Neslan said, “The more pressing question is why he tried to abduct Kansten. He could have killed her on the spot.”
“Payback,” said Lanokas. “Payback for what happened to Malzin.”
Kora said, “Is killing her not payback? Look, he sent a fireball at you.”
“Of course he’d try to kill me. I’m the king’s son. Zalski is a beast, Kora, and Kansten kicked the snot out of his wife. He wasn’t about to let her die as easily as Sedder.”
Neslan shot Lanokas a reproving glance, while Kora turned her head away at the unexpected blow.
“I didn’t mean….” said the prince.
“Forget it.”
“So,” said Kansten again, “how do we get out of here?”
Lanokas turned to Neslan. “We need Zalski’s plan to secure the city. The specifics.”
Neslan looked uncertain. “He’ll change things after today.”
“He’ll keep the basic structure, just tighten the net.”
And Neslan’s eyes turned bright. His voice came fast when he spoke, two signs of his brainwaves. “There’s a large group leaving on pilgrimage, tomorrow noon. They turned in their request for travel last week. The guard will take posts at the bridge, and the gate, to be sure we’re not with them. The net will be loose then.”
“Then that’s when we’ll act.”
They spent an hour hashing out plans. Bendelof joined them, slow on her feet but much improved from when she left. She spoke softer than usual but her thoughts were clear, her suggestions useful as they planned for the best and then formulated Plan B. Nonetheless, a stiffness lay over the proceedings that had nothing to do with their discussion; Sedder’s absence spoke as loudly as anyone present, and Kora took a strange sense of comfort in the tension. She appreciated knowing she was not alone in grieving.
They finalized their agenda and fell into a silence Kora had no time to judge: was it bristling? Empty? Studded with fear and doubt? Their hostess returned just as everyone ran out of things to say. She beckoned the sorceress, who followed her to the kitchen, a small room and clean, though pots and stacks of plates covered every visible surface. A meal of some kind simmered above the fire, and the air smelled of meat and onions.
“What’s your name?” asked the woman.
“What’s yours?”
“Prue Halt.”
“Kora Porteg.”
“I don’t know if you noticed, Kora Porteg, but a good thirty people watched you shooting off incantations out there.”
“Right,” said Kora. She had noticed, of course she noticed, and then forgot completely. Zalski had foreseen this, she told herself. You are marked, and not by the ruby….
How could she have let those strangers see her?
Prue began chopping bell peppers, speaking over her shoulder. “Is that all you’re going to say?”
“I don’t know what you want from me. There’s no changing what happened, is there? No stopping their tongues. The whole city’ll know within two days. I’ll be feared as much as he is.”
Prue put down her knife. “You are one stupid girl.”
“Excuse me?”
“Why would people fear you? You’re in the League, aren’t you? We know what the League stands for. If you wanted power, you’d have joined the other side.”
“That’s not how Zalski will make things look. If anyone understands prejudice, he does. He’ll manipulate everything.”
“If people are fools enough to believe a word he says….”
“They are, Prue. Because they’re afraid, afraid of magic, of starving, of the surging violence. I’m just one more monster in the closet. And I can’t discuss this, not now, I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
“Self-pity won’t do a thing for you.”
Kora kept in mind this woman was hiding other Leaguesmen. The thought of Bennie contained her anger, though she felt like throwing every pan in the room. “Please, don’t pretend you know me. I know you mean well, but you don’t know a thing about me.”
The only person in Podrar who knew her was nothing but a memory now.
Kora swept from the kitchen, but the fire of her insult froze when she found her companions still in silence. Neslan stared at the corner; Kansten studied the floor as though it were a book she was half-attempting to read. Silent tears had gathered at the tip of Bendelof’s nose. Lanokas alone marked Kora’s entry, and he merely glanced up to register that she walked in. He lacked the energy to ask what Prue had wanted, his ever-vivid curiosity the second fatality of the day.
