Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  He paused just long enough to rob her of her knife, then dumped her across the front of his saddle, facedown—as the horse galloped off, she thought she was going to be sick. The pommel of his saddle jolted into her stomach, and she had a terrible time just getting a full breath between jolts. The whole world was reduced to lashing hair and snow-covered ground, and the pain of an ever-increasing number of bruises.

  The next thing she knew, he'd stopped as abruptly as he'd started. He grabbed her under the arms before she got a breath, and threw her toward a—wagon? Whatever, she was flying through the air, straight for it. Before she had time to brace herself, she landed inside a darkened boxlike structure, and hit her head against the wooden floor. Meri landed on top of her in the next moment, then something bulky and heavy flew in after them. The door they'd been tossed through slammed shut, there was the sound of a bar dropping in place over the door. Before either of them could move, the box began jolting around, bouncing and bruising them both unmercifully to the sound of wheels and galloping hooves.

  We're in a wagon. A prison-wagon, or a treasure-wagon, they're about the same—

  That was all the tiny, still-sane part of her could think, as she and Meri clung to each other, and screamed and cried until they were hoarse, sore of eye and of throat, as well as battered and bruised.

  Eventually they managed to brace themselves so that they weren't bouncing around quite so badly, and long after they'd cried themselves out, the wagon finally slowed to a reasonable pace.

  "What happened?" Meri asked tearfully, in a hoarse whisper.

  "I th-think we've been kidnapped," Kira stammered back.

  "But—why?" Meri wailed. "Who would want to kidnap us?"

  Kira ignored that question; obviously their father was under the impression that someone would want to, or he wouldn't have sent guards to escort them home for the holidays. She knew, beneath her own fright and nausea, that somehow she would have to come up with better questions than that. You had to have questions before you could have answers—and oh, she needed answers now!

  A voice out of memory interrupted her chaotic, fear-filled rambling.

  "Think things through."

  She started; for a moment the memory of Tarma's voice was so clear that it seemed as if she'd really heard the words.

  "We have to think, Meri," she whispered fiercely. "Like Tarma always says." She screwed up her face in concentration, and tried to dredge up other memories that might help.

  "Start with what you know, and go on to what your resources are. Don't waste the first few moments on speculation."

  She licked her lips. What she knew—well, they'd been kidnapped. They were in a wagon, being hauled rapidly away from where they'd been taken. And she knew that sooner or later, someone would come looking for them.

  How soon? No, that's a speculation. There was nothing to tell her who it was that held them captive. But at the very least, she should begin by examining their prison.

  There wasn't much to examine; there was enough room on the floor for both girls to stretch out at full-length, but not much more than that. The walls were straight and unadorned, and would permit an adult to stand erect. There were no windows, no benches to sit on, but light did leak in through a couple of chinks and knotholes. No help there.

  She examined the bulky objects that had been tossed in after them by touch, and discovered to her joy that it was their packs! But it was obvious that they'd been opened, and a quick feel through both proved that nothing in the way of a weapon had been left to them, not even a pair of Meri's scissors. She still had the tiny knife in her boot, but it wouldn't be of much use.

  Resources. Clothing, Meri's embroidery, beads and jewelry they didn't steal, and my journal. I suppose we could use drawstrings to strangle someone, provided he held still and cooperated—

  She stifled a hysterical laugh. Concentrate! What came next?

  "Father will send someone to find us, won't he?" Men asked, her voice trembling just a little.

  "Once he knows we're gone. If he can find us." There didn't seem any point in telling her twin less than the truth. "That could be hard. I don't know where they're taking us, but it's probably far away. And they've got us locked up in this wagon, I bet, so we don't attract attention. If they get onto a trade road, it's going to be awfully hard to track us."

  Meri took a shuddering breath, but kept herself under control. "Couldn't we—leave a trail of something? Like the goose-girl and her pocket of pebbles?"

