There was a noise—she froze for a moment, but it was only the wind rattling a broken board on one of the stall doors.
Even so, she lowered her voice further. “I only wish I had some way of contacting Wolf. Knowing him, he probably could tell us exactly where Myr went.” Wolf was full of useful information when he chose to share it. “It could take us quite a while to find Myr.” She paused, then smiled. “But if I’m going out to engage in hopeless tasks, I’d rather look for Myr than struggle to clean that floor another day. We’ll start with those messengers and see what they know.”
Finished with the carrot, Sheen bumped her impatiently—asking for more. “Well, Sheen, what do you say? Should we abandon our post and go missing-monarch hunting?” The gray head moved enthusiastically against her hand when she caught a particularly itchy spot: It looked for all the world as if he were nodding in agreement.
The restlessness that had been plaguing her was gone. Like a hunting dog let off the leash, she had a purpose at last. She snuck into the kitchen and blessed her luck because no one was there—she could hear the innkeeper arguing with someone in the common room. It sounded as though he might be occupied for a long time, which suited her just fine.
She located a large cloth that was almost clean and folded it to hold such provisions as would keep on a journey: bread, cheese, dried salt meat.
Cautiously, she made her way upstairs without meeting anyone and snuck into the room that had belonged to the only son of the innkeeper. He’d died last winter of some disease or the other, and no one had yet had the heart to clean out his room. Everything in the room was neat and tidy—and she had the sudden thought that perhaps it hadn’t been the change in customs that caused the inn to fall on harder times. She murmured a soft explanation of what she was doing and why in case the young man’s spirit lingered nearby.
She opened the chest at the foot of the bed and found a cloak, a pair of leather trousers, and a tunic: tough, unremarkable clothes well suited to traveling. At the bottom of the trunk, she found a pair of sturdy riding boots and a set of riding gloves. She wrapped all of her ill-gotten goods in the cloak and hurried out of the room and up the ladder to her attic room.
She retrieved her sword from its hiding place inside the straw mattress (she generally slept on the floor, it being less likely to be infested by miscellaneous vermin). Before sliding the sheath onto her belt, she drew the sword from habit—to make sure that the blade needed neither sharpening nor cleaning. It was a sword she’d found hidden in one of the many cubbyholes of her father’s castle—the odd pinkish gold luster of the metal had intrigued her. It was also the only sword in the place that fit her, her father’s blood tending toward large and muscle-bound, which she was not. Aside from Sheen, it was the only thing she’d taken from her home when she left.
She wasn’t a swordswoman by any means. Practice and more practice had made her competent enough to make it useful against things like the Uriah, creatures too big to be killed quickly with a dagger and not easily downed with a staff—creatures not holding swords of their own.
She gratefully rid herself of the filthy maidservant’s dress and dropped it on the floor, donning instead the stolen garments and found that, as she expected, they were very tight in the hips and chest and ridiculously big everywhere else. The boots, in particular, were huge. If the innkeeper’s son had lived to grow up, he would have been a big man.
Her mother’s people could switch their sex as easily as most people changed shoes, but Aralorn had never been able to take on a male’s shape. Perhaps it was her human blood, or perhaps she’d never tried hard enough. Fortunately, the boy whose clothes she’d appropriated had been slender, so that it was an easy thing to become a tall, angular, and androgynous woman—with big feet—who could pass as a man.
Once dressed, she was satisfied she looked enough like a young man neither rich nor poor, a farmer’s son . . . or an innkeeper’s. Someone who wouldn’t seem out of place on a sturdy draft horse.
Most of the items in the room she left behind, though she took the copper pieces that she’d earned as well as the small number of coins that she always kept with her as an emergency fund.
She shut the door to her room and made sure that the bundle that she was carrying wasn’t awkward-looking. As she made her way down the stairs, she was met by the other barmaid. Aralorn gave the woman a healthy grin and swept past her unchallenged.
