Trickster's Choice (17 page)

“Well, nobody’s holding this fellow now,” Aly pointed out. “He just seems to have adopted me.”

“I give up,” Sarai told them, panting, as she returned. “He can keep them.” She collapsed on the blanket and fought to catch her breath. Aly wordlessly leaned over and poured the other pins into Sarai’s lap.

“Kyprioth will be pleased,” observed Dove. “He likes bright, shiny things, they say.” She looked at Aly as Sarai began to braid her hair once more. “Do you have other stories about Alanna the Lioness?”

A jerk of her hand left a smear of charcoal on Aly’s map. She painstakingly rubbed it off the parchment. Guilt flooded her veins as she remembered her mother’s worry in the dream. “Why such interest?” she asked, glad she didn’t blush easily. “I mean, forgive me, ladies, but I can see why the little ones are interested. All that fighting, and adventure. Children love heroic stories. You aren’t children.”

“It isn’t just children who need heroes,” Sarai replied, shocked. “Don’t you see what she’s done for women, for all women? The Lioness, your queen, Lady Knight Keladry, they’re living proof that we have a warrior spirit, too, that it hasn’t been bred out of the luarin blood. The Lioness is a true hero. She protected her country when no one else could, man or woman. Mithros, she found the Dominion Jewel, she’s killed giants and monsters to defend those who can’t fight them! That
proves
that we can do things men do. Not in the same way, perhaps, but we can still do them!”

“Everybody needs heroes, Aly,” Dove added. “Everybody. Even grown women. Even slaves.”

Aly looked at the younger girl. Dove’s small, dark face was alive with enthusiasm. Keen intelligence shone in her dark eyes, and fire burned in her tawny cheeks. Something about her reminded Aly of the Lioness herself, though she would be hard put to name it. “Even the raka, my lady?” she asked.

“Especially the raka,” Sarai told Aly.

Dove shrugged. “There’s room enough in the Isles for both peoples, if only everyone could be brought to see as much.”

Fesgao approached them and bowed. “My ladies, it is almost noon. Your father will be concerned.”

Groaning, Sarai and Dove got to their feet, saddled their mounts, and rode away. Dove turned in the saddle just before they reached the road, and waved goodbye to Aly.

The dust had settled from their departure when Nawat returned. He walked over to Aly and dropped the two jeweled hairpins into Aly’s lap. She grimaced and wiped crow saliva from the pins.

“Thank you, but slaves don’t own jewels,” she told him. “I would get in trouble if I’m caught with these. I’ll give them back to Sarai. But it’s sweet of you to want to give me a present, though,” she said hurriedly. Without thinking, she reached out and ran a hand along the crow’s glossy back. “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling away. “I forgot you’re wild. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Nawat climbed onto her lap and gently ran his beak through Aly’s growing hair. She closed her eyes, relaxing in the sun.

Hours passed. Gray clouds slid across the sky while Aly, Nawat and the goats prowled the countryside. By late afternoon rain began to fall. Aly wrapped her map book in oiled cloth, whistled the goats in, and led them home. Nawat flew overhead, perching under the roof of a village barn as Aly took her charges through the castle gate. She was soaked clean through. She wanted nothing more than dry clothes and a hot meal.

She put the goats in their outer courtyard pen. Entering the inner courtyard, she found the slaves and the six former bandits huddled under the eaves of the barracks and the kitchen. All stared miserably at the sky. The rain showed no sign of letting up. Unless they found room in the stable, they would have to eat in the wet, doing their best to keep rain out of their bowls.

The door to the keep opened to frame Duke Mequen, flanked by his duchess and Ulasim. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “All of you, come into the hall. We’ll manage for tonight, but I’ll see to it that we get more tables and benches for the future. From now on, this household eats together.”

“The servants won’t like that,” Lokeij murmured in Aly’s ear.

She looked at the old hostler. “They’ll learn to live with it, I suppose,” she replied. “Somebody told me that’s how it used to be done in older castles—the household ate and slept all together. It’s only been the last two centuries that nobles took quarters of their own and the servants had a separate hall to sleep in.”

Lokeij gripped the back of Aly’s neck with a friendly hand. “A word of advice. Slaves aren’t so knowledgeable about history,” he murmured. “Not raka slaves, not luarin slaves, unless you’ve been specially educated and sold as a tutor. Are you a tutor?”

