The big newcomer relaxed and turned to the jostling scramble of his companion in the doorway. “Don’t drop the light, ye gaum-snatched chucklehead,” he said. “We’re behind the fair.” One step took him to Fawn. “Are you hurt, lass?”
The man who’d tripped unraveled himself from the trampled remains of the collapsed bed and stumbled again over the dead bandit in his hurry to reach Starhawk, who was still sitting, covered with blood and floor-grime, beneath her slaughtered assailant. He knelt beside her, an even bigger man than the first one, with the same lock of brown hair falling over grave, blue-gray eyes. “Are ye hurt?”
Starhawk shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. “But thank you.”
Much to her surprise, he lifted her to her feet as if she’d been a doll. “We’d have been sooner,” he said ruefully, “but for some shrinking violet’s wanting to barricade our door...”
“Violet yourself,” the other man retorted, in the burring accent of the Bight Coast. “If we’d been the first ones they attacked, you’d have been glad enough for the warning and delay—if the sound of their shoving over the bed had waked you at all.”
The bigger man swung about, like a bullock goaded by flies. “And what makes you think any bandit in the mountains is something you and I together couldn’t handle without even troubling to wake up?”
“You sang a different tune night before last, when the wolves raided—”
“Ram! Orris!” a creaky voice chirped from the doorway. The two behemoths fell silent. The scrawny little gentleman in the starched ruff whom Starhawk had seen briefly down in the common room came scrambling agilely over the mess in the doorway, holding aloft a lantern in one hand. The other hand was weighted down by a short sword, enormous in the bony grip. “You must excuse my nephews,” he said to the women, with a courtly salaam appallingly incongruous with the gruesome setting. “Back home I use them for a plow team, and thus their manners with regard to ladies have been sadly neglected.”
He straightened up. Bright, black eyes twinkled into Starhawk’s, and she grinned at him in return.
“Naagh...” Ram and Orris pulled back hamlike fists threateningly at this slur on their company manners.
The little man disregarded them with sublime unconcern. “My name is Anyog Spicer, gentleman, scholar, and poet. There is water in the room next to us, since I’m sure ablutions are in order...”
“First I’m going to find that damned innkeeper, rot his eyes,” Starhawk snapped, “and make sure he doesn’t have any other bravos hiding out around here.” She looked up and saw that Fawn’s face had gone suddenly from white to green. She turned to the immense man who still hovered at her side. “Take Fawn down to your room, if you would,” she said. “I’ll get some wine when I’m in the kitchen.”
“We’ve wine,” the big man—Ram or Orris—said. “And better nor what this place stocks. I’ll come with you, lassie. Orris, take care of Miss Fawn. And see you don’t make a muff of it,” he added as he and Starhawk started for the door.
Orris—the handsomer of the two brothers and, Starhawk guessed, the younger by several years—raised sharply back-slanted dark eyebrows. “Me make muff of it?” he asked as he gently took Fawn’s arm and removed the dagger that she still held in her nerveless hand. “And who fell over his own big feet blasting into the room like a bull through a gate, pray? Of all the gaum-snatched things...”
“Be a fair desperate gaum would take the time to find your wits to snatch ’em...”
Starhawk, who sensed that the brothers would probably argue through battle and world’s end, caught Ram’s quilted sleeve and pulled him determinedly toward the door.
There were no more bandits at the inn. They found the innkeeper, disheveled and groaning, in the room behind the kitchen, amid a tangle of sheets in which he said he had been tied after being overpowered. But while he was explaining all this at length to Ram, Starhawk had a look at the torn cloth and found no tight-bunched creases, such as were made by knots. The woman said sullenly that she had locked herself in the larder from fear of them. Both looked white and shaken enough for it to have been true, but Starhawk began to suspect that by killing the bandits, she had demolished the couple’s livelihood. She smiled to herself with grim satisfaction as she and Ram mounted the stairs once more.
“You’re no stranger to rough work, seemingly,” Ram said, his voice rather awed.
