“Except this person, whoever he is, has access to at least one priest as well,” Perrin said.
“How do you know?” Dianthe asked.
“Unless the person—can we call him our enemy? It seems fitting—unless our enemy was in Uless, and why would he be if he had someone working for him there, Aneirin had to communicate with him at a distance. That means Aneirin was either in company with a priest, or had been given a means of communication by a priest. And if a priest works for our enemy, he or she will be able to track us by means of scrying, and I am in no position to counter that.” Perrin sounded bleak. His fingers twitched toward a flask that wasn’t there, then stilled.
“So it is dangerous for us to travel away from the main road,” Kalanath said, “out where anyone can attack and kill us without being caught.”
“Right,” Alaric said. He looked around. “We should keep moving. The enemy may not be able to bring his forces against us today, but there’s no sense dawdling.”
Sienne nudged Spark into motion. The horse had been grazing on tufts of grass growing out of the bank, but seemed unperturbed at being dragged away from her snack. “So how do we defend against this attack, if we don’t know when it will come or from which direction?”
“It will come from the south,” Alaric said. “They’ll want to set up an ambush rather than attack us openly, so they won’t want to chase us down by, for example, sending all their fighters to Harchow. And they’ll want to attack us well away from any settlements. We’ll look at the map tonight and see if we can’t identify the most likely ambush spots.”
“And I’ll try to figure out how to work the artifact tonight.” Sienne laid her hand on the bundle. “I wish I could jaunt back to Fioretti and put it somewhere safe. But I’d probably end up in the middle of the Jalenus Sea.”
“One thing at a time,” Alaric said.
18
The clouds darkened as the afternoon wore on, though no rain fell. The road rose back to ground level and unrolled straight as a furrow through the grasslands. It was hard to imagine anyone being able to ambush them, and Sienne said so. “We won’t reach the forest for several miles,” Alaric said, “and once we’re past that, it’s back to plains and farmland, as you remember from the trip out.”
“So if we can make it through the forest, we’re safe.”
“Unless our enemy is more desperate than I imagine, yes.”
“Maybe he is far less desperate than we imagine, and our refusal has deterred him,” Perrin said with a smile that said he didn’t believe his own words.
“Do you suppose he knows what the artifact does, and how to operate it?” Dianthe asked.
“What I wonder,” Sienne said, “is whether he thinks we know what it does and how to operate it. That would have to affect how he approaches us, right? If he believes we might use the artifact on his people?”
“Let’s hope that makes them cautious enough to give us an edge,” Alaric said.
The sun set about half an hour before they reached Verrone. With the overcast covering the moon, the road was dark enough that Sienne tried creating magic lights to illuminate the way. All they did was make the blackness more complete by comparison. She hunched over the artifact, feeling obscurely that she might protect it with her body from some nameless attack out of the darkness.
Night insects chirruped all around them, a high-pitched chorus that threaded its way into her ears and down her spine, increasing her tension. The low, long hoo of a hunting owl made her jump and nearly sent the artifact to the ground. She grabbed it and clutched it as tightly as if it were delicate porcelain.
“Are you well?” Perrin asked in a low voice. He rode beside her as usual, but sat erect in his saddle where she was bent over.
“Just… tired,” she said, “and ready to be indoors. I know they can’t reach us yet, but I feel so exposed.”
“Understandable.” They rode a few more paces, and Perrin added, even more quietly, “You were right. And I was rude. Pray, forgive me.”
It took her a moment to understand him. “No, I shouldn’t have attacked you—”
“You were concerned, and you were right to be. Perhaps, if I had listened—no. I think I have been on this path a long time.” He sighed. “I told myself I deserved oblivion because the pain of what I lost was so great. I think there is never a time when that is true.”
“Do you… you must miss your wife terribly,” Sienne dared.
Perrin sighed again. “She agreed with my parents that my choice put me beyond the pale. I thought… Cressida and I loved each other from childhood, and I would have sworn she trusted me more than any other. It seems I was wrong.”
She wanted desperately to ask if he had children, but knew it was a selfish desire that could only add to his pain. “I don’t understand,” she said instead. “Didn’t you know how your family would react to your conversion?”
“I had some inkling, yes.”
“Then why did you do it? If all it did was bring you misery?”
There was a long silence in which Sienne wondered if she’d pushed him too far. Finally, Perrin said, “My life until a year ago was a long, long string of doing what other people told me was right, no matter what my own intellect and instincts said. I worshipped on holy days and paid my offerings according to tradition and never thought about religion on all the days between. When I learned of the teachings of Averran, it was as if windows opened up inside me, revealing a world I could not have dreamed of.” He bowed his head and studied his hands gripping the reins. “And the first time I spoke to the avatar, and heard his voice responding to mine, I became the man I believe I was always intended to be. I could not give it up, do you see? I simply could not give it up.”
Sienne wasn’t sure she did see, but she nodded.
“You had to be true to yourself,” Dianthe said, startling Sienne, who hadn’t known she was listening. Perrin seemed unsurprised.
“It is a facile way of putting it—no offense to you, because I understand your meaning, but being true to oneself has for centuries been used to excuse all manner of bad behavior.”
