The Chronicle of the Worthy Son

Sharp

"I'll never speak of it." Fullbrook chuckled as well.

Able rested his head on Fullbrook's shoulder, then relaxed his eyes followed by his neck and finally his breath as he gamely considered this wasn't much more awkward than the dead woman's room he'd been using in Fairbanks. Right now he missed it.

~*~

Likely the sun was high in the sky above the clouds and trees that shrouded the procession. The road was winding and narrow, and the enforcers often had to dismount to help the wagons along through the mud. Several times there was talk of abandoning said wagons, but so far consideration for the wounded and the hungry prisoners had prevailed.

Able listened to the bird songs, distant hollow echoes throughout the endless halls of living timber. He had been trying to, as something to do, categorize them—figure out which cries sounded at which times of day and in which kinds of copses. And then he heard a particular bird cry that he had been hoping not to.

"I'm out of the house for a couple weeks, and this is what you get up to?"

Able, along with everyone else in the convoy, strained to see where the voice came from. They had just rounded a bend and a pile of decomposing trees lay across the road not a far stretch from their position. A man wearing all black stood atop this pile, hands on his hips.

"You," Tanner sputtered, torn between disbelief and fury.

"Aw, Tanner, you're not happy to see me? After all we've been through together? I suppose that explains why you didn't inquire after my health." And with a melodramatic sigh, the Shadow demolished all of Able's desperate hopes that the Resistance had simply dressed another member in black. He found himself with the paradoxical impulse to harm someone for having put themselves in harm's way.

"I had thought I'd finally put you in a grave," Tanner growled as he looked about for further ambush. His gray horse was snorting and dancing in place, though it might have only been responding to its master's mood and not smelling more danger in the woods.

"So unfriendly!" the Shadow chided. "To be expected, though, what with your mother too busy cavorting to spend time teaching you social graces."

"Form up a perimeter," Tanner barked and drew his sword. "If he wants our prisoners, he's going to have to come get them."

"Was that an invitation?" The Shadow sat down with a sigh. "I think I'll pass this go-round. Not going to be my kind of party, I'm afraid."

"Senior Deputy!" the rear guard called in alarm.

Able turned and was similarly alarmed to see a number of gray-clad fighters emerging from between the trees holding spears. As these formed a line on the path behind them, more rose up from behind other foliage all around with drawn bows.

Tanner's obvious vexation quieted that moment. Perhaps he had finally realized there would be no getting the paste back in the tube. Whatever his thoughts, he was quiet for all of one second. "Kitland, grab Herder. Hightown, Mulberry. To me!" and with that he led a charge, either at the roadblock or the Shadow.

The Shadow rolled back over the woodpile and out of sight well before the horses carrying men with drawn swords got to him. A choir of resonant clicks rose above the thunder of hooves—the archers had loosed. But all of the enforcers, including the two wounded ones that had been pulled aboard behind their comrades as Tanner ordered, and most of the horses managed to get past the obstruction unfeathered.

The ones with spears put them up and raced to the wagons where they began cutting the prisoners loose and urging them to run. Able's bonds were not ignored in the frenzy of slashing, but he remained crouched in the wagon while the others fled the now growing thunder of hooves. Able peeked over the wagon side to see the horsemen had come about and spread out through the brush. The archers fled behind the spearmen who rallied into a defensive line, but the horses swarmed around them and bore down on the stumbling prisoners.