Sasharia En Garde (53 page)

I whirled, dashed two steps—then two strong hands closed on
my shoulders. I twisted, and used an elbow strike.

A teenage-male
whoof
blew in my ear. I grabbed his arm to swing him into his partner—but he planted
his feet, and his heavier weight caused me to stumble.

And so the sixth one caught me round the waist. I twisted my
hip in order to shift him off-balance, but he gave a grunt and lifted me off
the ground. We both fell, he landing on top of me. Crunch. Thud. Three more
muscle-bound teenage-boy bodies piled on in a first-class scrimmage heap, with
me at the bottom.

Now it was my turn to struggle for breath.

The dogpile shifted, and the boys scrambled up. Two or three
hands grasped at my arms, and knees thumped on my back and legs. Though I
squirmed and struggled my mightiest, the fight was lost, and determined fingers
twisted my hands behind me.

I heard a breathless, “What do I use? What do I use?”

“Who has the rope?” I recognized that voice as Red’s.
“Nobody brought any? You idiots, we knew we had to—”

“No rope!” The low voice was Damedran’s, equally breathless.
“Rope is for criminals. You have your sash?”

“We wore belts, remember?” That voice I didn’t recognize. It
cracked on the word
remember
.

“Here. Use your handkerchief. It’s besorcelled, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Let me do it. I don’t want her hurt.”

I was struggling with all my might while this conversation
went on, not that it did me any good. My hands were effectively bound. Damedran
kept pausing to check the knots with shaking fingers.

I heard various versions of fast, heavy-guy breathing all
around me as someone stuck hands into my armpits and pulled me up so I could
sit.

When the dizziness subsided, I found myself looking into a
football huddle of grim faces, as sweaty and dusty as I knew my own had to be.
Red’s grimness was slightly bemused as he wheezed, and Damedran glowered.

A couple of them exchanged uneasy glances, obviously
unwilling to speak first. Damedran kept flicking dark-eyed looks up at me then
down at one hand as the other rubbed at his knee.

“Your call.” My heart raced. I shifted my weight, knowing I
probably couldn’t do much besides spring to my feet, but if this ambush was
shortly to end in murder, it wouldn’t be with my cooperation.

Red gave me a somewhat shaky grin as he rubbed his middle.
“Hoo, princess. You really do know how to fight.”

Princess. Not Lasva.

So this was a royal hunt.

“Yah. Well. Not well enough to get away.”

Damedran glared at me. “How did you know who I was?”

I occupied myself for a moment in trying unsuccessfully to
blow a couple of my braids out of my face. My hair knot, so easily made that
morning (as the universe had neglected to hint that I should dress for
abduction) had come undone.

Though I was ambivalent about Jehan, I had one sure
conviction: I did not trust Dannath Randart or any part of his family for a
nanosecond. Reluctant to outright lie any more, I said slowly, “You look like
your uncle. And I remember him from when I was little.”

True, though I would not have recognized Damedran without
that introduction aboard Jehan’s yacht.

But he seemed to accept it.

“If you’re supposed to kill me next, I really would like the
chance to fight for my life.”

Ban sat back, looking revolted, and Damedran said quickly,
“We are not here to kill you.”

I sighed. “Nice to know, but you have to see what it looks like
to me. The disguises—” I nodded at Ban and Red in their humongous tunics. “The
lie about hiring me—”

“Why are you traveling under a false name?” Damedran asked
abruptly.

I shrugged. “Come on. Think about it. I’m yanked to this
world against my will. My mother is taken prisoner. Am I really going to tell
everyone who I am? I want to be left alone.”

“To go to Tser Mearsies or to Bar Larsca?” He leaned
forward. “I mean, what is there?”

“Nothing except anonymity. I’ve been a law-abiding olive
picker for the past few weeks. I was about to become an apple picker. I
thought.”

“But you said you had somewhere to be,” Red pointed out.

I shrugged. “Conversational gambit. To find out how long I’d
be hired.”

They exchanged uncertain looks. I suspected they didn’t know
whether to believe me or not. Time to get the subject from my goals to theirs.

I wriggled my shoulders. “So what next? The noose,
war-commander style, or would that be a crossbolt in the back?”

