I was not a sheltered young thing who could believe no wrong of a cove I liked. Nor was I terrified to face the idea of a turncoat. If we had one and he, or she, went uncaught, then we were as good as dead.
Those two dead men were the professionals, the ragamuffin bandits there simply to distract us. It was the professionals who’d set the bronze tag on Farmer’s pack before Drummer and Steady caught them. The count’s people had surely had plenty of time to learn what bags belonged to each of us. The threat came from outside our group. The trick would be to escape them without losing our quarry.
Farmer, Tunstall, Achoo, Pounce, and the horses were gathered under the spreading arms of an ancient oak, out of the rain, when we returned to them. “I searched down the other trail,” Tunstall said when we were within hearing. He pointed to the path opposite the direction of the road. “No camp. Someone halted within view of us and ran back to others on horses. They all rode south, but I could follow only a little before the storm washed out their tracks.”
“Two dead men in the road, attired the same as our attackers from Queensgrace,” Sabine replied. “Beka has an amulet from one—”
“Two,” I said. “The second is from a bandit. He had some coin as well.”
“And I have an amber earring,” Sabine continued. “Farmer?”
He was holding a silk bag against his forehead. I thought I’d seen it in his pack, wrapped about something square. “Not yet.” He opened the bag and held it out to us. “Put them in here. I’ll get to the earring and coins when I’ve got myself back up to strength. You know I can’t manage amulets. The rest—that won’t be today. I’ll try to get my Gift restored, but it won’t be enough for anything big.”
Thunder rolled in the distance. The storm was returning. Sabine grimaced. Tunstall ran his fingers through his hair. “Sore-biting lice on this Hunt,” he grumbled. “If I’m remembering the last road sign, there’s a wayhouse three miles along. Let’s stay there tonight. We can leave word of our dead bandits for the army patrols while we’re at it.”
We collected ourselves and I put my cuirass back on before we returned to the highway. Achoo was the only one in good humor, rolling gleefully in the mud. She did it twice more when she discovered I was too weary and lost in my thoughts to stop her. Sabine rode my Saucebox, giving Drummer and Steady a rest, though Pounce rode Drummer. Pounce gets surly when he’s wet, and he never wants to talk with anyone. At least he didn’t rub it in by vanishing to the Divine Realms.
I followed Achoo at a trot mixed with a walk. The scent she had was strong yet, thanks to the prince’s piss-markers. Another day or two of these hard rains and the scent would be overwhelmed. Only prayer could change that. I finally had to take off my boots and stockings and run barefoot as the mud got slippery under my hobnailed soles. Luckily for us the local folk kept the dirt of the road packed down hard, or we’d have been deep in mud.
The rain continued, growing harder as the storm got worse. I almost overran the wayhouse before I realized the black shape by the road was its wall.
The place was huge, walled all about, four stories tall from ground to attic. It was as big as Provost’s House, built to give cover to several caravans at a time as well as anyone that might come alone.
The wayhouse keeper would have put us in a dormitory with twenty or so other travelers, had he not spotted Lady Sabine’s shield and the haughty look she gave him as we waited on a long porch out of the downpour. He had but one room left, he told us, and it with two beds. He apologized over and over for the lack, saying his people would dry out our bedrolls in time for the extra two to sleep warm in the stables and we could eat for free, though not drink.
I did not miss the looks of regret Tunstall and Sabine exchanged. “One moment,” I told the man. “If you would set your folk to getting the room ready?” Once he had left us alone, I said to the others, “Someone ought to stay with the horses and Achoo, just in case. I’m volunteering. I prefer straw and animal smell to stale inn pallets and too many merchants.”
“That’s a good idea,” Farmer said. “Beka and I can trade off watches in the stable. You two can guard the packs in the room.”
“Who would bother the beasts?” Tunstall wanted to know. “Places like this—Sabine!”
