Haran’s head tilted delicately in consideration, like a bird’s might, and seemed to notice something unsaid was transpiring between the two of them.

“Well,” Haran began abruptly. “I admit that I might have been a bit rash in the manner of my introduction, but as a bard traveling the roads alone during a time of war I think I had good reason to be overly cautious about you.”

He held up a finger as he began to speak at length.

“For one, the villagers might have known better than to pry too much in the business of a pair of tall strangers passing through, but I must admit I do not possess the same element of natural wisdom. Call it perhaps the curiosity of a fool, but when I saw you sitting quietly in a corner with your faces concealed, well, I had this undeniable urge to figure out who you were and what you were up to. Imagine my surprise when I saw you were drinking cherryswill in a region famous for its bloodwines! This struck me as notable, because cherryswill is cheaper than spring water around these parts, kept in stock by most innkeepers solely for passersby unaccustomed to the taste of blood. Perhaps you were merchants trying to save on coin or merely travelers down on your luck?”

Haran brought up a second finger as he continued.

“Two, merely judging by the height of the pair of you it was clear that you were not from these lands. As I travel with no companions I tend to have a vested interest in knowing who I share my road with for the benefit of my own safety, so when I saw how careful you were trying to be in keeping your weapons concealed, this all but confirmed in my mind that there was indeed something further odd about you. In times of war I might go so far as to reason that anyone traveling without open arms is, in fact, more suspicious than someone who is not. Furthermore, I thought at the time how curiously coincidental it seemed that you happened to choose to depart the inn just as I had concluded my last tale of the night, as if you had been planning on it. Not only did I already think you were suspicious, but I now had reason to believe you were dangerous, for the possibility struck me that you may have been trying to prepare to waylay me along the road south somewhere. Most likely, I thought that you were brokemen.”

Delryd’s face flushed red with growing anger. “And how were you so certain we would be going south?”

Haran shrugged, then spoke matter of factly. “Because south is where the king and his crusaders are. It is no secret that Dauriën has offered clemency to any brokeman who joins his cause and still has a left hand to swear fealty under his banner.”

A shadow passed over Delryd’s features. She slid off her left glove and showed her palm to the bard: it was dirtied but unmarred. Érad, seeing what she was doing, weakly raised his own to do the same, holding up a left palm covered in sweat, not scars.

“We are not brokemen! How could we break a bond we’ve never taken? Neither of us have ever taken an oath, you fool,” Delryd said with venom in her voice. “For a foolish fear of being waylaid you ended up waylaying us!”

“Ah, but I didn’t say you were brokemen, I said I had thought it likely. And even if you were not, I had a third reason for trying to ascertain your identities.”

Delryd’s nose crinkled in angered puzzlement as she shot a glance at her friend. Érad shrugged back up at her: he wasn’t sure what the strange words meant, either.

“To find out who you were,” Haran added helpfully.

“I know what you meant,” Delryd replied in a biting tone.

Haran chuckled in reply, prodding the fire at his feet with his boot to stir up the flames.

“Three,” he said theatrically as he held up a third finger, “I recognized the make of your traveling cloaks. They’re Ledian wool, are they not?”

Delryd shifted uneasily on her feet, her arms coming to cross defensively in front of her.

“Maybe,” she answered uneasily. “What’s it to you?”

“Well,” Haran said, “because I know that Ledia is the first nation that borders south of the Crown and I happen to know they shear their sheep at the start of spring. Your cloaks are freshly dyed which means they must be a recent purchase from there, but I can already see on them the starting wear and tear of rough rides and hard nights, which leads me to believe that despite having seen the pair of you at an inn, you haven’t been spending the night in any.”

Haran held up all his three fingers and counted them off.

“So, you are two strangers garbed in fresh Ledian cloaks, unaccustomed to local drink in a land famous for it. You must have ridden hard to make it here from Ledia since the snow has only just thawed some weeks ago, but your surreptitiousness - your secrecy,” he added helpfully, “implies you did not want to be accosted by any patrols on the open roads, hence sleeping in the outside causing your new cloaks to fray. And, lastly, you have just now shown me your palms with no scars of fealty, meaning that you are wholly unlikely to be brokemen. Even if I did not take into account your tall stature and your fair hair there could only be one explanation left.”

