The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) (73 page)

The men in green and brown mottled
clothing—six of them asleep, six others sitting around a tiny fire
and chatting quietly—jumped in surprise.

Yung sauntered down to their fire and pulled
up a log as the men stared at him, astonished.

The waking men rubbed their eyes to focus on
the unexpected visitor, and one of them found his voice.
“Yung!”

“Yes?” he said easily, rather enjoying the
fact that he shocked someone, for once.

“What are you doing here?”

Yung sighed. Enough fun. “Boys, there’s been
some trouble.
Big
trouble.”

“And where’s Shem?” asked another man,
slightly panicked.

Yung sighed again. “And that may be even
more
trouble.”

Ten minutes later a man sprinted through the
forest with the most worrying news he’d ever delivered.

---

Instead of stopping at the next station
before Idumea, Perrin and Shem rode to the fort at Pools, Perrin
gesturing once to the road that led to Gizzada’s.

“If we had time, you’d be amazed,” was all he
said as they rode toward the fort.

Colonel Snyd was at home sleeping, but
Captain Despertar was on duty that night. He was obviously startled
by the sudden appearance of the colonel and the master sergeant,
and stood up from the desk in the command office, trying to force
the sleep that wasn’t supposed to be there out of his eyes.

“Colonel! What a surprise. I had no
idea—”

Colonel Shin extended his hand to shake his.
“No one knew I was coming. Sit down, please,” he said coolly.

The captain sat and Perrin took the same
chair he had just a few nights before. “I have some questions about
the night our caravan was attacked.”

The captain nodded, turned to a cabinet
behind him, and retrieved a file. “All we have is right here, sir.
And may I add, I’m very sorry about your parents. We just got word
a few hours ago. Everyone is on high alert.”

“Except in this office, I see,” Colonel Shin
murmured. He opened the thin file and started reading while the
captain looked down nervously and resisted the urge to rub his
eyes.

“What’s this?” Colonel Shin demanded. “The
captured Guarders were in your custody for only a few hours? Then
they were retrieved at dawn. By who?”

He handed the top page to the master sergeant
who scanned it. Colonel Shin looked at the paper behind it and
didn’t find the answer he wanted. He gave a pointed look to the
captain who was trying to think of how to phrase it.

“The . . . the general. From Idumea. The
other one. General Cush. He sent Colonel Thorne, and his men took
the four Guarders we captured.”

The master sergeant sighed and looked over to
the file in the colonel’s hand. “Doesn’t look like they got
anything out of them.” Now he gave a disappointed look to the
captain.

“I recommend talking to Colonel Thorne,”
Despertar suggested.

“I intend to!” Colonel Shin snapped. He threw
the file on the desk, scattering pages over the floor, and left
with the master sergeant.

That’s when the captain finally rubbed his
eyes and cursed that he traded the major shifts that night. He
didn’t find out until later in the morning that two of their best
horses had been replaced by smaller, exhausted messenger horses,
and that for some reason new Master Sergeant Oblong—while seen near
the stables but not assigned to them—had a smug smile on his face
all morning.

---

Normally Gizzada’s was closed for the night,
but this was no ordinary night.

Bad news flies quickly, into the elitist
establishments and also into the lowliest. Gizzada’s happened to be
both—one in the front, the other in the back.

Just before the midday meal rush, Sheff
Gizzada heard the news from a few shocked officers and, stunned
himself, could do nothing else but sit in the back half of the
restaurant for the rest of the day and well into the night.

He didn’t sit alone. Enlisted men filed in
and out in record numbers, wanting verification and shedding a few
tears themselves. It wasn’t so much that they knew Relf or Joriana
Shin personally, but as a figurehead the High General had been
around for all of their careers. He was a solid, honest man, and
those were becoming rare.

But the tears shed behind hands shielding
faces were more for his son, the silverest brassy who bought rounds
of ale for the enlisted men. It happened not even two weeks ago,
but news spreads.

