“Yes.”
In the fire pit, she found the remains of the letter; a single piece of curled blackened paper remained intact. Very little remained legible. . . . fathered by a Tibler . . . pushing to find this lover, then the Porters must act. Tell this information to your wives in private. Warn them to be careful. The Porters have proved to be extremely dangerous. . . . Remember your aunts are as close as Annaboro.
Kij? With sickening clarity, she knew then. The Porters had lured the princesses into marriage, and then used Keifer to deal them death. He poisoned her father. He had been the one who demanded they go to a theater filled with explosives. He had been the one who delayed their arrival, preventing any search for danger. The royal family never suspected the Porters—too many of them had died that night too. Thinking back, now knowing Kij’s ruthlessness, Ren realized that only the feeblest of the Porter mothers had been at the box. Had Keifer known that he had been walking into a death trap? Or had Kij kept him ignorant of it all?
No, Ren couldn’t believe Keifer was innocent. He took too much pleasure in hurting her and her sisters. Keifer’s and Eldest Porter’s deaths must have been an accident—perhaps Keifer misunderstood the Porters’ instructions and wasn’t supposed to go himself. Certainly the Porters never tried to explain why Eldest Porter had arrived so late, or used the back entrance. Had she been rushing to save Keifer, who wasn’t where they planned him to be?
If Keifer hadn’t died in the theater, who would have been next on the Porters’ list? Her mothers and all the adult princesses, leaving the Porters regent to the youngest? The entire family?
Yes, the entire family. Sisters-in-law inherit an orphaned estate. They were an ancient and powerful family, lacking only a royal marriage, thus Jerin’s kidnapping.
If the Porters planned to marry Jerin, then there was hope. They would keep him alive, and hopefully clean. Logic suggested that they would take him to the Destiny, and from there, upriver to above Hera’s Step to the ducal seat, Avonar. She needed only to catch up with them before they could force the marriage.
And then she had vengeance to wreak.
Jerin woke to female voices arguing. For a moment of complete disorientation, he thought he was home with his sisters squabbling as usual. Then he remembered the attack at the palace, the desperate struggle to leave a warning for Ren as they dragged him from his rooms, the entry door booming like a great drum as the guard tried to force their way in. His attackers had been hampered by the fact that they wanted him unharmed—if they had wanted him dead, he would have never been able to fight free long enough to write his message on the wall.
At one point, though, one of them had whined, “Give it to him, already!” and a needle had jabbed into him like a wasp’s sting. Everything went weird and dreamy after that. A race down a dark tunnel. The garden from an upside-down perspective. A wagon ride with wheels rumbling like unending thunder. It seemed as if the true him had been shrunk down, caught like a butterfly in a glass jar, and was riding in the large shell of his body. That tiny him, unable to act, watched with helpless alarm as they slipped out of the city and took to the Queens highway before sleep finally spared him the agony of witnessing his own abduction.
“Just tell us straight—how did ya know it was us that nabbed the royal mount?” a woman was saying as he woke up.
“I guessed,” a second woman answered in a cultured alto that seemed familiar, as if Jerin had talked to her before. “Anyone with two ears and two eyes could see that the Hats tapped you for something big, and then this turns up.”
There was a rustle of newspaper.
“Ya know we can’t read, Miss High-and-mighty,” a third female speaker growled.
“Well, Bert, if you could read anything but Hat cant, you’d see that you now have what the entire Queensland is looking for,” Miss High-and-mighty stated in her strangely familiar voice. “The Hats told you to take him, Fen? Or you just figured to do a little husband raiding while you were in the palace?”
“We did exactly what we were supposed ta do. Take the boy.” Fen proved to be the first speaker. “Iffen ya want ta know more, ya can ask the Hats when they come for him.”
“What do they want with him?”
A short nasty laugh, and a fourth woman said, “I expect what any healthy woman would want with a man that pretty.”
In the general laughter that followed, Jerin picked out at least seven separate female voices. Seven strangers! Oh, merciful gods, he was lost. He wished he could sink back into oblivion, but now that he was awake, his body was making demands on him. He needed to pee and his stomach was queasy, like he’d eaten too many sweets.
