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

Clove slipped into his ponderous trot as he labored up the hill. It had been only a couple of weeks since I’d last been here, but it felt like years. Grass was already sprouting on the many graves we had dug for the summer victims of the plague. The trench graves were still bare soil; they had been the last graves to be covered, when the plague was at its height and we grave diggers could no longer keep up with the steady influx of bodies. They would be the last scars to heal.

I pulled Clove in outside my cabin. I dismounted cautiously, but felt a mere twinge of pain. Only yesterday the leg irons had cut into my tendons; the magic was healing me at a prodigious rate. My horse blew at me, shuddered his coat, and then walked a few steps before dropping his head to graze. I hurried to my door. I’d quickly destroy any evidence of my former identity and then be on my way.

The window shutters were closed. I shut the door behind me as I stepped into the cabin. Then I recoiled in dismay as Kesey sat up in my bed. My fellow grave digger had been sleeping with a stocking cap on his bald head to keep the night chill away. He knuckled his eyes and gaped at me, his hanging jaw revealing gaps in his teeth. “Nevare?” he protested. “I thought you were going to—”

His words fumbled to a halt as he realized exactly how wrong it was for me to be standing in my cabin.

“Hang today,” I finished the sentence for him. “Yes. A lot of people thought that.”

He stared at me, puzzled, but continued to sit in the bed. I decided he was no threat to me. We’d been friends for most of a year before everything went wrong. I hoped he would not judge it his duty to interfere with my escape. Casually, I walked past him to the shelf where I’d kept my personal possessions. As Spink had promised, my soldier-son journal was gone. A wave of relief washed through me. Epiny and Spink would know best how to dispose of those incriminating and accusatory pages. I felt along the shelf to be sure that no letter or scrap of paper had been missed. No. But my sling was there, the leather straps wrapped around the cup. I put it in my pocket. It might be useful.

The disreputable long gun I’d been issued when I first arrived at Gettys still rested on its rack. The rattly weapon with the pitted barrel had never been reliable. Even if it had been sound, it would soon have been useless when I’d expended the small supply of powder and ball I had. Leave it. But my sword was another matter. The sheathed blade still hung from its hook. I was reaching for it when Kesey demanded, “What happened?”

“It’s a long story. Are you sure you want to know?”

“Well, of course I do! I thought you were going to be lashed to pieces and then hanged today!”

I found myself grinning. “And you couldn’t even get out of bed to come to my hanging. A fine friend you are!”

He smiled back uncertainly. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but I welcomed it. “I didn’t want to see it, Nevare. Couldn’t face it. Bad enough that the new commander ordered me to live out here and keep an eye on the cemetery because you were in prison. Worse to watch a friend die, and know that I’d probably meet my own end out here. Every cemetery sentry we’ve ever had has met a bad end. But how’d you get out of it? I don’t understand.”

“I escaped, Kesey. Speck magic freed me. The roots of a tree tore the stone walls of my dungeon apart, and I crawled out through the opening. I nearly made it out of Gettys. I made it past the gates of the fort. I thought I was a free man. But then I met a troop of soldiers coming back from the road’s end. And who should be in charge of them but Captain Thayer himself.”

Kesey was spellbound, his eyes as round as bowls. “But it was his wife—” he began, and I nodded.

“They found Carsina’s body in my bed. You know, if not for that, I think the judges might have realized there was very little to link me to Fala’s death. But Carsina’s body in my bed was just too much for them. I doubt that even one ever considered that I might have been trying to save her.

“You do know I didn’t do any of those things, don’t you, Kesey?”

The older man licked his lips. He looked uncertain. “I didn’t want to believe any of that about you, Nevare. None of it fit with anything Ebrooks and I had ever seen of you. You were fat and a loner and hardly ever had a drink with us, and Ebrooks and I could see you were sliding toward the Speck way. You wouldn’t have been the first to go native.

“But we never saw nothing mean in you. You weren’t vicious. When you talked soldiering with us, seemed like you meant it. And no one ever worked harder out here than you did. But someone did those things, and there you were, right where they happened. Everybody else seemed so certain. They made me feel a fool for not believing you done it. And at the trial, when I tried to say that you’d always been a stand-up fellow to me, well, Ebrooks shoved me and told me to shut up. Told me I’d only get myself a beating trying to speak up for you, and do you no good at all. So, I kept quiet. I’m sorry, Nevare. You deserved better.”