Wardtown (Teer & Kard Book 1) Page 5

  “Gunman in the tower,” Kard said a moment later. “Looks like they’ve got a hunter. Unless it’s sighted in better than most, we’re still safe at this range.”

  A hunter was a breech-loading single-shot gun used for hunting. It wasn’t a gun for fighting wars, but it would be effective enough against most people that might try and rustle cattle from a ranch.

  “Gunwoman,” Teer corrected as they rode forward. “That’s Coral. She knows me.”

  He waved and Coral waved back.

  “We’re good,” he told Kard.

  “I was hoping not to get shot down in the road, I’ll admit,” the bounty hunter replied drily. “She’ll tell everyone we’re coming. That should make this easier.”

  By the time they rode through the gate Anthor opened for them, most of the population of the ranch was gathered in the courtyard. Teer’s mother was in front, striding forward as he reached them and dismounted.

  “I didn’t raise you to be a cursed fool, Teer,” she snapped.

  “No, I’m pretty sure that’s all on me,” he agreed.

  Alana swept him into a fierce embrace, looking up at the still-mounted Spehari.

  “No harm, Lord,” she asked, her tone cold, “but I am not figuring why you are here.”

  “To spare young Teer’s life, it was necessary for me to invoke the Right of Retribution,” Kard told her, the lilting formal tones back in his voice. “He is now my Bondservant, bound to me by law and magic, to stand at my side for the rest of his life.”

  Teer had a lot of questions to ask about just what he’d signed on for, but it hadn’t been time yet. He stepped back from Alana and smiled down at his mother.

  “It was the only mercy anyone could offer,” he told her. “I could do worse in my life than serve the Spehari directly.”

  “Lord Karn,” Hardin interjected, bowing as he stepped up. “I am beyond grateful for your intervention. Thank you.”

  “And I am grateful that you told me of the situation,” Kard replied. “Our conversation this morning set all of this into motion. My choices are my own and I have gained a servant, but you have not lost a son.”

  Hardin had talked to Kard? That explained a lot for Teer.

  “Your mercy is appreciated, Lord,” Alana said stiffly. “How may we serve you?”

  Teer undid the gunbelt and held it out to Hardin.

  “The gun, the belt…Star…all of it belongs to you, Hardin,” he admitted. “I won’t rob you.”

  “I am prepared to purchase Teer’s equipment from you,” Kard told them. “And supplies as well, if you have them. I was not expecting to acquire a Bondservant, and I will need food for him.”

  “Keep the horse and gun, Teer,” Hardin told him. “It’s the least I can give you for all that you have done. Come, join us for dinner, Lord Karn?”

  Teer glanced up at his new boss, who nodded slowly and dismounted.

  “Anthor will see to your horses,” Hardin said. “Is there any particular care your steed requires, Lord Karn?”

  “No, he’s sturdy enough,” the Spehari replied. “And please, Hardin, do not call me Lord. I have left most of the strictures of my father’s people behind at this point. I do not desire those titles.”

  “As you wish…Karn.”

  Dinner was an awkward and stilted affair. Teer eventually escaped for fresh air, standing next to the house that had been his home for ten turnings and looking up at the stars.

  He heard Hardin approach behind him and turned to look at the rancher.

  “Thank you,” he told the older Merik. “This isn’t what any of us wanted, but that’s my doing. Not yours. Not his.”

  Kard might not be requiring the title of Lord with Teer’s family, but he hadn’t given them his real name, either.

  “Karn seems to be an odd Spehari,” Hardin told him. “I have hope, somehow, which I wouldn’t have dared this morning.”

  “This morning, I knew I had forty-nine days left to live,” Teer whispered. “Now I know I have to leave all of this behind.”

  He gestured around him at the small houses of the compound. The massive barns, empty right now with the cattle in the fields still. The quiet clucking from the chicken coops and the neighing as the horses talked to each other.

  “You were likely always going to,” his not-father told him. “Alstair will miss you. So will the rest of us. But…I can’t help but wonder if this might work better than even my plan. I have watched you grow from a boy to a man, Teer, and there is something about you I have never seen before.

