity between them. Lise was calm and controlled, the opposite of the man who was immediately above her in rank. Deyvid hoped that by the time this was all over, Prince Petur would have learned better what made a good second-in-command.
“I think it’s a map,” he said, holding it out to her. “Take a look.”
Her gaze was curious as she peered at it. “How so? Wait, ah, no, I see it now. It’s possible.” She got to her feet. “Let’s show this to the prince.”
“Go ahead,” Deyvid told her.
She raised one eyebrow. “You don’t wish to come with me? This is your discovery, after all.”
“Not much of a discovery,” Deyvid said with a shrug. “Anyone who had gone through these packs would have found it.”
“No one else could have gone through those packs without losing a finger, most likely,” Lise pointed out. “It’s all right for you to take ownership for doing things well, you know.”
“The prince is busy,” Deyvid hedged, and that much, at least, Lise was able to agree with.
“He’ll be done disciplining Brannan soon,” she said, “but I’ll take this over if you prefer it.”
“Thank you,” Deyvid said.
“It’s my pleasure, Sir Cleareyes,” she replied. Deyvid watched her leave, then set about deconstructing the mage’s campsite. He needed to trigger any of the proximity spells they’d set up that might lead to doing people harm. Not many came this deep into the woods, but he’d feel bad if some missed spell led to awoodcutter losing an arm or a leg just because they fell into an invisible trap.
By the time he was done, a pyre had been built, and the three bodies upon it were burning steadily. The six shifters Deyvid was traveling with, Prince Petur and his squad of five, were standing together around it when Deyvid joined them. Brannan looked a little bit worse for wear, avoiding both Petur and Deyvid’s eyes, but the others greeted Deyvid eagerly.
“’Lise told us what she thought of the map,” Rhys said with a grin.
“There might be just one group of them left if that’s what it means,” Deyvid said.
