Trickster's Choice

by Tamora Pierce

  The footman, who’d been talking to Chenaol, walked over to them. “Your Grace?”

  Mequen lowered his voice. “Quietly—quietly—get the bows and spears out. Give them to any of the servants who can use them.” He glanced at his wife by the wagon, and added, “Sarai and Dove as well. We may have a problem, but tell everyone to behave as if this were normal.” As Winnamine sighed, Ulasim bowed. He ambled down the line of wagons, looking for all the world like a man taking a leisurely stroll, but he managed to speak to all of the free servants.

  “It will take me days to undo the wildness that your putting weapons in the girls’ hands will stir up,” Winnamine told her husband softly.

  “We may need that wildness out here,” Mequen replied. “Winna, we aren’t in Rajmuat now. We aren’t living a round of parties and concerts and hunts. Perhaps the rules of Rajmuat no longer apply.”

  Aly started to ease back, keeping her head down, pretending to be invisible, since they seemed to have forgotten she was there. “Aly,” said the duke.

  She cringed and halted. After a moment she remembered who she was supposed to be, and bobbed a curtsy.

  “Did the god warn you?” Mequen asked quietly. “Are these King Oron’s assassins?” He and his wife watched her intently.

  “Your Grace, I don’t need the god for something as plain as this,” Aly said, her voice just loud enough for them to hear. “Frankly, I’d as soon not trouble him any more than I can help. Gods . . .” She chose her words carefully. “Gods complicate things.” It was the understatement of her life, to judge by the havoc her mother’s Goddess and her Aunt Daine’s god relatives had wreaked.

  “Here I’d hoped they would simplify them,” Winnamine remarked with a sigh.

  Aly grinned. “That wouldn’t be very interesting,” she said.

  The duchess raised her eyebrows. “I do not like interesting things,” she said, amusement in her eyes even though her tone was one of reproof. “They tend to bite painfully.”

  A thought caught Aly’s attention. “You know, Your Grace, we might make some noise, to distract the robbers,” she said. “Something to account for our still being here.” She nodded toward the horses. Lokeij was almost finished hitching up the fresh cart horse.

  Winnamine went over to the old man and whispered in his ear. Lokeij nodded and walked down the line with the limping mare. A moment later Aly saw two menservants go to work on one of the wheels of a supply wagon, cursing loudly. Lokeij stopped to confer briefly with Ulasim, who came trotting up to the duke and duchess, a worried look on his face.

  “Your Grace, my lady,” he said, puffing slightly as Veron rode up to see what was going on, “forgive me, but one of the men says we have trouble with one of the wagons.”

  “What do you mean, a wheel’s coming off?” cried the duchess, the image of appalled nobility. “We can’t loiter here! We’ll never reach the inn by dark at this rate, and I simply cannot sleep in the open!”

  Within moments the caravan was transformed, giving the appearance of an anthill that had been kicked. The men removed the wheel as others clustered around to see what the problem was. Veron’s men-at-arms quietly armed themselves and mounted their horses, drawing in closer to the wagons. Ulasim and a couple of the servants moved down the length of the train. As they passed, Aly saw the gleam of weapons set within easy reach.

  She started to head back to the children, but Winnamine called, “Stay, Aly. Pembery is exhausted—she never sleeps well when she travels. Help me to untangle these silks.”

  Aly returned to the lead wagon. Winnamine did indeed have a heap of embroidery silks on her lap where she now sat on the wagon seat. She also had a drawn crossbow at her feet, hidden from view by the horses and her skirt. Startled, Aly glanced at Winnamine, then accepted a tangle of threads. “I want the girls to have decent marriages among their peers, which they won’t get if they act like raka highland savages,” Winna told Aly quietly. “But I never said I expected all women to be helpless and unable to defend their families.”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” Aly murmured as she made a mess of the thread.

  The duchess smiled. “Of course. You come from the land of fighting ladies like Queen Thayet, the Lioness, and Keladry of Mindelan,” she remarked, laying an emerald strand flat on the seat beside her. “Doubtless you feel naked without a weapon in your hand.”

