The Marcher Lord (Over Guard) (30 page)

“It’s wrong,” Ian said, his voice steady, but not as firm
as he’d imagined it would sound.

“Why?” Kieran asked. “What does it matter? Who is it going to hurt?”

“You’ll put it back wherever you found it,” Ian said slowly, “or I swear … I’ll get the captain.”

There was a stony silence. And for the first time, Ian began to wonder whether he could take both of them
in a fight if he had to. He was drawing some sort of consensus that it would be possible, though difficult, when Kieran moved a bit.

“Fine,” Kieran said quietly. “If that’s what it is. But
don’t think you’re so holy, Kanters. You would wake up the fat, Dervish baron himself if you were.”

And as much as
Ian shook his head—and as firmly as he escorted them back to where they had snatched the object, brought them back to their rooms, and through a number of careful and minor miracles, inside without rousing anyone, to end up staring back up at the same ceiling in much the same way he had not long ago—he wasn’t sure who exactly was right.

Though as the night bled away, he felt sure
that something had been taken from him that he’d held before.

*              *              *              *

Their departure the next morning was polite but expedient. Ian thought that Lord Wester’s handling of it was perhaps a bit overly crisp, but all in all, Lord Beaumont didn’t seem to mind, or perhaps it was more a matter of not noticing it.

Regardless of the emotions, they set off early on a clear Friday
morning, their party in generally merry spirits, something of a fullness in their content, which was greatly contrasted in the sullenness of the two who made sure not to look at Ian.

“Did you sleep well, Private
Kanters?” Elizabeth Wester asked in passing, shortly after they had departed.

“No,” he
said, without looking at her. It took some short but tangible amount of time after that to realize he should’ve been more diplomatic.

But a fog
lay over him, a cognitive haze that was more than just the effects of a night without sleep. It was like the morning after he had drank too much in Carciti and had felt so emotionally horrible about it. Thinking about that now still made him want to cringe, hide his face away from the fact that had been him, even several days after. It had felt like he had lost something then, and though his standings within his company hadn’t really changed all that much, this felt akin to that.

Only worse.

It wasn’t that he felt bad about potentially and permanently losing his friendship with Kieran and Brodie—or perhaps he did. But that was really infinitesimal to the bitterness and anger and shock. He was still shocked.

Only scoundrels stole, or idiots—or perhaps all the idiots who stole were still scoundrels, just of a less intelligent cut. And Kieran and Brodie weren’t scoundrels
. Or perhaps they were, and it was merely Ian’s own error of classification that was at fault. But no, he couldn’t think of anything, trying over and over as hard he could as much as he could, that would have led him to suspect they would do something like this. Oh, Ian knew that regular people were always committing plenty of immoral things—swearing, bending the truth. Those things were all mildly immoral though, and never really done with any good reasons, but this was different. This was … he didn’t know what this was.

The day passed, but mostly without his
notice. His mind registered the rising heat, the occasional change in wind. At some points in their northeasterly trajectory, conversation and happenings occurred within the rest of their party. But this he couldn’t care to observe for any length of time. Their brief stops, their lunch break passed without his attention. He was able to keep up his positions within formation passably well, and though he could probably do them in his sleep, today he didn’t make much of an effort to keep up the company’s standards. It wasn’t as if the rest of company was.

Almost as a flaunting of its own mystery, a reminder of just how alien they were in this place, the day persisted in its clarity. He found noth
ing in its clear hues. And the ground that he barely lifted his head from passed by without any ill omens as he went around in circles throughout the day, over and over.

It was with some surprise that he noticed evening drawing on, and they made a slightly later camp, as though to make up for their excursion. This made something anxious inside him hurt, to feel that he had neither gained nor lost anything he had sought for since the morning, but to know that he had lost an entire day’s time in it.
The preparations for camp and supper slid by.

The rest of the party
was still irritably upbeat on the whole. Will looked at him as though he wanted to talk a couple times, but otherwise Ian had no course with any of the others.

Immediately after the meal and his cleanup duties were finished,
Ian took the longest path away from camp that he could devise. By this point, he had seemed to exhaust his ability to remain inside himself, so he took to listlessly watching the things he passed. There were more birds in this area than most of the others they’d traveled through. Distinctive, trilling flocks were incessantly settling down out of sight within the grass, only to be roused by a single member that went up ahead, voicing that sound that Ian couldn’t quite categorize. They would circle, almost settle again, then recoil back up, with individuals diving down through the tops of the grass and back up again. At what, Ian couldn’t see, but when he took the time to surmise, he supposed it was for some sort of insect or small animal.

There were also the fling birds, which w
ere quite a bit larger and moved in much smaller groups than the trilling birds. Ian had read something about them in his yeoman, as their kind was unique to Orinoco and stood as an ornithological curiosity. While of fair size and bulk, they were even lighter than most birds were, save for their long tail-like appendage, which was weighted. When in danger or startled, as at several points in his walk, they would fling out of their concealment by means of hurling their tail up in the direction they wanted to flee. This would quickly catapult them away from danger at a speed that was hard to follow until their wings could carry them the rest, their tail securely tucked underneath them.

From
these passing distractions, Ian took some merit. It was a simple thing, he reasoned. The feelings would subside. Feelings always did with time.

He began to recall his blessings in his mind upon reaching this conclusion, by now some
distance from camp, and started to wheel back that way. His ambition, if it was actually that, was to order all the blessings that he could claim, classify them from larger headings and down into the smaller ones.

