“Bjorn?” says the foreman. “Bjorn! Damn you, get your ass into gear!”
“No,” he says softly.
“What? No? No to what?”
“No to this,” says Sigrud. “I am not this, not anymore.”
The foreman strides over to him and grabs his arm. “You’ll be whatever I damned well say you a—”
Sigrud turns, and suddenly the foreman’s head snaps back sharply. Then Sigrud twists him, turns him, and slams the man down on the ground. The foreman lies on the ground clawing at his neck, choking and coughing, and it takes the other loggers a moment to realize the Dreyling struck him in the windpipe, a single, quick blow that was so fast the eye could hardly perceive it.
Sigrud walks to the cart, grabs an ax, and walks back to the sprawling foreman. He holds the ax out with one hand until the tip of its blade hovers before the foreman’s nose. The foreman stops coughing and stares at it, eyes wide.
The ax hangs in place for a long time. Then Sigrud seems to deflate a little, shoulders slumping. He tosses the ax away and strides into the night.
He packs up his tent and belongings before they gather enough sense to come after him. He makes one final stop on the way out of camp, filching a spade from the camp’s wares. He can already hear his foreman’s shouts echoing over the campfires, his voice crackling like wax paper: “Where is the bastard? Where is the bastard?”
He sprints across the clear-cut fields to the lower forests, a scarred moonscape of ravaged trees, pale and gray in the bright moonlight. He slows down only when he falls into the shadows of the firs. He knows these grounds, knows this terrain. He knows how to fight in these conditions far more than the loggers do.
He stops briefly at the top of a gully, boots perched on a coiled root. His heart is hammering. Everything feels faint and distant and horribly wrong.
Dead. Dead.
He shakes himself, trying to compartmentalize it. He feels tears on his cheeks and shakes himself again.
She can’t be dead. She simply can’t be.
He cocks his head and listens: the loggers aren’t following him, or at least not yet.
He looks up at the moon and gauges his location. He skulks through the forest, all the old tradecraft returning to him: his toes find soft needles rather than brittle, snapping twigs; he keeps to highways of crisscrossing shadows, mindful of any glinting metals on his person; and when the wind rises, which it rarely does, he is careful to sniff the air, searching for any foreign scents that might betray a pursuer.
He spies scarred trees, amputated branches—landmarks he left behind to guide him back to what he left here. To lead him back to the man he buried, or tried to.
He comes to one leaning, dead pine tree, a long, sloping scar on its face. He sets down his pack and starts to dig. He’s in shock, he can tell, and he digs faster than he means to, using up precious energy that he should be saving. Still he digs.
Finally the tip of his spade makes a quiet clunk. He kneels and scrapes the rest of the soil away. Inside the hole is a leather-wrapped box, about a foot and a half wide and a half a foot deep. He pulls it out, hands trembling, and tries to unwrap the leather, but his ax gloves are too unwieldy. Glancing over his shoulder, he removes them.
The bright, shining scar on his left hand seems to glow in the moonlight. He winces at the sight of the scar, which almost has the look of a brand, a sigil seared into his flesh, representing two hands, waiting to weigh and judge. It’s been months since he’s seen it, since he’s revealed it to the waking world. An odd thing, it suddenly seems, to conceal a part of one’s own body for days on end.
He unwraps the leather. The box is dark wood, its clasp still bright and clean. He’s moved this package several times, whenever he had to move to a new job, but never opened it.
The trembling in his hands grows as he unclasps the box and lifts the lid.
Inside the box are many things, any one of which would cause his fellow loggers’ eyes to pop clean out of their heads—most notably, probably, the seven thousand drekel marks wrapped into tight little bands, probably three times what a logger makes in a year. These he goes about stuffing into various hidden places in his clothing: the cuffs of his shirt, his coat, his pants, the false bottom of his pack that he personally stitched into place.
Next he tends to the seven different POTs wrapped in wax paper: papers of transportation, allowing the holder free passage throughout the Continent and Saypur. He unwraps them, shuffling through the names and identities—all Dreyling, of course, as he can’t exactly hide his race, though he has shaved his head and beard in an effort to distance himself from his old life—not to mention purchasing a false eye. Wiborg, he thinks as he rifles through them, Micalesen, Bente, Jenssen…Which one of you is compromised? Which one of you will they watch for, after all these years?
He wonders briefly why he’s doing this, what his next step is. But it is easier to just keep moving forward, hurtling through the motions like a stone rolling down a hill.
Beside the POTs is a bolt-shot pistol: a small, crossbow-like device that falls well short of a true weapon of war, but should be capable of a single silent, lethal shot, provided it has held up in the months underground. The next item at first appears to be a bundle of lambskin, but as he slowly unwraps it, it proves to be an old, well-cared-for knife in a black leather scabbard. He carefully folds the lambskin and stores it away—one never knows what one might need—and pulls the knife out of its scabbard.
The blade is as black as oil. It has a wicked sheen to it, the glint of metal that has tasted a great deal of blood.
Damsleth bone, he thinks. He holds up a pine needle and swats at it with the knife, using the barest amount of force; the needle parts cleanly, splitting in half. Retains its edge, he thinks, for decades and decades.
Though now, he knows, all the damsleth whales are surely gone: some due to whaling, which he himself pursued as a young man, and others either moved away or perished from the changing climate, the cooler waters killing off or dispersing all their food sources. He’s never seen another damsleth weapon besides his own, nor has he ever heard of one still in existence.
He sheathes the knife and buckles it to his right thigh. The motion comes back to him in an instant, and it brings with it all the memories of those days in the field, waging silent, shadowy warfare against countless enemies.
And memories of her, the woman who was always by his side for all of it.
“Shara,” he whispers.
They were closer than lovers—for love, of course, is a flighty, mercurial thing. They were comrades, fellow soldiers whose literal survival depended on one another, from the moment she dug him out of that miserable little jail cell in Slondheim to the days of reconstruction after the Battle of Bulikov.
He wilts a little, crumpling over at the edge of the hole.
I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it.
Sigrud had always felt that, despite his long years in fugitive exile, Ashara Komayd—or just “Shara” to her friends—would reach out to him one day; that she’d somehow ferret him out amidst all the lowlifes and roustabouts he worked alongside, and he would receive some secret message, some letter or a postcard, maybe, saying she’d done her work and cleared his name, and he could come back to her, he could go back to work on one last operation, or perhaps return to his home.