  Aly frowned at the mass of silk in her lap. “Your Grace, you only hear about the fighting women because they make the most noise,” she told the duchess. “Most of Tortall’s women wouldn’t touch a sword if you begged them to. We have all sorts of females among us, you know.”

  Winnamine raised perfectly plucked brown eyebrows. “And which sort are you, to be the god’s chosen?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

  Aly shrugged. “I’m the confused sort.” That answer startled a chuckle out of Winnamine.

  Fesgao and his men eased out of the jungle and over to the lead wagon. Mequen and Sergeant Veron came to stand with the duchess and Aly. Fesgao brought a stick with him. He used it to draw a rough map in the dirt of the road.

  “There’s fourteen of them, on either side of the road just before it crosses a bridge,” he told them. “This creek joins a bigger stream there. It’s maybe a mile ahead.” The other four men-at-arms nodded their agreement.

  Mequen asked the question that Aly wanted to ask: “Are they fighters, or local?”

  “Poor men, Your Grace,” said another scout. “And women—two of them, anyway. The weapons are either old or they’re farm weapons. They’re not royal killers, just renegade jungle raka.”

  Aly could feel the relief that rose from the duke and duchess.

  “Well, if we go forward, now that we’re warned, we can fight them off,” said the duke. “Or we can fall back to town and send the local soldiers to clean them out.”

  “They’ll vanish from the area if they think we know they were here, Your Grace,” said Veron gruffly. “Then the raka dogs will go after the next prey to cross upwind of them.”

  Aly scratched her head. In for a calf, in for a bull, she thought, and said, “I don’t know if this could work, Your Grace, and I hope you forgive my boldness, but what if you send men to come up on their backs?”

  “We could strike from behind,” Fesgao said. If he’d taken offense over Veron’s remark about raka dogs, his face did not show it. “And you could attack from the road. They would be caught between us.”

  Veron looked at Aly and shook his head. “From the lips of infants shall the truth come unadorned,” he said, quoting a proverb. “If we are willing to risk casualties, Your Grace, we could be sure this rabble won’t harass our supply caravans in the future.”

  “Instruct your men, sergeant,” Mequen said. “How long should we wait until we set out?”

  Within moments Fesgao and the other scouts, along with two of Ulasim’s footmen who could shoot, had vanished back into the jungle. Winnamine counted slowly to one hundred while orders traveled down the line of servants and wagons. The wheel was put back on its wagon; Aly was ordered to sit with the children and keep them calm. No one considered giving her a weapon. In every slaveholding country it was illegal to give weapons to slaves.

  Instead, Aly got Petranne and Elsren to lie flat on the wagon floor as part of a brand-new game, seeing how long they could hold perfectly still no matter what they heard. As she waited she murmured stories to keep them calm, feeling the weight of the knife she had stolen in Rajmuat heavy under her waistband. Dove and Sarai, bows in hand, covered either side of the wagon, pushing up the canvas just enough so that they could see out and aim.

  As the wagon rumbled forward, Aly remembered her father’s long-ago advice not to pray. Now she wondered, Was that how it started with you and Kyprioth, Da? You praying, and him answering? I mean to ask you that, when I come home this autumn.

  The bumpy ride seemed to last forever. Elsren and Petranne had just begun to complain that Aly wasn’t making sense when the wagon jolted to a s
top. They heard yells and the crackle of bodies in the brush. Two arrows punched through the canvas wagon cover. Aly pushed Elsren and Petranne tight against the base of the padded seats, where arrows couldn’t reach them. Pembery and the healer, Rihani, huddled against the other bank of padded seats, keeping their heads down as the maid whimpered and Rihani mouthed prayers. Sarai, her lovely face grim, shot her crossbow and reloaded it. Dove watched through her opening in the canvas, her small hands trembling on the stock of her bow. Someone outside screamed; others yelled. Aly heard the clang of metal on metal, and a crash in the woods.

  The noise stopped for a moment. Then Veron and Mequen shouted orders. At last Ulasim opened the canvas door into the wagon. “It’s clear,” he told everyone inside. “Rihani, you are needed. My ladies, your father wishes you to attend him. Aly, also.”

