Maybe she was projecting. She still didn't like it.
"... wonderful…I'm so glad you agree!" he said. Something in his voice alerted her that she had just missed something important. Jayjay realized she'd lost him; she'd been nodding along politely, but she hadn't been listening, and now she'd said the wrong thing.
"I'll tell my brother you've said yes; he'll be delighted to spend the day in such lovely company, and we'll take in all the sights and try out one or two of the restaurants."
Jay realized she'd agreed to spend the day with him. She wouldn't, though.
He'd paused for breath, waiting for a reaction from her.
"Well—" She stared up at the ceiling, to discover that the heads of more dead animals stared down at her with worried eyes. Damn right, she thought. Somebody lopped their heads off and nailed them to the wall. That would make anybody look worried. She smiled at Amos. "We've spent the whole day riding, and more than anything we wanted to sleep in until noon. Then we were planning on heading to the market to see what sort of fabrics were there. I shouldn't have agreed so quickly. Why don't we make it another day?"
Amos looked disappointed. "I'm afraid if we don't go tomorrow, we won't get to."
"We're planning on spending a couple of days here," Jay lied.
"We are?" Sophie sounded surprised. Jay hadn't realized she was even paying attention.
"Of course we are," Jayjay said, kicking her in the shin again. What a lousy time for Sophie to join in the conversation. "We have to make time to see the Aptogurria and the fortresses, especially Kewimell. And we wanted to rent a boat to go out onto the lake day after tomorrow."
"I can get you into the Aptogurria," he said. "The inside is quite a bit more interesting than the outside, but you have to know who to ask to be permitted in."
"Are we going to have time for all of that?" Sophie asked, missing Jayjay's cue.
"Yes." Jay glared murderously at her and mouthed the word, "No!"
"Oh," Sophie said, and nodded. "You're right. We'll have time for all of that." She smiled vaguely and returned to her meal.
But Amos was going to be insistent. "Really, it would be such a waste to have you here at the same time we are and not spend the day with you."
"We can't give you a whole day," Jay said, firm. An idea occurred to her. "But why don't we meet you here late in the afternoon? Four o'clock?"
Amos smiled. "Marvelous. I think it would be criminal of us to waste such a lovely opportunity. So I'll see you at four. If I don't run into you both in the market before then, of course." His smile grew broader, making Jayjay think he intended to do just that. "I await tomorrow, then." He rose. Across the room, the two human gorillas tracked him with their eyes.
"We'll have a wonderful time, I'm sure," Jay told him.
He stepped over the bench and seemed about to walk away; at the last instant he turned. "Incidentally, where are you staying?"
"Here." Jay didn't like admitting that, but she couldn't think of a convenient lie fast enough.
"Yes, obviously. You wouldn't be eating here if you weren't staying here as well. The dining room isn't open. But what rooms are you in?"
Jayjay and Sophie exchanged glances; Jay noted wariness in Sophie's eyes, too. "I haven't the foggiest idea," she told him. "Some little guy took us through a maze to get there, and told us if we needed help to ring the bell. I don't think I could find my way back…or out, for that matter…if my life depended on it." She grinned. "I have a lousy sense of direction."
He chuckled; Jay saw a satisfaction in his smug smile that she didn't like at all. "So I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see you."
She shrugged and gave him the best "I-am-an-air-head" smile she could manage. "I guess so."
He left, and Jay leaned over and whispered in Sophie's ear, "Do you have a pen or a marker or anything on you?"
Sophie watched Amos strolling back to his seat; her eyes were narrowed and she'd pressed her lips into a thin, distrustful line. "Mmmm-hmmmm." When he sat down, she rummaged in the leather travel pack she wore around her waist. After a moment, she came out with a blue felt-tip marker, a green felt-tip marker, a soft-lead pencil with a plastic cover to protect the point, two roller-ball ink pens, both in black, and a piece of pale yellow chalk.
Jay stared. "Wow. What else do you have in there?"
"A little bit of everything." Sophie looked smug.
"I believe you."
