“I can’t imagine that route being anything but a waste of your time,” Matheus said. “There’s nothing out that way.”
Taltaz let out a low chuckle. “Might be you should listen to your sister a bit more often. There’s enough out east for any man to make a living, if he knows where to look.”
“But is it worth it?” Matheus gazed up at the merchant as the man climbed onto the driver’s bench and tied the end of his prisoner’s lead rope through the metal ring in the wooden slats.
Then Taltaz sat and took up the reins. “Oh, aye. More than worth it.”
Nina shot her brother a sharp glance; though it was short-lived and subtle, the woman clearly gloated.
“Well.” Matheus tilted his head and stepped away from the cart. “Until you return to purchase our entire stores, then.”
“This is the first and last time that will ever happen.”
Both men shared another chuckle brimming with friendly competition, then Matheus nodded in concession. “May the Unclaimed watch over your journey.”
“The Unclaimed?” Taltaz shook his head, and Rahlizje wished she could see the man’s expression as he did so. “You should know by now that I watch over myself, old man. I suggest you do the same.” Without another word, the merchant of Gethlem gave the reins a gentle flick and clicked his tongue. His horse was a more willing beast—and much better trained—than the thief Taltaz kept at the end of a rope.
Chapter 7
Rahlizje’s relative docility—which she’d necessarily adopted after her failed escape attempt on the second day in her captor’s wagon—was not without purpose. The merchant Taltaz had shown her everything she’d needed to know the moment he’d pressed his knee into her back on the dirt road and held her own dagger to her throat. ‘I do not believe in cruelty for its own sake,’ he’d told her, and he’d fortified that belief again during their brief stay at Gileath Junction. He’d given her enough of what little trust existed between them to let the aged traders at that waystation offer her some semblance of humane treatment. The thief had been bathed, clothed, fed, and even offered ale—for what little it had been. She’d slept on a pallet in a cupboard, which had presented itself as a luxury compared to the hard slats of the cart and the ache of broken sleep with her wrists bound behind her.
All this had convinced Rahlizje that the man wanted to trust her. Most likely, that desire of his stemmed from his much more urgent desire to recover the cost of what he would have collected had he not stopped to hunt her down and retrieve the stolen trinkets at the Lady Farden’s behest. Taltaz was silent and stoic, yes, but Rahlizje could have been fated with a much more brutal captor. She knew this very well, and she played to the kindness buried deep within the heart of a man hardened by decades of travel and business and looking after his own interests first.
Beyond that, she was buying her time with the rope.
She couldn’t imagine that the man had strategically positioned these exact crates in the back of his cart just to entice her with another prospect of freedom. Taltaz did not seem the type of man to tempt his own fate, which he’d already done by agreeing to Lady Farden’s demands and tracking down the false maiden who’d pilfered from the Lord’s estate. And the man obviously regretted his decision to submit to those demands, at least in part. Perhaps that regret was what had left him so stupidly, blindly trusting.
For two days’ travel after the unlikely pair set out from Gileath Junction, Rahlizje had busied herself with the tedious work of rubbing the lead rope back and forth against the corner of the closest wooden crate. It frayed slowly enough, which was just as well; she couldn’t risk breaking the thing altogether in the middle of the day, where the one-eyed merchant would see quite clearly what she had done. And each time Taltaz lowered the cart’s back gate so she might answer the calls of nature with what little privacy her situation afforded, she made sure to never let that lead rope grow taut.
The ropes binding her wrists were less of an obstacle. Rahlizje could run with her hands behind her back, as long as her waist wasn’t still tied to the iron loop at the back of the driver’s bench. So she bided her time, slowly scraping away at the thick twine of the rope, all the while maintaining the image of a prisoner whose urges to escape had been broken, if not yet her sarcastic resignation. Rahlizje of Holjstruke did not intend to spend the rest of her days fulfilling anyone’s wishes but her own.
