The king turned to another guard, “Bring the healer woman and the two prisoners she worked on the other day.” He sat back to wait. Irritated, he beckoned a slave girl who held a tray of tidbits. She looked frightened. That reminded him of the girl he’d been about to use when he’d sustained his injury. Could the girl have injured me somehow? I’d swear she didn’t touch me, but perhaps I should have her killed. If she did injure me, killing her should discourage any others who might think to do the same thing.
He selected his tidbit and settled back to wait and think.
They brought in the prisoners first and a moment later the healer woman entered. Seeing the two caravaners, the healer immediately rushed to them, hugging them and asking if they were okay. The two caravaners were white as salt, so it was fairly obvious they were scared shitless. Good, he thought, even without her family, it looks like these two “friends” will give me a grip on her. “So, let’s see how your healing efforts turned out on these two,” King Philip said, indicating the two prisoners. “Guards, bring them closer.”
Little had changed since he’d inspected the prisoners earlier in the day, but the king made a show of inspecting them anyway. After doing so, he said, “Well, it would appear you may actually be a healer, as opposed to the charlatans we’ve had through Realth in the past. We’re impressed.” He rubbed his chin for a minute, then said, “That being the case, we’d like to offer you the position of court healer.” He looked at the healer woman, hoping she’d look grateful.
“I travel with the caravan Sir King, I’m afraid I can’t stay here to take a position like that.”
The healer woman spoke plainly and without apparent fear. Most people who attempted to deny him were shaking in their boots. King Philip gave a little grin and said, “But you haven’t heard about the pay.” He named a monthly wage higher than most people made in half a year.
She shook her head, “That’s a generous offer Sir King, but I must move on with my caravan.”
He frowned, “Maybe you can’t. Since you got in trouble with the law here in Realth, your family has apparently abandoned you. They and your wagon are gone.”
To his irritation, she didn’t look in the least surprised. “Still, Sir King, I’ll stay with the caravan. Hopefully my family had a good reason to depart and will return to the caravan to look for me at some time in the future.”
How in all the hells did she know they’d gone?! Someone in the palace must have told her! He wondered how he would discover the traitor. He stared at her a moment, then said “I’m not so sure. It appears they’ve abandoned you. At least, they left no messages about why they were going, where they were going, or when they might return.”
She returned his gaze, unfazed, “Then the business they left on must’ve been urgent indeed.”
It’s like she’s telling me they knew I was going to have them arrested! He glanced around his courtroom, Who could have told them?! And told her?! He realized he might be able to figure it out by determining who had been in contact with her and could also have had contact with the caravan. He leaned back in his seat, “Well, I’ve offered an apple. Now I’m afraid I must show you the whip.” The woman’s clear gray eyes remained on him. She didn’t look either intimidated or surprised! He continued, “You will work for us. You don’t have a choice.” He motioned to the guard standing behind the prisoners. The guard already had his sword out. In an instant, he’d run through the prisoner whose leg the healer had sutured. That surprised her, the king thought with satisfaction.
The healer woman’s eyes flew wide and she turned to the prisoner, reaching out; then letting her hands drop as she realized she had no chance to save a man with a sword through his heart. As the man spasmed, then slumped to the floor, she turned rigidly back to the king, a tear running down her cheek and an icy hatred in her eyes.
“Now, you may be thinking you don’t like me. You might even be thinking that, as my healer, you could easily poison me.” He leaned forward and fixed her with his gaze, “Know this then, woman. If I die, you die. If I even get sick, your friends here from the caravan,” he nodded at the two people the sergeant had brought back from the caravan, “they each lose a finger. And, I’ll kill another prisoner in front of you,” he glanced over at the man who’d had the abscess drained, “starting with your buddy there.”
The abscess man flinched, looking terrified.
Still filled with hate, the healer woman’s eyes had taken on a resigned look.
