“No, I beg you, not again,” a woman croaked.
She was covered in soot that hid her nakedness. Her hair might have been blonde once but was so smeared with ashes it looked white. Only her eyes reflected light as she held one hand up, trying to fend him away.
“I’m a friend,” Malden whispered to her. “Are you alone here?”
“Friend? What friend have I?”
He saw her lips were badly chapped and her tongue dry and white. Searching through the debris, Malden turned up a bottle that had survived the cataclysm—and whatever had come afterwards. He dug out the cork with his belt knife and brought the bottle to her lips.
She sucked greedily at it like an infant at the teat.
“What’s your name?”
She only stared at him, still lost in terror.
“Alright,” Malden said. “I don’t need to know it. There were others here, earlier,” he went on, looking back at the pile of empty bottles. “I’m guessing they weren’t paying guests. Bandits?”
She nodded, careful not to take her eyes off of him. “Six of them. Some of them came back for seconds.”
Malden took off his cloak and draped it over her body.
“After the recruiting serjeants came, and took away all the men, there was no one but me to run the place. The law demands we stay open,” she told Malden.
“They conscripted your … husband?”
“My father, and all my brothers. They came through taking every man they could find. All the farmers from the local manor, all the villagers. Most women fled to wherever they had family or friends to shelter them. I had no one. I knew it wasn’t safe, but … ’tis the law. And I thought every man was gone, so what was there to fear? But it seems a few stayed behind. The sort that would refuse the call. There were six of them, still, six who kept their freedom. And I was all alone here.”
Malden closed his eyes in horror.
“Do what you must to me,” the woman said, her voice a resigned whisper. “Just please … I’m hurt. I’m hurt down there and I don’t think I can anymore …”
Malden strode out into the dooryard, wanting to spit with anger. He stood in the brightest spot before the door and waved one arm in the air. Soon Cythera and Velmont’s crew joined him. He only wanted Cythera. “There’s a woman in there who doesn’t need to see another male face for a long time. Can you try to comfort her?”
“Of course,” Cythera told him. She hurried inside.
He turned next to Velmont. “From now on, we stay off the roads. This whole county has been stripped of able-bodied men. That doesn’t mean the recruiters aren’t still looking. Worse, there are bandits afoot.”
Velmont shrugged. “That’s the way of it, in a war. Just lads havin’ a bit o’ fun while they can. And you shouldn’t get your blood up, seein’ as you’re about one peg up from them as did this.”
Malden’s face burned as he stared at his fellow thief. “I take money from fat merchants and fools who don’t know to keep their hands on their purses. But I don’t hurt anyone, not if I can help it, and I never—never—harm a woman. If you’re working for me, now, you’ll follow the same code.”
“Do I, now? Do I work for you? Or for meself?”
“You’d better decide soon,” Malden told him. Careful of his fingers, he put Acidtongue back in its sheath.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
T he woman from the milehouse turned out to be a homely girl of sixteen named Gerta. Once Cythera had seen to her hurts and washed the soot from her hair, she was able to rise and walk under her own power. Malden was glad for that. He didn’t know what he would have done, had she been unable to care for herself.
Gerta was happy to travel with them—the thought of staying behind all alone visibly terrified her. After a while Velmont tried to talk her up, telling her how pretty her hair was, offering her his manly protection. Malden put a stop to that right away.
The next night they found a holdfast on the grounds of an abandoned manor. Not much to it, just four stone walls and a locked door, but it offered more safety than the thatch-roofed cottages they’d seen along the way. A score or so of women from the local villages had sealed themselves inside. They wouldn’t open up for Malden or his crew, but they agreed to take Gerta in once all the men had gone away. Cythera stayed with Gerta to make sure the women kept their promise, then rejoined Malden and his crew as they headed south, away from the road.
Getting off the highway slowed them down considerably, but they spent all that day without seeing another living soul. They crossed through stubbled fields turning into patches of mud, well out of sight of any village or manor house.
Cythera stopped, once, to pick up a stray shaft of wheat that had been trampled into an irrigation ditch. “We won’t starve this winter, at least,” she said.
Malden pursed his lips. “How’s that?”
Cythera sighed and dropped the stem to flutter on the air. “The wheat’s all been taken in, probably milled by now, too. It’s harvest time. If this war had begun in mid-summer, and all the farmers pulled away from their labor, the wheat would have been left to rot on the ground.” She shook her head dolefully. “I’ve read of wars in the north where more men died of starvation and disease than ever could have been slain by steel. I worry what will come in the spring, if this war drags on—there will be no one here to plow or plant.”
Malden had never really thought about where the food he ate came from. Grain appeared at the gates of Ness twice a year, and was somehow turned into bread. Livestock were driven through the streets to great slaughterhouses, and steaks and cuts came out to be sold in the shops of butchers on market days. It all went on without his knowledge or labor, and so he’d assumed it always would continue the same way.
He had gone hungry many times, of course, but only for lack of coin—not because there was no food to be had. The idea of reversing that situation, of having plenty of coin but no grain to spend it on, made him feel a bit queasy. He could hardly raise his own food—that was a skill he’d never learned, nor wanted to. How many citizens of the Free City had the secret of it? How many of them would starve before they learned how it was done?
“That’s a problem for a future worry,” he told Cythera, because he didn’t like to think on what Ness would be like if there was no food in it. “Right now we need to make our rendezvous. We’re already a day late.”
They made camp that night in a deserted barn. They dared make no fire, but the walls kept some of the wind out. Malden made sure Cythera was awake enough to stand guard—he would never leave her sleeping alone with Velmont and his thieves around. Near midnight he slipped back out into the cold.
A mile away, at a place where two roads crossed, stood an ancient gallows. It had been built on the site of an old and desecrated shrine of the bloodgod. Once the Lady’s church had taken over this land, it had been turned into a place of punishment.
Normally no thief in his right—if superstitious—mind would get within a half mile of the place. Even Malden found it nigh unbearable to listen to the crosstree creak above his head. Hanging was the penalty for thievery, and he had lived his whole life expecting to end suspended from such a beam. In that flat land, however, it was the most convenient landmark available. Malden lit a single candle that guttered in the night breeze, and sat down to wait.
Nothing moved in the cloud shadows. Nothing stirred. He heard an owl hoot from miles away, a low, mournful sound almost lost under the noise of his own breathing.
He waited.
He took the scrap of parchment out of his tunic and unfolded it against his leg. In the light of the candle he could just make out