Renegade's Magic (The Soldier Son Trilogy #3)

Soldier’s Boy would go ahead of his warriors to eliminate the sentry at the gate. Once that way was cleared, his forces would flow in and spread out, torches ready to fire the buildings and weapons ready to kill anyone who emerged into the dark and cold. He himself would fire the stables; once his warriors saw the stables alight, they were to kindle their targets and then converge toward him.

Even before we reached the outlying buildings of Gettys Town, Dasie and her followers had vanished, melting into the night. Soldier’s Boy halted and whispered his final commands. His followers merged into the shadows. Very shortly, he rode on, apparently alone, a traveler on a big horse bundled against the night’s cold. The streets were empty around us as we passed. He had waited until it was so late that even the taverns were closed for the night, their lanterns long guttered out. Clove’s big hooves barely sounded on the deserted and snowy streets. I felt like a ghost, returned to the scene of my murder, as we thudded slowly past the crossroads. The cold of the night was as nothing compared to the cold I felt in my heart as I passed that place.

“Which is why I don’t understand why you think you owe them anything. This is where they killed you, or would have if the magic of the People hadn’t saved you. And yet you still see yourself as one of them. I would think that your thirst for revenge would be the most savage of all.”

I had no answer to that, so I remained still and small. Why didn’t I hate these people? Perhaps because I knew them too well. I knew what sort of fears had formed that mob, and I knew the forces that could turn a decent man into an animal. Should a man be judged forever based on what he did on one overwrought night? Was a man the good soldier he had been for fifteen years, or the mindless participant in a murder that he had been for only an hour?

I turned my mind from such useless thoughts. Perhaps, I thought, I was as spineless and unmanly as Soldier’s Boy and my father thought me. Perhaps all the anger and vengeance had gone into Soldier’s Boy, leaving me with only a weary and jaded understanding of the people who had tried to kill me.

I knew that a substantial force of warriors followed us, yet even aware of them, I heard no sound. If there was one thing that the Specks excelled at, it was stealth.

Soldier’s Boy rode up to the sentry post outside the gate. In the cold, still night, the torch burned steadily in a sconce beside his sentry box. I wondered if the sentry was dozing inside his shelter, huddling close to the small potbellied stove. I could smell the tiny drift of wood smoke and the iron of that stove tingled against Soldier Boy’s skin like the beginning of a sunburn. There was a stir in the shadows within the sentry box and the guard emerged, his long gun held across his chest. “Halt and identify yourself!” he called. The dark and the cold engulfed his words and made his challenge almost too small to matter.

Soldier’s Boy pulled Clove in and sat on the big horse, looking down at the man. He smiled. The sentry stared up at my face, looked down at my horse and then up again. When he tipped his face up to stare at me again, it was whiter with more than cold and his mouth hung open. “By the good god!” he rasped out hoarsely, and then caught his breath sharply.

It was all simultaneous. I recognized the man. He recognized my face. He was the fellow who had held Amzil’s arms pinned back behind her while another soldier tore her dress open to expose her body. He’d been there the night they’d killed me, and now he looked up at me, sitting on the horse he’d recognized, too, and thought he was seeing a ghost. Terror had frozen him more than the cold. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he babbled hopelessly.

And as he gawked up at me, Soldier’s Boy leaned down, seized the top of the man’s hood in one hand and with the other casually drew his copper knife across the fellow’s exposed throat. It happened so quickly that Clove wasn’t even spooked. He nudged the big horse back into motion, and as we rode on, the sentry fell into the road behind us, spasming and croaking softly as blood blackened the packed snow. Like following shadows, Speck warriors suddenly appeared and ghosted through the gate behind us. A moment later, not one of them was visible. They had immediately fanned out within the fort, each with a specific target to torch.

Soldier’s Boy rode on. He slid his knife, oiled with blood, back into his sheath just as smoothly as he’d drawn it. He rode on, but I felt I was still back there, leaning down from Clove’s broad back and pulling the knife smoothly across the exposed flesh. The man’s dying words echoed in my ears. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Had he been truly sorry for what he had done, or was he only feeling the emotion I’d pressed on him the night he had tried to help kill me? It shocked me that I could wonder that. One of my fellow soldiers from my own regiment lay sprawled in his own blood behind me.