Sophie turned her attention to her food. She kept her head down and her voice low, and said, "So what do you want with them? Something sneaky, I presume."
Jay took her cue from Sophie and pretended to be engrossed in her meal. "Yep. Going to make sure I leave us a trail of bread crumbs to follow back to the front door," she said. "I figure we can be a long way from here by four p.m. tomorrow if we get out of town at dawn."
Sophie inclined her head by the tiniest amount. "Sounds like an exceptional idea to me. I didn't care much for your…friend."
"He's a creep and a liar. I didn't know it in Peters. In fact, I liked him a lot when I met him in Peters. But he's lying now."
"But it is the same guy?"
"Absolutely. And he's tied up in this, and every instinct I have says he's trouble."
Sophie looked at her solemnly. "Our instincts agree."
Twenty
Hultif sat in the deepest part of his tunnel, watching Herself. She was engrossed in plotting, the fiend. Up in the Wizard's Bell, she could keep track of so much. If she chose to spy on him, he would be dead between one beat of his heart and the next. She wasn't looking in his direction, however, and he didn't think she would. Not for a while, anyway. He had given her too much else to think about.
He longed for a return to the days when the Aregen ruled Glenraven. When that day came, he would crush her, as she had crushed his family, the majority of his potential mates, and his rightful future.
He double-checked his chart of omens and actions. Change approached, the massive, complete change that could send the corrupt Watchmistress and all her Alfkindir cronies to their deaths, or make them so strong nothing would wedge them from their places for another thousand years. Coming, coming, sure as a storm when thunderheads filled the valleys…but the change wasn't guaranteed to fall in the favor of Hultif and the few remaining Aregen, who had bowed beneath oppression since they fell from the Watch, and who now hid themselves away, awaiting a shift in the prevailing winds. This change was only potentially an ally.
He stared a moment longer at her cold, hated face, and then with one claw he tapped the rim of the flat metal viewing bell that hung on its rack on his table. Light flashed across the metal surface, light red as fire and blood, and when that light cleared, his mentor stared back at him.
"You're taking a risk, calling me."
Hultif nodded. "Yes. But I have the information you needed. The field shifts and tears and becomes more unreliable every day, but I think these predictions should serve you." He held the pages up to the bell one by one, and his fellow conspirator on the other end copied them rapidly.
When the other finished, he nodded. "News this good is worth a risk—but we can't lose our chance here, boy. Can't. You and I won't live to get another, and if we die, the Aregen bloodlines die with us."
"I know." Hultif sighed. "She doesn't suspect me yet, but she'll have to realize what I'm doing sooner or later. When can I leave my post here?"
The other growled, irritated. "When she takes the bait, boy. Only when she takes it."
Twenty-one
"I see the next one." Jayjay flicked the pencil beam of the pocket light onto a little x of yellow chalk yards away, then slipped down a corridor, her finger smudging out the last x as she went. Sophie hurried behind her, listening for any sign that their departure had been discovered.
"How much farther can it be?"
Jay shrugged. "I don't know. It's taking forever to get where we're going, but it was a long way to the room."
It had been. Sophie c
ouldn't deny that. The awful feeling that their luck was going to run out at any time and that they were going to get caught weighed on her.
Will it be here? she wondered. Is this the moment the premonition warned me about? Will I die this morning?
If someone did come along and questioned their presence in the halls, they had an alibi. The two of them intended to say they were going out to visit the Aptogurria. But this seemed so much more dangerous than simply sneaking out of a bed-and-breakfast. Sophie hoped she and Jay were being ridiculous, and that Amos was simply a nice, if pushy, bookseller who meant well. She'd love to think her presence in Glenraven was linked to nothing more sinister than a tourism boards decision to open the place up. But she and Jay had talked long into the night, discussing Jay's discoveries with the book and bouncing hypotheses off each other until, weary of speculation, they'd dropped into exhausted sleep.
Sophie didn't like the idea of magic, she certainly didn't intend to be anyone's hero, and some little part of her was beginning to insist that things back home weren't as bad as she'd led herself to believe. That maybe disappearing into the wilds hadn't been her brightest idea.
