Trickster's Choice (10 page)

As Aly helped Chenaol carry the cooking tools back aboard ship, the cook told her, “Free raka—the ones who don’t work for the luarin—keep their reasons to themselves. They don’t trust us city folk, and we fear them. Every time they revolt, and they do, now and then, the luarin usually execute all the raka they can catch. That would include us. So people get jumpy when you ask too many questions.”

“You don’t keep any ties with your families?” Aly asked as she stowed the last of the herbs. She turned to look Chenaol in the face. The woman blinked. Liar’s sign, thought Aly. That’s what Da calls it when someone blinks during questioning.

“Seldom,” Chenaol replied, blinking again. “Mostly we keep to our city family. Off to bed with you, then.”

Aly obeyed, though it took some time for her to sleep. She was going through her memory, trying to see if she had ever known the proportion of Copper Isle raka to the luarin. And what secret was so important that even slaves and servants with drink in them wouldn’t hint at it?

You do your bit, and then you get to pretend to be part of the scenery. You sit and you sweat and you hope that all those who are paid to go out and show their faces and do the bloody work don’t foul everything up. The waiting for others to act on your information will give you the belly gripes, but that’s what agents do. And I advise you not to pray as you wait. You don’t know who will answer, times like that.

—From
A Workbook for a Young Spy

Lombyn Island, Tanair Castle and village

T
hey set sail once more at dawn, baking quietly in a sudden burst of early summer. By midmorning Lombyn was in view, an island nearly as long and wide as Gempang, but far more mountainous, with a ribbon of green jungle at the mountains’ feet, pine forest above, and then bare rock. Somewhere behind those granite barriers, Aly knew, was the Tanair estate, part of Sarugani’s dowry and Sarai’s inheritance. It was as safe as any of the Balitang holdings, since it belonged to Sarai and not Mequen, which made it less vulnerable to seizure by the king. As a refuge, it might just work, Aly thought.

Their ships were closing on Dimari’s harbor when Aly noticed movement in the skies. Winged horses rode the columns of warm air that rose along the cliffs of Lombyn, their immense, batlike wings outstretched, their manes and tails fluttering as they climbed and descended. Aly adjusted her Sight. Above the jungles and mountains she saw even more of the great creatures, all colors of horse from solid black to solid white, roan, buckskin, bay, chestnut, piebald, odd-colored, flea-bitten, dapple, a universe of horsedom in the air of Lombyn. She gasped in awe, thrilled to see these great immortals playing in midair. Did Aunt Daine know there were so many in the Isles? Winged horses were rare in Tortall. Aly had seen a handful of the smallest kinds, no bigger than starlings, and only one of these big creatures. Hurroks, the predatory fanged and clawed variation of this breed of immortal, they had aplenty, but their milder cousins were scarce.

“In the old times, the
kudarung,
what you would call winged horses, nested in all of our Isles.” Ulasim, dressed for the day in a sleeveless cotton tunic and breeches, had come to lean on the rail next to her. He squinted up at the fliers, a hint of a smile on his face. “They are sacred to the raka, the sign of our royal house, and its messengers. Then foreign mages banished the kudarung to the gods’ home with the other immortals, without asking our thoughts on the matter. They left us only songs and paintings to remind us of their beauty. Kudarung are found in all sizes. Those are just the biggest of them.”

“I’d heard they are different sizes,” Aly murmured, entranced. “How prideful of those mages, to banish them without asking you.” She remembered something she’d read in some of her father’s reports. “But they’re back now,” she pointed out, her tone one of harmless interest. “So do they serve the Rittevon kings? I mean, you said they were royal messengers.”

The smile Ulasim had brought to the rail vanished. His mouth flattened into a tight line. At last he leaned over the rail and spat into the water. “You speak lightly of serious things, Aly. Five of the kudarung were captured by Crown mages and forced to breed. So yes, the luarin king has kudarung as messengers, but they did not come freely to him, as they did to our queens.” He turned to Aly, his brown eyes sharp as they rested on her face. “There will be more raka than luarin, in the Lombyn highlands,” he said. “You should speak more carefully there. None of the raka are so tame as we let the luarin believe.” He turned and went below, leaving Aly to consider what he had said.