News also grows. The night the Shins were
there, Gizzada had counted just over two dozen enlisted men. But
now it seems as if half of the enlisted men in Pools and the
garrison in Idumea—easily several hundred—had also “been there”
that night, singing with the brassy and meeting his family. And by
the middle of that long dreadful night, every man considered
himself part of that family as well.

That was probably helped along by the ale,
Gizzada considered later. He’d opened the tap and told Margo to
take the night off. The boys needed to drown their sorrows freely
in peace. They especially appreciated the free part.

At one point Gizzada took down the sign
advertising his simple menu, scratched off the word “Gizzada” in
front of “sandwich,” and with a burned stick from the fire wrote,
“Shin.”

“That’s the new name, boys. My first Large
Gizzada sandwich was actually created for the younger Shin, years
ago. He was out at the forest’s edge, trying to track down some
noise—never did figure it out. He’d missed his breakfast and midday
meal, so Mrs. Shin ordered me to make him a couple of sandwiches. I
put everything on it I could,” he remembered fondly to a packed and
silent room. “He told me later it was the best thing he ever ate,
and that I should sell them in the marketplace. So later I did. In
honor of all Shins—generals and colonels—the sandwich is now a
Shin.”

The men held up their mugs of ale in honor,
and a weepy Sergeant Oblong patted Gizzada on the back. His shift
was coming up before dawn, and he needed to get back to the
fort.

He was still thinking about generals and
colonels and fathers and sons and sandwiches when he strolled
through the back door of the stables and noticed a movement in a
dark corner. Training told him to draw his weapon, but instinct
told him to quietly see what it was.

Oblong didn’t have time to tell Shin about
the sandwich honor, or to officially meet the master sergeant he
remembered Shin telling him was his best friend. They looked as if
they’d had a fight with a barn which they’d obviously won, and now
they needed horses to get to Idumea.

Oblong put his fingers to his lips, gestured
for the men to wait outside, then found Snyd’s favorite horse, and
his second favorite horse, and led them quietly out of the dark
stables.

Shin patted him on the back, the master
sergeant winked gratefully at him, and off they rode.

Oblong stood at attention, saluting, for a
full minute after they were out of sight.

---

The Administrators would most likely not be
in their offices until mid-morning. That was Perrin’s evaluation,
and the reason Shem used to force him to rest for a few hours
before they made their presence known in Idumea.

They were in a barn that didn’t appear to
have been used for some time, but there were old bags of oats
suitable for Snyd’s horses to feed on. Shem had taken Perrin’s
sword and long knife, and ordered him to rest for a while.

“You need sleep too, you know,” Perrin said
to him, lying down in the straw.

“I need to watch you more, though.” Shem sat
near him.

Perrin’s voice was calm as he closed his
eyes. “You can trust me, Shem. If something happens to me, Mahrree
and the children will be alone. The only man I could ever imagine
taking care of them would be you. But then again, I don’t think I
could tolerate any man marrying my widow,
especially
you.
I’d find a way to haunt you in that bedroom you just made.”

“I’ve no doubt you would,” Shem chuckled
nervously. “And I don’t think I could bear Mrs. Peto as a
mother-in-law, anyway,” he tried to lighten the moment. “She was
there nearly every day while we worked on your bedroom, giving me
bad advice, telling me what I was doing wrong . . . you’re a braver
man than I am.”

“Then I guess you wouldn’t want to marry her,
either.” Perrin sounded almost as if he were smiling.

“What?”

“The night you brought her to our house after
the land tremor, well, there’s something you don’t know about that
. . .”

When Perrin finished mortifying Shem about
Mrs. Peto’s fleeting fancy for him, Perrin sighed. “I could be a
builder too, Shem.”

“A builder?”

“Just give it all up. Be a builder. Feels
good to create, not destroy.”

Shem was thoughtful for a moment. “But we
need you as a colonel. Not all that you do is destructive,
Perrin.”

“I had it all figured out, too, a few days
ago,” Perrin continued as if not hearing Shem. “When I thought my
parents—” He stopped.

Shem searched for a distraction. “Do you know
what this reminds me of, Perrin?”

“No, Shem, what does our lying in a barn
remind you of?” Perrin’s tone was a touch impatient.