"Yes!" Jay looked back and grinned; her teeth looked very white in the predawn gloom. "The dining room."
"We're almost out of here." Sophie shivered, reacting to fear as much as to cold.
They slipped into the dining room, and immediately heard voices through the door that led to the foyer. One of the voices sounded a lot like the man Jayjay had introduced her to the night before; it had been a rich, vibrant baritone that Sophie would have thought unique. She glanced at Jayjay to see if her expression revealed anything, then glanced back at the door. The voices got louder.
"They're coming this way," she whispered.
Jayjay sucked in a quick, nervous breath and looked around the room. "Under the table."
It wouldn't provide much cover, but if no one looked directly at for them, it might be sufficient.
Sophie dove under the table and tucked herself toward the inside of the "U," crouching beneath the ledge of the little bench. She thought it a pity the Glenraveners didn't cover those massive trestle tables with cloths of some sort; she and Jay could have hidden indefinitely then.
Jayjay crouched in front of her, down on hands and knees. Both of them held still; Sophie prayed.
The door opened, and Amos Baldwell walked in, accompanied by several men wearing the livery of the Wethquerin Zearn and carrying weapons. Amos spoke to the men in the sharp tones of command, and Sophie became aware that though she heard his meaning as English, he spoke Galti. That killed any last hope that he was merely a bookseller from back home. Or a tourist. Or benign.
She crouched lower and held her breath. Please don't see us, she thought. Please, please don't look down.
Leather boots with jangling spurs stomped past, inches from her left hand, two pairs, then four, then eight, then twelve.
"... eadennil nrembe ta doshi Julie Bennington ve Sophie Cortiss besho terdelo meh. Condesheldil trehota ve berdo becco…"
The boots were past them then, and the voices faded quickly.
Sophie didn't care. One of the men with Amos had mentioned both of them by name. Jay glanced back at her. "We were right," she whispered.
Sophie nodded.
Jayjay crawled out from under the table and reached a hand down to pull Sophie up. "We're in real trouble. Lestovru and Amos and the book and the magic…" She glanced around for any signs of further danger, her face pale in the darkness.
They opened the door into the entryway carefully; it swung back silently to reveal the empty, dreadfully decorated hallway beyond.
"Nobody in any of that armor, is there?" Sophie whispered.
"I hope not. If there is, we're done for."
A premonition flashed across Sophie's field of vision—both of them dead, in nameless open graves in the midden behind a foreign castle. And no matter how hard her friends or her husband looked for her, they would never find anything to tell them what had become of her. Glenraven wouldn't open its doors for them as it had for her. It would devour her, devour Jay, and they would have ceased to exist without even a footprint to mark their passage. Sophie followed her friend down the hallway and out the massive front door, which opened without difficulty.
"Which way were the stables?" Jay asked.
Sophie pointed. "Back there…the kid took the horses that way."
They kept close to the side of the building, staying in the darker shadows. The sky was beginning to gray, and Sophie wished the two of them had managed to sneak out the door an hour or two earlier. If they had, they wouldn't have heard Amos's mastery of the local language, but they didn't really have to have their suspicions confirmed, and they would have been well away from the Wethquerin Zearn before the sky brightened enough to make them easy targets. As things stood, by the time they retrieved their horses and tack and got everything together, they were going to be parading out of the courtyard in front of God and everybody.
The stables lay straight ahead, slightly downhill from the main building and in a pool of darkness. No sound yet came from them; Sophie wondered how much longer she and Jay had before the stable hands came out to begin cleaning and feeding their animals.
"Run straight across the clearing and keep low," Jay said, pointing out the route she'd picked. "Through the darkest of the shadows right there."
Sophie nodded and followed; she knew horses, but Jay, with her odd childhood history of hunting and hiking and wandering in the remote reaches of God-only-knew-where with her parents, had a good feel for cover.
