“The game is called Whimsy,” Thorian said. “I could never quite get the spirit of it, but the object is to determine which squares each of your opponents holds based on sometimes inadequate information.”
Karin’s brow wrinkled. “That sounds like … poker?”
Thorian shrugged, dismissing it. “Perhaps.” Money games didn’t interest him. Chess, yes—he and Bob Aarsted had spent many nights over coffee and an old battered chessboard that had probably come over from the old country—but he had turned down the occasional offers to join the biweekly poker game over at Sven’s for so many years that Sven had finally stopped asking.
Karin nodded. Chess, but not poker; strategy, but not money. It helped to explain why he had never as much as asked about her stock trades.
“So, let me guess,” she said, “you all want a girl who is good with figures.”
He smiled as he placed his hands at her waist. “Among other things.”
Her hands snaked around him, but then she caught herself. She wasn’t used to Thorian distracting her, but he had. She held her body stiff. “You didn’t tell me what you are planning on doing.”
“It’s—” he thought about it for a moment. “It’s not difficult. I plan on staying alive, and talking at length about what I’ve been doing for the past years, about how close Hosea has become to our family, and demonstrating how good I’ve become with a sword.” He patted the hilt of his sword. “I’m going to defeat every man that any other house puts up against me, and make it look easy, and all the while I’m going to let everybody know that, eventually, I will be the key to Orfindel. I’m going to give His Warmth everything he wants,” he said, his jaw tight, his lips barely parted, “until the other Houses decide that that’s too dangerous, that His Warmth has become too great a threat.”
Karin frowned. “But what will they do then?”
He pulled her too him. “Sometimes,” he whispered, softly, gently, “you ask too many questions. Hold on, my Karin. There is no hurry.”
Chapter Sixteen
Escape
Hosea called for a break late the second afternoon, as he had on the first day. Ian was grateful, but Silvertop tossed his massive head, snorted, and trotted off through the thick brush, downslope toward where a slender silvery stream twisted and shimmered in the daylight. Not much of a stream, perhaps, but it was slender snowmelt streams feeding into larger ones that eventually built into the Gilfi; a mountain, no matter how huge, is just a pile of little rocks.
The horse crashed through the brush.
Well, if Silvertop didn’t want to rest, screw him. Ian was tired. After they walked a million miles yesterday—okay, okay, but it felt like a million miles—before stopping when it got too dark to continue, his night’s sleep had been fitful moments of slumber, repeatedly punctuated by moments of wakefulness when an insect or a bird chirped, or when the wind made the leaves rustle, or when he had just plain woken up for no reason. A lot of insects and birds had chirped, the wind often made the leaves rustle, and Ian had woken dozens of time in the night.
Walking had gotten the stiffness out of his muscles, but by noon he had been tired; it had only gotten worse from there. So Ian plopped himself down on an upthrust curve of root of an old oak, not bothering to take off his rucksack—it made a decent rest against the roughness of the bark—while Hosea simply squatted, spiderlike, rummaging through his pack, producing the waterbag, which he tasted, then dumped on the road.
Granted, the water didn’t taste as fresh as it had yesterday, but there was no point in wasting it.
“Hey—” Ian started, then caught himself. Oh.
Hosea smiled, his teeth too white in his dark face. “Yes, I’d rather have some fresh stream water than what’s left of the water from the well.” He eyed the slope ahead. “And given that there are cedars upstream from here, this water is likely to keep well.”
“I think I read that in my Boy Scout manual,” Ian said.
“Oh? You were a scout?”
Ian shook his head. “Just for a while. The old bas—my father put an end to it.” He shrugged. Ian had said something to Mr. Mclintock, the scoutmaster, about life at home; and when Mclintock had made some gentle inquiries of Ben Silverstein, dear old Dad had immediately pulled Ian out of Scouts, muttering veiled threats of lawsuit that were enough to frighten the scoutmaster off.
Not that there was anything anybody could do about it, mind. You had to show bruises, and a lot of them, to get the authorities interested in child abuse, and most of the shit Dad piled on Ian’s head was just words, just drunken, screamed words.
