Trickster's Choice

by Tamora Pierce

  “Like you,” Dove pointed out.

  Aly grinned. “You have to admit, it’s very useful.”

  Dove chuckled. When she did, her face lit with a powerful light. “Do you play chess?”

  “A little,” replied Aly, who could almost beat her grandfather, one of the finest players in Tortall.

  “Good,” Dove said cheerfully. “It’s getting harder to lose so Papa doesn’t realize what I’m doing. I can tell him I’m teaching you.”

  After their return to the castle, Aly laid out clean clothes for Dove, then went in search of their new mage. She found Ochobu in the rooms set aside for the healer and any patients at the back of the kitchen wing. The old woman was hanging up bunches of dry herbs next to those Rihani had already prepared. Shelves along one side of the infirmary, once empty but for Rihani’s collection of salves, liquids, and tools, now bore a collection of medical and magical tools, substances, and books.

  “What do you want?” Ochobu demanded, stretching to hang a bunch of dried mint from a beam overhead.

  Aly leaned against the door frame and smiled. “I wanted to see how you were settling in. I confess, I thought you’d prefer to live in a hut behind the stable than here within luarin walls.”

  Ochobu glared at her. “If I say I will do a thing, I do it,” she informed Aly stiffly. “I have come to safeguard the lady Sarai, and to help you win your wager. If the Balitang children survive the summer, there will be one less luarin in the Isles at least, and you are a particularly annoying one.”

  Aly raised her brows. “So the god told you of our bet. Does Ulasim know?”

  Ochobu shook her head. “The god spoke to me in the night. He says you are only a temporary irritation. He thinks that with the summer over, the luarin rulers will have sorted out the kingship. The lady who may or may not be our promised one shall be safe for the winter.” She poured juniper berries from a bowl into a mortar and began to mash them, releasing their piney scent.

  The mention of the end of the wager itched Aly. Being called “a temporary irritation” was also quite annoying. “There are too many of us to kill, you know,” she pointed out, thinking she was starting to talk like her father. “Too many who have been here three centuries.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” demanded Ochobu, pausing in her work to scowl at Aly. “I’ll have to get used to luarin, even if they aren’t you.”

  “You will if you don’t want a massacre,” Aly said, holding the old woman’s eyes with hers. “If you don’t want to mark your return to power with killing. How much luarin blood will you discard? Half-bloods? You’d murder your own lady, then. She’d object to the murder of her luarin father and stepmother in any case. Quarter-bloods, eighth-bloods? How much do you count as being too much?”

  “Stop it,” growled the old woman. “The raka people are not like the first three Rittevon kings, slaughtering those who would not bend the knee to them. We are not murderers.”

  “That’s not what I learned at my da’s knee,” Aly retorted. Her mental image of people executed by righteous natives was too awful for her to let Ochobu’s prejudices stand without argument. “The raka used to kill all the time. Your nobles and your rather temporary queens in the years before the luarin came were so busy battling each other that you didn’t have the strength to fight off an invasion. By the time you banded together, it was too late.”

  “I know that,” Ochobu growled, mashing her berries with ferocity. “All of us who inherited this mess know.”

  “Is a mess what you mean to give your new queen?” Aly wanted to know. “How can she be sure her people will stand behind her? Or will you put a dagger in her back for the crime of not choosing a father the raka will approve?” Aly inspected her fingernails. They would need work if she was to continue as a maid rather than a goatherd. “Personally, I think you might do well with Sarai on the throne—”

  “Silence!” Ochobu interrupted, glaring at Aly. “No names!”

  Aly raised an eyebrow at her and waited.

  Ochobu laid her pestle aside. “We have lived too long as tenants on lands that our foremothers owned. I know that. I know what is at stake. I can see for myself that a certain young woman is royal in two bloodlines, and that seems to fit the prophecy. But I am no lapdog, trained to roll onto my back for you or any other luarin. I am here to make up my own mind.”

  Aly brushed a speck from her sleeve. “Then let me tell you something I’ve observed. Those you call luarin here, including the ones who are part luarin, part raka—they aren’t citizens of the Eastern or Southern Lands. They see themselves as Kyprians. They took your land’s names for their own. They’ve made the Isles prosper. I think they’ve earned the right to stay, if they don’t side with the Rittevons when the time comes.”

