Page 40 of Fate of the Argosi

She hadn’t so much as gestured towards me, but Colfax nodded as if he’d already worked out all the details himself. ‘Argosi, I suppose,’ he said.

‘How’d you know?’ I asked.

Still not bothering to meet my gaze, he brought up one finger in a lazy circle around his face. ‘You all got that look.’

He didn’t need to say anything more for me to know that the rest of that sentence went something like,‘ . . . and I’ve never much liked that look.’

Conch pawed the grass with one of his hoofs. I saw his stomach expanding.

‘Best that spire goat keep his intestinal gases to himself,’ Colfax warned. ‘He’s too small to make a proper supper, but I do enjoy a snack in the afternoons.’

‘Goat’s hard to chew on when you ain’t got no teeth,’ I told him.

Don’t care how big a legend you are, tough guy. Nobody threatens my goat.

Colfax ignored me though, and kept on walking past the line of runaways until he got to us. ‘As for you, miss,’ he said, tipping his hat to Arissa without stopping, ‘you’re welcome to steal anything you like, so long as you don’t mind leaving your fingers behind as payment.’

Okay, the fact that he pegged her as a thief so quickly was alittleimpressive. Arissa nudged me with her elbow. ‘Ooh, a challenge. You in, Rat Girl?’

When he reached Chedran, it was the first time he actually looked one of us in the eyes. ‘You’re the exile,’ he said, again not bothering to make it a question. ‘Murdered a coven of Jan’Tep mages in their sleep a few years back.’

‘Sometimes I murder them when they’re awake,’ Chedran replied.

If he’d hoped that remark would cause the old marshal any unease, then he was sorely disappointed. ‘You won’t be killing anyone on my lands,’ was all Colfax said. No threat, no warning, just a simple, incontrovertible fact.

Ala’tris was about to launch into her third failed attempt at diplomatic discussions. This time it was me who stopped her. ‘Don’t waste your breath, sister,’ I muttered.

She turned to glance at me, confused and mildly irritated at my presumption.

I pointed to Colfax. ‘He ain’t gonna listen until he’s finished his magic trick.’

‘Magic trick?’

The marshal turned from the staring contest he was winning handily against Chedran, who’d been trying so hard to mesmerise the old man he’d given himself what looked to be a painful headache. ‘Argosi,’ Colfax said, imbuing the word with a bucketful of disdain. ‘Rather be dead than let anyone forget how clever they are.’

‘Marshals,’ I shot right back. ‘Rather start a war than let anyone forget how tough they are.’

Colfax chuckled at that. I thought maybe my arta loquit had cracked that stone-faced exterior of his. I was soon corrected when he gave a short, high-pitched whistle through his teeth that set the grey hairs of his moustache to twitching.

There wasn’t so much as a rustle from the tall grasses of the field outside the walls, but I turned anyway, following a slow circle as I counted forty men and women emerging from their hiding places to surround us. Their brown, rough wool farmhand attire was utterly at odds with their soldierly posture. They were pointing long slender iron tubes at Ala’tris, Jir’dan, Gab’rel, Ba’dari and Sar’ephir.

Oh, and at me.

‘Don’t,’ I warned Conch. The spire goat seems to understand only half of what I’m trying to tell him. I hoped this was one of those times.

‘Gitabrian fire lances,’ Colfax explained, referring to the long weapons. His troops held them at their right hip in a two-handed grip, waiting, I presumed, for the cue to twist the two joined halves that would then fire something entirely unpleasant in our direction. Colfax produced a lead ball from the pocket of his grey leather coat and held it up for us to see. ‘Once the powder inside the tube ignites, it sends one of these at the target at around a thousand feet per second.’ His gaze went to Ala’tris and her coven. ‘I’m told the impact is like being hit with both an iron spell and an ember bolt at the same time.’ He tossed the lead ball in the air, then caught it again. ‘The only difference being that my friends over there can twist those cylinders in half the time it takes one of you to cast a spell.’

People who talk about how easily they can kill you rarely intend to do so, but still, this guy was starting to annoy me. ‘Those mages helped save Remeny and the rest of the runaways, you foul-tempered old mule. They’ve risked their own lives to offer the Mahdek elders a chance at a decent future.’

Until that moment nothing had seemed to get through to Colfax. Now, though, he was so moved as to offer me an amused half-smile. ‘A future?’ He turned to Ala’tris, who did an admirable job of not looking terrified of the imposing marshal who could, without a doubt, have had her killed with a simple nod to one of his fire lancers. ‘Thirty years I spent in the marshals service. Tracked down escaped criminals all across this continent. Crossed hundreds of miles, sometimes thousands, just to hunt down a single fugitive.’ Without glancing at me, he asked, ‘You know the difference between a fugitive and a refugee, Argosi?’

I never much liked answering other people’s riddles. This one, though, mattered to him, which meant it was a chance to prove I understood his protectiveness over the Mahdek. ‘A fugitive gets a trial before you kill them.’

He gave no acknowledgement that I’d given the right answer, but it was plain from the way he stared down Ala’tris and her coven. ‘Thirty years of hunting the worst fugitives on the continent. Killers. Rapists. Traitors. None of their deeds held a candle to the foulness I saw left behind by bands of pretty young Jan’Tep mages like all of you.’

‘That’s not—’

It was his grey eyes that silenced Ala’tris this time. ‘I was a marshal. Had a job to do, and that didn’t involve protecting folks who weren’t citizens of the glorious and just Daroman empire. Filed reports though. Dozens of them. Begged the king to convince his regional governors that the Mahdek should be allowed to settle in Darome. Waste of resources, I was told again and again. Too many complications. No Daroman king wants to be the one who started a war with the Jan’Tep.’ He gestured back towards the tall stone walls surrounding his massive estate. ‘When I retired, the king gave me these lands. Reminded me that it’s not within the purview of a retired marshal to set domestic policy for the Daroman empire. On the other ha—’

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