Nothing illegal about that.
Hosea nodded. “Surely enough.”
Ian pulled off a boot and rubbed at his foot. It helped to restore the circulation, and besides, a bit of air would do his socks and feet some good, although if there was anybody with a nose downwind from them, they’d know about it for miles and miles. Speaking of which …
“I thought you said there would be a lot of things looking for you, now that you’re back … here.” Wherever here was.
Hosea took a piece of jerky out of his pack and took a bite, considering. “Well, there are,” he said. “I do look a little different—and, thankfully, smell a little different—than I used to. More like a nightelf than anything else, although I’d have to be one with heavily mixed blood to stand the daylight.” He considered the back of his hand as though he had never looked at it before. “But Odin and Freya recognized me immediately, as any of the Elder Ones would.” He raised his head and smiled. “So it would be best if we were to avoid any of the Elder, eh? At least until we get there.”
“There? And where is there?” he asked, again, feeling like a kid asking Are we there yet?
Hosea pointed. “Still that way,” he said, patiently. “A few days’ journey, if we’re fast on our feet and not much delayed; one less day’s travel than when you asked yesterday. Falias, where our friends have been taken.”
Ian grunted. “And there won’t be lookouts on the road for you?” he asked. He had thought of the question yesterday, but by the time Hosea had called for a break, Ian had been more involved in being tired than in being curious.
Hosea nodded. “I would suspect so. But we’re not taking the main road, or a particularly good one, for that matter. It’s likely to be less well watched, particularly since the final leg up to the City is—”
“Hidden?” Ian gave it the extra emphasis.
Hosea frowned. “No. Just hidden. But perhaps unmarked, even to this day.”
“So that’s the plan? We walk in the back route of this Falias city and walk out with the Thorsens and Maggie?”
Hosea was silent for a long moment. “Tell me, Ian: what are the codes a Trident submarine captain uses to launch his missiles?”
Ian spread his hands. “I don’t know.”
“Very well. Now: imagine I’m applying red-hot pincers to your genitals—and I ask you again: what are those codes? Tell me!”
“Okay, okay.” Ian’s mouth twisted. “What I don’t know, I can’t spill. Even under torture.”
“Or worse.”
“What’s worse than torture?”
“It is my hope that you never find out.” Hosea looked at him thoughtfully for a long moment. “Never.” He straightened himself and settled his pack more securely on his back. “Let us be on our way. I want to make that ridge by nightfall.”
Some idiot was shaking him in the dark, waking him out of the weirdest fucking dream he had ever had.
Ian reached for the switch on his bedside lamp, but instead of the cold, round little knob, his fingers found wet grass.
Not a dream, he decided, wondering why he had never tried to get out this way before. If it was a dream, he could wake up—
“Wake up, Ian Silverstein,” Hosea hissed. “We have some difficulties.”
Ian sat up, tossing his blankets aside, reflexively reaching for the hilt of his sword. When had he developed that reflex? It wasn’t
the first thing a fencer did in the morning, or when he woke in the night.
He must have been sweating in his sleep, because the night air felt too chilly; he wrapped his cloak tightly about him as he rose to his feet in the dark.
It was too dark; he could barely see his hand in front of his face, and while he could make out a vague bulk in front of him, he only knew that it was Hosea because Hosea had spoken, not because he could see anything. Clouds had rolled in, and that turned the night from a bright starlit one into the inside of a coal pit.
Try to find the road, sure.
Off in the distance, a dog howled. Or not a dog—it was a long, attenuated cry, that sounded more like a canine yodel than anything. “The Sons?”
“Mmm.” Hosea listened silently, while another long howl rang out. “One of them has cut our trail, he says, and he’s reporting where, waiting for instructions and a response before he comes looking for us.”
“How’s his night vision? I can’t see anything,” Ian said.
The cold dark felt threatening. Eyes and fangs could be out there, waiting for him, just feet away, and there was nothing he could do about it. Draw his sword and hope to flail around?
