Edith turned and walked back toward her horse. Aurey moved with her. Bram remained standing at the track, looking toward where the trees closed into a solid wall.
The last knight had already taken three steps back toward his horse when something cracked deep in the forest.
The knight turned.
Between two enormous trunks, in the gap where the greenish half-light was thickest, from behind a jutting root ridge, a man appeared. Or rather, what remained of one.
The breastplate of the Green Order had been torn away almost entirely, held only by a single surviving buckle strap at the left side, hanging askew like a jagged shard with ragged edges. Beneath it swung a chainmail shirt, torn in several places so that the links jutted outward in sharp loops. The right pauldron was gone. The left clung on by leather mounting tendons that had lost their shape. Greaves and gauntlets were intact, but coated in a layer of dried mud and dark streaks of dried blood. The face was one solid bruise, with a gash across the left brow swollen shut to a slit, and a split lower lip sealed with a crust.
He walked, pressing his palm against the bark of the nearest giant.
"Sir Aurey!" — shouted the knight who spotted him.
Dane turned immediately, his hand going to the hilt before his eyes had even found the figure.
Edith turned with the others.
The survivor moved slowly, heavily, each step costing him visible effort, and when he lifted his gaze and saw the forest watchmen and the royal party, something in his face changed, not relief and not fear. His lips moved slightly, but there were no words, only the movement of air that assembled itself into no sound.
His palm slid down the bark, his legs folded beneath him, and he fell face-first onto the forest floor.
Bram and two of his men ran quickly to the survivor, and the watch master dropped to one knee beside him, turning him onto his back in a single motion. He pressed two fingers to the neck beneath the jaw and raised his eyes.
"He's still alive."
Edith stood over them, looking at the survivor's face. One of the five missing, there was no doubt: the mark of the Green Order had survived on the intact fragment of the breastplate, a bear's head with elongated fangs, nearly hidden beneath a layer of dried mud.
Aurey stood beside her shoulder to shoulder and said nothing, studying the man on the ground.
Edith frowned, shifting her gaze into the depths of the forest.
"I don't like this" — she said levelly, with no intonation of alarm.
"We leave. Now."
The knights exchanged a glance for a fraction of a second and moved without a word. Two took the sides, a third took the legs, a fourth steadied the head until the body was lifted. The fifth knight stood behind them facing the forest, hand on the hilt. They laid his unconscious body across a horse while the rest of the party were already in the saddle.
As everyone moved quickly back, Bram paused for a moment and looked behind him, toward the direction from which the man had come. A path that began in the dark behind those trees and ended here.
He let his gaze touch the tree trunks around him, the lower tiers of the canopy, the gaps between the root ridges. Where it darkened, where the resinous air hung motionless. Where normally, if you looked long enough, it would begin to seem that something was looking back.
But now there was nothing seeming there. There was simply nothing.
Bram had lived at this boundary for thirty years and had long since stopped fearing what was in the forest. He knew what was there, and he knew how to work with that knowledge. What troubled him was something else, what was absent there, though by all the laws of this place it should have been present. Predators, which ordinarily could scent a wounded quarry from several kilometers away, had not come, for reasons unknown to him.
He followed the others, adding nothing to what had already been said.
- - -
Later, when the sun had already passed its zenith, the streets of Oсkhaven were filled again with the life and noise made by residents who were already anticipating one of the most celebrated cultural events in Waldruhm. Children with wooden swords in the streets were already dividing the air between them, imagining themselves the duelists of the tournament.
At that same time, the corridor of the Green Order's headquarters in Oсkhaven was long and straight, cut into the white stone of the castle wing under the first Borne, and over the intervening centuries it had changed in nothing but the degree of wear on the stone floor beneath the boots of hundreds of men. Narrow arrow-slit windows let in strips of morning light that lay across the flags at even intervals.
Sir Alistair Sterling walked alone, unhurried, his green cloak fastened, his hands free. The two-hander at its belt mounting tapped its scabbard faintly against the armored thigh guard with each step, and that sound was the only one in the corridor until another came from behind.
"Sir Alistair."
Sterling stopped. Turning sideways, he saw that in the corridor behind him stood a knight in full Order plate, gorget fastened, head uncovered, the helmet tucked under his arm. He looked quite young, no older than twenty-five.
Behind his shoulder stood three more, also without helmets, also in full kit. They did not come closer, but they did not disperse either.
Sterling looked at the first one calmly and without hurry, giving him the opportunity to continue. The knight took two steps forward and stopped at a distance that was not yet a breach of decorum, but was already almost bordering on one.
"No disrespect intended, but I want to understand…" — he said, keeping his voice steadier than it apparently cost him.
"Our brothers went out on the Hunt five days ago. Thirteen of ours, not counting other warriors. Two came back. Two, sir. One of them isn't from our Order, a local adventurer, and the other isn't from our lands at all, and that one unconscious. None of ours. And what do we do? We hang flags at the arena and polish our swords for a tournament."
Sterling did not answer immediately. He looked at the knight for exactly as long as it took the man to feel the weight of that silence.
"Have you said everything you wanted to say?"
The knight clenched his teeth. One of the three behind him shifted slightly from foot to foot.
"Foreigners forced their way into the sacred forest. It was their people who angered what lives there. Because of them our brothers are lying somewhere in the depths right now. And that magister from the Trade League is sitting in the castle keep alive and well, while we're here getting ready to entertain the townsfolk."
His voice wavered on the last word.
"Tell me, sir, where is the justice in that?"
Sterling slowly turned to face him fully and took four steps forward, stopping one pace from the knight. He stood a full head taller, forcing the young knight to lift his chin involuntarily to hold a straight gaze. The horizontal scar on the commander's left cheek was particularly visible in the strip of sidelight.
Sterling looked at him without malice and without softness, simply looked, the way a man looks when he has been asked a question and knows the answer exactly, but is still deciding how complete that answer should be.
"What's your name?"
"Sir Rowan Hart… sir."
"Hart." — Sterling repeated the name without inflection.
"You think I don't know how many of ours didn't come back?"
Hart said nothing.
"Twenty-three men went into the forest. Thirteen of ours and ten free fighters." — Sterling said it quietly and without pressure.
"I know their names. Every one. So there's no need to explain to me what happened."
Hart held the gaze, though it clearly cost him effort.
"Then why the tournament, sir? Why now?"
Sterling turned and walked on down the corridor. His voice remained level, directed at the space ahead, but loud enough for all four of them to hear clearly.
"Because the decision was made by neither you, nor me, nor the brothers behind you. Because your queen knows things you do not. And because your business right now, Hart, is to put on your helmet, take your position, and do what you entered service to do."
A pause.
"Justice will come. When the time comes, it will come. And you will see it."
He reached the corner of the corridor and stopped there, not turning back.
"Dismiss."
The three behind Hart exchanged glances. Hart stared at his commander's back for a long second, gripping his helmet under his arm so hard the knuckles went white. Then he turned without a word and walked the other way, while the others moved with him.
Sterling rounded the corner and stopped there, closing his eyes for three seconds.
Opened them.
He looked through the narrow arrow-slit window at the flat, pale strip of overcast sky above the city rooftops, and then moved on.