how hard she came after me. A woman scorned, and all that. I barely even slowed her down, and I had enough sorcerous traps on this trail to kill an army.” He gave Taniel an annoyed look. “Too bad you sprang half of them.”
Taniel frowned.
“You don’t know?” Bo rubbed his temples. “God, how much do I have to explain? You’re layered in protective sorcery tighter than your own skin. Not even the strongest Privileged can create that kind of protection on a person. The human body is just too complex. I wove spells on this mountainside strong enough to disable a god—I thought, anyway—and you walked through them without even noticing. I’ve not seen sorcery like that before. Wards are weaker around a Marked, and some of the strongest Marked, like Tamas, can unravel wards completely, but it takes time and practice.”
“That’s why you yelled at me not to come any farther.”
“Yeah.”
“Well…” Taniel flicked snow off his coat. There was so much he didn’t know. Bo seemed to have a lot of answers, but even he couldn’t provide them all. There was something going on in Adro, beyond the war and the coup and everything else, that was much deeper than anyone knew. It made his head hurt. “Who the pit has been weaving spells around me? I don’t even… ah.” Her.
Bo glanced into the cave, toward Ka-poel’s sleeping form. “Tell me about the savage,” he said.
Ka-poel was bundled tightly in her bedroll, not a finger’s breadth of her visible but for a few stray red hairs sticking out from the top. The bedroll rose and fell steadily with her breathing.
“She’s a Dynize,” Taniel said. “Not from the Dynize Empire, but from the Fatrastan Wilds.”
“How’d you come across her?”
Taniel said, “When Fatrasta declared their independence from Kez I joined up in the war. I spent about thirteen months using her village as a base during the war in Fatrasta. Her tribe was allied with the Fatrastans. I ranged all over southern Fatrasta from there, hitting Kez camps with my unit, killing Privileged and officers. Even a couple of Wardens. Her village was deep in the swamp, impossible to find unless a native showed you the way. It was the perfect place.
“Another tribe lived in the same swamp. They stayed neutral through most of the war, but toward the end of my time they were bought by the Kez. They attacked Ka-poel’s village. Her people managed to fight them off, but not before they captured twenty or thirty children.
“The village wanted Fatrastan help getting the children back. The Fatrastans were spread too thin. They said no. My unit was ordered out of the village. I stayed behind and went with the natives to recover the children. Well, they’d killed most of them.”
Taniel felt his mouth go dry. The memory haunted him, even now. The sight of dozens of children, crucified on barbed crosses, hung to rot from the twisted branches of moss-covered swamp trees.
“Why?” Bo asked.
Taniel snorted. “They wanted to show the Kez how savage they could really be. The Kez had offered barrels of whiskey, spices, rifles, horses. Anything they wanted in return for helping take down my unit. We’d caused them a lot of grief over that year.”
“What’d you do in that village?”
Taniel tossed a rock off the edge of the cliff. “Justice,” he said. “I’m not proud. But I don’t regret it either.”
Taniel watched wispy clouds form and roll and disappear with unseen air currents far off their cliff edge. He felt cold suddenly and wrapped his arms about himself. Memories of murder touched his mind, long shoved to the furthest part of his recollection and locked away. Perhaps there were a few things he’d regret.
He shook himself out of his reverie. “Anyway,” he said. “Pole was quite a bit older than the others, but they had taken her just the same. Probably because she was a Bone-eye. I didn’t know what that meant to them. I still don’t. Yesterday was the first time I’ve seen her use her powers for more than just tracking, though I’ve long known she was a Privileged of sorts.” Taniel scrounged about his person and his pack until he found a spare powder charge. He bit the end, tasting the sulfuric powder on his tongue, and snorted half the charge in one go.
Bo was watching him, a worried expression on his face. He edged away from the powder and scratched absently at his exposed skin.