They skulked across the clearing, over the fence, and into the stables; no one cried out, no dogs barked, no grinning workmen rose up out of the darkness to bar their way. The stable doors were open; the sweet smell of hay and feed and horse rolled out, and for an instant Sophie felt tears well up, felt her throat tighten. They were Karen smells.
Those smells almost took the fight out of her. What was the use? She'd go back home, but her little girl wouldn't be there. She thought longingly of quitting, giving up, giving in to whatever disaster stalked them and plotted after them. She could embrace the night.
But Jay would be alone, and Jay wasn't ready to quit. One of them would have much less chance of surviving than two—and she couldn't abandon Jay. She couldn't give in. She would keep trying a little longer. For Jay. Just until she knew Jay was safe. That's what friends were for.
Jayjay leaned against a stall, breathing hard. "Now all we need to do is get our horses and get the hell out of here."
Sophie said, "If they're all from the same stable anyway, let's take the closest four."
"In this part of the world, they probably hang horse thieves."
"That's the least of our worries," Sophie said, and after considering it for an instant, Jay agreed.
"Time does matter more right now. Horse thieves it is."
Jayjay brought the first horse out and hooked two holding ropes into his halter. She ran into the tack room and came out with saddle and saddle blanket, tossed the blanket across his withers and adjusted it, then dropped the peculiar high-cantled saddle into place and tightened the girth. Sophie saw the horse suck in a big gulp of air; his belly distended. Jayjay didn't appear to notice.
"Walk him and retighten that girth before you get into the saddle," Sophie said.
Jay, who had gone for the bridle, turned. "Why?"
"That one has decided he wants his belt loose for the trip…and you probably don't."
Jayjay glared at the horse. "Most of the time I'd rather have a bicycle to ride and see you guys cooking over the campfire." The horse flicked an ear in her direction and regarded her with one huge, contemptuous brown eye.
Sophie had her mount's hooves checked and had him saddled and bridled, the girth tightened and double-checked, and the saddlebags loaded, balanced and in place before Jayjay got her mount to accept the bit. Jay looked up to find Sophie leading out her choice for spare horse, an
d blew out her breath in a snort that could as easily have come from one of the animals.
"I'm sorry about this, Sophie. I never would have considered you coming with me if I'd known about the horses."
"I know," Sophie said. She looped the lead for her spare horse into one of the metal rings worked into the back of the cantle and knotted it securely. "I know. It isn't your fault. I invited myself, and I'm dealing with the horse part of this well enough." That wasn't particularly true, but Jay didn't need anything else to worry about. Sophie sighed and went to help Jayjay get her spare horse ready, since she was still struggling with her saddlebags.
A few minutes later, they waited, mounted and still, in the doorway of the stables. Liveried men moved out in the courtyard, blocking the route to the road and freedom.
"How are we going to get out of here?" Sophie felt heartsick. If they'd only been a few minutes faster, they could have gotten away before the day at Wethquerin Zearn began. Now, though, the pink promise of daylight glowed across the rocky eastern horizon and people moved in the courtyard, down the road, up the road…
The bells began to ring through the little city. Somewhere nearby, an all-male choir began a mournful contrapuntal song, voices soaring. And the liveried men in the courtyard, still shouting at each other, ran for the doors into the main house, and breakfast.
Jay managed a tiny smile. "Saved by the bell."
Sophie groaned.
They trotted out the stable door and across the temporarily empty courtyard—and then down the road.
Twenty-two
Hultif followed the serving wench into Aidris's morning room. Aidris glanced up at him and smiled, content. He would have what she wanted; if he didn't, he wouldn't have dared present himself at her door.
Aidris took the tray the scrawny Machnan girl offered and chased the child out of the room. She set the food on the table in front of her and lifted the silver dome. Ripe berries, hard brown bread and crumbling cheese, wine, meat served nearly raw. It looked lovely. Evidently the disappearance of one complaining cook had done wonders for the efficiency of the kitchen help. She sawed off a large slab of bread with her dagger and crumbled some of the cheese onto it. Only then did she bother to turn back to the patient, subservient Hultif. "What have you found?"
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01] Page 13