  “Things that took me seasons to master you learned in tendays. You see things I cannot, not just…not just the keener eyes of youth, but something else. I think this Spehari will be good for you.”

  “He said similar about seeing,” Teer admitted. The first moon was rising, sending pale light cutting through the evening shadow. “I don’t get it myself, but…I trust you. And somehow, I trust him.”

  Teer knew exactly where Kard was right now. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to tell if the Spehari was lying to him yet, but he suspected that part of the bond would work both ways if he focused on it.

  “Come with me,” Hardin ordered.

  The rancher walked away without checking to see if Teer was following. He was heading to the stables where Anthor had taken the horses, and with a confused sigh, Teer followed.

  The ranch stables were one of the most solidly built structures in the compound, with a base of stone and concrete the barns shared but the houses didn’t. Hardin knew exactly where he was going, stopping at Star’s usual stall.

  The saddle sitting by the stall wasn’t the one that Teer had come home riding. It was a more complex affair, with a long scabbard attached to the left side of the saddle horn.

  “This is my old riding saddle,” Hardin told Teer. “It’s got better saddlebags and such for a long ride. You’ve never ridden for more than a few days, but trust me, you’ll learn to value them.”

  Teer’s attention drifted from the saddle to the scabbard and its contents. Silently, he stepped past Hardin and drew the hunter. There was no decorative inlay on the gun, but it was still one of the more gorgeous weapons he’d ever seen in his life.

  The metal was a blued chrome he’d never seen on another weapon, hand-machined with precise, clean edges. The wood was all carved from the same piece of black heartwood, sturdy and true.

  Teer knew this gun.

  “This is your gun,” he told Hardin. “I can’t take—”

  “You can and you will,” Hardin barked. “I don’t have a repeater to give you, no soldier’s guns to keep you safe. Only this. Only the truest and straightest-shooting gun I ever owned.”

  He stared at the gun in Teer’s hands and sighed.

  “The one time I killed a man, it was with this gun,” he whispered, then shook his head. “Take it, Teer. It’s all I can do to keep you safe now. Anthor’s putting together a pack of supplies for both of you.”

  “Thank you,” Teer said. “I don’t have…I don’t know.”

  “Live, Teer,” Hardin told him. He produced a purse from inside his clothes and pressed it into Teer’s hand. Just from the feel of the contents, Teer knew it held actual stones, stamped crystals, not just glass coins.

  “This is not how I wished us to part,” the rancher continued. “But part of me always knew you’d have to leave. Not for my fears about Alstair, but for something else. Something about you always told me you’d be more than I could ever help you be.

  “So live, Teer, and ride out with this strange Spehari. This will always be your home, but we all have to leave where we began. Follow me, son?”

  “I think so,” Teer said, the hunter still cold in his hands. “I think so.”

  8

  Teer carefully kept his eyes on the back of Star’s neck as the mare cantered away from Hardin’s Ranch, refusing to look back as the road vanished beneath her hooves. He’d managed to bathe and change into his spare set of clothes, so he felt more al
ive—but he was also leaving his only home behind.

  “It’s always hard,” Kard told him in the Zeeanan drawl he seemed most comfortable with. “Leaving home. The first time, the tenth time. You don’t know when it’s going to be the last time.”

  “I figure this is going to be the last time,” Teer admitted. “If you’re hiding who you are, returning to my family puts ’em at risk, don’t it?”

  “It does,” Kard admitted levelly. “This time didn’t. There’s no way anyone will blame them for not knowing any more than they’ll blame the Wardkeeper.”

  “Will Lysus know?” Teer asked. “What are you hiding?”

  Kard sighed, glancing around the empty road.

  “Let’s leave that for a few candlemarks,” he suggested. “You are owed answers and I will give them, but not on the road.”

  Teer glanced over at the Spehari. For the first time, he noticed that there was a scabbard on Kard’s horse similar to the one Hardin had given him. The gun in Kard’s scabbard was shorter, with a visible lever on the grip.