  “Is that the god speaking through you?” Ochobu demanded, her eyes flinty. “Or just you?”

  Aly fought the urge to give Nawat’s wing shrug for a reply. “I assume the god picked me for my opinions as well as my skills, however temporary I might be. I am an outsider. Sometimes we see more clearly than those who live inside the problem.”

  “I’ll be better off when you leave,” Ochobu complained. For the moment she sagged, the lines of her face deepening. “You’ve given me a headache. Go away.”

  Aly went.

  She took lunch with the Balitang women and spent the afternoon with Sarai and Dove as they played with Elsren and Petranne. After Winnamine summoned the two older girls to their newly begun weapons training, Aly occupied herself with household mending and a quick search of Sergeant Veron’s rooms, to read his latest reports to the Crown. Once she had finished, she asked Chenaol to heat water for the sisters’ baths, then laid out the girls’ supper dresses. Bored with nothing to do but mend clothes, Aly wandered over to the window to look out over the inner courtyard.

  Below her Dove and the men-at-arms practiced archery. Aly leaned her elbows on the sill to watch and nearly yelped before she caught herself. Someone had come up with a new game.

  Nawat stood against the wall, relaxed and alert. Before him two men-at-arms were preparing to shoot. Dove stood behind one archer with a handful of arrows, while the duchess held arrows for the second archer. Aly’s mind told her that the duchess would hardly consent to murder just as the first man shot. The second man shot immediately after him. Then both set fresh arrows to the string and shot steadily, arrow after arrow, one at a time, until they had exhausted all the extras held by the duchess and her stepdaughter.

  Nawat caught them all with grace and ease, snatching the arrows from the air as if he had all day to do so. When the archers finished, he gathered the heap of arrows at his feet and carried them back to their owners.

  He’s so fast, Aly thought in awe. I couldn’t do it, and I’m no slouch! She sighed, wishing Da were here to see it. He’d taught her to catch daggers in midair, but this game was much more hazardous.

  The game was not done. The men-at-arms repeated the experiment with javelins, then hunting and combat spears. Nawat caught them all, moving so fast Aly couldn’t follow his hands. She cheered him and the men-at-arms on.

  When the bell rang to remind the household it was nearly time for supper, he looked up at the applauding Aly and waved. “This is my favorite game,” he called to her. “Do you want to play?”

  “I wouldn’t dare!” she cried, laughing, before she retreated into the room. She’d seen men catch knives before. She had seen the finest archers in the Queen’s Riders draw an outline in arrows of someone positioned against a wooden fence or wall, just to show they could do it. She had never seen anything like this.

  Sarai and Dove ran in. Sarai smiled at Aly. “You should have seen your face! Did you know he could do that?” she asked as she collapsed on her bed.

  Dove unstrung her bow, shaking her head. “He’s amazing,” she said, coiling her bowstring.

  “You know, maybe this horrible old place isn’t so bad,” Sarai told the ceiling. “Not if these wonderful men
keep showing up.”

  Aly raised an eyebrow at her. “I wouldn’t try kissing him,” she warned. “It wouldn’t be what you expect.”

  Sarai wrinkled her nose. “Aly!” she complained. “I found out he eats bugs! I’m not kissing a man with bug breath!”

  Aly blinked. I don’t remember him tasting of bugs when he kissed me, she thought. I’d better pay more attention next time.

  Her mind promptly reined her up. This was highly improper. There would be no next time. Her task was looking after the Balitang children, not mooning over someone, particularly not a crow turned man.

  Even if he could pluck arrows from the air.

  The next morning Aly, still on a goatherd’s hours, walked out of the keep into the dawn. The sun had just cleared the walls to light the inner courtyard and the young man who straddled a bench there. Aly stopped to watch him carefully glue pieces of feather onto the wooden shaft.

  Nawat looked up at her with a smile that lit his eyes. “You are beautiful in the new light,” he told her. “If I were the Dawn Crow, I would bring you the sun to hatch as our first nestling.”