On that second night back on the road, they enacted what had become their normal routine. Taltaz unhitched his horse from the cart and led the beast toward a somewhat open clearing within the trees. There, he tied the animal to another tree and set to gathering wood for a fire. It took the man less than an hour to fan the flames enough for Rahlizje to feel their heat from within the cart. When he approached her again, she sat back against the side of the cart to hide the nearly severed end of the rope just beside where it rested against the new clothes Nina had provided.
“If you have a need, thief, now would be the time to voice it before I turn in.” The merchant’s voice was low and gruff as he studied her with his one dark, glistening eye.
Slowly, Rahlizje turned her head to look at him over the siderail of the cart. Her dark hair fell over her forehead and into her eyes, but her attempt to shake it away proved unsuccessful. “If I have a need…” She raised her eyebrows. “Only my freedom, mercenary.”
Taltaz blinked his one eye, then grunted. “I suggest you sleep now, while the weather still favors us. Warm nights are hard to come by where we’re headed.” He reached into the cart just on the other side of the crates stacked beside her and shook out the extra horse blanket with which he’d covered her each night since her capture. The thing had grown a lot muskier now with the scent of the soiled and unkempt thief she’d been before Gileath Junction than with any scent of the man’s horse. Rahlizje hardly registered the smell anymore, especially now beneath the invigorating odor of a successful escape in her very near future. The man tossed the blanket over her, pulled it up around her shoulders, and grunted. Then he headed back to the crackling fire and his bedroll and his surety that the prisoner he’d worked so hard to retain would be where he’d left her come the morning.
Rahlizje leaned her head back against the siderail of the cart; she’d since found the most comfortable way to do so without straining her neck too much or further pressing her bound wrists into the small of her back.
She pretended to sleep while Taltaz made it his reality, listening in silence for that first half hour or more until she could hear his snores rising from beside the crackling fire a mere few yards away. For another half hour after that, at least, she waited, gauging the speed of his breath and counting the seconds between each rumbling cadence. The first test came when she shifted enough to send the thick woolen blanket sliding from her body and slumping onto the bed of the cart beside her. It was a whisper in the darkness, but for a man who slept as lightly as she assumed the merchant of Gethlem did, it might have been enough to wake him.
It wasn’t. Rahlizje heard neither a hitch in his breath nor a pause in the rising snores beside the fire. The man didn’t even stir, and so she pressed her plan even further.
Her fingers moved swiftly to find the weak point in the lead rope she’d spent days creating. Just a few thick twines at the center of that rope remained between the frayed ends, and she set to work sawing these back and forth against the corner of the crate beside her. It was much slower work than she’d managed during the day, where she could hide the sound of it beneath the clop of the horse’s hooves on the dirt road and the rumble of the cart’s wheels rolling constantly onward. Agonizingly slow, but agony had never stopped her from getting what she wanted. Nor would it stop her tonight.
Perhaps she worked on the rope for another hour, though it was much harder to tell the time under the darkness of a new moon. The dwindling size of the flames worked well enough, and if she was right, Taltaz would be in the deepest part of his sleep now—much less likely to wake at any curious new
sound in the night.
She almost had it now—her freedom. With both hands, Rahlizje gathered up the nearly severed rope and gave each side a little tug. The ripping twine sounded incredibly loud to her own attentive ears, so she pressed the rope into the back of her cloak and pulled again. The rope snapped, and the end of it leading to the iron ring in the back of the driver’s bench slithered silently onto the wooden slats beside her.
Taltaz snorted and turned in his sleep, puffing out a huge sigh. Rahlizje froze and waited longer until his rhythmic snoring rose once more over the lightly crackling fire. Then she slowly, achingly rose to her feet inside the cart and stared at his lumpy form beneath his cloak and his own blanket. Nothing and no one moved.
