He and Rune were to drive while the moon was up, giving the mules light enough to see the road. Since it was a straight track across the downs, bounded on either side by hedgerows, there was small chance they'd get lost. The worst that could happen would be that the mules would stop, pull the wagon over to the side of the road, and proceed to gorge themselves or sleep in their harness until someone woke up and got them back on the job.
Even if something frightened them, they likely wouldn't bolt-or so Gwyna claimed, saying that was the reason the Gypsies preferred mules over horses as draft animals. She claimed that when startled, they would probably stand stock still and wait for whatever it was that frightened them to show itself to be either aggressive and dangerous, or not a threat after all.
"And if they do bolt," she'd told him, "Let them have their heads. If they run, they've either been hurt badly by something you can't see, or they've seen something they already know is dangerous. They probably have a better idea of what's safe to do when there's real danger than you do. Let them follow their instincts."
As if he could do anything else! If they took it into their stolid heads to run off, he wasn't even sure he'd be able to hang onto the reins.
Rune climbed out of the back to sit beside him on the driver's bench. After a moment, she began massaging his shoulders, and he sighed with pleasure.
"I've been thinking," she said. "About magic."
"So have I," he replied. "I know we don't know everything. I know Peregrine doesn't know everything, however much he likes to pretend that he does."
"Exactly." She nodded her head vigorously. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at her, and smiled.
"Can I say something gauche and male?" he asked. "I think you look wonderful. The dress, your hair down, no leather hat hiding your face-"
"Oh, that's gauche and male, all right," she grinned. "But I like the compliment. I have to admit, sometimes I get a little tired of breeches and loose tunics. A pretty dress-well-Gwyna will probably tell you I was preening like a popinjay when we were going through the outfits the other women offered me and picking out the new clothing."
He cautiously took his attention from the road for a moment to steal a kiss. She stole one back.
"Now, about magic-" she said. He sighed.
There was no getting her mind off business when she was determined. "All right. About magic."
"For every offense in everything else, there's always a defense. I can't believe that there's no defenses against this seeking-talisman those killers are using." She braced herself against the swaying of the wagon over an uneven stretch of road, and waited for his response.
"I've been thinking the same thing," he said. "That was why I managed to talk Peregrine out of the one he took from the dead man. I was hoping we could find a way to fool it if we studied it long enough."
He transferred the reins cautiously to his left hand, and fished the talisman out of his breeches pocket. "Here," he said, handing it to her, and taking proper control of the reins again.
She examined it as best she could by the illumination of the three-quarter moon. It wasn't very impressive by either sun or moonlight; there wasn't much there but a small copper disk with a thin lens of glass cemented over it, suspended from a copper chain. She peered at it.
"Is there something under that glass?" she asked.
She had better eyes than he did. "Peregrine says it's a single strand of hair. He says that places where magic is used more openly tend to be very careful about things like nail-clippings and hair. We'd probably better assume that Birnam is one of those places. They'd probably been keeping every strand of hair he lost since he was a baby, and when they knew he was alive, they started making talismans to find him."
Talaysen had no idea how the thing had been made, but the fact that it had survived the fire intact was remarkable enough. It didn't look at all damaged, in spite of the fact that it had been the actual focus of Peregrine's defenses, the point from which the fire sprang. A distinct disadvantage of having a magical object; unless you also had a magical defense-which Peregrine called a Shield-your object could actually call an offensive spell to it, simply by existing.
Once they'd figured out how to outwit this thing, Talaysen planned to sink it in a deep well.
"Does it still work?" she asked.
"Try it for yourself," he told her. "Hold it in your hand and tell yourself that you want to find Sional."
She obeyed-and frowned. "It still works, all right. Nasty thing." She rubbed the hand that had been holding it against her skirt, although there was nothing physically there to rub off. Talaysen had done exactly the same thing after Peregrine had shown him the trick of working it.
