He didn’t have to fake being weak-kneed; his muscles really were so cramped that they were not cooperating with his captors. He kept his eyes shut this time until they were done with him.
But they must have realized what being curled up was doing to him—finally. Instead of putting him back, they hauled him with his arms draped over their shoulders some distance from where they had taken him, and laid him down, stretched out, on a blanket that was now spread out over something softish. Leaves, or pine needles, maybe. They extended all his limbs as he feigned unconsciousness. He didn’t have to pretend that he couldn’t move. He still couldn’t, and he fought down another round of panic as he wondered if he really was paralyzed as well as without Mindspeech.
But . . . no. He remembered bits from Bear’s chattering. People who were paralyzed couldn’t feel their limbs, either, and he certainly felt his. It was just the drug. In fact, one of his hands and both of his feet were practically on fire now . . . they’d been “asleep” from pressure and now were “waking up.” And his right ankle just ached from having been bent at a bad angle for so long.
He heard the sound of a fire being started with flint and tinder. After a while, he cracked one of his eyes open, just a little.
It was sunset. He couldn’t see exactly where he was, but it looked like a forest, a thicker forest than the last time they’d stopped. More pines, fewer trees with leaves.
He cracked the other eye and edged his head over by the tiniest possible increments.
Both men were engrossed in doing something over the fire, with their backs to him. Cooking, he thought. Well, that made sense, soup would go bad pretty quickly; they were obviously taking great care with him for some reason, and they wouldn’t want to poison him with bad soup, so they would have to stop to make fresh fairly often.
They were talking quietly, so quietly he couldn’t hear anything but a murmur.
He still couldn’t imagine what they wanted with him.
One of the men got up, moving with smooth grace, then came over and stared down at him, and he tried to keep his breathing even and quiet. After a moment, the man went away, then came back again, and threw the horse-smelling blanket over him, then went back to the fire.
Disorienting waves of vertigo engulfed him as the pain and cramps eased and his limbs relaxed under the warmth of the blanket. Obviously the drug wasn’t done with him yet.
Mags closed his eyes, fought off the dizziness the only way he knew how, by concentrating on everything else around him.
Sound first, that was easiest. Near at hand, the fire crackling, the two men muttering occasionally. The sound of muffled metal on metal in a regular, slow pattern. Someone was stirring food in a pot. Someone who actually knew how to cook. Mags remembered dimly, from when he worked in the Pieters’ kitchen, how the cooks would end up with pots full of half-burned and ruined food because they didn’t bother to set someone to stir it. Fat sizzling in the fire and the flare-ups that followed.
Farther away, the sounds of tearing and chewing. He knew those sounds, it was a horse eating grass. A horse? More than one? The stamp of a hoof. Another. Then two snorts, just slightly apart in time. Two horses, then. No harness jingling. So, they were definitely here for the night.
Under the cover of the blanket and between waves of dizziness he tried wiggling fingers or curling toes, but nothing happened. Back to listening, then.
Leaves moving in a slight breeze, and a moment later, that same breeze cooled his forehead. The sound of something small moving through the underbrush. A couple of birds he couldn’t identify in the middle distance, and far, far off, the faint honks of a flock of geese.
No sounds whatsoever that were man-made except those of his captors.
That disposed of sound. Smell?
Nearest, the stink of his own sweat. No surprise, given how he’d sweated his clothing until it was soaked. Under that, the faint smell of crushed pine needles. The fire gave off a slightly different aroma than he was used to. Meat cooking, both the sharp scent of meat cooking directly over the fire and the more mellow aroma of meat cooking in water. So they were making their own dinner as well as his soup. And there was a baking-bread smell, although, again, it wasn’t the sweet scent he was used to. From the direction of the horses came the smell of torn grass. All around, the faint and bitter smell of leaves turning.
Finally, the last of his aches melted under the warmth of the blanket. He couldn’t help it; his body felt comfortable for the first time since he’d been put in the wagon, and even though he tried to fight it, between the remains of the drug and his relaxing body, he dozed. But it wasn’t restful, because there was a great and terrible gulf of loss between him and any real rest.
He couldn’t hear Dallen. He couldn’t hear Dallen. He was all alone in his head for the first time since he’d been Chosen, and only once in all his life had he felt so completely alone, abandoned, and in despair. That was when he had decided that he didn’t deserve Dallen and had tried to give up being Chosen.
It hadn’t worked, of course. But now—
It felt like a bitter betrayal. Not by Dallen! By his own body, perhaps. But he’d been promised, faithfully, that he would never be alone again. And now he was. And it was horrible.
He wept, silently, until he was so exhausted all there was left was sleep.
When he woke again, it was to snores; his eyes were sore, and his face itched from the tears dried on it. He itched all over, from the dried sweat. They hadn’t drugged him—he cautiously cracked an eye and turned his head a little to look toward the fire.
One man was curled up on his side, a lump under a blanket. The other sat with his back to Mags, poking at the fire with a stick.
