Shortly after meridian, the highwayman turned them west off the road. No trail guided them, but he seemed to know his way, and never paused even when fording a shaded river running in the depths of the tall evergreens.
Night had not fully come when they emerged from a thin grove of aspen into a flat hollow at the base of three mountains. In the center of a clearing, a small log cabin sat low and virtually hidden by several holly bushes. A large moon shimmered on a narrow stream that wound through the hollow and near one side of the cabin. In the dark, the smell of wild honeysuckle and high-mountain lilac hung heavy in the air. Jastail surveyed the basin before going ahead, his sharp eyes searching the dark. Several times he turned around to watch the way behind, allowing Wendra to pass. He appeared more skittish than she’d ever seen him. The furtive look on his face pleased her. But what might make a hollow man jumpy?
Jastail left the horses saddled while he checked the cabin. No lock secured the door, and the highwayman entered so quietly that the sound of the brook concealed his entry. The fleeting thought to run teased Wendra. But she could no longer be sure Penit would follow her—the boy and the highwayman seemed good friends.
In the neutral glow of the lesser light, the boy’s silhouette showed the image of the man he would become. A fuller nose, a deeper jaw, eyes set in lines earned by experience he couldn’t yet dream of, broader shoulders and chest. She would fight to save the brave lad’s future.
“Come,” Jastail whispered.
Penit jumped down and bounded inside. Wendra climbed down with stiff legs and wrapped her reins in a nearby shrub, then did the same with Penit’s. Jastail emerged from the doorway and skulked like a shadow to her side. He rolled a tobaccom leaf into a small wrapper. With a curling motion, he drew a knife across a cylinder of flint and brought an oil lamp to flame. He puffed his tobaccom alight, and stood drawing deeply of the sweet-leaf.
“We are almost done, you and I.” He spoke like a merchant describing a business arrangement.
Wendra smelled the smoke on the air, and watched it, silver and dreamlike in the moonlight. She remembered Balatin striking alight his pipe, the gentle soap and tobaccom smell of his beard and sleeves as he pulled her to his chest and rocked back in the shadows of their porch. A hundred lesser cycles ago this night, this moon, and this smoke would have meant something entirely different. Tonight, they came as an insult to her memory, more bitter, cold resin than sweet, warm leaf.
She withdrew her parchment from her pocket, and followed the graceful strokes as she remembered her melody.
Without looking up from the page, she said, “I can only imagine that we will die, highwayman.” She uttered the defamatory term with as much derision as she had. “Either in body or in spirit, but whatever trade or sale you conduct in this remote vale is meant to be kept secret. An arrangement you keep with men that are less comfortable beside the road. I come to comfort the boy, or you would have had to kill me long ago to have my obedience.”
“Are you sure you’ve never read Toille?” She could feel his sarcastic smile in the darkness. “You speak much as he wrote, such unvarnished truth. But really you have seen an unlikely end to this.” He scrubbed one side of his face. “No matter. I won’t convince you. You’ll know when you know. Not that you’ll be any happier, but you are resilient, my dear. A good deal more so than I’d have guessed when I first found you seeking out the boy. And a good lad, too.”
“You strain your hold over me, highwayman.” This time Jastail bristled at the epithet.
“Meaning if you believed him lost to you that you would take to these hills alone and leave him behind?” Jastail chuckled. He drew deeply of his tobaccom, and let out the sweet-smelling smoke as he spoke. “A poor threat, my lady. I know more about you than you may realize. Learned, as a matter of fact, in just keeping your company. And what I know tells me that you will stay close to the boy until you’ve no more power to do so. That the child fancies me, that I’ve encouraged it, makes you hate me. But I really don’t care.”
His glib words and easy manner as he smoked and admired the waxing light of the moon rankled Wendra as nothing else had done. She wanted to tell him she’d try to kill him. She longed to clutch his throat and drive his head into the ground. The images blossomed in her head and brought with them snatches of melody that cooled her heart.
“Nothing to say,” Jastail mocked. “Dear me, what can this mean?” He puffed again on his tobaccom. “I gave the boy a bed. Tomorrow will bring revelations to him for which he’ll need his strength. You should sleep as well.”
