“I’m offering,” Tahlen answered with not even a flicker of humor in his eyes. “Gladly.”
The sound that burst from Zelli was a trifle unsteady but still might have been called a laugh. “Why must you be like this?” he despaired, smiling despite how Tahlen pulled Zelli’s hand to his chest and kept it there. The gesture hurt, somehow, and felt wonderful too.
Tahlen held Zelli’s stare, looking so serious that Zelli’s smile slowly left him.
“I did this wrong,” Tahlen said, drawing his eyebrows together but otherwise almost calm. “I didn’t consider that you wouldn’t know how things are done and I’m sorry if embarrassed you or made you feel…” he hesitated, apparently over what word to use, “uncertain. If you like, I can do better.” His frown cleared, and Zelli imagined Tahlen at fifteen, learning a new way of life and putting his whole being into it. “Iwilldo better.”
The sound of whistling carried over the birdsong and the thunder of Zelli’s heart.
Tahlen turned his head to follow the sound, so Zelli did the same, noting distractedly as he did that the berries had disappeared from beneath the tree.
Ten
The source of the whistling was named Fy, or said he was. He was closer to Zelli’s age than Tahlen’s, reached only Tahlen’s shoulders but was broader, and wore the same sort of thick doublet for armor that Tahlen wore, although his had not had a good scrubbing in some time. He had a blue-green cloak with a torn hem and marks where some embroidery had been plucked out. Zelli guessed that the emblem of a beat-of-four house was what was now missing, not that he needed to guess.
Fy had been whistling merrily when he’d rounded the blackberry thicket and found Tahlen and Zelli waiting for him, but he’d reached for the sword at his belt quickly enough—a sword farmers tended not to carry.
He was also a clever one, or hadn’t wanted to risk harming another sworn guard without cause, because he’d taken a good look at Zelli, taken a better look at Tahlen, and moved his hand from his sword hilt. “Just here to collect some berries,” he’d explained himself, smiling. Zelli didn’t think he’d been lying.
“IfIthought the berries were appealing, of course a group of wayward family guards would think the same,” Zelli had observed, making Fy turn to him with his bushy brown eyebrows sky high.
Tahlen had not been amused. He had Fy’s sword strapped to Starfall and Fy’s various knives in his belt. Fy carried a lot of knives, only one of which was for practical everyday use.
They didn’t have rope, but there was nowhere for Fy to run in any case. He walked ahead of them or sometimes alongside them as he led them across the field to a small wooded area. He glowered a few times about this, a glower that faded whenever Zelli reassured him that he and Tahlen would have known about the woods his friends were in anyway, since outguards had spotted them, and there were few other places Fy could have come from on his way to the blackberry bramble.
“The real question is: how many of you are there?” Zelli mused thoughtfully. “And, I suppose: what are your intentions? And then: what’s to be done with you?”
“Whoareyou?” Fy wondered.
“Mizel,” Zelli answered absently. “This is Tahlen. The odd patch on your cloak, Fy…. What was torn out? The image of a spear and a net? Is that for the Lyralinah?”
Fy clenched his jaw.
Zelli shook his head. “Is it something sworn guards learn? To be silent like that?”
Tahlen simply said, “Zelli,” in warning, as they came closer to the trees. “Stay behind me.”
“They aren’t going to shoot him!” Fy complained indignantly. Sworn guards took offense at the strangest things.
“Then are they going to shoot Tahlen?” Zelli demanded. “It’s not as if you take oaths to not kill anyone, is it? If it’s in defense of your chosen families, or, I assume, yourselves.”
“The oath was to protect first,” someone called out from the trees. “At least, ours was. Not sure about your guard there.”
Tahlen and Starfall stopped, so Zelli stopped too.
“If you’re a representative of the people in this valley, we mean you no harm!” the person added, voice raised, then emerged from the shadows under the trees.
She wasn’t alone. Four others came out with her—four that Zelli could see. Tahlen might have seen more. Two of the people standing at the edge of the trees were visibly injured, one using what looked like a repurposed tree branch as a crutch, the other with an arm bound to their chest.
“You all right, Fy?” asked the older woman who must have been the leader of the group.
“They didn’t hurt me,” Fy replied almost cheerfully. “I didn’t get any berries, though.”
If Zelli were going to try to intimidate others and give the impression of strength, he wouldn’t have brought out his injured guards first. He also liked that she’d asked after Fy. He slipped down from Lemon Blossom and heard Tahlen swear before dismounting.
The sound kept Zelli from going any closer to the trees, but he didn’t move back.
“Six, plus Bree, makes at least seven,” he murmured. “But I don’t think Bree knew they were here since she came from the capital.” He glanced to Tahlen, who had his attention fixed on the guards ahead of them. “Seven explains ten riders. Could even be more than seven.” Zelli turned to the guards again. They were living off berries and whatever they’d scrounged from the area, after hiking across the mountains. If they were like Bree, they had not been prepared for the mountains and had avoided the established paths, which would have made it a hard crossing. They were not starving, but by late autumn, they would be. They were hardly in fighting condition as it was.