  Kira almost dismissed that as desperate babbling, but something in her seized on the idea. A trail—maybe that wasn't such a bad idea. There was a chink in the floor, and they could drop something small out of it without much trouble. But what? And how could they keep what they dropped from being seen by their captors? Almost anything they dropped would stand out in the snow—

  —snow. White snow. White silk! Silver beads!

  "Meri, I need the white silk you got from Jadrie, and the silver beads," Kira said urgently. "Can you find it in here?" She shoved Meri's pack over to her, and hoped that the silks hadn't been looted.

  "I think so." Meri rummaged around in her pack in the semidarkness, and finally came up with a handful of skeins of thread that shone pale as moonlight in her hand, and a little box that rattled. "Here. What are you going to do?"

  "Leave a trail for people to follow," Kira replied, carefully finding the end of one of the skeins, then snipping off a short piece with her tiny knife. "They should have dogs. They might have Warrl! When they find this silk, they'll know it's us."

  Carefully, she fed the silk through the chink, doing her best to keep it from snagging on a splinter. It took three tries, and three pieces, before she hit on the idea of making a funnel with a piece of paper from her journal, but at last she got one to drop all the way through.

  Meanwhile, she kept thinking. "We've got to figure out a way to slow everything down," she said, as she continued to thread bits of silk through the wooden floor, alternating the silk with silver beads. "Think, Meri! What can we do to make it hard for these people?"

  "Should we try to run away when they take us out?" Meri asked doubtfully.

  "They're a lot bigger than we are, and there's more of them," Kira reminded her. "And I don't think they care if we get hurt a little."

  Or even a lot.

  "Besides," she continued, "If we try to run away, they won't ever let us out again."

  "Could we do something to the horses?"

  "Only if they let us get near them." Kira thought about it a moment, pondering the possibilities of burrs under saddles, or crystal beads lodged in hooves, then shook her head regretfully. "I don't think they're going to do that. If we were bigger, we could probably loosen the wheels on the wagon or something—if we had wine we could get them all drunk—"

  Meri thought for a while longer, then said, reluctantly, "What if we got sick? Wouldn't they have to stop so we wouldn't die?"

  "They'll know if we aren't really sick, and anyway, they could just leave us in the wagon."

  "Not—" Meri bit her lip, and Kira could tell her twin was blushing by the tone of her voice. "Not if it's—stomach troubles. And lower."

  "Stomach grippe? What are you thinking of?" Kira asked sharply.

  "Remember my black beads? The ones Kethry told me never to let the baby play with, because they'd make him sick? They took my good jewels, but not those." Meri rummaged in her pack again, and came up with three long ropes of small, dark beads. "They're not really beads, they're seeds, and Jadrek helped me to find out what they were. They don't taste like anything, and if we eat three or four, we'll get sick. Then they'll have to stop to let us—be sick. Won't they?"

  Kira looked at her twin with sudden admiration. I would be willing to get sick to slow everything up—but I wouldn't have thought Meri would! "I think so," she said, with another thought coming into her mind—but one she would save, until she had a better idea of what their situation was. "It's worth a try."

&
nbsp; Blood everywhere. I'd thought I would never have to deal with a situation like this one again. Tarma surveyed the carnage impassively, but with a sinking feeling in her heart. The bodies of the ten guards that had lately left the school with Meri and Kira now sprawled in ungainly poses over about a quarter of an acre of trampled snow. Three were down on the road itself, four lay in a ragged line under their dead and fallen horses and had clearly never gotten the chance to struggle free before they, too, were killed, and the remaining three were in a line behind them, where they had made a final stand afoot. Blood stained the white snow red everywhere, and liberal trails of more blood heading off to the south and west showed that the kidnappers had not gotten away completely unscathed.

  But there were no dead that were not of the guards in Tilden's livery, so if any of the attackers had died, their bodies had been carted away. A bad sign. Whoever planned this was well organized, well armed, and with a lot of men. And it wasn't a simple bandit-raid. Not one guard had been left alive to send word of the massacre. Those horses that weren't dead were grouped together, heads down, exhausted—not carried off with the bandits. The two ponies that Meri and Kira had ridden out on stood under a tree beside the road, sadly nosing through the snow and biting at the withered grass they found there.