Starhawk shrugged. “I’ve been a mercenary for eight years,” she said. “These were amateurs.”
“How can you tell?” He cocked his head and gazed down at her curiously. “They looked to me as if they were born with shivs in their fists.”
“A professional would have put a guard on your door. And what in the hell does ‘gaum-snatched’ mean? That’s one I never heard before.”
He chuckled, a deep rumble in his throat. “Oh, it’s what they say to mean your wits have gone begging. Gaums are—what you call?—dragonflies; at least that’s what we call ’em where I come from. There are old wives who say they’ll steal away a man’s wits and let him wander about the country until he drowns himself walkin’ into a marsh.”
Starhawk nodded as they turned the comer at the top of the stair and saw light streaming out of one of the rooms halfway down the hall. “In the north, they say demons will lead a man to his death that way—or chase him crying to him from the air. But I never heard it was dragonflies.”
They came to the slaughterhouse room. By the light of the lamp she’d appropriated from the kitchen, Starhawk saw that the greasy little man who’d spoken to Fawn was the one Orris had brained. It was a good guess, then, that the innkeeper had indeed been in league with them. Ram jerked his head toward the door as they passed it. “What about them?”
“We’ll let our host clean up,” Starhawk said callously. “It’s his inn—and his friends.”
Orris and Uncle Anyog had moved the women’s possessions to their own room while Ram and the Hawk were reconnoitering. Beds had been made up on the sagging mattresses. Fawn was asleep, her hair lying about her in dark and careless glory on the seedy pillow. By the look of his boots, Uncle Anyog had been investigating the stables. He reported nothing missing or lamed.
“Meant to do that after we’d been settled,” Starhawk said, collecting spare breeches, shirt, and doublet from her pack and preparing to go into the next room to wash and change. “Maybe they didn’t mean to take you three on at all. If you asked after the two of us, the innkeeper could always tell you we’d departed early.”
“Hardly that,” Orris pointed out. “Else we’d overtake you on the road, wouldn’t we?”
“Depends on which direction you were going in.”
In the vacant room, she took a very fast, very cold damp-cloth bath to get the dried blood out of her flesh and hair, cleaned the superficial gash on her leg with wine and bound it up, and changed her clothes. When she returned to the brothers’ room, Uncle Anyog was curled up asleep on the floor in a corner; Ram and Orris were still talking quietly, arguing over how good a bargain they’d really gotten on some opals they’d bought from the mines in the North. Starhawk settled herself down with a rag, a pan of water, and a bottle of oil, to clean her weapons and leather before moving on. The night was far spent and she knew she would sleep no more.
Orris finished pointing out to his brother some facts about the fluctuation in the price of furs and how opals could be held for a rise in prices—neither argument made any sense to Starhawk—and turned to her to ask, “Starhawk? If you don’t mind my asking—which direction were you bound in, you and Miss Fawn? It’s a rotten time to be on the roads at all, I know. Where were you headed?”
“East,” the Hawk said evasively.
“Where east?” Orris persisted, not taking the hint.
She abandoned tact. “Does it matter?”
“In a way of speaking, it does,” the young man said earnestly, leaning forward with his hands on his cocked-up knees. “You see, we’re bound for Pergemis, with a pack t
rain of fox and beaver pelts and opals and onyx from the North. We’ve met trouble on the road before this—the man we took with us was killed five nights ago by wolves. If there’s more trouble with bandits along the way, we stand to lose all the summer’s profits. Now, I make no doubt you’re a fighter, which we could do with; and neither of us is so bad at it himself, which Miss Fawn could do with. If you were bound toward the south...”
Starhawk hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “We aren’t,” she said. Pergemis lay where the Bight washed up against the feet of the massive tablelands that surrounded the Kanwed Mountains, far to the southwest of Grimscarp. She continued, “But our road lies with yours as far as Foonspay. That will get us out of the mountains and out of the worst of the snow country. If you have no objection, we’ll join you that far.”
