"Who did this?" Mama demanded.
The man looked at Laetri's battered face, and the shiftiness in his eyes told Mama all she needed to know. "Do not think to lie, young man! I can see well enough what you and your fellows have been doing. Tell me why!"
"She wouldn't give." The man refused to meet her eyes. "It's her stock in trade, after all, and if she's in our gaol—"
"If she's in a cell in your dungeon, you are to guard her, not despoil her! Must I set soldiers to guard her from her gaolers? Be sure that if I do, they shall be no more gentle to you than you have been to her!" Mama raged. "Do you understand, sirrah? If there is one more bruise on this woman's face or body, anywhere on her body, you and all your fellows will be fortunate to have your hides whole! What manner of rotten gibbering apes are you, to exploit a woman who is given into your care? What sort of mother did you have—a baboon who sold herself to any hyena who asked? I won't even ask about your father, for any man who would treat a woman this way can't have known what his father was, let alone who! No matter what she has done or has been, in the queen's castle she shall be safe, or you shall find yourself before a judge and become a prisoner in your own dungeon! Unless that judge is merciful, of course, in which case you might find yourself fortunate enough to spend your years mucking out stables until you can be sent to the front rank in the next war! Do you understand me, you moral cripple?"
The man's face burned with anger and shame, but he knew better than to talk back to the queen's mother-in-law, especially since she was a powerful wizard in her own right. "Yes, milady," he mumbled.
"And she shall be safe in your dungeon?"
"As safe as a princess, milady."
"None shall even think of touching her?"
"No, milady."
"Then go and tell all the other gaolers! At once! Or shall I come out and tell them myself?"
The gaoler winced at the thought of all his prisoners hearing this termagant railing at every single gaoler, one by one. "I shall tell them, milady."
"Go do it, then!" Mama pointed out the door, imperious in her anger. The gaoler shuffled out, muttering under his breath. Mama glared at the door as it grated shut, then turned to find Laetri staring at her in complete amazement.
"You may feel safe now, child," Mama assured her.
"I—I thank you, milady!" Laetri said. "But... but why would you... would you trouble yourself for... for a street whore?"
"Because every woman should be treated with respect, and no woman should be subjected to such abuse as you have been!" Mama told her. "Then, too, I suspect you have been far more a victim than a sinner." She watched Laetri closely for the quick, calculating look in the eyes that would show a jaded, cynical mind quickly estimating how much of a sucker this sympathetic rich woman was, how far she could be milked for money or freedom—so Mama was completely unprepared when Laetri virtually threw herself into her arms, sobbing her heart out.
"There there, child." What could she do but hold her and pat her back and make soothing noises? "There are some of us who know it wasn't your fault, not yours at all, that the worst thing you did was fall in love with the wrong man and do whatever he asked of you, as love bids us all do. Not your fault, not yours at all, but his, all his, for courting you and pretending love, only to make you into a commodity he could sell!"
The worst of the storm passed, and Laetri managed to push herself away and wipe her eyes with the hem of her dress. "How—How do you know all this about me?"
"Do you think you are the only pretty child who has ever found her love so abused, who has been decoyed by a handsome face and sugared words into becoming a virtual slave? Poor thing, you aren't the first, and won't be the last! It's an old tale, very old, but vulnerable creatures of the heart that we women are, it will always be told. Come, dry your eyes now and tell me the truth of these charges against you."
Mama sat on the camp stool she had brought, pointing to the heap of moldy straw that served Laetri for a bed—there was no chair, not even a stool. The prostitute sat down beside her with a certain awkwardness about her movements that made Mama wonder how old she could be—sixteen? Seventeen? Mama hoped she was at least nineteen, but doubted it strongly. "Tell me—which of those bruises did the prince make?"
"This one." Laetri touched her forehead. "And these." She pulled down the neckline of her dress to show five purple marks where a rough hand had squeezed far too tightly. "There are others." She lowered her gaze, blushing with shame. "I am sure you would not care to see where they are, though."
