The Dragon's Path

noble forehead furrowed. Geder waved his arms and pointed to the west.
Don’t look at me. Look at Maccia.
    “Who are you, sir?” Lord Ternigan said. His voice was as deep as a drum and echoed a bit. The world around it seemed quieter than it should have.
    “Sir Geder Palliako. Jorey Kalliam’s sent me. West end’s not just mercenaries, my lord. Maccia’s there. Can’t hold them back. Kalliam… Kalliam sent me. You have to help him.”
    Ternigan shouted something over his shoulder, and the horns blared again, close by and powerful as being slapped in the jaw. Geder opened his eyes again, surprised to find that he’d closed them. People were moving around him. Knights rode past him, streaming toward the west. At leasthe thought that was west. Lord Ternigan was beside him, holding him hard by one elbow.
    “Can you fight, sir?” the Marshal of the Kingdom of Antea asked him from a long way away.
    “I can,” Geder said, turning in his saddle. Slick with blood, his foot slipped free of the stirrup. Churned mud rose up, but the world went black before it reached him.

Marcus
     
    F or the midday meal, the caravan stopped at a clearing with a wide, slow brook. The thin boy, Mikel his name was, sat on the fallen log at Yardem’s side. Like the Tralgu, he wore his leathers open at the throat. They both leaned forward over their plates of beans and sausage. The boy’s shoulders were set as if bound by muscle they didn’t possess and his movements had a slow, deliberate power that his frame didn’t justify. Yardem tilted his head down a degree to look at Mikel. With the same gravity, the boy tilted his head up.
    “Captain,” Yardem said, his ears pressed back. “Make him stop.”
    Marcus, cross-legged on the ground, fought back a smile. “Stop what?”
    “He’s been doing this for days, sir.”
    “Acting like a soldier, you mean?”
    “Acting like
me,
” Yardem said.
    Mikel made a low noise in his throat. Marcus had to cough to cover his laugh.
    “We hired these people to act as guards,” Marcus said. “They’re acting as guards. Only natural they’d look to us for the details.”
    Yardem grunted and turned to face the boy. When the boy met his gaze, the Tralgu deliberately flicked an ear.
    The forest around them now was oak and ash, the trees taller than ten men. A scrub fire had come through within the last few years, scorching the bark and burning down the underbrush without ever reaching the wide canopy above. Marcus could imagine smoke rising up through green summer leaves. Now the roadside litter was damp, the fallen leaves black with mold and on their way to becoming soil for the next year’s weeds. Only the leaves on the road itself were dry. At the eastern end of the clearing, a wide-eyed stone Southling king in battle array and a six-pointed crown was half entombed in an oak. The old bark had swallowed half of the solemn face, roots tilted the wide stone pediment a degree. Vines draped the stone shoulders. Marcus didn’t know what the marker had been meant to commemorate.
    For almost a week, the caravan had been making good progress. The road was well traveled, local farmers keeping it for the most part clean, but there had still been whole leagues where their way was covered in newly fallen leaves. The rustling of horses’ hooves and the crackle of the cart wheels had been loud enough to drown out conversation. The ’van master wasn’t bad for a religious. For the most part, Marcus could ignore the scriptures read over the evening meals. If the Timzinae happened to pick something particularly hard to listen to—sermons on family or children or the assurances that God was just or anything that touched too closely on what had happened to his wife and daughter—Marcus ate quickly and took a long private walk out ahead on the road. He called it scouting, and the ’van master didn’t take offense. Other travelers had joined with the ’van and parted company again without more than a look from Yardem or himself to keep the peace. Except that they weren’t yet a quarter of the way to the pass that marked the edge of Birancour, the job was going better than expected.
    Marcus chewed his last bite of sausage slowly. The dozen carts filled half the clearing, horses and mules with feedbags over their heads or else being led to and from the brook to drink. The carters knew their business for the most part. The old man driving the tin ore was a little deaf and the boy with the high cart of