He blinked open his eyes. They were in a shack, large enough for two good-sized rooms with a door between them, but river-trash poor in quality. The walls lacked plaster and whitewash, and were made of roughhewn lumber nailed to framing timbers. Sod covered the roof, pale fingers of grass roots prying at the cracks between the overhead boards. One paneless window, its outside shutters latched tight, a shipping crate standing in as bedside table, a lit oil lamp, and the bed he lay on made up the furnishings of the room he was in. The voices spilled through the open door from the next room; shadows cast by a second lamp moved menacingly across the rough walls. A girl, filthy-faced and feral-eyed, stood in the doorway, a finger digging into her nose.
“He’s awake,” the girl intoned with the same disinterest a kettle of boiling water might raise.
“Get away from him, Dossy,” Miss High-and-mighty said.
“Ya ain’t my sister.” Dossy stared on at him.
“If I was, I would wallop you good for not listening.” Miss High-and-mighty walked closer. “I told you to stay away from him.”
“I ain’t ever seen a man before,” Dossy said.
A hand reached into the room, caught the girl by the scruff, and jerked her back into the other room, out of sight. Miss High-and-mighty muttered softly, “With any luck, you’ll never see another one.” She stepped into the room, a chair in hand. With a hollow thunk, the chair was set beside the bed he lay on, and a black-haired woman sat down on it. She gazed at him with infinite sadness on her face.
Jerin blinked at Miss High-and-mighty a few moments, recognizing the woman but not knowing from where. Then he remembered. She had been at the landing when they arrived at the summer palace. She had stolen a kiss from him. Did this time she steal more than a kiss? “What have you done to me?”
“You haven’t been touched.” Miss High-and-mighty reached out a hand and he flinched away. “Easy, easy, it’s just a towel.” When he held still, she dabbed at his forehead with the damp rag. “Nobody is going to touch you. I promise you.”
“Don’t go giving promises ya can’t keep!” Bert called from the next room, and there was snickering.
Anger flared in Miss High-and-mighty’s eyes, the muscles in her jaw jumping as she gritted her teeth. She didn’t speak, only continued to carefully clean his face with the gentleness of a mother.
His left hand was caught somehow above his head, the back of his wrist pressed against the cold bars of the brass bed. Twisting his head up, he saw that iron manacles shackled him to the bed. He stared at them with sick dread.
“Easy,” High-and-mighty murmured again. When he glanced at her, she was glaring at the manacles, the anger in her green eyes at odds with her soft murmur of, “Everything will be fine.”
“Who are you?” Jerin asked, shifting slightly until he felt the comforting lump of his emergency stash.
She looked troubled and busied herself at refolding the rag to a clean corner. “Cira.”
“If you take me back to the palace, my wives will pay twice what the Hats offered you.” Jerin struggled to keep his voice firm and authoritative.
“Fen?” Cira raised her voice without turning. “It’s a good offer.”
“The Hats are paying us in hard cash and land,” Fen called from the next room. “Them bitches in Mayfair will just string us up to dance by our necks.??
?
Jerin scrambled for a better offer. “Then to Annaboro, I have kin there. They can get you three times what the Hats offer without my wives in the deal. You can buy your own land with it.”
The sister or mother of the girl came to lean against the doorframe. She worked a wad of chewing tobacco between her back teeth. “Boy.” By her voice, he knew her to be Fen. “I’m no fool. No one has that kind of money just sitting around except the nobles, and yer just poor gentry. Everyone says so.”
“They can borrow the money from the bank when it opens. They’ve got a mercantile that they can take a loan against. My wives will pay them back.”
Fen spat on the floor. “Mercantiles? Nah, they won’t beggar themselves on the hopes yer royal bitches will have you back. Everyone knows that those sluts nearly turned ya out once ’cause they thought one of them caught something riding the wrong horse.”
The truth of her words hit him like a hard slap. Much as Ren might love him, she wouldn’t dare take him back without being sure he was clean. He had to get away from these women, quickly.
