Tanya and the mare exchanged a quick glance. Tanya was tangled in the mare’s stirrups and there was no time to shake her loose. The mare neighed sulkily and then tore through the barn door with Tanya on her back, sending planks and splinters flying.
An arrow whizzed past Tanya’s ear. The tavern’s door opened and out spilled the townsfolk, looking wide eyed at the careening golden warhorse carrying a scrubby girl barely hanging on to her saddle. The mare looked around wildly, shaking wood shavings out of her ears. Tanya watched as the boy in the oversize scholar’s robe pushed his way to the front of the crowd and dropped his jaw. She only had time to shrug at him before the mare crashed into overgrown brush to the east.
They rode hard for an hour, but eventually, after the noise of pursuit had long died away, the mare stopped in the middle of the clearing and shook her head so violently that Tanya hopped off in sheer self-preservation.
“Fine, yes, I hear you,” she snapped, landing shakily on her feet. She bent over, massaging her aching thighs. “Trust me, I don’t want to be on your back any more than you want me to be there.”
Tanya eased herself down onto the forest floor, wincing as muscles she didn’t even know she had shot through with pain on impact. Inching her legs out and leaning backward so the small of her back was on a rock, Tanya finally inhaled, exhaled, and looked around.
She had absolutely no idea where she was.
It was dark except for moonlight and lightning bugs floating around a nearby creek. The only noise came from crickets and the mare’s snorts as she wriggled against a tree, trying to shake off her harness.
Eventually the mare gave up. She stopped, huffed, and looked to Tanya with an accusing stare.
“So now you want me,” she grumbled, painfully pulling herself back to her feet. “But you did get me away from Jana, so I guess I owe you this much.” She unstrapped the saddle and lifted it away, but hesitated at the harness. “Are you going to just run away if I take this off?”
The mare looked away. “You are, aren’t you?” Tanya sighed and began to wind the lead around a nearby tree. The mare reared up in protest. “What do you want me to do?” Tanya asked, aware that she was whining, but too tired to care. “I can’t let you run away. I’m in the middle of the woods with no supplies and no idea of where I am. I at least need a horse.”
The mare put her nose in the air.
“I’ll make you a deal,” said Tanya, loosening her grasp. “If I undo the harness and let you go free, will you stay with me at least until I hitch another ride?”
The mare eyed the rope in Tanya’s hand and briefly made eye contact with her. Her head went up and down.
“Thank you,” breathed Tanya.
Tanya liked to think of herself as a reasonable, no-nonsense sort of person, and so it was with trepidation that she released her hold on the mare. “I have just made a verbal agreement with a horse,” she murmured to herself. But the horse stayed, only wandering off a few feet, nudging the forest floor with her nose, in search of something to graze.
Tanya sat back down. Her stomach grumbled. And her mind was uneasy: She needed to feel like she was doing something. She thought she would prefer that thing to be eating, but, as that wasn’t an option, she pulled the quill out of her shirt and studied it instead.
It wasn’t glowing the way it had before. It looked just like an ordinary white quill feather, albeit a rather large and overly symmetrical one. Tanya turned it around in her fingers and noticed a dark smudge on the quill point. She moistened her finger and touched it to the edge. Her fingertip came away stained blue.
A sketch formed in her mind. The map that Darrow had given her—she had lost it in her flight from town . . .
Eager for a task, Tanya pulled off her apron and laid it out in front of her. She leaned over the grimy white cloth and gripped the quill hard—and then snarled out loud in frustration.
The map had been from Ironhearth to Griffin’s Port. Even if she could trace her steps back to Darrow’s hastily sketched road, it wouldn’t lead her to where she need to go, to the Capital.
“Useless,” spat Tanya. Impatiently, she licked the quill—briefly tasting something burning and sweet and utterly unlike ink—and angrily scratched a message on her apron:
Just get me from here to the Capital, you stupid shiny feather!
The wind hushed. The creek ceased its gurgle. The stars blinked out.