They docked in Dimari, Lombyn’s main port, around noon. Once again the family and a handful of body servants went to an inn to rest. The slaves and servants unloaded possessions from the ships, then packed them in wagons purchased by servants who had left for Dimari the day the Balitangs knew they were going into exile. Some wagons were already loaded with foodstuffs. Near them the servants had penned or cooped domestic animals. The duke had planned ahead, Chenaol told Veron, the luarin who commanded the household men-at-arms. Life was harder on the plateau where Tanair stood, the crops less plentiful. The duke had purchased supplies in advance, to keep the family and their attendants from placing a burden on the local folk. One of the island’s merchant caravans had already been engaged to carry extra supplies in when they made their summer rounds. Not only would the family not create a burden for the people who had farmed Tanair for centuries, but they meant to expand what was grown and herded to the benefit of everyone.

“What
is
Tanair, exactly?” Aly asked the cook as she struggled to push a crate onto a wagon of kitchen supplies. “I mean, I know it’s a fiefdom, but no one’s said if there’s a town anywhere near, or a river …”

“Tanair Castle is a tower with outbuildings,” Chenaol replied with grim good humor. “Inner wall, outer wall. Then there’s the village around it. Inti and Pohon are two other villages on the plateau. There’s some luarin blood in the Tanair folk and some in Inti, which stands on the road leading to the western ocean. There’s no luarin blood in Pohon. It used to be that any part-luarin who wandered into Pohon never wandered out, so the luarin stay away. Word gets around.”

“How charming,” Aly murmured.

Chenaol shrugged, her dark eyes twinkling in their folds of flesh. “Pohon folk are a righteous lot—or maybe
destructive
’s a better word. They’re so cut off up there that they don’t realize the luarin are here to stay, and breed. Maybe when they’ve had the chance to meet our ladies, they’ll change their—Oh, curse it, those idiots will smash my peppers, mauling them about that way. You there!” she yelled to two dockhands as they slung baskets into a wagon. “Those aren’t hay bales!”

Interesting, Aly thought as she continued to load the kitchen wagon. Chenaol had almost let something important slip. Why would the Pohon folk change their minds about luarin when they met “the ladies”? What about Sarai and Dove would change minds, and why did the cook want the Pohon minds changed?

Aly felt as if she was reading a book from which every second page was missing. She needed to learn more about the raka and their politics.

The next morning masters, servants, men-at-arms, slaves, and animals set out from Dimari, bound for the Turnshe Mountains, which formed Tanair’s eastern border. On the first day they rode through lush, settled lands owned by luarin and farmed by raka. The people labored in the sun and heat, men and women alike wearing only a tied sarong tucked up to keep them out of the mud. This was one of the most fertile parts of the Isles. Everywhere that Ali looked she saw rice paddies, the plants covering the brown water in which they were planted in a green mist. They also passed coconut and bamboo plantations. Struggling to keep Elsren and Petranne from falling out of the covered, padded wagon where they would spend the rest of their trip, Aly did not envy the raka and part-raka who labored everywhere. When overseers descended on the slaves with whips raised, Aly had to look away. Without the Balitangs, she might have been one of those slaves, laboring in filth and being punished if she displeased a man with a whip.

This was the way most of the world lived, on slave labor. Tortall didn’t encourage it, any more than Tusaine, Galla, and Tyra did, but some people in those countries did own slaves. Everyone ignored the working slave populations of the great farms of Maren. Aly just wasn’t used to it. To her the slaves looked very like the convict gangs who labored on Tortall’s roads and in its quarries and mines. At least those people had committed crimes to get a sentence of hard labor.

Overseers or no, when the Balitang wagons passed the farms, the raka straightened to watch them pass. Dark-skinned full-bloods or varying, light-skinned mixed-bloods, all shaded their eyes and looked on in silence as the wagons rattled by. Free raka, not wearing slave collars, dressed in colorful sarongs and light tops, stood by the road to see them. There they remained as the caravan, encircled by Veron’s twenty men-at-arms, passed by in all its clatter. Others watched in the villages, from trees and upper-story windows of houses, on bridges and on rocks in the rivers. None of them said a word. All returned to their tasks as the last goat and man-at-arms went by.

