Dan's Darkest Secrets I

Synopsis

The fight was seconds cold when the questioning started. The dead would go back to Loshev as proof, the living as witnesses. Leila lingered at the edge of the firelight that night while Aldo, who had killed a woman a few hours earlier, sat apart against a tree, and Koa checked on him once and then left him the space.

She began with a story about official business (a guard had asked her, personally, to carry a warning to the crew and guide them to a hideout), and Aldo told Mikhail flatly that she was lying and that the prisoners should be kept apart. Under Mikhail’s questioning the story came apart into the truth: her sweetheart, a Loshev guard, had handed her a map, sent her days into the woods and refused to say why. The name was Dan. She had been with him four years and had carried sealed letters for him the whole of that time without opening one, and once, after a stranger asked her whether the river ran swift, she had answered that the books were cleaned, with no idea what she had said.

Yaser, the tradesman who had robbed Mikhail on the road, came at it from the other side, and largely because Aldo was cutting a crossbow bolt out of him at the time. He was the crew’s fence, and he called these woods Gaba Alam and haunted. Dan let his goods through Loshev, took first pick and asked nothing; the crew spoke to him in a barrel-and-cargo code that fooled nobody who heard it twice. Aldo’s hands shook throughout. He had killed a man on the road once, in self-defense, and said the first time stays with you. The surgery failed, and the thief bled out on the ground. Koa spent one of the potions Phil’s family had given him to bring the man back, which he did as much for Aldo as for the patient.

Two searches paid. Samir’s forearm bore a single lash, inked in the manner of the ring’s mark; the captain Mikhail had met in Forven wore nine. Zara’s kit held a crude map of the road from Loshev to the camp and on north to a fallback. One detail would not sit right: Leila’s name had been on the town’s list of people to bring in, and Leila had still been in Loshev the day the party rode out.

They went north to the fallback rather than home. Mikhail caught Koa’s arm short of a bed of spiked vines under the leaf litter, and then noticed the same vines had grown across the path behind them, walked an hour before. What they reached was built of the same gray ore-veined stone that runs through Loshev’s ancient bridge and its town hall. Mikhail walked up to what he took for a kneeling statue and it stood up: near seven feet of it, skin like carved stone that still moved, a cracked bald head, and eyes of green gem.

Kithul was courteous about the misunderstanding. He walks alone, he said, and goes where the Whispers tell him danger is. He came back to the camp with them, recognized Koa’s Free Folk colors and the sword that goes with them, and was plainly uneasy about the prisoners and about how much blood was already on the three of them. This had been a Mól village, he told them, one of many; the empire fell a long time ago, the seat of its importance lies further north, and there is a genuine danger in this place. What the Whispers gave him of it was creaking and cracking, a movement like a breeze, and a sharpness that finds anyone not minding it. Mikhail put that beside the vines and the drowned stretch of forest and said they were probably at the edge of the Twisted Grove. Kithul drew the region’s rivers out of his journal (two of them closing on Haudh-Gwenn like a pair of arms around the whole wood), and asked, sharply and in a word they did not know, about the terms of Aldo’s servitude, and did not explain himself.

They lit a fire on bare stone and slept. By morning the thorns had closed a full ring around the camp. Kithul offered to carry both prisoners and refused to force either into the danger, and Leila refused to be carried. The crossing took hours: Kithul with Yaser on his back, Mikhail riding Nightstorm and clearing vines ahead with an unseen hand, Aldo mounted, Koa walking. They came out shredded to the skin, and Kithul dressed what he could. The horse was hurt and the donkey had gone lame, and the donkey was put down where it stood. It got one last bite into Mikhail on the way out. To cross that ground properly, Kithul said, you would want a wagon banded in iron.