The quill exploded with white light. Sparks vaulted upward and around Tanya like a shower of diamond raindrops, until they floated up, up, up, settling into the places the stars used to be. A great blast of air blew back Tanya’s hair, rippling from the stem of the quill itself, only barely ruffling the feather’s strands before dissipating into the cool night air. A pool of muddy water formed around Tanya’s sitting form before it trickled across the forest floor, propelled by some invisible force, and dissolved back in the creek bed.
The quill’s glow illuminated the apron on the ground. Tanya stared as the faint ink from her angrily scratched message moved, the lines wriggling across the fabric like live worms until they coalesced into one inky blob and grew, separating into disparate shapes made up of words: oak, packed sand, fertile soil, granite, water, gold—Tanya’s eyes widened.
The quill’s light pulsed, vibrating with each flicker. Swallowing her fear of strange magic, Tanya licked it again and put the edge to the still-blank half of her apron. She drew a circle. She drew an X with her name underneath.
As soon as she lifted the quill, the ink started coalescing and dissipating, forming words, lines, symbols.
When it was done, her apron was a map. An X marked where Tanya was sitting, and arrows marked a path to a main road. Several turns later, another X marked the Capital.
Along the way were towns, lakes, mountains, a cavern. But all of it, every mark, was made up not of plain blue lines, but of little words: gravel, granite, salt.
Gold.
Tanya put her finger cautiously on gold, and felt a shiver pass through that finger. She stroked the word and then jumped back with a yelp. When she stroked the word gold again, the gold moved in the direction her finger was moving in. She did it a third time and felt the ground underneath her rumble.
Tanya looked up and around, desperately wishing for a way to verify what had just happened. With no other option, she reluctantly turned to the mare.
“What was that?” she asked. The mare, her eyes wary, shrugged.
Tanya’s eyes fell on the creek. She looked back at the map and saw fresh water idling very close to her X. She put her finger on fresh water and closed her eyes. She took a breath and dragged.
The mare felt it first and yelped, jumping away. Tanya opened her eyes and started laughing.
The creek was moving.
It was churning up the earth and bedrock, flinging dirt and tiny rocks in every direction, but the path of the river was visibly moving, angling itself toward Tanya. She felt the tip of her boots get wet and lifted her finger. The creek rumbled to a halt.
Tanya was too stunned to move until a blueberry bush to her left burst into flames.
Tanya scrambled to her feet, kicking away her apron. “Junkoff,” she sneered. “Great.” Turning her back on it, she dipped the empty leather saddlebags into the newly repositioned creek and put out the small fire.
She moved back to the center of the clearing and primly arranged herself on a nearby boulder. With distaste and suspicion, she eyed the quill, abandoned in the dirt, but still glittering.
“No, thank you,” she said firmly. The mare ambled up next to her, chewing on some greenery, and snorted her agreement.
Tanya smelled the rosemary and chicory coming from the mare’s mouth. She hadn’t eaten in a very long time.
She could pick the chicory, but it was a tough root, and it wouldn’t do much good to her without a fire—which she had just extinguished. Tanya sighed and went over to the singed blueberry bush, scanning for uncharred fruit. There was none.
She turned and her eyes fell back on the quill.
Tanya screwed up her face in concentration. She didn’t like amateurs. And everyone who was using this magic was an amateur, so it naturally followed that she had developed a distaste for magic.
But one thing Tanya did respect was a tool. This quill was a kind of tool.
And she was really hungry.
She picked up the quill.
Less than an hour later, Tanya was roasting chestnuts over a roaring fire, several sweet potatoes buried in the embers. A small pile of salt sat on her left and a patch of sweetgrass to her right, the mare happily—if begrudgingly—grazing.
“Well, that wasn’t so hard,” said Tanya, sprinkling a few grains of salt over a chestnut and popping it in her mouth. Yes, at some point cotton had started falling from the sky and she had noticed a sinkhole opening a few leagues away on her apron map, but who cared? The cotton was hardly dangerous and the sinkhole was easily fixed with a few strokes of the quill, all without moving from her comfortable spot by the fire. All that was required was a little organization.
