“Is Ierie traveling with you?” Alyea asked, trying to keep her tone level.
“Yes, of course,” the woman said. “He's over there, with the guards; he's the one with the heavy pox mark on his left cheek.”
Alyea lifted her gaze to the man indicated and realized he'd been watching them. They stared at each other for a long moment; then the man's lip curled into a sneering smile. He looked away, leaning over to whisper something in the ear of the man seated to his left. There were five guards seated around Ierie, all dark, flat-faced deep southerners, muscled and scarred.
A chill shivered down Alyea's back as Ierie straightened and stared at her again, speculation in his gaze now. She hesitated, weighing the risk, then decided Chac and Micru could protect her from any reprisals Ierie might aim her way.
“My lady Sela,” she said quietly, “I don't know much of the old language, but I know that word. Machago does not mean matchmaker, it means slave-master. Those guards are not there to protect you. They are there to keep you and your daughter from running away. Did you sign anything?”
The woman stared at her in blank horror. “I . . . what . . . well, yes, but . . . that's absurd! It was only a contract that he would escort us, that we wouldn't choose someone else as a guide.”
“Did your daughter sign anything? What language was it written in?”
“The same contract,” the woman said, drawing herself up and looking offended. “Of course it was in the desert lord's native tongue, but our s'iopes assured me it was a clear and legitimate document and I could sign it with no worries. Machago Ierie was their guest while in Isata. He's a good man; he gave generous donations to our church while he stayed with us.”
Alyea resisted the impulse to drop her head in her hands and growl in frustration. Generous donations? More likely bribes. But she knew better than to say that aloud.
“My lady,” she said carefully, “desert lords do not send servants to the northlands to find pretty young ladies of desirable family for their sons. Every desert lord I have ever known—” Which consisted, at this point, of Eredion Sessin, but Sela didn't need to know that. “—would have to be threatened with imminent death to even consider the notion, and would likely choose death. You are not taking your daughter to a potential betrothal; you are taking her to be sold. And quite likely you will be beside her.”
“That's impossible,” the woman said, the flush along her cheekbones a bright crimson now.
Her daughter's face had, in contrast, been growing steadily whiter.
“Oh, dear gods,” Gria said, hardly more than a breath.
“Don't you listen to her! I don't know what game you're trying to play, young lady,” the older woman snapped, “but I'll tell you this: I'll trust my s'iopes' word over yours. They are the favored of the gods; they cannot lie.”
“My lady,” a familiar voice drawled behind them. “Do me the honor of sitting with me? They're about to start serving the food.” Deiq smiled down at her, darkly handsome and completely implacable.
Alyea let a breath hiss through her teeth and considered the merits of refusing him flat out; but open hostility wouldn't help, and she was glad of the chance to get away from this stupid northern woman and her doomed daughter. She rose from her seat, nodded goodbye to the flustered women, and followed him to the head of the table.
Deiq didn't press her with conversation until after the food had been served and she had eaten several bites. Instead, he watched her thoughtfully, his dark gaze unreadable.
“It's unusual,” he said at last, “for a slave merchant to allow his purchases to sit at a noble table.”
Alyea paused and set the food back on her plate, feeling suddenly ill. “They don't know yet. The mother thinks she's on her way to a marriage auction for a southern desert lord.”
“You tried to tell them.” It wasn't a question.
She nodded and glanced down the table at the women being discussed. The mother was eating rapidly, still looking indignant; the girl stared at her food, picking at it slowly. “The mother doesn't believe me. The girl does.”
“Interfering with a machago can be dangerous,” Deiq said. “There's a reason he hasn't told them yet. There's a reason they're allowed to think they're still free nobles. I wonder what it could be?” His gaze went to the side table where the slave-merchant and his guards sat.
“Easier to transport willing victims,” she said.
His dark gaze returned to her face. “Very true. Once again, I'm impressed, Lady Alyea. You are a rare one.”
She almost groaned. Acting stupid might have lost his interest. Too late now.
He smiled. “Your advisors don't want you to have anything to do with me, yes?”
She bit her lip and resisted the impulse to cast a beseeching glance at Chac. He couldn't help her. “Yes.”
“Ah.” He smiled and turned his attention to his food for a while. At last he said, “This northern woman. Who is she?”
“Lady Sela and her daughter Gria. Cousins, I think, to Isata's Marq at some remove.”
“I know that line. Yes.” He smiled as if at some private joke. “I understand what's going on now. How interesting.”
He went on eating placidly, and Alyea picked at her food and fought against asking the obvious question. Deiq just as obviously wanted her to ask, to need something from him. She knew the game, and wasn't playing. The northern woman was nothing but another damn fool who trusted her stupid Church too much; a shame, and sad, but it wasn't the first time this had ever happened, and wouldn't be the last. Alyea had a job to do and it didn't involve rescuing stupid northerns. Chac would be beyond furious if she even tried, especially with Deiq's eye on her. Best to keep silent.
