Jana might very well have had to give the Tomcat valuable information in order to maintain her position. But that meant Tanya should never, ever trust her again.
It came as a shock that she had started to trust Jana at all.
She was in for another sort of shock at the stables, where Riley was fitting a saddle to the golden mare.
“Who gets to ride her?” asked Tanya, trying to catch the mare’s eyes, avoiding looking at Riley. Tanya hoped that Riley would be the lucky one, if only because he was among the lighter of the men.
Riley cleared his throat and stood up straight. “Actually, you get to ride her.” He bowed ironically. “My lady.”
Tanya looked up at Riley and then back at the mare. The mare had stopped shuffling and shaking her head. For the first time, she was still. She wasn’t looking at Tanya, she was looking at the ground, but her ear cocked in Tanya’s direction. It twitched once, twice, three times, in a slow, purposeful rhythm.
Tanya reached out and stroked the mare on the ear, and the mare let her. Riley snorted.
“What’s so funny?” she asked, pulling her hand away from the mare.
“Nothing really,” he said, shrugging. “Just . . . he serves you breakfast, you get to ride her—this is some recruiting pitch. I guess he treats you a little differently when you’re a great big girl with something he wants and not a skinny brat who can’t steal enough to eat on his own. That goes a little differently, let me tell you.”
“You got a different ‘pitch’?”
“I got a bowl of stew, a cookie, and bedroll,” Riley told her, smiling ruefully. “But that was a long time ago.”
The mare’s ear had felt like velvet. Tanya reached out to stroke it again. She asked, “Do you like being a thief?”
Riley frowned and crossed his arms. “I don’t really think about it like that,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ve always been a thief. I’ve never been anything else. I’m good at being a thief. I like that I’m good at it. Is that close enough?”
Tanya shrugged, not quite sure why she was asking.
“Why? Do you like being a tavern wench?”
Tanya winced. “Must you call it that?”
“What? That’s what you are, isn’t it?”
She thought of her life at the Smiling Snake. She thought of the cleaning and the cooking, the serving and the washing, the flirting and the scolding and the bargaining. Did she truly like any of that?
Tanya looked up and parroted his words back to him:
“I like that I’m good at it.”
Riley hesitated. “In that case, you might want to consider being a thief,” he said. There was laughter in his voice still, but it was careful laughter, tinged with a bit of respect.
“Why should I?” she asked, irritated. “So I can be even less respectable than a port city serving wench?”
“Because, you’re not bad at it.”
“Really?” Tanya asked, surprised.
“I mean, you have no foundation in the basics,” he said quickly. “Your inexperience would be a liability in almost any heist and you have no respect for the small movements—and keeping your movements small absolutely keeps you alive and free. But you think fast and you’re a good liar. And I don’t know for sure that anyone else could make that feather do what you can make it do. The Tomcat couldn’t get it to work and he’s the best thief I’ve ever seen.”
Then the greatest of thieves lacks basic organizational skills, thought Tanya. But she declined to criticize Riley’s boss and instead said, “You seem like you hate the quill.”
Riley stretched again, feigning a nonchalance that Tanya knew he didn’t feel. “Relying on that thing was what got us into that mess in the first place,” he said. “Because none of us knew anything about it, we forgot about finding a place for marble, and that cut off our escape route. But . . . it—or rather, you and it—did get us out clean. I’m willing to keep an open mind. I just don’t like magic.” He shivered. “Never have.”
“I agree. Magic seems very unreliable.”
Riley still looked uneasy. “It’s not that it’s unreliable, exactly,” he said. “It’s that it’s . . . not fair, maybe?”
Tanya snorted. “The thief complains about fairness.”
Riley smiled, cheering up a little. “Hey, the way I see it, if you haven’t adequately protected your property, that’s your fault.”
“Maybe magic just scares you.” The words slipped out of Tanya’s mouth before she even knew they were on her tongue.
Riley stiffened for a moment and then shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve never seen anyone I trust use magic and I’ve never seen it used for good. You’ll see when we get to Bloodstone. Things get twisted.”
