Bastion

by Mercedes Lackey

  For a moment it looked as if Jakyr might tell her anyway, but he glanced at Lena and Amily and shrugged. “It should be ready, anyway. Good thing you made it in before nightfall; running that trail in the dark could have been a hazard.”

  They queued up for bowls of the thick, dark stew, and chunks of bread to go with it. It had a rich, wild taste to it, and the bits of organ were tasty, oddly familiar, oddly unfamiliar in his mouth. Whatever odd, metallic flavor that the blood might have given to it, Jakyr had neatly disguised with seasoning.

  “So I was thinking,” Mags said, after he’d had a couple of mouthfuls, “I was wondering if maybe you lot ought to go out ahead of us this time. That way you could sorta scout the village and let us know what’s what once we get there.”

  Jakyr frowned. “I don’t think that’s all that good a notion, Mags,” he said—and Lita predictably cut him off.

  “Of course you wouldn’t. You don’t trust us to be able to suss out the situation,” she said with scorn. “I’ve been gauging audiences since before you were in Whites, Jak. I think it’s a splendid idea.”

  She paused to inhale a few more bites of stew, and Jakyr winked at Mags while her attention was still on her bowl. Then he launched into his counterargument, an argument that was as frail as a cobweb and just as easily destroyed. He put up a brave mock fight, though. They went through two bowls of stew each before he put down his bowl, threw up his hands, and said, “Have it your way! You will anyway! It’s all about you winning!”

  “As if it wasn’t as much about you winning, you hypocrite!” she snarled back, and they were off, this time with some real vitriol.

  The others hastily gathered up the dishes, worked together to get them quickly washed and put up, took lanterns and retreated—Lena and Bear to the caravan and Mags and Amily to their sleeping nook.

  “Where are we going?” Amily asked in puzzlement, as Mags led her by the hand past the now-empty spot they had used, and deeper into the cave.

  “It’s a surprise,” Mags said, and chuckled. “Or maybe not, since you saw we ain’t got the same place.”

  “Ooh,” was all she said, and let him lead her down the twisting passage. The arguing voices faded away as they made the first turn, and after the second, they could not be heard at all.

  He hung up the lantern on the hook and was pleased with her reaction to the new bed. Now . . . to follow Jakyr’s instructions.

  Although there was one thing they were certainly not going to do. Jakyr had suggested that he start undressing her slowly, caressing her and kissing her as he did, but she was already stripping away her clothing and huddled under the feather comforters in next to no time, and he didn’t blame her. It was cold enough to make his teeth chatter, and he was glad to follow her example, blow out the lantern, and join her under the covers.

  This was the first time they had ever been undressed together. He felt excited, and awkward, and hot and cold all at the same time. But he kept his head and did as Jakyr had suggested, starting with the same sort of kissing and cuddling they’d done all along. Then he started doing the other things that Jakyr suggested. Some things had made sense and some hadn’t—but all of them seemed to work just fine, and her little sounds started making him hot and things almost got out of hand—until he let down his barriers and concentrated on picking up little bits of thought from her.

  He was pretty sure that if he had been an Empath and was feeling what she was feeling, that wouldn’t have gotten the results he wanted. But having to concentrate on listening with his mind, that was work, and it calmed that unruly part of him right down and let him work on getting her to that big happy place Jakyr had told him about.

  Then her thoughts went all incoherent, and she began to gasp, and all of her shuddered and arched under his ministrations, and with great satisfaction he knew that he had done it.

  He held her and cuddled her while she panted and slowly relaxed, then started it all again. Except that this time, now that she’d been taken care of, it was going to end in his turn.

  Just when he was about to make his move, she wiggled and got herself under him. That made him pause. He couldn’t see her in the thick cave dark, but he whispered to her, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, and yes said her body under his and yes, yes, her hands and her lips, and so he did what he’d been dreaming about for months and months.

