Challenges

by Sharon Green

  Rion was the first to leave, which he did with a courtly bow to Jovvi while ignoring Vallant as though the second man were a piece of furniture. Vallant snorted again to show his opinion of that, but Rion ignored the reaction as well. As soon as he was gone, Vallant looked at Jovvi.

  “We both know Mardimil was just bein’ foolish,” he said, actually sounding somewhat stuffy. “Women need a man to lean on, so I’ll be right there to supply the shoulder. When are we leavin’?”

  “Right after breakfast,” Jovvi told him, doing her part by adding stiffness to her voice. If Vallant hadn’t winked again to show he wasn’t serious, she would have been good and insulted. As it was… “You really don’t need to bother going, you know. I can—”

  “Now, now, not another word,” he interrupted, definitely sounding stuffy. “A true gentleman never finds somethin’ like this a bother, so we’ll say no more about it.”

  Jovvi nearly giggled at the way Vallant rolled his eyes after saying that, knowing exactly how narrow-minded he sounded. Instead of laughing she simply sighed in exasperation, thereby making sure his playacting wasn’t wasted. She could always giggle later—before they got to court.

  Vallant waited until she was finished eating, and then he escorted her out of the house. The coach she’d arranged for last night was just pulling up, so they waited for it to stop and then climbed in. Once they were settled and the coach was moving again, Jovvi eyed Vallant.

  “I think you can tell me now what you and Rion were doing,” she said. “And in case you’re interested, there was a servant standing just out of sight, taking it all in.”

  “Actually, I already knew that,” he replied with a grin. “It came to me that I can judge if any people are nearby by the amount of body water humans have. And Mardimil and I were doin’ what he and I and Coll agreed to do last night: make sure the testin’ authority has no reason to break us up. If they think we’re gettin’ too friendly, they just might do that.”

  “You’re absolutely right!” Jovvi exclaimed. “I missed that, but happily you three didn’t. You and Rion will be arguing with Lorand next, I suppose?”

  “Mardimil first and then me,” Vallant agreed with a nod. “At first we were goin’ to do it after the next group meetin’, but then we decided we might not have the time to wait. It’s gettin’ too close to the time they’ll be formin’ us into a Blendin’, and we’re hopin’ they won’t do any separatin’ afterward. If they think we can’t stand each other, they ought to leave us alone.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Jovvi agreed fervently. “I’ll have to speak to Tamma as soon as we get back, to let her know what’s going on. After that I can blame her for the fact that Allestine was arrested, and she’ll know I’m not serious.”

  “Coll and Mardimil are supposed to tell her while we’re gone,” Vallant said. “They’ll both try to get her alone, and at least one of them ought to succeed.”

  His words stopped there, but Jovvi could see that there was something he ached to add. His emotions had rippled wildly when he’d mentioned Tamma, and Jovvi couldn’t stand it.

  “You might as well tell me whatever you’re holding back on,” she said, smiling faintly at his startlement. “If you don’t, we’ll probably both explode.”

  “But imposin’ now would be wrong,” he protested, actually meaning it. “This court business has got to be botherin’ you, and I meant to say right away that I don’t have to go in with you if you really don’t want company. I can walk around outside the buildin’ until the whole thing is over—”

  “Vallant, please,” she interrupted, leaning forward to touch his hand where it rested on his knee. “I’m very glad to have you going with me, and talking about what’s bothering you won’t be imposing. I’m badly in need of something to distract me, so you’d actually be doing me a favor.”

  “To tell the truth, I feel like a damned fool just thinkin’ about it,” he admitted heavily, his very handsome face strained. “Talkin’ about it is worse, but neither is as bad as not doin’ somethin’ to change it. Last night Tamrissa said some things to Coll, and he got mad and repeated them to me. It seems I was wrong to believe she has no feelin’s for me.”

  “I think I tried to tell you that at one point, but you were in too much pain to hear me,” Jovvi commented with a smile and a nod. “I expect Lorand put it a bit less delicately than I did… And now you’ve decided to do what? Change your mind again?”

  “The only reason I changed it the first time was to keep from botherin’ a woman who wanted nothin’ to do with me.” Now his expression was just serious, and it was clear that he was telling the truth. “I also felt pretty worthless, to have a woman like Tamrissa hate me so much.”

  “It wasn’t hate, it was fear,” Jovvi felt compelled to tell him. “She’s very much afraid of getting involved again, and the fact that she only treated you that way said clearly how attracted she was to you. It was rather easy for me to see that, but discussing it without her permission was another matter entirely.”

  “And now we have an even bigger problem,” he said, leaning forward to rest his arms on his knees and clasp his hands. “I was all for talkin’ to her right away and gettin’ the misunderstandin’ straightened out, but Coll and Mardimil talked me out of it. They pointed out that I was probably kept in the residence while Holter was moved elsewhere because he was startin’ to fit in too well. And he also got along with Tamrissa, which seems to be the major point. If I start gettin’ along with her, I could end up bein’ transferred elsewhere.”

  “Yes, you certainly could.” Jovvi was forced to agree even while she hated the idea. “So that means you can’t change the way you’ve been acting with Tamma, but she has to be told something. The way things are now, she’s completely miserable.”