Tanya swallowed—was he saying he trusted her? She reached for his shoulder. “I don’t want to twist you,” she said quietly.
Riley looked down at her hand in surprise. Someone called his name and he shook her off, hurrying away with a mumbled, “Excuse me.”
When Riley had gone, the mare lifted her head and, her eyes wide, took a step toward Tanya. She nudged her on the shoulder—not the affectionate nuzzling Tanya had witnessed from lesser horses, but a hard, sharp push—and tossed her mane in the direction of the forest.
The meaning was clear: See? There is nothing and no one here for you. Let’s get the hell out of here, she was saying. Untie me and let’s go!
Tanya put her hand on the mare’s temple, feeling the vein pulse there. “If we run now, we will get caught,” she whispered. “Jana is fast and when he wants to be, I’d bet Riley matches her.” The mare snorted. “Even if he doesn’t, Jana would be quite enough: She tracked your little magician friend when he was disguised as a bird.”
The mare looked up sharply at the mention of the boy wizard and kicked her hooves. “He’s fine,” Tanya said quickly, understanding. “The Tomcat and Riley don’t even know he exists. He’s not here anymore, anyway. He’s safe with the other wizards.”
The mare snarled at their mention and Tanya nodded in agreement. “Useless, I agree,” she said. “Listen to me. We will find our moment. But if you run with me on your back, they will bring you down to secure me. They won’t care if they kill you.”
The mare seemed to think about this for a moment. Then she tossed her head downward, shaking the rope around her neck.
“What? Look, I’m not fluent in horse!”
The mare did it again and then nudged Tanya again, a true nuzzle this time, rubbing the rope against the exposed skin on the girl’s neck.
“Oh,” said Tanya softly.
If she untied the mare now, while everyone was still packing up and distracted, she just might get away—Tanya would still be stuck there, but the mare would be free.
Tanya looked to the side, and then to the other side. They were nowhere near alone. But then again, no one was looking at them, either. As nonchalantly as she could manage, she bent to her knees and put her hand experimentally on the knot tying the mare to the steel stake piercing the earth.
The knot was tight and elaborate, made of thick, rough rope. It was too tough and made of too strong a material for the mare to break away on her own, Tanya could see that. It was too tight to dismantle at all without a knife to jimmy the weak spots loose.
Well, for most people, it would have been too tight. But Tanya had grown up with sailors. She had learned to tie a knot before she learned to read, and even now, her fingers could undo a jumble of twisted rope quicker and more neatly than they could write.
Tanya slipped a fingernail into a seam and began to tug.
“What are you doing?”
Tanya whirled. “Riley said I get to ride her,” she said. “I’m just going to get her ready.”
Jana was munching on an apple. She came to stand next to Tanya and patted the horse on the head. To her surprise, the mare flared her nostrils, but allowed the touch.
Using small movements, Tanya continued working the knot. “Excited to go home?” she asked.
> Jana laughed, but didn’t sound amused. “Oh yeah,” she said. “It will do wonders for my skin.”
“What? Why?”
“The steam.”
Tanya turned and looked carefully at Jana. The other girl’s face was confusing. There was a curious flattening of her features, as if she had purposefully squeezed any and all emotion into a rubber ball and she was trying to keep from bouncing away.
“Steam?” Tanya asked, still watching the other girl’s face. “Is there a hot spring nearby?”
Jana looked at her. “Technically, yes. But you don’t want to go swimming in it.” She turned and pitched her apple core into the clear blue lake. “The steam comes from Bloodstone itself. It rises off the brimstone canals. They boil, you see.”
“Bloodstone . . . steams?”
Jana nodded. “And smells like hell’s kitchens. The air is so thick, you’re going to sweat off five pounds, if that’s the sort of thing that worries you.”
Tanya shuddered, her skin suddenly prickling, thrown backward into the fear from her childhood, the nightmare of Bloodstone etched into her heart.