“Yes. I meant you couldn’t keep your integrity and go back to being a casual worshipper of Gavant.”
“That is it exactly. I might as well have broken my marriage vows—it would have been as damaging to my soul.”
“I hope Averran is listening to this,” Sienne declared, making all of them laugh.
“He embodies wisdom in its most perfect form, so of course he hears us,” Perrin said. “And he knows my heart. It is simultaneously my greatest hope and my greatest fear that he will take my intentions into consideration. And—what’s that?”
Sienne looked past Alaric’s dark bulk. Ahead, lights twinkled. “Please tell me that’s Verrone.”
“We’re here,” Alaric said. “And I hope we don’t have the kind of warm reception we had at Harchow.”
Verrone was considerably larger than Harchow, nearly a city in size, and the highway broadened as they neared it. Sienne relaxed when tall, half-timbered buildings with stone foundations surrounded them, most of them bearing sign boards with names or pictures painted on them. Maybe she did prefer civilization, after all.
Dianthe chose their inn based on criteria Sienne wasn’t privy to. She hoped they had to do with the place’s impregnability in case of a siege. It was tall and narrow, with a stable yard behind and well off the street, and occupied a corner lot where two wide roads, busy even at this hour of evening, intersected. Sienne, alive to the possibility of pickpockets and tense enough to worry about the artifact being stolen off the horse while she sat there, kept one hand on the canvas bundle as she followed Alaric and Dianthe around to the stable. She dismounted, held onto Spark for a moment while her legs remembered how to support her, and removed the bundle from Spark’s neck.
“Inside,” Dianthe said in her ear. “We’re going to negotiate for rooms while the others handle the horses and gear.”
“Shouldn’t
we stay together?”
“We’re safe here, Sienne. Relax.”
It was easy enough for her to say that, Sienne thought, when she didn’t have a deadly artifact tucked under one arm. She went with Dianthe through the back door of the inn and through the kitchen to the tap room, where Dianthe found the owner serving drinks. A few coins changed hands, and they returned to the yard to meet the men just entering the inn. “Two rooms, guaranteed lice free,” Dianthe said. “I was afraid to ask why that had to be specified.”
“Let’s drop off our things and get some food,” Alaric said. “I’m starving.”
The rooms were on the top floor, and it turned out Dianthe had requested them intentionally. “I like having the high ground,” she said when Sienne complained at the third-floor landing. One room had two beds, the other four, and Sienne sank gratefully onto her bed and set the artifact beside her.
“I’m not very hungry,” she said. “I’ll stay up here and see what I can make of this thing.”
“You have to eat, Sienne,” Alaric said, “and it’s not safe for you to try to activate it without anyone around in case of an accident.”
“I was thinking it might be safer not to have anyone around, in case it shoots poison darts or something.” She stretched. “Bring me back some bread and cheese. I’ll be fine.”
Alaric looked like he wanted to argue the point a while longer, but only pressed his lips together in a thin, disapproving line and followed the rest of them out of the room. Sienne leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. She liked Spark, but it was so nice to sit on a surface that didn’t move.
She unwrapped the canvas to reveal the emerald falcon, but didn’t touch it. “So, you’re dangerous and there’s no conventional defense against you,” she said. “You’re an artifact, so you need someone to operate you, which means, I assume, you won’t kill your operator when she uses you.”
The thing stared up at her with a flat, glassy eye. It tilted to one side, propped on its right wing. Its claws were partially curved as if the creator had transformed a real falcon in the act of stooping on its prey. Sienne closed her hand around its… were they still ankles if it was a falcon’s legs they were attached to? At any rate, she took it around the legs just above its feet, with those wickedly sharp talons she was careful not to touch, and lifted it so its eyes and beak were level with her chin. She turned it around to face away from her.
“If it were me, I wouldn’t design a weapon with a face unless I intended that face to be a crucial part of that weapon,” she went on. Good thing her friends weren’t there to hear her talking to an emerald artifact. “Maybe you do an extra-powerful version of scream. I’ve heard there’s one that knocks people unconscious, and it’s hard to defend against an attack made of sound. Or force? It could blast from your beak, I suppose.”
She prodded the back of its head and neck, looking for moving parts. There was a groove a few inches deep and about a hand span wide at the base of its neck, and she ran her fingers through it. It was smooth and warm, warmer than the falcon’s surface, but nothing changed when she touched it. She ran her hands over the wings and tail, checking every feather. None of them moved. She tested the point of a talon against her thumb; it pricked her sharply, nearly drawing blood, which made her wonder if it needed blood to activate. She’d heard of artifacts that did. Grimacing, she raised her left hand to the thing’s beak and drew her thumb across the point, then squeezed a drop of blood into the falcon’s mouth and braced herself for an explosion. Nothing happened.
Sienne set the falcon on the bed and sucked on her thumb. It was a weapon. It couldn’t do damage in an area all around, or it would kill the wielder. Therefore, it had to do damage in a line or a burst of some kind. She picked it up again and examined the groove. It looked a little like a hand grip, curved inward as if made to match the contours of a hand…
She took a deep breath, then curled her right hand around the groove. Instantly the falcon grew warm to the touch, not just where her hand fit the groove, but where she gripped its legs and along its back where her right arm rested.
