When I ceased hammering the wires and looked at my companions, they stared at me. The ones that had gotten knives held them tight, their hands white-knuckled on the grips. Their nervousness had not stopped the boldest of them from grabbing the food I’d taken down, I noticed. One of them held Pounce awkwardly in her arms as Pounce gave me his most patient look.
“What?” I asked them. “Why are you still about? It’s not like you can’t hear them mages battlin’ up there.”
One of the older ones opened her mouth, only to cringe when a particularly large smashing noise boomed down the stairs. “This old pile be full o’ magics,” she said when she could be heard. “They done tol’ us that. ’Twill never fall. An’ you’s leavin’ a mess o’ food. We’d be fools t’let it go.”
“Wasn’t doin’ it for free,” I told them. “Everything’s got a price.”
A small lad with a face like a fist said, “What’s yours, then?”
“A slave for food,” I said quietly. They moved closer to hear me better. “There’s a new one in this place, here only a few days. He was out serving three days ago when they brung in prisoners. He was a little lad, and he fell. My lord cuffed him and sent him away. They call him up to the nobles’ rooms, mayhap only a couple of times, mayhap a lot.”
“What d’you want ’im for?” asked the gixie who’d spoken first. “What’s he to the likes of you?”
I took a breath. It was funny, how tense it made me just to say it. “His friend sent me. Linnet.”
“Linnet?” I heard a voice say. “You know Linnet?”
“I spoke with her a bit,” I replied, deliberately not looking for the speaker. “Another gixie, she called you No-Skin, Gareth.”
“They have ordered me not to use that name,” the invisible speaker replied. “Gareth.”
My heart twisted in my chest. No wonder they had kept him mostly in the cart. All he had to do was speak to let folk know he was not a typical slave. No child bought and sold in the markets spoke so well.
“It’s all right, lad,” I told him. “I’ve come to take you home.” I looked at the others as I heard someone struggling and scraping near me. Holding up the wires, I said, “I’ll take you all if we can find a way out of this place.” There were a couple of promising tunnels on the map in my head, but they would trust me more if I needed something important from them. Slaves and the poor trust no one who offers sommat for nothing.
“There’s no way,” lisped a fair-haired gixie, but the oldest gixie and the oldest lad were trading looks.
“Like we’d get anywheres with these,” the fist-faced boy snapped, tugging his ankle chains.
The prince crawled out from under the shelf at the bottom of one of the tables. I took the angry lad and sat him atop the same table fast, before he had time to do more than hit my cheek. I grabbed his arms and said, “Don’t hit me again. It makes me cross.”
“I’m no toy to be lifted up and about,” he told me, but he kept his hands to himself. “An’ you don’t look like you did when you come in. You’re taller. You got a braid, an’ you’re skinny.”
“I had magic on me,” I said, “and it wore off. You want to complain? Or do you want the shackles off?” I ignored the other slaves’ whispers.
The noises from upstairs were quieter. Who was winning? I looked at the opening to the stair, then ordered myself to keep my mind on business.
Gently I set the prince next to the cross-grained lad. “Were you born so nasty, or did working here make you this way?” I asked the vexing one, going to work on his shackles. Lucky for me these were the expensive kind, that locked with a key. I’m no hand at striking them off, but locks I can pick.
“I was sold,” he told me, peering at my work. “What’s that you’re doing, with the wire?”
“Quiet, and you’ll see,” I said. My good lock picks were in my shoulder pack, wherever it was. These clumsy ones took more fumbling. “Someone give the lad here some meat.”
“You can’t get out of here, magic spell or no,” the gixie said, the one who did the talking at first. “They’ll kill you.”
“They’re going to be busy for a bit,” I replied. There was the click as I turned the second wire. The first shackle popped open. Under it the lad’s skin was red and raw. I wanted to kill someone. Instead I turned to the second shackle. It took less time. I kicked it under the table and the lad jumped to the floor.
When I turned to Gareth, I saw he was feasting on a strip of meat that someone had given to him. My change in appearance did not seem to worry him. I started on his shackles. The infection under them was bad, though not old. They could only have put the ankle shackles on recently. He had a wrist infection where another clasp must have been. Seemingly the orders about no marks on him had changed. He’d lost a lot of weight. His rib bones showed stark against his skin through the overlarge armholes of his tunic. His eyes were sunk deep in his skull and surrounded by dark skin. He was ill.
He chose to stay where he was, eating hurriedly, while I turned to the others and held up my picks. They shrank back, behind the oldest girl, who shook her head.
“They’ll kill us if they catch us without the chains,” she said. “They’ll kill us if we try t’ run. There’s more slaves comin’ in every week this time o’ year and we’re the cheapest sort. You’re mad t’ take the little lad, and Daeggan there is mad t’ go with you.”
“I wasn’t born t’ this,” the cross one—Daeggan—said. He must have been all of eight. “They already know I’m bad. How long before they break me?”
I nodded to him. “Do you know a way out, then?” He made a face in a way that told me he did.
“ ’Tis risky, and none’ve ever come back t’ say if it works. Could be they’re still layin’ in there, gone to see the Black God,” he told me.