  Aly blinked at him. Her heart felt strangely squeezed by some powerful emotion. She bit her lip to distract herself from a feeling that made her horribly unsure. “Have you been kissing anybody?” she asked without meaning to, and gasped. She had let words out of her mouth without thinking, which was not like her! Worse, they were such personal words, ones he might feel meant personal feelings she did not have! This was the kind of thing that other girls said, those girls who were not bored by all the young men who had courted them. How many handsome fellows had sighed compliments to Aly while, unconcerned, she had mentally wrestled with breaking a new code? At home she never cared about her suitors enough to worry if they kissed other girls. She scrambled to blot out what she’d said. “Not that it’s any of my business, but you should understand, people have a way of kissing for fun, without it meaning anything serious, and I’d hate for you to think someone wanted you to mate-feed them just because they’re kissing—” Stop babbling, her mind ordered. Aly stopped.

  Nawat’s smile broadened. That disturbing light in his eyes deepened. “I have kissed no one but you, Aly,” he assured her, serious. “Why should I kiss anyone else?”

  Aly gulped. You can continue this conversation, or you can talk about something less . . . giddy, she told herself. Less frightening. “You know I won’t always be around,” she said abruptly. “I don’t belong here, really.”

  “Then I will go with you,” Nawat said. “I belong with you.”

  He doesn’t know what he’s saying, Aly told herself. He doesn’t know what that means.

  She looked at him, arms folded, trying to keep any extra feelings from leaping out. “What are you doing?” she asked, to change the subject to anything less dangerous. Then she grimaced. He was fletching arrows, as always.

  She glanced at his bench, then bent down. He was fletching, but these arrows were heavier, and the feathers he used were not bird feathers, but Stormwing. “How did you cut them up?” she wanted to know, genuinely curious. More scraps of cut-up steel feathers lay on the bench.

  Nawat pointed to a long piece of what looked like black, chipped glass. “Shiny volcano rock,” he told Aly. “Chip the edge until it is sharp. That cuts Stormwing feathers. They come from the heat of the place where Stormwings were born.”

  Aly touched the glassy blade. “Obsidian,” she said. “That’s its name.”

  “Yes,” Nawat replied. “Shiny volcano rock.” He set a length of steel feather into a thin groove filled with glue and held it in place.

  Aly didn’t see a single cut on his hands, though the feathers were lethally sharp. “Won’t they be too heavy for the glue?” she asked.

  “I shaped the glue. It holds Stormwing feathers,” Nawat answered.

  “Stormwings really are born in volcanoes?” Aly inquired, curious.

  “In the beginning time, when they were first dreamed,” replied Nawat, setting another piece of steel feather in its slot. “Now, if carrying an egg does not kill the mother, they are born from steel eggs.” He looked at Aly and sighed, his dark eyes wistful. “The eggs are too heavy for a crow to take.”

  “You’ve already taken enough from Stormwings,” Aly told him, pointing to the small pile of glinting feathers beside his bench. “You could have been killed.”

  “There is a trick to it,” he replied, and blew lightly on his fletchings. Holding the arrow shaft before one eye, he squinted down its length. “Perfect,” he declared, and set the arrow down.

  “It seems like a lot of trouble and risk when goose feathers are safer to work with,” Aly remarked. “What is a Stormwing-fletched arrow for, anyway?”

  “They are mage killers,” replied Nawat. “No matter if the mage is powerful, if he has great spells to protect him. A Stormwing arrow will cut through illusion and magic.”

  Aly whistled softly, impressed. “Take very good care of those, then,” she told Nawat. “We might find a use for them.”

  “I made them for you,” Nawat said, giving her that radiant, innocent smile. “They are yours, for a day when they will help you.” He offered a finished arrow shaft to her.

  Aly smiled at him despite the goose bumps that rippled along her skin. “Keep them until they’re needed, please,” she told him. “My archery skills aren’t very good.”

  “You could practice,” Nawat pointed out.

  “I’m a slave,” Aly explained. “Slaves who are caught with weapons are killed.”