Damedran’s splendid cheekbones highlighted even more splendidly
with a blush.

Ban said, “Bolt in the back? Why did you say that?”

“Well, isn’t that the way he gets rid of inconvenient
people? He certainly did to Magister Glathan. I cannot imagine he’d find me
anything but inconvenient, or I wouldn’t have been ambushed like this.”

More uneasy glances met these words.

“Tell me where I’m wrong,” I invited, trying again to sling
my braids out of my face. I needed to see. I would have expected gloating and
bullying, but if anything, these boys seemed if not reluctant, at least
ambivalent about their having captured me.

“He wouldn’t,” Ban said, but I think we all heard the
unspoken
Would he?
and he shot a
pained look at Damedran.

Who seemed to be totally absorbed in reading his palms. Once
again quiet fell, except for the breeze through some autumn red trees, the
distant chuckling of an unseen stream, and the snort of a horse.

Finally I said, testing the parameters of this abduction,
“Hey. If you’re not really going to kill me, how about untying me? You know I
can’t get the drop on seven of you.”

“Yes—” Ban began.

But Damedran put out a hand. “She has magic, remember?”

I sighed, wiggling my fingers. They were tingling slightly,
despite Damedran’s efforts not to cut off my circulation. I suspect adrenaline
had not made him as accurate in safe knot tying as he’d thought he was. “I only
know about three spells. Make no mistake, they are powerful, but they are also
specific. If I could transfer around by magic, I would have rescued my mother
and vanished long ago.”

Damedran turned to Ban, who jerked his chin up, then brought
his attention back to me. “So you can’t use any of these powerful spells and
turn us into rocks or something?”

I shook my head. “They are specific, having to do with types
of healing, I guess you could say. Like that one your guys saw me do when I was
first brought here by Devli Eban. That spell changes . . .”

I thought in English, because I did not know the magical
vocabulary. The spell enabled one to “see” a poison in a person and shift what
amounted to a dangerous molecule or two, so that they became neutral, and that
shift propagated swiftly through the person.

I turned my attention to Damedran, who had crouched down
near me, one hand absently rubbing his sore knee as he waited for my answer. It
seemed plain that this situation was as important for him as it was for me.

“The spell calls a kind of fire, and not all people can hold
it, but it seems I can. So you send the fire in a kind of thread into the
person, and it burns out the poison, so to speak, and then is gone.”

Ban nodded silently. “My sister said something of the sort
once. But she said that kind of magic is only taught when you’re at a high
level.”

“My father was desperate,” I answered, glad to speak
some
truth, anyway. “And I guess I had
the aptitude. My mother doesn’t. She told me once he tried to teach her, but
she couldn’t hold the magic up here.” I tipped my head back and forth. “There
wasn’t time to teach me all the basics, so he taught me that healing spell in
hopes it would protect Mom and me in the other world. Unfortunately, there
isn’t enough magic potential there for it ever to work.”

Damedran rubbed his jaw. “You can’t use the spell to, I
dunno, change someone’s mind about something?”

I laughed. “No. No mood-altering, or mind-altering. At
least, I do remember someone talking about the ancient Sartorans, and how they
could do that sort of thing. How the villain Detlev can kill with just his
mind, without moving a finger. But whether or not that’s true, or the
exaggeration of rumor, I can’t do anything like that.”

“Well, remember that Siamis fellow, Detlev’s nephew,
enchanted us all by talking to leaders,” Red said.

Damedran sighed. “All right, but those rotters are four
thousand years old, supposedly. Enough about them. What use is magic? I mean, I
know, it keeps water clean, and so forth. But—” He shrugged. “Can you use it
for much of anything else?”

Ban said soberly, “If you mean for war, my sister says any
new spell has to be vetted by the Mage Council. And they find out if you’re
doing them. Magic is like rain to them. Say you ride into a territory well
after the clouds dispersed, but you can smell the wet grass, see puddles, so
forth. That’s what my sister told me. There’s a lot of it at high levels that
can do frightening things. But the other mages always know it.”

Red said, “Like Siamis spreading that spell just by talking.
Of course he didn’t care who knew he’d done it.”

