He stopped in the nick of time, the blade of her dagger pressing between his middle and index fingers just before the point of drawing blood. The motion that had put it there was so quick and fluid that he hadn’t even seen it.
Rhapsody looked up at him for only the second time.
“Now, I believe I’ve been polite, but you don’t seem to be listening. If you have smudged one note of my work you will henceforth only be able to count to six, and you will need to drop your pants to do so. Now please, go and leave me in peace.” With all eyes now on her she reinked her quill and returned to her work, her hand still on the dagger.
The stranger glared at her, removed his hand gingerly from the table, and left the tavern, jostling past a few of the remaining patrons and slamming the heavy wooden door behind him. Barney watched him go, and then came to Rhapsody’s table, a look of concern wrinkling his kindly face.
“Don’t you know who he works for, darlin’?” he asked anxiously, watching Dee begin to gather the plates and debris left on the hastily vacated tables.
Rhapsody was methodically stacking the parchment leaves and rolling them into scrolls. “Of course. Michael, the Waste of Breath. What a ridiculous name.”
“I wouldn’t be talking so disrespectfully, love. He’s become a lot more dangerous of late. And he has a lot more ears than he used to.”
“Oh dear. And he wasn’t all that attractive to begin with.” Rhapsody stuffed the roll of papers into her oilcloth satchel, and began to pack up the small items on the table, leaving out only a wilted primrose and a scrap of vellum.
She corked the inkwell and tied it carefully into the pocket she had sewn within the sack, wrapped her harp in its burlap cover and placed it in on top. Then she began to write again on the vellum scrap, methodically and slowly this time.
“On second thought, Barney, I will have some more of that soup.”
The others were already breaking camp when Gammon reached the outpost outside the northwestern wall of Easton. He could tell by the tone of Michael’s voice, barking commands to his henchman and berating the men-at-arms, that this was not safe news to deliver. His only hope was that the wild instability that had plagued their leader of late might cause him to forget the errand that Gammon had been sent out on. That hope was dashed with one look at Michael’s face.
“Where is she?” he demanded, striding to Gammon and shoving aside the lackey he had been abusing.
“She’s apparently out of the business, sir.”
Michael’s eyes opened wide and Gammon saw within them a battle for self-control raging. “You couldn’t find her? How could you miss her?”
Gammon hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I found her, m’lord. She refused to come.”
Michael blinked, and it seemed to Gammon that his eyes darkened and grew calm again.
“Refused. She refused?”
“Yes, sir.”
Michael turned and watched the men packing up the horses and the weapons.
“Perhaps you misunderstood my order, Gammon,” he said calmly as the sour black smoke from the doused campfires billowed toward them and over the wide meadow, where it hung like dirty wool in the air. “I didn’t want you to ask the wench if she would like to accompany us. I expected you to bring her back.”
“Yes, m’lord.”
“Now go back to town and get her. Gods, she barely comes up to your shoulder. Drag her by that beautiful golden hair, if necessary. Did you see her hair, Gammon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I have thought about that hair for a long time, Gammon. Can you imagine what that hair feels like in your hands?”
“Yes m’lord.”
“No, you can’t, Gammon,” Michael said, his voice cold and emotionless. “You can’t because the pouch between your legs is empty. You have never had her, have you? I thought not. It is not something one such as you would survive.
“Now I, Gammon, I have had her, and I have never experienced the equal of it. She’s part Lirin, did you notice that? Lirin women have an especially sweet taste, did you know that, Gammon? Hers is particularly fine. And—well, let us just say that her hair is only the beginning of her charms, charms you could not even begin to imagine.
“Perhaps, though, Gammon, if you remain in my good favor, I will let you try her out a little. Just enough to make your wretched life worth something while keeping you from any major damage, hmmm? Once I’ve had my fill of her—or should I say she’s had her fill of me? What say you, Gammon? Would you like that?”
Gammon knew this trap. “I’ll go get her, m’lord,” he said.
“Good man,” said Michael, and he returned to the field.
Rhapsody had just finished the last penstroke on the scrap of vellum and was blotting it dry when Gammon returned to the Hat and Feathers. The tavern was now empty save for Barney and Dee, and they watched in dread as he strode to her table again and stood across from her. As before, Rhapsody did not look up at him as she finished her work.
“You will come with me,” Gammon said.
“Can’t today. Sorry.”
“Enough of this,” Gammon snarled. He grabbed with one hand for the long fall of golden hair held in place by a simple black ribbon; with the other he drew a short sword.
The tavernkeepers watched him double over in pain as Rhapsody slammed the table forward into his groin and pushed him up against the wall with it. He gasped as she ground the corner of the table into his genitals, and his head bobbed down over the table board. She knocked his sword onto the floor next to him, retrieved it, and then leaned forward over the table and spoke directly into his ear.
“You are a very rude man. Go and tell your commander that I said what he was planning to do to me he should do to himself. Do you understand?”
Gammon glared at her, and she put her dagger to his throat before moving the table for him to pass.