She had delivered a hard elbow to his ribs. “Don’t be a hoddy-dod,” she said with a smile for Farmer and me. “They’re giving us a night alone. Let’s take the packs to the room. Say thank you while you’re about it.”
Tunstall blushed a fiery red. He muttered sommat that might have been a thank-you and hoisted some packs on both shoulders. I took charge of the other horses as Sabine brought Drummer and Steady along. The big horses would do naught unless she gave them the special signs and words to obey. I can’t help but think that it is like having two more Achoos, both the size of bears. If only they could be taught the craft of scent hounds, they would be the perfect creatures for Dogs.
The stable was bigger than Jane Street kennel. It was oddly built, with two long buildings that housed four rows of horses in each. The buildings were connected by a smaller one at the center. Hostlers raced out of that one to take control of our other mounts, showing Sabine where Drummer and Steady could be lodged. While she saw to them, I chanced a look out of a back door. From there I could see white-painted railings like fences, but regularly broken, about twenty yards behind the stable. Rows of them stood there between building and wall. I was confused, but then, we’d never had cause to stop in a really big wayhouse before this. Normally Tunstall and I preferred to sleep wild on a Hunt.
The hostlers were a cheery group. They were good enough to arrange an area where all of our animals could be near each other. When I explained to the chief hostler that Farmer and I would spend the night with our horses, he fetched out blankets and safe lanterns and kept an open box stall for us to bed down in. He took my coin and my thanks and bowed to Sabine, who had groomed Drummer and Steady as we settled the other horses. When Farmer arrived with his shoulder pack, he helped to groom our remaining animals with me, waving the stable lads and gixies off to their supper with a grin. For a time we all busied ourselves in quiet, looking after our pack animals and riding mounts alike, seeing to it that they got a decent supper when we were done. They had earned it.
I felt better there than I had all day, wrapped in the scent of horses, straw, and the old stone of which the stables were built. It was good simply to work there with Sabine and Farmer at their most silent, comfortable with the tasks of horse care. A couple of stable hounds came to sniff at Achoo as I cleaned her up, wagging their tails and acting like gentlemen. They were friendly folk, ranging in all sizes, down to one curly little thing who could rival the Butterfly Puppies. She and Achoo had quite a talk, nose to nose, before the little pup ran off into the shadows.
At last Sabine climbed the ladder to check the loft for anyone who might be lingering. Farmer and I, understanding what she did, inspected the rest of the place. Once we were certain we were alone, we joined Sabine at the stalls where Drummer and Steady were settled.
“I should have done this before,” Sabine told us. “It’s needful that you two be able to handle my lads here without trouble, just in case.” She took Farmer’s hand first and drew him over until he held his hand out, palm up, under Drummer’s nose. “Friend, Drummer,” she told the big gelding softly. “This is Farmer, and he’s a friend. Friend.” She pressed a lump of sommat she’d been holding onto Farmer’s hand. “Feed it to him, and say friend several times,” she told the mage. She did the same with me and Steady, then had us switch horses so that we were formally introduced to both. Inside me I had a little shiver. What if I was wrong, and Sabine was introducing her splendid warriors to a traitor? “You’ve done this with Tunstall?” I asked.
“Of course,” the lady replied. “Otherwise Drummer might have killed him the first time he saw us embrace!” She grinned. “Drummer can be most protective.”
“Remind me to stay on his good side,” Farm
er said, giving Steady a nervous pat. “I take it what’s in these balls isn’t just sugar or fruit?”
“You take it rightly,” Sabine replied. “It’s my own special mixture. They’re trained to take ordinary food from stable folk, but any who try to feed them by hand will get an unpleasant surprise. Honest people know better than to get in close with a knight’s horses.”
“What about mashes?” I asked. “Food in buckets?”
“They know the common poisons by smell,” Sabine replied, stroking Drummer’s big nose. “If they detect even the tiniest hint, they refuse the meal. They’re my good, clever lads.”
