by Carol Berg
Such a circuitous route made no sense at all.
“ANI! ANI! ANI!” A FULL hour after leaving Montclaire, five dirty-faced urchins with near-white hair chased the donkey cart into Jaugert’s yard, swarming onto the step and the box before we had rolled to a stop. A gangly girl held back and dipped her knee, while at the same time snatching the collar of a freckle-nosed boy trying to climb my skirt. “Divine grace, damoselle.”
“Divine grace, Kati. I’m so sorry I’ve brought nothing today.” I patted several warm white heads and told myself guilt was irrational, which did nothing at all to cure it.
As Remy went off in search of Jaugert and the noisy swarm dispersed, I motioned Jaugert’s eldest up close. “Kati, you must get up to the house tomorrow early and tell Melusina I said to fill you as many baskets as she can. I’m called to the city, and there will be a new lord at Montclaire. A new family. Do you understand?”
“Aye, damoselle.” Though her shy flush died away, her proud manners held.
A child of eleven should not have to understand what I’d just told her. But her mother had died birthing the baby that clung to Kati’s hand, and her father was waiting for a charm singer to cleanse his house before considering a new wife to care for his brood. Unfortunately, the Camarilla, the council of master mages who supposedly protected Sabrians from magical charlatans, had the habit of branding charm singers on the forehead and hanging them up in the public markets until they confessed their false practices—or starved.
I never knew who to despise the more: the lackwit grannies and hedge wizards who perpetuated these superstitions, the brutal mages who insisted people hold faith in—and pay for—only their particular variety of charms and spells, or the believers like Jaugert who allowed magic to impoverish their lives.
“Damoselle Anne, divine grace be with thee this sweet even’,” said Jaugert from the barn door. “Guess me fair who I’ve got fer ye.” The wiry little man led out a bright-eyed little silver-bay mare, who nickered and bobbed her head in greeting.
“Ladyslipper!” The happy surprise almost destroyed my hard-won composure. Holy saints, how I detested such sentimental weakness.
“The laird what sent you here paid me sum enow to fetch one of yer own beasties from the hostelry in Tigano. Shall ye ride her down to the crossing, or would ye rather stick with Remy and his balkish ass?”
So Duplais had intended me to ride all along. Why hadn’t he told me? I doubted he’d done it from generosity.
Ladyslipper nuzzled my shoulder. I stroked her neck and apologized for my empty pockets. Though she looked a little thinner, her brown coat was glossy, her pale mane combed, and her hooves well trimmed.
“I’ll ride,” I said, throwing my arms around the bony hostler—which was entirely unlike me. “Thank you, Jaugert. Such a kindness you’ve done me.” He could have used Duplais’ coin to hire me a bone-racking hack and pocketed the difference.
Jaugert fastened my book satchel to the saddle, but I couldn’t bear to wait longer and had him give me a hand up. Yelling to Remy that we’d transfer the rest of my bags when we joined Duplais at Vradeu’s Crossing, I took out across Jaugert’s meadow. Allowing Ladyslipper her head in the soft evening was almost enough to outrun grief. We certainly outran Remy and his ass.
AS THE TRACK ANGLED BACK toward the fretting ribbon of Pelicaine Rill and the crossing, I slowed the mare to a walk. An evening haze had settled over the gray-green stubble of Barone Vradeu’s lavender fields, half obscuring the vertical white rocks that bounded the valley. Remy and his cart were the merest dust cloud behind me. The wind and pounding rhythm of Ladyslipper’s exuberant run had cleared my head.
Yet my contentment was short-lived. Duplais awaited me at the top of a short incline. Behind him the track leveled and plunged through a sea of rippling wheat before vanishing into a thick stand of oaks and beeches.
“Well-done, damoselle,” he said, pulling his little chestnut around before I could halt. “We’ve time enough to get through the wood and across the ford before dark. We’ll have moonlight the rest of the way to Tigano, and the road’s easy enough. Quickly, if you please.”
If he was in such a dreadful hurry, why had he brought me the long way around?
All at once, the harsh realities of my situation stung like a slap on tender skin. We had encountered no sentry on the back road, and Vradeu’s Crossing would deposit us well outside Vernase. No one in the village and none of the encircling guard would have seen me leave Montclaire with Duplais. Deception. Duplicity. Lianelle had said to trust no one.
