Page 31 of The Summer Pass

Firuduna was telling the story with relish now. “So some locals come to the Protector with a report that the Boar of Hawakhurta has been seen hiding in the Ghost Wood. They say he’s wounded, maybe even dying, and he went to ground there with some of his men. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up, so the Protector sends a cohort in to hunt for him. They get lost. Or something—they don’t come out.”

“Artayarasha sends in another cohort?” Lill guessed.

“He does. They don’t come out either, but they send out a messenger after a while—one of the same locals who’d come to report about the Boar in the first place, interesting coincidence—who says they’ve found something, but they think the Boar has more men with him than they were expecting, and they need backup.”

“Oh, I see.” He was picturing how Vanu would have explained the plan to his men, signing to Mikhi, who would have translated it all crisply in her loudest, sternest voice.

“Before long, pretty much all of the Protector’s men are blundering around this haunted forest, seeing things, hearing voices, shooting at each other by mistake.” Firuduna wriggled with delight at the thought. “Apparently the Protector himself went in at one point because he couldn’t believe it was taking them so long. In the end, they find what they were looking for: a camp, in the densest part of the forest, with booby-traps around the perimeter, but abandoned—actually, there’s no sign that anyone ever stayed there, there’s no campfire or anything, it’s just some tents put up in among the trees, and in one of them … is a dead boar.”

“Beautiful.” Whose idea had that been, Lill wondered. Maybe Vanu’s; maybe one of the Gukhártu brothers?

“Isn’t it? When the soldiers finally make it out of the forest, their local guides having mysteriously vanished, they find … They’re cavalry troops, right? Like you said. But they’ve been doing all this on foot because you can’t ride through this forest, there’s too much undergrowth. They get back to their camp, and their horses are gone. Their servants and camp followers are all there, tied up—nobody’s been killed—but the wheels are gone from all their supply wagons, and the weapons they didn’t take with them have all been stolen.”

Firuduna sat back, dropping his hands into his lap. “You see why I know it’s him, right?”

“Yeah,” said Lill. It was a classic exploit for the Lion of the Summer Pass, and it made a good story. Yet Lill couldn’t help wishing that Firuduna hadn’t guessed. He wished he could be the only one to know it was Vanu.

If Firuduna was the first one to guess that the dead boar in the forest and the theft of Prince Artayarasha’s horses were Vanu’s doing, he didn’t remain the only one for long. By the time Lill went down to the gathering place later that day, there were people signing “Lion” as they gossiped by the well. Later still, someone brought news that Vanu’s banner had been seen flying over the walls of Ara Tawa, so it was more or less official. The Lion was back.

Lill was told the story several times by different people. He was no longer sure who knew he’d been Vanu’s bride and who didn’t; he trusted Firuduna when he said he’d only told Muni and Aunt Artami and Cousin Udo and sworn them all to secrecy, but he wasn’t sure how much their oaths of secrecy were worth, and he knew for certain that Artami had told one of her neighbours, because he’d been there when she’d done it.

Then the headman of Tsuruva announced that they could move out of the towers and suggested that “Some lad might make himself useful going to Tagra Degra to fetch back our menfolk,” while looking in Lill’s direction.

“I doubt they’d let them go yet,” said Firuduna.

The headman waved a hand dismissively at him. “No attack will be coming for weeks now—maybe months. Our Lion has seen to that.”

“My lord, that might not be true,” said Lill diplomatically.

“The invader king doesn’t even know of the attack on his henchman’s outpost yet. How could he? His stronghold of Suna is three months journey from Torakand, young lowlander,” said the old man authoritatively.

How anyone, even up here in the mountains, could be so ill-informed about the wider world, Lill could not fathom. Certainly some of the other people present—they were a large group drinking in the gathering place at dusk—knew better, but none of them seemed to want to speak up.

Lill took a deep breath. Nobody would beat him for insubordination, he reminded himself.

“For you or me, my lord, on foot or horseback, it would take three months. A message going by courier on the King’s Road can make that journey in five days.”

The headman gave him a comical look. “By witchcraft?”

“By relay. Changing horses and riders at the way-stations.”

“They do that,” Firuduna’s ex-wife put in quietly. “I have heard that.”

“Huh,” said the headman. “I suppose that could work. But he’d need an awful lot of them.”

“He has an awful lot of them,” said Lill.

The headman snorted. “The army still has to walk.”

“Yes, but not from Suna. The—” He swallowed the word Great. “—king’s general Pantaresh was in Masseta with an army of conscripts and Sukiyan mercenaries to put down a rebellion in the spring. If they haven’t disbanded, they could be here in a couple of weeks. I mean a couple of weeks from whenever they received the order from the king. Which could have happened some time ago. We’d better hope they have disbanded. I don’t know. I haven’t … heard anything lately.”

He’d stopped himself saying, “I haven’t had access to good intelligence in months,” but the headman of Tsuruva still peered at him suspiciously. The others in the gathering place didn’t look suspicious; they were nodding and murmuring agreement.

“So I think it would be best to reprovision the towers as soon as possible,” Lill went on quickly, anxious to make it clear that he was firmly on the villagers’ side.

The headman grunted as if unconvinced, but he did give the order to provision the towers.

Later that night there were torches seen glowing in the valley, and at dawn the bank of the Rakhiri was crowded with refugees from a village downstream. Boats ferried them across to Tagra Degra all morning. By noon the towers in Tsuruva were fully provisioned again and ready to take the remaining villagers. The headman wasn’t exactly avoiding Lill, but he didn’t seek Lill out to thank him, either. Lill told Firuduna, who laughed heartily.