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"I'm not very good at math."
"Neither am I. Pretty fucking unlikely, though. I'm sure of that."
"I told you I was lucky," Esme said. She struggled out of Will's arms. "Nobody ever listens to me."
"Let me ask you a question, then, and I promise to listen. Who is he" — she jerked a thumb at Will — "to you?"
"My papa," Esme said confidently.
"And who am I?"
The little girl's brow furrowed in thought. "My... mama?"
"Sleep." said the centaur. She placed a hand on the girl's forehead and drew it down over her eyes. When she removed it, Esme was asleep. Carefully, she laid the child down in the grass. "I've seen this before," she said. "I've seen a lot of things most folks never suspect. She is old, this one, old and far from a child, though she thinks and acts as one. Almost certainly, she's older than the both of us combined."
"How can that be?"
"She's sold her past and her future, her memories and adolescence and maturity, to the Year Eater in exchange for an undying present and the kind of luck it takes for a child to survive on her own in a world like ours."
Will remembered the lie he had told the lubin and experienced a sudden coldness. The tale had come to him out of nowhere. This could not be mere coincidence. Nevertheless, he said. "I don't believe it."
"How did you come to be traveling with her?"
"She was ru
"Lucky thing you chanced along." The sergeant patted the pockets of her jacket and extracted a pipe. "There is only a limited amount of luck in this world — perhaps you've noticed this for yourself? There is only so much, and it ca
"Are you telling me to abandon her?"
"In a word? Yes."
Will looked down on the sleeping child, so peaceful and so trusting. "I... I ca
Sergeant Lucasta shrugged. "Your decision. Now we come to the second part of our little conversation. You noticed that I sent my girls away. That's because they like you. They don't have my objectivity. The small abomination here is not the only one with secrets, I think." All the while she spoke, she was filling her pipe with tobacco and tamping it down. "There's a darkness in you that the rookies can't see. Tell me how you came to be traveling by yourself, without family or companions."
"My village cast me out."
The sergeant stuck a pipe into the corner of her mouth, lit it. and sucked on it meditatively. "You were a collaborator."
"That oversimplifies the matter, and makes it out to be something that was in my power to say yea or nay to. But, yes, I was."
"Go on."
"A... a dragon crawled into our village and declared himself king. It was wounded. Its electrical system was all shot to hell, and it could barely make itself heard. It needed a lieutenant, a mediator between itself and the village. To... give orders. It chose me."
"You did bad things, I suppose. You didn't mean to, at first, bur one thing led to another. People disobeyed you, so they had to be punished."
"They hated me! They blamed me for their own weakness!" "Oh?"
"They wouldn't obey! I had no choice. If they'd obeyed, they wouldn't have been punished!" "Go on."
"Yes, okay, I did things! But if I hadn't, the dragon would have found out. I would've been punished. They would've been punished even worse than they were. I was just trying to protect them." Will was crying now.
For a long moment the sergeant was silent. Then she sighed and said. "Killed anyone?''
"One. He was my best friend."
"Well, that's war for you. You're not as bad a sort as you think you are, I suspect. In any case, you're neither a spy nor an agent provocateur, and that's all that really concerns me. So I can leave you behind with a clean conscience." "You can what?"
"You're far enough from the epicenter now that you should be safe. And we'll never rendezvous with our platoon unless we ditch the luck-eater." She unholstered her gun and pointed it at the sleeping child. "Shall we try the monster's luck one last time? Or should I shoot it up in the air?"
"In the air," Will said tightly. "Please."
She lifted the gun and fired. The report shattered the night's silence, but did not awaken Esme.
"Lucky again," Sergeant Lucasta said.
Summoned by the gunshot, Campaspe and Antiope trotted back to the spi
The sergeant, too, leaned down as if to kiss him. Will stiffened involuntarily. But instead, she said. "Listen to an old campaigner: Trouble will follow you so long as the child is in your care." She straightened. "Keep the lodestar to your left shoulder, and then at dawn walk toward the sun. That will take you east — there are refugee camps just across the Great River. Best not dawdle."
"Thank you."
"Let's go, ladies — this war isn't going to fucking well fight itself!" "The cavaliers cantered off without so much as a backward glance.
Will gently shook Esme awake, shouldered his pack, and took her hand. They walked to the dawn and beyond, ever eastward. When Esme tired, he picked her up and carried her. The sun was still low in the sky when he could carry her no longer. Ranging away from the road, then, he found a junk car in a thicket of sumac and made beds for them on the front and back seats. For a time, he slept.
In the village, before driving him out, the lady elders had made Will a bundle of sandwiches and placed a cantrip on his knapsack to alert and alarm him should anybody meddle with it in his sleep.
So now Will found himself sitting bolt upright, fully awake and staring at his knapsack Saligos de Gralloch had opened the driver's side front door and had both hands buried to the hilt in it. He gri
"What happened to your stickfellas?"
"We had a tailing out. I had to kill them. Lucky I chanced on you — otherwise I'd be all by myself."
"Not luck," Will said. "You broke a pin or button in two when you first found the child and hid half among her clothes, against the chance of her slipping away from you. Then, today, you followed the other half here."
"That's very sharp for one who's just woke up." Saligos said appreciatively. "I note, however, that you didn't say 'my daughter,' but 'the child.' So you're not her father after all. I know my peasants. There's got to be some gold on you somewhere, even if it's no more than a single coin to lead you back someday to the crock you buried out behind your croft."
"Nope. Sorry"
"That's too bad." Casually Saligos removed his belt. "You interrupted something yesterday. So, before I make sure as you haven't hid the stuff somewhere about your person, I'm going to tie your wrists to the steering wheel. You can watch while I do her — he nodded toward Esme, still asleep in the back seat — "good and hard."
Will felt the dragon darkness rising up in him, and this time, rather than fighting it down, he embraced it. letting it fill his brain, letting its negative radiance shine from his eyes like black flame.