“Wait! Sonjeur!”
He brought his horse around again. “What is it?”
“I must wait for Remy and the cart,” I said.
“Impossible.”
“But I’ve left bags on the cart. My clothes. Valuables.” I wasn’t going anywhere without the leather case I’d tucked under the seat of Remy’s cart. It held my mother’s jewelry and my own few pieces, my grandmother’s and cousin’s tessilae, a few coins I’d taken from Montclaire’s iron box, before consigning it to Bernard’s custody . . . and Lianelle’s packet.
“The cart will proceed to Vernase, where the innkeeper will send on your belongings. I’ve left her funds for just such necessity. We must go now, damoselle.”
A few times on his first visit to Montclaire, and for a certain moment after my father’s trial, I’d imagined Duplais possessed of some small portion of compassion. In the years since, I had marveled at my naïveté. Everything he’d said and done had been aimed at convicting my father and his confederates.
My newly wakened mistrust emboldened me. “Why must we?”
Had I been an artist like my mother, I would have sketched Portier de Duplais’ smooth, narrow face as chiseled ice, seamed with cracks spewing steam. At my question, the cracks split.
“Because, damoselle, my king has charged me to deliver you to Castelle Escalon intact. As you so recently discovered to your distress—and my own—your father’s rank in the brotherhood of traitors no longer ensures his children’s safety. I was followed to Montclaire and have no reason to believe those followers friendly. Now, will you please ride?”
The horrors I’d dismissed at Seravain came rushing back. “You believe my sister was murdered. For what?”
“Vengeance,” said Duplais, his gaze roaming the path and the shadowed boundary of the wood. “Your sister revealed secrets that brought down three powerful sorcerers and stalled your father’s plot to upend Sabria. Those who dabble in murder and unholy sorcery invite retribution in like coin. Or perhaps someone believed she knew more than she told and wished to silence her . . . or tried to pry out her secrets for their own use.” He cast his keen-edged scrutiny on me. “Something’s changed in the world. Now they’re coming after you.”
“But I know nothing of use to such people!” The assertion, repeated a thousand times before the trial, sounded false even to me. Because now, of course, I did know something. Yet Lianelle had warned me not to speak of her magic books. For your life, Ani . . . I’d thought her exaggerating.
Without waiting for more argument, he goaded his mount to a trot. Ladyslipper took out after the chestnut, though every morsel of my own spirit yearned to hie back to Montclaire and barricade myself in the study.
Fear welled up like a black, sour flood. Ambrose could not run. “What of my brother?”
“A well-guarded hostage is not so easy a mark as a lone woman in the country,” said Duplais. “But I’ve warned the Spindle warder to bolster his guard.”
No matter how I detested Duplais, I could fault neither his logic nor his thoroughness. Naive was too bold a word for me, who had wasted these four years pretending I could stay hidden and safe at home forever. Dunderheaded described me better. No matter that Duplais had tried to tell me, I had not considered what Lianelle’s death might mean about my father.
One of Lianelle’s fellow students, a young girl named Ophelie, had become involved in the illicit practice of blood transfer
ence in an attempt to grow her power for magic. Lianelle had known her friend’s secret and tried to help her. But my father and his confederates had abducted Ophelie and imprisoned her, and the three sorcerers had used her blood for themselves. For one brief hour, the dying Ophelie had gotten free of them, providing the first evidence that led to my father’s conviction. At the trial, Duplais had used Lianelle’s continued life as evidence of Papa’s supremacy in this magical conspiracy. Now she was dead, and with only this flimsy explanation.
The lowering sun slipped through scattered clots of purple and gray cloud. Hawks and kites circled, dodging angled sunbeams as they surveyed Vradeu’s wheat field. The drying wheat rustled like a showering rain. But as we passed under the canopy of oak and beech, the noise of the Rill, the wheat, and the birds fell silent. The spongy woodland turf muffled hoofbeats and muted the light.
“Damn and blast.” Duplais’ soft epithet sliced through the breathless damp like a saber. “Stay close, damoselle. Follow my direction, whatever comes.”
