Trickster's Choice (30 page)

The fifth knelt beside the door between two impassive raka. His arms, wrists, and ankles were bound, his mouth tightly gagged. Blood streamed down his face from a cut in his scalp. He was the man Aly had identified as the leader. His green eyes were stony as they met hers.

She looked at the other bodies. Here were two of the merchant’s regular employees as well as two more strangers. The count of dead outside included two of those she had recognized as assassins as well as one of the merchant’s people. Where was that redheaded woman? Was it possible that she wasn’t an assassin but a spy, trying to root out secrets in the village at that very moment?

Sarai bent and picked up one killer’s sword, easily taking its weight in her delicate hand. She held it upright. “No maker’s mark on the hilt,” she commented to herself. “But if this isn’t royal foundry work, I don’t know swords.”

Bronau chuckled. “Sarai, you startle me. How would you learn that?”

Sarai lowered the blade slowly. Aly was impressed. She knew swords were heavier than they looked. It took control and strength in the wrist and arm to do what Sarai was doing.

The duke wandered over to the bed. He was idly brushing at feathers, looking around, when a heap of curtains a yard away shifted. Up came the missing woman, her teeth bared in fury, a long knife clutched in her hand.

Aly felt as if she were struggling through honey, she was so slow. Like Aly, Ulasim, Fesgao, and the prince all stood on the wrong side of the bed, closer to the door than Mequen. The duchess gasped. Mequen scrabbled at his sword hilt.

But Sarai, the killer’s weapon still in her hand, lunged across the gap. Her arm stretched out in a long, ferocious thrust that pierced the woman through. Swiftly she braced a foot against the assassin’s body and freed her sword, then cut the woman’s throat, just to be sure.

The sixteen-year-old looked around at the rest of them, brown eyes wide, blood on her hands, face, and clothes. “It’s so messy,” she murmured in surprise. Then she fainted.

Aly, trembling, went to her and knelt. Using her Sight, she confirmed the girl hadn’t been wounded or poisoned. Though it would serve me right if she had been, Aly thought, furious with herself. Idiot! I shouldn’t have let
anyone
come back in here until I checked the room. That’s
my
job, and I was too overconfident to do it!

Feathers and cloth rustled as Winnamine joined her. She had found a pitcher of water and handkerchiefs. She wet a handkerchief, wrung it out, and began to clean her stepdaughter’s face. Aly soaked and wrung out other handkerchiefs and began to wipe Sarai’s hands as the girl began to come around.

When Sarai opened her eyes, Winnamine gave her a tiny smile. Her mouth trembled. “Obviously halting your sword lessons was a mistake,” she murmured to Sarai. “It’s a crime not to encourage such an aptitude.”

Sarai stared at her stepmother. “But I fainted,” she whispered.

“After,” said Winnamine. “You fainted
after
you’d done the important thing.” She bit her lip, then continued, “We shall find you a teacher in the morning. In fact, though it may be too late, I may study swordcraft, too. And Dove … ?”

Sarai gulped, tried to speak, and could not. At last she cleared her throat and said, “She hates swords. She does like to shoot, if she doesn’t have to shoot animals.”

“Archery it is,” Winnamine said. She blinked over-bright eyes, then leaned in, and kissed Sarai’s cheek. “Thank you for saving his life.” She took a deep breath, then rose and went to see how her husband was.

Sarai looked at Aly. “If I’d known that all it would take to start my lessons again was killing someone …” Her voice and humor failed. Her eyes overflowed. “Did I do the right thing?” she whispered.

Aly cleaned blood from Sarai’s other hand as the other girl wept silently. “You did better than me,” she replied softly. “I just stood and stared. But I wasn’t needed. Sarai, balance a murderess’s life against your father’s. This entire household would prefer the duke to an assassin.”

“There’s one who disagrees,” Sarai remarked as she struggled to sit up. She pointed to the last living killer. He’d made no sound as the drama had unfolded. Now he stared blankly into the air.

Aly sighed. “Will you be all right?” she asked Sarai.

A hand reached down: the duke’s. Sarai took it, and let her father pull her up into his arms.

Aly stood and went to Fesgao and Ulasim. Bronau had gone out to the landing, where he inspected the dead men. “Perhaps he should be reminded that his servants are missing,” Aly murmured to Ulasim, “and that if he wishes to see to their welfare, he should go to the barracks? I don’t want him noticing me any more than he already has.”