Aly smiled at him. “That’s so sweet,” she replied. “My da always said my brains were too big for my head.”

Lokeij looked into her face, his rheumy dark eyes inspecting her almost pore by pore. “If I were you, little parrot, I’d rub dirt in my bright feathers and work harder to pass for a sparrow,” he said.

Aly spread her tunic, streaked with grass and mud stains. “The goats have taken care of that, don’t you think? I’m sparrowing already. Chirp. Tweet.” She winked at him and entered the castle. She wanted to change to her spare set of dry clothes before supper and to return Sarai’s hairpins.

That night, when she dreamed her crow lessons, Nawat was not there. Instead the senior female crow took over. In addition to teaching Aly new sounds and hearing Aly’s explanation of sounds and behaviors made by humans, she introduced Aly to the new crows who had come to Tanair.

Aly saw no sign of her friend the next day, either. She heard and easily interpreted the calls of the crows, but Nawat had become company for her, out alone with the goats. She missed him as she took shelter under a tree from the daylong drizzle. With Nawat to talk to, she wouldn’t have been so aware of the cold and damp. To warm up she tried some of the hand-to-hand combat exercises she had learned, but soon found that mud and wet grass made for tricky footing. More often than not she went sprawling, which amused both the goats and the crows.

When she returned to the castle at the end of the day, she found that long tables and benches had been placed in the main hall. There was an order to the seating. The duke and his family were on the dais, near the big hearth. The servants were arrayed at a long table set at right angles to the left of the dais. The men-at-arms who were not on duty took their seats at the first long table to the right. The slaves had lower tables—those with special skills like carpentry and smithcraft on the right, with the soldiers, general slaves like Aly, and the slave maids on the table below the free servants.

The new arrangement did not sit well with everyone, particularly the free luarin servants and the men-at-arms who had come with the family from Rajmuat. Ulasim and the fifteen other full- and part-blood raka seemed perfectly comfortable. Aly was just happy to be warm, dry, and sitting down.

Once the weather cleared up the next day, Dove and Sarai began regular visits with Aly after they and their guards took a morning ramble through the country around their new home. Sometimes they brought Petranne and taught the four-year-old to ride her pony, as her guard guided it on a lead rein.

Aly welcomed their company, particularly since Nawat had not returned, neither in her dreams nor during the day. She soon saw that, on the older girls’ part, her attraction lay in her stories of Tortall, those too bloody or full of bedroom gossip for Petranne and Elsren. In exchange, Aly extracted Isles gossip from her visitors. Sarai knew most of the luarin and raka nobility, as she had been presented at court. Her descriptions of life there were precise, cutting, and without illusions. Dove seemed to have spent her time in Rajmuat in different circles, among the capital’s intellectuals and more worldly merchants, studying politics, trade, and the affairs of foreign nations.

The more time she spent with those girls, the more respect Aly had for them. They would have been at home in the circle of clever, observant women that were Aly’s adoptive aunts. More than once Aly caught Dove eyeing her after she’d asked a question that a slave might not be expected to ask. She had to wonder if Dove, at least, did not suspect there was much more to Aly than a metal ring around her neck.

Sometimes the Balitangs stayed long enough to eat lunch with Aly. More often they visited for a short time before they returned to the castle and the duties Winnamine had set for them. With only a fifth of the servants who’d worked at the Rajmuat house, every member of the family was now required to help with chores. Mequen met with villagers, supervised repairs to the walls, and oversaw the building of new sheds and sleeping quarters within the castle walls. Sarai and Winnamine plied their needles, not on ladylike embroidery and tapestry work, but on plain sewing for the household. Dove, who loathed needlework, worked in the stillroom and learned to spin. When the older girls described their labors to Aly, they spoke as if work were an adventure. Aly hoped they would feel the same when winter made it impossible to leave the castle.

Twice a merchant caravan came to Tanair with supplies. On both visits Aly saw the merchants reach the Balitang lands through the road in the rocks. The crows warned her ahead of time so that she could look over the merchants and decide if they were a threat or not. They were always welcomed at village and castle, both for the items they carried and for the news of the realm.

