Page 3 of Into the West

Let them see I had magical power all along. I could have healed fully before anything else, but chose to bleed instead. They’ll see me bind my own wounds, giving the impression I am utterly self-capable. And they know I don’t mind being in pain. Wait. Wait. Do I actually like pain? It would explain a lot. Why do I feel like whatever it is, it’s not enough work until I’m hurting from it? Why am I thinking about this right now? Concentrate.

They’ve seen me defend a Doll, and check on their well-being before tending to my own wounds. That should stick with them.

One thing about all of this, though. Leading by example hurts.

He gave the crowd a raking glance and a firm go-away gesture, implying wordlessly that if they were not busy, they bloody well should be. A second glance assured him that his three Dolls were taking the broken one off without any difficulty (and he hoped with as little pain as possible). Kordas walked on down the muddy path—everything about camping or deployment seemed to turn into mud—healing his hands up as he walked. The pain-blocking had been right on time, but the fractures the pain told of were still there, whether they hurt or not. His right hand seeped blood through the fray-edged bandages. What was it they said in his youth? “If the blood’s fresh and clean, you’ll be all right. You aren’t in trouble till the blood stops flowing.” His slower pace let him get the bones set and pressed. The bandages would help with that, so he left them on. Downhill to a crosspath—also mud, of course—he went where he’d been intending to go in the first place: the corral where his riding horses were.

Arial was finally in shape to ride, and the foal was in the process of being weaned, eating about half solid food and half Arial’s milk, so the mare could be ridden again. She welcomed him with a whinny and a toss of her head, coming straight for him, and she even seemed to welcome the saddle, saddlebag with a pair of old trews and a shirt stuffed into it, and light bridle that he fetched from a rough thatched shelter where the tack was kept. Then again, going for a ride meant getting away from her foal, and the foal was getting to be of an age where she was a bit of a pest. Maternal instincts were wearing thin by now, and the relief of being where the foal couldn’t get to her, combined with the pleasure of going out for a nice amble in relatively interesting, though unfamiliar, surroundings, must be what was accounting for her pleasure at seeing him.

Well, and she does like me, I suppose . . .

Arial whuffled at his bound-up hand, then snorted with disapproval at the smell. “It’s fine, dear, it’s fine. You probably just smell some sadist-face on my knuckles.” Arial apparently had nothing to say, which suited him right now. He let her out of the gate—she could have easily jumped it, but there was no point in letting her know she could—and mounted up, turning her toward the lake and the path around it. Horses were creatures of habit. All the Valdemaran Gold horses had been trained to respect fences and wait for a human to open a gate, so it had happened that many of them could be stopped by a low fence that was only chest high, unless trained out of it. It made keeping all of the horses confined much easier. One thing Valdemaran Golds had in quantity was confidence, so more often than not, uncertain horses tended to follow what the Golds did.

This shore had become a city in all things but name, a long, thin city composed of barges, skiffs, and narrowboats pulled up along the shore of what they all unimaginatively called “Crescent Lake”, boats docked three, four, five, even six deep. The narrowboats, where the high majority of people lived, were the nearest to the bank, with the boats storing all their goods and whatever else they had been able to get out tied prow to stern out behind them. If the tow-path was crowded, you could walk where you wanted to get from boat to boat using planks, and many people did. It had a song of its own, this arrangement. Thumps in several different tones played as slow, suffused wind chimes. When the breeze blew through, the low waves of the lake caused the whole array to bump hull to hull, so closely were they anchored. Interspersed with the thumps was the higher-pitched rubbing of hulls, something like a strange melody. It may account for why there aren’t as many predators as we expected. We’ve effectively beaten drums to drive them away, from the day we got here, Kordas thought. The insects didn’t get the hint, though, and chewed us up until bugchaser lanterns were put up all along the shore. Forget what you learned from tales of quests and adventures. This is the real life of adventure: it always ends up as cold, mud, or bugs. Usually all three.

He and his fellow leaders were trying to keep the land from being over-grazed and the woods from being plundered. That meant everyone was living in a boat, and except for those who must, such as guards and gamekeepers, residence ashore was forbidden. It was safer, too. Nobody yet knew what dangers could come out of that all-too-dark forest. The population being afloat meant they effectively had a moat around them. Kordas had his and Delia’s boats tied up in the center of the lake’s arc, putting them right in the middle. No one could accuse him of keeping himself out of reach of his people.

The original evacuation had been enormous, but when everything had settled and it was determined that the new Duke of Valdemar was going to be a decent man, Kordas had given people who wanted to go back home the option to do so. About two-thirds of them had queued up and returned. The Squire was not one; he was happy in his new village, and the Empress, his prize sow, was happy with her palatial new sty, so some of the Squire’s children had taken two-thirds of the Squire’s pigs and gone back to the Duchy, while the Squire’s eldest divided the remaining third between himself and his father and was going to follow Kordas. Lots of people had done the same. Kordas reminded them that no one could guarantee their safety if they returned—but that going out into the unknown was going to be risky, probably dangerous, and at best uncomfortable, hard work.

The mages, to a man and woman, stayed. They already knew how the Empire treated magicians, and none of them were under the illusion that things would change under whatever general or Great Lord of State managed to claw his way to the Conquest Throne. And there were a lot of them, far more than Kordas had ever anticipated, far more than his little mage-enclave had hosted. Apparently mages who were not a part of the Imperial Court talked a lot to each other.

It was always a possibility that one or more of them was an agent of the Empire.

But at the moment, there wasn’t any Emperor. There might not be an Empire. Whoever they had planned on reporting to probably wasn’t in any position to do anything with the information anymore. Once they uprooted from this place and started on their exodus, there would be no way to get forces after them—they wouldn’t exactly be burning bridges after themselves, but his plan would have the same effect.