Jana stepped toward her own horse. “The thing you have to know about Bloodstone,” she said slowly, petting her horse on the nose, looking anywhere but at Tanya, “is that whatever you have, people will want it. Whatever you don’t have . . . that will cost you.” Jana looked up abruptly. “Do you know what I mean?” she asked, looking Tanya straight in the eye.
Tanya returned her gaze and nodded. And she did know.
Jana was warning her.
Jana nodded and hopped on her horse’s back. She looked behind her shoulder at Tanya, just once, before riding away.
Tanya stared after her, one thing crystal clear in her head. There was absolutely no way that she was going to voluntarily go anywhere near Bloodstone.
She redoubled her effort on the knot, speaking in a low tone. “Listen to me carefully,” she said to the mare. “We are getting out of here”—the mare looked up quickly—“yes, both of us are getting out of here.”
The mare inclined her head down, looking pointedly at all the thieves around them.
“Yeah, I know,” said Tanya impatiently, finally finishing the knot. “Don’t move. Let me think.”
The mare froze, her eyes wide.
Tanya shut her eyes against the mare’s glare and began to organize her thoughts. She was good at organization; she could figure this out.
Her assets were the dubious loyalty of a moderately supernatural horse and an exhausted quill.
She pulled the quill out of her shirt. It was quiet. It had been hours since she had displaced a circle of the White and it still hadn’t woken up. But with no time to worry about that, Tanya licked the quill, and, still not entirely in possession of a plan, started scrawling on the fabric of her shirt.
Nothing came out.
“What?” whispered Tanya. “No. No!” She sucked the edge and tried again, but nothing.
“What am I going to do?” she whispered. She had never even had to use ink before with the quill, and there was no way she could surreptitiously search the rapidly packing camp for a bottle.
She whirled wildly around the stable, looking for something, anything that might work as pigment, but there was only water—no other liquids at all.
Except . . .
Tanya held her arm up to her eyes and examined the nearly totally healed gash from the mine shaft. She looked around. No one was watching her. She looked at the quill.
Maybe . . . it was hungry?
“This better work,” she sternly told the quill and rolled up her sleeve.
The world seemed to hold its breath as Tanya whispered a prayer, bit her lip, and stabbed her forearm with the moistened quill.
She felt her blood bubble out of her veins and into the quill. The spine engorged and spat pink-and-red pigment onto its feathers.
It didn’t hurt. But it cost her something she couldn’t put her finger on. The energy flowed out of her faster than blood and, for the sake of efficiency, Tanya decided not to twist herself in knots getting purchase on her shirt and instead just scrawled into her arm, the quill slipping past the barrier of her skin with only the slightest pressure.
As she finished, she felt her knees buckle. She grabbed the mare’s bridle, gritted her teeth, and kept drawing until she heard the word “Now!” torn from her own throat, ragged and deep and entirely unlike her own voice. She repeated it: “Now!!”
A breeze whipped through the camp, lifting stray bits of nature and tossing them into the air.
A whistling noise grew into a roar, and suddenly the whole camp was staring, Jana and Riley were charging, and the Tomcat was shouting, but it was too late.
A gust of tightly packed wind blew through the clearing, flattening the entire company and covering them in dust and pebbles.
Except for Tanya. The wind created a vortex around her, one hand on the quill, the point still stuck in her arm, the other on the mare’s harness.
The wind picked up speed until Tanya felt herself lifted into the air.
A scream rang out and a remote corner of her brain identified it as both too low and too high to be anyone in the Tomcat’s crew before the cry was crowded out by a piteous whinny, and she lost her grip on the mare. She looked down at her feet, now hovering some eight or ten feet above the ground, and caught sight of blue feathers, a gray robe . . .
. . . and all the while, the wind spiraled tighter and faster and faster and faster . . .
Cushioned by a narrow pocket of soft air, Tanya felt herself pulled forward by the rib cage until she was horizontal. Acting on some previously unknown instinct, she put her arms out behind her, slightly spread, and shot forward.