Two weeks after her arrival at Tanair, Aly was drowsing in the late morning sun when the crows set up a racket that made her jump to her feet and draw the stolen knife from her waistband. She couldn’t tell what they were saying—none of their sounds were those she had been taught. Skeins of shrieking birds flew by, bound for the southern road, where they circled and dove at a man who walked there.

Aly sharpened her Sight until she saw the newcomer as clearly as if he stood before her. A young man of her age, he carried a sack over one shoulder, one not big enough to hold what he might need for life on the road. His luarin-style tunic and leggings were patched and darned, showing plenty of wear. He was barefoot, and he walked in an awkward manner, as if he had not really mastered the use of feet. The strangest thing about him was the way his skin looked to her Sight: feather patterns showed under every inch of bare flesh.

Curious, Aly told the goats “Stay,” and trotted down to the road. Something about that feathered pattern was very interesting.

“Hello, Aly,” the newcomer said in a pleasant baritone as she approached. His skin was dark, but not raka brown—more like her da’s coloring than a raka’s. His eyes were brown, long-lashed, and deeply set on either side of a long, thin razor of a nose. His cheekbones were sharp, his chin square with a hint of a point. His mouth was long and slender, the lower lip fuller than the upper. He wore his short black hair tousled, as if he’d combed it back with his fingers. He was nearly six feet tall, with a wiry build. The way he moved, Aly half expected him to leap straight up into the air at any moment and not come down. The feather patterns under his skin were even clearer to her Sight up close than they’d been when she first looked at him. She thought that if she touched him, she might
feel
feathers, as if he’d pulled a human skin on for a disguise.

He’d called her by name. “Do we know each other?” she asked.

“I looked different before.” The newcomer knelt and placed his sack in the roadway. “I am sorry I have been away so long,” he added, undoing the knot and spreading out the cloth. “I had to practice this shape. It is not what I am used to. I am used to it now, though.” He looked up at Aly. “I am here to serve you and the two-legger queen-to-be.”

Aly peered into his face. If he wore another shape normally, one with feathers … “Nawat?” she whispered.

Nawat smiled at her, his entire face lighting up. “I did not want you to see me fumble like a nestling,” he explained. “This shape, and the talking, are hard. My friends say I am even sillier than a nestling.” He waved up to the crows whirling over their heads.

“But … are you a mage?” Aly asked, tucking her knife back into her waistband. “A, a shape-shifter? A god?” But I would have seen those things in him, she thought, completely bewildered.

“I am Nawat Crow,” Nawat replied. “
They
could do this, if they wished.” He looked up at the crows again. “They do not wish.”

Aly sat on a boulder at the side of the road. “Aunt Daine never said crows could make themselves into humans.”

Nawat shrugged as birds did, thrusting his shoulder blades up from his back. “We do not give away all our secrets.” He smiled. “I can help you better this way. I learned to make arrows for the two-leggers.” He gestured to the contents of his open satchel. “They prize arrows, and no one makes them by the stone sticks where you live.”

“Castle,” Aly murmured, nibbling her lower lip as she tried to work this all out in her mind. She nearly had control of her thoughts when she made the mistake of truly looking at Nawat’s satchel.

“Goddess save me,” she whispered in awe, picking up a feather as long as her forearm, stippled in a pattern of gold and soft black. “This is a griffin feather! And this one, and this … How did you get these?” she asked. “They’re worth a fortune. Everyone knows you hit what you shoot at with griffin fletching.”

“They are sparkly,” Nawat said. “The griffins shed them. I thought if I brought you a present that was made of discarded things, no one would punish you for having them.”

Steel glinted through the heap of shimmering griffin feathers. Carefully Aly pushed them aside. At the bottom of the pile she found strips of metal, shaped like bird feathers. She gulped. With a trembling hand she lifted a feather a handspan in length and drew its tip along the corner of the cloth satchel. The corner fell neatly away, as if sliced by a razor. “
Stormwing
feathers?” she whispered, meeting Nawat’s deep-set gaze. “You’re carrying
Stormwing
feathers?”

Again that shrug. “They molt,” Nawat replied. “The feathers are shiny. I collected them and washed them,” he added.

Aly was glad to be sitting down. Neither griffins nor Stormwings liked others to approach their nests or flocking grounds. Her own mother would rather face a company of hill bandits than a nesting griffin. “What did you mean, the two-legger queen-to-be?”