It was startlingly quiet. Overhead, the stars were spread across the sky like a dusting of heavy pollen, or seeds spilled from a giant basket onto the black earth, too many and too thick to count.
With infinite care, Mags tried to move his right index finger.
It moved!
He almost cried all over again.
He tried all the fingers, one at a time, then tried the left hand, and moved on to his foot. He could move! But he wasn’t going to press his luck by trying to move his arms or legs. That might alert his captor, and that was the very last thing he wanted to do right now. Now he knew approximately how long it would take for the drug to wear off, and—
Before he could finish that thought, the man at the fire straightened and tossed the stick he had been using to poke at the fire into the coals. Then he reached over and shook his fellow awake.
Time for the second watch, then.
But it seemed that it was time for more than that, as the first one reached down and picked up something next to him, and as Mags hastily closed his eyes again, he recognized with dismay the shape of the waterskin.
—no—he thought.
But his captors had their own plans. And there was no help for it.
All he could do was, as before, try to drink as little as possible. And then wait for the dreams to carry him away again, and cling to his knowledge of who and what he was as he was tossed around like a leaf on a storm wind, and with about as much control over his fate.
9
They had stopped giving him the drug in his food, and now it was only in his water. He must have convinced them that he was weakening, and that they didn’t have to drug him so heavily anymore.
Or, maybe, they were running low, and they were trying to stretch out what they had.
The point was that his moments of clarity were longer, and he was able to move now at the end of them. In fact, he was in his curled position, secretly flexing his muscles to exercise them, when the wagon stopped.
He froze, not daring to move at all, lest he be heard.
“Where are you
going, and what are you carrying?” asked a harsh voice that sent chills of fear all down his spine. Fear, because even though he understood the language, it was not one that he wanted to hear.
This was Karsite.
“That is none of your concern,” replied one of the now-familiar male voices, heavily accented and thick with arrogance. It was an arrogance that Mags remembered only too well from the so-called “merchant-princes.” “Behold this seal, dog, and know the will of your masters. We are to go where we will and answer only to them.”
There was a long pause. Then, “It appears real,” the first man said, grudgingly.
“That is because it is real, hound,” the second replied, voice laden with contempt. “Go back to your meddling in the lives of the small and weak. We have important work to do and no time to waste satisfying your pitiful curiosity.”
Well . . . this was worse than he thought. As he listened to the sounds of a fairly large troop of men marching away, he felt his heart plummeting. If he’d had any doubt before, it was erased now; these were the same sorts of assassins who had been systematically trying to destroy Valdemar at the behest of Karse. They must still be holding to their contract with Karse to have a token that enabled them to be rude to the captain of a troop of Karsite regulars with impunity. So not only was he somewhere on the Karsite side of the Border, he was in the hands of people who could order Karsite soldiers around.
So very bad. Really, the only thing worse would be to be in the middle of being tortured for information.
Which . . . could happen at any point.
Because right now, for whatever reason, they were taking care of him. But if they lost the protection of that token—or if they insulted someone badly enough that he decided to ignore it—the Karsites would find him.
At least I’m not wearing Grays. And at least there’s nothing on me that says I’m from Valdemar . . .
Not that such thin protection would last long if they were all tossed into a Karsite prison, because eventually the drug would wear off, and they’d start to question him, and if his story didn’t match that of his captors . . . or they noticed his accent . . .
He started to sweat.
Maybe if that happens, I’d better pretend to be insane.
* * *
Mags could not look up at the canvas throw over his head without craning his head to the side in a way that got painful before very long, but then, there wasn’t much to see, just the cloth lit from behind by whatever light was coming in through the canvas cover of the wagon. The two men babbled at each other in urgent voices as the wagon swayed and rolled over uneven ground, and the bed slanted first one way and then another. He’d thought the road they were on was rough, but now he knew he had been quite mistaken. Mags was pretty sure what they were doing, and it was exactly what he would do under the same circumstances. They might have sounded arrogant when they addressed the captain of that Karsite troop, but he reckoned now that they were not as sure of their status in Karse as they had pretended to be. So they had left the main road and taken to something less traveled.
That wasn’t their only problem. He could hear thunder in the distance. They were about to get hit by a storm, and they were on what was a very bad road. That could spell a lot of trouble.
Evidently that occurred to them, too. They stopped the wagon as a peal of thunder growled for a very long time, and the light inside the wagon faded so much that he could barely make out the shapes of the things penning him in. This was going to be bad, and they knew it. But they hadn’t pulled off the road, so they weren’t stopping—which might, or might not, be a good plan. He didn’t know a lot about driving wagons, but he did know that trying to drive horses in a storm was going to give them an enormous amount of trouble. He figured they weren’t going to take any chances on him waking up during the storm, so they were going to drug him now.
Dammit! Under cover of a storm, of course, would give him the best possible chance at escape. Even if they pulled off the road, he would have a chance of overpowering them and getting away.