“Cira. I have to wee-wee.” He used the baby word and tried to look helpless.
“Who has the key to these manacles?” Cira said.
“He’s a man!” Fen shrugged. “He doesn’t have to get up to piss.”
“What if he has to void?” Cira said.
Fen spit on the floor. “If he has to shit, he’s got room to move around some. I saw to it myself.”
Jerin noted that the loop of steel latched to the bed could indeed ride the bar from straight over his head down to the bed rails. He could get out of the bed, stand, and reach the length of his outstretched arms. He kept himself from experimenting—no need to let them know how mobile he was.
“This isn’t decent,” Cira growled. “You don’t treat menfolk like this.”
“I really need to wee-wee and poo.” Jerin added the second to buy himself more time. He had to get free before one of them decided to rape him.
“There’s the piss pot.” Fen spit into it to point it out.
“For gods’ sake, give him privacy.” Cira brushed past Fen and went into the next room.
“Fine with me.” Fen caught the loop of rope serving as a doorknob on the crude door. “We were told not to touch him. That’s what they’re paying well for, and I’m not going to nick this deal by not giving them what they want.”
As the door shut, Cira said, “If we take him now, straight from the palace to his aunts’ store, then everyone can count on their fingers and know that there wasn’t time for rides on the side.”
Jerin held still, waiting for the answer.
“We?” Fen’s voice was muffled now, but he could tell that she had brushed off the suggestion without giving it any serious thought. “There’s no ‘we’ here. There’s us and you. Don’t come crowding in here, after the work is done, with yer hand outstretched.”
Jerin lifted the loop of metal, ran it down the headboard to its farthest reach, and slipped out of the bed. He relieved himself in the chamber pot.
“Who got you out of that mess in Sarahs Bend?” Cira countered. “You would have been hung if I hadn’t bribed the Queens Justice.”
“That’s the only reason,” Bert said, “that I didn’t plug ya dead when ya waltzed in here unannounced like.”
“I’ve seen you shoot,” Cira drawled. “I wasn’t in any danger.”
As the women laughed like baying dogs, Jerin slipped his lockpick out of his stash pack, stabbed the stiff wires into the keyhole, and fished about carefully, while his heart hammered in his chest. All the winter days he and his sisters spent playing thieves, hiding in the shadows, seeing who could pick locks the fastest, and he never dreamed he’d have need for the skill.
“Iffen we’re doing this sister thing,” a new speaker said, making the count of women to be eight, “maybe we should count Cira in too. We could use someone with book learning and smarts like her.”
There was a moment of silence from the other room.
The click of the lock springing open seemed loud as thunder. Jerin paused, listening, poised to fall back into the bed and pretend helpless innocence.
“Sister thing?” Cira asked.
“When we git this land,” Dossy said, “we’re going ta tell folks that we’re sisters.”
“You seven?” Cira’s voice was full of disbelief.
“Mothers did it by tens.” Fen meant that they would claim that their “mothers” had visited cribs to explain how they were all sisters. “Been done before. You interested?”
Jerin stepped quietly to the bedroom window. The shack stood on pier footings, a stone’s throw from the river. A barn loomed against the night sky, some fifty feet away; the soft noises of restless horses came from it.
Cira said, without any real excitement, “Perhaps.”
“We’re not making this offer to everyone,” Fen said. “Greddy’s right, though—yer a sharp one, through and through.”
Jerin wavered at the window. He’d be running blind in an area they knew well. If he just slipped away, the moment they realized he was gone, they’d be on him like a pack of dogs. He might not get any farther than the barn. He needed to throw them into confusion. He turned back to the room.
“You’ll be the Eldest?” Cira was asking.
“Ah,” Fen replied. “So that’s it—ya want to be Eldest? Greedy little bitch.”
“I’ve done second in line,” Cira said. “It doesn’t work too well.”
“Ha!” Bert cried. “Ya got thrown out for back talking to your Eldest?”
“Let’s just say,” Cira said, “that some of the parties involved thought I was usurping my sister’s authority and it would be best that I leave.”
