Rise of a Hero (The Farsala Trilogy)

by Bell, Hilari

  “And you’re spying on the Hrum for them?” She found it hard to believe of the man her father had bribed and blackmailed into bringing news from the croft where Soraya had been hidden. But it was that, or he was working for Garren after all, trying to get her to reveal something, and that seemed less and less likely. And if he wasn’t working for them . . .

  “Are you Sorahb?” she asked again.

  “Everyone’s Sorahb,” he repeated. “Some of them more foolish than I’d ever be. Why? Do you fancy working for the great deghan who leads the resistance? I was planning to take you back to Golnar and Behras. They’re working on a farm south of Desafon, but I think they’d take you in.”

  “They might,” said Soraya. She felt a surge of gratitude for it, for the care they’d given her over the last winter. “But I’d rather go to the Suud. Can you take me there?”

  The Suud’s desert was just across the mountains from Mazad—she might be able to tell them about the governor, even if the peddler couldn’t help her. And she longed to see Maok again.

  “The Suud?” The peddler stopped, staring at her until his mule paced past him, pulling on the lead. Duckie, that was the beast’s name. What name had the peddler used?

  “Why do you want to go to the Suud?” he asked.

  “I’ve got friends there,” said Soraya. “And I’ll certainly be safe. I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  The flash of dismay in his eyes told her that he’d forgotten it too, but he didn’t miss a beat. “Garven,” he said. “Of Marat, originally, though I’ve traveled a lot since.”

  No, she couldn’t trust him yet. But it was a long way to the mountains. There would be time to test him—time to learn the truth. Soraya smiled.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  KAVI

  THE GIRL MADE BETTER TIME on the road than Kavi had expected, walking behind him all day without complaint. Though when they reached the modest inn where he planned to spend the night, she pushed open the door and walked in as if she owned the place, so it seemed she hadn’t changed too much.

  The inn’s mistress stared, and Kavi reached out and smacked the top of her head. “Hey, boy, I know it’s your first day on the road, but that’s no reason to lose all your manners!”

  The girl glared at him, but she had some sense left. She lowered her head and mumbled, “Sorry, mistress. I should’ve been knocking.”

  “That’s all right, lad. First day on the road? You look worn out with it!” There were shadows under the girl’s eyes—small wonder, after the night she’d spent, with a day’s walk on top of it. Even Kavi was tired—that she’d held up as well as she had was amazing.

  “Come to the hearth, boy, and rest a bit. We’ve just started cooking, but I know how lads eat. I’ll bring you a bit of bread and cheese, to hold you till dinner. What were you thinking, Kavi, wearing the poor boy out so?”

  Tired she might be, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing or her wits. Dark eyes, glowing with irony, flashed at him from under the rim of her cap. Then she went to the hearth, sitting on the floor beside it, for all the world like a tired boy. When the mistress brought in bread and cheese, she thanked the woman with an inarticulate shyness that concealed the fact that her peasant accent wasn’t very good. Not that she mispronounced anything, but it was too broad, almost a parody. Was that what peasants sounded like to her? In any case, she’d need some coaching—they’d be on the road several days before they reached the mountains, and they didn’t dare arouse suspicion. But in the meantime, Kavi had always been able to talk enough for two.

  He told his fellow travelers, and a few locals who came in for beer after dinner, all about the slave girl—once a fine lady deghass!—who’d escaped the Hrum, and about the big reward they offered. Sixty centirus, no less!

  Some men were interested in the reward, for its size if nothing else. But most men, and all of the women, clearly hoped the girl got free, deghass or no.

  Not one of them glanced twice at the boy, sprawling in the shadows beside the hearth with his bright cap and dusty boots. She did look tired.

  Kavi sought out the innkeeper and paid a few more foals for a room with a second bed, explaining that the boy kicked in his sleep. The innkeeper pocketed the coins and changed his room, and the girl was asleep within moments of hitting the bed. In fact, Kavi had to pull off her boots and draw the blankets over her.

