After that, we made our way half-blind up the hill toward indistinct shapes until a Gray Wolf, posted on the outskirts of their numbers to watch for a sneak attack from the defenders, spotted us.
After that things became a little easier: a little, because we couldn’t see well. The cold was fierce even for me, or maybe it was exhaustion, and finally I fell onto my hands and knees in a drift of snow. Behind me somewhere Geric shouted hoarsely, his voice muffled by the thickening curtain of white. I crouched down, looking wildly for danger.
“Come, Lhind.” Hlanan bent over me, hands outstretched.
I scrambled to my feet. A Gray Wolf appeared, leading a horse. Hlanan mounted, then pulled me up behind him. Prince Geric leaped onto another horse.
The rumble of hooves indicated the Gray Wolves closing around us. Good? Bad? My head ached, and my poor stomach, neglected for what felt like a thousand years, wrung plaintively.
But we did not ride far. No one could see any better than I could. Swiftly approaching hoof beats indicated that a scout had gone ahead. I peered past Geric’s bare head to where the blonde Gray Wolf captain gestured with her gloved hand, and Geric raised his fist, then pointed back at her.
Our cavalcade followed her down a path into a valley, which sheltered us somewhat from the building storm.
A short time later we dismounted under a rock outcropping, and the horses were taken away.
“Pandoc,” Geric yelled as he dismounted. He motioned impatiently at the curly-haired scout.
I stayed close to Hlanan’s side, and as far out of Geric’s reach as I could. I did not want to run out into the snow, but at the first sign of any grabbing on his part, I’d flit. Better floundering around in snow than a quick trip to the Evil Emperor.
The blonde Gray Wolf captain shook back her ash-pale hair, which hung about her face in curly locks, and turned her palm over as she jerked her chin at a couple of the others. They moved to set about making a fire.
I followed Hlanan past busy gray-cowled bodies into what we discovered was an old cave. Firewood had been neatly stacked along the curving rock wall, next to barrels and jars. Of course. This close to the castle, it was probably a scout outpost, for occasions exactly like this.
“We dare not stay long,” I said, peering past Hlanan’s shoulder. “I don’t know which is a worse threat, Geric or those imperial warriors.”
“The imperial warriors,” Hlanan said in an under voice, “should not be a threat at all.” Reminding me again that they were supposed to be under the command of Aranu Crown.
That sparked questions.
I knew better than to ask. Instead I glanced at Geric, his cheekbones ruddy with anger as he spoke low-voiced to the Gray Wolf scout, Pandoc. The scout chopped and twirled his fingers, tapping his palms, his other wrist, his forearms, and making other signs as the blonde Gray Wolf observed, head bent, expression blank.
“How did you find me?” I asked in an under-voice, while that was going on.
Hlanan said, “A courier saw a cloak-wrapped bundle in human shape laid over the back of a horse when riding into the capital. He got suspicious and reported it. They sent a message to the outer perimeter, who spotted you being taken into the mountains. They followed at a distance. By the time I got their message and transferred to them, you were gone. But they saw signs of a hastily concealed trail—starting from the remains of a lute lying on a rock below the falls.”
“And so you came after me, but how did you end up captured with Geric Lendan—oh, wait. You said truce. That means you—” I smiled at him, utterly charmed. “You meant to rescue me!”
“Before we both walked into her trap,” Hlanan said wryly.
“But you meant to! I’ve never had anybody want to rescue me before,” I whispered, loving him all over again.
I’d been watching Prince Geric as the blonde captain talked to Pandoc with her fingers. Geric listened to Pandoc, who translated her fast signs. Then he glanced my way, and I tried to hide my grin, but too late. Abruptly Geric pushed past her. She dropped her hands, her face unchanging.
I sidestepped around Hlanan to his other side, plunging one hand into my tool bag, though I had no weapons in it. My fingers closed around my lock pick, then loosened. If I tried to threaten Prince Geric with death by lock pick, he would just laugh.
Geric said, “What are you gloating about? Yes, Maita Boniree got my transfer token, but that only means our journey is postponed.”
“Ended,” I retorted promptly.
