Boni Woe and the rest of Gunn’s crew attacked the following day, a few hours after Fia’s company had broken camp, having waited just long enough for the skittish and jaded riders to let down their guard.
It was a pearler of a morning. A few insubstantial clouds hung in a brittle sky the colour of glacial ice. A stiff breeze brought with it the sharp, almost painfully cutting scent of fresh snow from the far north.
They crossed the dry riverbed, trotted across it quickly, without seeing so much as a single leg of a single spider.
“Where’d they go?” Darach Lees asked weakly. He was looking a little green around the gills and had refused so much as a strip of dried venison when they’d broken their fast. By the time Fia and Gunn had returned to the fire the night before, Lees had already blitzed through the stage of being a jovial drunk, bypassed snot-slinging pissed altogether, and passed clean out.
“Burrows,” Fia said. She wasn’t feeling particularly fresh herself.
Lees eyed the riverbed with loathing and clicked his tongue at his horse so that it hurried along the quicker. He must’ve had a hell of a morning head on him, Fia thought, because as he rode briskly past Gunn, who was whistling tunelessly, he said, “It’s nice that you’re in a rare good humour this morning, but if you can’t carry a tune, Gunn, then how’s about quitting the whistling for the sake of the rest of us?”
Fia heard the grin in Gunn’s voice when he replied.“I can carry it just fine, it’s when I try to unload it that it gives me trouble, friend.”
He carried on his whistling, giving Fia a sideways look as he pulled his coat closer about him.
Fia kept her face blank, but on the inside she couldn’t suppress a warm tickle as Gunn’s grey eyes fell on her.
What the bloody hell are you doing, Fia? part of her mind asked her.
She had no real answer, but her heart told her that she might very well be drawing close to the end of her life. She couldn’t imagine that Redmond would take her in with open arms, not after he’d already tried to have her quietly murdered in the Foldwood. Not when he was so obviously in up to his eyebrows with the Imperator. Her mother, if she still lived, might want to see her even after she’d run away, but Redmond might make that impossible. Her half-brother’s plan, the deal he had made with the Imperator, would be a lot less complicated to honour once she was out of the picture and floating face down in some bog, or being picked at and nosed through by wolves on an open hillside somewhere.
That realisation, that she might very well be marching on to meet her own death, was a confronting one, certainly, but it was also extremely liberating. An impending grisly demise at the hands of a family member sure couldn’t be beat, as far as ways to whittle down the list of things you gave a shit about went.
She looked over at Gunn, who was riding slightly ahead of her. Eyed his rugged profile; the crow’s foot in the corner of his eye, the silver shot beard, the grim mouth. Yeah, looming death certainly took the care out of choosing who she fucked, that was for sure.
Fia’s sixth sense was still pulling at her, but it had settled down now—less like having the world digging its heels into the flanks of her mind, more like being urged on with an apple and a soothing word. It was as if the land knew that she had resigned herself to the fate that had been lying in wait for her all these years. Ever since she had watched Arlen cough out his ghost. And the land was glad at the rightness of it.
They rode through the tumbled grasslands, while around them the hills began to swell once more out of the wild waving meadows of cudweed, sword-grass and honeygorse. The plains breathed around them. High up, riding the thermals, hawks and wedge-tailed eagles looked for the unwary to kill.
There was evidence of settled crofters and ranchers having recently moved on; abandoned and empty stone huts, broken down fences and stockyards that were being slowly claimed back by the tundra.
“I have heard mutterings about how Viscount Marr has been squeezing the lands and communities around Castle Dreymark,” Cleric Vass said sombrely, eyeing the vacated hovels. “Squeezing them for silver until they cannot pay, then for livestock to feed his armies until they cannot eat, then for their sons and daughters until they have nothing left.”
“We’ve found more than one farmer that hung hisself from a tree when he had ought left but a rope,” Gil said, and for once he wasn’t grinning.
Gunn hawked up phlegm. Spat it over the weathered timber of a dilapidated gate. “I’ve heard the same things. He’s a lot to answer for, Redmond Marr, and more than a few people to answer it to. And as for this Imperator, standing over his shoulder…”
Fia should have known, when the pheasants took flight from a thicket of bushes on their left, that something wasn’t right. She’d been distracted though, by Gunn pointing out a lake where they could water the horses not too far ahead.
The first pistol shot hummed past her head. The second shot, this one accompanied by a sharp rolling rifle report, missed Darach Lees only by dumb luck, as he leaned over the neck of his horse to purge his guts.
Fergus Allaway went sideways off his saddle, dragging Gil with him. Lenix threw himself clear of his own mount, as a couple more lead balls whined off a boulder nearby.
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“Ain’t nothin’ worse in this world than gettin’ shot at when you’re sufferin’ from barrel fever!” the sharp-featured twin cursed, hunkering down in the grass.
“Ain’t nothin’ better to get rid of it though neither!” his twin yelled back.