“Not so much the barn, but . . . the time you
failed to train the cook properly.” Shem smiled into the dark.

“The cook?”

“The one that transferred over to Scrub a few
of years ago? He cooked because cooking was the only thing he could
do? Not really qualified to do that, either. His chicken stew was,
well, hard to forget and for all the wrong reasons. I don’t know
why he thought mushrooms belonged in everything. Stews, breads,
cakes
—
”

Perrin grunted in response to get him to
continue the story.

“That accident was one of the oddest things
I’ve ever seen.” Shem chuckled softly. “We tried so hard to teach
him. No matter how much I worked him and how much you trained him,
he could never manage to hold that sword steady.”

“I’ve tried unsuccessfully to forget him,”
Perrin sighed. “Scrawniest thing I ever saw. No muscle. Still don’t
know how he managed to fall on me.”

Shem chuckled again, trying to make it sound
natural. “If I hadn’t witnessed that accident myself, I would’ve
sworn he was a Guarder in disguise sent to get you. But he truly
was just that clumsy. Horrible gash. And I think he was more
traumatized by it than you. He kept saying over and over, ‘I’ve
stabbed the major!’”

“And how does this barn remind you of that?”
Perrin asked, a little hotly.

Shem sobered. “I remember one of those nights
when you were in so much pain that you couldn’t sleep. Must have
been the second night, when all those stitches in your side started
turning red.”

Perrin ran his hand along his liver where the
white scar remained. “That was a bad night,” he whispered. “Mahrree
was so anxious. She’d never seen so much of my blood before. She
never left my side, trying to care for me. Refused to let me stay
at the surgeon’s. You sent her upstairs to bed so she could finally
rest,” Perrin recalled, “and you stayed on a chair next to me while
I was on the sofa. We talked all night, didn’t we? You told me the
most ridiculous stories to distract me from the pain. Even
something about putting a piece of moldy bread on the stitches to
prevent them from becoming infected.”

For just a moment, Perrin’s voice sounded a
little lighter.

“I still think of that each time I see bread
gone moldy. Peto came out of his room that night, remember? He
didn’t dare come near me—I think my moaning worried him—but he sat
in his doorway listening to your stories. Must have been about four
years old.”

Shem smiled. “He fell asleep there, too. I
put him back in bed just before Mahrree came down in the
morning.”

“You stayed for five days and nights, didn’t
you?” Perrin said quietly. “Supposed to have gone on leave, but you
spent your leave at our house helping Mahrree, instead of visiting
your father. I still need to apologize to him in person about that
some year.”

Shem waved that off. “He didn’t mind. Mahrree
had the surgeon’s assistants so riled up none of them wanted to
stay around for long after checking you each hour. I was just glad
the timing was right so I could stay and help her.”

“You’ve always done more than just ‘help,’
Shem,” Perrin whispered, a slight tremble in his voice. “I remember
earlier that year when my father sent me all over the world
training the fort commanders. Mahrree told me how you put yourself
on guard duty every night at our house while I was gone for those
weeks. You even spent one night in Jaytsy’s room when there was a
bad storm and she was missing me. Jaytsy never thought Mahrree was
‘strong’ enough to keep away the thunder,” Perrin smiled briefly at
the memory. “But you were strong enough. Mahrree said it wasn’t
until you lay down on the floor next to Jaytsy’s bed that she
finally felt safe for the night and went to sleep. You’ve always
been there for our family, Shem. You’re more of a brother to us
than any real brother could have been.”

“My pleasure,” Shem whispered.

“Someday I hope to tell your father in person
how much you’ve done for us. Maybe I’ll have to get down to Flax or
Waves again. He won’t be taking any more trips, will he?”

“He still feels bad about that,” Shem told
him. “The one time you go all the way down there to train the fort
commanders, and my sister takes him to Coast for a week! As if he
doesn’t see enough salty water in Waves. It’s been what, about ten
years now? He’s still talks about meeting you some day.”

“The one time I had the opportunity to do
something for you and him, and I missed it,” Perrin said. “We just
take and take from you, and you just keep giving to us.”