He gave me a lip-curled glance, and turned to Hlanan, who gazed back with an expression of extreme reserve. My heart squeezed behind my ribs. That expression meant that he was very, very angry.
“We’ll eat, then discuss our egress,” the Prince of Poltroons said, clearly assuming that Hlanan was no threat. He jerked his elegant chin toward the curtain of snow falling beyond the outcropping, flurries dancing at a slant, which indicated an icy wind propelling them. “Ordinarily I would trust to the weather to slow her up, but I know not what weaponry she has stored in the form of magical spells.”
“She doesn’t have any,” I announced smugly.
Hlanan and Geric both gave me sharp looks.
“At least, if her spells were piled in that room with the big candles. It’s all ash now. I set it on fire.”
I was looking at Hlanan as I spoke, expecting an echo of my triumph. I was surprised—dismayed—to see horror lengthen his face, before his expression shuttered.
“Now that was well thought of, thief,” Geric drawled.
As he spoke, the sizzle of dried meat in nut oil wafted greasily through the cave. My stomach lurched, and I stepped back, but then I saw a couple of the Gray Wolves setting flat round travel breads on the ring of stones circling the fire, and laying out dried apricots, figs, and a big wedge of bright orange cheese. Food that I could eat!
In short order we sat on flat stones arranged in a ring outside the fire pit, the Gray Wolves’ woolen tunics gently steaming and smelling like wet hound. I gobbled down my share of the cheese and the figs, then chewed determinedly on the tough apricots as a sense of well-being suffused me. Even my shoulder hurt a little less.
Geric carried his plate in his hand as he strolled to the cave entrance to talk to his Gray Wolf captains in low voices, Pandoc fluttering and tapping fingers in signs. The blonde captain’s head made minute jerks as her focus turned back and forth between Geric and the scout.
I turned to Hlanan, to discover him watching them, a frown of puzzlement tightening his brow. Then he shut his eyes, gave his head a shake, and looked away—to find me standing there. A horse clopped a foot, and someone coughed in the distance before he spoke. “I wish you hadn’t used that fire spell, Lhind. It’s dark magic—so dangerous.”
I contained my impatience. Magic was magic, or so I’d thought until I met those Mage Council magisters with their serious faces and their obvious distrust. And their refusal to teach me anything but the most useless fundamentals that I couldn’t even use. “I know,” I said to sidestep what could turn into another argument. “But I did not use it for a bad purpose. I did it to save you! You’re not mad at me?”
“Of course not. I understand why you did it, but see, now the evidence of her betrayal is gone.”
“So? We saw her! Heard her! You heard her!”
“I am just a scribe,” he reminded me gently. “Until the empress decides otherwise. Any accusation must be accompanied by proof. The Mage Council won’t take my word against an established magister.”
Reminding me he wasn’t yet confirmed as heir. And that imperial children could be passed over altogether for a cousin if the ruler was displeased enough.
Aranu Crown expected her children to follow the law.
I grimaced. “Burning that stuff seemed the right thing to do.” I remembered our last encounter with that evil book and added, “You set fire to the duchess’s stuff when we escaped her.”
“But I saved the evidence of her treachery first. Reme
mber? It was that sheaf of papers I asked the king of Liacz’s nephew to take to his uncle. In any case, the Duchess of Thann was not a mage betraying her oaths.” He must have seen my disappointment, for he murmured softly, quickly, “Lhind, I don’t mean to disparage your gallant rescue—”
“Never mind that,” I said, my disappointment all the sharper. “There has to be some way to convince the empress—”
“Convince the empress of what?”
Geric had slithered up as sneakily as a snake.
I glared at him, secretly glad I had a perfectly unexceptionable answer right at hand. It was even true! “That she’s got a stinker of a mage using blood magic right on her border,” I said. “If we can get a message to the Ravens, surely the empress will drop on Maita like a load of stone, and we won’t have to skulk around in this stinky cave hiding from her.”
My reason seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but Geric’s blue gaze flickered on the word “empress” in a way that made it clear that he did not like the trend of the conversation at all.