At a look from Ulasim, Fesgao went out into the hall. He bowed politely to the prince and spoke to him as Ulasim and Aly watched. “She was beautiful, our Saraiyu, wasn’t she?” Ulasim inquired, his mouth barely moving as he whispered. “Like Gunapi the Sunrose, goddess of war and molten rock.”

“She was,” Aly admitted. Her eyes stung strangely. The last time she had seen so perfect a fighting move was when her mother had battled pirates at the Swoop.

“Without you, all might have been lost,” Ulasim told Aly suddenly. He picked up one of her hands and pressed it to his forehead. “We owe our lives to you, and our thanks to the god for you tonight.”

Aly yanked her hand from his grip, unnerved by his intensity. “Ulasim, calm down,” she said, forcing amusement into her voice. “I just alerted you about some assassins, that’s all.”

He surveyed her from his greater height. Aly had expected him to be offended by her light brush-off. Instead he smiled. “I always forget, you are not of us. We think you are raka in your heart, but no. You are newly come. No one teaches a slave the laws that govern the Isles. Had these
sisat
”—he pointed to the still-living assassin with his dagger—“killed even one Balitang or the prince, then every raka man, woman, and child of Tanair village and castle would die. That is the luarin law governing such things.”

“Oh. But these are luarin assassins, and I’d bet whatever I own that they were sent by the king,” Aly pointed out. “If he sent them, surely he wouldn’t enforce that law… .” Her voice trailed off as she registered the grimness on Ulasim’s face. “Even if he sent the assassins himself?” she asked, wanting badly for it not to be true and fearing that it was.

“The idea is that if any member of the luarin nobility is killed, the nearest local raka must have helped the murderer. At the very least, the courts would say that the local raka did not die to stop the killers,” added the duke. He stood behind them, one arm around Winnamine, one around Sarai. Both he and Sarai looked mournful. “It’s insane, but Oron is quite mad. The law itself comes from the time of the luarin conquest. It’s how they broke the spine of the raka rebellion. Some of us have laid petitions before the courts to have the Conqueror’s Laws repealed, to no avail.” He shook his head.

Aly stared. That is just not right, she thought. To murder people who had nothing to say about it, just because they were near? She understood why there were such laws. They were made to fit a conqueror’s logic, used to keep a captive people under control. She had just never matched the law to the faces of people she knew, like the Balitang raka.

I don’t want to get involved with this country, she thought as she looked at the floor. I must go home soon, before I get so wound up in their lives and injustices that I’ll never want to leave.

The prince trotted down the stairs, two of Fesgao’s weary men following. Fesgao himself walked back into the bedroom. “Aly? What do you recommend for this man?” he asked, nodding to their prisoner. “Torture?”

Startled at the suggestion, she met his eyes and realized that this was yet another test. She made a face at him. “Any amateur knows torture is chancy at best. People do still lie under torture. What you need is truthdrops.”

Fesgao gave a tiny smile and went to find Rihani. Aly looked at Ulasim. “So I may look forward to these little exercises until I die, is that it?” she asked brightly. “Or will you decide I’m not some luarin brute before I am, say, fifty?”

Ulasim wiped one of his long daggers on a cloth. “Oh, more like forty, I’m sure,” he replied casually. He flipped the dagger up casually, caught it by the hilt, and in the next motion cut the gag from the last assassin’s mouth. “Who sent you?” he asked.

The man stared at the raka, expressionless.

“Once we have truthdrops in hand, you will speak,” Ulasim pointed out. “Keep your pride and tell us now. Don’t wait for magic to force you.”

The man leaned forward and spat on the floor.

Fesgao returned from the room across the hall with Rihani in tow. She held a small, uncorked vial in her hand. Aly was startled by the healer’s steely gaze. Normally Rihani was as fierce as pudding. “Open his mouth,” Rihani ordered.

A band of green fire locked around the assassin’s throat and tightened, vanishing into his flesh. The man choked. Green fire coated his mouth in Aly’s Sight as his face got redder and redder. The veins bulged in his throat and forehead as he fought for air. Within a moment he was dead.