The king thought the two caravaners were about to crap. He wondered if it would be safe to have the healer woman give him an opinion on why he’d started bleeding. Probably as safe now as it’ll ever be, he thought. “Now, I have a condition myself. I’d like your opinion so the guards are going to clear the court of everyone except…”
She interrupted him. “Your genitals began bleeding,” she said matter-of-factly.
His eyebrows shot up. Wanting to tell her to shut up until the room was cleared he said, “They did not! I…”
She interrupted again, “They did. I’m a healer. It’s my business to know these kinds of things.”
Somehow she’d begun dominating the conversation! He’d wanted the court cleared before he talked about his own genitals, but was a little late to try to keep it a secret now. He began, “What could cause…?”
“Abominations. I suspect you were about to commit a crime generally punished by the death sentence. Is that right?”
Philip swallowed, how the hell does she know?! Out of the corner of his eye he could see some of his people glancing back and forth amongst one another. Shit! “What I was doing at the time has nothing to do with…”
The bitch interrupted him again, “If you were about to rape someone, that has everything to do with what’s wrong with you! If you keep doing things like that, the disease in your genitals will just get worse.”
The king swallowed. He wanted to tell her he’d been using the enslaved girls for years without a problem, but that wouldn’t be a good public admission. And he sure as hell didn’t want people thinking his genitals were diseased! “They’re not diseased! I had an injury!”
“Really?! Who injured you? I’m betting no one even touched you!”
In a fury, King Philip pointed a shaking finger at the healer woman and roared, “You, will shut up!” He could feel his heart pounding and knew his face had turned red. Getting a grip on himself, he continued in a steely tone, “We may want a healer, but we don’t want one bad enough to put up with an insolent bitch like you.”
The woman actually drew in a breath for another one of her insolent retorts, but apparently she then recognized just how close to the edge Philip was. She swallowed whatever she had been about to say and stood silently, her lips pressed together in a disapproving line. Anger still flared in her eyes.
Philip turned to his chief guard, “Put her in leg irons and short chain her to a bolt in her room. Her friends here,” Philip waved at the two caravaners, “can feed her and carry her chamber pot. We’ll see if she’s still this uppity after a few days of chafing at her ankles.”
As they led the woman from his chamber, his thoughts wandered once again, How did I get injured down there? Could it really be some kind of disease?
***
Tarc stood, leaning against the palace wall underneath one of the little guard cupolas as if resting. He had his eyes shut as his ghost explored Eva’s new situation. The guards had put her in a new room with a much heavier door. It had a large eyebolt sunk into the floor. A blacksmith had come in and riveted shackles around Eva’s ankles that afternoon. A heavy chain went from one ankle to the other. The chain wasn’t very long and it had been attached to the bolt in the floor with an enormous padlock. Both the door and the padlock had been locked with large keys. Tarc’s ghost had followed the guard with the keys when he left, hoping the keys would be kept in a readily available location. Unfortunately the guard had hung the keys on the wall in a large guard room which always seemed to have 10 to 20 guards mil
ling around in it.
Tarc stepped away from the wall and wandered off down the street. Daussie would keep an eye on Eva from a block away. Tarc walked, hoping something would inspire him with a solution to this new problem.
After buying rope and cord that morning, he’d been fairly confident he’d be able to get over the wall and into the palace grounds. Once inside, he’d hoped to be able to use his ghost to avoid the guards. He’d bought material for gags and extra cordage. If he had to, he could render a few guards unconscious, then bind them. Now if only he could unlock his mother’s room and chains, it would just be a matter of retracing his steps to the wall and helping his mother climb down the rope to get out.
He really didn’t want to kill any of the guards. He’d been giving a lot of thought to the ethics of killing with his talent. He’d accepted that some people did things that rendered their lives forfeit. Not that he wanted to be their executioner, but he’d decided that he shouldn’t feel guilty when he killed people who would have been given the death sentence by a judge and jury.
The guards on the palace grounds, however, they were only doing their duty. Killing them would be… Just pondering it gave him a sick feeling in his stomach. He couldn’t leave Eva his mother in this prison, but he surely hoped he wouldn’t have to kill one of the guards to get her free.