"I haven't been able to figure out how it works," he confessed. "Though I have to admit, I haven't done as much with it as I might have if it didn't feel so-slimy."
She agreed, grimacing distastefully. "Still-I grew up working in an inn. I emptied chamber pots, cleaned up after sick drunks, mucked out the stables. It won't be the first time I've had to do something nasty, and so far, this doesn't make me feel any worse than one of those jobs. I'll see what I can do with it."
She was quiet for a very long time, her brow furrowed, her eyes half-closed. After a while he began to "hear," with that strange inner ear, little snatches of melody and dissonance.
When she finally spoke, he wasn't ready for it, and he jumped, startled.
"Sorry," she apologized. "I guess I should have moved or something first."
"It's all right," he assured her. "I was sort of dozing anyway, and I shouldn't have been. Have you gotten anything figured out?"
"Well, I think I know why Peregrine said nothing could be done about it," she replied thoughtfully. "This doesn't work like our magic-in fact, I'd be willing to believe that it wasn't made by a human at all."
"Huh." That made sense. Especially if you were doing something that you didn't want countered. There were pockets of strange races scattered all over the Twenty Kingdoms; it wouldn't be unheard of to find other races that worked magic. And unless you found another mage of the same race, your odds against countering what had been done might be high.
"That could be why it feels-and sounds-so unpleasant," he offered. "It's not operating by laws of melody that we understand, or even feel comfortable with. I've been told that there are some things living off by themselves in the swamps in the south that can make you sick by humming at you."
She nodded vigorously. "You know, that's really what's going on here; it isn't that it really feels bad, it's that it makes you feel bad. I had a chance to talk to a Mintak about music once; he said he couldn't stand human sopranos and a lot of human instruments because they were too shrill for him. And I couldn't hear half of the notes of a Mintak folk-song he sang for me."
He bent his head down so he could scratch the bridge of his nose. One of the mules looked back at him, annoyed at getting a rein-signal it didn't understand.
"Maybe what we need to do is figure out the logic, the pattern in it-then and try and disrupt or block that pattern with something we can stand?" he offered.
"I don't know," she replied, dubiously. "That could be like trying to catch a Mintak with a minnow-net. Or a minnow in a snare. But I suppose that's the best we can do right now. You want to try?"
He took the charm with distaste. "I don't want to, but I will. Besides, maybe some of this stuff Peregrine stuck in my head will help."
"Maybe," she replied. "It couldn't hurt, anyway, as long as you remember we aren't playing by human rules anymore."
"I don't think I could forget," he said, and bent with grim determination to his task.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rune's stomach heaved. "You know," she said conversationally to Kestrel, as they neared the border-post at the edge of the fens, "if I didn't like you so much, I think I'd have left you back in the mud with that copper charm and saved myself this."
Heat pressed her down and humidity made her head ache.
The ever-present reek of the marsh permeated everything. Gnats and midges buzzed in annoying clouds around her head, but thanks to the thick, sticky herb-juice the Gypsies had given them, neither landed nor bit. But the juice itself had a bitter, unpleasant smell, and that added to her misery. The sun glared down through a thick heat-haze, making the road shimmer and dance.
After much trial and error, she and Talaysen had worked out the counter to the magic of the talisman. Comprised of notes they felt more than heard, it only made them slightly ill to work. Just enough that Rune refused to eat anything this morning, since they were going to have to cross the border before noon. She hadn't wanted anything in her stomach, and right now she was chewing a sprig of mint in the vain hope that it would settle her rebellious insides.
Sional grimaced. "I'd d-do it m-myself, but I'm not g-good enough yet." He held out his hands and shrugged. "I w-wish I w-was."
"Oh, don't worry about it," she replied, closing her eyes to subdue another surge of nausea. "Besides, if I'd dumped you in the mud, Robin would have gone back after you, and then we'd have gotten to smell fen-stink until we cleaned you up."
