Fleeing Peace

He smiled, and returned to his chore. It was too weird a coincidence; black cats did look alike.

  o0o

  For Senrid the days stretched into weeks. Gradually the sharp, cold winds from the north and west lost their bitter force.

  The work of a ship was constant, but Senrid liked the precision of sail and rigging, and the endlessly changing sea and sky. On land, weather was a matter of logistics.

  He worked hard, and regained strength and stamina.

  He also had time to think while sitting high above the deck through the nights. If he was on a capital list, it might be because he’d escaped, but it was also possible that some elevener higher up—someone like Detlev—had somehow found out that Senrid had the hatpin. Of course Detlev had to know about the same weaknesses in spell-structure that Senrid did, with respect to rift creation and off-worlders.

  If Detlev knew about the off-worlders, he would have put Norsundrians on their trail. If they were still on the continent of Drael, Senrid had only to find search parties, and listen somewhere for the description of their target.

  One night, as he took a break from worming and parceling a new shroud for the standing rigging and stared out at the moonlit shore of Drael, he decided it was time to leave the next time they touched land.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Leander crouched in a crockery closet, his sleeve stuffed in his mouth to keep any noise from escaping, and shook with laughter.

  Peering between stacks of clay-colored crockery, he watched Dtheldevor hanging upside down, her legs and arms wrapped round an old, iron wheel chandelier.

  Her heavy dark braid dangled a bare arm’s length over the heads of a couple of Norsundrians who stood at the cookpot, gazing morosely into it.

  One of them poked at the soup with the ladle, then snorted.

  Leander closed his eyes and held his breath.

  Of course the candles in the chandelier had not been replaced, much less lit, or Dtheldevor never would have gotten away with it. Yet he wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t have tried it even so. The only light in the kitchen came from the fireplace and from a candle in one of the Norsundrians’ hands.

  The Norsundrians continued to look down into the big pot, commenting in their language. Leander’s back ached, and his legs felt like someone had stuck a hundred sewing needles into them, but he dared not move.

  As the Norsundrian would-be cooks puzzled over the mysterious smell of their soup, Leander fought against the panicky laughter in his chest by thinking about other things. Like where they’d been. Yes. It had been such a strange winter!

  When he first departed from Mearsies Heili, his foremost worry had been how he’d be able to bear killing someone, even a Norsundrian—but within a couple of weeks that had metamorphosed into a worry about finding the man.

  They’d managed to make contact with some wild horses and rode hard southward through Teldenor, southern neighbor to Mearsies Heili. Some winter jays squawked and scolded them into the capital and thence to a certain inn. There they met a group of outlaws who had escaped the spell, and—delighted to help someone who actually meant to do something about this mysterious Siamis—loaded them with mounts, stolen coins, and good advice on traversing the southern trails.

  From there they chased down the Toaran continent, sometimes on horseback, once flying over snowy peaks on gryph-back, a few times on water vessels—the canoe down the mountain stream would always be a particularly vivid memory.

  And they’d had help. Murial’s promise was no light thing. Everywhere they traveled they found animals willing to aid them, from small ones that spied out the location of the nearest Norsundrians to birds that carried messages or spotted patrols. Big animals bore them willingly much faster than human legs could ever progress.

  Yet even with this help, he and Dtheldevor still never managed to catch up. Siamis moved fast, and he seemed to be tireless.

  Clink! One of the Norsundrians opened a spice jar, and rather gingerly poured some of the contents into the pot. The sweet smell of loethe tickled Leander’s nose, and he bit his lips—hard. Nice enough in puddings on its own or with shaved vanillin, loethe would be truly disastrous combined with pepper.

  He forced his mind away. Think about something sobering . . .

  Like Senrid.

  Leander had discovered that even action did not entirely assuage guilt.

  He shifted minutely as the Norsundrians muttered, then one of them decided to throw some flour into the soup. Above them, Dtheldevor clung, silent, still, her face turned toward Leander, her slashing grin just visible.