Tanya dug out the sweet potatoes and offered one to the mare. The mare flared her nostrils and turned away.
“Fine. Be snobbish.” Tanya shrugged, carefully peeling the skin away from the potato. “But, I’m the one who brought you your dinner and, as far as I can tell, I caused no harm along the way. From where I’m sitting, that makes me the best magic user in the kingdom.”
The mare snorted. Tanya threw a chestnut shell at her.
Tanya yawned. Now that she had filled her stomach, it dawned on her that she had gone without sleep for even longer than she had without food.
She eyed the clearing. It was rocky and dusty. She turned to the map and made a few quick movements.
The ground groaned and sprouted a thick bed of moss. A creek spurted into existence a few miles away. Tanya smiled and directed it so that it irrigated a nearby wheat field. Then she drew the apron around her shoulders and snuggled down under it.
Tanya slept.
She slept peacefully, lulled by crickets, and no longer hungry. She probably could have slept for twelve hours.
She could have slept for twelve hours, that is, if she had gotten the chance.
Something was kicking her. Tanya shifted away. “Leave me alone, horse,” she mumbled. She flinched as a drop of sweat splattered down her cheek.
“I’m trying to sleep, horse!” Tanya groaned and threw out her arm.
Someone caught it at the wrist.
Chapter
6
Tanya’s eyes flew open.
She wrenched her arm back and tumbled across the moss, landing in a particularly rough patch of upturned dirt, courtesy of the root-diving mare.
“Augh,” groaned Tanya, rubbing her smarting thigh. “Bad horse.”
A whinny drew Tanya’s attention. She turned and saw the golden mare held—barely—by a nasty-looking piece of black leather tack and three nastier-looking men.
“What are you doing?” asked Tanya, creaking to her feet. “You can’t honestly be trying to rob me. Not unless you’re very bad at your business.”
“Why’s that?”
Tanya turned around. A young man had made himself comfortable on the moss and was twisting her apron idly around in his hands.
Tanya made a move to grab her apron, but the youth shifted enough that she could see the very sharp blade at his hip. She snuck a glance at the men holding the mare and saw that they were similarly armed.
He spoke again. “Why can’t we be robbing you, girl? What disqualifies you?”
Tanya spoke carefully. “It was my understanding, sir, that the highwaymen gangs tend to attack carefully chosen targets: caravans, transports, couriers.”
He smiled and stood up. “And you don’t consider yourself an attractive target?”
Now that he was standing in the moonlight, Tanya got her first good look at the man. He was younger than she would have expected. The men holding back the mare seemed older, but there was no doubting the confidence radiating from the thief in front of her. Tanya thought back to the first time she saw Rees, his leadership clear from his enormous size and even more enormous ego.
It wasn’t the same with this boy, for that’s what he was. His eyes were shining with warmth and amusement; his smile was easy and open. Tanya felt that he was someone who would be very easy to say yes to.
Tanya was very glad that she was practiced at saying no.
“Frankly, no,” she told him, eyeing the mare, mind racing, trying to plot an escape. “I don’t have any gold, any weapons, any valuables at all, unless you count my horse and, well, to be honest, she’s not a very good horse.”
“She’s very pretty.”
“That doesn’t count for much with a horse, does it?”
The youth shrugged, still eyeing the mare admiringly, and unrolled his fist. The map-marked apron unfurled from his fingers. He held it up.
Tanya forced herself not to blink. “May I have that back?”
“I don’t think so. Sorry.”
She crossed her arms, shivering. “It’s just an old apron. You’re going to steal a girl’s apron? You really are terrible highwaymen.”
“Did you draw this map?”
Haughtily, Tanya laughed. “A map? I was just doodling. A girl gets bored traveling alone.”
“So, you did draw this.”
She felt prickles run up her neck. She had made a mistake.
He cocked his head. “No answer? OK. Since we agree, then, that you drew this map—for that’s what this is, a map—can I ask what you drew it with?”