  “And I refuse to let her go on feelin’ like that,” Vallant said flatly. “This happened because I acted like a fool, and I won’t have her sufferin’ over my mistake. I’d like you to tell her the truth—and that I’ll be lookin’ for a chance to get her alone. What the testin’ authority doesn’t know can’t hurt us.”

  “Well, I’ll tell her, of course, but I’m not sure how she’ll take it,” Jovvi said, needing to tell the man the truth. “She took a very big step forward when she decided to try a relationship with you, but that was just before you apparently changed your mind. Now that you’ve changed it back, there’s no guarantee she’ll do the same.”

  “I feel like I’m ridin’ a runaway horse,” Vallant said after letting out a long, deep breath. “And not only runaway, we’re both blindfolded. But you can tell Tamrissa that I offer my apologies in advance, because this time I won’t be changin’ my mind back again. She’d better do the same, or she’ll end up very unhappy with me.”

  “Vallant, you have to promise me that you won’t push her too much,” Jovvi asked, suddenly nervous. “She’s gotten into the habit of reaching to the power in order to protect herself, and she could accidentally cause you a great deal of harm. You have to remember what she’s been through—”

  “I do remember, but it’s time she forgot,” Vallant said as he sat back, his mind solidly made up. “I won’t ever do anythin’ to harm her, but it may be time to stop thinkin’ of her as breakable. Real women aren’t that fragile, and she’s as real as they come.”

  His thoughts slipped into a private area then, and Jovvi didn’t have to work very hard to guess which one. She felt the definite urge to press her warning, but usually tried to avoid wasting her time and breath. Vallant’s earlier determination about Tamma was like a single flame to the current conflagration raging inside him, and Jovvi could only hope that the comparison would not turn out to be literal.

  Having no more conversation to distract her, Jovvi looked out of the coach window to see that they were entering an area of the city that seemed to have a large number of official-looking buildings. The sight caused her to shiver just a little, so similar was it to that time she’d had her own brush with the law.
The official-looking buildings appeared just the same, only slightly less imposing than they’d been to a very frightened young girl.

  The time had been just after she’d met the family which had offered to take her in, but before she’d decided to accept the offer. The people had seemed unbelievably decent, but young Jovvi had seen too much of the other sort to give her trust that easily—even if her gift tried to tell her they were sincere. She’d eaten the food they’d given her and then had returned to the streets, going back to the house twice in five days when finding food elsewhere proved impossible. Each time they’d told her she could stay and live with them, but they hadn’t tried to keep her from leaving again.

  And then the day came when the guardsmen suddenly appeared everywhere, their aim being to arrest every street child they could catch. There had finally been too many complaints about burglary and trespassing in locked warehouses for the officials to ignore, so they sent out a large number of guardsmen to sweep up the dregs who were causing so much trouble. Very few of the children and older street people avoided the net, and Jovvi wasn’t one of them. She’d been caught easily and thrown into one of the cages-on-wheels the guardsmen had brought along to hold their prizes, and had been too frightened to use her ability in an effort to escape.

  There had been so many others in the cage that Jovvi had found it difficult to breathe despite all the open spaces between the cage’s bars. It had also been almost impossible to stand, especially when the wagon the cage was sitting in began to move. Everyone had reeked of fear even before that; once they were definitely on the way out of the neighborhood some of them never left, the fear turned to choking terror.

  They’d passed the official-looking buildings before the wagon was driven into the back of one, and then they’d been pulled out of the cage and dragged to a series of large cells. The cells afforded more room, but the stink of urine and vomit added to terror and hopelessness had made Jovvi throw up. The filthy straw underfoot hadn’t really absorbed what she’d produced, even though it wasn’t much. She hadn’t had a decent meal in a few days, so there’d been little more than liquid to give up.

  They’d been kept in that cell for three days, and once each day they’d been given a bowl of thick gruel and a cup of water. Jovvi had had to force herself to eat the terrible stuff, which had tasted worse than day-old garbage, but she hadn’t been able to force herself to sleep. At most she’d catnapped, and then only for a few minutes at a time. Constant fear is exhausting, but it also refuses to let its victim rest. When Jovvi was finally taken out of the cell with five of the other children she knew, she was close to complete collapse.

  Before that day Jovvi had never been in a courtroom, but she had no difficulty recognizing it when she and the others were dragged inside. They were made to sit down on a bench at the front of the wood-paneled room, and a man seated at a nearby table had risen to address the panel of judges. He recited the list of crimes they were accused of, and the first of Jovvi’s group, a boy she knew and disliked, was pulled off the bench to stand in front of the judges’ dais. One of the judges asked if there was anyone in the courtroom who was willing to be responsible for the boy, and when no one spoke up to volunteer, the boy was told he’d been found guilty and was then sent away to work off his sentence.

  The fact that they weren’t told what the sentence was only made things worse for Jovvi and the others. She sat there in pure terror as one by one the other children were done the same as the first, and finally it was her turn. She waited numbly for her fate to be sealed—but suddenly a voice spoke out, saying it would be responsible for her. The voice belonged to the father of the family which had invited her to live with them, and Jovvi never understood why she hadn’t fainted with relief.

