and his mates are the corbies there.” He jerked his head a second time. “Awn’s the tufted owl and we’re the spotted thrushes.”
Fighting was just a game to these men. Like white raven, where men shifted little wooden trees and carved forest birds around the boards scored into his father’s taproom tables. The other player must evade all such traps set for the mythical white bird. Who was going to win today? Tathrin wondered. How much blood would be spilled instead of ale?
Reher nodded, frowning. “We need to know who they are.”
“Follow me.” Gren darted down a narrow path worn by deer or foresters.
They had reached the edge of Duke Garnot’s hunting preserve, where the price of a poached deer was a severed hand. Men living off the woods wouldn’t be eager to explain themselves to anyone, Tathrin reflected.
“Stay behind me and stay out of trouble,” Reher warned in a low tone.
They all spoke to him like that. Was it because he was still of an age when most youths were just ending their apprenticeships? Or because he wore a scholar’s silver ring, bearing the arms of the city of Vanam, far away in distant Ensaimin? Tathrin had soon learned mercenary swordsmen and craftsmen like Reher all assumed a university education eradicated most of a scholar’s common sense.
Well, Tathrin knew woods and fields better than any townsman. An autumn morning should be full of birdsong. These thickets were silent, tense. Tathrin fixed his eyes on Gren’s mailed back slipping through the bushes ahead. He strained his ears for some hint of anything bigger than a coney making its escape.
Ahead, a man dashed across open ground. Tathrin saw he wasn’t wearing the cream surcoat of Arest’s mercenaries, the black wyvern lashing its tail. He had no neckerchief of unbleached linen and bold yellow, the colours of Evord’s army. He wasn’t one of their own.
“Stand and identify yourself!” Reher bellowed.
In the thorn bushes, Gren halted, tense as a hunting hound.
The man stared horrified at Reher and Tathrin. Shouts erupted and someone screamed. Swords clashed in scuffles hidden by the trees. The man fled.
Gren stepped out and extended his arm, chest-high. The man couldn’t stop himself. He crashed to the ground, flat on his back, gasping like a stranded fish. Gren barely wavered, his iron-studed boots planted solidly in the leaf litter. Just for good measure, he drove a steel-capped toe into the man’s thigh. Tathrin winced. Even before Gren had rebelled to become a mercenary, his muscles had been hardened by boyhood among the mines of the peaks and lakes, on long trips hunting fox and beaver.
The blond man looked down with satisfaction. “Floored like a market-day whore.”
The man writhed on the ground, his wheezing pathetic as he struggled to catch his breath. He was a wretched specimen, left bandy-legged by a poverty-stricken childhood, chapped lips drawn back from rotted teeth. Tathrin wondered how long it was since he’d lost everything and taken to the forests.
“So what have we got here?” Reher planted a boot on the fallen man’s chest and scowled down. “Not Duke Garnot’s cully?”
He wasn’t wearing Carluse black and white. Tathrin bent to rip open his grimy jerkin and the sweat-stained shirt beneath, in case he wore some hidden boar’s head pendant. The duke’s men might go in disguise but they’d always keep something to prove their allegiance in case they were threatened by one of their own.
“We’re just woodsmen, you bastards,” gasped the man.
Gren chuckled. “Or do you mean Woodsmen?”
Tathrin had been barely breeched when he’d first heard the rumours. Tales of supplies meant for the duke’s mercenaries unaccountably seized on the road. An honest family who’d seen their livestock driven off found a flitch of bacon hidden in their woodpile, so the story went. A bag of coin had dropped down a widow’s chimney, enough to save her son from the militia’s clutches, her daughter from worse. All thanks to the Woodsmen, so the whispers said.
Now Tathrin knew the truth. He knew how much the unfortunate owed his father and his fellow guildsmen. They didn’t just drink white brandy and abuse the duke’s name when they met in the Ring of Birches’ cellar. They did all the good attributed to the Woodsmen and more besides. Who was better placed than an innkeeper to encourage the tavern stories that kept Duke Garnot’s men hunting for mythical Woodsmen, and to see a youthful packman or a fresh-faced cook’s maid unobtrusively joining a merchant’s wagons, heading for sanctuary among those