Chapter 3: Chapter Three

Chapter Three

“You’d really kill a prisoner?” Corwin asked as he watched the woman get heaved over into the back of a wagon.

“I wouldn’t enjoy it.” Speranzi remarked, “But sometimes you can’t keep them. Back when the Demon God was rampaging we had to get rid of a lot of prisoners, some theirs, some ours that we rescued, ones too weak to move. If that one,” she inclined her head toward the wagon, “proves a problem? Dangerous? Or otherwise? I might show mercy out of curiosity, but I won’t put the lives of my men at risk over it. Besides, maybe she’s wanted or something, she might be worth more alive. If the gods want her dead though, she can hang just like any other bandit. For now though, I’d like to make sure nobody made her be with that lot.”

“Made her?” Corwin asked and looked in the direction of the cart, the helmeted woman was inching her way up into a seated position, wiggling around on a sack full of beans.

“A peasant girl in a camp with a few hundred bandits could have a lot of ways to end up there, pretty well all of them are bad ones. Could be she was born with them, some bandit tribes grow pretty large and last a long time before someone comes along and puts them down. The Demon God rampaged about six years ago, she could have been taken when she was a girl. Could be she fell in with them for other reasons and thought a quick smash and grab would go her way. Or?” Speranzi gave a full shoulder shrug, “Maybe none of that, maybe she shadowed the bandits and joined in to snatch something in the confusion.”

Corwin scratched his thinning brown hair.

“Whatever it is, if she’s some pathetic wretch that got caught up and forced into being here, I’d rather not kill her if I’ve got a choice. It’s just not just to kill those who’re forced to be guilty.” Speranzi remarked offhand, any further conversation was cut off however when the smoke began to rise from within the forest, along with the sounds of scattered fighting.

Steel clashes reached their ears and Corwin felt his heart skip a beat, he instinctively stepped back from it and waited in silence while his hired bow put herself in his path. She didn’t reach for one of her remaining arrows, but she did take up a draw stance with one foot back, ready to draw if needed, the remaining fifty of her soldiers quickly rushed into the wagons and struck duel stances, the front rank down on one knee, the other behind them standing at the ready. The front rank nocked arrows ready for the draw, the rear rank only grabbed and readied them in a loose grip.

Servants and aspiring merchants rushed for the wagons and either hid beneath them or behind the black armored mercenaries. “I think you’re going to lose some apprentices after this.” Speranzi said with a little laugh, she didn’t look back to see her ward, but she could feel his befuddlement.

“You don’t think you can protect them from whatever’s out there?” He asked, sweat sprang to his brow, in the years he’d known her she’d never expressed such a doubt before.

She shook her head, “This is just a precaution,” she waved her gloved hand toward her readied double line, “whatever is out there,” she nodded toward the forest, “is just remnants, old bandits, sick bandits, it looks like we found a tribe, or so I’m guessing. They’re no match for the ones to go out there.”

“Then why-?” Corwin let the statement hang.

“You’re a lot braver than you look, Corwin Amber. A lot braver than you look.” She let out a hearty laugh and waited while the silence stretched out.

The wait was not a long one, the smoke continued to rise, but the noise of fighting died down only minutes after it began.

The trees rustled and swayed, the noise of scattering birds and other wildlife continued on, and a few at a time in a long line of Black Quivers appeared in the treeline. Their armor was stained with blood and a handful of them clutched injuries to their arms or a gash to their cheeks, but most appeared no worse for wear.

Those who came with them however, were not so lucky. A handful of bare chested men from very young to relatively old came stumbling with them carrying crates and barrels, they almost all bore some form of injury and struggled to move despite the pain etched on their bearded faces.

Speranzi’s glare hardened when more people followed the bandits that were being forced to surrender their hard gained plunder, these were mostly young women. They bore bruises on their faces and several struggled to walk on wobbly legs, to call them underfed would have been to say that a crust of bread was a feast.

The pathetic rags were once intact, if loose peasant clothing, and all of it bore spattered bloodstains of varying degrees of age.

Their hair was matted and their feet were bare, but most of all she saw the despondent, hopeless look in their hollow eyes. At the front ranks of the captives, the senior most of her soldiers shouted, “It’s done, My Lady. It wasn’t really a tribe, just a coalition, I guess they must have raided a village fairly recently because we found these in one tent, and a fair amount of food still uneaten.” He pointed behind himself toward the disheveled rescues that trudged forward, “Not that it did them much good. They haven’t eaten in a week.”

As woods were gradually left behind and the underbrush and bushes no longer barred the way, the towering soldier jogged lightly over to his commander. “Ma’am, what do we do with them? Do we take them on to the nearest city, do we drop them at a town?”

Speranzi rubbed her jaw, “They’re bandits taken in combat. They’re guilty by default, but… bad by desperation and bad by nature aren’t the same thing… did you take the leader, or is he dead or fled, Zaxa?”

“That one seemed to be in charge.” The towering Zaxa pointed to a particularly burly bandit with arms thick as tree trunks and an ugly, potato shaped head. He snarled and bared teeth that were large enough that Speranzi wondered if he had orcish blood in him, a dozen wounds covered his body and he maintained his glower even while obviously favoring one leg and his alternate foot raised so it was off the ground.