“One more thing,” she said as she backed him toward the door. “I will be leaving right after you, and I won’t be back. Either you and the other thugs you will undoubtedly summon to help you can bother these people, or you can try to catch me. I wouldn’t waste the time here if I were you.” She threw his sword into the filth of the street.
Gammon spat at her as he left the tavern for a second time.
“A very rude man,” Rhapsody repeated to Barney and Dee. She dropped a handful of coins onto the table, then gave Dee a quick hug. “I’ll go out the front door. You should probably close up until suppertime. I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve caused you.”
“Be careful now, dear,” said Dee, fighting back tears.
Rhapsody pulled her cloak from the peg by the entrance and donned it quickly. She slung her satchel over her shoulder and onto her back, and made for the door. As she passed him she gave Barney the scrap of vellum along with one last smile.
“Good luck to you, Barney,” she said, kissing his cheek. “And if you should ever come upon a troubadour, get him to play this for you.”
Barney look down at the scrap in his hand. On it were graphed five straight lines and a series of musical notes. “What is this, darlin’?” he asked.
“Your name,” she said, and she left.
Dee went to the table, pocketed the coins, and picked up the soup bowl and spoon, and the discarded quill. “Barney,” she said, “come have a look at this.”
There on the table lay a primrose, fresh and fragrant as the moment it was picked.
The back streets of Easton were dark and cool, a haven from the scorching sun. The two men traveled silently over the cobblestones, past bickering merchants and domestic squabbling, unnoticed in the shadows. That Grunthor could pass without being seen attested to the blinding heat of the day and the depth of the shade in the streets. Normally his sheer size and mass stopped conversation and traffic on the rare occasions he entered a city.
The Brother could sense the more crowded streets long before they got to them, the deafening vibration of the heartbeats of the unwashed masses throbbin
g in his ears and skin. Whenever a large group of people were present in an upcoming street they would circumvent it, taking an alternate route, adding time to their journey but increasing their chances of going unnoticed.
They picked their way down a deserted section, avoiding scattered refuse and the human garbage that was sleeping off the last night’s binge, belching and muttering at the cobblestones beneath their faces. Neither man looked down as they stepped over the drunkards and piles of rubbish, dodging the obstacles with a practiced gait.
The upcoming alley was empty, the Brother knew, and it was a feeder street to the external thoroughfares of the southeastern section. A few streetcorners more and they would be within reach of the wharf, and the surrounding bustle would swallow them up into anonymity.
The Brother and Grunthor had traversed most of the alley, were within fifty yards of its end, when a commotion spilled into it. A handful of clumsy town guards rounded the corner and came into the alley, chasing a street wench. The two men came to an involuntary stop in the shadow of the buildings.
Rhapsody stepped into the street in front of the Hat and Feathers, scanning the area for any of the miscreants and lowlifes she remembered from Michael’s ragtag band of followers.
The pub was on the Kingsway, one of the busiest of Easton’s thoroughfares near the northwestern gate, and the street was teeming with human and animal traffic, pounding with noise and stench. Not seeing anyone she recognized as one of his ruffians, she crossed the muddy road, avoiding as best she could the puddles of muck left over from the last night’s thunderstorm.
At the center of the Kingsway she met up with Pilam the baker, attempting to navigate a heavy wheeled pushcart covered in burlap through the bemired street. Like a stone breaking the flow of a river, he was causing the stream of people to part and pass around him, sometimes narrowly missing him. His bald pate was red with exertion and shiny with sweat, but his face broke out in a wide grin when he saw her.
“Rhapsody! How are you this fine afternoon?”
“Hello, Pilam. Here, let me give you a hand with that.”
Rhapsody scanned the street again, dodged some merchants who were skittering around the obstacle, then took hold of the near side of the cart and raised it out of the rut that was preventing it from moving. Pilam gave it another push and the cart lurched forward, scattering a pile of flat loaves of bread from under the cloth covering. He caught one as it fell, then offered it to her as they again joined the traffic propelling down the muddy street.
“Well, thank you, dear. Please, take this, with my thanks.”
“Pilam, you are so gallant. Thank you,” Rhapsody said, tossing her head in a manner that made the golden fall of hair catch the light and flashing him a smile that made him weak in the knees.
She stuffed the bread into her pack, then looked around again. Her exaggerated movements had caught the eyes of a number of passersby, which was her intention; the more witnesses who saw her away from the Hat and Feathers, the safer Barney and Dee would be.
As she came to the cross street, she noticed a familiar-looking man engaged in an intense conversation with a town guard. Quickly pulling up the hood of her cloak, she stepped behind a line of barrels in front of the bowyer’s shop and watched as a second guard joined the conversation. Then the three of them made their way rapidly down the street toward the Hat and Feathers.
Rhapsody looked on anxiously as the men approached the tavern, stopping passing townsfolk on their way. After having no apparent luck with the first three or four people they asked, a woman nodded in answer to their questions and pointed up the street in her general direction. She sighed in relief as they turned and ran back toward her, the opposite way from the Hat and Feathers. She put her hood down again and rounded the corner onto the cross street.