Haran clapped his hands together in a triumphant fit of delight at his own deductions.

“You are both Comedhi, come down to kill the king.”

Delryd said nothing, biting her lip in frustration as she thought on what best to say. At her feet Érad had managed to sit back up again and he couldn’t help but let out a laugh at the end of the bard’s explanation, something that earned him a jolt of pain from the base of his skull.

“Close,” Érad said as he rubbed the raw on the back of his head. “But not the entire truth.”

Delryd tried to catch his gaze - to convince him to keep quiet while she thought of something - but Érad held up a hand towards her, refusing to meet her eyes. If Haran had been a mountain lion, Érad thought, the pair of them would have already been dead.

“Then please,” Haran said as waved his hand in an invitational gesture. “Correct me.”

“We’re Comedhi, yes, but we’ve not come to kill your king. We’ve come to serve him.”

“Serve him?” Both of the bard’s eyebrows raised in comical unison.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“I admit,” Haran began slowly, clearly taken aback, “that my suggestion that you might have come to assassinate our would-be emperor was a jest said in poor taste, but I daresay that a couple of Comedhi coming to join his crusade seems an even stranger joke.”

“I assure you,” Érad said in as serious a tone as he could muster, “despite what you may think, that’s exactly why we’ve come down the mountains.”

“But why?” Haran asked, baffled. “Dauriën has declared war on all of Elia who have denied him his crown, including your Comedh. Most of Surelia has already folded under his banner. Once he conquers Redport he will certainly take Southcrest within the following month, giving him control of the sea lanes. The Crown will pose him no obstacle then - he will be on your shores before the start of summer.”

“We know,” said Érad.

“Before the year ends the king will see them stained red.”

“We know,” repeated Érad. “Still, we seek to join his crusade.”

“And you would fight against your kinsmen?”

“If we were ordered to.”

“To kill?”

“Yes.” Érad hesitated briefly. “If we were ordered to.”

He snuck a glance up at his Delryd. Now it was she who refused to meet his eyes, still staring daggers at Haran, her arms still crossed and with her hands clenched tight around her own waist as if she had to physically restrain herself from throttling someone. Érad knew from the way she was pointedly refusing to look at him that it was as likely her hands might want to find his throat as the bard’s.

It was hard to have the truth out in the open.

“I wonder, I wonder,” Haran said musingly out loud as he rubbed his beard again. “What could cause a pair of young hearts to turn on their blood? In all my long years of travel, I have never met a Comedhi fond of following orders,” Haran said softly, his thin fingers dancing lightly along the pommels of the taken longknives as he observed the pair before him.

“Let alone ones eager to come to an outsider’s heel.” he added with a sudden smirk.

“Shut your mouth, you dog!” Delryd snapped suddenly. Her arms uncrossed violently and a hand fell none too subtly towards her belt, coming to rest on air. Frustrated with no weapon, she instead spat the distance at the bard’s feet.

Haran chuckled again. “I was about to infer the same comparison! Amusing how thoughts between people come together in moments like this, would you not agree?”

Delryd’s voice rose almost to a shouting. “I’d agree that you’ve the tongue of a swine, the eyes of a goat, and the manners of a-”

“Stop,” Érad said urgently as he put a hand on the back of Delryd’s knee. At the faint touch she fell silent albeit still keeping tense, and took a step back. Her hands came to fists at her hips. The strained whites of her knuckles were the color of marbling on good meat.

“We’ve no quarrel with you,” Érad said earnestly.

“And by your own admittance, you feel the same way about us. We’ve told you the truthful reason as to why we are in these lands. I would ask that you return our possessions and leave us to continue our journey in peace.”

Haran scratched a thumb to his lip in contemplation before he replied.