  Leander closed his eyes and continued his mental review.

  His thoughts often returned to Senrid; guilt would ride him until Senrid was free. He opened his eyes, and the laughter was back at the sight of Dtheldevor hanging ridiculously upside down.

  Like Kitty, Dtheldevor never bothered hiding her emotions. In just about every other way they were as unlike as two people could be.

  Leander would never permit himself to compare them, for Kitty was in a sense his family, and very definitely his responsibility, but he had to admit it was fun to travel with someone who could move as fast as he, who cared nothing for cold, or wet, or strange foods, who never once—that he ever saw—glanced into a mirror, who thought it a very great joke if her clothes got ripped or dirty. She had little fear of risk, and her quick wits and deft fingers more than once got them to hot meals and away from danger. She always kept an eye out for an unclaimed rope, which she’d wind round her waist until she needed one. “Faster’n twistin’ ‘em,” she said cheerfully—though she was amazingly fast at that, too.

  It wasn’t always easy. Dtheldevor had a habit of issuing orders, and her table manners were nonexistent. If Leander had something interesting on his plate, out would come her knife and she’d help herself. She also drank wine—when she could get it—and though she didn’t get drunk, she always snored afterward.

  She was the one who’d thought up this game. Each Norsundrian-occupied place they came to, if they had to wait for Siamis, the enemy would get a visitation from them. ‘Visitations,’ Leander discovered, were to Dtheldevor what sabotage was to the rest of the world. The game was a contest. Whoever made the other laugh the hardest would win.

  The prospect of fun kept them going as they took ship—working as crew slubs—to avoid the long, arduous (and dangerous) landbridge from Toar to Leander’s own subcontinent, Halia. Whether they found a barracks or an encampment, they found some way to make their mark.

  He’d had private misgivings about having to visit his own homeland, several days’ fast ride to the north. He did not want to see his own people enchanted.

  But he didn’t have to. While he and Dtheldevor shivered outside a small temporary Norsundrian outpost in Perideth, they found out that Siamis had already been through the kingdoms to the north. In his wake, small units of Norsundrians were to cover the countryside looking for pockets of resistance.

  So he and Dtheldevor turned to the east—after Dtheldevor used two of her spare ropes and a block-and-tackle to rig a mud-filled horse trough over the door to surprise the Norsundrians when they returned from their rounds.

  At first they traded off on their wager. False alarms—fires, spooked horses, clanging bells at dawn—were their most frequent ploys, but once or twice inspiration caused them to work together. Their most spectacular success was the diversion of an ice-cold stream in Naidhiahi’s heights, which flooded a huge encampment below.

  The funniest so far was this one. If they survived their attack on Siamis, who was due at any moment, it was going to make a great story.

  Noises outside the kitchen had sent Leander racing behind the crockery and Dtheldevor, lacking a better place, vaulting onto the prep table and to the chandelier just three breaths ahead of the entry of some enchanted Norsunder flunkies obviously stuck with kitchen duty.

  Leander couldn’t understand Norsundrian, but he knew they were discussing what the peculiar smell could be.

/>   Finally one of them made a decision, and as Leander watched, his sleeve still stuffed in his mouth, they slopped the soup into waiting bowls and then bore the trays back through the door.

  Dtheldevor dropped down, snorting and sniggering, her face purple.

  “C’mon,” Leander breathed.

  “Wait. . . I wanna . . . hear their screams when . . .they . . . taste that mess. . .” She clutched at the table.

  Leander grabbed her tunic collar and hauled her backward. “Imagine it,” he muttered.

  Just as they rounded down the worn stairs to the wine cellar, they heard the Norsundrians open the kitchen doors again—and howls of rage and disgust wafted down.

  Leander’s knees almost buckled, he was gulping and wheezing in an effort not to howl with laughter. Dtheldevor now had to hold him up. Together they made it through the secret door that a friendly cat had shown them, and out into the night.

