“What have you told your parents about all this?” Minnie Hansen asked.
The smile was back. “Oh, my parents and I have long had an understanding, Mrs. Hansen.”
“What understanding would that be? And do call me Minnie. Thorian still calls me ‘Mrs. Hansen,’ but he was in my class some years ago, and both of us like it better that way. Correct, Thorian?“
“Yes, Mrs. Hansen,” Torrie said, no trace of irony in his voice, he hoped. Yes, she was really just a little old lady who no more would than could do anything to harm him, but she was also his second-grade teacher looming above his desk like a displeased giant.
“Now, what understanding would that be between you and your parents?” she asked Maggie, again.
“That I’ll tell them what I think they ought to know, and they’ll love me and support me no matter what I do,” she said. “And I don’t think they would really want to know what we’re doing, even if they did believe me, which… well, my mom wouldn’t, not even if she saw it all. And my dad’s…”
“A psychologist.”
“A clinical psychologist,” she said. “He doesn’t do rats-in-mazes; he treats people. And he’s used to being told things that he can’t quite believe.”
Minnie nodded. “As are school teachers, I can assure you. How did you reach this agreement?”
“Force of character,” she said.
Torrie was trying to figure out why Mom was glaring at the two of them, and why Maggie wasn’t telling the whole—
Oh. Of course. Mom was in the room. Probably not a good story for her ears.
“Force of character can be overdone,” Reverend Oppegaard said. “Which is why my Emily refers to it as ‘pigheadedness’.” He gave another few puffs on his pipe, then turned to Mom. “That’s easy. What I—and I think Minnie, as well? Yes, Minnie? I thought as much—what I don’t understand is why you’re lying to them, Karin.”
The room was suddenly colder.
“I don’t have the foggiest idea of what you are talking about, David Oppegaard,” Mom said, her lips tight. “And I do not much care to be called a liar in my home. I very much do not care to be called a liar in my own home.”
“Then sit down and explain it to us, Karin,” Minnie said, her voice soft and low. “Please sit down.”
As she walked over to the table, her posture reminded Torrie of the way Dad would walk up to a fencing strip: weight on the balls of the feet, knees slightly bent, ready to defend even before the match started. At the fencing club at school, there had been a little teasing of Torrie’s stance—that was how he had been taught—until after freestyle had caught on.
“What do you think there is to explain?” she asked.
“Much.” Oppegaard shook his head. “It’s too much. You’re one of the most competent people I know, Karin, and probably the most worldly person in Hardwood.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Shh,” Minnie said, patting her on the leg. “Let him finish.”
“—But when Hosea started getting sick,” Oppegaard said. “You found yourself unable to locate Torrie, and that surprised me.”
“But that was the idea,” Torrie said. “We were just getting away from it all. It was a vacation—”
“—which was terminated only,” Minnie said, cutting Torrie off like she’d thrown a switch, “when you were on your way home anyway, and only then after Ian Silverstein had been dispatched with Hosea.”
“Well, Karin?” Oppegaard’s heavy brows listed. “Didn’t you think of calling American Express sooner?”
“No, of course not.” She shook her head. “It didn’t occur to me. It’s not obvious, after all.”
“Neither are you, after all,” he said. “Obvious, that is. It’s subtle, and it’s very much like you, Karin, to decide when you are and aren’t going to be competent.”
“It is,” Minnie Hansen said, “well, it is a standard tactic in a young woman’s book of tricks, David. If you are attractive enough, even a slightly helpless look will get men to do whatever you want.” Her smile seemed genuinely warm. “I was once almost that pretty.”
“I…don’t know what to say,” Mom said. “It sounds like you’re saying I endangered Hosea just to …”—she spread her hands—“do what?”
“Of course.” Maggie thumped a hand against the table so hard that the dishes danced. “I should have figured it out by now. To keep your son safe, of course.” She turned to Torrie. “That’s what this has all been about. She didn’t want him to take your dad with him, and she didn’t want you to go, either. But Ian’s expendable.” She looked Mom full in the face.
“You have a lot of nerve. How could you? I mean, really, how could you?” she said.
