“Not in the slightest. The god was with me, you see. It was all this marvelous golden fire and everything was… right.”
The soft noise behind them came from Shane. It sounded like pain.
“Anyhow, the tide ran its course and I came to surrounded by corpses. I’d killed a couple of them myself. My arms hurt so badly I could barely lift them. Fortunately all the other paladins had seen baby berserkers before. Istvhan—have you met Istvhan? No? Pity, you’d like him—he bundled me up and took me back home and explained the whole situation, both to my husband and me.”
“Husband?” Somehow it was hard to picture Wren as having been married.
“Of convenience,” said Wren cheerfully. “Poor fellow married me to secure water rights from my father, and didn’t know what to do with me, I’m afraid. He’s dead now. Err, from fever, not anything I did.”
“Good to know,” said Marguerite. “And so you decided to become a paladin?”
“Not much deciding involved. The Saint takes you and that’s the end of the matter. Next thing I knew, I was being assigned weapons and a bunk and spending my days learning how to swing a
sword without wanting to die the next day.”
Marguerite ran the reins through her fingers, grounding herself in the grain of the leather and the raised bumps of stitching. I wonder if all the Saint of Steel’s people had a similar experience, simply going into a battle rage with no idea what’s happening. And how did they come out of it after?
Did some of them never come out again?
She glanced back at Shane, riding behind them. His expression was very still. She wondered how it had happened for him, and what scars it might have left behind.
“And now you work for the White Rat,” she said, carefully skipping over the awkward intervening bit where the Saint of Steel had died. “That always struck me as unusual, I admit, though it obviously worked out well.”
“They needed us,” said Wren, shrugging. “I mean, I love the Rat’s people, but the vast majority are so busy fixing things that it doesn’t occur to them that they might be in physical danger.”
Marguerite thought of Beartongue’s surprising security. “Mm,” she said noncommittally. “Well, if you ever get tired of working with the Rat, I’m sure you could set up as bodyguards.”
“We owe them,” said Shane.
Marguerite turned to look back at him. “Beg pardon?”
“We owe them,” he repeated. “When the god died, they cared for us. Dozens of us fell into a stupor. Most didn’t wake up again.”
Wren stared at her hands. Marguerite thought, So much for skipping over the awkward bit.
“They’re good people,” she said aloud. “And you can’t tell me that Beartongue kept some kind of ledger for that.”
“God, no,” said Wren, making a gesture as if to avert the evil eye. “She would never.”
“Still,” said Shane quietly. “We owe them. For the living and the dead.”
You cannot buy that kind of loyalty. If I were to turn against the Rat, these two would cut me down without thinking twice. On the bright side, it also means that no one is going to be able to bribe or suborn them against me, so long as I stay on Beartongue’s good side.
“All right,” said Wren, obviously changing the subject. “Now your turn. How does one wind up an…er…？”
“Operative,” said Marguerite, lowering her voice. Spies generally did not lie in wait on deserted stretches of country road in hopes of overhearing something incriminating, but old habits died hard.
Foster was riding a few lengths back, not that Marguerite was really worried about him, either. “I fear it’s not nearly as exciting a story as yours.” She sorted mentally through a half-dozen cover stories, and settled on one that was more or less true, though it glossed over some of the grimmer details. “I was a page in the Merchant’s Guild in Anuket City. Most of the pages there are by-blows of the various members, so presumably I was as well.” This was true, in fact, although she knew exactly whose bastard she was. Her grandfather had been a shipping magnate, and when his son had the poor
taste to sire half a dozen children on the wrong side of the sheets, they had all wound up as pages. It was a way to care for them without having to acknowledge anyone, and if any of the youngsters showed talent, they were within easy reach.
Marguerite had indeed shown talent, although not for business. At least, not for the business of trading physical goods. “I was very good at listening. Pages are nearly invisible, and even people who should know better let things slip in front of us. Eventually that talent attracted notice from certain factions within the Guild. First they pay you for information, then they start sending you out specifically to collect more information…” She lifted a hand from the reins and waggled it back and forth. “There’s not a specific point where you wake up and realize that you’re an operative. You just keep going along and meeting more people and chatting to them and learning who is interested in buying what information, and then it’s twenty-odd years later and you’re off to the Court of Smoke, trying to figure out where a stray artificer has gotten off to.”
This was also true, so far as it went. Mostly. If you squinted.
Wren cocked an eyebrow at her. “I doubt it’s as simple as you’re making it sound.”
“No, but I doubt learning to swing a sword was that simple, either.” Wren’s expression made Marguerite want to laugh. “Honestly, being an operative is frequently very boring. For every time you’re smuggling information out of a powerful warlord’s bedroom, you spend a month sitting and watching one particular bar, waiting to see who shows up.” （This was not a lie, but the truth was that these days, Marguerite paid people to sit in bars for her.）
Shane surprised her by offering a comment. “We often marched a great deal,” he said, “and waited a great deal, merely to be in place for a battle that might last less than an hour.”
“Yes,” she said, turning to nod at him. “Exactly like that.” Internally, she exulted that she’d gotten the man to talk at all. Perhaps he simply needs time to warm up to new people. He might even be shy.
A shy berserker. Well, why not?
She would have liked to draw him out more, but unfortunately the road grew busier as they approached a market town, and they went back to riding single-file.
They were passing a drover with a line of bored-looking cattle when disaster struck.
A dog came out of nowhere, barking at the cows. Most of them ignored the animal, but one youngster made a deep sound of alarm and kicked up his heels. The drover turned to get him back in line when the dog darted forward and nipped savagely at another cow’s hocks.
The cow jumped forward, startled, swinging her head to look at the dog. Marguerite’s mare was sufficiently placid that neither the sound nor the motion bothered her much, though she did manage a rather graceless sidestep. Marguerite tightened the reins just as the cow kicked out in a panic.
The cow’s aim was good, if slow. The dog was fast enough to dodge, but dodging put it practically under the mare’s hooves, and suddenly there was a barking dog and a kicking cow and the mare was no longer feeling placid at all. Marguerite had time to think, Oh shit and then the horse