Where had she put that quill? She had been so tired by the time she had finished playing with it. A tingle flickered over her ankles and she remembered: She had stuck it in her left boot.
Her legs began to shake. She couldn’t give up that quill. She needed it to get her inn back.
Tanya was still working out a plan when the boy apparently lost his patience, sighed, and signaled to one of the other men.
A finger lightly touched Tanya where her throat met her head, and then everything was dark.
It was still dark when Tanya woke up.
Her legs were tied at the ankles and her hands were tied behind her back. The knots were much tighter than the ones Jana had used. Tanya thrashed around blindly, but she couldn’t even wriggle to a sitting position.
A burlap sack had been thrown over her head and tied down around her chest. She would have been suffocating except someone had thought to cut three holes, one for each nostril and one over her mouth.
They were small, but Tanya knew how to scream loud.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help! Help, I’m being kidnapped by road thieves! Help, someone, help—”
“Don’t bother,” said the smooth voice of the youth. “We’re nowhere near the type of villagers that would be inclined to leave their houses at dawn—not to attend random screams for help.”
Tanya ignored him and continued to scream her head off until, eventually, her voice gave out.
She had no choice but to calm down.
Once she had access to what her ears and body were telling her, it quickly became clear that she was traveling, tossed like a sack of potatoes in the back of a wagon or—gauging the soft rolling motion flinging her tied-up limbs against the hay—a cart, the large kind used to transport heavy cargo, like livestock, or gangs of highwaymen.
A horse whined and Tanya stiffened. They had captured the mare, too.
She really wished they would take the sack off her head. Tanya knew how to read a room. She knew that if she could just see her captors, she would know the right way to handle this. But, as it was, all she could do was lie there, prone and helpless.
Tanya hated being helpless.
The cart pulled up short. Strong arms—male, with the sleeves rolled up—slid underneath the small of her back and scooped her up, lifting her up and then down, until she was nestled, helpless, against a bony collarbone
draped in a, thankfully clean, linen shirt.
“Apologies for this.” It was the youth again. “No impertinence meant,” he continued, and started walking.
Tanya automatically opened her mouth to deliver a tart retort, but found that part of herself frozen.
She was scared.
Tanya had not felt fear in years. But every muscle in her body seemed to cramp. Every breath hurt. She was cold and sweating.
That was all uncomfortable. That didn’t help. But what really grabbed her heart in a vise and squeezed was this: She was under someone else’s control.
They’re going to take the horse and the quill, Tanya thought, her breathing accelerating rapidly. I’m going to be left in a patch of dirt, shivering, alone, with nothing.
I’m going to be nothing again.
The youth deposited her in a chair.
“This is the girl, sir.”
“I can see that, Riley.” This voice was softer, higher, but with a low rasp in it, like a wagon wheel rolling over fine gravel.
There was a sigh. “I’m not in the mood,” said the voice. “Riley, could you?”
Tanya felt Riley’s arms go around her. He fiddled with the ties around her waist until the burlap fell away and then lifted the sack off her in one swift movement.
She blinked. She was in a large tent, dimly lit with one lantern, which was sitting on the corner of a lightweight but capacious and paper-loaded desk.
“What’s your name, little one?”
Tanya turned her head. There was a smaller, lower table directly to her right, laden with an ornate silver tea service. The scent of jasmine and something green and spicy that she couldn’t identify floated up with the steam. Tanya swallowed as her practiced nose wrinkled and sniffed the air: Somewhere nearby were freshly baked biscuits and bacon just about to burn.
“Would you like some breakfast?”
Tanya put aside her empty stomach and focused on the man sitting behind the teapot. He seemed to be rather a little man, although maybe that was just because he was sitting on the floor, propped up only by a broad, thick cushion encrusted with dense embroidery in some dark, lustrous thread. He was round in body and face, with a rather prominent chin and a shiny scalp underneath a thin rim of flyaway white hair. He was older. Not as old as Froud had been, but he was just starting to tip out of middle age into grandfatherly.
Wench Page 6