“Perhaps you’re being too critical,” Minnie said. “If you bear a child, you might feel differently. It’s one thing to take a risk yourself; it’s another to send a child into danger.” She turned to Karin. “This isn’t the first time any of us has been asked to risk a son, Karin.”
“But—”
“Yes, I know. But this is your son. Others have sons, as well, Karin,” she said, her eyes focusing on something far distant, for just a moment When she spoke, her lips were tight. “I had a son, once.”
“I don’t approve, but it is slick.” Oppegaard shook his head. “Ian Silverstein has no family to speak of; that’s one of the things that drew him here. His mother’s long dead, and his father has no use for him, since he’s too old to be an emotional punching bag anymore.” He puffed on his pipe again, apparently not noticing that the coal had gone out. “Which made him even more expendable, eh?”
Reverend Oppegaard broke the silence. “So: what do we do now?”
“You can’t send Torrie. He’s just a boy.”
“Mom!”
Maggie laid a hand on Torrie’s arm. “Shh, please.” She turned to Mom. “He’s not your little boy, not anymore, Mrs. Thorsen.”
“You should be more concerned with… cutting your losses, Karin,” Minnie Hansen said. “What do you think that Thorian’s father would say if he found out?”
“He’d insist on going, as well,” Karin said, flatly, staring into her coffee as though she could see something on its oily surface. “He would see it as a matter of honor. Ian… championed Torrie. It’s Thorian’s duty to protect his son. I was able to talk him out of going before, but it wouldn’t occur to him that I had … other things on my mind than my own safety.” She looked up. “We have to work something out, Minnie, David. I mean—”
No. Mom wouldn’t—“You mean, Mom, that you thought that Ian and Arnie could be sent—”
“You don’t talk to me like that, Thorian Thorsen,” she said, a snap in her voice. “I may not be perfect, but I do the best I can.”
Torrie hadn’t heard that tone in Mom’s voice since the time she’d caught him, at age six, trying to figure out the combination lock on one of the gun boxes, and had screamed at him before spanking his butt so long and hard that he almost shuddered from the memory.
Maggie shook her head. “You need somebody with you,” she said. “I’m someone.” She thought about it for a moment. “I’ll need access to a typewriter or a computer and printer.” She looked over at Oppegaard. “Can you get a letter postmarked from the East Coast? Safely?”
“Certainly, if necessary.” He didn’t seem surprised by the request. “Anywhere in particular?”
“Bangor, Maine. Or anywhere near Mount Katah-din. Torrie and I met up with another couple coming back from Europe, and decided to spend the rest of the year walking the Appalachian Trail. We’re taking a break from school this year, but we’ll catch up.”
Oppegaard shook his head. “Two letters, if you please. One with whatever lie you want to try. Another one with the truth. If your parents come looking for you, they may well end up on my doorstep.”
She shook her head. “We should only be gone a few weeks. My guess is that Ian’s just fine, and that this Freya he’s so clearly…” She paused fo
r a moment, searching for polite word. “… so clearly enamored of, that’s it, enamored of—she’ll send them both back healthy, stuffed with apple pie so that they can barely walk.”
“Then why go at all?” Karin asked. “If it’s all so unimportant and safe…”
“If you thought it was all so unimportant and safe, Karin,” Maggie said, as though she were the older, lecturing to the younger, “then you wouldn’t have tried to interfere with Torrie going. And if it isn’t so damn safe, then maybe a helpless-looking girl who just happens to be handier with a sword than anybody would expect can come in handy. Again.”
“But you don’t understand. Here, he’s just my son. There, he’s his son. Thorian the Traitor, they call him. There’s nobody in the Middle Dominions who would raise a hand to protect him, and swordsmen of the House of Steel are famed and feared all over Tir Na Nog.”
“As indeed we are,” Dad’s voice came. His blocky frame seemed to fill the doorway, and the light behind him cast his face into shadow.