Come on, boys, see me
as a person, not an objective.
“Didn’t you all pretty much lose a year?
That’s what I was told. Though I don’t get how enchanting leaders of countries
got people enchanted, too.”

Red pulled off the huge rough-woven tunic and threw it down,
leaving him wearing his shirt and brown cadet riding trousers stuffed into his
boots. He was the shortest and leanest of them, but that meant he was my size.
“If you were loyal to anyone, and he enchanted that person, you fell into it,
too. That’s what
we
were told.”

Ban opened a hand. “My sister thinks time kind of stopped
during that enchantment. The way they know is, babies stayed babies. You know
how fast they grow. Nobody’s baby started walking and talking that year.”

That’s right, talk to
me, boys. Don’t let me be the war commander’s next crossbow target.

One of the quieter boys spoke up unexpectedly. “There’s even
bigger magic, in history. Like mages raised all the mountains north of Sartor.
My tutor told me it affected weather for a century or more. Yet those spells
didn’t keep out Norsunder.”

That silenced everyone.

I was trying to think of a way to shift the talk from evil
mages to evil war commanders when Damedran got to his feet. He looked skyward,
then around at the countryside, which was full of russet-hued trees and grass
and late-flowering weeds, birds, a stream, and our horses, but no other people.

Then he sighed and faced me, though he wouldn’t meet my
eyes. “I’d like to untie you. Even if you give us another run.” His brief grin
was wry and changed his entire demeanor. His gaze touched mine for a fleeting
moment. “I apologize for knocking you off the horse.”

I shrugged. “Hey, you didn’t use the blade on
me
, for which I’m grateful. That was a
cool trick.”

Cool
puzzled them,
but they seemed to get the idea.

“As for my part of the fight, well, I’m not going to
apologize for anything until I am convinced I’m not on my way to a hasty
execution, just because my family name happens to be Zhavalieshin.”

Their easy expressions vanished as if wiped by a cloth.

Damedran looked sulky and brooding again. “I can’t do
anything until I report to my uncle and get orders.”

“But—” Ban began.

Damedran swung around. “You know what the orders were,” he
snapped. Under his breath, though I heard it, “And what will happen if anything
goes wrong.”

I’d forgotten about fear.

In silence he wrote a note reporting my capture, put it in
his magical transfer box, and sent it to the war commander.

In a lifetime of unexpected blows and tough decisions,
Jehan had avoided the toughest of all.

Until now.

As soon as he received Owl’s note—
I think I found her, somewhere in Bar Larsca, but Damedran is ahead of
me
—he sent Kazdi to dispatch one of his covert teams of guards to Owl as
backup.

And then he had to wait.

Days dragged by, excruciatingly slow and meaningless. He
stood next to his father to review the palace guard before the chosen wing rode
off to participate in the war game. He sat in the royal box during two
jaw-stiffeningly boring plays dedicated ostentatiously to the king. Canardan
skipped out on the second one, but Jehan remained where all could see him. He
attended balls, picnics, regattas, dancing the night away and in the morning he
attended trade sessions, but only as a spectator.

Then, unexpectedly, the king said after breakfast one
morning, “There’s no putting off these hearings concerning this treason-trial
foolery. You may as well suffer along with me. It’ll look good when these Guild
Council fools unload the speeches they’ve been scribbling for days.”

On the ride over (in an open carriage, so they could be
seen, but surrounded by armed guards, so they couldn’t be touched) Jehan said,
“Why are we here? It’s hot and stuffy in those halls, Father. Are you really
going to hold a treason trial for those people?”

“Of course not. Treason trials are nothing but an excuse to
riot or an excuse to kill off half the populace. I don’t want either of those
things.”

“So why do we go?”

“Because it looks like good faith. I’ll whittle ’em down,
one or two at a time, while we negotiate the trial. Meantime we’ll let them
talk as long as they like. It makes them feel good to talk. I want them to feel
good. And so they can keep on making speeches and negotiating and feeling good
until there’s none of the fools left in prison.”

Canardan had not meant to say that much, but the question on
such a hot morning was unexpected. For some reason Jehan’s tone reminded him of
Math in the old days, the same dreamy pretense at being reasonable, without any
awareness of how kings really did things.