Getting the keys out of the guard room posed a huge problem. He couldn’t imagine how he could get the keys without killing a lot of the guards.
Tarc had been daydreaming, but suddenly realized he was passing a hardware shop which had some locks in its display window. He ducked inside and meandered the aisles. He stopped to look at some padlocks. They weren’t as big as the one holding Eva, but he imagined they worked on the same principles.
The key was tied to the lock, so he was able to look at it while his ghost felt the parts inside the lock in three dimensions. He quickly understood the blade of the key had to have a certain shape. Without notches in a couple of places, it would be blocked from turning, but without protuberances in three other locations, it wouldn’t lift the three pawls that released the lock.
However, it was easy for his ghost to simply lift the three pawls.
He paused and, without looking around, sent his ghost out to make sure no one in the store was close enough to see what he was doing. Assured the coast was clear, he lifted the pawls with his ghost and pulled on the hasp. The lock fell open. Immediately closing it, he proceeded to wander around the store a little more in case someone was watching him. In another section, he found some door locks. Again, they weren’t as heavy as the one in the prison, but their mechanisms turned out to be very similar to the one in the padlock. His ghost easily unlatched one of those as well.
He felt a great sense of relief. After wandering around the store a little longer, he bought some nails and went to find his sister.
“Dauss.”
Daussie looked up at her brother, surprised she hadn’t noticed him approaching. Her mind had been flailing uselessly at the problem of her mother’s imprisonment. She felt guilty for talking Tarc out of trying to rescue their mother the previous night. She’d thought it would be hard to get Eva free then, but it seemed infinitely worse now. It seemed so hopeless that her thoughts spent most of their time cycling through useless self-reproachment and only occasionally managed to focus on possible solutions. Tearing her attention from this useless sequence and turning to Tarc, she said, “What?”
“I’m trying to work out our options for breaking Mom out.”
“Breaking her out?! But that’s impossible now! Surely your ghost has shown you the locks and chains they’ve got on her? You were right—we should have tried to get her out last night like you said!”
Tarc shrugged, “Turns out I can open locks with my talent. I’m assuming you could probably break them if you had to.”
Daussie gave him a stunned look, “I could?!”
“Well, yeah. I stopped in a hardware store that had locks and studied them with my ghost. It turns out that, at least the locks they had, have little catches in them like the pawls on a ratchet. The pawls keep you from turning the latch. I can lift the pawls with my talent, but I’ll bet you can just teleport the catches right off the pawls. Without the hooks on the pawls it would essentially be unlocked. Even if that didn’t work, you could just punch a bunch of holes in the hasp of the lock and then break it.”
Daussie said, “You think I can punch holes in steel?!”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking it might not be any harder than punching holes in soft things. Here, I brought you a big nail. Try it.”
Daussie took the nail. It was huge, with a shaft nearly a quarter of an inch in diameter. Focusing on it, she tried punching out a small piece. A three millimeter ball of steel fell from underneath it, leaving a little hole inside it. A few seconds later she had punched a cluster of holes across its diameter. She grabbed the mail with both hands and easily broke it in half. Suddenly she sobbed and buried her head in her hands, “Dammit!”
“Hey! What’s the matter?” Tarc asked, gently resting a hand on her shoulder.
“I could have punched holes in the rope that son of a bitch had tied me up with! Why didn’t I think of that?! It’s so obvious!”
“Some things are only obvious after they’ve been pointed out.”
“Well, I wish someone had pointed this out before that bastard carried me off!”
“Me too. I just now thought of it while I was thinking about how to get Mom free. Actually, the first thing I thought of was…” He paused, thinking.
“What?”
“Well, say we’re captured by some guards while we’re trying to get Mom out. While they’re holding us, before we tried to escape again, you could punch a row of holes through the blades of their knives and swords. Then, if they attacked us during the escape, their weapons would break.”