Kora should have died at that cabin, not Sedder. She was the one exposed as a sorceress, the one less than worthless to the League as a result. She was the one who could not cast a simple shield spell fast enough to prevent a death that never would have happened had Laskenay been at the battle in her place.
The room remained still. No one even sighed in fifteen minutes. Kora had never wished so badly to be anywhere else, anywhere; had she known the time she would have counted every second. Instead, she suggested they go back through the plan for tomorrow.
Neslan nodded in her direction. “It couldn’t hurt,” he said, and the group launched into a recital of how things should go the next day, for no other reason than to distract themselves.
* * *
The noon sun was hot on Kora’s invisible head, hotter than normal for the month of November; hot enough, in fact, to make her remove her bandana temporarily. She had left the city and passed to the range of hills northward, hills that served as a buffer between Podrar and the surrounding forest.
Three people stood in her line of vision, two of them associates of Lanokas. He had called on them that morning. A married couple in their early forties, they had no trouble acting the part of lovers out for an afternoon stroll and paid no undue attention to the young workingman exercising his horse at a canter. Zalski’s guard played his role perfectly: had Neslan not named this spot a certain place to find at least one soldier, Kora would never have suspected the pleasant-looking horseman. Lanokas and Kansten hid nearby, just inside the city limits.
Kora waited for the guard to move closer. When he did, she whispered “Kaiga,” and the horse stumbled over its front feet, nearly tossing the man on its back. “Estatua,” she added, and the rider fell with a hollow-sounding thud to the grass, frozen on his side in a sitting position.
Lanokas and Kansten led their horses out from hiding. Kora, with a quick glance for strangers, replaced her headwrap and turned visible. She stared at the statuesque guard, his skin a now familiar shade of gray almost metallic. “You’re sure he’s not watching us?” she asked.
Kansten said, “I couldn’t see or hear a thing when you cast that spell on me.” Lanokas tossed her his reins and steadied the soldier’s horse, which he offered to Kora.
“Your steed, my lady?”
“I couldn’t control that animal.”
“Take mine then.” He helped Kora onto his gelding, whose saddlebags were filled with supplies. Kansten climbed on her chestnut mare. Lanokas then pulled himself on the back of the third horse, a stallion, the darkest of the three, while the married couple arranged themselves around the fallen plain-clothes guard.
“Thanks again,” said Lanokas. “Especially for fetching the horses.” The woman asked him:
“You still can’t say why you’re heading north?”
Lanokas said they’d all be safer if he didn’t, and she accepted his answer with good will. “It was an honor to meet you,” she told Kora. Her husband said the same, pressing the group of three to head off.
Lanokas and Kansten urged their horses forward; a few steps and they disappeared in the forest. Kora followed more slowly, turning in her saddle to mutter “Desfazair” from the shelter of the trees, as far from the immobile guard as she could put herself. He began to stir, and she took off after Lanokas, leaving the League’s supporters to fuss over the handsome young man stunned when he fell from his mount, which they regretted to tell him had bolted.
&nb
sp; It took Kora, Kansten and Lanokas four hours to reach a small milling village, the first settlement on their path. They stopped outside it to let the horses graze and to eat the most perishable of their food stores. The boiled eggs Prue gave them were not what Kora wanted midway through the afternoon, but they constituted a meal, and she found she was hungry enough that they tasted as fine as the herb-smothered chicken her mother used to make.
After lunch they set off again, skirting the town; it was far too close to Podrar and too intimate a place for the deposed prince, the Marked One, and the woman who had just attacked Zalski’s wife to show themselves. Kora looked out at what she could see of the town through the trees. The mill met her eyes first, its wooden wheel turning on the river, four or five men bustling all around it with crates and boxes and donkey-led wagons. A span of quaint stores and homes also fell in view, and left no doubt a stranger would be greeted in this quiet, simple spot with wary eyes. Lanokas had hoped the pilgrims might eat here, might stop a bit, so he and his companions could slip among them to obtain the ideal cover. Zalski knew no Leaguesmen had left Podrar with that group, which was why the prince wanted to join it, but unfortunately, the pilgrims had ridden past. The mill would have shut down for forty or more visitors. The village was just that small.