Deiq seemed to accept the quiet. He said nothing more the rest of the meal. As the dishes were cleared from the table, he cast her an amused glance and said, “Thank you for this conversation, my lady. It was most enjoyable.” He scrubbed the cleaning sand briskly between his hands, rose, and strolled away.
“I tried, Chac, I swear,” she said the next morning, as the old man glowered at her.
“He's still at our tail,” the old man said. “You must not have tried very hard.”
Alyea ground her teeth and resisted a strong urge to justify and defend herself—time to start taking some control before she turned into a puppet. She searched for a suitable rebuke, a sharp enough comment to set the old man in his place, and came up empty.
They rode in silence for a while. Alyea's annoyance slowly evaporated in the warming air. The mist that had greeted them in the morning burned away reluctantly, leaving the faintest of hazes behind for a while; then that vanished, and the dew that clung to the increasingly shrubby plants around them disappeared as well.
The ground still sloped noticeably upward. Ragged rock faces rose and fell around them like madly tossed crates. The path itself was relatively smooth, heavily traveled and worn underfoot, but narrowed in many places to allow no more than the width of a cart to pass. At one such spot, Alyea happened to be looking up at a long needle scrub pine that seemed to be growing out of a tall cliff to one side—and saw movement where there should have been stillness.
“Chac,” she said, trying not to sound panicked.
“Don't look,” he said, not moving his eyes from the path before them. “It's offensive.”
She took her eyes from the thin man in grey-patterned clothes who seemed to be hanging, unsupported, against the side of the rock face above them. He blended into the lichen and scrub-covered rock perfectly; if he hadn't moved just as Alyea looked up, she never would have spotted him.
“Who is he?”
“They,” Chac said, in a quiet, correcting tone, “are the teyanain. Singular, teyanin. The watchers of the Horn. They guarantee the neutrality of the path we're on.”
Alyea swallowed, feeling a chill run along her arms. “I thought teyanin meant some sort of desert demon,” she said. “My nurse used to threaten me that the teyanain would come get me if I
told a lie.”
Her childhood imagination had painted an image of monsters twenty feet tall that breathed flames and carried barbed whips in both hands. Now that she thought about it, that seemed a rather similar image to the one the northern s'iopes called up when talking about their gods. Chac nodded, still looking straight ahead. “Teyanin could be loosely translated as 'desert dread.' They were the arbitrators and enforcers of the desert; the keepers of the old laws. When the tribes split, the majority of the teyanain went south. As the kingdom developed, the remaining teyanain found a place for themselves in the Horn. They don't have the authority in the kingdom that they did in the desert, but they hold absolute rule along this road. That's why this road is safe—and why it's dangerous. As long as you hold your peace, you're safe, but start any kind of squabble or fight here and you'll be cut down from above without remorse or question.”
Alyea resisted the urge to look up again. “How many are there?”
“Nobody knows,” Chac said. “Best guess, two or three thousand. It's never been a large tribe, and they're particular about who marries into it, and who has access to their villages.” He paused, glanced sideways at her. “Took you long enough to notice them. I thought you'd pick up on them yesterday.”
She stared at him, openmouthed; he shrugged and looked back at the road ahead.
“We passed four yesterday, and the one you finally noticed was the second today,” he said. “And for every one you see, there's likely four or five more, hidden better. They don't mind being seen, every so often, just as a reminder that they're there, but don't make the mistake of staring.” She reflexively started to look up; stopped herself just in time and stared hard at her horse’s ears until the urge passed.
“Gods,” she said at last, badly shaken.
Chac grunted and said nothing. They rode for a time in silence. Alyea noticed that the group was unusually subdued, and when she looked over her shoulder, her men all had their eyes straight ahead, their shoulders stiff and tense. Only Micru seemed completely at ease, but still showed a reluctance to survey the area as he normally did. “They know,” she said, looking back to Chac.
“Of course they do,” the old man said a bit tartly. “Every one of the men with you has been through the Horn, along every road there is, more than once. Did you think you'd be given fools?”
“What happens when someone who doesn't know comes through here?” Alyea asked. “Like those northerns?” She'd told Chac about them the night before, after dinner; as expected, he'd dismissed them as fools and told her to leave them to their doom.
“They make allowances,” he said. “But they've seen the men here before, and they have good memories. They won't be making allowances for any of us except you; and given that you're surrounded by men who do know better, that leeway will be very short.”
“Why haven't I been told any of this before?” she demanded, suddenly angry. “I grew up in the king's court and never heard anything of what I've learned the last few days!”