In the stable, Aralorn saddled Sheen. The cloak and the food she packed into her copious saddlebags. She filched an empty grain sack from a stack of the same and filled it with oats, tying it to the saddle. From one of the saddlebags, she took out a small jar of white paste. Carefully, she painted the horse’s shoulders with white patches such as a heavy work collar tends to leave with time. Farmer’s plug no, but he could well pass for a squire’s prize draft horse.
On the road, she hesitated before turning north toward Kestral. That was the direction that the messengers had been traveling. If she could find them, in the guise of a young farmer, she could question them without anyone’s taking too much notice—as the barmaid could not have. A second reason for looking north was that the mountains were the best place for someone seeking to hide from a human magician. Human magic didn’t work as well in the Northland mountains as it did elsewhere. She knew stories of places in the mountains where human magic wouldn’t function at all. Conversely, green-magic users, her mother’s brother had told her, found that magic was easier to work in the north. She’d experienced that herself.
As Myr was from Reth, Aralorn felt that it was safe to assume that he was aware of the partial protection the Northlands offered. There were very few other places as easily accessible that offered any protection from the ae’Magi. Unfortunately, the ae’Magi would also be aware that the Northlands were the most likely place for Myr to go, hence the messengers to the otherwise-unimportant villages that dotted the border of Reth.
Although it was still late summer, the air was brisk with the chill winds. They retained their bite this far north year-round, making Aralorn grateful for the soft leather gloves and warm cloak she wore.
Several miles down the road, she turned off to take a trail she’d heard the highwayman describe when, half-drunk, he bragged about getting away from an angry merchant. The shortcut traversed the mountain rather than wandering around its base. With luck and the powerful animal under her, she could cut more than an hour off her travel time.
Sheen snorted and willingly took on the climb, his powerful hindquarters easily pushing his bulk and hers up the treacherously steep grade. His weight and large hooves worked against him on the rocky, uncertain ground, though, and Aralorn held him to a slow trot that left Sheen snorting and tossing his head in impatience.
“Easy now, sweetheart. What’s your hurry? We may have a long way to go yet this evening. Save it for later.” Always mindful that someone could overhear, she kept her voice low and boyish.
One dark-tipped ear twitched back. After a small crow hop of protest, Sheen settled into stride, only occasionally breaking gait to bounce over an obstacle in his way.
As evening wore on, the light began to fade, and Aralorn slowed him into a walk. In full dark, his eyesight was better than hers, but in the twilight, he couldn’t see the rocks and roots hidden by shadows. They had a few miles before the sun went down completely, then they could pick up the pace again.
Being unable to see clearly made the seasoned campaigner nervous, and he began to snort and dance at every sound. There was a sudden burst of magic nearby—she didn’t have time to locate it because that was the last straw for Sheen, who plunged off the trail and down the steep, tree-covered side of the mountain.
She sank her butt into the saddle and stayed with him as he dodged trees and leapt over brush. “Just you behave, you old worrywart, you. It’s all right. Nothing’s going to get us but ghosts and ghoulies and other nice things that feed on stupid people who ride in the woods after dark.”
The dark mountainside was too treacherous to allow her to pull him up hard, especially at the pace he was going, so she crooned to him and bumped him lightly with the reins—a request rather than an order.
He sank back on his haunches to slide down a steep bit instead of charging down it, and stopped when the ground leveled some. He took advantage of the loose rein to snatch a bit of grass as if he hadn’t been snorting and charging a minute before.
Aralorn stretched and looked around to catch her bearings. As she did so, she heard something, a murmur that she just barely caught. Sheen’s ears twitched toward the sound as well. Following the direction of the stallion’s ears, she moved him toward the sound. When she could pick up the direction herself, she dismounted and dropped his reins.
She crept closer, moving as slowly as she could so as not to make any noise. Several yards from Sheen, she picked up the smell of a campfire and the residue of magic—it tasted flat and dull: magic shaped by human hands despite the nearness of the Northlands. Probably the remnant of the spell that had startled Sheen into charging down the hill, toward danger, just as any good warhorse would have done.