“Done,” Orris said, pleased; then the light died from his honest, slab-sided face, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re not ever bound for Racken Scrag, are you, lass? It’s a bad business, all through that country, mixing with the Wizard King.”
“So I’ve heard,” Starhawk replied noncommittally.
When she said no more, but returned to cleaning the blood from the handle of her dagger, Orris grew fidgety and went on. “Two girls traveling about alone...”
“Would probably be in a lot of danger,” she agreed. “But it happens I’ve killed quite a few men in my time...” She tested the dagger blade with her thumb. “And since I could probably give you five years, I’d hardly qualify as a lass.”
“Yes, lass, but...”
At this point, Ram kicked him—no gentle effort—and the two brothers relapsed into jovial bickering, leaving Starhawk to her silent thoughts.
In the days that followed, she had cause to be thankful for their partnership, for all that the brothers periodically drove her crazy with their fits of chivalry. Orris never ceased trying to find out the women’s destination and objectives, not from any malice but, what was worse, out of the best of intentions to dissuade them from doing anything foolish or dangerous. Starhawk admitted to herself that their journey was both foolish and dangerous, but that fact did not make it any less necessary, if they were going to find and aid Sun Wolf and learn what, if any, designs Altiokis had toward the rest of the troop. Orris’ automatic assumption that, having met them only a day or so ago and being completely in ignorance of the reasons for their quest, he was nevertheless better qualified than they to judge its lightness and its possibilities of success alternately amused Starhawk and irritated her almost past bearing.
Likewise, the brothers’ good-natured arguments and insults could be carried far past the point of being entertaining. When they weren’t poking fun at each other’s appearance, brains, or social manners, they joined verbally to belabor Uncle Anyog for his habit of reciting poetry as he walked, for his small size, or for his flights of rhetorical eloquence, all of which Anyog took in good part. Around the campfires in the evenings, the brothers listened, as enthralled as Fawn and the Hawk were, to the little man’s tales of heroes and dragons and to the silver magic of his songs. Years in the war camps had given Starhawk an enormous tolerance for the brothers’ brand of bovine wit, but she found herself more than once wishing that she could trade either or both of them for a half hour of absolute silence.
But, she reasoned, hers was not to choose her companions. Noisy, busy blockheads like the brothers and the hyperloquacious Anyog were far preferable to travelling through the mountains in winter alone.
The Peacock Inn, when they reached it, was deserted, with snow drifting through the windows of its shattered common room. In the stable, Starhawk discovered the bones of a horse, chewed, broken, and crusted with frost, but clearly fresh; the splintered shutters and doors of the ground floor had scarcely been weathered. With thick powder snow squeaking under her boots, she waded back across the yard. In the common room, she found Fawn and Uncle Anyog, huddled together, looking uneasily about them and breathing like dragons in the fading daylight. Orris and Ram came down the slippery drifts of the staircase.
“Nothing abovestairs,” Orris reported briefly. “The door at the top’s been scratched and pounded, but no signs that it was forced. Whatever’s done this, it’s gone now; but we’d probably be safer spending the night up there.”
“Will the mules go up the steps?” Starhawk asked. She told them what she’d found in the stables. There were six mules, besides her own little donkey.
Orris started to object and lay out a schedule for double watches on the stable, but Ram said, “Nay, we’d best have ’em up with us. If any ill fell to ’em, we’d be fair put to it between here and Foonspay, never mind leaving behind the pelts and things.”
It was a stupid and ridiculous way to spend an evening, Starhawk thought, shoving and coaxing seven wholly recalcitrant creatures up into the chambers usually reserved for their social superiors. Uncle Anyog helped her, with vivid and startlingly elaborate curses—the elderly scholar was more agile than he looked—while Orris and Ram set to with shovels to clear a place around the hearth for cooking, and Fawn gathered straw bedding in the stables and kindling in the yard.