“The politics you grew up with have to do with the northlands,” Chac said. “Not the desert. Most northerns prefer to forget anything exists past Bright Bay, and the desert lords like being left alone, so they encourage that.”
Alyea shook her head, brooding.
“How am I going to do this?” she said at last. “I thought I knew something about the desert lords. Now I feel like a child waddling into a bonfire.”
“About time you figured that out,” Chac said dryly. “That's exactly what you are.”
Her earlier resentment and anger returned. “And you're to keep me from burning myself?” she snapped. “You'd do better at that if you talked more about what I'm walking into, don't you think?”
“Thought you'd never ask,” he said.
“Ask?”
“First thing you need to learn,” he told her, unaffected by her anger. “You don't assume anyone's going to help you, here. You ask, and you acknowledge that even the asking puts a debt on you, whether or not you get the help you're after.”
She glared at him. He kept his gaze to the front, serene, even smiling a little.
“You're being paid by the king to help me,” she said.
“But you're the one directly benefitting from it,” he replied. “There's your first lesson in desert logic. What the king is paying for is my guiding you to the Scratha fortress, and a willingness to help you learn. You acquire your own debt every time you ask for advice or help.”
“Lunacy,” she said.
“If you don't learn that lesson,” he said, “the rest are useless, and so are you.”
She turned a fierce glare to the front, staring at outcrops of rock and unoffending scrubby brush, chewing her tongue against the curses crowding her throat. Breathe in. Breathe out. The lessons of aqeyva nudged at her mind. Breathe. Focus on the breath. Let everything go, just for a moment, and focus. Focus. Breathe.
After a while, she let out a long, slow, controlled sigh and nodded. “I would be deeply in your debt, s'e Chacerly of Bright Bay,” she said very quietly, very steadily, “if you would be so kind as to instruct me as you think best.”
“Well spoken, if rather broad,” he said. “Better to define the terms more closely, or you'll find yourself serving as a pleasure-girl in a noble's brothel.”
Breathe. Focus. Breathe. She must not lose her temper, must not haul off and knock the old bastard off his horse. Her mind stayed blank. Everything she came up with sounded worse than her first attempt.
“I don't think I know how to ask,” she said finally.
Chac let out a sigh. “Now I think we can get somewhere.”
* * *
Chapter Seven
Scratha waited until he and Idisio were in their room with the door shut before allowing his anger to surface. Idisio dodged out of the way as his master's hand shot out.
“I didn't,” he said quickly, putting some space between them. “I swear, Master, I didn't kill her.”
Scratha advanced, angling to trap Idisio in a corner. Judging that avoiding him again would only make matters worse, Idisio let himself be steered back against the wall. He allowed the man to get in one heavy blow, then sagged to the ground with an arm raised defensively. It seemed to ease Scratha's temper; he stepped back and stared down at Idisio.
“You stole my knives,” Scratha said. “Where's the other one?”
“I didn't!” Idisio protested, peering over the top of his arm. His cheek throbbed; he'd have a bruise before long. At least Scratha hadn't been wearing any rings.
“I saw you rooting through my pack,” Scratha said. He crossed his arms; his black glare tied knots in Idisio's stomach. “You thought I was asleep.”
As the man spoke, Idisio poked a tongue around in his mouth, checking for loosened teeth; they all seemed solid.
“I was checking to make sure nothing had been stolen,” he said. “I saw that girl coming out of the room and thought she might have taken something.”
Scratha stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “Either that's the worst lie I've ever heard, or it's truth. And I know you lie better than that. Get up and tell me what happened.”
Idisio climbed to his feet, watching his master carefully; there were still lines between Scratha's eyebrows, but the anger seemed to have passed. Idisio settled on the edge of a chair and said, “I was afraid someone was thieving through our room while we were eating. So I went to check, and caught that blonde girl as she rushed out of our room; she said she didn't steal anything, and you came in while we were arguing it.”
Scratha's eyebrows rose into a deeply skeptical expression.
“I know how it looked,” Idisio said. “But I couldn't get her to admit she'd taken anything, so I let her go and checked the packs to see if anything was missing. I thought you had your knives with you; I didn't realize you'd left them in the pack.”
He went on to detail his later search for the noise that had woken him, and the hurried, interrupted flight. He made
sure to phrase his intent as a return to his master's side for advice, and although Scratha gave him a dark, frowning look at that, he let the lie rest without question.
His master picked up the knife from the side table, stared at it a moment, then started to sit on the bed. Idisio heard a faint hissing rattle, and opened his mouth to shout a warning; Scratha spun around and stabbed the knife into the mattress, then leapt backwards, almost crashing into Idisio. Idisio hastily scrambled out of the way, only to find Scratha's hand clamped on his shoulder.
“Hold still,” Scratha ordered. “Not a muscle. Not a sound.”
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