No amount of peering into the gloom revealed what concerned him. I nudged Ladyslipper to Duplais’ side as he slowed, though every part of me wanted to kick her to a gallop. I had no other defender.
“Hey up, steward . . . wimman’s heinend . . . whateer th’art called at present day.” The flat, contemptuous hail snapped through the woodland like a whipcrack. “And tha, too, lahddee fair.”
CHAPTER 4
1 OCET, EVENING
The variegated gloom disgorged three bulky men in hammered leather. Heart thumping, I hauled on Ladyslipper’s reins. She came around sweetly, but two riders blocked our retreat. Duplais sat petrified on his chestnut.
“There’s noort ta go, lahddee fair.” The cloaked swordsman who stepped forward wore a full leather mask, shaped so like a human face, one expected the narrow lips to issue a blessing. Deepening shadows hid the gaze behind the eyeholes and the human lips behind the mouth slot. A heavy brown hood, tied to the mask, hid his hair. “We’ve a small bizn with tha; thence can be on yer way. Doon, now. Ta ground tha go.”
The big man’s bizarre costume transfixed me. Not a squared centimetre of his skin was exposed. Horrors could lie beneath so perfectly sculpted a mask.
“Do as he says, damoselle,” said Duplais, taut as wind-stretched canvas. “Resistance gains nothing.”
The secretary, so imperious this day past, had shriveled, appearing diminished and subservient before the masked giant. Wholly a coward. Face pale and rigid as a limestone cliff, he dismounted hurriedly and offered me his hand.
I ignored his stiff courtesy and slid to the ground. He’d be no protection against these five. He did not appear to carry so much as a knife. Not that I was better prepared. My zahkri, a Fassid bandit knife given me by my Cazar grandfather, remained in Remy’s cart. When my uncles had tried to teach me its nastier uses, I’d practiced only long enough to make them happy before escaping to less barbaric enjoyments.
The leader’s thick accent spoke of Norgand, the ever-hostile tribal lands of rock and ice and fire that constricted Sabria’s northern sea routes. But these were neither marauders come downriver nor other common highwaymen. He had called Duplais steward and a woman’s heinend, or bond slave. They knew him. But their bizn—business—was with me.
I was not so frightened as I would have expected. Though the cruel nature of my father’s crimes implied the like from any rivals, facing danger seemed easier than anticipating. But if I was to survive, I’d best pay attention.
The masked man motioned to his companions. One held our horses’ bridles, while the other threw my satchel to the ground. Duplais’ shabby leather case soon joined it. These two and the two riders who’d come up from behind wore simpler masks and no hoods, which left their hair and necks exposed. I judged them no cadre of Norgandi mercenaries, either. Ebony skin and black, tight-curled hair named one man a Fassid. Norgandi believed the Fassid to be Fallen and would never work side by side with them.
The two behind dismounted and joined their fellows, weapons bristling.
“We’ve naught of value, wegheind,” said Duplais, naming the leader an ox’s rear, as the Fassid cut his purse and a velvet spall pouch from his belt and dropped them beside our bags. “The coins in my purse won’t cover the first bribe for your jailer. And surely you were taught that those who dare touch sanctified spalls are doomed to wander Ixtador Beyond the Veil for a thousand years.”
Kneeling beside our belongings, the masked Norgandi emptied Duplais’ spall pouch into his hand and examined the three stone chips—struck from tessilae to be constant reminders of honored dead. “We’re nae worrt by yer god’s punishings o’er splits of stone. Die with honor, and the Mariner sails un direct ta Skyhallow. Nae cruelish wanderwalks out of time. As tae valuing, oor bizn is oor own.”
Duplais’ glare roved from one of the masked men to the next as if committing them to memory. One of the four was missing a finger on his left hand. One wore gold hoop earrings, and a zahkri at his belt, yet he was not Fassid, but rather brown-haired and thick boned.
Discarding pouch and spalls over his shoulder, the leader dug into my book satchel. Spiderwebs brushed my face and hair.
“Ah! Look-see . . .” He pulled out the books I’d packed for Ambrose. One by one, he examined the titles, riffled the pages, and carefully traced his fingers over random text.
