Halfbreed cut in. “I really don’t give a fig about your followers.”
Far from being offended, the god smiled knowingly. “You can pretend all you want, Brak, but I know you’re mine.”
“Is that right?”
“You’re a bandit , Brakandaran,” the god pointed out with a smug grin. “You have been for years, now. That puts you right up there with the burglars and the pickpockets.”
“I am at the moment,” Brak admitted, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, as if he was torn with indecision. “But there’s a war about to start soon, you know. I can already feel myself being tempted to abandon my life of larceny for the noble pursuit of war.”
“What do you mean?” Dace demanded.
Brak forced himself not to smile. “I’m just saying, Dace … It’s going to be hard to resist swapping the joys of robbing fat merchants in the Widowmaker Pass when the higher calling of dealing out death to the poor, unsuspecting Hythrun beckons. All for the greater glory of Zegarnald, the God of War, of course.”
“I hope you’re joking.”
Brak spun around to find Dace had vanished as Chyler Kantel approached from the trees behind him.
In her own way, Chyler Kantel was a queen and her kingdom was the Sunrise Mountains around the Widowmaker Pass. Admittedly, the bulk of her subjects made their living from robbing caravans in the pass, but there was far more to Chyler’s Children than simple banditry. Every village in the mountains paid homage to her and in return, Chyler and her ragtag band supplied them with the protection Hablet’s army wasn’t interested in providing, along with selling them goods relieved from the caravans raided in the pass.
It was the reason, Brak knew, he’d stayed in the mountains with the bandits for so long. Here, among Chyler’s Children, he could fight regularly and maybe if he was lucky, some young, hot-blooded caravan guard would get the better of him someday, and he might die. In the meantime, along with honouring Dacendaran, he occasionally got a chance to help the villagers in the region. It went some way to making up for what he’d done.
Chyler was bundled up against the cold in a fur-lined coat similar to Brak’s (also stolen from a passing caravan), two layers of wool under her leather trousers and high, sheepskin-lined boots. There were silver streaks in her thick red hair these days, and laughter lines around her eyes that remained even when she wasn’t laughing. Chyler was still as handsome and as lithe as a woman half her age. She was tough, too, in a way Brak found quite beguiling. He had seen her kill as coldly as an assassin and an hour later found her crying like a child when she was forced to put down a sickly dog.
Chyler stopped behind him on the ledge, looked around curiously and then fixed her gaze on Brak. “Who were you talking to?”
“The God of Thieves.”
Chyler smiled. “If anybody else told me that, I’d swear they were crazy. But with you … Did he have anything interesting to say?”
“The gods rarely do,” he said. “Mostly he was just whining about how Zegarnald and the other gods are getting stronger because there’s a war on the way, which means he’s getting weaker.”
“He’s got a point,” Chyler agreed, stepping up next to Brak as she studied the vast war camp below. “We won’t be robbing fat merchants—or any other kind—for quite some time, once that lot starts moving through the pass. I actually feel sorry for the Hythrun.”
“ You ? Pitying the Hythrun? There’s something I never thought I’d live to see.”
She shrugged. “Well, first they get slaughtered by the plague and now, when they’re at their weakest, Hablet’s going to overrun them, and with the borders closed, they don’t know anything about it. Doesn’t seem fair, really.”
“Not a lot about war is fair, Chyler.”
“Do you think someone should warn them?”
“Who? The Hythrun?”
“No,” Chyler replied, rolling her eyes. “The bloody