  It wasn’t till early next morning that he was able to visit Duckie, and have a quiet chat with the head groom. The food the local farmers had gathered was ready to ship, and there was more than they had hoped. The harvest was beginning, and it looked to be a good one. Many people were willing to empty out their grain and dried vegetable bins to make room for fresh, and even throw in a bit of salt meat, to help the valiant defenders of Mazad. As for news of the Hrum, the man thought there’d been fewer messengers heading for Mazad in the last few months. He’d seen nothing else out of the ordinary except for a patrol that passed yesterday, looking for an escaped slave girl, and they’d turned back at the next village, thinking that a girl on foot couldn’t have gotten any farther in just one night.

  It seemed she’d been spirited out of a locked cage, leaving a woven straw statue of a girl in her place, so lifelike that by torchlight it had fooled all the sentries. Sorahb was a miracle worker, of course, but this seemed almost like the work of djinn!

  Kavi laughed and told the man he hoped the Hrum believed that, but that peasants should have better sense.

  Returning to the inn for his breakfast, he found the girl eating fried potato cakes with an appetite that would do a twelve-year-old boy credit. And she thanked the inn mistress in a boy’s mumble, without being reminded.

  “You make a good boy,” Kavi told her when they were on the road once more. They’d enjoyed a stretch of dry, sunny weather lately, and it looked like it would be continuing for at least a few more days. She was doing fine on dry roads, but he didn’t think she’d tolerate mud so well.

  “I’m pretending I’m Hejir,” she told him. “He was only nine, and once he got to know me he talked a lot, but at first he used to mumble like that.”

  “Who’s Hejir?”

  “Golnar and Behras’ younger son. I took him hunting sometimes, when I was living at the croft. Don’t you remember him?”

  “I remember the boy. I don’t think I ever heard his name.”

  At the mention of names she sent him another bright, ironic glance, but she made no further comment. And perhaps the bright-faced boy Kavi remembered would have shouldered his satchel and marched down the road without a second thought, but it amazed Kavi that she had.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked, and not only because he wanted to distract her from the subject of names. “According to Ludo, you offered to take a beating for him. He said you were a friend, but that seems to go beyond friendship.”

  “We were friends,” said the daughter of the House of the Leopard, without any hesitation he could see. “But I don’t think I’d have offered to be beaten in his place. Hennic accused me of being the one who told him to take the papers. Garren had been looking for an excuse to . . . motivate me to talk, ever since he got the notion I was there to spy for Sorahb. I knew they were going to flog me no matter what I said, so I thought I might as well get Ludo off. And it wouldn’t have been necessary if your friends hadn’t recruited him in the first place! Not that I’m not grateful that you rescued me. I am. Truly.”

  Kavi could see that she was, and that it galled her to be indebted to him.

  “We didn’t recruit Ludo,” he told her. “He just—”

  “Overheard a conversation, and decided to help out by stealing Hrum documents. Yes, of course,” she said coolly.

  Clearly she believed that he worked for Sorahb, and would ask no questions that might cause trouble for the resistance. Kavi decided to let her go on thinking that—it was easier than trying to explain Nadi’s penchant for adopting anyone who needed it, be it a simpleminded Hrum servant, o
r a young peddler whose heart had been more crippled by anger and bitterness than his hand had been by a sword cut. And he certainly wasn’t going to explain his ongoing struggle to keep Sim and Hama from trying to actively support “Sorahb.” In the future, they’d be more careful what they said in front of Ludo. And the lady Soraya had some explaining to do herself.

  “Why were you posing as a servant if you weren’t there to spy?” Kavi asked. He couldn’t imagine the deghass he’d met less than a year ago acting as a servant for any reason—though he could believe it of the slim boy-girl who walked beside him now, considering whether or not to answer. Had she any idea how much she’d changed? And could the other deghans have changed, have been taught to be better people? Probably not—at least, not by anything less than months of servitude. Which, come to think of it was precisely what most of them were enduring right now. Would they all return competent and steady, and willing to befriend a simpleminded kitchen boy?