  It was, unless Teer missed his guess, exactly the type of repeater Hardin had been wishing he’d had to give. Like the quickshooters they both carried, it would hold multiple bullets.

  “Where are we heading now?” he finally asked.

  “While I was in Alvid, I got reports of Boulder being seen in Odar,” Kard told him. “Odar’s not a wardtown. No regular riders, no sending stones, so the news is out of date. But. That makes the second town in a small region I’ve heard of him in—and lets me draw a path since he made a mess in Carlon.

  “I know a guide from the area we’re going to meet in Odar,” the bounty hunter continued. “Her letter promised me a detailed local map, one I can use to pick out likely hiding spots. Boulder may have found himself a lair.”

  He shook his head.

  “Boulder won’t stay anywhere for long; he draws too much attention and he can’t stay quiet,” Kard concluded. “But if we get to Odar fast enough, we might manage to jump his hole before he moves on.”

  “Two of us against seven of them?” Teer asked. “That seems dangerous.”

  “And I try not to use magic as well,” Kard agreed. “It is dangerous. The plan is always to ambush them, make them blink and get them to lay down their guns. Once they’re unarmed and tied up, it’s as easy to handle ten bounties as it is to handle ten cattle.”

  “Probably easier,” the ranch hand said after a moment’s thought. “The bounties probably believe you’ll shoot them if they run. Cows aren’t smart enough to register the threat.”

  “Fair.” Kard sighed. “Plan always depends on the ground when we get there. We’ll see what Doka has to say when we meet with her. She’s a good eye but no gun hand. This isn’t her fight.”

  “But it’s ours,” Teer accepted.

  “So long as we want to get paid. And, sooner or later, if we don’t get paid, we run out of money, bullets and food.” The Spehari paused thoughtfully. “Usually in that order.”

  Teer suspected that Kard wasn’t quite sure how hard he could push Star yet, as they took most of the day’s ride relatively gently. Still, by the time they were making camp at the end of the day, they were almost fifty miles from Alvid.

  It wasn’t quite on the direct line to Odar, which Teer had finally found on a map, but their pace would get them there in another two days.

  “Remember to brush down your horse,” Kard ordered as he dismounted. “She’s a ranch horse, so I’m guessing a healthy eight-candlemark day isn’t new to her, but she’s probably not used to a long-distance ride. The better care you take of her, the better care she’ll take of you.”

  Teer had been planning on doing that anyway, but he wasn’t going to argue with the reminder. The exact terms and nature of his relationship with Kard were strange and uncertain. He wasn’t going to tell the man about the purse Hardin had given him—between the stones and the coins, there’d been almost twelve stones’ worth of cash in it.

  That was the entire annual salary of one of the ranch hands. Teer had saved up a chunk of his own salary as well, which meant he had just over sixteen stones of coins hidden in various places throughout his saddlebags.

  It took half a candlemark for them to get the horses settled, checked over and fed. Only then did they start to set up the fire to cook their own dinner. As Teer finished stacking wood in the stone-lined firepit—they were not the first people to camp in the little gulley at the side of the road—Kard started going through the packages Anthor had put together for them.

  “I think your family might like you more than mine ever did me,” the Spehari concluded as he pulled out a package of premixed stew with instructions written on it in what Teer recognized as his mother’s careful handwriting.

  “That’s just what ma prepares for the riders and keeps on hand,” he admitted. “She said it was easier to dry a bunch of jerky and vegetables and put in a bag with spices than to make trail bread.”

  “Easy isn’t the word I’d use,” Kard told him. “Efficient, maybe.”

  “I’m not sure Ma would know that one,” Teer admitted after a moment. “And she did most of my teaching.”

  The Spehari nodded as he set up a tripod kettle silently.

  “Makes sense,” he conceded. “I learned out west. Longer ago than I think you realize.”

  “You said you were at the landing?” Teer asked, trying to guess the age of the man sitting next to him.

  Kard exhaled a long sigh and waved a hand at the fire. Teer saw red sparks flicker from the Spehari’s hand and land in the wood as the fire suddenly heated up.