She let out a little shriek and nearly dropped it, but it didn’t do anything else. Cautiously, she released the groove, and it cooled off immediately. She gripped and released a few more times before setting it on the bed again. She’d gotten a reaction out of it. She just didn’t know what it meant.
Someone knocked on the door. “I brought food,” Alaric said. “Despite my feeling that I shouldn’t encourage you to neglect your physical needs for the sake of that artifact.”
“Thanks.”
He offered her a napkin-covered plate containing some beef in gravy and a pile of limp green beans. “The food’s not much, but it’s better than going hungry.”
“I made it do something.” Sienne dug into the beef. “It’s a start.”
“What, already? Isn’t that unlikely?” Alaric picked up the artifact by one wing and let it dangle.
“There’s really only so many ways you can design a weapon for human use. The real unlikelihood is that we’ll figure out the conditions for activating it.”
Alaric took a seat next to her on the bed, making it groan under his weight. “I thought you had a chance at doing that, because you’re a wizard.”
“I’m hoping, because it’s a weapon, it was made for anyone to use. Artifacts can have the oddest requirements, like only working in the light of a new moon, or you have to be a virgin—”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Anyway, this one—hold it by the ankles and see if you can fit your other hand into that groove.”
“Are they really ankles, if it’s a bird?” Alaric wedged his fingers into the groove. “I don’t feel anything.”
Sienne touched the falcon’s side. It was cool. “Maybe your hand is too big. Let me show you.” She traded him the plate for the bird and gripped it properly. Instantly, it heated up. “Touch the side.”
“So you activated it!”
“Part of it, anyway. There must be some other step.” She set the falcon down behind her and went back to eating. “We just have to be prepared for the possibility that it’s a step we can’t fulfil.”
Alaric leaned back against the wall and looked at the thing. “All this trouble over Sisyletus knows what.”
Sienne scraped her plate clean and laid it and the fork on the floor. She moved the bird aside and leaned back next to Alaric. “It’s not what Tonia wanted. If we weren’t concerned about what it might do, we could have sold it to that fake Marchena for ten thousand lari.”
Alaric slid his arm around her waist. “I could do a lot with a fifth of ten thousand lari. What about you?”
“Buy more spells, I suppose. A nice dress to go dancing. Would you go dancing with me?”
He shook his head. “I look like a performing bear when I dance. But I could watch you dance.”
“With other men? You wouldn’t enjoy that.”
“I would enjoy seeing their faces when you left them at the end of every set to join me.” He pulled her closer and kissed the side of her head.
“You sound awfully certain of yourself. How do you know I’d come back to you?”
“Because,” he said, tilting her head up so she looked at him, “none of them will ever kiss you the way I do.”
His lips touched hers, first lightly, then with a growing insistence that made her tingle all over. She put her arms around his neck and drew him closer, and they kissed, gradually shifting until they were lying on the bed, entwined together. Alaric shifted his embrace to pull her tightly to him, kissing her breathless. Sienne hooked one leg over his, feeling desperate to be as close to him as possible.
Something hit the floor with a chiming thunk. Startled, Sienne drew back, then laughed. “It’s the artifact,” she said. “What a duenna.”
“Yes, I think we were a little carried away,” Alaric said. He helped her sit, then kept hold of her hand as she picked up the falcon with the other. “I don’t
think we’re ready for that.”
“Certainly not when Dianthe could come back at any moment.” Sienne examined the falcon for cracks, or any sign it had been damaged by its fall, though she didn’t expect to find anything.
“Does Dianthe know there’s something between us? She gave me the strangest look when I said I’d bring you food.”
“She guessed. Were you really pining after me?”
“Is that what she said? I was not pining. I was secretly longing from afar.”
“That’s the same thing as pining.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s far more manly.”
Sienne laughed and punched him lightly on the arm. “I think it’s sweet. Though it’s far sweeter that you’re not pining anymore, and I’m not dithering, and—”
He interrupted her with a kiss. “Dithering, eh? I’m glad that’s over.”
Someone knocked lightly on the door. “It’s me,” Dianthe said, opening it a few inches. “You’d better not be naked.”
“Dianthe!”
“Just kidding.” Dianthe came fully into the room. “Any luck?”
“I can make it heat up, but still have no idea how to use it as a weapon.” Sienne removed her hand from Alaric’s and picked up the falcon in both hands. “Take it by the ankles and put your hand in the groove.”
Dianthe did as she was told. “I don’t feel anything.”
Puzzled, Sienne laid her hand along the falcon’s faceted side. “That’s strange. I thought Alaric couldn’t make it work because his hand is too big, but maybe you have to be a wizard to activate it.”
Alaric stood. “I’ll get the others. We can test that theory right now.”
When he was gone, Dianthe said, “I hope you were kissing at least some of the time. Wouldn’t want you to waste any of the privacy I engineered for you.”
“It would be indelicate of me to comment.”
Dianthe snorted. “Meaning you did. Good for you! Alaric needs some fun in his life, and you could stand to think about something other than magic.”
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