  And he hurt her; he heard her gasp, and it wasn’t a gasp of pleasure, but at this point that part of him that was not to be reasoned with had the bit in its teeth and it was going to gallop away to what it wanted regardless. He couldn’t have stopped it and, really, didn’t want to. He’d pleasured himself, of course; what fellow didn’t once that part became aware of what it was for and how good some things felt—but, oh, this was better, better, so much better!

  And then it was his turn to gasp and groan and shudder and then collapse over to the side, shaking.

  But when he could think again, he remembered what Jakyr had told him. “After you’ve hurt her, make her feel good again.” So even though he would have liked to fall right asleep, he kissed her and cuddled and caressed her, and finally the plaintive little breaths and the pain-thoughts turned into pleasure again, and he made her happy.

  And then they slept.

  • • •

  With a wink at Mags, over a breakfast of oatmeal cooked in the deer broth—which was surprisingly good—Jakyr suggested mildly to Lita that they might want to start right away for the next village. But this time Lita didn’t exactly rise to the bait. Maybe she had figured out she’d been manipulated last night; after all, she was anything but a stupid woman.

  “Tomorrow is soon enough,” she said. “We won’t be taking the caravan anymore; we’ll be riding double on the vanners. With snow in the air, we can’t take the chance the caravan will get stuck somewhere.”

  “For once, I agree with you,” Jakyr said, and that was that. Mags and Amily had a second night together, which went even better than the previous one, and in the morning, with Lena up behind Amily and Bear up behind Lita, the four of them headed off at a brisk trot for the next village on the Circuit. He hoped she wasn’t still sore so that riding the wide-barreled vanner was going to hurt her, but she seemed cheerful enough as they trotted off.

  Mags and Jakyr gave them a half-day head start, which would become a full day after they overnighted at the next Waystation. Jakyr spent the morning bottling up as much of the broth as he could, which was not nearly as much as he wanted, and cleaned the kettle, while Mags secured the site for another five or six days of absence. Then, after a good lunch, they were off.

  But as they approached the Waystation, they immediately knew that something was . . . not right.

  There was a smell of woodsmoke in the air, and there shouldn’t have been anyone around to build a fire. Maybe the scent had traveled from the village, but the wind was in the wrong direction, and that seemed unlikely.

  They approached the Waystation cautiously. Unlike the previous station, this one was not only in good repair, it was in suspiciously good repair. The roof was newly thatched, every stone in place, and all the woodwork repaired and stained. And, yes, there was a very thin curl of smoke coming up from the chimney.

  They looked at each other. “Someone’s moved in and is helping themselves,” Jakyr said, with a hint of a growl in his voice.

  “I thought that was against the law,” Mags replied.

  “It is. And we’re going to put a stop to this. But whoever is using it might be armed, so we’ll treat this as if an enemy had taken it.” At Jakyr’s nod, they both dismounted and turned the Companions loose. The Companions ghosted through the trees, somehow becoming practically invisible, and scouted the area around the Station.

  :Nothing out here. And we don’t scent anyone in the Station itself,: Dallen said. Mags and Jakyr glanced at each other, and Jakyr nodded, but they both kept their swords in their hands as they eased up to the door.

  Someo
ne had modified it so that it had a real latch and a lock instead of the string latch that Waystations were supposed to have. Jakyr made a face, but Mags waved a hand at him.

  “I got this,” he said, and sheathed his sword, taking a slim dagger from his belt instead. Of course, if he had known that he was going to have to pick a lock, he would have brought the set of lockpicks with him. But who could have predicted that someone would have helped themselves to a Waystation?

  Mags had been taught by an expert, a member of the City Watch who’d once been a thief. He himself was by no means an expert, but this was a very crude lock, and that was being generous; it yielded to his efforts long before Jakyr got impatient.

  When they opened the door, it was to find that the unknown someone had not only helped himself to the Station, he had moved in, lock, stock, and barrel.

  One of the bed boxes had become a curtained bed. The other had been turned into a storage chest, complete with a lid. The storage cupboard had been joined by a second as well as a wardrobe. There was a table with a basin and a pitcher, a little table with a chair, a rug on the floor, a chamber pot in the corner, and very little room left in which to move.

