Sasharia en Garde

  The boys had fallen silent. I was fine with that, busy with my own thoughts. Like, how I could get to a map without raising any questions—which meant lying. Which, of course, promptly threw right back at me all the self-righteous yap I’d given to Jehan about his lies.

  Of course my cause is good, I instantly told myself.

  But I could hear him insisting he wanted my dad back. If so, why didn’t he just come out and say so, as Prince Jehan—why the purple pirate secret identity? Could it be for the same reasons I was lying? But he was a prince! Princes had power.

  Or did he? On the yacht, Randart sure hadn’t behaved like . . .

  I sighed sharply, causing my mare to sidle.

  The boys looked over at me, Ban concerned, Red confused. “Anything wrong? Uh, Lasva?”

  “No. Just, next time someone tells me something, I’m going to listen,” I said with fake cheer. “Instead of boring myself afterward with trying to imagine what they would have said.”

  Now both looked confused. I sighed again and looked around. While I’d been arguing with myself for the thousandth time, we’d gradually left the other travelers behind. We were completely alone on a road that had narrowed to something little wider than a worn footpath. “Where are the others?”

  Ban said with a tight expression, “Others?”

  “Hirelings.” I motioned upward, as if picking an apple from a tree. “You cannot tell me I’m the only one hired from that place. I could name you at least a dozen who were faster and better than I. Taller, too.” I meant the last as a joke, and belatedly Red laughed, but it was a strangled sort of laugh, and Ban’s smile was more of a wince.

  I stopped my mare. “Um, what’s going on here?” I asked. “You two look like you swallowed glass. There’s nobody else around—”

  I was interrupted by the thud of horse hooves from beyond a rocky outcropping.

  From the other side of the scree, five guys in cadet brown emerged, followed by two more guys with a string of horses. The first rider was familiar—hawk nose a lot like my own, generous, curving lips, black eyes, long glossy black hair—

  “Damedran Randart?” I squeaked.

  His mouth dropped open. “How did you know that?”

  I swung my horse around. “All I know is,” I ripped my sword free, “I am not going anywhere with a Randart!”

  I whapped the mare’s sides. Her muscles bunched. She was very ready for a run.

  The others closed round me, their faces determined.

  None of them were armed. Yet. I whirled around in the saddle, and swung my sword so fast it hummed. Whizz—snap—whoosh! I cut through the reins on three of their mounts. The horses panicked, and the boys couldn’t control them.

  That was enough to win me a gap in their circle. I gave the mare the knees again. She, rested for weeks, loved the opportunity to gallop, and took off like a rocket. I bent low over her head, bushes whipped past—

  A darkish blur thundered up on one side. A flash of silver—Damedran Randart brought his sword down toward me.

  I slewed, whipped my blade up. I was already off-balance. I had never fought on horseback and feared my block would be weak, so I rose up in the stirrups the better to brace against his killing blow.

  Which was a feint. Damedran snapped his blade to a low flat thrust under my thigh. He flexed his wrist, and whoop! I tumbled right off the horse.

  Only my martial arts training in falling saved me from breaking at least an arm, if not my neck. I tucked under, rolled over what felt like 345,679 jagged boulders, and momentum propelled me to my feet.

  My sword had tumbled in one direction as I dropped in the other. I couldn’t see it, so I shifted into kenpo mode. When Damedran flung himself down from his horse, I whipped up a foot, kicked his blade clean out of his hand, followed up with a whirl and a sidekick to the knee, and he yelped, falling right in Ban’s path.

  I ran.

  Got about three steps before two big, brawny boys came at me, arms out. No swords. I feinted toward one, and when his hands jerked up to block, I gave him a nasty palm-heel strike to the solar plexus, blocked a reach from the other, and snapped another side-sweep to the knee. He went down first, the other whooping for breath as he stumbled after me.

  I whirled, dashed two steps—then two strong hands closed on my shoulders. I twisted, and used an elbow strike.

  A teenage-male whoof blew in my ear. I grabbed his arm to swing him into his partner—but he planted his feet, and his heavier weight caused me to stumble.