As the women howled in laughter, Jerin shoved the limp pillows under the ratty blanket. He unscrewed the top of the lamp and poured its oil out onto the bed. Plucking the hot chimney free of the tines on top that kept the glass from shifting, he carefully he laid the top—lit wick and all—down on the cover. Hopefully the wick would act as a fuse. He was lowering himself out the window when the bed went up in a soft muffled whoof.
He landed with a jolt that went up his right leg. He folded to the ground with pain, clutching his ankle. Light and smoke spilled out the window above him. Steeling himself against the pain, he limped as fast as he could to the barn. It leaned precariously, the roof was swaybacked, and the air inside was rank with rotting hay. A dozen horses stood waiting in box stalls, their bridles hanging from pegs. He unlatched all the stall doors and tossed all but one bridle into the dark corners. Back at the shack, the window framed a brilliant blaze—how had they not noticed the fire yet?
Returning to the first stall, he slipped in beside the horse there with the last bridle in hand. Then his escape, which had been going so smoothly, stuttered, as he fumbled with the straps of leather and pieces of metal in the dark.
“Come on. Come on,” he whispered.
A shout went up from the house. The fire had been discovered. Desperate now, he urged the bit into the horse’s mouth and tried to fit the headpiece over its ears, only to discover he had the bridle upside down. Jerin removed the bit, flipped the bridle around, and coaxed the bit back into the horse’s mouth. As he pulled the headpiece into place, someone stumbled into the stable.
The horse startled forward, forcing Jerin to step backward. Pain flared up his leg. He bit down on a gasp, but not quickly enough.
Cira’s voice came out of the darkness. “Who’s there?”
“I’ve got a gun.” Jerin tried to keep his voice calm as he pulled out his pistol and leveled it at her. It was so heavy for something so small. “I know how to use it. I will use it.”
“Jerin!” Cira cried, and launched herself at him.
If it had been one of the other women, he would have pulled the trigger. He was sure he would have. He tried to tighten his finger, to pull the trigger, to kill her, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. Her acts of respect and kin
dness flashed through his mind, freezing him in place.
She caught hold of him in a crushing hug, pressing a damp cheek to his. “Oh, thank the gods, oh, thank the gods, oh, thank the gods,” she breathed like a mantra into his ear. Then she was kissing him, a desperate hungry kiss.
He jerked out of her hold, whimpering in pain as he put weight on his bad ankle again. “I’ve got a gun. I know how to use it. Please, don’t make me.”
“I’m not part of them, Jerin.” The flame from the shack gleamed on her pale face. “On my word. I came to save you.”
“I can save myself.”
“I can see that.” Her tone almost seemed like admiration. “Let me help you.”
“I don’t trust you!”
They stood, facing each other, as the fire crept through the shack’s ceiling to feast on the dried sod roof.
“You’re not going to believe anything I say, are you?” she said quietly.
“No.” He motioned with his gun. “Back up.”
She backed up, giving him plenty of room to run. He swung up onto the smooth back of the horse and took it.
Chapter 14
It was almost a royal brawl on the landing of Mayfair. Despite Ren’s orders for Odelia, Lylia, and Trini to be escorted back to the palace, they met her on the cobbled landing.
“Look at this!” Lylia cried, thrusting a copy of the Herald at Ren. “Is it true? Is he gone?”
Ren took the paper and scanned it. The Herald, always willing to blare out rumors, hearsay, and outright lies, blasted the story of Jerin’s kidnapping across the front page. The Herald went on to decry the royal security, lamenting that losing an innocent from the palace was a sign of supreme incompetence. Worse, the story begged someone, anyone, to save the poor royal-blooded boy before it was too late. Read carefully, it hinted darkly that such saviors could expect to keep their spoils. After such an article, the public would look softer at Kij for keeping Jerin after “rescuing” him from the river trash. Kij was already juggling madly to make her marriage to Jerin respectable. The news of Jerin’s kidnapping must have reached the Herald’s office long before it reached Ren. Or—she gritted her teeth in sudden anger—even before Jerin had even been kidnapped!