Before her twitching lips could fully bloom into a smirk, the escaping thief stepped cautiously over the sideboard. Her boot settled firmly into the crook of a spoke and the wheel’s hub, and when she was sure the thing could take her weight, she leaned forward and swung her other leg out of the cart. It was a lot harder than she’d imagined to be silent and swift like this with her hands still bound behind her, but she finally managed to get both feet off the wheel and into the soft trampled grass beside the cart.
She couldn’t help but take a final glance back at the man who’d thought himself so clever in capturing her. The urge to laugh bubbled up inside her, but she quelled it instantly; that same defiant urge had gotten her into this mess in the first place, and Rahlizje liked to think herself the type of person who did not knowingly make the same mistake twice.
With careful footsteps, she slinked past the cart, heading for the thickening forest on the other side of the glowing fire. The merchant merely kept snoring and rolled over again in his sleep. So she ran.
Just a few quick steps, and she’d be at the tree line. Something thick and heavy rustled behind her, followed by a swift, metallic thunk. The next second, Rahlizje’s calf exploded with searing pain, and she screamed.
Taltaz’s horse snorted quickly and lifted her head before the thief went skidding across the soft grass of the clearing, her scream cut short by the ground coming up swiftly to meet her face again. The pain was so intense that, for those first few moments, she couldn’t hear, see, or feel anything else. Then she managed to peel herself off the ground just enough to glance back at her leg.
An arrow, much thicker than it had a right to be, had punched clean through her calf—and the new breeches Nina had given her. Grunting against the pain and cursing herself for that scream, Rahlizje dug the heel of her other boot into the earth in an attempt to somehow push herself back to her feet.
“Don’t move.”
She was in too much shock or agony or both to have noticed Taltaz approaching her. But now she looked up to see him standing there in front of her, his grizzled scar of a missing eye shimmering in the firelight. The shadows darkened on the man’s face—or perhaps it was merely Rahlizje’s vision. Then she saw the massive crossbow hanging at his side. Not an arrow, then.
“You… shot me,” she growled.
“It’s your own doing.” He lowered into a squat beside her, and Rahlizje’s immediate reaction was to squirm away from him. His massive hand clamped around her ankle just below the bolt he’d put there, and she nearly screamed again. “I said don’t move. If you want to keep the use of this leg as you’ve known it, I suggest you also stop making any decisions at all.”
Rahlizje’s neck and shoulders burned with the effort of keeping her head off the ground, with her wrists still bound behind her and a crossbow bolt now protruding at both ends from her calf. With a grunt, she lowered her cheek back to the earth and glared at him.
Without a word, the one-eyed merchant set the crossbow down a few feet behind him, drew Rahlizje’s knife from his belt, and sliced the leg of her breeches from the hem to just below the bolt. He took a bit more care cutting the fabric around his own weapon lodged in her flesh, but even that small amount of movement worsened the pain. She had to remind herself not to stop breathing.
When Taltaz had cleared the cloth away from her wildly unnecessary wound, he studied her leg for a few more seconds. That grizzled black beard twitched, he glanced at her one more time, and then he stood and went to the fire.
“You’ll not leave me here.” Her voice was raw, gravelly, and not nearly as loud as she’d hoped. Rahlizje had spent very little time in her life whispering—either by choice or necessity—and now it seemed that was all she could manage.
“I probably should.” The man hunkered down beside the fire.
That was all Rahlizje could see before she gave up trying to watch him from her position, and she dared not move again. She didn’t trust the merchant of Gethlem in any form, especially now that he’d felled her like a startled deer. But she did not doubt the truth of his warning. She very much valued the use of both her legs, which were particularly necessary for a thief who’d spent her entire life running on them.
Long minutes later, Taltaz stood and approached her again. The soft whisper of his boots across the grass startled her enough to make her realize she might have been on the verge of losing consciousness, and she willed herself as far away from that escape as she could manage. It was more dangerous than the most recent escape she’d failed to make.