  “I’ll look after the little ones,” Pembery said gratefully. She gathered Elsren and Petranne into trembling arms. Both children tried to wriggle free, clamoring to see the battlefield as the maid clung to them.

  Aly followed Sarai and Dove to the head of the wagon train. They had halted just before the bridge. Some of the dead lay in the jungle on either side of the road. A few of the household staff and men-at-arms sported wounds, but none of the Balitang party lay among the bodies as far as Aly could see. Fesgao, Veron, and the rest of Fesgao’s party of men-at-arms were forcing six bandits to their knees, binding them in ropes while other men-at-arms leveled weapons at the captives to prevent their escape.

  Aly’s temples began to throb. She had not considered this possibility, that robbers might be captured. The neatest solution would have been if they’d all been killed or if those left alive had fled. What would the duke say? He was a sensible man. He should realize there was no question of letting the captives go. They would only rob the next group to come up this road, or else they would get reinforcements and attack the Balitangs again.

  Aly clasped her hands tightly behind her back so that no one would see them shake. The Balitangs could not turn back with captives in tow. They would never reach the safety of the village they had left that morning, with its royal fort and soldiers, by dark. The duke’s people would be under constant attack along the way from would-be rescuers. At their present crawling speed, they would need two days to reach the next royal outpost. The local families would have plenty of time to steal their men back. If the Balitangs kept the captives until they reached Tanair, it would mean six more people who must be fed and guarded. The duke could spare neither guards nor food. If he enslaved the robbers, Aly wouldn’t trust them, particularly not if the new slaves got word of their whereabouts to their families.

  There’s just one solution, Aly thought as the duke and duchess watched her sidelong to see what, if anything, the god would order her to say. She couldn’t let them know that her particular burden of a god had given her a wager, not instructions. She also couldn’t bear to tell them what they had to do, what her father, grandfather, and mother would have told them they must do. They had to execute six impoverished men.

  “Let’s kill these raka swine,” Sergeant Veron said, inspecting one bandit’s rusty sword. His eyes were gray ice. “Make sure their kin think twice before they attack luarin.”

  Duchess Winnamine looked at her husband and nodded, her face an emotionless mask. “My dear, it’s the only solution.”

  Mequen shook his head, troubled.

  “No!” cried Sarai, who might one day be faced with such a choice. “We can’t do murder, and that’s what it is, murder!”

  “It’s survival,” Ulasim said gently. He was there in his capacity as the head of the male servants and slaves.

  “Forgive us!” cried one of the bandits, a haggard-looking man in his forties. “We would never harm the la—”

  “Silence,” ordered Fesgao, his dark eyes flashing.

  “We swore a vow, on the altar, that all we would take is food, when you have so much,” babbled another bandit.

  “None of the others would help or even stay to hear it done,” the man next to him added. “They did not come to see you pass. They retreated into the jungle to hide their faces in shame, but they know how it is with our village. They know we are desperate.”

  “The lord took everything for the tax, everything,” explained the first man who had spoken, talking fast. “Our children cry, their bellies empty. So we swore the vow before three villages. Our people would have killed us otherwise, had we harmed the la—”

  Fesgao stepped forward and slapped the man, rocking the bandit back on his heels. “Keep your mouth shut, you fool,” he hissed.

  Aly pretended to be concerned with one of her fingernails. Something besides the normal treatment of criminals was going on here. Fesgao had twice stopped these men from saying one particular word, one that began with “la.” Ladies, again, she told herself. He stops them from saying “ladies” in front of the luarin nobles. And these ladies aren’t just important to the local raka. Fesgao also thinks the ladies are important. She wrote these thoughts on the growing list in her head of things to investigate.

  “Their families will come to free them, unless they know their men are dead. They will fear us, and stay well away, if we do it,” the duke said reluctantly.

  “Make them slaves,” suggested Dove. Everyone turned to stare at her. “Then sell them at the next army post.”

  Aly whistled silently. Now there was a solution she hadn’t considered. She eyed the small, dark twelve-year-old with new respect.