“Now what do we do?” asked Kora.
Lanokas said, “We keep moving.”
“When can we take to the road?”
“Tomorrow. Zalski’s never been known to set guards on the roads themselves, he goes for town entrances, but it’s best to be cautious.”
Kansten was less than thrilled by Lanokas’s observation. She slumped in her saddle, harrumphing like the animal that bore her. “How do we get into towns to refill supplies? Or do you plan to eat wild berries and sleep in the woods the whole trip?”
Lanokas rooted through his sack and pulled out three metal pendants strung on twine. They were cheap, molded in the outline of an eye and its iris: the symbol of full health, the symbol a person wore when he traveled to the Pool of Healing in Partsvale. Some returned healed from the journey thanks to the Giver’s mercy, others no. The majority no; the Giver’s miracles were few and far between, but that did nothing to prevent hundreds of people a year making pilgrimage to Partsvale, if not for the Pool, then to visit the god’s shrine close-by. Kora’s mother owned such a charm. She had made the trip in her youth with an aunt who died months later.
Lanokas and Kansten swapped Zalski’s symbol hanging around their necks for the eye. Kora reached out for the last pilgrim’s pendant. “Where did you get these?” she asked the prince.
“Prue pulled me aside last night. She must have heard us mention going north, because she gave me these.”
Suspicious, Kansten fingered the eye that sat upon her chest. “We were careful not to speak when she was around. What if she’s arrested and gives us up? What if Malzin gets to her?”
“We’re ahead of anyone Zalski could send after us. And we’ll avoid towns on the way back. For now, we’ll pass ourselves off as natives of the fishing villages, three cousins. If Kora’s up to it, she can fake the early stages of consumption. That should keep people from getting too close. As far as guards go, you know Zalski concentrates them south of here.”
“Thank God so few people live up north,” said Kora. Kansten glanced at her pendant again.
“I still want to know how Prue overheard us.”
Kora said, “She listened at the door, she must have. Giving the emblems was her way to apologize. She’s a strange person, no? I don’t know what to make of her.” Neither did Lanokas. Kora added, “I wonder if her grandson was arrested, or if he ran for it? I may have read about him, in the Letter.”
Kansten said, “If she thinks he ran, she’s deluding herself. Zalski’s men took him. They’re behind ninety percent of disappearances.”
None of the three said to make good time was vital, but they all knew it. Kora thought as much as she could about the obstacles that lay ahead and as little about Sedder, but she never shook him completely from her mind. Only Kansten was markedly out of spirits, if extending her natural tendencies to be difficult could be considered such. She exposed every flaw, every danger in anything Kora or Lanokas suggested. She would hear no criticism of her own ideas, even the most wild, though to be fair, most of them made sense, like taking to the road just before dusk fell to cover a bit more ground. The trio ending up doing just that, and by the time night lay thick they reached the second village past Podrar.
“Do you think the pilgrims stopped here for the night?” Kora asked. “They might ask us to join them.”
“Are you kidding? They were on the open road all day. We were forcing a path through thickets. They’re miles ahead of us.”
Kora knew better than to respond, so ill was Kansten’s mood, but continued to hope for the best until they reached the inn. There were three other guests, all headed to Podrar or Yangerton. These wished Kora the best, but as Lanokas had foreseen, were content to otherwise ignore the ill woman and her friends for fear of contagion. After a dinner of lukewarm soup and tough meat during which no one said a word, Kansten slunk off with an angry look to the room she was to share with Kora. Her travel companions, annoyed with her, played a couple of hands of cards. The game the sorceress suggested, called Cradle, was well-known and required nothing more than a standard deck in four suits: fortune, its symbol a circle; blades, represented by a dagger; knowledge, its icon a book; and sorcery, with its triangle. Lanokas won each round soundly before he and Kora went to ready themselves for bed.
