Trickster's Choice (11 page)

Aly looked up and down the length of the train. She didn’t want to go shrieking to the duke and duchess. They would listen, but she would also draw the attention of the other servants and slaves, and she had been bred from the cradle not to draw attention. She needed to encourage someone else to voice concern at the silence.

At the back of the train, where the cows walked on tethers, five men-at-arms, some part raka, one full raka, had clustered to talk. There was tension in every line of their bodies. They would do.

Aly strolled up to them. “I know I’m new here,” she began. The five men turned to stare at her. She smiled at them shyly. “It’s just, you know, I’m a country girl at home, and my old dad taught me a few things.”

The one named Fesgao, Veron’s second-in-command and a pure-blood raka, raised angled brows. His ebony eyes were calm and level. His nose followed a straight line down from his forehead; he had high cheekbones and a square chin. Dressed in Balitang tunic and breeches, he was solidly muscled. His sword and dagger were plain but of good-quality steel. Aly guessed him to be thirty or so, younger than Ulasim and more reserved than the head footman. “And why should we be interested in what your father taught to you, little girl?” he inquired.

“Because Da taught me the same thing you have noticed,” she said. It was a guess, but judging from the way two of the men looked up at the trees, it was a good guess. “Or do all your birds and mice and monkeys take a nap this time of day? Back home, we hear silence in the woods, and we arm up.”

“And do you know woods?” asked Fesgao.

“I know the ones at home,” she said. “I know them as well as Da.”

The next moment Fesgao gripped Aly by the arm and drew her to the front of the line of wagons. Mequen and his sergeant, Veron, were idly talking while they watched a servant unharness the mare who had taken the stone in her shoe. The old hostler, Lokeij, waited with a fresh horse, his lined, monkey-like face worried as he looked at the lame mare. The other slaves liked to tease him that he thought of each and every Balitang horse as his own child.

“Fesgao, what’s this?” demanded the sergeant. “And who’s this wench?”

“A country girl who hears the same thing we do,” said the raka, letting go of Aly.

“And what does she hear?” asked Mequen, his steady brown eyes on Aly’s face.

She bobbed an awkward curtsey. “Nothing, Your Grace,” she replied, keeping her eyes down as she acted the same country girl she had pretended to be for Fesgao. “Back home, in the woods, when the animals go silent, oft-times it’s because robbers are waiting up the road.”

“I’d like permission to scout ahead, sir,” Fesgao said to Veron. “We five are country-bred like her. In the city streets you know I follow your lead without pause. Here …” He left the word hanging in the air as he met Veron’s gaze.

The sergeant, a luarin, scratched his head and sighed. “Forgive me for saying it, Your Grace, but he’s right. I’m not a raka jungle runner. Fesgao is.”

Mequen looked at Aly. Now she returned his gaze in an un-slave-like manner, silently reminding him of a god whose voice had driven him and the duchess to their knees. After a moment Mequen focused his gaze on Fesgao. “What do you recommend?”

“If we may scout ahead?” asked Fesgao.

“Go,” Mequen ordered.

Fesgao hand-signaled to three of his companions. They faded into the brush on the left of the road. Aly couldn’t even hear them once they vanished from sight: these men were good.

Fesgao and the other part-raka guard started for the right side of the road. Suddenly Fesgao stopped and looked at Aly. “Do you wish to come and see for yourself?” he asked, an ironic twinkle in his eyes.

Aly shook her head. “
I’m
no warrior,” she said, still the country girl.

Fesgao let the tiniest of smiles reach his lips. Then he and the other man-at-arms skipped over the brook and vanished into the jungle.

Mequen looked around, his eyes assessing their company. “Sergeant, have your people on their horses, bows at the ready. Ulasim,” he called cheerfully. “A word, if you please?”

The footman, who’d been talking to Chenaol, walked over to them. “Your Grace?”

Mequen lowered his voice. “Quietly—
quietly
—get the bows and spears out. Give them to any of the servants who can use them.” He glanced at his wife by the wagon, and added, “Sarai and Dove as well. We may have a problem, but tell everyone to behave as if this were normal.” As Winnamine sighed, Ulasim bowed. He ambled down the line of wagons, looking for all the world like a man taking a leisurely stroll, but he managed to speak to all of the free servants.

“It will take me days to undo the wildness that your putting weapons in the girls’ hands will stir up,” Winnamine told her husband softly.