As she opened her eyes, she saw him flush and turn away, and smiled in spite of her roiling stomach. Robin was in love with Kestrel, and he was returning her feelings with interest. How long it would last, she had no idea.
Nor did she know whether it would survive the kinds of pressures put on a would-be King. . . .
Worry about that if we get there, she told herself firmly. We have enough trouble to handle right now.
One problem they did not have to worry about was whether Sional would be recognized from a physical description. Anyone looking for Jonny Brede as he had last appeared would never see him in this young man. Regular meals and hauling the wagon out of soft spots in the road through the fens had put a lot of muscle on him, and the sun had tanned him as dark as any Gypsy. In clothing given by some of the younger men and his long hair tied back in a tail, he didn't look much like Jonny Brede, and even less like a prince.
The border-station grew from a dot at the end of the long, straight causeway, to a tiny blob of brown, to a doll's house with doll-guards, to something her eyes would accept as a building. This flat expanse of fen was disorienting to someone used to forested hills. There were no trees, no points of reference-just an endless sea of man-high grass stretching in either direction. Forever, as far as eyes could determine.
The border-guards had plenty of time to see them coming and take up their stations in a leisurely manner. No surprise inspections at this post, assuming anyone ever bothered inspecting at all. And if there should ever be hostilities between Rayden and Birnam, it was improbable that anyone would ever try to bring an army along this way.
She would not have been at all surprised to see that the guards were slack and slovenly, but in fact, they were the very opposite. Brisk, business-like, they did a brief inspection of the wagon and the occupants and sent them on their way. In fact, there were only two jarring notes.
The first was that they were plainly looking for someone. The serjeant in charge consulted a piece of paper and kept glancing from it to them, as if comparing them with a set of notes.
The second was that one of the men did not come out at all. Rune caught a glimpse of him in the doorway; he was not wearing a uniform of Birnam's soldiers, and she thought she saw a glimpse of copper in his hand-and that was when she thought she heard a bit of that unsettling drone that came from the seeking-charm. She increased the humming that rattled her teeth unpleasantly and made her stomach churn, and concentrated very hard on creating a barrier between Kestrel and the rest of the world.
Finally the inspection was over, and the man she'd seen moved to the door again, just long enough to shake his head at the serjeant. She didn't get a good look at him, but she thought he had a face that was so ordinary that the fact in itself was remarkable. And it occurred to her that if she was creating a disguise, that was precisely how she would go about doing so.
It wasn't until after they were out of sight of the guard-house that she stopped her humming and dropped her magical defenses. By then, they were nearing the end of the causeway, and in the distance there was a haze of green that marked the blessed presence of trees.
Gwyna fanned herself with her hat, her hair curling from the heat and damp. "Blessed Lady, no wonder no one comes this way," she said faintly. "It's fall, for heaven's sake! Doesn't it ever cool off in there?"
"All that shallow water holds heat very well, Robin," Talaysen said from his place on the driver's bench. "The damp air makes it seem worse than it is. Just be glad we had that juice Vixen made up to rub on us, or we'd have been eaten alive by insects, and the mules with us."
"I want a bath," Rune said, sick to death of feeling sticky and hot. "I want a bath, and fresh food, and I don't want to have to hum that Shielding spell again. Or at least, not for a while."
Kestrel, silent until now, roused at that. "D-did you s-see the s-s-sorcerer? The one in the guardhouse?"
"I did," she replied grimly. "And he was looking for you. For us. He didn't catch that we were what he was looking for, though."
"We hope," Talaysen replied pessimistically.
Kestrel shook his head. "He d-didn't. Th-they w-wouldn't have l-let us by. Th-they'd have k-killed us."
"True, oh doubting Wren," Gwyna said. "They haven't hesitated for a moment, before this, even when Kestrel was nothing more than a harmless boy. They would have had no reason to hesitate now, and every reason to cut all four of us down. After all, who'd miss a few Gypsies?"