“The Sons have very good night vision, although on a night this black, they’ll have to move more slowly than they’re accustomed to, if they don’t have a scent trail to follow. Silvertop? Silvertop.”
Ian could hear the horse crashing through the brush, and the changing wind brought Silvertop’s peculiar, harsh horsy smell to his nostrils, but he couldn’t see even a white horse on such a black night.
“How about Silvertop, and you?” Ian asked.
“Silvertop can’t see without light. There was a time when I”—a pause—“and I can’t see without light, either.”
Then what the fuck do we do? “Then if we’re going to run, we’d better make a torch or something.”
Hosea grunted. “In the light, I’d find a birch and strip it of bark for a torch, as perhaps I should have. Or taken some ticking and doused it with lantern oil, which I don’t have, because I don’t have a lantern, because I’d not wanted to make a light at night, because—” He sighed.
Ian wasn’t sure whether or not he was more scared or more irritated. Werewolves—Sons tracking them in a darkness that didn’t seem to bother them any, but had Ian, Hosea, and Silvertop stopped dead in their tracks … “So what do we do? Wait for them?”
“There’s little choice.” Ian could hear Hosea fumbling with the straps of his rucksack. “I know I had one of these in here … ah.” Then there were sounds that he couldn’t make out, and a muttering or two.
Light flared bright from the palm of his hand, too bright, pushing the darkness away to the edges of the small clearing. Hosea’s long, bony face, lit almost demonically from below, gleamed, the hollows of his cheeks and the shadow cast by his bony nose seemed too black. “And there was light,” Hosea said, with a grin. The silver Roosevelt dime in the palm of his hand glowed white, so white Ian reflexively shuddered at the heat.
But there wasn’t any heat. This close, a white-hot piece of metal not only would have burned through Hosea’s palm but the heat of it would have washed across Ian’s face in a fiery wave.
Hosea held the coin sideways between his middle and ring finger, his arm thrust out ahead of him, the palm of his hand acting like a reflector.
In the bright light Silvertop pawed the ground and snorted hard, the pawing sending detritus swirling up into the air, and the snort splattering Ian’s face with awful moist horse-gunk.
Ian wiped his face on his cloak. “So why didn’t you do this in the first place?”
Hosea’s mouth twisted. “Perhaps because I didn’t wish to advertise to any magical adept within a hundred … miles that I’m here. Would that reason satisfy you? Or perhaps would you understand that one who has once flown easily gets no pleasure from crawling painfully?”
“So now we make a run for it, eh?”
“No.” Hosea had already donned his own cloak, and he produced a handful of leather thongs, which he used to bind the top of his quiver closed and his unstrung bow to the straps of his rucksack, leaving his hands free. A few quick turns of leather tied his sword into its scabbard; he tossed Ian a thong, and Ian did the same.
“A matter of extremity.” Hosea laid his free hand on Silvertop’s neck. “I know you can outrun them, old friend—”
Ian stifled an objection. A horse couldn’t outrun a pack of wolves, but then again, Silvertop was no ordinary horse any more than the Sons were ordinary wolves.
“—but we need for you to do so without throwing us from your broad back. Can you try?
“One snort for yes, two for no?”
Ian wouldn’t have believed that a horse could glare, but it did, as Silvertop’s massive head bobbed slowly up and down. It snorted again, and tossed its head, tendrils from its long, ragged mane cracking like whips.
“Come, Ian Silverstein,” Hosea said, dropping to one knee and cupping his hand in front of him. The glowing dime lit only his chest and face, and the broad black side of the horse. “Silvertop will not tolerate a saddle on his back or a bit in his mouth, but he will allow you to hold onto his mane, and hold on as tightly as you can, with your hands and your legs.”
I’m a fucking city kid, and I don’t ride horses, much less huge horses, much less huge magical horses, much less huge, magical, immortal horses, Ian thought, but he put his boot in Hosea’s hand and sprang to Silvertop’s broad back. It felt like sitting on a hairy statue. The horse’s hair was coarser and harder than Ian had thought from looking at it, and the muscles underneath its skin were rock-hard, unmoving. He could have pounded on its back and done nothing more than broken his hand.