Wendra said nothing, and did not move. She only looked again at her parchment and followed her song in her mind.
Lost in the internal sound, she did not notice the highwayman draw nigh. Suddenly, he stood very near, hunched slightly to stare at the page she held in her fingers. A derisive smile curled his lips in the strong moonlight. “Seems we both have our favorite poets. Yours, a Ta’Opin who drives a wagon filled with useless artifacts.” A quiet chuckled escaped him. “You see, even now I am not unkind. A petty scoundrel would snatch your song from your hands to deprive you of its distraction.” He put one hand on his chest. “While I recognize the value that tinder holds for me in quieting your vengeful thoughts.”
Wendra seethed at his disregard for her parchment of music. Her captor’s arrogance stirred the unsettling song in her bosom.
“No poem tonight?” Wendra asked in response, her voice neutral, mocking his penchant for verse. “You would let your education slip so that you could taunt me, a piece of merchandise. Or have you just realized that your poet is a buffoon?”
Wendra knew her words seared him, for even as she spoke, the familiar callousness stole over his eyes as he turned them toward her in the lunar light. The rays of the moon in his pupils, his face very close to her own—the smell of sweet-leaf soft as a lover’s kiss between them. No anger, no regret, no fear, no expectation showed in his hollowed cheeks or slash of a mouth. He stared at her, his eyes focused and unmoving. Then he recited from memory:
Some lift prying eyes to discover the motive hands.
Some toil daylight hours to rest and dream their days a different end.
Still others make brash sounds,
And many tormented supplication say on bended knees.
Youth scrapes and hides and practices for its own time to stare the wall.
I these things observe and name them wounds,
And by so doing create my inmost salve,
With which to rise and watch it all again.
Jastail held her gaze a moment more. Then he tossed his tobaccom into a bulrush and unsaddled the horses. The words leapt to spontaneous melody inside her. They felt like song that mustn’t be sung. The mere thought of it chilled her heart. She rushed inside and left the highwayman to his neutral moon and dark verse. Tomorrow, she felt, would be her last chance to save the boy and herself, and to have any hope of seeing Tahn again.
She offered a silent good-bye to her brother at the lesser light, just in case … I love you, Tahn.
* * *
Light came through the window, diffused by the ungainly branches of several holly bushes growing beside the cabin. Wendra lay in a fetal position, Penit curled up against her chest. The soft intake of his breath against the blanket made her sure she’d been right to find him. Hoping that their silence would keep Jastail away, she lay watching the sun strengthen in the sky and at last heard old melodies in her head and let go the worry of imminent confrontation she’d carried since meeting the highwayman.
In another part of the cabin, she heard preparation for endfast. Penit would be hungry, but she did not want to wake him. He had not been this close to her in days. His smooth brow and downy cheeks glowed just a finger’s breadth from her own, his face a portrait of unconditional trust. The memory of sleeping this way with her father, especially in the months after her mother had died, stole over her. His broad chest and strong arms had made her feel safe. Then, like now, she�
�d woken first, but lain still so the spell of morning calm could linger.
The way she imagined she would have done with her own child.
A soft moan, response to some fanciful childhood dream, escaped Penit’s mouth. He squirmed and settled again even closer. Wendra fought the urge to hug him. He might wake if she did. In her softest voice, she began to hum, the sound delicate, so soft that Penit’s breathing could be heard to keep time. She found phrases from her songbox in her mind and wove them into variations as bright and promising as the light from the window. Penit did not stir, and Wendra thought she could feel herself healing as she had in the cave, though somehow differently now.
Thinking of the cave, she remembered that she’d wanted to ask the boy what he’d seen in the mists of Je’holta when he’d broken the line and raced away. But it no longer seemed to matter, and she relaxed for the moment, lying by his side.
Then he opened his eyes and turned to look at her. “You sing well. We never had such a good voice on the wagons.”