Aly itched to question them but, trapped in the wagon with Elsren, Petranne, the duchess’s maid, Pembery, and the house’s mildly Gifted healer, Rihani, she had to accept it as an itch she couldn’t scratch. That vexed her. Grandfather Myles always said it was impossible to have too much information. Aly agreed from the bottom of her heart as she watched those stony, copper-skinned faces. She would not sleep easily until she knew what was on the raka’s minds.

They spent the night at a village inn and set out once more at dawn that day and the next. On their third day out of Dimari the road entered dense jungle. It was like being enfolded in a vast, warm, damp woolen cloak under the trees. The ground actually steamed in the early morning as the land gave up moisture under the warming sun. Here the raka appeared at the head of turnoffs that led to their villages. The deeper into the jungle they went, the fewer raka men wore sarongs or shirts in the heat. Many wore only a loincloth; they carried farm and woodland tools or hunting spears.

The men-at-arms rode closer to the wagons, but Aly saw no hostility on those raka faces. None of the onlookers so much as moved when they passed. What draws them to stare at Dove and Sarai? she wondered endlessly, until she wished she could just yank the questions out of her head and bury them under a rock. If the raka among the duke’s people knew, they were not saying. She ought to know: she took every opportunity to drift near them when they weren’t aware of her, listening in on their conversations. Many were as spooked by the local raka as Aly. None would speculate on what made them flock to view the Balitangs.

With the sun directly overhead they stopped on the road for a cold lunch of bread, dates, and sticky rice dumplings stuffed with beef and steamed in banana leaves. Aly expected Elsren and Petranne to complain at the rough fare, but they regarded the food and life in the wagons as an adventure. Elsren promised that as long as Aly produced new stories, he and his sister would behave.

“You have a happy nature,” Aly told them as she cleaned Petranne up after lunch.

The four-year-old beamed at her. “I’m having fun,” she informed Aly. “Aren’t you having fun?”

Aly grinned at the girl. “Actually, now that you mention it, yes, I am. I’ve never seen jungle before.”

“We have lots,” Petranne explained as Aly scrubbed Elsren’s upturned face. “There’s hundreds and hundreds of islands, and they
all
have jungles on them.”

“And have you seen them all?” Aly teased. She had spoken only half the truth to Petranne. The jungle, with its myriad flowers, trees, vines, and birds, was a gorgeous place, even if it was so humid it was hard to breathe. Aly could look at such beauty all day, except that she also knew the dangers of such thickly wooded ground. Jungles—any forest, for that matter—limited her field of vision. They offered outlaws too many opportunities for mischief. The fact that the raka could be so quiet in their movements, never giving away their presence until the Balitangs rounded a bend in the road and saw them, made Aly’s nerves fizz with alertness. One of these times the raka around the bend might not be so friendly.

After lunch the raka witnesses vanished. Aly discovered she disliked that even more than she disliked having scores of raka silently watch the Balitangs. Their caravan passed a number of openings where roads and trails led away from their road, but they saw no one. As far as Aly knew, the jungle raka might be up to any unpleasant thing.

Their caravan traveled about ten miles before a horse on the lead wagon picked up a stone in her hoof. Mequen commanded their group to halt, which for Aly meant permission to climb out and look around. She stretched as she hobbled down the line of wagons and animals. Her entire body felt cramped. Not only had Petranne, Elsren, Pembery, and Rihani decided to stretch out for a nap, but Dove and Sarai had joined them, filling the wagon bed as full as it could get.

The kinks worked from her back, Aly observed the jungle, thinking. Something wasn’t right. This was more than the absence of raka watchers. What was it? She knelt, pretending to tie a sandal lace, as she examined their surroundings.

When in doubt, her mother had said during hunts and rides through bandit country, use your ears. Aly used hers. Leaf movement: some, in a slight breeze. Tree movement: no, the breeze wasn’t strong enough. Moving water: the burble of the stream along the right side of the road. Feet in leaves: a couple of the men-at-arms crouched by the stream for a drink of water.

She heard no animals. Where were the calls of howler monkeys and the chatter of parrots? Where were the rustlings of mice and shrews in the leaf clutter? The jungle should have been alive with wildlife sounds. The hair at the back of her neck prickled. Something was very wrong. The raka who had vanished from the roadsides knew it, and now she did, too.