“It’s about time,” Kansten grumbled when Kora joined her. The room was hardly large enough for the two bunked beds that stood in it; Kansten lay in the lower of the two, her face exposed by Kora’s candle. “If you or Lanokas slow us down tomorrow because you stayed up….”
“Contenay Ruid.” The walls took on what had become a familiar yellow tinge; the glow actually lit the room a bit. Kansten bolted upright.
“What the…?”
Kora took a seat at the foot of the bottom bed. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Sedder. It wasn’t your fault.”
Kansten smashed her pillow with a fist. “Of course it was! Zalski cast that spell at me! I was stupid enough to turn my back to him. I made myself an easy mark, and someone else paid for it.”
“Listen to me, you didn’t see how it happened. Zalski glared at Sedder with murder in his eyes, and then, then he turned to you, so fast I didn’t know how to react. I just didn’t know. Zalski was the only one who knew what he was doing. He knew Sedder would take that hit. You can’t blame yourself, not for the drowning. I’m the sorceress. I’m the one who couldn’t protect him.”
Kansten’s cheeks were so red she looked feverish. Kora felt her eyes fill up with tears, but held them in. She had gone all day without crying. She was not about to start now.
Kansten said, “If you came in here to argue who’s responsible….”
“I came to help you stop feeling guilty for something you didn’t do, before you drive me and Lanokas insane! I understand why you’ve been edgy, I do, but if you don’t get over it, I swear one of us is going to kill you.”
“Go ahead. Go ahead, who the hell cares? My life’s as past due as my taxes.”
Kora took a deep breath. She had toiled so much to turn Kansten friendly, that to make an enemy of her now could be irreparable. She searched for something to say, something inoffensive. “Did you ever think that maybe Zalski planned for you to feel this way? He toys with people’s emotions, Kansten. Manipulates them.”
Kansten contemplated Kora’s suggestion. Her cheeks returned to their normal, peachy hue, and her breathing became less raspy, albeit gradually. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted.
“Listen, when I went to the Crystal Palace, Zalski had three guards escort me to him.” Kansten knitted her brow. “Three guards. I’ll never
forget it: one in front and two behind. The corridors were so narrow, I felt suffocated. That’s the kind of thing he does. He’s a master at it. I promise, he planned to kill Sedder before he cast that spell at you. Sedder was the one fighting Malzin, and I think Zalski really does care for her. Doing it the way he did had the bonus of messing with your head, that’s all. Look, if anyone has the right to blame you, wouldn’t it be me?”
“I guess,” said Kansten. She looked at the yellow tinge on the wall and flushed red again. “I’ve been an ass.”
“Forget it. We both need our sleep, we’re getting up at dawn.”
“Right,” said Kansten. “See you in the morning.”
“Ditto.” Kora blew out her candle, climbed to the top bunk, and after removing the sound barrier lay awake for at least an hour, succumbing at last to a stream of silent tears.
Kora and her group had to leave as early as they could the next day; they had no choice, Zalski could have sent someone after them. The prospect of more travel only thickened the drops sliding down Kora’s chin. What she needed was time alone, to recognize Sedder’s loss, to appreciate that his death had been dignified, the kind of death from which his colleagues would take courage. But what difference did that make, in the end? Kora needed no martyr. She needed her friend, in person, his calming presence, his steady voice.
She needed time to accept his absence, time that Zalski too had robbed from her, because Sedder’s life had not been enough. She was rising with the sun to get back to the road, where all her energy would be put to looking ahead, determining the places where an ambush might be set, guessing how many soldiers could be waiting.
He should have just killed me at the Palace, when he had the chance. When he realized I wouldn’t support him. Why didn’t he? Son of a bitch, why didn’t he?
445
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bidd and Hayden
The Crimson League (The Herezoth Trilogy) Page 20