But there wasn’t anything he could do about it—except that, as they poured the drugged water into him, to let as much as he could dribble out one side of his mouth, counting on it being so dark they wouldn’t notice.
Only one of them came around to the back and got in. By the little lurches the wagon was making, the horses were nervous and the driver didn’t dare leave them unattended. Mags let about half the water leak out of the side of his mouth, and evidently the man feeding it to him didn’t see it. He even held the last mouthful and spit it out once he’d been laid down again.
But being stopped had meant that they hadn’t fed him the soup, either, so since his stomach was completely empty, the drug hit him fast. All he could take note of when he passed into a dream of being huddled with the other mine-kiddies in their pit under the barn floor during a thunderstorm was that he still hadn’t been curled back up in his cavity, and the fellow was doing a lot of moving things on the other side of the wagon.
* * *
This time, he came awake all at once, as an enormous boom nearby made the horses scream. The wagon lurched and swayed wildly. And he was in complete darkness.
He didn’t panic, because for once, on waking, he knew exactly where he was. Except—he wasn’t curled up. He was stretched out, and he felt wood pinning him in on all sides. Not coffin-tight, but he hadn’t a lot of room to move, either, except at his head and his feet. The blanket had been laid over him. A moment later, as another bolt of lightning hit nearby with a simultaneous crash of thunder, the wagon rocked and bucked, and he felt boxes and bales hit the side of whatever it was he was in. If he’d been in his usual position, by now he probably would have had every bone in his body broken by stuff falling on him. He didn’t think he was in a coffin, because why would they have a coffin with them? That would be just daft—no one transported bodies in coffins for very far except the very rich, who could afford to have the bodies of their loved ones preserved. A coffin in a common wagon would just attract attention. But they had probably unpacked some sort of equipment from this box and stuffed him in it to protect him, knowing what was going to happen as they continued down these terrible roads in a storm.
I guess I’m worth quite a bit if they’re taking that kind of care of me.
They might have thought the storm would blow itself out or that they could get to the other side of it, and by the time they realized how wrong they were, it was too late and too dark to stop.
He couldn’t move—yet—but he sensed he had a fair amount of room in this thing, whatever it was. And if ever he was going to get a chance to escape . . . yes, he might be able to manage it, even now.
As the wagon lurched and rolled, and rain sluiced over the top and sides, as lightning struck and thunder boomed, he worked his fingers and toes until life came back into his limbs. Once he could feel fingers and toes moving normally, he flexed his muscles until they all came back to life. Then he tried simply lifting the top of the box.
No good. Something had it fastened down tight. He didn’t dare pound at it, not now, not when he was within an arm’s length of his captors. He tried to remember what he had seen of the wagon itself. It wasn’t much like a solid wooden gypsy or minstrel caravan or a prosperous trader’s wagon; it was more like a farmer’s wagon, except with a round, tentlike canvas top held up by hoops of wood over it all. Had there been a drop-down flap at the back? Or—could his luck be good enough that there was no back to it at all?
He decided that it didn’t matter. His plan involved getting out the back, and that was what he was going to have to do, even if it meant smashing through whatever was blocking him.
So, when the wagon was lurching and wallowing down a hill, he used his weight to slide the box he was in to the front of the wagon, and when it was going up, he did the same
, only moving to the back. He hoped that he was shoving the rest of the cargo out of the way, but it was impossible to tell from inside. He was sliding farther each time. And his captors were too busy fighting their panicked horses to pay much attention to what was going on behind them.
And then it happened.
Another bolt of lightning smashed into the ground so near to them that he felt it, felt the shock, felt the hair stand up all over his body, smelled the sharp scent of the lightning itself and the scorched smell of the earth. Thunder hammered them. The horses screamed, and the wagon lurched forward into a downhill run that sent everything in the wagon bouncing and flying, including him and his box. He braced himself inside it, getting bone-bruising jounces as the box danced all over the floor of the wagon, but knowing from the impacts on the top that however bad it was in the box, it was much worse outside it.
Fueled by hysterical strength, the horses lurched up the next hill. A huge bounce gave him the moment he needed, and he shifted as much of his weight to the foot of the box as he could. The box went skidding toward the back of the wagon. And this time . . . he felt it teeter on the edge, balancing there for one precarious moment.
And then the wagon lurched again, and the box went flying into the storm and the night. It hit the ground, knocking all the breath out of him, then began rolling and bouncing down a steep slope.
Desperately, he splayed out his limbs and braced himself inside.
The slope was certainly steep enough, and he had enough momentum, that it just kept tumbling. The blanket they had wrapped him in tangled up around him and cushioned the blows a little, but not much. It felt as if he were being beaten; it was almost impossible to keep entirely braced.
And then, sickeningly, he felt—falling. And the thought flashed through his mind that the end of the fall would be at the bottom of some horrible chasm.
But the fall ended, quickly, in a splash.
And water immediately started pouring in the seams of the box.
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