"I can imagine," Mama said, her voice hard. "He did not wait to see his purse was gone before he struck you, then."
"Oh, he did." Laetri touched her breast. "He did not make these by striking me. No, it was only when we began to dress again that he saw his purse was missing. Then he shouted 'Thief!' and struck me with his fist." She shuddered at the memory. "I screamed and ran, but he caught me at the head of the staircase and threw me down the steps, calling for his money, calling me a robber. Then Pargas stepped between us, and I was safe."
"Until Pargas decided to rent you to another sadist," Mama said grimly. "What did you see of the battle between them?"
"The prince accused me of stealing. I said I hadn't, and Pargas told the prince that if I said it, it was true. The prince struck at Pargas. If he'd been honest about who he was, Pargas would never have dreamed of striking back, but since he didn't know, he pulled out his little clubs and swung. He struck the prince on the arm. The prince yelled with rage and stabbed Pargas in the left arm. Pargas dropped his left stick, but gave the prince a knock on the head with the right before he could pull the knife out. The prince backed away, howling, and slashed at Pargas, but he blocked with his club. They traded three or four blows then, but neither hit the other until the prince screamed, arched his back, and fell. My man pushed back against me then, panting, ready to defend. That's when the sergeant and the nobleman stepped in and started asking questions. Then the landlord shouted and pointed to the man who was going out the window, and my man and I started for the kitchen and the alley door, but the nobleman stopped us and accused us."
"Pargas is not 'your man,' except as a dog might think of its owner as 'his owner,' " Mama said severely. "Have no doubts about that, child. Pargas is not in love with you. He only thinks of you as his property."
Laetri's eyes filled with tears. "Surely he has some feeling for me!"
Mama shook her head sadly. "Only lust for your body and greed for the money it can bring him. How many other women does he run?"
"Only two." Laetri had to force the words out, eyes lowered, face red.
"You may be his most profitable," Mama said, "because you are his youngest—but that is all. You must not go back to him, child, nor to any other pimp, or your life will be wasted."
"But what else can I do now?" Tears began to run down Laetri's face. "No man will take me for a wife, and my family would not take me back in their cottage! I must whore, or starve!"
"I shall speak to the queen," Mama said. "I think she may find you a place in her kitchens. You may have to scour pots, child, and endure the sneers of the other women till they begin to trust you. Can you steel yourself to that?"
"Oh, yes! But—But the men of the staff. Will they not expect... expect me to..."
"If the queen is willing to take you into her service," Mama said firmly, "she will see that all her menservants know not to presume upon you. If I can arrange it, child, will you accept it?"
"Oh, yes!" Laetri cried, seizing Mama's hand in both her own. "I shall labor long and hard for the queen, milady, you shall see! I was born a serf's daughter, and learned to work hard at washing and baking and scrubbing as I grew! I wish I had never left that life, that I could go back to it!"
"Why did you leave it?" Mama said, frowning.
"Because all the boys were brutish and foolish, and I longed for something more—but in the city, I have found less! Be sure that I shall scour and labor from dawn till dusk for
Her Majesty, milady! I ask only enough food to stave off hunger, and a warm place to sleep—and that never, ever again shall I have to suffer the touch of a man!"
Dinner done and talk run out, the three men prepared to sleep. Matt offered to take first watch, and neither of his companions argued; in fact, they both looked relieved. But as Sergeant Brock opened his pack to draw out a whetstone, Matt noticed something gleaming. Looking more closely, he saw silver. "A sickle?" he asked. "Silver, too! That's a curious thing for a soldier to be carrying!"
Brock tensed, but forced a smile as he closed his pack. "Curious indeed, milord. It is a battle trophy from a band of perverts we broke up. Caught none of them alive, sad to say, but we slew a few and chased all the rest. I took that sickle off one of the dead ones."
"Perverts?" Matt frowned, ready to do battle for a misunderstood and oppressed minority. "What kind?"