“Well, you have told me why you are in these lands, but the question that now burns my tongue is why a pair of Comedhi would wish to enlist in an army that has made no secret of wanting to conquer their homeland before summer’s end.”

“That is not your concern.” Delryd said curtly.

“And we would prefer not to say.” added Érad.

Haran looked between the pair of them, his head slowly moving from side to side as if putting physical motion to the weighing of a decision in his mind. After a few moments his slender fingers moved fluidly to ungirdle both of the longknives at his belt before tossing them across the crackling campfire. Delryd stepped forward and caught one in the air. Surprise streaked across her features, quickly supplanted by the emotion of sudden triumph.

A breath later, the firelight caught the glint of her blade, bared and raised at the ready.

“And our coin?” asked Érad.

A moment later a pair of leather pouches clinking with worth hit the dirt by his feet.

“Thank you,” Érad said in a grateful tone as he fastened their loops and his sheath on his belt. To Delryd, he spoke: “Lower your hand.”

“No,” Delryd replied stubbornly as she retrod her lost ground, taking a step forward.

“He’ll ride off and warn someone. We’ll never find Adhern!”

Haran looked unperturbed with his hands now at ease on either side of his waist.

“If he wanted us harmed,” said Érad, “he could’ve knifed us already.”

“It’s just a ruse,” Delryd replied, taking another threatening step towards Haran. Her face was flushed from residual anger. “He’s trying to trick us, somehow. Make us lower our guard even further.”

Érad noticed the tip of her knife was shaking, a sight he hadn’t seen in years.

“Delryd!” Érad shouted, having had enough. The volume of his own voice caused the pain to flare up again, thrice-fold. He felt it radiate outward from above his nape to the rest of his head like a wine stain on fresh linen, forcing him once again back down to his elbows.

A flurry of movement saw Delryd back at his side, one of her rough hands cradling the back of his head and the other returning her blade to its resting place. Her hand, Érad noticed, had steadied despite once again seeing worry plain on her face.

You shouldn’t have told him anything, her tightened lips signaled down at him.

But I did, Érad replied with a sliver of a smile.

Yes. Delryd let out an annoyed sigh as she moved a hand to check his forehead for a fever.

You did.

Neither of them even heard Haran having come up to stand beside them.

“I used to work iron when I was your age,” Haran said apologetically as he flexed his fingers. There was a sinewy strength to them apparently that their delicate look belied. “Even an old dog remembers how to bite every now and then. My apologies, boy.”

“Water runs but one way,” Érad said. “No point complaining about its course now.”

“An interesting saying. Does that wisdom come from the mountains?”

“No, from the rivers.”

Haran let out a pleased laugh and earned himself a glare from Delryd, but that looked to be all. Érad felt it too.

The tension had faded, at least for the time being.

“We’ll need something proper for the wound, a poultice. Mollycaulk. And queen’s wreath, I think, to stop any sick,” Delryd said.

“Queen’s wreath?” Haran asked. “I am not sure I know of it.”

Delryd reached for her longknife again, but this time not to draw. Instead she tilted its sheath against the glow of the fading evening to show its floral patterning. Her thumbnail rasped across the grooves shaping the image of a distinct crown-bulbed flower.

“I’m not sure it grows anywhere in these lands,” she said. “It’s a low-growing plant. A faint gray in the stem and leaf, but a bright yellow in the flower.”

Haran scrunched up his eyes as he examined the icon, then snapped a finger. “Ah. It’s called dove’s milk, here. Yes, I’ll keep an eye out as we travel.”

“We?” mumbled Érad. “So you’re not letting us go?”

“You’ve given us back our knives,” Delryd said dangerously. Her hand still lingered on her sheathed knife, tension visibly returning to her shoulders.

“What’s to stop us from using them to work you over and leaving you to redden the soil?”

“I can think of a few good reasons.” Haran replied calmly as he held up his three fingers again. Slowly, he raised a fourth.

“Four. You are not the first Comedhi that I have encountered on the road recently.”

Haran’s features softened with regret.

“Adhern, you said his name was? I am sorry. They hanged him some days ago.”