  Nobody actually stopped to loot either, not even the gear on the dead and living horses. All the arms and armor, all the packs that belonged to the dead men, it's all still here. Just the girls and their packhorse, that's all that were taken, and I have to wonder if the packhorse wasn't grabbed just because they didn't want to take the time to unload the girls' stuff off him. If we hadn't had Need, nobody would have known this happened until some trader or farmer stumbled over the bodies—and even then, no one would know that the girls were missing. Until Tilden came looking for them, that is.

  "Where now?" she asked Kethry.

  "South and west," she replied immediately. "More west than south."

  Well, that certainly corresponded with those telltale blood trails.

  Tarma sucked on her lower lip, and glanced up at the sky to the west. Behind the gray pall of clouds, the sun shone feebly, no more than a finger's-breadth above the horizon. The air was sharply cold, too cold for snow at this point, so for a while they could follow the clear trail left by the kidnappers. It would be dark soon—and no time to act on her hunch that the kidnappers were about to drive straight south. At least, not in time to cut them off.

  "Stay on the pillion, Furball," she told a weary Warrl behind her. "I'll track them as long as I can see, then you take over until we can't ride anymore."

  But just as twilight faded, that became easier to do, for the tracks of the running horses in the unbroken snow were joined by the tracks of wheels. Warrl raised his nose for a quick investigation, as Tarma read the churned-up snow. The blood-trails ended where the wheel marks began, so the kidnappers had paused long enough to rough-bandage their wounds.

  :New men, here. They waited for some time while the others created their ambush and sprung it.:

  "So they had a wagon ready and waiting, and that's where they put the girls." She gritted her teeth. "Smart. You keep them completely under control and you don't have to worry about someone accidentally seeing them. Hard to explain a little girl trussed up like a chicken for the pot, but no one is likely to be curious about a prison-wagon. I wish to hell I knew who these people were! It would tell me a lot about why they've done this and what they want."

  "Surely ransom," Kethry ventured, but Tarma shook her head.

  "Not necessarily, she'enedra. This could be political, an attempt to force Tilden into a position he wouldn't otherwise take by holding his girls." She used a little mental discipline to keep herself calm so that she could think properly, as her battlemare responded to her unease by shifting her weight and looking around for the danger. "It could be political in another way, to make an example out of the girls, to show how ruthless these people can be. Hellfires, if there are still any of Char's old allies around, I'd count on them to be that ruthless. It could be religious; the Triune Goddess Priests have been getting their noses out of joint since there isn't an official state religion anymore."

  "It doesn't even have to have anything to do with Rethwellan," came the small, uncertain voice from behind her. As she turned to peer at Jadrie through the gloom, the girl swallowed but looked straight into Tarma's eyes and bravely continued her thought. "Merili is supposed to marry the Prince of Jkatha. And the kidnappers are going south. Maybe someone wants to force Queen Sursha to do something to get Men back safe. You know she'd have to do something, especially if it's Jkathans that took Meri and Kira."

  "Damn. Out of the mouths of babes. Good thinking, kitten." And maybe I ought to be grateful that she's along… Tarma shook her head, then tried to visualize where they were on a map. With a sinking feeling, she realized that if the kidnappers continued southward, they would quickly strike a major trade route, and the odds were high that they would be able to muddle or hide their trail there in the tracks of ongoing traffic.

  Which meant that the odds were high that they would strike straight south soon. Going across country to try at least to catch up was a better plan than it had seemed a few moments ago.

  Plots on plots—what if someone wants the boy to marry his girl? Getting Tilden to forbid the marriage in order to get the girls back would do that, and Sursha doesn't even have to enter into it. What if they want to make a political incident out of this, between Jkatha and Rethwellan? Making it look as if Sursha is behind it could easily do that. The trouble is—the trouble is—a lot of these plots end in murders.

