Reluctantly, Styke found his boots and climbed to his feet, glaring at Ibana through the darkness. “I was enjoying the quiet.”
“It’s not going to be quiet much longer. Rumor has it Flint has a plan up her sleeve, and it includes us making a move before sunup.”
“Is that why you woke me up?” Styke made a fist, then stretched out his fingers, repeating the motion to loosen the muscles.
“No. Something else.”
“Pit.” He thought about ignoring her and throwing himself back to the ground in a futile effort to get a few more hours of sleep. If this was really important, Ibana would have woken up everyone. “Okay, fine. What do you want to show me?”
Ibana led him through the lancer camp and out through their eastern pickets. They didn’t exchange another word until they were well beyond earshot of the guards; then she said, “How is your hand?”
“Fine.” Styke, midstretch, buried his left hand in his pocket. “Why? Celine telling you stories?”
“She’s worried about you.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m more worried about you telling a little girl that I need to stop feeling sorry for myself.”
Ibana paused briefly before continuing their walk. “And I need to teach her how to keep secrets.”
“Not from me, you don’t.”
“Every girl keeps secrets from her dad,” Ibana said with a note of bemusement. “Just like every boy keeps them from his mom.”
Dad. What an odd notion. Styke had no way of knowing if he had a few bastards scattered around Fatrasta, but he’d certainly never thought of himself as a father. But with Celine, it felt right. “I wouldn’t know.”
Another pause. “Sorry.”
Styke rolled his eyes. Thirty years or more since his father murdered his mother. It was underhanded to play that card, but he was tired and irritable and Ibana hadn’t yet told him why she was dragging him all the way out here. “It’s fine. What’s going on here, anyway? You didn’t wake me up to ask after my health.”
“No,” Ibana said, “I didn’t.” She gestured ahead of them, and Styke looked up to see the distant outline of a small farmhouse with a light flickering in the single window. He scowled, curious, but allowed Ibana to lead him onward until they were almost to the house. It was an old farmsteaders’ plot, a one-room home with rotting timber walls and a low sod roof.
“Who lives here?” Styke asked.
“No idea. We found it empty, but it seemed apt for our needs.”
“What needs were …?” Styke trailed off as Ibana opened the door and they both stepped inside. Everything of value had been cleared out of the house, leaving bare walls and a dirt floor. A single lantern hung from the rafters and illuminated three men. Styke recognized two of them: Markus and Zac were a pair of Brudanian brothers in their midthirties, ugly as sin and dressed in rags that helped them blend in when they were out scouting. The brothers were old Mad Lancers, two of the original group that had helped Styke terrorize the Kez Army all those years ago.
The third figure was a bigger man, kneeling between the brothers with a burlap sack over his head and hands bound behind his back.
“Afternoon, Colonel!” Markus said cheerily, snapping a salute.
“It’s the middle of the night, you twit,” Zac told him.
“Don’t make no difference. Night, afternoon, all just a construct of the modern man.”
“Oh, don’t start this shit again.”
“It’s true! If it weren’t for man, the sun in the sky wouldn’t care what we called each particular time of day. Why, I bet—”
Styke cleared his throat and Markus’s mouth shut. Styke glanced at Ibana, who’d taken up a spot by the window and now stood watching the small group impassively. “What’s all this?” Styke asked her.
Ibana nodded at the two brothers. They exchanged a glance, and Zac spoke up. “It’s a little bit of a story, Colonel, sir, if you don’t mind me telling it.”
“Make it short,” Styke said, though his curiosity was piqued. He squinted at the kneeling man, wondering who was hidden beneath that burlap. He had the distinct impression he knew the prisoner.
“You remember the day they took you to the firing squad?”
Markus punched his brother in the shoulder. He hissed, “Of course he remembers, fool. Don’t be insensitive!”
“Right, well …” Zac cleared his throat. “Markie and I, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that day.”
“Me too,” Styke said slowly.
“On that day, the Blackhats came and took our weapons, then carried you away. They put you to the firing squad before we could organize ourselves and afterward they didn’t even leave us a body. We had a funeral for you the next day.”
“That’s touching,” Styke interrupted, “but I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“He said short, you prick,” Markus whispered. He cleared his throat and took up where his brother left off. “What he’s getting at is this, sir: There were four of us missing from the funeral.”
Styke felt his eyes narrow and now he couldn’t take his gaze from the kneeling form. He was beginning to have his suspicions about who was under that burlap bag, and about where this story was going. It was not a direction he wanted to follow.
“Thing is, sir, we gave up our weapons because four of us convinced the rest that the Blackhats were going to give them right back. And those four that made that argument … well, they weren’t at your funeral. So a couple years ago, me and Zac decided to track them down. Did some asking, dug around a little bit in back channels. All four of them wound up with a windfall from Lindet’s regime right after the war. They got paid off for something, sir.”
“You’re saying they betrayed me?” Styke asked bluntly. He resisted the idea—he didn’t want to consider that any of his lancers would turn on him—but slowly, it began to make sense. His memories of the day were fuzzy at best, but he remembered an argument among the lancers before they were disarmed. There was no way Fidelis Jes could have managed that without inside help.
“They betrayed us,” Ibana said.
The brothers looked at Ibana for a long few moments before Markus ducked his head toward Styke. “Three of them weren’t hard to track down. We’ve been keeping an eye on them since. But this one”—he nudged the kneeling figure with one boot—“he hasn’t been seen since. We found him with the refugees yesterday.”
Styke took a step toward the kneeling man and jerked the sack off his head, discarding it in the corner. The face that blinked up at him was familiar, if aged a decade. He was in his forties, roughly the same age as Styke, and had graying brown hair and a wispy beard. He had a thick neck and muscular shoulders, which had made him a fantastic lancer, and he blinked up at Styke’s face impassively. His left eye was swollen nearly shut by a recent shiner, and Styke wondered which of the brothers had given it to him.
“Sergeant Agoston.”
Styke remembered Agoston as an implacable figure, unruffled by burned villages and slaughtered enemies. He’d been a sword-for-hire before the war and joined up with the lancers for the spoils, always ready to go through the pockets of the dead after a battlefield. Styke had considered Agoston a friend—not close enough for secrets, but a man he’d share a beer with at the end of the day.
Agoston glanced at Ibana, more irritated than afraid, and gave a deep sigh. “Styke,” he replied. “I’m not a sergeant anymore. Haven’t been since the war.”
“Yeah? And what have you been up to since the war?”
“A little bit of this, a little of that.”
Agoston’s nonchalance suddenly touched something within Styke, and he could feel a rage building deep in his stomach. “And this story the brothers are telling me? What do you make of that?”
“A bunch of rubbish.”
Ibana snorted. “He’s lying.”
“I am not,” Agoston protested.
“I played cards with you for eighteen months, asshole. You look down and to your left when you bluff.”