  Two, three buildings away they made it before they collapsed into mud.

  “Pepper! All—the—pepper!”

  “Sourberries! Salt!” Leander thought of his own additions, and his stomach hurt with his efforts to breathe. “The—the jug of pickling-s-s-s-yrup . . .”

  “The loethe!”

  “Loethe and—and—and—puh—puh—puh—pepper!”

  “The . . . the curses! The curses! How they c-cursed!”

  “Ow, my gut hurts!”

  “Wa—wa—wah . . .” She finally gave up.

  “You . . . win . . .” He couldn’t talk any more.

  Slowly the laughs died to snickers, and then to panting.

  Dtheldevor rolled onto her back in the mud, rain beating in her face, her black eyes open, reflecting the light from a nearby window. Then she got up and pounded away, her steps sloshing.

  Leander held his breath; he’d managed to give himself hiccups.

  Dtheldevor reappeared fast, cursing softly. She hunkered down and punched Leander in the arm. “Fart fire! I overhead the orders. He was already here—they had their meetin’ in the stable while us and everybody was waitin’ on ‘im in the inn! Time t’hit the road.”

  They did—but when they reached their next destination he was gone.

  o0o

  Senrid exerted himself to stay out of sight of the civilian population of Everon. He hoped his trail had gone cold as he tried to make sense of the search patterns—because he’d guessed right. He saw more Norsundrians here than he had anywhere else. They rode about constantly, stopping in every town, every village.

  He discovered that the knapsack did not produce food. Either the spells had worn off, or else he was beyond the reach of Loi magic’s influence. So he stole horses and food from strangely heedless people, and racked his way cross-country northwards, where the searches seemed to be coalescing.

  He rode steadily, changing mounts when he could find a new. One day he dozed in the saddle, to discover to his amazement when he jerked awake, his neck aching and mouth dry, that the animal had not turned around and made its way back home—but was still going north.

  No time for relief, not with the sound of hoof beats in pursuit. He kneed his mount. The horse jumped into a gallop. The hoof beats altered in rhythm, and there was the sound of a human voice, an exclamation. They’d spotted his mount’s fresh prints.

  He kneed the horse again. The hunt remained the same distance behind, still not visible—the trail was far too windy for that.

  By the time that horse tired, he had reached wild, dark, old oak and hickory forestland. He watched carefully, and when he was safely round a curve with a drop down one side he flung his leg over and jumped.

  He landed on his feet, slipped on rubble, and tumbled headlong into the gulley, smashing through bracken until he landed with a splash in the mud at the side of a stream. He flung his head up, whooping for breath, then slogged deeper into the water, wading downstream a ways before he dared to emerge, dripping, cold, but at least the mud had been washed away.

  So had his faked-up knife sheath. He scrabbled around. Gone. He’d bought the knife on the river, but hadn’t found a decent sheath—not like they made at home.

  His body trembled as he jerked the knapsack straight. He reached inside, felt the inner seam—and the hatpin was still there, pinned firmly.

  He splashed to the other side of the stream until he spied a goat trail, and took that.

  The shadows had hardly changed before he had to slow. Searchers galloped along unseen paths, once northward, another time westward. Either they’d called all the locals out, or there were two or three patrols circling around in increasingly tighter perimeters.

  Night fell. The noise of the search ceased. He wove himself into a thick brush and slept, then continued on the next day, plodding steadily though he had no more than a couple sips from a stream to fill his gut.

  That day he counted seven patrols.

  The following day he only had to hide twice, but there was no triumph; the very difficulty the Norsundrians had in finding him mocked him with the inescapable truth that he was just as likely to find the off-worlders. From a distance it had seemed so simple: move along the main highways, and watch for kids who didn’t act like the enchanted. As he zigzagged between all the major north-south routes, tramping along mossy paths or wading through thick, leafy undergrowth that had gone undisturbed for ages, he wondered if he’d pass within shouting distance of the off-worlders and never find out.

