“You are concerned with them now,” said the girl bitterly. “Would that you had been concerned about them before. Though what you could have contributed to the cause I don’t know.”
“Renthrette,” said Mithos swiftly, “we have no time for bickering. The boy will leave Cresdon under our aegis whether he likes the idea or not.”
“I’m not a boy!” I exclaimed. “I’m eighteen. A man.”
The girl—who couldn’t have been more than a year older than me—snorted with disdain.
Mithos, ignoring my indignation, told me my options in a matter-of-fact tone: “Should you decide, once we’re outside Cresdon, to ride with us to Stavis, you’ll come as one who must earn his keep and keep his place. Or we can part company when we are a comfortable distance from the city. It’s your choice. You will find us trustworthy unless you endanger our mission.”
I nodded my agreement, anxious to go along with anything that would get me away from this inn. But as for trust, he could forget it. William Hawthorne trusted no one, and wasn’t about to start with a handful of murderous rogues he knew little—all bad—about. I figured I would have them get me clear of the city. Nothing more.
My one anxiety—apart from the Empire, of course—was that they might feel obliged to do away with me to protect their precious identities before they headed for Stavis, the easternmost reach of the lands taken by the Diamond Empire armies. To seem keen to go with them might make me seem less of a security risk, though the journey itself, if it came to that, would probably kill me.
The Empire had come from the northern mountains of Aeloria, financed by the precious stones mined in their homeland. They had clad their legions in white, their pennants, banners, and cloaks over-laid with the blue diamond motif. So had they acquired their name: the Diamond Empire, wealthy, cold, hard, sharp, and smugly eternal. They had crushed the lands that bordered Aeloria and pushed south to the kingdom of Thrusia. We had fallen hard and taken the edge off the Diamond’s advance for a while. Then greed set their eyes across the virtual desert plains of the Hrof wastes—a land drier than Thrusian grain whiskey or the wit of an Empire centurion—to Stavis in the east, a sickeningly prosperous port. They extended a thin finger of their force, unable to feed and water a more smothering movement in so harsh a region, took Stavis, and held it. The Hrof remained a wild place to this day, and you’d need a rollicking good reason to cross it. There was little Empire presence on the road, though the bandits, scorpions, and vultures had their own plans for you. If you make it to Stavis, you are back in proper Empire territory, but once you get through the town and head east, you are free. That might be the rollicking good reason I needed.
They probably had another.
“What is your mission?” I asked.
“That’s our business,” Mithos answered quietly, but with a deliberation I was not supposed to question.
“Thanks a lot,” I snapped. “So you expect me to go trekking across the bloody Hrof with you, knowing that the trip is going to be an absolute swine, and you won’t even say where we’re going! That’s great, that is. Your name has been all over this town for months, years! But because you did me an unrequested favor and saved me from the bloody Empire, putting me right on top of its wanted list in the process, you expect me to go picnicking with you in the desert, even though it wouldn’t surprise me if you put a dagger in my spine to save water. I’d be safer doing a week in the stocks.”
“People die in the stocks,” Garnet hissed, his green eyes flashing. I think he rather liked the idea. He was right, of course. The worthy townsfolk couldn’t always be trusted to throw no more than fruit and veg at whoever was chained in the marketplace.
I went on nonetheless. “At least I wouldn’t be looking over my shoulder to see whether you thugs were about to . . .”
Garnet got up. His fist was clenched round the haft of a large and mean-looking battle-ax, so I shut up quickly. He came for me anyway, grabbing a handful of dress just below my chin in a pale, strong hand and hoisting me against the wall. His eyes burned hard as emeralds and he placed the cold