Hosea slipped to the horse’s back behind him, and slipped one steel bar of an arm around Ian’s waist. His other arm he thrust forward, the glowing dime lighting the path back to the road, albeit only dimly.
It was enough for Silvertop. The horse set off at a slow, gentle walk, and Ian wound his hands in the horse’s mane, the none-too-clean strands ungiving in his grip.
“For the love of all, Ian Silverstein, hold on,” Hosea said. “Careful of your eyes, now.”
Branches whipped at Ian’s face; he ducked his head and closed his eyes to protect them until they reached the road, and the rustling and snapping of brush became the clop clop clop of Silvertop’s massive feet as the horse set off in a fast walk. The rhythm of it was simple to move with, and for a moment Ian thought that this would be easy.
Clop clop clop clop became clop-clop-clop-clop and then clopclopclopclop, and it was only a little more difficult to anticipate the rhythm, to shift from side to side in concert with the horse.
Silvertop broke into a canter—clop-wham, clop-wham—and broke Hosea’s grip on Ian, and the grip of Ian’s legs on the horse’s broad back.
Ian pitched forward, hard, sliding across Silvertop’s withers upside down, holding onto the mane for dear life. His shoulders bore his weight, and he thought for a moment that his arms would rip right out of their sockets as he jounced around, one kick from Silvertop’s right foreleg catching him on the boot before the horse could stop.
It was all he could do not to scream.
Hosea was still on his back, his leg-grip unbroken. “Hurry, Ian Silverstein, hurry.”
“This—this isn’t going to work,” Ian said. “We have to try something else—”
He was interrupted by a wolf’s howl, and not as far off as it had been, and Ian cursed himself for an idiot as he accepted Hosea’s free hand, and levered himself once more to Silvertop’s back.
“Okay, Silvertop,” Ian said, “let’s go for it.”
This time Silvertop set off in a canter right away, which should have thrown Ian off again, but somehow he was able to hold on, even though his butt bounced hard against the horse’s back with every buck and rear, harder and harder as the horse’s speed increased.
And then a strange thing happened: clop-
wham clop-wham became a steady stream of clopita-clopita-clopita, and as the hard wind whipped tears even from his closed eyes, the back of the horse seemed to stabilize. Beneath his thighs and bruised buttocks Ian could feel the hard muscles under the thick hide, but it all was happening so fast, so rhythmically, that it was smooth, more like riding a steel locomotive than a horse.
He opened one eye, and past his wind-whipped tears the dark road twisted through the night, illuminated by a glowing dime held on an outstretched hand.
He closed his eyes tightly, and prayed for the night to end.
Chapter Seventeen
Hunters
It’s possible to hold still for as long as you have to, but not day after day. Arnie Selmo was allowed five minutes to stretch—and snack, if necessary—every hour on the hour. Orphie took his five minutes on the half-hours.
As the second hand swept up toward the twelve, Arnie sat back in the lawn chair, the BAR across the arms of the chair, a hot cup of coffee competing with a roast beef sandwich to warm his insides. A bit later in the morning, when Davy Hansen and the idiot Cotton kid were to relieve him and Orphie, he would supplement the coffee with a short pull from the silver flask in his breast pocket, but for now, the coffee and sandwich would have to do.
You make do the best you can with what you have. His family always had.
His grandfather Hansen had been living in Northfield, Minnesota, the year that the James and Younger gangs rode in to terrify the squareheads and rob their banks, and Grandpa Hansen had helped bury some of the bastards, one of whom he had shot with his old squirrel gun.
In the back.
From behind a tree.
Twice.
Whenever he would tell the story, Grandpa Hansen would finish with a snort. “Didn’t ask him to ride into my town,” he would say.
You made do with what you had. Like the BAR, and the Garand in the oilcloth on the ground next to him. In one sense, Arnie would have preferred to have the Garand as his main artillery, with the BAR in reserve or over with Orphie, but that really didn’t make sense.
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