  Finally the terrain opened into rolling, gentle hills, and brush land and meadow dotted by farms and divided by hedgerows. Senrid tramped along the roads in the summer light, and found himself wishing for the cool shads of the oak forest again.

  The weather continued to alternate between hot days and sudden thunderstorms. He used the stormy episodes to sit quietly in what looked like they’d once been well-frequented inns, so that he could listen to the talk.

  Nothing happened. No one paid him any attention. No one followed him.

  No one talked, except about their immediate business.

  The third time a storm-line towered on the western horizon, he was near a small town. He made straight for the first inn he saw, and walked in just behind several travelers as big drops of rain splattered down and thunder grumbled in the distance.

  On the pretext of watching the lightning, he moved about the crowded common room, which still carried the summer heat and smells of cookery. People exchanged occasional, dispassionate words about the day’s business. There was no laughter, or gossip, or music, even. No rowdy drunks, no older people flirting, no little kids chasing about, or big ones playing games.

  When the storm had passed, Senrid trudged by the innkeeper, who polished her pans with methodical movements, her eyes absent.

  “I’m looking for my cousins who are traveling south from Flendere,” he said in a flat voice. “They are my age. They might not speak the language. ”

  “I have not seen any foreign children who cannot speak the language,” she murmured, raising her eyes. They were dark eyes, their focus unnervingly fixed.

  ‘Foreign children.’ It might be a restatement of his lie, but there was something too smooth about her words, too much like a phrase from a remembered order, such as Report any foreign children who cannot speak the language.

  Senrid departed with a muttered “Thanks.”

  No one followed him, though his shoulder blades crawled. He circled around and helped himself to a horse from the stable, as the stable hand sat mending a harness with slow, methodical movements.

  At another inn, the next night, he tried a different tack. He was now on the outskirts of a good-sized town. Not everyone would know everyone else.

  He slid into the kitchen through the back way, and found a young kitchen helper chopping potatoes. “Me and the apprentices have been assigned a task,” he droned. “To count how many foreign travelers under the age of twenty seen in one month. You noticed any?”

  The girl looked up at him, her blue eyes narrowed and unblinking. “I have not
seen any foreign children who do not speak the language.”

  He backed away from that narrow gaze, nerves tingling. He’d deliberately left out anything about language.

  Time to get lost.

  The next afternoon he was walking eastward as fast as he could across the hilly country when he heard horse hooves behind him. He looked around the open countryside. The next cover of hedges and trees was too far ahead. He doubled back and dove down behind a thicket of tall grass surmounted by a flourishing wild lemon bush.

  A big patrol rode by. Senrid peered between shiny green lemon-leaves at the grim, heat-flushed faces watching the road. The smell of horse-sweat and dust was permeated ridiculously with the fresh, astringent scent of lemons.

  When they were well out of earshot Senrid emerged cautiously. The chances were slim that someone would put that much muscle on his trail, but he wasn’t going to make any easy assumptions. He’d proceed as if he were the target.

  He dusted himself off, and set out on the road, but he’d not gone twenty paces when again he heard the drum of hooves on the road behind.

  He made it back to his lemon bush just in time, and threw himself down, sweat stinging his eyes.

  Into view rode four men: two young, one middle-aged, one old. They were dressed like civs, but there was no mistaking their military bearing.

  He knew he hadn’t left a trail because the road was too hard, too furrowed. When he saw them all scanning, two low, two tree-level, either side, he knew it was a search. He sensed that these were not allies of Norsunder. Nor were they enchanted; their gazes were direct.

  He’d read about Everon and its famous guardians, called the Knights of Dei. He was pretty sure he knew who these riders were.

  His heart slammed against his ribs as he stepped out.

  “Hey,” he called—not loud.

  But loud enough. The four reined in, and surrounded him.

  “Where are you going?” the oldest one asked.

  “North,” Senrid said, pointing, though he was on an east road. “Ah, eventually.”

  Another said, “You are the one who’s been asking about child travelers.”