“Much of it, of course,” he went on, “is exaggeration; some of it, of course, is the fact that we’re specialists, and very good at what we do.” He shook his head, gently, as he walked over to Mom. “Min alskling,” he said, “this is not the way I do things, as well you know.” He took her chin in his hand. “I think Maggie is probably right, and your fears are largely misplaced, but what if Maggie and I are wrong?”
Torrie very much didn’t like the way Dad said “Maggie and I.” He was feeling more like a spare wheel all the time. Dad and Mom and Maggie had fought and killed the Sons of the Wolf themselves; Torrie might be Dad’s son, but Maggie was Dad’s comrade-in-arms, the relationship sealed in blood.
“Then,” Dad went on, “there’s the more important matter of honor. Not only do we have an obligation to Ian, but to Hosea, as well. He’s been my comrade for more than twenty years now, and where I grew up, we take that seriously.”
“As we do here in Hardwood,” Minnie Hansen said, never missing a stitch. “As you know perfectly well.”
“No offense was meant, Minnie,” he said.
“Well, offense is taken, Thorian Thorsen.” She looked up at him. “Winter comes around every year to remind us of that, I’ll have you know. Winter has always been a cold and dangerous beast on the plains, Thorian. You need to be able to count on your neighbors to help you fight the beast, not to jockey for position to avoid being the next one eaten.” She looked at Mom, and this time neither her voice nor her look were gentle. “I think, young lady, that you had best think about whether or not you wish to live in this small town of ours; your ways have become far too citified for my tastes.” She sniffed pointedly. “When you start thinking of your friends as a modern convenience, to be discarded at will, you’ve long gone past merely not being neighborly.”
Mom’s face was a mask of self-control. “I have no apologies,” she said. She turned to Dad. “But if you are going to go, I shall go with you.”
“No, you shall not,” Dad said, in that quiet, level voice, barely more than a whisper, that he used when he was past the point of arguing. “Torrie is enough of a hostage to fortune. I… need to protect his back, and mine, not watch out for you.” If he was angry, it didn’t show on his face, or in his voice. “I think Karin’s worried that the return of the Sons is misguided—”
“Or a convenient way to keep you here,” Maggie said.
“—but it is not impossible; I entrust my wife and home to your care, David Oppegaard,” he said, formally.
Oppegaard nodded as he rose. “We’ll manage. I’ll call Doc and Bob Aarsted. And Jeff Bjerke,” he added, clearly an afterthought.
Dad drew himself up straight, practically clicking his heels as he turned to face Maggie. “Maggie, you wish to accompany us?”
“Wish?” She shook her head. “Nah. I insist.”
“You’d let her go, and not me?” Mom’s lips tightened.
“Min alskling,” Dad said, taking her hand and bringing it to his lips for just a moment, “you are my wife. I honor and respect you, and when we have had a chance to… put this behind us, I will perhaps again trust you with matters of honor as I always have and always will in other matters.
“But you are my wife; when Maggie took sword to the Sons, she became my … svertbror, my comrade-in-arms.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
Dad clapped his hand to Maggie’s shoulder. “Well and good, then; we’ll get you fitted out. A little work on some of Karin’s square-dancing shirts, and you could pass as a goldstitch, and such are much prized in Vandescard.” He turned to Karin. “Your skills with needle and thread are better than mine; you will follow my instructions.”
Torrie had never heard Dad speak to Mom like that, and Mom clearly wasn’t used to it. Her eyes held his for a long time, so long that Torrie started to say something, regretting it the moment that Maggie, Reverend Oppegaard, and Minnie Hansen all turned to glare him into silence.
Finally, Mom nodded, her eyes fixed on the floor. “Whatever you say, Thorian, whatever you say.”
“Good.” He turned to Torrie. “Check your rucksack, and plan on turning in directly after supper. We sleep, then we leave.” He turned back to Mom, and took her hand, drawing her to her feet. “There is much you and I have to talk about, my wife.”
Torrie Thorsen sat alone in the kitchen. Mom and Dad had gone off for their talk, although what they had to talk about right now escaped him. Minnie and Reverend Oppegaard had departed, as well. Maggie was down in the basement, filling a rucksack with her gear and supplies, and he knew that he ought to go help her, but he really needed to sit by himself for a few minutes.