While Farmer and Sabine talked about horse training, I ordered Achoo to stay with them. Then I went to cleanse myself of the mud that was splattered all over me. As I rinsed off the mud on the kitchen porch I listened to the help’s talk. Mostly it was about sweethearts, hard work, and the busy night ahead with so many travelers in the house. One thing in particular caught my ear. It seemed the local lordling had raised the tax on his people without even waiting to see if the harvest would be good or bad. If it was bad, a great many starving folk would be on the roads this autumn, looking for work and a place to live.
Once I was clean, I went to the taproom. There a serving mot told me where to find the room given to our party. Looking about me as I crossed to the stairs, I saw eaters and drinkers pleased to be out of the rain. None wore only black. They were a mixed lot, farmers on their way to a wedding, merchants and their guards bound south and complaining loudly of the fees lords were charging on the side roads, a knight and his sister, accompanied by their guards and servants. I gathered all this as I crossed to the stairs that would take me to my partners’ room.
“Be careful as you travel,” the innkeeper advised everyone from his place by the taps. “Bandits and slave takers on the road of late. And the lords are that irritable nowadays. Troublesome times …” He shook his head.
I did not like hearing that, either, but none of this bad news was my problem. Wearily I climbed two flights of stairs to reach the room. I could recognize it by the familiar pairs of boots set beside the door to dry.
Somehow Farmer and Sabine had beat me there. Perhaps they had not been eavesdropping downstairs. They and Tunstall were on the thin beds, bowls of soup in their hands and cups of ale on the floor by their feet. I picked up the bowl on the floor next to Sabine. She and I sat directly across from the lads.
“No bread?” I asked, staring into the bowl. It held meat stripped from the bone, turnips, onions, noodles, fresh peas, chunks of this and that, garlic, thyme, and who knew what else. It was a basic bordel stew, left to simmer at the back of the stove and changing as the cook dumped each day’s scraps into the pot. The results went one of two ways.
I tasted it, using the spoon I kept in a side pocket of my shoulder pack, and sighed happily. This batch had gone well.
Sabine passed me a chunk of heavy, moist bread and the butter pot. “The choice was cold ham, bordel stew, or wait two hours before the beef they’d just put on to roast was done,” she explained. “The innkeeper told me they almost never ran out of mains before in all the days his family’s run this place for the Crown.”
I nodded and dipped a serious mouthful out with my spoon. “Achoo and Pounce?” I asked before I ate it.
We have been fed, Pounce told me sleepily. I told Achoo it was all right to do so. He was curled up on the bed where the men sat, snug against Farmer’s heavy thigh. I yanked my eyes away from the discovery that Farmer’s legs were very well muscled. Achoo is under the bed with a bone. She fears someone will take it, though none of us have ever done so.
Now that Pounce mentioned it, I could hear the sound of Achoo crunching a bone eagerly. Sabine was grinning.
“She pays us the compliment of thinking we are like her, grumpy one,” Sabine told Pounce.
It is not a compliment to me, replied Pounce.
I looked at Tunstall, who ate without speaking. It should have occurred to me that his bones would be aching, given the weather.
“Do you need a rub?” I asked.
From the way she sagged against the wall, her face strained, Sabine was too weary to have thought of it. “Donkey puke,” she whispered. “Mattes?”
“I do not want nursemaids,” Tunstall snapped. “A man pays no heed to pain of any kind, not traitors and their weapons, and not bones. The only pain he should heed is what he serves up for his enemies.”
I rolled my eyes and caught Sabine doing the same. The pain must be bad for Tunstall to talk like a hillman.
I glanced at Farmer to see if he could help Tunstall, but he was trying to dig a thread of meat from between his teeth, using his bone pick. Seemingly he was not about to say anything. Before I could swat him for being annoying, he put the pick away.
Farmer, the things you mean to use make my nose itch, Pounce complained.
“I’ll need you to take your breeches off,” Farmer told Tunstall lazily. “And I am sorry, Master Constellation, but my medicines are the easiest solution just now.”