“We may need that wildness out here,” Mequen replied. “Winna, we aren’t in Rajmuat now. We aren’t living a round of parties and concerts and hunts. Perhaps the rules of Rajmuat no longer apply.”

Aly started to ease back, keeping her head down, pretending to be invisible, since they seemed to have forgotten she was there. “Aly,” said the duke.

She cringed and halted. After a moment she remembered who she was supposed to be, and bobbed a curtsy.

“Did the god warn you?” Mequen asked quietly. “Are these King Oron’s assassins?” He and his wife watched her intently.

“Your Grace, I don’t need the god for something as plain as this,” Aly said, her voice just loud enough for them to hear. “Frankly, I’d as soon not trouble him any more than I can help. Gods …” She chose her words carefully. “Gods complicate things.” It was the understatement of her life, to judge by the havoc her mother’s Goddess and her Aunt Daine’s god relatives had wreaked.

“Here I’d hoped they would simplify them,” Winnamine remarked with a sigh.

Aly grinned. “That wouldn’t be very interesting,” she said.

The duchess raised her eyebrows. “I do not like interesting things,” she said, amusement in her eyes even though her tone was one of reproof. “They tend to bite painfully.”

A thought caught Aly’s attention. “You know, Your Grace, we might make some noise, to distract the robbers,” she said. “Something to account for our still being here.” She nodded toward the horses. Lokeij was almost finished hitching up the fresh cart horse.

Winnamine went over to the old man and whispered in his ear. Lokeij nodded and walked down the line with the limping mare. A moment later Aly saw two menservants go to work on one of the wheels of a supply wagon, cursing loudly. Lokeij stopped to confer briefly with Ulasim, who came trotting up to the duke and duchess, a worried look on his face.

“Your Grace, my lady,” he said, puffing slightly as Veron rode up to see what was going on, “forgive me, but one of the men says we have trouble with one of the wagons.”

“What do you mean, a wheel’s coming off?” cried the duchess, the image of appalled nobility. “We can’t loiter here! We’ll never reach the inn by dark at this rate, and I simply cannot sleep in the open!”

Within moments the caravan was transformed, giving the appearance of an anthill that had been kicked. The men removed the wheel as others clustered around to see what the problem was. Veron’s men-at-arms quietly armed themselves and mounted their horses, drawing in closer to the wagons. Ulasim and a couple of the servants moved down the length of the train. As they passed, Aly saw the gleam of weapons set within easy reach.

She started to head back to the children, but Winnamine called, “Stay, Aly. Pembery is exhausted—she never sleeps well when she travels. Help me to untangle these silks.”

Aly returned to the lead wagon. Winnamine did indeed have a heap of embroidery silks on her lap where she now sat on the wagon seat. She also had a drawn crossbow at her feet, hidden from view by the horses and her skirt. Startled, Aly glanced at Winnamine, then accepted a tangle of threads. “I want the girls to have decent marriages among their peers, which they won’t get if they act like raka highland savages,” Winna told Aly quietly. “But I never said I expected all women to be helpless and unable to defend their families.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Aly murmured as she made a mess of the thread.

The duchess smiled. “Of course. You come from the land of fighting ladies like Queen Thayet, the Lioness, and Keladry of Mindelan,” she remarked, laying an emerald strand flat on the seat beside her. “Doubtless you feel naked without a weapon in your hand.”

Aly frowned at the mass of silk in her lap. “Your Grace, you only hear about the fighting women because they make the most noise,” she told the duchess. “Most of Tortall’s women wouldn’t touch a sword if you begged them to. We have all sorts of females among us, you know.”

Winnamine raised perfectly plucked brown eyebrows. “And which sort are you, to be the god’s chosen?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

Aly shrugged. “I’m the confused sort.” That answer startled a chuckle out of Winnamine.

Fesgao and his men eased out of the jungle and over to the lead wagon. Mequen and Sergeant Veron came to stand with the duchess and Aly. Fesgao brought a stick with him. He used it to draw a rough map in the dirt of the road.

“There’s fourteen of them, on either side of the road just before it crosses a bridge,” he told them. “This creek joins a bigger stream there. It’s maybe a mile ahead.” The other four men-at-arms nodded their agreement.

Mequen asked the question that Aly wanted to ask: “Are they fighters, or local?”

“Poor men, Your Grace,” said another scout. “And women—two of them, anyway. The weapons are either old or they’re farm weapons. They’re not royal killers, just renegade jungle raka.”

Aly could feel the relief that rose from the duke and duchess.