She followed the sound of men’s voices and the smell of smoke through a thicket of bushes—she had to use a tendril of magic to keep quiet going through that—and around a huge boulder that had tumbled down from a cliff above. Peeking around the side of the boulder, she saw a cave mouth, the walls of the entrance reflecting light from a fire deeper inside.
The voices were louder, but still too far away to be distinguishable.
The wonderful thing about mice, Aralorn reflected as she shifted forms, was that they were everywhere and never looked out of place. A mouse was the first shape she’d ever managed—and she’d since worked hard on a dozen different varieties and their nearest kin. Shrew, vole, field mouse, she could manage any of them. The medium-sized northern-type mouse was just the right mouse to look perfectly at home as she scampered into the cave.
Two men stood by a large pile of goods that ranged from swords to flour, but consisted mainly of tarps and furs. The scent of fear drifted clearly to her rodent-sharp nose from the more massive (at least in bulk) man as he cowered away from the other. He bore the ornate facial tattooing of the merchant’s guild of Hernal, a larger city of Ynstrah, a country that lay several weeks’ travel to the south on the west side of the Anthran Alliance. He was wearing nothing but a nightshirt.
The second man had his back to her. He was tall and slender, but something about the way he moved told her that this man knew how to fight. He wore a hooded cloak that flickered red and gold in the light. Underneath the hood of the cloak he wore a smoothly wrought silver mask in the shape of a stylized face.
Traveling players used such masks when they acted out skits, allowing one player to take on many roles in a single play without confusion to the audience. Usually, these masks were made out of inexpensive materials like clay or wood. She’d never seen one made of silver, not even in high-court productions.
Each mask’s face was formed with a different expression denoting an explicit emotion that mostly bore only a slight resemblance to any expression found on a real face. As a girl from a noble house, Aralorn had spent many a dreary hour memorizing the slight differences between concern and sympathy, weariness and suffering, sorrow and defeat. She found it interesting that the mask this man wore displayed the curled lips and furrowed brow of rage.
In one hand the slender man held a staff made of some kind of very dark wood. On the lower end was the clawed foot of a bird of prey molded in brass, and its outspread talons glowed softly orange in the darkness of the cave as if it had been held in hot coals. The upper end of the staff was encrusted with crystals that lit the cave with their blue-white light.
The staff made it obvious that this man was the mage responsible for the magic that had so startled Sheen. If he had spirited the merchant and his goods from wherever he’d been to here—she assumed the man hadn’t been traveling in his nightshirt—then he was a sorcerer of no little power.
Hmm,
she thought,
maybe this mouse idea wasn’t such a good one.
A powerful mage on alert might find a nearby mouse that wasn’t really a mouse, and he wasn’t likely to be very pleasant about it. Even as she started to back away, the mage looked over his shoulder and gestured impatiently. She didn’t even have time to fight the spell before she was stuffed into a leather bag that smelled strongly of magic.
She tried once to shift back into her human shape, but nothing happened. He’d trapped her, and until she figured a way out, she was stuck.
“How much, merchant?” the mage asked in Rethian. His voice was distorted with a strange accent—or maybe it was just the leather bag.
“Fourteen kiben.” The merchant, too, spoke good Rethian, but his voice was hoarse and trembling. Still, Aralorn noticed, the price he’d quoted was at least twice what the items were worth, unless there was something extremely valuable among them.
“Six.” The magician’s voice may have had an odd slur to it, but it was still effective in striking terror into the heart of the merchant—who squeaked in a most unmanly fashion. Aralorn had the feeling that it wouldn’t take much to achieve that result.
“Six, I accept,” he gasped. There was the sound of money changing hands, then a distinctive pop and an immense surge of magic, which Aralorn decided signaled that the merchant had been sent back to wherever he’d come from in the first place.
There was a moment’s pause, then a third person’s voice spoke.
“It worked.” He sounded as if he hadn’t expected it to. He also sounded young and aristocratic, probably because Myr was both.
She hadn’t planned on finding him quite so soon, not a half day’s ride from the inn. It was too convenient. Had Ren known that something was going on here? Was that why he’d sent her out to the backside of nowhere? She might have to take back months of heartfelt curses if that was so.