“That’d only work if I got really close to them.”
Tarc shrugged, “Yeah, a lot of things to do with our talent depend on our getting close. But, we still have a lot of advantages.”
“Yeah,” Daussie sighed, “but I’m not sure they’re enough.”
***
Eva’s shoulders were slumped. She couldn’t believe she’d let her temper get the best of her while talking to a king of all people. Certainly this particular king was evil in a disgusting and depraved sort of way, but yelling at him like she had! It was like poking a sleeping tiger with a sharp stick!
The blacksmith had only riveted the shackles around her ankles that afternoon, but her skin already hurt from chafing against the heavy steel. The heavy but short chain between her ankles attached to the bolt in the floor with an enormous padlock.
She snorted at herself. She hadn’t wanted her children to try to break in and free her because of the risks involved. But now, her behavior in the king’s chamber had ensured that, even if they did break in, they wouldn’t be able to free her.
Eva’s guilt over dragging the Ropers into her problems had overwhelmed her for a while. She’d apologized to them repeatedly and Haley Roper had pointed out that Eva shouldn’t be held responsible for someone else’s evil deeds. Henry though, had mentioned that he knew Eva’d been told not to work as a healer in Realth. Eva had the impression they didn’t hold her to account for King Philip’s deeds, but they did think treating patients in Philip’s kingdom had been terribly irresponsible.
Worse than the chafing of her ankles was the indignation of having the Ropers service her with a chamber pot. At dinnertime Haley Roper had retrieved a bowl of unappetizing mush for her. She’d scooped it from a large pot which had been wheeled by their door by some of the guards. They hadn’t given them spoons, so Eva had to eat the pasty sludge with her fingers.
Lying on a thin mattress under a ragged blanket, Eva once again tried to shift into a position where the manacles didn’t irritate her ankles so. In her ear she heard Tarc’s whisper. He sounded amused, “So, ‘Woman who yells at Kings,’ how’re you
doing?”
Eva rolled onto her side and tucked her head in under her blanket so she could whisper back without the Ropers hearing. “Yeah, sorry. I got a little carried away.”
Tarc chuckled, “Well, you wouldn’t be our Mom if you weren’t ‘uppity’ to vile kings.”
Eva sighed, “I’ve been thinking about how to dig myself out of this situation I’ve gotten myself into. I’m going to have to be on my best behavior for a long time before they’ll let me out of these shackles. Once they do that I’ll have some chance to escape. I’m thinking you guys should take the wagon someplace far from here. Somewhere you think you can do business without the caravan.”
Tarc interrupted her, “We’re not leaving you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They have me chained to the floor with heavy shackles. Even if you could break in here, you couldn’t get me free! The only reasonable plan is for you to come back with both horses in about a month. Hopefully, by then I’ll have remained meek, been on my best behavior, and proved my worth to the king. I’ll no longer be in shackles and I’ll have convinced him that I must to be taken out shopping regularly at the apothecaries so I can find the best medications for his ‘crotch rot.’”
“Oh, that sounds like a plan!” Tarc managed to sound like he was biting his lip to keep from laughing. This despite the fact that he was generating the sound of his voice with his talent, which meant any struggles to avoid laughing shouldn’t really have affected it.
Irritated, Eva said, “Of course it’s not perfect. I’m completely aware things probably won’t work out just as I’ve outlined them. We’ll have to improvise when the time comes, but it’s as good as we can do right now!”
A hand shook Eva’s shoulder and Haley Roper’s voice came from behind her, “Eva, are you okay?! You’re mumbling—are you having a bad dream?”
Eva realized with some embarrassment she had spoken a little louder than she should have when she’d gotten frustrated with Tarc. “No,” she pulled back the blanket and looked into Haley’s worried eyes. “No, sorry. Sometimes I talk to myself when I’ve done something particularly stupid.” She gave Haley a weak grin, “I’ll try to chastise myself a little more quietly from here on out.”
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