  And so the sixth one caught me round the waist. I twisted my hip in order to shift him off-balance, but he gave a grunt and lifted me off the ground. We both fell, he landing on top of me. Crunch. Thud. Three more muscle-bound teenage-boy bodies piled on in a first-class scrimmage heap, with me at the bottom.

  Now it was my turn to struggle for breath.

  The dogpile shifted, and the boys scrambled up. Two or three hands grasped at my arms, and knees thumped on my back and legs. Though I squirmed and struggled my mightiest, the fight was lost, and determined fingers twisted my hands behind me.

  I heard a breathless, “What do I use? What do I use?”

  “Who has the rope?” I recognized that voice as Red’s. “Nobody brought any? You idiots, we knew we had to—”

  “No rope!” The low voice was Damedran’s, equally breathless. “Rope is for criminals. You have your sash?”

  “We wore belts, remember?” That voice I didn’t recognize. It cracked on the word remember.

  “Here. Use your handkerchief. It’s besorcelled, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me do it. I don’t want her hurt.”

  I was struggling with all my might while this conversation went on, not that it did me any good. My hands were effectively bound. Damedran kept pausing to check the knots with shaking fingers.

  I heard various versions of fast, heavy-guy breathing all around me as someone stuck hands into my armpits and pulled me up so I could sit.

  When the dizziness subsided, I found myself looking into a football huddle of grim faces, as sweaty and dusty as I knew my own had to be. Red’s grimness was slightly bemused as he wheezed, and Damedran glowered.

  A couple of them exchanged uneasy glances, obviously unwilling to speak first. Damedran kept flicking dark-eyed looks up at me then down at one hand as the other rubbed at his knee.

  “Your call.” My heart raced. I shifted my weight, knowing I probably couldn’t do much besides spring to my feet, but if this ambush was shortly to end in murder, it wouldn’t be with my cooperation.

  Red gave me a somewhat shaky grin as he rubbed his middle. “Hoo, princess. You really do know how to fight.”

  Princess. Not Lasva.

  So this was a royal hunt.

  “Yah. Well. Not well enough to get away.”

  Damedran glared at me. “How did you know who I was?”

  I occupied myself for a moment in trying unsuccessfully to blow a couple of my braids out of my face. My hair knot, so easily made that morning (as the universe had neglected to hint that I should dress for abduction) had come undone.

  Though I was ambivalent about Jehan, I had one sure conviction: I did not trust Dannath Randart or any part of his family for a nanosecond. Reluctant to outright lie any more, I said slowly, “You look like your uncle. And I remember him from when I was little.”

  True, though I would not have recognized Damedran without that introduction aboard Jehan’s yacht.

  But he seemed to accept it.

  “If you’re supposed to kill me next, I really would like the chance to fight for my life.”

  Ban sat back, looking revolted, and Damedran said quickly, “We are not here to kill you.”

  I sighed. “Nice to know, but you have to see what it looks like to me. The disguises—” I nodded at Ban and Red in their humongous tunics. “The lie about hiring me—”

  “Why are you traveling under a false name?” Damedran asked abruptly.

&
nbsp; I shrugged. “Come on. Think about it. I’m yanked to this world against my will. My mother is taken prisoner. Am I really going to tell everyone who I am? I want to be left alone.”

  “To go to Tser Mearsies or to Bar Larsca?” He leaned forward. “I mean, what is there?”

  “Nothing except anonymity. I’ve been a law-abiding olive picker for the past few weeks. I was about to become an apple picker. I thought.”

  “But you said you had somewhere to be,” Red pointed out.

  I shrugged. “Conversational gambit. To find out how long I’d be hired.”

  They exchanged uncertain looks. I suspected they didn’t know whether to believe me or not. Time to get the subject from my goals to theirs.

  I wriggled my shoulders. “So what next? The noose, war-commander style, or would that be a crossbolt in the back?”

  Damedran’s splendid cheekbones highlighted even more splendidly with a blush.