As night settled over the frozen wastes of the mountains and they barricaded themselves into the upper storey of the inn, Starhawk found herself feeling moody and restless, prey to an uneasy sense of danger. The brothers’ boisterousness did nothing to improve her temper, nor did the grave lecture Orris gave her on the necessity for them all to keep together. As usual, she said nothing of either her apprehension or her irritation. Only Ram glanced up when she left early for her watch. Fawn and Orris were too deeply immersed in a lively discussion of the spice trade to notice her departure.
The silence of the dark hallway was like water after a long fever. She checked the mules where they were stabled in the best front bedroom, then followed the feeble glow of the tallow dip to the head of the stairs, where Uncle Anyog sat before the locked door.
His bright eyes sparkled as he saw her. “Ah, in good time, my warrior dove. Trust a professional to be on time for her watch. Are my oxen bedded down?”
“You think Orris would shut his eyes when he has an audience to listen to his schemes for financing a venture to the East?”
Though she spoke with her usual calm, the old man must have caught some spark of bitterness in her words, for he smiled up at her wryly. “Our pecuniary and busy-handed child.” He sighed. “All the way from Kwest Mralwe, through the woods of Swyrmlaedden, where the nightingales sing, through the golden velvet hills of Harm, and across the snow-shawled feet of the Mountains of Ambersith, he favored me with the minutest details of the latest fluctuations of the currency of the Middle Kingdoms.” He sighed again with regret. “That’s our Orris. But he is very good at what he is, you know.”
“Oh, I know.” Starhawk folded her long legs under her and sat beside him, her back braced against the stained plaster of the wall. “To make a great deal of money, a person has to think about money a great deal of the time. I suppose that’s why, in all the years I’ve been paid so handsomely, I’m never much ahead. No mercenary is.”
The salt-and-pepper beard split in a wide smile. “But you are far ahead of them in the memory of joy, my dove,” he said. “And those memories are not affected by currency fluctuations. I was an itinerant scholar all over the world, from the azure lagoons of Mandrigyn to the windy cliffs of the West, until I became too old and they made me be an itinerant teacher, instead—and I’ve been paid fortunes by universities of Kwest Mrawle and Kedwyr and half the Middle Kingdoms. Now here I am, returning in my old age to be a pensioner in my sister’s house in Pergemis, to stay with a girl whose only knowledge ever lay in how to add, subtract, and raise big, wayfaring sons.” He shook his head with a regret that was only partially self-mockery. “There is no justice in the world, my dove.”
“Stale news, professor.” The Hawk sighed.
“I fear you’re right.” Uncle Anyog extended one booted toe to nudge the stout wood of the door. “You sa
w the marks on the other side?”
She nodded. Neither Ram nor Orris had identified them. She herself had seen their like only once before, as a small child. “Nuuwa?”
He nodded, the stiff white petals of his ruff bobbing, catching an edge of the light like an absurd flower. “More than one, I should say. Quite a large band, if they were capable of breaking into the inn.”
Starhawk’s face was grave. “I’ve never heard of them running in bands.”
“Haven’t you?” Anyog leaned forward to prick up the tallow dip that sat in a tin cup between them on the floor. His shadow, huge and distorted, bent over him, like the darkness of some horrible destiny. “They get thicker as you go east—didn’t you know? And they’ve been seen in bands since early last summer in all the lands around the Tchard Mountains.”
She glanced sideways at him, wondering how much he knew or guessed of her destination. Down below in the inn, she could hear the soft scrabbling noises of foxes and weasels quarreling over the garbage of dinner. For some reason, the sound made her shudder.
“Why is that?” she asked, when the silence had begun to prickle along her skin. “You’re a scholar, Anyog. What are nuuwa? Is it true that they used to be men? That something—some sickness—causes them to lose their eyes, to change and distort as they do? I hear bits and pieces about them, but no one seems to know anything for certain. The Wolf says that they used to appear only rarely and singly. Now you tell me that they’re coming out of the East in big bands.”
“The Wolf?” The little man raised one tufted eyebrow inquiringly.
“The man I’m—Fawn and I—are seeking,” Starhawk explained unwillingly.
The Ladies of Mandrigyn Page 14