He sipped on his weak coffee.
Please, he thought, let it be easy this time.
Chapter Nine
“The Best fruit…”
The trick, Ian had quickly found, was to keep at least one gloved hand on the spear at all times. That way, even if it happened to brush against him, nothing would happen. The best analogy he’d been able to come up with was that the glove grounded him, even though that didn’t make sense. Well, it didn’t have to make sense to him: it just was.
Then again, it was magic, after all, and there was no particular reason magic had to make sense. Shit, there was no particular reason that life had to make sense, and too much of the time it didn’t.
What was important was that he didn’t repeat what had happened the first night: he had stuck the spear into the ground, taken off Freya’s gloves, and pitched his sleeping gear nearby. Sometime in the night his left arm had brushed against the spear. He had come awake, instantly, in horrible pain, a blister the size of an egg yolk already forming on his arm.
It still hurt like a sonofabitch, but he was more careful as he, Arnie, and Ivar del Hival continued down the road.
Arnie was amazing, for an old man. Ian would have expected that he would have been all-in by the end of the first day or so, but here he was, keeping up with two younger men.
“What’s the matter, youngster,” he said, his lined face split in a grin. “Having trouble keeping up?” Strangely enough, this whole thing seemed to be good for Arnie.
Ivar del Hival, on point, held up a hand. “If you please, there’s a patrol on the road ahead, and it’s about half the size it ought to be.”
“Then why aren’t you smiling?” Ian asked.
“Because ten lancers are enough to do all three of us in before we’d have time to more than fart, and because I don’t think that the Vandestish would be sending a small patrol after us.”
“Yeah.” Arnie Selmo’s fingers seemed to be trying to clutch something that wasn’t there. He looked down as though he noticed himself doing that, and then hooked his thumbs in his pack strap. “And like Doc Sherve says, when you hear hoofbeats—and I do hear hoofbeats coming from around the bend behind us—think horses, not zebras.”
“There’s a time to fight and a time to stand easy,” Ivar del Hival said. “This isn’t one o
f those times where I’d say it was a difficult choice.”
The leader of the patrol slowed his horse first to a slow walk, and then to an even slower shuffle. On horseback he towered above Ian, of course, but he seemed to be a tall man, anyway. He wore black leather, trimmed with silver thread, a thick wool cloak half-concealing the scabbarded sword held clutched in his enameled, mechanical left hand.
Ready as he and his men seemed to be, there wasn’t anything to do but face them. Ian could feel the blood pounding in his ears, but the weird thing was that he couldn’t help wondering what the guy did when his nose itched, what with one hand occupied with the reins and the other holding the scabbard at all times.
Somehow, though, it didn’t seem like the right moment to ask.
“Greetings,” Ian said, his voice just shy of a shout.
The man eyed him silently for a moment, dark eyes peering out from under heavy brows. “I return your greetings,” he said, his voice low. “Without hostility or commitment,” he went on, his expression giving the lie to his words. “I am Aglovain Tyrson; by birth, brother to the Margravine of the Hinterlands; by appointment, rider-in-chief of this patrol. Declare your intentions, if you please.”
“Huh?” Ian cleared his throat to cover. “I mean, er, we mean you and yours no harm. We are just bringing a message to your capital—”
“To the Seat,” Ivar del Hival put in. “Just messengers, that’s all we are.”
One corner of Aglovain Tyrson’s mouth turned up. “Of course, naturally, it’s difficult for one to imagine an ordinary of the House of Flame on any sort of spying mission. Unless, of course, one had, as a little boy, met Ivar del Hival, innocent trader, at the Seat, and found out later, that he was, in fact, a Dominion spy.” He turned to one of his companions, an older, barrel-chested man who reminded Ian of John Rhys Davies. “What do we do with spies these days?”
“It seems to me that we still behead them,” the fat man said. His voice was nasal, and annoying. He looked them over carefully, scratching his fingers against a day’s worth of stubble on his chin. “You’d have to ask the margrave about that. We also ought to see what he would want us to do about a spy’s companions, come to think of it.”
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