  Ban said, “Bolt in the back? Why did you say that?”

  “Well, isn’t that the way he gets rid of inconvenient people? He certainly did to Magister Glathan. I cannot imagine he’d find me anything but inconvenient, or I wouldn’t have been ambushed like this.”

  More uneasy glances met these words.

  “Tell me where I’m wrong,” I invited, trying again to sling my braids out of my face. I needed to see. I would have expected gloating and bullying, but if anything, these boys seemed if not reluctant, at least ambivalent about their having captured me.

  “He wouldn’t,” Ban said, but I think we all heard the unspoken Would he? and he shot a pained look at Damedran.

  Who seemed to be totally absorbed in reading his palms. Once again quiet fell, except for the breeze through some autumn red trees, the distant chuckling of an unseen stream, and the snort of a horse.

  Finally I said, testing the parameters of this abduction, “Hey. If you’re not really going to kill me, how about untying me? You know I can’t get the drop on seven of you.”

  “Yes—” Ban began.

  But Damedran put out a hand. “She has magic, remember?”

  I sighed, wiggling my fingers. They were tingling slightly, despite Damedran’s efforts not to cut off my circulation. I suspect adrenaline had not made him as accurate in safe knot tying as he’d thought he was. “I only know about three spells. Make no mistake, they are powerful, but they are also specific. If I could transfer around by magic, I would have rescued my mother and vanished long ago.”

  Damedran turned to Ban, who jerked his chin up, then brought his attention back to me. “So you can’t use any of these powerful spells and turn us into rocks or something?”

  I shook my head. “They are specific, having to do with types of healing, I guess you could say. Like that one your guys saw me do when I was first brought here by Devli Eban. That spell changes . . .”

  I thought in English, because I did not know the magical vocabulary. The spell enabled one to “see” a poison in a person and shift what amounted to a dangerous molecule or two, so that they became neutral, and that shift propagated swiftly through the person.

  I turned my attention to Damedran, who had crouched down near me, one hand absently rubbing his sore knee as he waited for my answer. It seemed plain that this situation was as important for him as it was for me.

  “The spell calls a kind of fire, and not all people can hold it, but it seems I can. So you send the fire in a kind of thread into the person, and it burns out the poison, so to speak, and then is gone.”

  Ban nodded silently. “My sister said something of the sort once. But she said that kind of magic is only taught when you’re at a high level.”

  “My father was desperate,” I answered, glad to speak some truth, anyway. “And I guess I had the aptitude. My mother doesn’t. She told me once he tried to teach her, but she couldn’t hold the magic up here.” I tipped my head back and forth. “There wasn’t time to teach me all the basics, so he taught me that healing spell in hopes it would protect Mom and me in the other world. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough magic potential there for it ever to work.”

  Damedran rubbed his jaw. “You can’t use the spell to, I dunno, change someone’s mind about something?”

  I laughed. “No. No mood-altering, or mind-altering. At least, I do remember someone talking about the ancient Sartorans, and how they could do that sort of thing. How the villain Detlev can kill with just his mind, without moving a finger. But whether or not that’s true, or the exaggeration of rumor, I can’t do anything like that.”

  “Well, remember that Siamis fellow, Detlev’s nephew, enchanted us all by talking to leaders,” Red said.

  Damedran sighed. “All right, but those rotters are four thousand years old, supposedly. Enough about them. What use is magic? I mean, I know, it keeps water clean, and so forth. But—” He shrugged. “Can you use it for much of anything else?”

  Ban said soberly, “If you mean for war, my sister says any new spell has to be vetted by the Mage Council. And they find out if you’re doing them. Magic is like rain to them. Say you ride into a territory well after the clouds dispersed, but you can smell the wet grass, see puddles, so forth. That’s what my sister told me. There’s a lot of it at high levels that can do frightening things. But the other mages always know it.”

  Red said, “Like Siamis spreading that spell just by talking. Of course he didn’t care who knew he’d done it.”

  Come on, boys, see me as a person, not an objective. “Didn’t you all pretty much lose a year? That’s what I was told. Though I don’t get how enchanting leaders of countries got people enchanted, too.”