But he only smiled. “You seem eager to return to the empress’s custody. Was her imperial majesty’s prison that pleasant? But of course, you were permitted to walk the Paths of Harmony. Oh, to be Hrethan. It seems one can get away with anything, if one is possessed of fur and a tail.”
“It’s not fur,” I muttered, brushing my fingers over the wrist of my hurt arm. “It’s feathers.” I gulped air, getting that vertigo feeling of swinging between lies and truth. When in doubt, answer questions with questions. “Do you have a better idea?”
“I do,” he said, his gaze shifting to Hlanan. “As soon as this snow lifts, Maita will have the entire garrison out searching for us, armed with a lot of lies about enemies of the empire, no doubt. She will expect us to run toward Erev-li-Erval and the protection of the Ravens, so I suggest we ride west.”
“West!” I snorted—away from Erev-li-Erval. “Hah!”
They ignored me, each eyeing the other. “There is no reason to ride west,” Hlanan said in that neutral tone of reserve.
Geric’s smirk broadened—he had no idea how angry Hlanan was. “Oh, but there is,” Geric drawled. “If you still carry your admittedly incomprehensible regard for your friend Prince Ilyan Rajanas of Alezand.”
“Because?” Hlanan asked.
“The reason why,” Geric said, “I am at this moment constrained to act as Jardis Dhes-Andis’s errand runner—” He made a dismissive gesture in my direction. “Is because my late wife hired out the greater part of my Gray Wolves to him to watch the Idaron Pass.”
“Late wife,” Hlanan repeated. “You married the Duchess of Thann?”
Prince Geric’s mouth twisted. “You may congratulate and commiserate me. On second thought, don’t waste your breath.”
“And so,” Hlanan observed, still in that neutral tone, “it was not you who contracted the Gray Wolves to be sent to the Idaron Pass?”
I remembered that dramatic notch in the mountains on the western side of the continent. Directly below that pass lay Alezand, full of Gray Wolves.
“It was not I. Unfortunately, my late and dear wife withheld certain crucial dealings from her, ah, nuptial confidences. Shortly before our wedding, she made a pact with Dhes-Andis, her part being to send the Gray Wolves to the Pass,” Geric said impatiently. “I do not owe you any explanation of my own movements, but my own dealings with Dhes-Andis were separate from hers.”
“She got the book from you,” Hlanan observed, still in a neutral voice. “Was it her bride gift?”
Geric flushed, and lifted a shoulder sharply. “The book is gone. It’s immaterial now. Surely even you, sitting in your scribe tower somewhere, have heard that Dhes-Andis plans an invasion. I know not if that will be this month, this year, or this decade. He has not seen fit to share his imperial strategy with me. But when I asked him after my wife’s execution in Liacz to release the Gray Wolves from her pact, he said he would, if I brought him this thief.”
He made another dismissive gesture in my direction. “I still do not know why he wants this tiresome Hrethan. Maybe he collects them. The important point is that I want the Gray Wolves back, not wasted in the front lines leading the charge if he does intend to invade Alezand come spring.”
A cold, sick feeling harrowed my bones, but I struggled not to show it. “I don’t believe anything you say.”
“I don’t care what you believe,” Geric retorted. “You did get me out of Maita’s tower, so there is the information. Call it a trade. And ignore it as you will.” He turned to Hlanan. “We are riding west. Do what you want when we get there, scribe.”
FOUR
And so, as soon as the snow began to lift, we forced our way out of the caves, the animals up to their chests in drifts. Heads down, they toiled grimly into the diminishing storm, driven on so that the last of the wind and snow would disguise our tracks.
I was wild to talk to Hlanan alone, but we rode surrounded by Gray Wolves. Geric wasn’t letting us out of sight.
The Gray Wolf outriders had managed to scout ahead successfully enough to lead us down into relatively sheltered valleys, enabling us to reach the eastern slope of the mountain. We stopped when the animals needed it, sharing out cold trail food as some of the Gray Wolves stomped off in a group to do their sword practice, and others rested against nighttime guard duty.
My portion of the trail food was cheese as hard and as tasty as old wood, and bread like stone. As I chewed grimly, I couldn’t help but reflect on the old days when I went hungry, scrounging for food much like this and considering myself lucky.
