Furies of Calderon (23 page)

Amara frowned. Would the First Lord truly arrange such a deadly storm, a fury-crafting of proportions she could scarcely visualize, merely to allow his agent to rest?

Amara shivered and wrapped the cloak around her a little more tightly. She could only deduce so much of Gaius’s reasoning. He knew far more than most in Alera ever could—most would not even begin to grasp the scope of it. He was oftentimes a subtle ruler: Rarely did his actions have only one objective, only one set of consequences. What else did her ruler have in mind?

Amara grimaced. If Gaius had wanted her to know, surely he would have told her. Unless he trusted her competence to work out on her own what he intended.
Or unless he still doesn’t trust you
.

She turned away from the doorway and padded silently back into the chamber, her thoughts in a whirl. She leaned against a wall beside one of the stone guardians, denuded of his cloak, and raked her fingers through her hair. She had to get moving. Surely, the enemies of the Crown would not be idle once the weather broke. She had to have a plan, at least, and get to work on it right away.

The first order of business, Fidelias would have said, would be to gather intelligence. She had to establish what was going on in the Valley before she could effectively do anything about it, whether it be to act, to invoke her authority as a Cursor of the Crown to the local Count, or to report back to Gaius.

She swallowed. All she had to help her was the knife she’d stolen from Fidelias’s boot and some clothing far too light for the weather it seemed she would be faced with. She looked back at the boy, curled on his side before the fire, shivering.

She also had him.

Amara moved to the boy’s side and laid a hand on his forehead. He let out a soft groan. His skin was too hot, feverish, and his breathing had dried out his lips, cracked them. She frowned and went back to the water, cupping her hands together and carrying it back to the boy. She urged him to drink and tried to tip the water into his mouth. Most of it trickled through her fingers and splashed onto his chin and neck, but he managed to swallow a little. Amara repeated the process several times, until the boy seemed to relax a little, settling down again.

She studied him as she fetched another of the scarlet capes, folded it into a pad, and slipped it beneath his head. He was a beautiful child, in many ways, his features almost delicate. His hair curled around his head, dark, glossy ringlets. He had the long, thick lashes that so many men seemed to have and not care about, and his hands had long, slender fingers that seemed entirely oversized to the rest of him, promising considerable growth yet to come. His skin, where not marred with bruises or scratches, glowed with the ruddy clarity of youth that had somehow avoided awkward adolescence. She hadn’t seen what color his eyes were, in the hectic events of the previous evening, but his voice had been clarion-clear in the storm, bell-sharp.

She frowned more seriously, studying the boy. He had almost certainly saved her life. But who was he? They were a considerable walk from any of the local stead-holts. She had chosen her landing site in order to avoid coming down within sight of any of the locals. So what had the boy been doing there, in the middle of nowhere, in that storm?

“Home,” the boy murmured. Amara looked down at him, but he hadn’t opened his eyes. His face twitched into a frown in his sleep. “I’m sorry, Aunt Isana. Uncle Bernard should be home. Tried to get him home safe.”

Amara felt her eyes widen. Bernard-holt was the largest stead-holt in the Calderon Valley. Stead-holder Bernard was the boy’s uncle? She leaned closer and asked him, “What happened to your uncle, Tavi? Was he hurt?”

Tavi nodded, a dreamy motion. “Marat. The herd-bane. Brutus stopped it but not before it bit him.”

Marat? The savages hadn’t given the Realm any trouble since the incident on this very site, fifteen or sixteen years ago. Amara had felt skeptical when Gaius had voiced his concern about the Marat, but apparently one had come into the Calderon Valley and attacked an Aleran Stead-holder. But what did it mean? Could it have been one lone Marat warrior, a chance meeting in the wilderness?

Tavi shook his head, and his expression twisted with pain. “Here. Was supposed to be home. Sent him home with Brutus. Brutus should have brought him back.” Tears had started down his cheeks, and Amara swallowed upon seeing them.