I drew back, a creeping, wriggling certainty churning my gut. As sure as my name, the masked man was using spellwork to examine the books. His mask covered his neck, so I could not see if he wore a mage’s collar, and his gloves hid any blood family’s handmark.
One by one he discarded my books. With a muffled curse, he upended my bag and pawed through the papers and silly oddments I had snatched up to bring with me. Family birth warrants and the Camarilla validations of our handmarks. My parents’ marriage contract. Montclaire’s planting book, which I would need to return to Bernard, merited a brief look. A thumb-sized portrait of my mother. The journal I’d not written in since I was an overimaginative twelve-year-old. The magnifying glass from the study. The engraved silver scissors Mama had given me on my sixteenth birthday. Bits and pieces of a life in splinters.
The Norgandi seized on the journal at once and set it aside. Had I not been increasingly sick at the thought of his magic working, I would have laughed at the consideration of desperate criminals reading my lurid speculations on male anatomy, “women’s mysteries,” and what went on in my parents’ bedchamber.
The planting book went with the journal. The papers he reviewed and tossed aside.
The scissors and the glass also merited study. The masked sorcerer laid the magnifying lens on a silver plate from his cloak, encircled them with the length of yarn, and mumbled a word that sounded something like fyacor or fillator, words that meant starfish or evil brother or something like. My Aljyssian vocabulary had evaporated for the moment.
Though he blew a note of disappointment, the Norgandi tossed the magnifier atop the journal. His examination of my scissors resulted in the same.
“Baggage seems a mite scant for a lahddee traverling.” Though its molded expression remained serene, his displeasure battered me like hailstones. He jerked his head at his men. “Outen their pockies ’n see what’s else hid. Soft wi’ the lahddee. Nae want ’er mussed till we scoff’er spiniks.”
What were spiniks? My head was spinning. Not jewels. Treasures? No. Something to be scoffed—stolen. Thank the stars that the cart carrying Lianelle’s letter and charms had lagged so far behind us.
As he dumped clothes and sundries from Duplais’ case, two of the others sheathed their weapons. While the fellow with the hoop earrings stood behind Duplais, the Fassid searched the secretary from neck to boots. Duplais stood rigid, as the brigand tossed a slim leather-bound book, an overlarge silver coin, and a small, tarnished brass case to the ground.
Then it was my turn. The man with the hoop earrings laid his thick-knuckled fingers on my shoulders and slid them down my arms
all the way to the wrists.
My flesh shrank away from my skin.
When he returned his creeping hands to my shoulders, his thumbs strayed above my bodice to my bare throat, and stroked the skin with a slow, discomforting pressure. Then his fingers splayed wide and his thumbs circled downward. The fire in my gut blossomed.
“Don’t touch me!” I said hoarsely, bringing my forearms up sharply between his and slapping them outward, knocking his hands away. At the same time I lurched backward, right into the arms of the Fassid. I flailed at him and dodged to the side before he could grab me. “I’ve no pockets and nothing you would—”
A guttural screech split the gloom. Something huge and dark swept out of the trees. A rider.
Pandemonium erupted as someone’s grunting curse turned to a bubbling shriek. Duplais’ chestnut reared. Ladyslipper whinnied. With frightened snorts, our horses vanished into the wood.
As I strained and twisted, Duplais enveloped me in his arms and slammed me to the ground. A second horse and rider charged into the fray, so close the wind of their passing fluttered Duplais’ collar into my eyes. They must have crossed the very spot we’d been standing.
Duplais’ heart drummed through his coat as I tried to wriggle out from under him. Two steps away, the Fassid lay unmoving, an arrow protruding from his eye.
“Into the trees,” Duplais growled into my ear, before rolling off me. Gripping my hand and pressing my head low, he half led, half dragged me deep into the twiggy underbrush.
“Fitch the lahddee! Fitch ’er!” The breathless Norgandi sounded as if he were too busy to fitch me himself. Savage grunts accompanied the clank and scrape of steel.
Duplais gave me no chance to heed my footing. When I tripped on a mass of roots, he had me up again before I could spit out the dirt and dead leaves. We’d gone perhaps twenty metres from the road when he backed me against a tree. Stronger than he appeared, he forced me still and pressed a finger to my lips. I shoved his finger from my mouth, but bit my lip and stayed quiet.