  There was also a pot simmering over the fire in the fireplace, which suggested that the occupant could be expected to return at any—

  :He’s coming up the path,: Dallen warned. Mags and Jakyr positioned themselves on either side of the door, weapons ready. They waited, scarcely breathing. The door swung open.

  Before the man could react to the fact that “his” door was now unlocked and unlatched, the two were on him, Jakyr’s sword at his throat, as Mags snatched away the ax in his hand.

  Now, any reasonable person, at least in Mags’ estimation, who found himself confronted by an angry Herald in full Whites—scarcely someone whom you could mistake for anything but a Herald—would acknowledge the fact that he’d been caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t and surrender.

  This fellow was evidently not a reasonable person.

  He tried to knock the sword aside and went for Jakyr. Jakyr was handicapped by the fact that he really didn’t want to hurt the fellow, and the fight that ensued, though short, turned into something rather brutal. By the time it was over, the chair and table were good for nothing but kindling, the pottery in one of the cupboards and the basin and pitcher were shards, Jakyr had a black eye and bruises on his throat, and the only reason that the fight had ended at all was because Mags had managed to get behind the man and brain him with the flat of his own ax.

  After they’d bound him and shoved him into a corner, swept out the broken pottery and thrown the ruined furniture—and the lid on the bed box—into the woodpile, Jakyr woke the interloper up with a rude pail of ice-cold water from the little well to the face.

  The man spluttered into consciousness, tried to rise, discovered he was bound, and glowered at them.

  “I’m trying to be charitable here,” Jakyr said carefully, “but it’s damned difficult. What are you doing in a Herald’s Waystation?”

  “What are you doing in my house?” the man roared back.

  “It’s not your damned house!” shouted Jakyr.

  “Wait!” Mags interrupted, holding up a hand. “This ain’t gonna get us nowhere. Lemme Truth-Spell ’im.”

  Jakyr paused and blinked at Mags. “You’re right. We don’t have to get consent for the Truth Spell when we catch someone breaking the law.” He waved at their captive. “Do it, Mags.”

  It was Dallen, not one of the teachers at the Collegium, who had taught Mags the Truth Spell. Dallen had taught Mags practically everything he knew about his Gift, and since Mags had an exceptionally powerful Gift of Mind-magic, Mags could lay the strongest possible variation of the Truth Spell on a miscreant—or someone who simply wished his story to be believed. This version could compel the truth out of the person it was placed on, and more. It would compel them to tell the whole truth, blurt it out in fact, without needing specific questioning.

  This would be the first time Mags had ever put the Truth Spell on someone who wasn’t a fellow student, and it felt very odd to be doing so. Even odder was the part of the spell where you concentrated on a pair of . . . eyes. He actually saw the eyes hovering over the miscreant’s head for a moment, and from Jakyr’s start, so did the Herald.

  Then they blinked out, and the blue aura of the Spell enveloped the man.

  Mags could not help thinking, though, as Jakyr moved in and took his place to question the man, about the eyes. Because the assassin’s magician who had gone mad had babbled about eyes watching him. Were these . . . the same eyes?

  He didn’t get a chance to think about it for long, however, as Jakyr barked, “What are you doing here?”

  “This is my home!” the man snarled back. “My father gave it to me! What the hell do you think I’m doing here?”

  11

  “Now what do we do?” Mags asked aloud. The man had finished ranting, he had dismissed the Truth Spell, and they had gagged him because he still kept ranting about “his house” and “his rights.” He was sitting on the edge of the empty bed box, and stared up at Jakyr, hoping that the senior Herald had an answer.

  “I confess I am at a loss,” said Jakyr, staring down at the man, who glared back at him and issued muffled and incoherent sounds from behind his gag. “We clearly have a problem here. This should not have happened. At all. Someone at that village—what is it?”