Comfort sure spoils a person fast.
We reached flatter country before nightfall. We set up camp, Geric keeping Hlanan close by as he blabbed away about imperial politics. I didn’t know any of the names he brought up, so I daydreamed, but I couldn’t help noticing that when Geric got in the mood for these conversations, he monopolized Hlanan, riding at a distance from the Gray Wolves, except for the deaf one.
Did that mean he didn’t trust them? Yet another question I couldn’t answer. I contained my impatience as we settled down for the night.
As always, I made certain that my mind was well warded by a strong mental wall before I dared to fall asleep. Hlanan had taught me that—and it had worked to keep Dhes-Andis from finding me in the mental realm.
But my dreams wandered anywhere they willed, and I shivered in terror as an storm-dark cloud muttering with thunder advanced on me, flashes of green lightning searching, probing every shadow and cranny—
And there was the Blue Lady, walking through the shadows, banishing them with brushes of her hands. I recognized the graceful loops of her clothes as a Hrethan drape.
Was the Blue Lady my mother or an illusion? And if real, had she really abandoned me? Every time I tried to see her face. . . .
I woke up.
The faint blue of dawn outlined the west. Geric’s footsteps crunched dirt as he moved about, a scarcely discernible shadow figure. He gave me a boot in the side. “Up and ready to ride, thief.”
I reached for a rock to throw at his retreating figure, but Hlanan caught my hand. I sighed and straightened my drape as he got up and brushed his clothes off. Pandoc lent him a comb to drag through his tousled hair. Geric watched as Hlanan returned the comb, neither exchanging more words beyond “Thanks” and “Your horse is with Thusim” from the other as he chucked the comb into a saddlebag.
Someone passed cold bread around as we mounted up.
Geric took the lead. Nobles train early in riding, especially those who like fast sports like point-to-point races. From the way he watched Hlanan from time to time I couldn’t tell if he expected him to ride away or to fall off. Or maybe it was a silent contest, but if so, Hlanan seemed oblivious; when I caught sight of his profile, he seemed absorbed, as though his thoughts reached ahead down the trail.
The horses, bred for speed as well as endurance, appeared to enjoy the pace. They didn’t seem to mind the intermitten
t snow, constant low clouds, and cold fog.
With nothing to look at but gloomy indistinct shapes around us and mud below, I watched the company, distracted by Geric’s stink-eye glances at Hlanan, and finally by the blonde woman who I overheard addressed as Captain Nath, and once, Oflan.
Until now I’d regarded the Gray Wolves as an interchangeable parcel of villains, but that was when I was running from them. Now that I was among them I noticed things as they went about their routines of perimeter guard, sword practice, and camp making and breaking.
Like the fact that the Gray Wolves, when responding to an order from Geric, called him “Your Grace.” Ordinarily I paid no more attention to titles than I did to politics or court fashions. But I did know that princes and princesses usually went by “Your Highness,” something I’d gained a great deal of private amusement from when observing that short, snotty princess Kressanthe, a few months back, being addressed as “Hour Highness” by a fellow who towered at least three heads above her. Was anyone ever tempted to call her “Your Lowness?” I certainly would have, had I not been a couple fingers shorter than she was.
Anyway, “Your Grace” belonged to the likes of dukes and duchesses. So was this kind of a covert insult? I sure hoped so.
But they obeyed his commands promptly, and that included deaf Captain Nath, whom Geric completely ignored, except when he beckoned one of the orderlies or Pandoc the scout to convey an order to her in hand-sign, which he clearly did not know.
Hand languages varied from kingdom to kingdom, sometimes from city to city, or even strata within a city. For instance, I’d once been part of a gang of thieves led by an old codger who didn’t hear. Their hand language had been comprised mostly of quick finger taps, meanings changing depending on what was tapped: either palm, forearm, chest, chin.
In another city in Keprima, I’d stumbled across a scribe school made up almost entirely of deaf people. These scribes were well trained and highly regarded, hired exclusively by powerful people who found it convenient to employ scribes who could not hear their conversations.