She needed information, yes. But she couldn’t torment an unconscious child for it. He needed rest. If he was the Stead-holder’s nephew, and the man had survived the attack, she could bring him home safely and almost certainly secure the Stead-holder’s enthusiastic cooperation.

“ ‘M sorry,” the boy said, broken and still weeping quiet tears. “I tried. Sorry.”

“Shhhh,” she said. She used an edge of the cloak to wipe the tears away. “Time to rest now. Lay down and rest, Tavi.”

He subsided, and she frowned down at him, smoothing his hair back from his fevered forehead while he slept. If a lone Marat was in the Valley, perhaps the Stead-holder had gone to hunt it down. But if so, then why would this boy be along? He had no particular skill at crafting, she judged, or he would have used it when the wind-manes had been attacking them. He bore no weapons, no equipment. He couldn’t have been hunting the Marat.

Amara inverted the idea. Had it hunted the folk of Bernard-holt? Possible, particularly from the herd-bane tribe, if all that she heard of the Marat was true. They were a cold and calculating people, as ruthless and deadly as the animals that accepted them as one of their own.

But Marat didn’t often take more than one beast as… what sufficed to describe the term? Mate? Companion? Blood-sibling? She shook her head with a shiver. The savages’ ways were still alien to her, something fantastic from a tale rather than the businesslike reality she had learned from classes in the Academy.

Horde-masters took more than one beast, commonly, as a symbol of status. But what would a Marat horde-master be doing in the Calderon Valley?

Invading
.

Her own silent response to the thought gave her a little chill. Could the holders have run into the advance scouts of a Marat attack force?

The attack could hardly come at a more advantageous time for the enemy, Amara realized. The roads were slowly closing down for the winter season here among the northern cities. Many troops had been given winter furlough with their families, and folk of the countryside, in general, were winding down the frantic labor of harvest into the sedate pace of winter.

If the Marat attacked the Valley now, providing the forces stationed at Garrison were neutralized, they could wipe out every person in it and maraud through all the stead-holts, practically all the way back to Riva itself. They might even, if they numbered enough, simply pour around the city and into Alera’s interior. Amara shuddered to imagine what a horde might accomplish in that event. She had to contact the Count at Garrison— his name was Bram or Gram or something like that—and put him on the alert.

But what if the boy was lying about the Marat? Or mistaken? She grimaced. She knew the local Citizenry by name, at least, though the memorization of the Lords and Counts had been one of the more tedious chores at the Academy. She had no such knowledge of this Stead-holder Bernard or of the folk of the Valley.

By all accounts, they were a tough and independently minded folk, but she knew nothing about their reliability or lack of it. She had to talk to this Bernard. If he had indeed seen a Marat horde-master and been wounded by one of the great hunting birds of the outland plains, then she had to know it, secure his support (and hopefully some new clothes with it), and act. She frowned. But she could expect the opposition to be moving as well Fidelias had lead her into a trap she had escaped by the smallest of margins. She had been pursued for several hours and escaped the Knights Aeris sent after her through skill and good fortune. Did she suppose that Fidelias would not continue the pursuit?

In all probability, she realized, his business lay here, in the Calderon Valley. That had to be one of the reasons Gaius sent her here. Fidelias was her
patriserus. Or had been
, she thought, with a bitter taste in her mouth. She knew him, perhaps better than anyone else alive. She had seen through his deception at the renegade camp, though only barely. What would Fidelias do?

He would judge her by her previous actions, of course. He would expect her to arrive in the valley and promptly to make contact with the Stead-holders, coordinating information and after suitable data had been gathered, to take action against whatever was happening, whether it meant falling into a defense within one of the strongest stead-holts or mobilizing the men of the Valley and the troops of Garrison to meet it. And what would he do to stop it?

He’d find me. Kill me. And sow confusion among the holders until his plan could begin.