She was moving too fast to see anything clearly, but there was a flash of red, interrupted by a jagged edge, and then the swirling color changed to brown to blue to white again, this time intertwined with gold.
Tanya spiraled through this whirlwind impossibly fast. The tips of her ears, nose, and fingers went numb with cold, but her hair flew behind her and the sun beat on her face, and Tanya was flying.
She flew over rivers, over the huts on stilts in shrimping basins, over the razor-sharp grass of the Glassland Meadows, over miners’ settlements, over farming villages, over castles—over everyone and everything on Lode. She was the highest person in the world.
For a time anyway. Eventually, the wind slowed and, like a spool emptying itself of the last of its thread, spun one last, lazy time and deposited a girl who had moments before been the most powerful person in the kingdom onto a dusty road underneath a walnut tree.
Tanya blinked, propped herself up on her elbows, and, finding that too difficult a position to maintain, fell onto her back.
She was dirty, hungry, exhausted—a fugitive from the Queen’s Corps and the target of a crime lord. Her right elbow was caked in blood an inch thick and so was her hem.
But she was alive. Tanya, moving slowly, her bones creaking, painstakingly rolled onto her knees, wincing as the joint popped, and, finally, pushed herself to her feet.
The sun was setting and Tanya had to put her hand up against the glare. But, there, a quarter mile down the brick road past a corridor of weeping willow trees, was the famous marble wall of the Capital, the pure white stone streaked with red and orange from the sinking sunlight. And right in the middle of the wall were the gates, made of pure gold and topped with razor-sharp spikes, as beautiful and terrible as could be.
Tanya was nothing but a tavern wench, that was undeniable, but she was a tavern wench that had made it. On her own, thwarted at every turn, she had made it to the Capital’s gates and she had something the Queen and Council wanted.
“What did you do???”
The wizard boy rode out of the forest on the golden mare, his face red and furious, hers smug and content, apparently unbothered by the strange mode of travel.
Tanya didn’t blink. Instead she looked at the mare. “So, after everything, you rea
lly just belong to this kid, huh?”
The wizard blushed even redder and the mare neighed in indignation.
“I am Magus Rollo, senior apprentice of the College of Aetherical Manipulation and second son of the Earl of Vermillon’s Pass,” he said, hopping off the mare. “You will address me as such and cease referring to me as ‘boy’ or ‘kid’ or any other diminutive.”
Tanya snorted. “Yeah? Well, I’m Tanya, the tavern wench who just flew you across the country with the stroke of a quill, so you might want to reconsider your tone.”
“Look at what you did!” he screeched, pointing at her arm. “It’s an abomination. Look at yourself!”
Tanya took the opportunity to do just that and caught her breath.
In the stable, she had hastily drawn a funnel—fast, strong wind—a tornado, really, with herself as a stick figure in the center. She had drawn an arrow with the words safely flying me to scrawled alongside and the point ending in the words the Capital.
She had drawn this, using her own blood as ink to make shallow scratches in her skin. The sketch had been just that—“chicken scratch,” as Froud had used to call it, constructed of rickety, overlapping lines.
That was not what was on her arm now.
Spitting on her apron, she scrubbed away the dried blood to reveal a tattoo in a brilliant red, the lines thick and sure.
The raw ideas of the original sketch were the same. There was a tornado, an even, tightly wound spiral with a starburst in the middle that Tanya realized with a jolt was meant to represent her. A leisurely looping line traveled across the length of her forearm, from her elbow to her wrist, landing with a splash like an exploded starburst right on her pulse in front of a perfect, tiny representation of the Capital wall, complete with the gate in the middle.
But that wasn’t all the quill had done. There was a map of Lode covering every spare inch of flesh on her arm—every river, every hill, every field she had passed was represented, to scale and in topographical detail.
Tanya lifted her arm to her eyes and revolved it, marveling. The quill was still lodged in a vein, but she didn’t even feel a sting when she pulled it out. It slid out as easily as a knife through butter, and her skin closed around the puncture with a tidy popping sound.
Wench Page 14