  The man had been required to pay three silver dins in reparation for her crimes, just about every penny the family had. After feeling dizzying relief Jovvi had felt guilty, but Nolin, the man, had just told her she could pay him back when she grew up. He took her home, his wife Minara had helped her to bathe before giving her an old but clean dress to wear, and then they’d fed her. By then it had been impossible to keep her eyes open, and she’d ended up sleeping for a full day. And she’d never gone back to the streets again…

  But now she was going back to a courtroom, and the thought of it threatened to make her throw up all over again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It took some doing, but by the time the coach stopped in front of the large stone building, Jovvi was projecting outward calm. Inward was another matter entirely, but she refused to let herself think about that.

  “This whole neighborhood looks like a ghost town,” Vallant commented as he helped her out of the coach. “I haven’t even seen anybody walkin’ in the street for two or three blocks.”

  “This is supposed to be the second rest day,” Jovvi reminded him with a brief smile of thanks for his help. “It’s odd that they didn’t wait until tomorrow to hold this trial, and I’m tempted to think that there’s an ulterior motive involved. But the whole thing might just be standard practice, and I’m simply being overly suspicious.”

  “In our position, overly suspicious is the safest thing to be,” Vallant murmured as they started up the wide stone steps. “Don’t forget that I’ll be actin’ superior and insufferable, and maybe you ought to be actin’ more than a little upset. If they’re doin’ this just to ruin your balance, it would be a shame to make them think they wasted the effort.”

  Jovvi considered that an excellent idea, especially since it would be easy to arrange. Showing her true feelings rather than hiding them would do it, and that way even another Spirit magic practitioner would be convinced. Yes, that was definitely the way to play it, and the realization made her even more glad that Vallant was there. Normally she would probably have come up with the idea herself, but where courtrooms were concerned there was nothing normal about her reactions.

  The heavy wooden front doors of the building were unlocked, and just inside was a guardsman standing a post. He directed them to the room where the trial was being held, on the second floor and in the daylight court, whatever that was. She and Vallant produced rather loud footsteps as they crossed the wide, empty floor to the proper stairway, and Jovvi was relieved to see that her companion was only faintly disturbed about being indoors. With all that emptiness around them, there wasn’t much feeling of confinement.

  The second floor corridor had windows at either end, but there were still lamps lit around the first set of double doors on the right. Opening one of the doors showed them where everyone had gathered, more than a dozen people in addition to the defendants. But the three high chairs up on the dais were empty, which meant that court wasn’t yet in session. An older man dressed like a bailiff stood near the doors they entered by, and when he saw them he came over.

  “Good mornin’,” he greeted them pleasantly, his accent sounding just like Vallant’s. “Can I help you folks with somethin’?”

  “This lady is here to observe the trial,” Vallant answered with a smile. “She’s the one they tried kidnappin’, but the officials said they wouldn’t need her testimony. Is it all right if she and I just sit down back here somewhere?”

  “You’re welcome to sit any place you like,” the bailiff replied with a smile of his own, one that seemed a bit warmer than the first one he’d produced. “If anyone has a right to observe the trial, I’d say this lady is it. And if one of you has any questions about what you see, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “That’s really lovely of you,” Jovvi told him with one of her own best smiles. “I just might have some questions, so we’ll sit down right here.”

  The bailiff nodded to show that it was fine with him, so Jovvi urged Vallant to move to the bench first and let her sit on the end. Vallant hesitated very briefly, but the room was rather large and he wasn’t far from the door. It was possible to feel his clench-jawed efforts at self control, but they were successful enough to let him do as she wanted.

&
nbsp; Once they were seated, Jovvi made herself look around a bit more deliberately. Ark and Bar were seated not far from Allestine at the front of the room, but her two bullies were wearing chains while she was not. Jovvi had expected to find Allestine frantic and terrified, but in point of fact the woman was calm and a bit impatient. It was as though she considered the proceeding a formality, and was just waiting to have it over and done with.

  For a moment Jovvi wondered whether someone had lied to Allestine about what would happen, and then she realized that it didn’t matter. Someone could have lied, but it was just like the spoiled-brat Allestine to expect to get away with whatever she did. She’d gotten her own way for so many years that it was probably beyond her to picture any other outcome. Jovvi sighed and braced herself, anticipating what would happen if things went against the woman. Which they probably would…

  Everyone sat or stood around for a number of minutes, some of those at the front of the courtroom speaking together in soft, secretive voices. They were the prosecuting officials, Jovvi suddenly understood, and their thought patterns suggested that they didn’t know why they were there on a rest day. So much for the practice being an ordinary one.

  And there was someone probing gently at Jovvi with Spirit magic. She’d noticed as soon as the attempt began, but had made no effort to keep the practitioner away from her surface thoughts and emotions. As Vallant had said, if they were trying so hard to upset her, it would be foolish to make them think their efforts were wasted. Not to mention the fact that she was upset. If someone closer to her than Allestine were the accused, she would probably be as much of a nervous wreck as she now only pretended to be.