"The kind that get their thrills from killing the innocent," Sergeant Brock said grimly. "They dressed up in robes and ivy crowns to do it, and set her out as a naked sacrifice to some pagan god under the full moon as an excuse, but they were going to kill her, right enough. Four of them were holding her down, one to each limb, and a fifth, their priest or whatever, was lifting his blade to do her, when we came upon the scene and routed them."
Matt struck the "oppressed minority" off his list. Even freedom of religion had its limits, and two of them were human life and pain. "That sickle's kind of odd as a sacrificial knife. The blade's too narrow for a murder weapon." But he thought it would make just the right kind of wound in a straw doll—right to match the cut in Prince Gaheris' back.
"That sickle is not what the priest wielded—he lifted high a knife with a stone blade. We found it afterward." Sergeant Brock sat down and began to sharpen his short sword. "You must do this every day, if you have no squire to do it for you—catch each speck of rust before it can grow."
"Yes, I know," Matt said. "Gives me something to do while I'm on watch. You take care of your weapon..."
"And your weapon will take care of you. Yes." But Sergeant Brock stopped stroking the blade with the stone, frowning off into the distance. "I suppose it would have been a different matter if the woman had been one of them, and going to the slaughter of her own will..."
"Not really," Matt said. "Hardly different at all. But she wasn't?"
"No; that's why the reeve called us in—because she'd disappeared, and his men alone couldn't find her, and there are some nasty bogs on the King's Own Lands." Brock started whetting again. "But we knew they'd kidnapped her, for we'd heard about other cases like this, and chased down three of them already, so we knew what we'd find before we went looking."
"Four cases?" Matt stared.
Sergeant Brock nodded. "They've sprung up all around the land this last year. Claim to be the Old Religion, and their leaders Druids who've kept the old knowledge passed down from father to son, but the bishop set his monks to looking in old books, and they found a dozen ways these kidnappers differ from the Druids of old. No, I think they're just a very nasty bunch who like to dress up in outlandish robes so they can forget who they really are and have some excuse for their twisted pleasures."
Matt shuddered. "Nice country we're going into."
"It is that." Sergeant Brock stopped whetting and lifted his head to look Matt straight in the eye. "It's a beautiful land of rolling downs and vasty old woods, of azure lakes and stone-walled fields, and the people are the salt of the earth, steady, hardworking, and always ready to help a stranger. Don't judge us by these bands of cultsmen, Lord Wizard. They're a sprinkling only, and the most of us are good folk indeed."
He might have said more, but the moonlight suddenly dimmed, and Sergeant Brock looked up in alarm. Sir Orizhan shouted an oath, then froze, staring up at the huge dark mass outside the doorway, sword in hand.
"The stray cow was near," the huge voice rumbled out of the darkness. "You owe the farmer who dwells in the cottage with two tall pines beside it, Matthew."
"I'll pay it." Matt grinned. "I've claimed first watch, Stegoman."
"Wherefore?" the dragon asked. "I have no lids to my eyes; even in sleep, I shall see what occurs."
"Dragons don't really sleep," Matt explained to his companions. "They just sort of slow down their systems and go into a trance."
"How reassuring," Sir Orizhan said in a hollow tone, and the two men slowly went back to what they were doing. Matt went to get out his own whetstone, feeling much safer knowing that Stegoman would be watching when he went to sleep. It wasn't that he didn't trust the two men, really—it was just that he couldn't trust anyone who hadn't proved his loyalty by saving his life a few times, the way the dragon had.
Both knight and sergeant rolled out their pallets and lay down to sleep. Matt rolled his out on the other side of the firepit, but sat up on his blanket, on watch. He let his mind wander, sorting through the various possibilities of who gained by Gaheris' death, and wondering where the Man Who Went Out the Window fit in. It all came down to him, of course. For a moment he had the crazy irrational notion that if the man hadn't gone out the window, none of this would have happened.
Then that thought vanished from his mind, because he saw the eyes watching him from the shadows.