“I told you there is nothing you can hide from me. Do you remember?” The man squatted in front of her again and placed her dagger on the grass beside him. Rahlizje thought it looked red in the flickering firelight, and she thought she smelled a sweeter strain of smoke, but she couldn’t be sure of anything at this point. “And I promised you’d not set foot beyond my cart if you tested the truth of my words, did I not?”
That had been his warning the first and only other time Rahlizje had tried to seize her freedom from him, yes. Her only response, however, was another glare that burned almost as much as the unyielding ache in her leg.
The merchant—or mercenary or hunter, perhaps all three—studied her for a few more seconds, then tilted his head. “What is your name, thief?”
“My name means nothing to you,” Rahlizje spat.
“True. But it may keep you sane to hear it once or twice.” He paused, clearly waiting for her to tell him who she was. She did not. Taltaz nodded slowly and returned his attention to the wooden bolt through her calf. “As you wish. This will hurt.”
Before she could think of asking what he meant to do, the man clamped his hand around her calf with an unbreakable grip, right over the few inches of wooden bolt slicing through her muscle. Rahlizje cried out before she heard the swift snap of wood and felt the flaring tug of her leg being ripped apart. But it was merely the broken shaft of his bolt, which he tossed to the grass with its shorter, far-less-bloody other half. She had just enough time to think how black her own blood looked in the firelight before she saw the dull glow of her dagger lifted in the merchant’s hand.
The glint she’d thought she’d seen upon the blade was no trick of the light and no reflection of the fire. The red-hot glow of her own dagger heated in the merchant’s flames had almost disappeared, but that did not mean the steel had cooled.
Rahlizje clawed at consciousness just long enough to catch the scent of charred meat above the hiss of her own searing flesh. Then she could hold onto it no longer.
Chapter 8
The merchant of Gethlem let her have what little peace fainting had afforded her. It was easy for him, of course, because it meant he had to do nothing. Rahlizje realized this as soon as her awareness returned; she still lay in the same place and the same position on the ground, just a few yards from the fire. The flames had died even more into glowing embers and the mere shadow of charred branches. She’d also been unconscious long enough for her mouth to run dry and for the tightness of strain and pressure to build at her temples. The thief drew in a long, slow breath and tried to ignore the throbbing in her leg. “Why?” she croaked, well aware of how much effort she put into not moving her limbs at all.
“Hmm.” Taltaz sat between her and th
e fire, his back to the embers. He tipped his head back just a little and studied her as much as he could in the darkness. “It insults us both to pretend you don’t know why I fired my weapon. You made your choice, thief, and I made mine. Might be you realize now that I’m a man of my word, though it gave me no pleasure to act on it tonight.”
She grunted, wanting to roll over and sit up but completely lacking the energy to do so. Her focus centered on the individual blades of grass flickering beneath the rhythmic shudder of her breath. “That’s not what I meant.” Rahlizje gritted her teeth and exhaled another short, agonized burst. Her neck felt like it was on fire now, too. “I can hardly run from you again, merchant. If it gives you no pleasure, the least you can do is cut these ropes.” She wiggled her fingers resting atop the small of her back—or at least she thought she did. All she felt now was a cold tingle bordering on numbness.
Taltaz was silent for a few seconds before he sighed, pushed himself to his feet again, and approached her. He untied the knotted rope so quickly, she wondered if she’d been irredeemably foolish in not having tried to free her hands before the rest of her. As soon as she heard the rope thump against the soft earth beside her, she tried to pull her arms under her but only succeeded in jerking them down to the ground at her sides. A groan escaped her, which wildly understated the sharp pain rising up her arms, through her shoulders, and into her neck. Her cold-feeling hands flared with the new heat of returning blood flow. The merchant took up his seat once more between her and the fire, and his prisoner slowly, achingly drew her arms along the ground until she could push herself up enough to rest her forehead on her fists. For now, it was all she could manage.
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