  “You can’t enslave them,” Sarai argued. “Look at them. They’re poor, half starved. What is their village like, if the men look this bad? Papa, we’d make their lives worse, not better. Their families need them to hunt, and fish—”

  “And rob, and kill?” Winnamine asked, cutting her off.

  “Why do we even discuss this?” demanded Veron, his voice hard. “These dogs attacked members of the royal family. By law they must die. If we had time, we ought to hunt down and burn out their nest—in fact, we should report it at the next royal fort. This sort of lawlessness only gets worse if your first response is a soft one.”

  The adults debated it further. Aly thought the duke was about to order Veron and his men to kill the captives when Sarai interrupted again. “Give them a choice, Papa,” she begged. “Death, slavery, or free and loyal service to our family. If they pick service, we’ll have six more fighters—”

  “Who will kill us as we sleep, begging your ladyship’s pardon,” Veron interrupted. “Your offer speaks well of your heart, but you will put us in danger.”

  “Make them swear by Mithros,” retorted Sarai. “Or one of the raka gods.”

  “People have broken vows to gods before,” Winnamine reminded Sarai gently. “If the god is busy elsewhere, it might be too late for us when the god finally punishes the oath breaker.”

  “Make them swear in blood.” The quiet suggestion was Dove’s. “If that’s what they choose. No one breaks a blood oath. We can trust them if they swear that way, and if they don’t . . .” The girl shrugged.

  Those who broke such an oath died as their own blood boiled in their veins. No mage, however powerful, had found a way to prevent that. The gods had decreed it, and so it remained, a promise no one would dare to break. Aly looked from Dove to Sarai, a peculiar emotion stirring in her heart. She wasn’t sure what it was, beyond respect for both girls, but it was powerful and troubling. She put it aside for the moment and looked to Mequen for a decision. The duchess and Ulasim nodded. When the duke looked at Aly, she nodded and ignored Veron’s confused look. He would be asking himself why she was even present, let alone why his master seemed to want her opinion.

  Before anyone could stop him, the man who had first spoken had wriggled over to Sarai. Awkwardly he leaned forward to touch his forehead to Sarai’s shoe. “You are as gracious as you are beautiful,” he whispered.

  Aly bit her tongue. It was Dove who had truly found a way to keep these men alive. She glanced at Dove, who met h
er eyes and shrugged. “She’s prettier,” the younger girl murmured as she passed Aly on her way back to the wagon. “Everyone always goes to her first.”

  The oaths were given, the bandits untied. When the wagons rolled on, they did so with six new men and a parchment that bore each former bandit’s thumbprint in his own blood. If their families attacked, the men would tell them the bargain they had made, and invite them to live at Tanair.

  They camped beside the road at sunset and moved out at sunrise. It took the better part of the day to reach the royal fortress at the foot of Kellaura Pass. Only as they approached the fort did the local raka emerge again to watch them go by.

  Inside the fortress walls, the Balitangs spent a day bathing in hot springs, sleeping in clean beds, and eating meals that were not cooked in a single pot. Another day of plodding brought them through the pass, watched at different points by silent raka, and into the high plains country on the far side of the mountains. They stayed the night at a second royal fort, among soldiers eager for fresh faces and news from Dimari and the capital. The raka waited beside the road that led the Balitangs northwest, watching them without a sound. They made Aly’s flesh creep. At home people waved, or called their greetings or insults. She wished the raka would say something.

  Two days later they passed through a ring of high-thrust rocks and clefts onto a broad, grassy plateau. Here a log palisade encircled a hill: their new home, Tanair Castle and village. Aly complained of stiff muscles to Pembery, Rihani, and the younger children, then hopped out of the wagon. She walked alongside it as they approached Tanair, taking the chance to view what she thought of as her summer home. The twenty-foot-high palisade did not inspire her with confidence, though the fifteen-foot-deep trench that lay before it, with its flooring of jagged-edged rocks, had promise. The wooden bridge to the village gate was sturdy enough to take the weight of their wagons, but wooden bridges could be burned or destroyed in a hurry. That wasn’t too bad.