Talaysen's shoulders relaxed. "You're right," he admitted. "I probably worry too much. I think of all the sneaking things I might try, then assume someone else would do the same things I would. But there's no reason for them to let us into Birnam to kill us, when they could kill us with impunity anywhere."
"Well, the first hurdle is passed," Rune told him. "We're in Birnam. Now what?"
"Now we find a good place to camp and people who are willing to talk, in that order," Talaysen told them all, turning for a moment to meet their eyes, each in turn. "And remember: this is the enemy's home ground. We have to be much cleverer than he is. Quiet, elusive, and completely harmless as far as anyone can tell. We have to keep the enemy's eyes sliding right past us."
"And m-most of all," Kestrel added unexpectedly. "W-we have t-to find out wh-what he's up to. And why."
"Exactly," Rune said. "Exactly. And maybe the why is more important than the what."
Kestrel met her eyes, and nodded.
But a week later they were no nearer to the answer to either question. They camped for the night in the shelter of an arm of a greater forest that stretched the length of Birnam, and set up a camp complete with a very welcome fire. Now that they were out of the marsh, it got cold at night, and the days of frost weren't far off. Rune sat and stared at the flames beside Talaysen, waiting for Kestrel and Robin to settle down too.
"If I were looking for a place to foment rebellion, I'd throw up my hands in despair," Talaysen said, as he leaned back against the tree trunk behind him. "These people are so contented it sounds like a tale. I find it all very hard to believe, except that the evidence is right before my eyes. The King can't have paid everyone off to pretend to contentment!"
Sional nodded, reluctantly. Rune held her peace. Both of the men had done their level best to find trouble; they had found nothing at all. No trouble, no discontent, just a placid, contented countryside. This was grazing land, full of sheep and dairy cattle, though it was not the hilly, stony ground of the downs they had left in Rayden. These hills were rich, covered with a lush grass that cattle thrived on; not only cattle, but every other grazing animal. And the people were as fat and contented as their cattle.
"I wish we could find someone to talk to that we knew we could trust," Talaysen said fretfully. "I don't like it. These people are like sheep; they're so happy with King Rolend that it makes no sense. Everyone has at least a little grieva
nce against those in power!"
Rune fingered the elven-bracelet on her arm, then stopped and stared at it as an idea slowly formed in her mind. "Maybe we can find someone-at least, someone who's neutral. That is, if you're willing to trust the word of an elf."
Talaysen sat straight up, his laziness vanishing. "An elf? Where would we find an elf?"
"We call one," she told him, staring into his eyes from across the fire. "All four of us, together. I think that if we work as a group we're strong enough to manage it."
Talaysen licked his lips nervously; the other two watched her with speculation. "Wh-what did you have in m-mind?" Sional asked.
"There's a song we do, with the name of 'Elf-Call,' and now that I know about this magic we can do with music, I wonder just how close to the truth the title is," she said speculatively. "Especially since that friend of Peregrine's gave us these-"
She held up her wrist. Was it her imagination, or did the silver seem to shine with an especially brilliant gleam?
"So what do you intend us to do?" Talaysen asked, with one eyebrow raised.
"Well, we're in a forest, and there might be a Hill of elves around here," she replied, thinking as she spoke. "If we sang 'Elf-Call,' and thought about how we'd like someone to come talk to us-well, maybe someone would."
"We'd better hedge that in," Talaysen said grimly. "Put conditions around it, before we get ourselves in trouble. We'd better limit our 'wish' to elves nearby, and to elves who don't have anything particular they want to do tonight. I don't want to get another King angry with me!"
"Uhm-right." Neither did she, actually, One such experience was enough for a lifetime. "All right, how many conditions do we have?"
"Four, one for each of us," Gwyna supplied. "An elf who actually knows the answers to the questions we have, one who is willing to talk to humans, one who is nearby, and who would probably be amused by our ingenuity and audacity." She stood up. "Shall I get the instruments?"
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