“We’ll learn soon enough,” I replied.
“You’ll be in the woods,” protested the oldest gixie. “Where can you go after that? You’ve no horses. They hunt runaways on horses, with hounds! And all the land hereabouts is my lord’s. Anyone on it would give you to him. Is your magic enough?”
“The lords will be occupied, I think,” I said. “I know how to travel in hostile country. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a better mage with me.” At the very least Pounce and I could reach the road. With Achoo already in the woods, we would do even better. It wrenched at me to leave these other children behind. I knew they would slow us down. Daeggan at least looked to be in good shape, but most of them were exhausted and starved. They would be frightened in the dark woods and terrified of other people. And we had to hurry to take advantage of the distraction provided by Farmer and Elyot. Still, I had to offer the chance to them. “Think again. I’ll take off your shackles. Go with me and Gareth, or stay. You’re fed here, I suppose, and warm enough. If we make it away, I can promise you’ll be free, and I’ll find places for you.”
“You’re mad,” the oldest girl said firmly. “And nobody’s lucky here. There’s bears and mountain lions and wolves in the forest, and snakes and traps. All this is Lord Thanen’s, all of it. They’ll brand my face and I’ll never get anything but hard work again.”
One by one they all refused to go with Pounce, Daeggan, the prince, and me. Seemingly dying a slave was better than the forest and the chance of dying or being fetched back for punishment. I thought I’d be relieved, but I wasn’t. Daeggan made more sense to me. He wanted to leave before he was broken. It was no wonder, after he’d been working with the broken all of the time.
We bundled up food in a hurry. I made a strip of sacking into a sash where I tucked the food pouch and four good, sharp knives. Then Daeggan led us down a hallway littered with straw and splinters, plainly used for deliveries. I could have done so myself, as the map in my head lined the path to his tunnel in yellow. About five hundred yards along Daeggan took a turn into a lesser hall. We trotted down a set of stairs and along another hall. By then Pounce had disappeared again, gone off on some errand of his own. We were i
n the stone under the castle now, the air cold and forbidding. I liked it no better than I had liked it in the dungeon.
Gareth was shivering and laboring to keep up with me. I took pity on him. First I set my knives aside so they wouldn’t stab me in the gut. Then I knelt, motioning to my back. “Up with you,” I told him quietly. “Piggyback, let’s go.”
“Go on,” Daeggan urged. “Ye’re slowin’ us down, honeytongue.”
I frowned at him. “The lad’s name is Gareth, please.” I turned my head to look at the prince, who had frozen in place. Tears ran down his cheeks. “What is it, my boy?” I asked him softly. I swiveled on my feet to wipe his face with my hand. He was no prince to me in that moment. He was just a little fellow who’d gone through a month of ruin with no understanding of why.
“My—friend, Tassilo, that protected me,” he whispered. “He—he’d give me rides on his back. He fought right in front of me and they killed him.”
They had made him afraid to name his guards and surely his parents and servants. Either that or they’d spelled him. I smoothed his hair, hating Thanen and his fellow traitors myself. I could not let hate distract me. Mine was the task of getting clear of these monstrous conspirators with the boy in one piece.
“You will have justice for your friend,” I told him. “Now, come. We’ll go faster this way.”
He linked his arms around my neck. I grabbed my knives and rose to my feet, sticking the blades in my belt before I gripped his legs with my arms. My bad rib stabbed at me, but I ignored it. I started forward, surprised to find Daeggan had waited for us.
“Thank you,” I said when we caught up.
“I’m goin’ soft,” he replied. “Keep up, now.”
We had gone but a hundred yards or so more, past a handful of sets of stairs leading up and away from the corridor, when I heard the approach of running feet. I put Gareth down and sent the lads up a stairway into the shadows. Then I took a torch from a bracket in the wall, waiting to see what nasty surprise the gods had arranged.
Pounce rounded a curve first, with Farmer in his wake. Like me, he looked like himself, not the guard in the cells. It was all I could do not to cry out. The ribbon was gripped in my man’s fist, the flesh red and swollen around it. The ribbon itself was unmarked. Farmer was burned on the side of his head and on his chest. Half of his tunic was charred, but he still gave me his looby grin. The moment he embraced me, he sent healing into my body, mending that bad rib at last and getting soot and scorched cloth on me. I struggled, but he wouldn’t let me go until he’d kissed me well.
“Take care of your own self, you great cracknob!” I scolded. Luckily for him, I could see his burns slowly healing. “And don’t overdo. We’ve got company. He knows a way out.” I looked up into the stairway. “It’s all right. He’s with us.”
Daeggan, knife in hand, came down first, keeping Gareth behind him. He looked Farmer over, then he pointed at Farmer’s fist. “Don’t that hurt?” he asked.
“Only when I laugh,” Farmer replied with a straight face. He rubbed the swelling with a wince as the red flesh began to shrink. “Did someone mention a way out?”