  Red pulled off the huge rough-woven tunic and threw it down, leaving him wearing his shirt and brown cadet riding trousers stuffed into his boots. He was the shortest and leanest of them, but that meant he was my size. “If you were loyal to anyone, and he enchanted that person, you fell into it, too. That’s what we were told.”

  Ban opened a hand. “My sister thinks time kind of stopped during that enchantment. The way they know is, babies stayed babies. You know how fast they grow. Nobody’s baby started walking and talking that year.”

  That’s right, talk to me, boys. Don’t let me be the war commander’s next crossbow target.

  One of the quieter boys spoke up unexpectedly. “There’s even bigger magic, in history. Like mages raised all the mountains north of Sartor. My tutor told me it affected weather for a century or more. Yet those spells didn’t keep out Norsunder.”

  That silenced everyone.

  I was trying to think of a way to shift the talk from evil mages to evil war commanders when Damedran got to his feet. He looked skyward, then around at the countryside, which was full of russet-hued trees and grass and late-flowering weeds, birds, a stream, and our horses, but no other people.

  Then he sighed and faced me, though he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I’d like to untie you. Even if you give us another run.” His brief grin was wry and changed his entire demeanor. His gaze touched mine for a fleeting moment. “I apologize for knocking you off the horse.”

  I shrugged. “Hey, you didn’t use the blade on me, for which I’m grateful. That was a cool trick.”

  Cool puzzled them, but they seemed to get the idea.

  “As for my part of the fight, well, I’m not going to apologize for anything until I am convinced I’m not on my way to a hasty execution, just because my family name happens to be Zhavalieshin.”

  Their easy expressions vanished as if wiped by a cloth.

  Damedran looked sulky and brooding again. “I can’t do anything until I report to my uncle and get orders.”

  “But—” Ban began.

  Damedran swung around. “You know what the orders were,” he snapped. Under his breath, though I heard it, “And what will happen if anything goes wrong.”

  I’d forgotten about fear.

  In silence he wrote a note reporting my capture, put it in his magical transfer box, and sent it to the war commander.


  Chapter Twenty

  In a lifetime of unexpected blows and tough decisions, Jehan had avoided the toughest of all.

  Until now.

  As soon as he received Owl’s note—I think I found her, somewhere in Bar Larsca, but Damedran is ahead of me—he sent Kazdi to dispatch one of his covert teams of guards to Owl as backup.

  And then he had to wait.

  Days dragged by, excruciatingly slow and meaningless. He stood next to his father to review the palace guard before the chosen wing rode off to participate in the war game. He sat in the royal box during two jaw-stiffeningly boring plays dedicated ostentatiously to the king. Canardan skipped out on the second one, but Jehan remained where all could see him. He attended balls, picnics, regattas, dancing the night away and in the morning he attended trade sessions, but only as a spectator.

  Then, unexpectedly, the king said after breakfast one morning, “There’s no putting off these hearings concerning this treason-trial foolery. You may as well suffer along with me. It’ll look good when these Guild Council fools unload the speeches they’ve been scribbling for days.”

  On the ride over (in an open carriage, so they could be seen, but surrounded by armed guards, so they couldn’t be touched) Jehan said, “Why are we here? It’s hot and stuffy in those halls, Father. Are you really going to hold a treason trial for those people?”

  “Of course not. Treason trials are nothing but an excuse to riot or an excuse to kill off half the populace. I don’t want either of those things.”

  “So why do we go?”

  “Because it looks like good faith. I’ll whittle ’em down, one or two at a time, while we negotiate the trial. Meantime we’ll let them talk as long as they like. It makes them feel good to talk. I want them to feel good. And so they can keep on making speeches and negotiating and feeling good until there’s none of the fools left in prison.”

  Canardan had not meant to say that much, but the question on such a hot morning was unexpected. For some reason Jehan’s tone reminded him of Math in the old days, the same dreamy pretense at being reasonable, without any awareness of how kings really did things.