Wendra smiled. Then something she’d wanted to be alone to talk to Penit about surfaced abruptly. “Don’t be fooled by Jastail, Penit. He is only playing at being your friend. He uses you to control me, because he knows I won’t do—”
“I know,” Penit interrupted with a secretive whisper. “I’ve known men like him my whole life. They’re the ones that take coins out of the hat on the wagon wheel. I’m just letting him think his little pageant is working to keep his trust. I figure sooner or later it may give us an advantage—”
The bedroom door opened with a thick, heavy crack against the wall. “You’ll need to eat,” Jastail called and returned to the outer room. Wendra and Penit shared a conspiratorial smile. Then he leapt from the bed and pulled on his boots.
“Will we make it to Recityv today?” Penit asked, following Jastail and resuming his ruse.
“Not today, lad.” Jastail put an arm around the boy and the two walked into the hall toward the kitchen.
“Maybe never,” Wendra added, alone in the sunbathed room.
Fried oats covered in honey, roasted water-root, and spring water lay on the table in a bounteous endfast. Jastail sat magnanimously at the head of the table and passed dishes to Wendra and Penit. “You’ve both worked so hard,” he said. “I wanted to treat you to a good morning meal. Have plenty.”
“And where did you learn this hospitality?” she asked.
Jastail smiled thinly. “But you already know. It is my poetry that teaches me civility. And”—he looked around the cabin—“there is a certain grace amongst highwaymen, if you must know. We do not all slop from a trough.”
Wendra forced herself to eat. The meal felt like an extra bale of hay, when calves and lambs were fatted for Harvest Bath. But she would need her strength when her moment arrived, and she ate a second helping of everything to ensure she did not faint when that moment came.
Penit slapped his lips with every bite, savoring the oats especially. He rushed through each helping, seeming to expect that they’d be back on the trail again after endfast. He gulped his spring water and sat looking at Jastail as the highwayman finished his water-root. Their captor ate in silence, suddenly less disposed to play to Penit’s worship.
Wendra thought of Master Olear taking lambs into his shed. The animals bleated and complained, sensing the awful business intended for them, until Master Olear spoke in his soft, singsong voice to reassure them. She never saw how the lambs met their end. But she could still hear the lilting phrases of reassurance muted by the wooden walls of the shed. She heard hooves on planks coming to a halt. And she still heard a final strangled cry before the silence, and with it, the grunt of Master Olear bearing down as he plunged his implement of death into the beast. She and Penit were on the boards as surely as he’d been in Galadell. They were in the silence now, the coaxing words having brought them to the cabin. She wondered what sound Jastail would make as he made victims of them.
She put trembling hands into her lap to hold them still. The terrible uncertainty of not knowing Jastail’s plan oppressed her. Wendra looked down at the fork she’d taken her meal with. One clean movement. Take the utensil in hand and stick it into Jastail’s throat. She could smell the tobaccom smoke on him, and hated her own fear of the apathy in his eyes. Her gorge rose, sour and rank at the very look of her captor; bile burned her throat.
“We’re going to stay here a day or two,” Jastail said, not meeting Penit’s eyes. “We could all use some rest, and I have stock here for ten days or more.”
“I thought you were taking us to Recityv?” Penit asked.
“Indeed, lad, I am.” Jastail instantly adopted the paternal look he’d mastered during their days together. “But the woman here needs some rest. It’s not fair to push her as fast as we can go.” He leaned toward Penit to make a show of solidarity.
“I am fine,” Wendra responded, still clutching her hands in her lap. “I’m not at all tired.”
Jastail flashed angry eyes at her, but regained his composure quickly. “Every woman will say such things, Penit, may the Will bless them for it. They’ll push on until they near collapse from exhaustion. But a proper man knows to take his time, attend her needs.” Jastail allowed himself a slightly lurid look. “And so we’ll rest a day or two, eat well, relax. Then on to Recityv.”
“And will you help us find the Sheason?” Penit asked, immediately looking at Wendra. His face said that he knew he’d just made a horrible mistake. It was the first look at the old Penit she’d had in many days, and despite the blunder, the face warmed her.
Jastail glared at Penit, then Wendra. He exuded anger like heat, catching her and Penit in its waves. “What business have you with Sheason?” Jastail inquired, his voice just barely restraining fury.