Fia pulled one pistol free of her belt and looked around as another rifle rolled across the open country, the sound bouncing off the sky.
Lees cried out in dismay.
“Lees, are you hit?” Fia called.
“No,” came the deep reply of the cleric’s voice, “but he’s dismounted rather enthusiastically into his own vomit.”
Fia rolled her eyes, caught sight of a furtive movement over by a scree-covered hillside and fired. Her bullet kicked up stone chips, but missed her mark.
“Get down, woman!” Gunn hissed. He’d dropped to earth and was squatting in a bush not far away.
Fia did as he suggested and flipped herself smoothly off the back of her brumby. The sable animal looked at her out of one dark eye and snorted.
“Everyone still alive?” Fia called softly, as gunshots continued to crack and whine over their heads.
There was a chorus of acquiescence.
“We’re fairly nicely covered by the long brush and tumble of boulders we were riding through when the attack began, Miss McCrae” Cleric Vass said, crawling over to Fia through the grass.
“We’re fairly nicely pinned down too, Cleric,” replied Fia. She eyed the holyman sceptically. His eyes were still a little sunken and there were deep lines cut into the corners of his mouth. “No chance that you can use a bit of know-how to kill these folk, is there?” she asked.
“We don’t know who they are,” Cleric Vass rebuked her gently.
“I know who they ain’t. They ain’t our friends,” Fia said, as she uncorked her powder horn and started reloading her pistol.
The cleric shook his head. “No, I cannot. And even if I had the strength, I would not. Not until we ascertained whether they were truly our foes. Just because we ride with a known killer does not mean we have to act with a killer’s lack of compunction.”
“You’ll take a bullet through the chest as confirmation, I assume?” Gunn asked.
“Yes,” said Cleric Vass, missing the irony.
Fia’s quick ears detected the unmistakable hissing rush of someone surging through the grass towards them, charging in from the direction of the hill of scree she’d shot at a moment before.
Letting her instincts guide her, Fia whipped out her broadsword as she rose to her feet. The blade scythed through the dry stalks as it described a half circle, even as another sword wielded by another woman came lashing out towards her. There was a screeching clang as steel met steel.
“Enough!” Gunn bellowed.
Fia’ sword stopped half an inch from the other woman’s collar bone. Her vision seemed to be filled with crooked teeth in a snarling mouth, pale green eyes set in a pale face, wild red hair that had been plaited and twisted with human knuckle bones and streaked with dust. She could feel a cold line pressing against the side of her own neck.
A sword.
Nothing else felt quite like that against your skin.
“You must be Boniface Woe,” she said in her usual unperturbed tone.
Boniface Woe’s lips trembled in what might’ve been a smile.
“My friends call me Boni,” she said in a jarringly girlish voice, laced with barely controlled lunacy. “Or, at least they would if I could manage to make any.”
There was the sound of a pistol being cocked from somewhere around Fia’s navel and something pressed into her stomach.
Fia’s eyes never left Boniface Woe’s.
Out of the corner of her eye, Fia saw Hunter rise out of the grass with her bow nocked and pointing at the red-headed Woe.
“Boni…” Gunn said in a cold voice.
“Can I trust you, Gunn?” Fia asked calmly.
“Far as you can trust anyone in this world,” Gunn said slowly.
“Can I trust this woman with the sword to my throat?”
“You can trust her to do what I say,” said Gunn, in a tone that brooked no argument.
Boni Woe’s lip curled. Her mad green eyes stared into Fia’s, unblinking; a wolfhound held on the string-thin leash of Gunn’s command.
“You’ve my word,” Gunn said.
“Well, Gunn, seems to me it takes twice the effort to build a bridge once it's been burned,” said Fia. “And you never have the same faith in its strength as you did before. You best not let me down.”
She lowered her broadsword.
A ripple of furious disappointment passed over Boni’s face and she ran her tongue over her cracked lips. Then she too lowered her blade, uncocked her flintlock and shoved it moodily back into her belt.
“All that chasing we done and we don’t even get to spill a single drop of claret come the end of it? That’s not on, boss, not on at all,” she said sullenly.
Gunn put his fingers to his lips and blew a long, shrill whistle. On cue, about twenty men and women emerged from where they had been lying up in the scrub, behind boulderstones and pressed into the shadows of a couple of banks. Fia recognised a few of them––Kerr, and the two women, Winnie and Rule––as having tried to kill her before.
“You want claret, Boni, you want blood?” Gunn said, striding over to her and taking her by the arm once it became apparent that no one was going to kill anyone else just at that moment. “Muster half a dozen of our swiftest riders. We’re sendin’ out some invitations that’ll have you bathing in the stuff.”
“Invitations?” Boniface Woe echoed, frowning and sucking her teeth. “We havin’ a piss-up or a brawl or somethin’, chief?”
Gunn’s face split into something that might have been a smile under a kind light.
“Somethin’ like that, Boni. Somethin’ like that.”