He
wasn’t sure how long he had been at this—and it did bring him a small kind of delight, especially in thinking of all the ways that he could make his blessings grow—when he caught sight of Kieran and another person at a distance, moving perpendicular to him. He immediately knew Kieran by his shock of light hair, and the other had to be Brodie.

Frowning, wondering just how many nights he would be at this,
Ian considered altering his route. Some daylight was still left. But no, he thought, he had been heading this way by his own accord. He had no need to change.

His cur
iosity grew increasingly piqued, however, wondering at their furtive pace, which he only caught once more before they disappeared entirely in a lower area out of sight. Not all that humorously reasoning that there wasn’t anything to steal out here, Ian quickened his pace, just a bit so that he might sight them again. He descended down a small hill, the rangers having gone into isolated bits of short but thick trees and foliage.

Ian held his rifle against his shoulder to keep it from bouncing as he quickly scaled down the last part of his hill. Staring along where he was perpendicularly crossing their trail,
Ian started with some surprise to see that they had stopped just inside the trees, contrary to what he had expected. Ian started because he also hadn’t expected, and had really hoped, that they wouldn’t see him at any point. But Brodie immediately spotted him and nudged Kieran, who was looking forward. Looking back, quite grimly from what Ian could make of their expressions, they hesitated for a moment. But even more to his surprise, Kieran made a small wave for him to come their way.

Warily, though hoping that he would never actually have anything to fear from them,
Ian agreed and quickly ran to them. His pace was a hybrid between expedient and careful, as he couldn’t decide which attitude he should be trying to exude as he ran.

Kieran put an unnecessary finger to his lips, Brodie only glancing at him before looking back ahead. Deciding not to care about these reactions,
Ian crouched beside them and looked off in the direction that Kieran gestured. As the sounds around him stilled again, the imminent thrumming of insects returned, over which faint voices came.

He guessed that it was Elizabeth Wester’s voice before he was actually able to tell. A sinking f
eeling ran up through his gut. His mind ran through the possibilities, despite his best efforts. All of them led to the conclusion that the margrave’s daughter was walking outside of camp—outside of camp needing an escort—an escort that wasn’t any of the three of them—and an amiable escort to justify Elizabeth speaking in such warmly animated tones—

“—by the courts of the
grand duke,” she was saying, “though his halls are not nearly so exquisite as the receiving halls of the arch bishop. We have a yearly invitation to take part in the Christmas celebrations there.”

Through the moderate foliage that separated them from the open area beyond, Ian could easily catch glimpses of Elizabeth Wester’s white dress and bits and pieces of the
accompanying red, Bevish uniform.

“I have heard that the festivities occupy much of the nobility’s week,” Corporal Wesshire’s
much lower voice came idly following hers. “It would seem a rare honor that a marcher lord from so far out would receive such invitations.”

“Oh,” Elizabeth said, “my father is well liked for such functions. I am not entirely sure why, as he is loathe of them, but I imagine most of it is political.”

And here she lowered her conversation so that they were unable to hear her, though they were then passing at their closest point. By now, they had all dropped as low to the ground as possible, Ian half-expecting such efforts to be in vain. Even from his rather compromised angle, he could see Wesshire’s head scanning around and especially into the trees where they were. But evidently they were obscured enough, as they passed without pause.

By the time Elizabeth regained her previous volume, after some equally soft answers from Corporal Wesshire, they were gone some ways beyond them, the topic still lightly on political considerations. But apparently the serious parts of it had passed.

Kieran cautiously sat up a little, Brodie wryly smiling back at Ian.

“Well, how do you like that?”

*
              *              *              *

Ian didn’t. Try as he might, there were numerous ways that he couldn’t and felt like he shouldn’t. And, as he mused the next morning as they broke camp, it only made his possibilities feel impossible, which had seemed plausible only the night before last.

There was some satisfaction in knowing that Kieran had finally seen the inglorious and utter destruction of his own chances, but it was a small
, bitter satisfaction.

But it’s
none of my concern,
Ian thought as he idly kicked at the rocky soil. There had been some hardening of the terrain late yesterday, but it steadily escalated throughout the morning, and in the distance they began to come in sight of a rocky-looking northern horizon.

“We’ll make Mombosso by noon,” Will said to the captain and margrave, “more than plenty of time to
fish, if you would so like.”

“That could be in order,” Captain Marsden said after first making a confirming look to the margrave’s expression.

Fishing,
Ian thought, trying his best not to let that notion feel good. He had done only the barest of it when he was a boy, in the dirty Wilome rivers and down by the docks. He hadn’t had much time for such things though, and they had never been able to eat any of the fish for fear of lanphoid. But he remembered it being fun, and he wondered what it might be like to actually eat something he had caught.

The respite was brief
, however, as he also remembered the state of things.

The rest of the morning passed uneventfully, with a sense of some directness to their pace. As it grew steadily hotter, the outcrops loomed from slight bumps on the horizon to large
boulders that they began to pass in increasing numbers and volume. Just before lunch, they waded across a small foot stream that ran diagonally across their path. Ian heard Will tell the margrave that it was one of the loose strands that had managed to break away from the Mombosso River.

Their elevation began to rise slightly as they came within sight of a range of large rocks, haphazardly strewn in something of a line
running west to east. The ever-workings of the motions of water became discernible, and Ian caught his first glimpses of the river.