CHAPTER 23

Treachery

IT WAS TOO soon to look for his kinsmen’s return. Riagil í Molan had no reason for concern until a trader of the Akhendi clan named Orin í Nyus brought him a handful of bloodstained Gedre sen’gai, an earring that belonged to Aryn with a wizened bit of flesh still clinging to the silver hook, and a Skalan gorget.

He rode out at the head of a search party that same day, with the Akhendi as their guide. The trader led them a day and a half up the coast, to a little ravine in a wooded pass. He’d seen the crows circling over it, he explained, and followed them to the pile of stripped bodies piled by a stream at the bottom.

Aryn was there, with the rest of the escort. Of Seregil and his talimenios, however, there was no sign.

“Could they have done this, Khirnari?” his cousin Nurien asked, with one hand over his nose to block out the stench.

The old man bent to examine the bodies more closely. In addition to sword wounds, he found the stumps of broken-off arrows in most of them. He pondered this for a moment. Then, asking his kinsman’s forgiveness, he cut one of the broken shafts from Aryn’s body. The barbed, intricately incised steel head was unmistakable. “This is the Zengati work.”

Nurien shook his head. “Slavers, this far inland, and this far east?”

“It’s less than a day’s ride to the sea from here,” Orin í Nyus pointed out. “They could have put in at any of a dozen smuggler’s coves.”

Riagil nodded and turned to wash his hands in the stream, already composing a letter to Queen Phoria.