A
slow chill went through her. She considered the situation again, but it was perfectly typical of Fidelias. He preferred simple approaches, direct solutions. Keep lies simple, he had always told her, keep plans simple. Leave them open to modification, and use your eyes, your head, more than any plan. Word of a Cursor in the Valley would spread among the holders like wildfire. She might as well paint a circle over her heart and wait for an arrow to soar into its center.

A slow chill crawled through her. He
would
kill her, now Fidelias had given her a chance, and she had made him suffer for it. He would not allow himself to make the same mistake again. Her teacher would kill her, without a moment’s hesitation, if she got in his way again.

“That’s what I’m here to do,” she whispered.

She started shivering again. Though she tried to tell herself that it was not fear coloring her decision, she felt it, tickling at her belly, racing with cold spider-fingers up and down her spine. She could not allow herself the luxury of openly invoking her authority and revealing herself to Fidelias. To do so would be to invite her own death, swift and certain. She had to remain quiet, as covert as possible. A runaway slave would be a far less unusual occurrence here at the frontier than an emissary of the Crown warning of possible invasion. She couldn’t allow her identity to be known until she knew who she could trust, who could give her information that would let her act decisively. To do any less would be to invite her own death, and possibly disaster upon the Valley.

She looked down at the boy, her thoughts still in a tangle. He hadn’t needed to come and help her the previous evening, but he had. The boy had courage, even if he lacked some more life-preserving common sense, and she had little choice but to be glad that he did. That said something of him, and in turn of the folk who had raised him. In his sleep, in his fever, he had spoken not to a mother or a father, but to his aunt, whose name apparently was Isana. An orphan?

Amara mused, and as she did, her belly rumbled. She rose to her feet and padded among the trees planted around the pool. As she expected, she found more than a few fruit-bearing trees among them. Gaius never acted with a single consequence in mind, when he could manage several at once. In creating this Memorium for his fallen son, he had raised a spectacular tribute to the Princeps’ memory, reminded the High Lords exactly what power he commanded and provided a place of refuge for himself (or for his agents) all at the same time.

She picked fruit from the trees and ate, studying the area around her. Amara went to the statues. They had been armed with genuine shields and with weapons, the short, vicious blades of the Royal Guard, meant to be used in close quarters, to incapacitate or kill in a single blow. She slid one from its sheath and tested it. Its edge proved to be keen, and she returned it to its resting place. Food, shelter, and arms. Gaius was a paranoid old fox, and she was glad for it.

Her arm twinged as she slid the sword back, and she glanced at the dirtied bandage on it. She retrieved the knife from her discarded skirts and cut a fresh bandage from them. She dried it, first, near one of the fires, before cutting the old one off, cleaning the wound with fresh water, and applying fresh wrappings. Something else tugged at her attention, but she pushed it firmly away. There was work to be done.

Amara moved quickly then, making sure the boy was sleeping peacefully. She gathered fruit onto one of the shields, using it as a platter, and rested it near him. She washed their clothing in the pool and used branches from the small trees to dry them over one of the other fires. She called upon the weary Cirrus to stand guard around the Memorium and to warn her should anyone approach. And when those chores were done, she found a smooth stone among the soil of the plants and used it to hone the edge of her knife.

That was when the tears took her. When the memories of years of instruction, conversation, of life shared with the man who had been her teacher came rolling back over her. She had loved him, in her own way, loved the danger of her work, loved the experiences he shared with her, loved the life to which she had been called. He had known how much being a Cursor meant to Amara. He had known, and he had done everything to help her with her studies, with graduating from the Academy.

He did everything except tell you the truth
. Amara felt the tears rising, and she let them come. It hurt. It hurt to think that he had turned against the Realm, that he had, in that single act of treachery, endangered all that she had struggled to achieve, to fight to protect. He had declared his life’s purpose as a Cursor to be empty, meaningless, and by extension, hers as well. His actions, not his words, said that it all had been a hollow, vicious lie.