  "Warrl, we need you now," she told the kyree, and with a groan, he jumped down off the pillion-pad behind her into the ankle-deep snow. "We'll keep going as long as we can, then we'll stop for a rest and start as soon as there's light."

  "Footing?" Jadrie said hesitantly. "For the horses? Shouldn't we have some light?"

  Tarma followed in Warrl's wake before she answered, but this was practical knowledge for Jadrie. "If we didn't have Warrl, or if he was fresh, or if we were on anything but Shin'a'in horses, I would agree. Warrl is too tired to make more than a walk," she pointed out. "At that pace, we let the horses feel their own way. I don't want to advertise our presence with a light—in conditions like this, you could see a light for leagues. Plus if the kidnappers have a mage, he might be able to sense a mage-light."

  There was no more comment from Jadrie, so Tarma put the child out of her mind, and let Warrl lead them all onward, as the horses placed their hooves with deliberate care.

  At this point, she wasn't anything more than a passenger; she folded her arms and tucked her hands into her belt, let her head sag, and dozed. If the damned sword wasn't making life too difficult for Kethry, she knew her partner was doing the same. Catch sleep whenever you can. The mares and Warrl would warn of danger long before it was visible, and they were too far behind the kidnappers for there to be any likelihood of stumbling into their camp. Of course Jadrie wasn't going to nap, and shouldn't, because she didn't have a battlemare, only a Shin'a'in-bred saddlemare. But Jadrie also had two advantages over her elders—the first, that she wasn't expected to fight or track later and didn't need the extra sleep, and the second that she was decades younger than either Tarma or her mother and could go longer on less rest.

  The horses plodded on into the thick darkness, as Tarma roused herself roughly every candlemark or so to check their bearings by Kethry and Need. As she had expected, some time within the first candlemark after darkness fell, the kidnappers turned south, and were probably on the trade road into Jkatha right at that moment. Probably camped. I hope the girls are all right, at least for now. It was some comfort to know that they were in a wagon, probably locked in there, and that the people who'd taken them were trained and disciplined. If all they were was terrified—well, they could get over simple terror. There were other things that could happen to little girls that were harder to get over.

 
Including being murdered.

  It was just after midnight that Warrl stumbled over a snow-covered branch, and admitted, :I'm done in, mindmate. We have to rest now. The track still says nothing has happened to the girls, and I can't go any further.:

  Both mares stopped when Warrl did, and Jadrie's horse only went another pace or two further than that. "Right. We're stopping, Keth," Tarma called.

  Kethry grunted a vague reply, and shook herself awake. As she and Tarma slid stiffly out of their saddles, Kethry kindled a very dim mage-light and Tarma looked around for a suitable campsite. There wasn't much, out here in an area of rolling hills mostly covered with scrub and very rough grasses, but a half-circle of snow-covered bushes gave a certain amount of protection from wind and watchers. She got Jadrie to help set up the tiny tent, and Kethry got out grain for the horses and took over the three packs and extinguished the light. Then, while Kethry laid blankets down on the floor and tucked their packs inside for safekeeping, Jadrie and Tarma unsaddled the horses, rubbed them down, and gave them their rations. She didn't need to hobble the battlemares, for they wouldn't wander, and to keep Jadrie's mare from strolling off, she simply fastened her halter to Ironheart's.

  The tent was very small, but big enough for all three of them to lie down together, with a little room to spare for luggage. As Tarma had known she would, Kethry had set up a spell to keep it warm all night long, without a fire. She'd also done something to make the tent poles glow faintly (a glow that couldn't be seen from outside through the canvas) so that they could see to keep feet out of faces. Their blankets were to pad the tent floor beneath them, and to keep the cold from seeping into their bodies from below, not for warmth. It was possible that a mage could sense all this, but these were very minor magics, and well within the scope of just about any earth-witch or hedge-wizard.