Aly bit her tongue to keep from shouting her frustration at the lost opportunity. “
This
is why we need a mage who is not just a healer,” she said quietly, looking into Ulasim’s face. “And I should have seen that coming.” She turned and ran down the servant’s stair before she gave in to the temptation to shout. It was time to get some cool air.

Sloppy! she thought as she strode outside. Sloppy not to check the room for assassins before I so much as let a Balitang set foot outside that protected room. Sloppy not to think he might have a silencing spell on him before we set it in motion. What else have I missed? There are ways to stop a silencing spell. And Sarai shouldn’t have had to kill anyone!

I have to be sharper, she told herself, gently thumping her head on the keep’s stone wall as a reminder. I won’t get lucky a second time.

The inner and outer courtyards crawled with Bronau’s and Mequen’s men-at-arms. They were looking for anyone suspicious, turning the buildings upside down in their search. Three guards from the merchants’ caravan lay dead at the entrance to the kitchen wing. Bronau’s and the Balitang soldiers searched the bodies. Laid out in front of the barracks, awaiting proper burial, were two of the castle’s own, one of the former bandits and one of the official men-at-arms. Aly murmured a prayer to the Black God for their rest in the realms of the dead, then wandered back toward the keep.

She heard voices behind the kitchen wing, where a tiny garden had been built for Tanair’s ladies. A small door opened directly to the servants’ halls inside the tower. Its torches cast light onto two dead merchant’s guards lying on the path that led to the carefully landscaped garden. Two of Ulasim’s servants stood beside them, but their attention was on the fig tree that shaded the walk.

Intrigued, Aly walked over to see what was going on. The two dead men were the first that night who had not been killed by blades. Both lay facedown, with dents between their shoulders and their heads twisted askew.

“Please come down,” a Balitang hostler was saying to the tree. “You have already unnerved us enough for one night,
duan
.” The title meant “honorable sir,” used to a man who was not a noble. “Ulasim will wish to know what you did here.”

Aly looked up. Nawat, perched easily on a branch that should not have held his weight, gazed down at her. With his dark, long-nosed face surrounded by leaves and growing figs, he looked like some wilderness god.

“
Now
what are you up to?” Aly demanded as her conscience pinched her. She should have told Nawat what was going to happen tonight so that he could have decided whether or not he wanted to be caught up in human quarrels.

“I am up to nothing,” the crow-man said cheerfully. “Those two were going to mob you through that door.” He pointed to the door into the keep. “I stopped them.”

Aly knelt beside the dead men. Their necks were broken. The dents in their backs looked like the prints of bare feet. She glanced at his: they were bare. “How did you do it?” she asked her strange friend.

“I saw it,” said another servant, one of the footmen. “We had the duty here. They was coming at us, and all of a sudden he leaps up in the dark, and hits one in the back with both feet, kicking out, like. Then he did it to the other. And then he jumped into the tree.”

Aly stared up at Nawat. He must be very strong to break bone with jumping kicks from a standing position, she thought. Well, crows are very strong. “You could have been hurt,” she told him. “They might have killed you.”

The hostler snorted. “Not him!”

Nawat’s gaze was steady as he looked down at Aly. “They were going to mob you,” he repeated firmly. “I mobbed them. Only I added a hawk thing. When the hawk strikes, he breaks the head of the prey. I did that.”

Aly rubbed her temples. “Thank you,” she said. “Will you come down now? I think we have them all.”

Nawat smiled brightly at her. “I will come down for you, Aly.” He jumped down as lightly as a cat. Aly patted his cheek absently and let him come along as they patrolled the rest of the castle grounds.

It was hours before the castle’s residents calmed enough to go to bed. Aly was in the kitchen, finishing a very late supper, when the duchess’s maid, Pembery, found her. “His Grace wishes to see you in the ground floor study,” she told Aly, and yawned. “Don’t take forever. I can’t go to bed until the family is settled.”

Aly sighed. She would have liked to go to bed herself. Instead she found the duke in the small room where she had cleaned up the day Bronau had arrived. There was a bottle and a glass on a table by the duke’s hand, but the contents of the glass were untouched. The duke himself was staring at a branch of candles, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair.

Aly bowed. “Your Grace wished to see me?” she asked.

“Veron says the merchant Gurhart tells us that all of his people who became particular friends of the five newcomers are also among the dead,” Mequen replied. “A search of their belongings has revealed gold
seratudus
and a death order under the Crown’s seal.”