“Wait here.” Speranzi muttered and approached the line of prisoners and rescues. The peasants instinctively knelt, a few beginning to sob as her terror inducing eyes found the lot of them one by one. ‘They must wonder if they’ve hopped out of the stew pot directly into the cookfire.’ She suppressed her mental sigh at the obvious terror her face induced, but forced herself to carry on. “I don’t have a lot of room for prisoners. But I like to think I’m fair and just, in my own way. If any of you want to speak against any of these,” she pointed to the bandits her soldiers held swords against, “I’ll believe you. Tell me that man deserves to die, and he will die.”

“You.” She pointed to a woman who was probably once quite pretty, with ink dark hair that was torn out in places, a recently split lip, and amber eyes that had been dulled by ill treatment. “What do you say?”

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The woman cast herself down on her face, rubbing it into the mud near Speranzi’s feet, “I swear he never touched us!”

Down the line she went, one by one, each woman insisting the giant of a bandit had done, but for Speranzi, it didn’t mean what the bandit himself seemed to think it did.

She drew out her knife and held the clean, polished steel up, angling it so that she could see behind her. The broad behemoth was still in obvious pain, his multitude of wounds seeming to only barely impact his ability to move, and more importantly, it didn’t stop his ability to make a smug expression, almost leering.

“I have seen your testimony.” Speranzi said, then spun around in a blur of motion and launched her knife from her hand and into the disbelieving reaver’s thick, meaty throat.

He looked at her, then at the peasants, then back to her again and tried to speak.

Only gurgles came out as he immediately began to choke on his own blood.

“And I pronounce you guilty.” She said as the tree-like behemoth began to fall, when he fell to his knees he and Speranzi were eye level, his eyes smoldered with a mix of hate and confusion as his strength left him.

“Their fear and your arrogance were the testimony I wanted. Mouths can lie, but bodies? Those have a much harder time of it.” She answered the question he could no longer ask, and added, “Let me help you.” She then in one smooth motion swiped the dagger back out, his eyes widened, and the mountain of manflesh swayed like one of the trees they so recently left, and he fell backward with a soft thud, arms splayed out and eyes staring up at the gray sky while he choked on his own final words.

Speranzi wiped her blade on the cleanest part of his shirt, lingering over him, hovering over him so that her face loomed like some horrifying sun, her eyes boring into his, the strands of straw colored hair like some perversion of the warming yellow rays of light. “You don’t deserve to see anything beautiful before you die.” She hissed down at him, eyes boring in while he shook with fear for the first and final time.

A whimper passed his lips, childish, infantile, weak, and desperate.

And then nothing. He lay still.

“They said he didn’t deserve to! They said he was-” The protests of the surviving bandits died when Speranzi straightened up and sheathed her dagger.

“If they said it about you, would they mean it?” She asked and turned her withering gaze on them one by one.

Whether it was fear or some lingering sense of shame in their filthy souls, Speranzi couldn’t be sure, they looked down at the ground while wet spots formed in the crotches of their pants. ‘Fools or no, they read their fate.’ She concluded and looked over to the cluster of peasant captives. They looked at the dead bandit and up at the killer and then darted their eyes back at the dirt.

Speranzi turned her back to them, “You received justice from one of them. Do the rest deserve the same or not?” She asked, and without the fearsome eyes of the mercenary commander on them, and in sight of the corpse of the worst of them, their spirits were unchained.

“Kill them! Kill them! Kill them allllllll!” They howled like banshees, a cry started by one in their number, it became like a battle cry for the rest, hollow eyes filled with fire and fueled by hatred, it was only the presence of the armed Quivers and Speranzi herself who kept the survivors alive.

“We don’t need the labor, just take the ears for bounty, and I’ll bet that one’s head is worth something.” She pointed to the dead mountain of a man who still stared up at the unfeeling sky. “How’d you bring him down anyway?” She asked, raising an eyebrow, “I know my followers are good but… really?”

“We caught him on the squat.” A sheepish young soldier said, rubbing the back of his head as if his mother’s praise was wholly undeserved, “A few arrows while he was busy shit’n, he never had a chance to use mana.”

Speranzi almost laughed and pointed to the kneeling bandits, “An extra ale for whoever got those shots in.” She said with a sharp nod of approval, “Fair fights are for fools, duels, and dead men.”

She left just as her soldier’s kicked the now blubbering bandits toward the liberated captives, and did not stay to watch the reason the new captives and the old alike howled in common.

The rest of her band had already separated the captured supplies, sorted out the weapons, and the pyres of corpses were steadily burning. In short, ‘All in a good morning’s work.’ She put her fingers in her mouth and whistled toward the heavy figure of Corwin Amber, “Round them up! I’d like to reach civilization by nightfall!” She shouted as soon as he turned to see who called for his attention.

He didn’t have a commanding voice nor a noble visage, but between his rich, enchanted traveling clothing and his sheer size… regardless of the shape it took, he commanded attention. And if she were being honest, his shouting voice wasn’t that bad.

“Now for a peaceful trip south.” She said to herself as she sought to make the ancient gods of men laugh in the way people always had, by speaking their plans out loud.

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