Gareth hung back on the stairs, eyes wide, his thumb going into his mouth. I took my knives from my belt and set them down, then crouched on the bottom step with my back to him. “Farmer’s all right,” I said to him. “A little odd, but you know how mages can be. Come here, lad.”
I heard a sound and looked back. Gareth had backed up two steps rather than come to me. He pulled his thumb from his lips. “Mages were there,” he whispered, his eyes huge. “They let the murderers in. They burned everything.” He put his thumb back in his mouth.
Daeggan glared up at me, then at Farmer. “Now see what you done?” he demanded. “We nearabout had him not suckin’ his thumb, bein’s how my lord and the mages pinch ’im whenever they catch ’im at it. Lookit ’im!” I thought of the ugly round bruises that I’d glimpsed, pinch marks, showing up against Gareth’s dyed skin, and bowed my head so no one would see my fury.
Farmer crouched where he was, in full view of the stair. He had to be as on edge as I was now that the crash of the fight was ended. Folk would be moving about soon, mayhap even down here, but Farmer acted as if we had all night. “I wasn’t one of them that attacked your friends,” he said. “The mages that did that were wrong. We need to catch them. I just came from fighting one. Elyot.”
“Tell me you killed him,” I said quietly. I knew him, knew what his answer would be, but a mot can dream.
“No,” Farmer said, shocked. I sighed and my soft-hearted man told me, “It is not my right to kill him. It’s the law’s right, and the king’s right as wielder of the law. I knocked him halfway to Midwinter and laid a sleep on him.”
“Faw,” Daeggan said with scorn, and spat on the floor. “All the slaps and pinches I’ve had from that one, and he only gets a nap?”
I glanced at the prince. Gareth had taken the thumb from his mouth. “The law?” whispered the lad. “You work for the law? The law belongs to my papa.”
“It’s your papa who sent us, and your mama,” I said. “I promised them we’d bring you home.”
“We all swore to serve the law and bring you home, and find out who took you,” Farmer added. “Come along, lad. We need to hurry.”
Gareth trotted down the steps and climbed onto my back.
“That’s better,” Daeggan said as Pounce leaped onto his shoulders. He flinched, but he accepted the cat’s weight and looked at Farmer.
“We need to go back a way,” Farmer told me. “There’s another tunnel. It looks better suited to us than the one you were aiming for.”
“Are you certain?” I asked quietly, following him back down the corridor. “I want to get the swive-all pus mouse out of this sarden castle.”
“Those are bad words,” Gareth said in my ear. “Lunedda spanked me when I said swive.” I waited for him to weep at the mention of his dead nursemaid, but he only buried his face in my shoulder.
“You have no idea of the bad words Beka knows, my lad,” Farmer murmured back. “Once she starts, she nearabout sets my ears on fire. We’re very, very lucky she’s no mage, or the power of her words would split every lawbreaker she arrests from top to toe.” He led us up a flight of stairs. The downward end was the way to the dungeons.
“Stop blathering,” I ordered Farmer, as if he’d listen. Truth to tell, I was grateful for his folly, as the boy seemed to take comfort from it. He was relaxing in my grip. His trembling eased until it was the slightest of quivers. I doubted that he’d stopped shaking since he was yanked from his home.
“You arrest people?” Gareth whispered.
“Farmer and me are Provost’s Guards,” I explained as we continued to climb. “There’s three of us and a lady knight who came here seeking you.”
“I want to be a Provost’s Guard when I grow up, before I’m … you know,” he said, stumbling to a halt before king, I was sure. “I thought you all had uniforms and batons and boots and badges.”
It was good to hear him so eager. “This is my uniform. It’s very dirty,” I explained. “One day you’ll see me properly kitted out.” Farmer was hand-signaling for silence. I put my finger on my lips so the boys would understand and the three of us ducked into a hall that opened onto the stair. Farmer did something to the nearest door that made it open partway. The room beyond was dark and smelled of lack of use. Silently we three moved out of the light that shone in through the opening.
Farmer bumped me with his hip and tugged Gareth. Gently he shifted the boy onto his own back. He would do so when I couldn’t object, not aloud, and not with hand signs that he would see. When I put my hand on Gareth’s side, though, he was trembling no more than he had on my own back. I relaxed. Seemingly the chatter between Farmer and me had made him feel better about my man, better enough that Gareth didn’t mind riding on Farmer’s back instead of mine.
I moved to the crack between the hinges on the door, where I could see
the stair. I heard the approach of booted feet and voices. The folk were arguing softly and passionately. I took out two of the knives I’d stolen, just in case. Then I realized that one voice was Sabine’s. When they came in view, I nearly gasped. Nomalla of Halleburn walked with Sabine and Tunstall as if they were taking a stroll after supper. Only the fact that all three carried four heavy packs and the belt with my baton put the lie to their appearance. Tunstall was in uniform again, his baton hanging at his waist. He even had boots!
I clicked my tongue twice, in the way Tunstall had taught me, the way hillmen do it. He stopped the two mots. “Cooper, it’s all right, I think,” he said quietly, with a glare at Lady Nomalla. She’d put her hand on the hilt of her sword the moment he spoke. “The lady has rethought things.”
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