The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [29]
“For all they know we’re a couple of bandits. Ah, by the hells, Maddo, we can’t go wandering the roads like this, or we might well end up robbing travelers, at that. What are we going to do?”
“Cursed if I know. But I’ve been thinking a bit. There’s those free troops you hear about. Maybe we’d be better off joining one of them than worrying about an honorable place in a warband.”
“What?” For a moment some of the old life came back to Aethan’s eyes. “Are you daft? Fight for coin, not honor? Ye gods, I’ve heard of some of those troops switching sides practically in the middle of a battle if someone offered them better pay. Mercenaries! They’re naught but a lot of dishonored scum!”
Maddyn merely looked at him. With a long sigh Aethan rubbed his face with both hands.
“And so are we. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Maddo? Well, you’re right enough. All the gods know that the captain of a free troop won’t be in any position to sneer at the scars on my back.”
“True spoken. And we’ll have to try to find one that’s fighting for Cerrmor or Eldidd, too. Neither of us can risk having some Cantrae man seeing us in camp.”
“Ah, horseshit and a pile of it! Do you know what that means? What are we going to end up doing? Riding a charge against the gwerbret and all my old band someday?”
Maddyn had never allowed himself to frame that thought before, that someday his life might depend on his killing a man who’d once been his ally and friend. Aethan picked up his dagger and stabbed it viciously into the table.
“Here!” The tavernman came running. “No need to be breaking up the furniture, lads!”
Aethan looked up so grimly that Maddyn caught his arm before he could take out his rage on this innocent villager. The tavernman stepped back, swallowing hard.
“I’ll give you an extra copper to pay for the damage,” Maddyn said. “My friend’s in a black mood today.”
“He can go about having it in some other place than mine.”
“Well and good, then. We’ve finished your piss-poor excuse for ale, anyway.”
They’d just reached the door when the tavernman hailed them again. Although Aethan ignored him and walked out, Maddyn paused as the taverner came scurrying over.
“I know about one of them troops you and your friend was talking about.”
Maddyn got out a couple of coppers and jingled them in his hand. The taverner gave him a gap-toothed, garlic-scented grin.
“They wintered not far from here, they did. They rode in every now and then to buy food, and we was fair terrified at first, thinking they were going to steal whatever they wanted, but they paid good coin. I’ll say that for them, for all that they was an arrogant lot, strutting around like lords.”
“Now that’s luck!”
“Well, now, they might have moved on by now. Haven’t seen them in days, and here’s the blacksmith’s daughter with her belly swelling up, and even if they did come back, she wouldn’t even know which of the lads it was. The little slut, spreading her legs for any of them that asked her!”
“Indeed? And where were they quartered?”
“They wouldn’t be telling the likes of us that, but I’ll wager I can guess well enough. Just to the north of here, oh, about ten miles, I’d say, is a stretch of forest. It used to be the tieryn’s hunting preserve, but then, twenty-odd years ago it was now, the old tieryn and all his male kin got themselves killed off in a blood feud, and with the wars so bad and all, there was no one else to take the demesne. So the forest’s gotten all overgrown and thick, like, but I wager that the old tieryn’s hunting lodge still stands in there someplace.”
Maddyn handed over the coppers and took out two more.
“I don’t suppose some of the lads in the village know where this lodge is.” He held up the coins. “It seems likely that some of the young ones