  “Then do not be a slave,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Fly free.”

  “Not just yet,” she replied. “I’ll see the summer out first.”

  Five days later a well-guarded messenger arrived on the plateau. Crows and raka patrols encircled and held the small group until Veron and the castle guard arrived. As the Balitang men-at-arms approached, the raka guards scattered to make Veron think they were robbers and not fighters who had been assigned to keep new arrivals away from the Balitangs until they were searched.

  Aly and her riding companions, out on the road west of Tanair, heard the crows’ alarm. They arrived at the eastern road at the same time as Veron. Aly murmured a suggestion to Fesgao that he join in the search. If the new arrivals were royal assassins, Aly suspected Veron would take them to the Balitangs. With Fesgao involved, she knew no killers sent by the Crown would go undiscovered.

  She watched as the men-at-arms questioned the strangers, looking for anything unusual. None of them lied in answer. As it turned out, their errand was a normal one. They bore thank-you gifts from Bronau, purchased in Dimari before he sailed. They also brought letters from those friends who had been writing to the exiles all along, as well as letters from those who had decided it was safe to correspond now that Hazarin might recall them to the capital.

  After supper, Winnamine, Sarai, and Dove played soldiers on the floor with Elsren and Petranne. Pembery, Aly, and Rihani worked on sewing as the duke opened the letters and read them aloud to the family. Aly saw that Winnamine, normally so controlled, could not keep a tiny, sarcastic smile from her lips as people who had been silent for weeks now proclaimed their affection for the Balitangs. Sarai’s toy soldiers acted fiercely as she struggled to control her anger with such fair-weather friends. The duke shook his head sadly as he read. Dove practiced that staple item of a young noblewoman’s studies, a facial expression of polite interest that gave away none of her true feelings. Aly silently applauded Dove’s skill. The twelve-year-old was much better at that polite control than Sarai.

  For herself, Aly could only give a mental shrug as she stitched. It was human nature for people to protect themselves from a monarch’s temper. That went triple for everyone who lived under the king’s eye in Rajmuat.

  There was news, too, from the Eastern and Southern Lands. Aly barely listened to the word from Carthak. Emperor Kaddar and his empress were still dealing with that realm’s far-flung malcontents, though Kaddar’s gri
p on his throne grew firmer with each passing year. She was far more interested in news from the Eastern Lands, though she pretended the same indifference as she had for Carthak. The Scanran war continued, but the end was in sight. There were rumors that unhappy clansmen had secretly reached out to the Tortallan monarchs, offering peace in trade for their king’s head. Aly hoped that Their Majesties, ably assisted by people like her mother, would choose to hammer the Scanrans for a while longer. It would ensure that fresh Scanran attacks would not take place for at least another generation.

  After the duke had read all the letters he wanted to share, he opened the trunk from Bronau. Once again there were new books for him, the duchess, and Dove. There was a wooden pull-along knight on horseback for Elsren, who abandoned his soldiers, and a new doll for Petranne, who immediately did the same.

  For Sarai there was a gold necklace, its fine chain decorated with citrine drops along its length, and a matching bracelet. The older girl put them on immediately and went to the duchess’s looking glass to admire them. “He remembered how much I like citrines!” she told them all.

  “Huzzah for him,” muttered Dove. Aly, the only one who heard, grinned.

  Mequen shifted uneasily in his chair. Winnamine reached over and rested a hand on his arm. “So my old friend courts you, Sarai,” the duke said, watching her with concern in his eyes. “Of course, his friends have suggested that he marry for years, but we thought . . .”

  “Oh, Papa, it’s not serious. He’s just flirting,” Sarai replied.

  “That’s very different from what you’ve said before,” the duchess pointed out.

  “Well, I’m sixteen, and giddy,” Sarai told them mischievously. “My husband had best be faithful to me alone. Bronau isn’t likely to do that. Besides, unless King Hazarin gifts him with offices or estates, he’s not very wealthy.” She went to kneel beside her father. “Don’t fret, Papa,” she said, her face turned up to his. “I’d never do anything without your approval.” She looked at Winnamine, hesitated, then said, “Or yours, Winna.”