Among the refugees there were, of course, the accidentals, the strays from the Capital who had simply flung themselves through the nearest Gate without a Gate key and randomly ended up at the Lake. They mostly had nowhere to go until families who were leaving altogether and had no wish to go back to the Duchy had met up with the dispossessed, who found themselves going from “homeless” to “cottage and a garden, and jobs that needed hands to do them.” Which might not be much, but it was more than they’d had after leaving everything behind. After witnessing the rampaging mother Earth Elemental, they were grateful to have anything at all.

Right now there were only three people who knew the truth about why that creature had torn the Palace and Capital apart—Kordas, the new Duke Merrin, and Kordas’s Herald Beltran. The Duke was scarcely likely to let anyone know he’d helped murder the Emperor—is that called a co-murder? Kordas wondered—and kick off the carnage. Beltran could be trusted, and Kordas didn’t intend for anyone else to know the whole truth, not even Isla. The Dolls knew, of course, but the Dolls were very good at keeping secrets.

To his eternal relief, the Dolls in charge of the hostages had taken their charges (and sometimes picked their charges up bodily—the Dolls, it seemed, were enormously strong), stuffed the Gate keys to the Gates nearest their homes down the fronts of their uniform tunics, and pitched them through the Palace Gates before coming here to the Lake themselves. We know it was a merciful rescue, but technically, it was also kidnapping children. In doing good, we become someone’s villains. It feels like every decision is mired in unhappy repercussions these days. Well, that’s real adventure, too. Only storybooks end neatly. At least we managed to send those poor children back to their homes.

He’d worried that he’d have to deal with almost a hundred parentless children, with no idea where their loyalties lay. He’d have had to send them home, of course, but that would mean more people who knew about the plans and the escape and . . . well, he was just glad things had worked out the way they had. The Dolls, it seemed, had kept their heads when everyone around them had thoroughly lost theirs—absolutely no one in authority had turned up at the hostages’ area to evacuate them before the Dolls took matters into their own hands.

I really made a dog’s dinner out of the situation, and if it hadn’t been for the Dolls, things could have gone far more horribly wrong, in every possible way.

So there were about fifteen thousand people here now, mostly younger sons and daughters who would likely never have had the chance for a home and land of their own. So, not as many families as he had initially thought there would be, and no one with children younger than eight or nine. There were quite a few families of the Duchy who were tired of the Empire, figured that whoever eventually became Emperor was not going to be all that different from the last one, and elected to take their chances with Kordas. So they were doing better for long-term supplies than he had dared hope.

And now, everyone who wasn’t going into the west with him had already left.

People were used to him riding up and down the lakeshore, and no one took much notice of him except to look up from what they were doing and wave.

He was ashamed of himself for losing his temper so badly back there—but doing so felt so damned good. It felt good to be able to take his emotions out on someone who deserved a pounding—the creep didn’t even know the basics about what he hated. This wasn’t mere stupid behavior, it was inept, and that only made it worse. This idiot had singled out a Doll, who told him that they already had a job to do, and made that an excuse to beat on them—unaware that what one Doll knew, they all knew.

That’s what Rose had told him, when she ran to get him to save her fellow Doll. Knowing they won’t fight back. Knowing he could do anything he wanted. That’s just pure evil, like torturing a puppy.

But he was glad it happened now, and not after they got underway. Because now people know what I won’t tolerate, and what the price of lawbreaking is. He had come to the conclusion that the best answer to most lawbreaking was going to be exile. It’s “merciful” without putting my people at any more risk. Because risk from within was not something that they were going to be able to allow, not now, and not for a very long time.

He wished they could stay here. If there hadn’t already been people here, people who had a prior claim to this land. And if he wasn’t afraid that despite his best efforts, someone might be able to follow them here from the Empire. After all, he and his mages had managed to do it blind. What could they do if the Imperial mages got their hands on something connected to anyone who was in this mob of exiles? What if they had a plant here, somehow?

He looked landward, and didn’t like what he saw. Already things were looking a little bit stressed—nothing that a good spring couldn’t put right, but . . . over there, goats and donkeys, which would eat anything, had been nibbling on bushes and trees, and the undergrowth had been eaten down to a level where any good herdsman or shepherd would know it was urgently time to move the herds. And pigs, dear gods, what the pigs would do . . .

No, no, besides the fact that other people had rights to this land that superseded their arrival, there simply was not enough room here for his people and theirs. And the strain on the lake—

Well, other people besides him knew this. A lot of mages were Landwise, and he could tell that they were of the same mind. I wonder how many in the Emperor’s Court would have been ill at the mere thought of land management being part of a Duke’s life? I say, if you want to be a Duke, well, it’s vital. Work from the furthest points inward, maintain roads and safety, respond to emergencies, keep the Duchy well-defended, give respect, and always have at least three plans and escape routes.

Right now, he didn’t have three plans, but he did have two. One was to send more people back to the Duchy, if he could find any more that wanted to go. Along with that was to allow a small settlement here. Nothing that would compete with the locals, or make them resentful. That would reduce the strain on the environment here, and they would set up Crescent Lake as their town and hope for the best. The second was, in equal measure, desperate and daring. The scouts had already found a new river on the other side of the marshes, and four mages were setting up a Gate there. It was a lot easier getting two wooden uprights, four mages, and eight scouts across that swamp than it would have been to take fifteen thousand humans and roughly four times that many animals across—and that didn’t count the chickens and waterfowl. The scouts had a Doll with them—and of course, what one Doll knew, they all knew, so as soon as Rose told him the new Gate had been activated, they could link the two and the real migration could begin.

And we’ll go for as long as it takes. Rumor in the villages here says that the lands to the west are ravaged by the Mage-Wars, and no one lives there. So we find out if that is true. And we find a place of our own.