Leaving the Kingsway put her out of the mercantile district and into the narrower, alleyed streets of residential buildings. Rhapsody knew this area well; it was easy to find alcoves and porticos in this section of town in which to hide. She was almost to the end of the first block when she heard shouting behind her.
She wheeled around to see about a dozen men, several of whom were town guards, running at full tilt toward her, drawing weapons. Rhapsody was amazed. Michael had never been able to count the town guard among his lackeys when she had been unfortunate enough to have commerce with him, but that was almost three years ago. Apparently Barney was right about his growing influence. This was going to be more difficult than she had thought.
Rhapsody ducked around the corner and pulled up her hood once again. She hurried across the street and made for the second alley, which ran between a one-story shack with a thatched roof and a building with two floors fashioned out of mudbrick. The shack had a root cellar, and she was able to squeeze along the side of the hole and under some thatch fallen from the roof. She made herself as comfortable as she could, listening to gauge the guards’ approach.
She could hear them for some time before they came into her line of sight, checking the alleys across the street. From the sound of it they had broken into smaller groups and were splitting up to comb the area more quickly. It also seemed to her that there were many more of them than before.
A group of three came around the corner and walked past her head. She took a deep breath and held it while they looked around, kicking over broken crates and boards, cursing.
She felt like cursing herself—how could she have missed Michael’s ascent to importance? Her general loathing of him had won out over her common sense, and her miscalculation could cause her problems she was not prepared to deal with. But, she reminded herself, it’s not like I had another choice. To have gone with Gammon obediently would have been unthinkable.
Rhapsody watched as one of the three guards scattered a pile of lump coal next to another mudbrick building a few blocks up. A man in a leather apron ran out into the street, cursing and shouting. As the argument grew heated she used the distraction to slip out of her hiding place and dashed around the corner, back toward the cross street that led to the Kingsway. She was almost to the first corner when a cry went up behind her.
There was no way to make it back to the Kingsway now. There was also no hope of taking shelter in a house—even if the residents let her in, she might be responsible for bringing disaster upon them. Rhapsody fled, breaking into a run that took her up the first alley and three blocks deeper into the back streets before the guards rounded the corner. They were shouting, and as they pursued her up the alley two more appeared from a street just in front of her. She was trapped in the middle.
Rhapsody tried to run for a side alley, but she was brought to the ground almost immediately. The guard who seized her rolled her over onto her back and slapped her full across the face; she returned the favor by booting him in the testicles. As he hunched over in pain she scrambled to her feet and broke away from his grip, only to be grabbed by the second guard. He pulled her arms roughly behind her back, lifted her off the ground, kicking and struggling, and carried her back into the main alley.
“My, you certainly are a lot of trouble,” he said into her ear as he jerked her down the street. “But I’m sure you’ll make it worth his while, won’t you? When he’s rammin’ it in you, darlin’, think of me.” His mouth closed on her neck, and his free hand groped her breast.
With great effort Rhapsody twisted one of her arms free, sending a stabbing pain from her shoulder to her fingers. Fighting to overcome the wave of nausea that followed the pain, she flicked her wrist to bring her dagger forth, twisting her fingers to make it slide into her palm.
She slashed over her head and behind her, aiming for his eyes. The speed with which she hit the ground as he dropped her and doubled over assured her she had struck her target. His screams shocked the three guards who had been following behind her and had stopped where they stood when they saw her captured.
Before they could move she had taken off again, running at breakneck speed down the main alley and into the darker
parts of the back streets. When they recovered their composure the three gave chase, while the other tried to tend to his hemorrhaging companion. They saw her dart past two women carrying baskets of clothes and slip down yet another corridor in the street.
Rhapsody entered the alley and stopped, looking around for a place to hide. There was none. She ran forward again, then stopped abruptly when she saw two shapes approaching her from the other end of the street.
The first was a man of gigantic proportion in metal-banded leather armor wearing a helmet with a pointed spike on the top. The second figure was cloaked and hooded, his face covered with what appeared to be a form of veil, and though he appeared diminutive next to the giant, she knew he was tall as well. He moved with an agility that startled her; when he saw her he stopped immediately, about three steps sooner than the giant was able to.
Rhapsody looked behind her again. The three guards had rounded the corner and had closed the distance between them to about thirty feet. She was trapped between the strangers and the guards. Given what she knew about the guards, she decided to appeal to the strangers for assistance.
She turned to the two odd travelers. “Please help me,” she gasped, puffing from exertion. “Let me pass.” The strangers looked to each other, but did not move.
The guards slowed their steps but continued forward, walking three abreast. Rhapsody turned to face them again. She would need to convince them these strangers were her allies, powerful allies. She did her best to smile at the odd-looking men.
“Pardon me, but would you be willing to adopt me for a moment? I’d be grateful.”
The man next to the giant nodded slightly.
“Thank you,” Rhapsody gasped again. She turned back to the town guard. “What an extraordinary coincidence,” she panted, a smile of false bravado on her exquisite, sweating face. “You gentlemen are just in time to meet my brother. Brother, these are the town guards. Gentlemen, this is my brother—Achmed—the Snake.”