  Somehow Kavi doubted it.

  The girl had made up her mind. “I was there to spy,” she admitted. “But not for Sorahb. I was trying to get in to their records, to find out where my mother and brother were sent. I almost succeeded, too. I had the scroll in my hand.”

  Watching her teeth grind together, Kavi observed that her temper hadn’t changed. But in this different Soraya, he didn’t seem to mind it.

  “Even if you’d learned where they went, you’d likely not have been able to reach them.” Was that comforting or not? It was the truth. “They always send slaves far from the country where they’re taken, so even if they escape, they can’t get home. You’ve a better chance of seeing them again if Mazad holds out—though your chances there aren’t that good either.”

  Why did that make her look suspicious?

  “I suppose you’re right,” she admitted. “I never found out where they were sent anyway. Never even had a chance to search for my cousin Pari’s name. Though I don’t know if she was taken or not, much less where, so that would have been—”

  “She was taken at the Sendar Wall,” Kavi interrupted before she made him feel guiltier than he already did. “At least, if she’s the girl who was with you when we first met.”

  The memory of that meeting, where her noble father had blackmailed Kavi into his service, roused enough anger to assuage his guilt, letting him meet her astonished gaze. But still . . . This was the first time he’d heard the name of the girl he’d last seen in the Hrum slave pens.

  “The Sendar Wall?” said the girl, Soraya, blankly. “What was she doing there?”

  “A lot of the deghans brought their families,” Kavi told her. “To witness their great victory. Your father was furious about it, but the deghans said it was part of their ‘ancient and glorious tradition,’ and refused to send them home.”

  Pain flashed in the vivid dark eyes at the mention of her father, but most of her attention was fixed on him. “How do you know all that?” she demanded, sounding almost like the lady Soraya of old.

  No, he couldn’t trust her with any part of his story, much less the whole of it. The Craft Council might have acquitted him, but he didn’t think Commander Merahb’s daughter would do the same.

  “Let’s start working on your accent,” said Kavi firmly.

  SHE CONTINUED TO BE A good traveling companion, sleeping in blankets on the ground with no complaint, and when the fine weather broke and they stopped at another inn, she readily agreed to flip a coin to determine who would sleep in the bed. Under his tutoring, her accent improved to the point that she wouldn’t make folks suspicious, at least in casual conversation.

  But that one load off his burden of worries was soon replaced by others. Kavi was using this unexpected trip north to check on his arrangements. The gathering of the next food shipment was continuing apace, but the intelligence his people reported was disturbing.

  The nearer they drew to Mazad, the more active the Hrum patrols seemed to be. The casks of supplies that had already come in had to be stored farther from the city than the first shipment, for the Hrum were searching all of the large buildings in the area on a regular basis. Almost as if they suspected another shipment was being gathered, which was absurd since they had no way to know about the first one.

  In a village just west of Mazad, Kavi took the girl to an inn and left her to eat alone, claiming that he needed to speak with potential buyers at another table.

  The men he spoke to swore that the searches, the increased patrols, had started shortly after the last food shipment. And that the Hrum weren’t looking for Sorahb’s wondrous, disappearing army—not this long after the battle—in other folks’ barns! On the other hand, they didn’t seem to know about the tunnels. Messages still appeared in the hollow tree, and the occasional guardsman still came out to contact them. But they weren’t certain a second shipment could reach the tunnel entrance, not with all these patrols about.

  Kavi carried his tankard back to the table where Soraya sat, wondering how he was going to get thirty carts of food past all those Hrum.

  “You don’t look like they wanted to buy many knives,” the girl said softly. Her gaze was on the crowd, not on him. Kavi had spoken to many of them earlier—this close to Mazad almost everyone knew who he was, and what he was doing here. So now, when he seemed to want privacy, they left him alone.

  “They don’t,” he said, erasing the scowl from his face. “But no matter. I’ll sell them down the road.”

  Her expression said clearly that she recognized that for a lie, and a transparent lie to boot.

