His Own Good Sword (The Cymeriad #1) by Amanda McCrina Read Free Book Online Page B

his mind,
considering. Easy enough to mount pursuit. Embarrassing, especially
with Luchian here—Risto couldn’t even keep his own
body-slave in order. But easy enough, and then the thing would be
forgotten, as if it hadn’t happened.
    But deep inside he knew he wasn’t going to mount a search. The
thing was his own fault. He should have set the Cesino free back in
Vessy, let him go then. Let him take the horse, even. It wasn’t
that the horse mattered so much. It was just that the horse had been
a gift from his father—for once it had been almost a loving
gesture. Well, it wasn’t the horse itself that mattered. His
own fault. (And, damn it all, why had Luchian even been here? Almost
as if he’d known. Maybe he had known—or he might have
guessed. He’d have known you’d be coming through Rien.
But, damn it all to Hell, why’d he have to be here?)
    He’d no intention of coming back to the club. He left the
stable-yard and rode out again onto the Gate Street. At least, he
thought, at least the Cesino hadn’t taken Risun. It was good to
be on his own horse again. Let the Cesino have the black colt; he
still had Risun, and that was how it should be. The Cesino had the
greater need for a fast horse anyway: there was the slave-ring round
his throat, and the penalty for runaways was steep. If only the colt
hadn’t been a gift from his father.

    IV

    He spent the night under a fat old oak tree a little way from the
road, maybe two or three miles beyond the city’s western gate.
He’d slept out often enough on the journey home from Choiro and
he didn’t mind it. It was cool in the nights but not cold, now
summer was here, and with the saddle at the back of his head for a
pillow and the heavy woolen uniform cape over him it wasn’t a
bad way to sleep. In the morning, while Risun nosed at his feed-bag,
he refilled his water-skin at the thin stream running noisily past
the tree and ate a breakfast of flatbread and raisins from his packs.
He was out on the road again by the time the sun was above the
treetops to the east.
    Past Rien to the west was the wilder part of Cesin. The only Vareni
coming through this country were soldiers of the mountain garrisons,
or traveling merchants—slavers, mostly—or troops headed
to and from Carent, which was another fort town three days’
ride south and west of Rien, in the part of Cesino territory that ran
like a peninsula a little way into Varen. Very little civilian
traffic; that was confined mostly to Rien’s southern road,
which led eventually to the port city of Arondy, on the Eastern Sea.
There were still farm villages as you went west, but the people here
were of the old Cesino blood, largely unmingled with Vareno blood,
and few of them spoke the language of the Empire and most of them
harbored a quiet but deep-seated hostility for the Vareni that the
more practical Cesini, or perhaps the less noble-minded ones, had
long ago put aside. Sometimes now, in the dark, mossy hollows by the
roadside, there were the crumbling ruins of old Cesino statues, the
likenesses of tribal kings from before the time of the Varri even,
broken down and overgrown with vines, blackened by age, stone eyes
staring gravely. Altars to the past, or else cynical reminders Cesin
had been independent once, had thought to defy the might of the
Empire—and this is what happens to those who defy the might of
the Empire.
    The road narrowed as he went on and by noon of that day, after he’d
crossed the Carent road and left all other traffic behind, the paving
ended and the road was nothing more than a faint beaten track on the
long green grass, and the ground was climbing up beneath Risun’s
hooves, and in the distance, above the black pine, he could see the
blue heads of the mountains, the tallest peaks crowned with snow,
crisply white in the sun.
    He came to Souvin in the evening of the second day out from Rien. The
sun was falling slowly down behind the mountains and the little
valley and the village