“Well, if we go forward, now that we’re warned, we can fight them off,” said the duke. “Or we can fall back to town and send the local soldiers to clean them out.”

“They’ll vanish from the area if they think we know they were here, Your Grace,” said Veron gruffly. “Then the raka dogs will go after the next prey to cross upwind of them.”

Aly scratched her head. In for a calf, in for a bull, she thought, and said, “I don’t know if this could work, Your Grace, and I hope you forgive my boldness, but what if you send men to come up on their backs?”

“We could strike from behind,” Fesgao said. If he’d taken offense over Veron’s remark about raka dogs, his face did not show it. “And you could attack from the road. They would be caught between us.”

Veron looked at Aly and shook his head. “From the lips of infants shall the truth come unadorned,” he said, quoting a proverb. “If we are willing to risk casualties, Your Grace, we could be sure this rabble won’t harass our supply caravans in the future.”

“Instruct your men, sergeant,” Mequen said. “How long should we wait until we set out?”

Within moments Fesgao and the other scouts, along with two of Ulasim’s footmen who could shoot, had vanished back into the jungle. Winnamine counted slowly to one hundred while orders traveled down the line of servants and wagons. The wheel was put back on its wagon; Aly was ordered to sit with the children and keep them calm. No one considered giving her a weapon. In every slaveholding country it was illegal to give weapons to slaves.

Instead, Aly got Petranne and Elsren to lie flat on the wagon floor as part of a brand-new game, seeing how long they could hold perfectly still no matter what they heard. As she waited she murmured stories to keep them calm, feeling the weight of the knife she had stolen in Rajmuat heavy under her waistband. Dove and Sarai, bows in hand, covered either side of the wagon, pushing up the canvas just enough so that they could see out and aim.

As the wagon rumbled forward, Aly remembered her father’s long-ago advice not to pray. Now she wondered, Was that how it started with you and Kyprioth, Da? You praying, and him answering? I mean to ask you that, when I come home this autumn.

The bumpy ride seemed to last forever. Elsren and Petranne had just begun to complain that Aly wasn’t making sense when the wagon jolted to a stop. They heard yells and the crackle of bodies in the brush. Two arrows punched through the canvas wagon cover. Aly pushed Elsren and Petranne tight against the base of the padded seats, where arrows couldn’t reach them. Pembery and the healer, Rihani, huddled against the other bank of padded seats, keeping their heads down as the maid whimpered and Rihani mouthed prayers. Sarai, her lovely face grim, shot her crossbow and reloaded it. Dove watched through her opening in the canvas, her small hands trembling on the stock of her bow. Someone outside screamed; others yelled. Aly heard the clang of metal on metal, and a crash in the woods.

The noise stopped for a moment. Then Veron and Mequen shouted orders. At last Ulasim opened the canvas door into the wagon. “It’s clear,” he told everyone inside. “Rihani, you are needed. My ladies, your father wishes you to attend him. Aly, also.”

“I’ll look after the little ones,” Pembery said gratefully. She gathered Elsren and Petranne into trembling arms. Both children tried to wriggle free, clamoring to see the battlefield as the maid clung to them.

Aly followed Sarai and Dove to the head of the wagon train. They had halted just before the bridge. Some of the dead lay in the jungle on either side of the road. A few of the household staff and men-at-arms sported wounds, but none of the Balitang party lay among the bodies as far as Aly could see. Fesgao, Veron, and the rest of Fesgao’s party of men-at-arms were forcing six bandits to their knees, binding them in ropes while other men-at-arms leveled weapons at the captives to prevent their escape.

Aly’s temples began to throb. She had not considered this possibility, that robbers might be captured. The neatest solution would have been if they’d all been killed or if those left alive had fled. What would the duke say? He was a sensible man. He should realize there was no question of letting the captives go. They would only rob the next group to come up this road, or else they would get reinforcements and attack the Balitangs again.

Aly clasped her hands tightly behind her back so that no one would see them shake. The Balitangs could not turn back with captives in tow. They would never reach the safety of the village they had left that morning, with its royal fort and soldiers, by dark. The duke’s people would be under constant attack along the way from would-be rescuers. At their present crawling speed, they would need two days to reach the next royal outpost. The local families would have plenty of time to steal their men back. If the Balitangs kept the captives until they reached Tanair, it would mean six more people who must be fed and guarded. The duke could spare neither guards nor food. If he enslaved the robbers, Aly wouldn’t trust them, particularly not if the new slaves got word of their whereabouts to their families.