The Conqueror's Shadow by Ari Marmell Page B

animal’s halter. The hem of his cloak and the heels of his boots—all of him Corvis could really see from behind—were worn and frayed, bespeaking a life of constant travel.
    His gestures slow and deliberate, hoping to avoid being heard above the clop-clop of the hooves and the faint rustling of the leaves, Corvis fidgeted at his bonds. All he learned, to his chagrin, was that his captor knew what he was doing: His feet were bound together beneath the horse’s girth, tight enough that he couldn’t possibly kick the beast into sudden movement, and his hands had barely an inch of slack from the pommel to which they were tied.
    He learned, as well, that his captor had sharper ears than Corvis had given him credit for.
    â€œYou might as well relax,” the fellow said in the gruff tone of a man who loved his pipe. “It’s a long journey back east, and it’s not going to get any more comfortable for you.”
    He turned as he spoke, and the sight of his unshaven cheeks and heavy-lidded eyes punched through Corvis’s remaining haze like a ballista. Images of that morning flickered back into memory … The man leaping out at him from where he’d lain concealed in a shallow culvert … Corvis drawing his own weapon in a desperate parry … His attacker’s blade, covered in foreign runes, shearing
clean through
Corvis’s sword as though it were made of so much bread crust …
    And all had gone black, until he woke tied atop this horse. Corvis knew full well that he should be dead now, had his attacker wished it. The man must have struck with the flat of his astounding sword.
    â€œWho are you?” Corvis asked, startled at how gruff his own voice sounded.
    â€œEvislan Kade. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”
    The prisoner swallowed once. “Perhaps” indeed! Corvis took a moment, running mental eyes over the list of enemies he’d made in recent years. (It was, though certainly far smaller than the list he would one day accumulate at the head of a mercenary army, already growing uncomfortably large.)
    Still … “I can’t possibly be worth enough to interest someone like you,” he protested.
    â€œYou’d be surprised,” Kade told him. “As it happens, Colonel Nessarn’s family is more than a little rich, and more than a little perturbed at what you did to him. Now be a good little bounty and shut up for a while, or you’ll spend the rest of the journey gagged.”
    And for four laborious days—days in which Corvis spent all but a few moments tied either to a horse or a tree—that was the extent of their conversation. They traveled along game trails and forest paths, never drawing anywhere near the main highways.Corvis was tired, hungry, and sore, and he was certain that he was nothing but one large bruise from his knees to his hips. Still, he struggled to remain alert, ever watchful for even the smallest opportunity …
    It came in the late morning of that fourth day, as Kade dragged his “bounty” off the horse for an all-too-infrequent rest break. Brusquely he shoved Corvis into a stand of bushes in order to answer nature’s various demands, and Corvis nearly gasped aloud as a clump of thorns gouged rivulets of blood from the skin of his left hand. And then, instead, he smiled, and snapped off the largest of those thorns between his fingers.
    It wasn’t much of a tool, but it was more than Kade expected.
    When evening fell, and the bounty hunter moved toward the horse to truss his captive up against a tree for the night, Corvis had managed to pick and tear through only about half the individual strands that made up the rope about his hands. It would have to be enough.
    A desperate yank against the weakened bonds shredded the flesh of his wrists, but the coils gave way with a vicious snap. Corvis twisted low in the saddle, one hand dropping to the pommel of Kade’s sword even as he