They were perfectly nice eyes, seemed almost like those of a deer, large and brown, but what were they doing there? Sir Orizhan lay parallel to the hearth, Sergeant Brock lay at right angles with Matt's pallet opposite him, but the corners of the room lay in shadow, deepest opposite the fire and farther away from it, on the wall with the doorway. Matt was close to the hearth, and the eyes were watching him from the corner farthest away, where the darkness was most complete.
No, not perfectly nice after all, Matt decided—there was definitely a malicious cast to those eyes, or at least a mischievous one, and they didn't blink, they just stared, wide-open and calculating, staring right at him!
Matt didn't use his captured magic wand very often, so he never carried it, but he had found that any long, straight object would do reasonably well for focusing and directing a magic spell, so he rested his hand on the hilt of his dagger and waited, watching. After all, the eyes might be those of a sheep who had wandered in out of the cold while he wasn't looking. Not likely, he had to admit, but he hoped the only problem here was his own lack of vigilance.
Then the eyes turned away with studied nonchalance and moved toward the fire. They brought the whole creature along with the grace and silence of a prowling cat, and Matt stopped breathing for a moment.
It was humanoid, he could say that at least, though its legs were shorter than a man's and bowed; Matt couldn't see what shape they were, because the creature wore a ragged pair of trousers that came down to mid-calf—trousers, in a land where peasants wore leggins! Its arms were longer than a man's, almost to the proportion of a gorilla's—and it was just as hairy as a gorilla. But it walked with the upright posture of a human being, and its face was almost completely human. The ears were larger, and the head was very round, almost a perfect globe, covered with hair except for the face—but it grinned with a very human delight in its own mischief as it settled down near the fire, holding its hands out to the flames.
Matt was appalled, more than he would have been if it were so severely deformed as to be an outright monster. He could have accepted a different species more easily than a creature that was as much animal as human.
The creature sat on its heels, its legs folding like jackknives, and rubbed its hands in the warmth of the fire, but its eyes stayed on Matt, and its grin widened.
Matt stared back, feeling the atmosphere grow tense and more tense, waiting, waiting. He was bound and determined that he wouldn't speak first, or take any hostile action—but a defense spell ran through his head again and again, ready to be shouted at the slightest false move on the creature's part.
Apparently the creature realized his resolve, because it finally said, "Ye might as well speak up, man. I know you're watching."
&nbs
p; Matt only nodded.
"Fear not for them." The creature dismissed Sir Orizhan and Sergeant Brock with a glance. "They'll not wake till dawn. I've seen to that."
So it had magical powers, too. Matt nodded again, still holding the creature's eyes with his own.
Its lip curled in derision. "What's the matter, then? Have ye never seen a bauchan before?" It pronounced the word "buckawn."
Name magic thawed Matt; it was irrational, but having a word for the species reassured him. "No, I haven't. Are you a male?"
"That I am, and it's long since I've seen a female of my kind, I tell you. Centuries. Don't fear, though—I've no yen for human women. No yen for any kind of coupling, if no female bauchan is by me and in heat." It paused, but Matt didn't comment, so it said, "We do get lonely, though."
Suddenly, Matt felt sorry for the creature. To be the only one of his kind—as he must have been, if it had been hundreds of years since he'd seen a female—must have been very lonely indeed. "I can see that you would. But aren't there any other bauchans around?"
"There is one some four miles distant." The bauchan pointed north. "And one some ten miles east." He pointed another finger, looking like a semaphore. "But we have little liking for each other." He dropped his hands.
"Oh, great!" Matt said. "Two more near enough to do some good, and they're both grouches."
"Oh, nay." The bauchan grinned. "They're no worse than I am—but no better, either. Bauchans do not like other bauchans, you see."
Matt had read his share of folklore in his studies of comparative literature. "You mean you're solitary fairies?"
"Fairies!" The bauchan sniffed. "Why do ye mortal folk always lump all us magical folk together as fairies? We're spirits or spirks or pooks, nothing else! But solitary, aye, at least as regards our own kind. We'd much rather have mortal folk for company."
"Oh?" Matt felt the first tendrils of dread reaching out for him. "Tell me, why is that?"
"Because we've no wish to suffer one another's tricks and whims."
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