Free The Silvered by Tanya Huff

of sound began with a musket butt slamming against bone, the impact of a body with the ground, a slight scuffle, and a sudden uneasy silence broken by the baby’s hiccup.
    Captain Reiter turned just far enough Danika could see past him to where Natali lay crumpled on the ground. The others stood glaringbut still, and Marinka’s maid—Danika hated that she couldn’t remember the girl’s name—cuddled little Talia, her cheek pressed against the baby’s golden hair. When the captain turned back, his gesture took in all five of the captured mages. “Is one of you the mother?”
    She did not look at Marinka’s golden-furred body, not wanting to bring the contempt these men had for the Pack down on her child. Hands curled into fists, she could feel her fingernails cutting into her palms. “No.” She didn’t trust her voice with more than the single word.
    “Good.” The captain also did not look, a muscle jumping in his jaw as he stopped himself from turning his head. “Tie the servants. Make sure the girl can tend the baby.” When no one obeyed immediately, his lips drew back off his teeth. “Move!”
    Ryder couldn’t have done it better.
    The thought brought a different kind of pain. Danika whispered her husband’s name, allowing the breeze to take it. It
would
find him.
    She missed the captain’s instructions to the lieutenant, but heard the younger man ask, “Where will you search?”
    Search? And then she remembered. The prophecy had sent these Imperial soldiers into Aydori to capture six mages, not five. Six.
One in six or six in one.
    “She can’t be far.” He glanced back along the long curve of the road toward the city. “I see no carriages heading up from Bercarit, so I’ll take the boys up the road; take a look at what’s around that corner. Move as fast as you can. Don’t wait if you get to the wagons before we catch up.”
    Danika got the impression that the last bit of the captain’s order was more for Sergeant Black than the lieutenant. It seemed that the captain believed the lieutenant less than capable in the woods. That could work in their favor, slowing them enough to allow Ryder to find them before they reached the border.
    As for the sixth mage, Danika had no idea who the Soothsayers could have meant. Only eight of the Mage-pack had been in Bercarit and the three men had gone to stop the advance of the Imperial army. While it was more likely that the Soothsayers’ crazed babbling had been misinterpreted, it was possible that one of the others had been alerted by the refugees arriving in Trouge and was even now heading back toward Bercarit to help.
    Barely parting her lips, she breathed out a warning. Unrestrained, any one of the Mage-pack could send these Imperials across the border, tails between their legs.

    They retrieved their packs before moving into the woods, both to cut off the corner and maintain the element of surprise. Reiter could hear raised voices even before they regained the road.
    At his left shoulder, Chard snickered. “Someone’s gettin’ an earful, Cap.”
    “Captain.”
    “Sergeant Black calls you…”
    “You’re not Sergeant Black. You haven’t earned the right.” Without Black, Chard would push. But Reiter had been a sergeant once himself; he could handle young men with delusions of experience.
    The carriage, pulled as close to the far side of the road as it could go without putting the far wheels in the ditch, was a little smaller than the three they’d stopped. Reiter knew squat about carriages, but it seemed of similar quality—shiny reddish-brown paint, tarted up with unnecessary brass. No wolf’s-head crest, so it was unlikely it belonged to the mage they sought. Still, the Soothsayers had said
six
, six at this place in the road and it was the only carriage in sight.
    The upper-class woman leaning out the open door, one hand clutching the overcoat of the equally upper-class man standing on the road, was clearly demanding he get back in. Some