The Ambush of the Sunken Trace

The sunken road was a gorge that water and salt carts had been carving into the limestone for centuries. Its walls rose straight up, covered in ivy and icicles, and at the bottom there was room for no more than two riders abreast. Irati had chosen it for that: the dogs lost the scent in the water at the bottom, and horses couldn't get around them.

Íñigo followed her, legs burning and sandals soaked, jumping from stone to stone where she jumped. He didn't complain. She noticed and said nothing, but at one of the halts she passed him the waterskin without his asking.

"Why are you doing this?" Irati asked him while he drank. "The document. You're one of the ones who win. Your family signs the orders."

"My uncle signs them. My family carries them out." Íñigo wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "For twelve years I've added up what the crown takes from people like your father and written it in a very clean ledger. Last night I read what they planned to do with the rest. I don't know how to add that up."

Irati looked at him as if she were about to say something. She didn't. She slung her bow over her shoulder and went on.

At the bend of the Black Friar she stopped dead and raised her fist.

"Weapon grease and fresh horse dung," she whispered. "Ahead."

They had no time to fall back. Behind them a hunting horn sounded and the gallop of shod horses, and four riders of the Black Guard burst into the sunken road in blued cuirasses with wheellock pistols. Ahead, at the mouth of the bend, two more blocked the way. The captain dismounted with his saber in hand.

"Don Íñigo de Vivar." He said it courteously, almost with regret. "Your lord uncle bids me tell you that nothing is beyond mending. Give me the document and come back with me to Burgos. You keep your office and your safe-conduct. The mountain woman, of course, stays here."

Íñigo felt Irati's eyes on the back of his neck. He thought of the small parchment she kept in her jerkin. He thought of a hot supper, of his auditor's desk, of the clean ledger of accounts.

"My uncle has always been generous with family," he said, and drew his rapier. "With everyone else, not so much."

Irati shot before the captain had finished understanding. Her first arrow took the nearest rider in his pistol arm; the second, a horse in the croup, which reared and threw its neighbor against the wall. In that narrow corridor four men couldn't attack at once. Íñigo parried the first thrust with his guard, clumsily, too high, and the second nearly cost him his hand. Salon fencing was nothing like this. But he held.

"Here!" shouted Irati.

She wasn't looking ahead or behind. She was looking at the left-hand wall, where the ivy hung thick over a crack Íñigo hadn't seen. She pushed aside the green curtain with her bow: behind it was a stone crawlway, narrow, too small for a horse and barely wide enough for a man sideways.

Íñigo backed toward her step by step, his rapier in front of him. The captain saw the crack and came at him. The saber came down on the diagonal; Íñigo put himself between the blade and Irati, who already had half her body inside the crawlway, and felt the blow on his left shoulder like a hot hammer. He didn't drop the rapier. He thrust forward blindly and felt it strike something soft. The captain cried out and fell back.

Irati grabbed him by the belt and pulled.

The crawlway climbed steeply inside the rock, in darkness, for a hundred paces that felt to Íñigo like a thousand. They came out on a snow-covered ledge above the sunken road, among stunted pines. Below they could hear the Black Guard shouting as they searched for another way up and the mastiffs barking at the wall.

Íñigo dropped against a tree trunk. His shoulder was soaked with blood down to the elbow.

"You took a cut that was meant for me, little lord," said Irati, kneeling beside him. She no longer said it with contempt.

"I'll collect in archery lessons."

She tore open his shirt, pressed a handful of moss and pine resin against the wound and bound his shoulder with a strip of her own linen, with firm knots and fingers that didn't shake. When she had finished, she didn't move away. She left her hands on his shoulder a moment longer than needed.

"The captain said it about the safe-conduct," she said quietly. "That you could keep it. And you didn't ask for it."

"You have it."

"That's why."

Below, the barking was moving off southward. But one of the riders, the one with the wounded arm, had galloped off down the Burgos road as soon as the fighting began. He was going for reinforcements, and Irati knew it. She had one night to get a wounded auditor to the saddle.