  “I said half the Spehari still living were,” he noted carefully. “Even then, I was figuring I didn’t want to get in the habit of lying to you. We’ve started off with enough lies as it is.”

  That wasn’t what Teer had been expecting, and he looked at the kettle silently. If he remembered the instructions, they’d add the mix once it was boiling and leave it all in for a quarter-candlemark. They’d be sitting by the fire for a while.

  “Lies?” he finally asked.

  “You didn’t guess from the fact that I gave you a different name than I gave everyone else?” Kard asked. “There were secrets and truths I promised you. Now’s as good a time as any, I suppose.”

  He stared into the fire.

  “I am not Spehari,” he finally began. “My father was Spehari. My mother was a Merik woman. I didn’t know her. She died in childbirth. I am El-Spehari, a halfblood.”

  Teer had heard the term before, but only in one context.

  “Like the Prince in Sunset?” he demanded. The Prince had been El-Spehari, the governor of a northern Zeeanan province who’d rebelled against the Spehari. The entire Sunset Rebellion had been fought because of an El-Spehari.

  “Exactly,” Kard agreed. “I rode with Sunset, Teer. You have to know that first. Your father died in the war?”

  “Battle of Otaka,” Teer said slowly. He saw Kard wince in response to the name, then grimly nod.

  “There is a decent chance I killed your father,” Kard said flatly. “If not by my own hand, then by my orders. I was at Otaka.”

  Teer turned away from the fire and the man he’d bound his life to, looking up at the rising first moon. Part of him wanted to be angry at Kard for that, but…he wasn’t. It wasn’t even that he was numb. It was that he was so angry at the Unity, he couldn’t spare any for the Unity’s enemies.

  “You fought him,” Teer finally said, trying to put into words what he felt. “That was war. You might have killed him. That…too, was war. The Spehari betrayed him.”

  “The Spehari betrayed a lot of people,” Kard said after a moment. “That was what the whole cursed war was about. We thought we were right.” He shrugged. “We lost, so most take that as a judgment of who was actually right.

  “Do you know what the Midnight Proclamation is, Teer?”

  Teer shook his head.

  “It was the King in Winter’s order after the
war was over and the El-Spehari leading the Rebellion were defeated,” Kard told him. “No more El-Spehari are to be born. Those of us who remain were to return to the City of the Pillars and submit to a magical binding, similar to the one you now have with me, only more powerful.

  “Any who refused were to be put to the sword and the fire.”

  “You refused,” Teer said. It wasn’t even a guess. He could feel the old anger Kard was holding.

  “I refused. I rode with Sunset. I would not bow again to Winter.” The El-Spehari sighed. “They need the El-Spehari. The Spehari themselves don’t bear many children. Pairings between Spehari men and the various Aran people’s women are not incredibly fruitful, but they bear more children than those between the Spehari themselves.”

  The water boiled and Kard emptied the stew package into the pot, stirring it silently while both men thought.

  “The El-Spehari are like mules,” he noted. “We are barren—though long-lived, like our fathers. There is an Inquisition now that hunts the remaining El-Spehari rebels. I don’t know how many like me there are. I spend my life wearing a false face, after all.

  “I know most of my friends and comrades from the war are dead,” he concluded. “I didn’t hate the Unity during the war, but I hate them now. They never kept faith with us.” He stared down into the bowl of stew. “I wish I was more surprised that they failed to keep faith with men like your father.”

  Teer looked back into the fire. He could feel Kard’s bone-deep weariness and decided against asking how old the El-Spehari was.

  “Why do you work for ’em, then?” he asked. “You hunt bounties for the Unity. Doesn’t that help ’em?”

  “I hunt men like Boulder,” Kard told him. “Boulder is a monster. Other people aren’t real to him, so he kills and hurts without thought or care. The only way to stop a beast like that is to put him in the ground.

  “So long as the Unity and I agree on what counts as crimes, I can hunt the criminals who harm their people. There are writs I burn,” he conceded with a sad smile, “but in the main, the Unity and I agree on who needs to be stopped.”