“None at all,” Wendra responded, her eyes still on Penit.
“Boy,” Jastail said turning toward Penit. “Tell me true. You seek one of the order. Why?” Penit looked at the highwayman and back at Wendra like a rabbit caught in a trapper’s snare.
“I won’t ask you again,” Jastail said, his voice rising as he slowly lost control.
Wendra let the highwayman grow cross with Penit, and made no immediate move to help him. She hoped it would dispel the false countenance he’d tried to show the boy. The turn of events pleased her, and she fought her own smile even as Jastail lost his temper.
“What should I say, Wendra?” Penit finally asked, pleading for help across the table of oats and water-root.
Jastail smiled. Penit’s face immediately showed regret for his mistake: He’d revealed her true name.
Wendra put a forgiving hand over Penit’s own and inclined toward him. “Tell him that it might be wise of him to take us to Recityv today. Tell him that his anger or any bruises it may cause you and me will not look good to potential buyers, if we are to fetch the price he wants for us. And tell him that the poet he adores has twisted him from a fine cook of honeyed oats to a sack of grain tainted with weevils.”
Penit stared back in confusion.
“Or tell him he smells bad and ought to take a bath.”
The table shook. Jastail rose, his fists still trembling where he’d pounded them into the tabletop. He swallowed slowly, the rise of blood to his cheeks suffusing his entire face. Then he composed himself, the callous look that Wendra dreaded returning. “You misunderstand, Wendra,” Jastail began, making sure she knew he’d caught her lie. He went on in his strange uninflected tone. “I only wish I might have known to raise my price on you and the child. But I’ve not been entirely in the dark. Why do you suppose I purchased my own lot?” He motioned at Penit without looking at him. “I saw what happened in you at the auction. I listened to you singing with the Ta’Opin. How ironic that it is my poet who has described such things to me and leaves their traces in my memory? The boy’s loose tongue gives my suspicions credibility. It will help me fetch the prize I seek.”
“And what is that, highwayman?” Wendra asked. “I’ve a poet,
too, and he has defined the man you are.” She studied his face. “Stuffed. And as worthless as a scarecrow. So much dried hay to fill a discarded shirt and pair of trousers. For you, no prize will stir your heart. That is what I learned from Gynedo on your gambling riverboat. It is a wonder you care at all for your own safety.”
Jastail smiled then, a baleful, awful twist of his lips. “Ah, but I do.” He came around the table and bent to speak at Wendra’s ear. “One does not deal with Quietgiven alone.”
Wendra’s heart seemed to stop. She did not turn in surprise, as she thought Jastail hoped she might. But the mention of the legions from the Bourne sent chills down her back.
“They are not generally of high business principles,” Jastail went on. “You may be glad of it, too, Anais. I’ve men coming to partner with me in this trade. Safety in numbers, you see. And your womb and the child’s innocence are high market items with those out of the Bourne. Your little songs and closeness with the order are treasures I would thank the Great Fathers for, if I believed.”
Wendra smiled triumphantly. “I’ve a gift for you then. One that may inspire belief in you for a Will of mercy.”
“Indeed,” Jastail mocked. “One of your pretty songs laced with insults and hatred, perhaps.”
“Not at all.” Wendra dug into her trousers and produced the parchment she’d found in Jastail’s room at Galadell. She placed it delicately beside her plate. “A fine garnish to this meal, highwayman.” She then turned and glowered at him. “There’ll be no help coming. Your men will have no message.”
Jastail hit Wendra full force on the side of the head, sending her sprawling to the floor. “By every death I’ve seen!” he howled. “I would send you to join them!”
Licking blood from her lip, Wendra said, mocking, “And what of our price, highwayman?” Penit raced around the table to kneel beside her. “Is there still value in us if my womb is cold and the boy lies dead in his purity?” She spat the blood from her mouth. “I don’t know what use they have of us, you mongrel, but great is the Will that brings you to know what it is to be ruled by the hand of another. I’ll pray for rough hands on your most tender skin. And to know what price a highwayman will bring on his own block should the Given take a liking to you.”
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