  “They have bought my knives,” Kavi protested. And they had, though mostly as an excuse to meet with him.

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Soraya slowly. “What matters is that these people trust you. They respect you too, but trust is the important part.”

  The flickering light from the hearth, from the candles near the bar, shadowed her face and made her eyes mysterious.

  “How would you know what they feel?” Kavi meant it to sound like a joke, but a prickle of unease ran down his spine, for she sounded as if she truly knew.

  “That doesn’t matter either,” said the girl, with the firmness of someone who has made up her mind. “But if they’re certain they can trust you, then . . . then I think I can too.”

  “Oh?” Kavi settled back in his chair and waited. He’d become aware, as they traveled, that she was holding something back. But it couldn’t be too important.

  “I think that Garren has suborned the governor of Mazad,” she said. “I think he’s working for the Hrum, planning to betray—”

  “What?” People all over the room turned to stare, and Kavi lowered his voice hastily. “What makes you think that? Governor Nehar’s—”

  “A deghan,” Soraya finished. “So what? Plenty of deghans were ambitious fools, at the best of times. And this isn’t the best of times.”

  “No, it’s not.” He watched her intently, but could see no sign of nervousness or deceit. “What makes you think Nehar’s a traitor?”

  “Some things that Governor Garren said.” She was speaking more slowly now. “He’d just found out who I was, and he thought I was spying for Sorahb—I told you about that. What he was most interested in was who Sorahb was, how I was contacting him, that kind of thing.”

  Kavi felt another chill. If she had made some bargain, if her imprisonment and the threat to beat her had been a snare, she had certainly made contact with one Sorahb. But surely, that was too convoluted for the practical Hrum. “Go on.”

  “Well, I said something about Mazad being a bigger problem than Sorahb, and he said he wasn’t worried about Mazad.”

  “So? He likely thinks that all he has to do to overwhelm Mazad is bring in enough troops. Mazad’s stuck in one place—Sorahb can be running all over the countryside.”

  “I know, but he sounded so confident. It just felt wrong. And later, in the same conversation, I said something like, ‘No deghan would ever work for the Hrum,’ and he said, ‘Tell that to the
gov—’ and then he broke off and tried to change the subject. But I put the two together, and I asked him—accused him, really, of suborning Governor Nehar, and he hit me. I know it doesn’t sound like much.” Her hands were clenched on the table. “But Garren . . .” She seemed to have run out of words.

  “Garren hit you?” Kavi’s brows rose. “I’d have said he’s not the sort to go hitting folk—more efficient to just tell the arms master to chop off their heads. Anger’s not worth the effort, for him.”

  “How do you know that?” She looked startled, and a bit suspicious. And no wonder, for he’d betrayed a depth of knowledge no peddler dealing casually with Hrum ordnancers should have possessed.

  “I know a lot,” said Kavi grimly. “But this isn’t much to go on. A couple of sentences, in different contexts, that could mean something else entirely.”

  “But when I reached a conclusion, he hit me,” Soraya persisted. “Why would he do that, except to distract me from what I was thinking? To silence me? And why do you think he offered such a big reward for my capture, except to keep me from passing this on?”

  Kavi had wondered about the size of the reward. The girl’s dark eyes met his without hesitation, as honest and open as any peasant’s.

  “All right,” he said, making up his mind as he spoke. “Can you stay here by yourself for a day or two?”

  “Certainly. Just leave me enough money for meals.” She leaned back in her chair at last, looking satisfied. Kavi noticed that she was smart enough not to ask questions he wouldn’t have answered, but it was a passing thought. Most of his mind was already working on the need to reach Mazad and get in—tonight, if he could.

  HE DID GET IN THAT NIGHT, with the help of a local lad who volunteered to guide him across country till he reached the familiar hills near the town. Hrum patrols were everywhere, and they had to waste much of the precious darkness crouching on hilltops, or in the gullies, as the Hrum marched past. His informants were right—they were far more numerous, and more alert, than they had been. Too numerous, and too alert, for thirty large wagons to sneak past them even if he created some sort of diversion.