Sabine and I looked at each other. “I’ll check the animals,” I offered just as Sabine said, “I should take a last look at my horses.”
“Cowards,” Farmer told us as Tunstall glared at him. “Ask the house to send up a small pot of hot water, if you will.”
“Hurt me and you’re a dead cove, mage,” Tunstall announced.
Farmer glared at Tunstall. Now there were sparks in his blue eyes. Tunstall had finally gotten under his skin. “Enough carping, curse it all! I have a headache!” he snapped at Tunstall. “You haven’t been holding off four or more harmful spells a day along with everything else, you rock-skulled hillman. We’ve been under constant assault. If Gershom hadn’t been lucky enough to have me at Blue Harbor, you’d be dead by now, do you understand that?”
“Ho, the great mage!” Tunstall cried, rising from his seat on the bed. “So you’ve halted the rebellion all by yourself, have you? Just you, a stink-assed pig’s knuckle from the midlands!”
I began to wonder if they hadn’t had enough cold water that day and if I ought to fetch a bucket of it to throw on both of them.
“Chaos take us all, have you a brain that you actually use?” Farmer demanded. “Of course not! But I am keeping some enemy mages busy, folk I imagine they thought they’d be putting to better use than keeping one four-Dog Hunt under watch!”
“It’s more than the four of us!” Tunstall snapped. “You poxy cityman, what do you know of the way a Hunt’s done? There’s the Dogs we’ve requested from Frasrlund—”
“Are there?” Farmer asked. “Are there? How would you know? We’re cut off from everyone, remember?”
“And the teams in Corus!” Tunstall shouted. “They’ve met and combined notes and read our reports by now, and they’re on the Hunt, too, hobbling these Rats in their dens!”
“Wonderful!” Farmer shouted back. “I’ll just go and let one of those teams snap at my tail awhile, so you may have some rest!” He clenched his fists, took a breath, and looked at Sabine and me. “Now, if I’m to heal this oaf, I need hot water.” He glared at Tunstall. “Unless you like to suffer?”
Sabine and I hurried out. On our way downstairs, I told her, “There was this fortuneteller we saw once, at a fair in Kleo.”
Sabine nodded. “The Bazhir trade there.”
“Yes,” I replied. “The fortuneteller said to Tunstall that his was a sunny nature that would bind friends to him.” Sabine’s mouth twitched. I added, just between us mots, “I always wondered what she’d been drinking, and if I should try it.”
Sabine burst into laughter.
I didn’t hear our door open or close, but a moment later Pounce and Achoo caught up with us. “Did you know about the spell attacks?” Sabine asked Pounce loudly. The sound of the taproom was drowning out any noise on the stair.
Pounce answered with his mind. I did. He didn’t want you to know you’ve all been under spell-siege. I thought you were clever
enough to have thought of it, given the bad luck that’s befallen this Hunt. There’s only so much one mage can do, as good as this one is.
Sabine cajoled the pot of hot water from one of the cooks. “I’ll take it back to the lads,” she told me when she had the pot in hand. “I trust you to look after the horses.” She winked at me. “We’ll see you in the morning.”
The cook gave me a gift of berry turnovers before I went back out into the wet. As I made my way back to the barn, I wrestled with envy. The best thing about Holborn was our time in bed. I missed the bedding, though not the man, and I deeply envied Sabine and Tunstall that night.
Outside I discovered that the rain continued to beat down as hard as before. At least there was a covered wood path from the inn to all three parts of the stables. I stayed mostly dry but for a few wind-driven spits of water. The central building turned out to be a station and residence for the stablemen. They were gathered in their watch room with an after-supper drink. They waved to me as I passed through on my way into our stable building. There were a few lamps for light, the horses being well asleep, so I found my way easily to the section where we’d been placed. Over the box stall where Farmer and I had set up for the night, I saw the hostlers had hung a good lamp. Achoo and Pounce were curled up in the straw already.