  “Therian,” Mags said, consulting the map. He wasn’t surprised that the name had flown out of Jakyr’s mind; it had gone from his as well. What should have been a routine, if somewhat irritating, Circuit was turning into something unexpected and ugly.

  “Someone at Therian thinks he has the right to give away Crown property, and I will be unsurprised to discover it is the Headman, given the general attitude out here.” Jakyr paced back and forth—even though there wasn’t a lot of room to pace in. The man continued to glare. Jakyr continued to ignore him. “He couldn’t do that unless one of two conditions obtains. Either the rest of his village doesn’t know, or the rest of his village is convinced they don’t have to obey the law. If it’s the first, we can probably come down like the Wrath of the Gods Themselves and frighten them all into appropriate behavior—probably even get the Headman dismissed. If it’s the second, we have a real problem on our hands. Right now we don’t know which condition is the one we are about to face.” He paced some more. “I’m minded to turn right back around and get the Guard. Except that might make things worse.”

  Mags thought about this very hard. He could see how getting the Guard would make things worse. The whole idea was that villages were to enforce the laws on themselves. But if they brought the Guard into it—there would be even more resentment, if not outright rebellion, and there would be no way to enforce the laws without keeping a detachment of the Guard there. “How about if I sneak down there, get hold of Amily, and find out what they’ve learned?”

  Jakyr stopped pacing. “That seems to be our best option. Meanwhile, I am going to help myself to dinner here, since our thief has provided it.” It was Jakyr’s turn to glare down at the man, who was uncowed. “Perhaps a lecture delivered while I eat might bang some sense into his head.”

  Mags nodded and went outside. Jakyr would probably need his Companion soon, but Jermayan couldn’t be left to stand in the cold, unprotected. He threw a blanket over Jermayan, but did not unsaddle him, and mounted Dallen. A brisk gallop through bleak forest got them to the edge of cultivated land and within sight of the village just about sunset. There was a glare of light on the western horizon, and the sky was a deep and sullen crimson.

  There he dismounted near a hedgerow and used it as cover to get into the village itself without being seen, slipping along the bushes bent over, so as not to show above the top. When the hedgerow ended, he crouched and peeked around the bottom of it, assessing the two or three dozen buildings of the village. He found the inn quickly enough by the wheat sheaf carved into a board a
bove the door and by the fact that it was roughly twice the size of any of the other buildings in the town. Making sure there was no one about to spot him, he ran to the shelter of the nearest house, put his back to the wall and edged toward what passed for a street, ran across to the inn, and slipped in behind it. Still keeping his back to the wall, and moving as quietly as possible, he slid over to the attached stable—an actual stable, this time, a not merely a lean-to shelter. As he expected, the stable held the vanners, who regarded him with benign indifference as he hid himself between them. There were no other horses here, but the fact that this inn actually had a real stable told him that it got a respectable amount of traffic, probably in the warmer part of the year.

  Then he crouched down in the straw between the horses, closed his eyes and sought the familiar sense of Amily’s mind. As he searched for her, he tried to make note of the contents of stray thoughts, and at least he didn’t sense any overt hostility. Although when the villagers discovered how they had treated that interloper, that could change in a heartbeat.

  He found her; the connection seemed a lot stronger between them now, and once again he wondered if she had a Gift that was somehow late in coming, and whether it was slowly awakening now that he was “talking” to her. :Amily. We got problems. I’m in the stable,: he sent to her. He caught her startled assent and the general sense that she was coming to him.

  He waited, crouched in the straw, relatively comfortable in the warmth being radiated from the two vanners. It was hard to tell in the darkness whether the stable was kept up well or not—but it certainly didn’t smell poorly kept. Even an empty stable that hasn’t been mucked out regularly had a stink of ammonia and old droppings to it. From where he crouched, he could see the door and the yard outside it clearly. After what was probably a quarter-candlemark, he spotted someone hurrying to the stable in the thin moonlight. As soon as the girl—he could tell it was a girl by the shape—got close, he heard Amily call, softly, in the direction of the stable.