by Bell, Hilari
“I am not.”
He looked at me, and enough of the tan moon’s light came through the window to let me see his eyebrows rise.
If he’d seen me, and guessed enough about my plan to be waiting here, then maybe I had been clumsy.
“So you decided to use me as a diversion? Isn’t that shop a pretty small target, for a big-time type like you?”
“A box of saffron was delivered to that shop today—it’s priced at a silver roundel per quarter cup. And thanks to you, the dog, the spicer, and all his apprentices are gone.” He cast me a flashing grin and stepped back into the night. “So long, lad. It’s been…profitable to know you.”
“Wait a minute.” I scrambled after him. “I cleared the way for you! And lost my whole night’s haul. The least you can do is cut me in. You can trust me.”
“Can I? Then you’re a fool. I never trust anyone.”
He was walking swiftly back toward the shop. Which would now be wide open…except for him.
“Cut me in on that saffron,” I said. “It’s the least you can do, since I pulled them away for you.”
“I got you out of it. That debt’s more than paid.”
“All right, maybe you don’t owe me. But I can help you clear out the shop. In fact, I could have been more useful if you’d let me in on the plan from the start.”
He didn’t stop walking, but he glanced aside at me for the first time since we’d left the lodging house.
“You know, you might be right about that. But don’t expect me to apologize.”
“I won’t,” I said, half-jogging to keep up. “I’m Fisk.”
The man winced. “That’s your real name, isn’t it?”
“Um. Yeah.”
“Figures. Well, my name isn’t Jack Bannister. You can call me Jack.”
Over the next three years, Jack had taught me not to give my real name. And some of the other skills he’d taught me might just make our mad plan work.
* * *
Over the next few days Will kept his blanket wrapped around him, so the rest of the train became accustomed to seeing a blanket-wrapped lump on that bench instead of a sulky boy.
We pulled into a small village, and the boss sent me out to one of the farms along with a cart, to keep an accounting of the purchase—though the price the train paid was so high I’m surprised anyone bothered to cheat. I brought back a neatly written inventory, and the boss was so pleased he sent me out to every farm I could reach.
That evening, among the villagers, I had a chance to practice dipping on people who weren’t part of the train—though in most cases I added a few brass fracts to their pockets, instead of subtracting. People are less likely to make a fuss when money mysteriously appears, and a lot of the people in that village looked purse-pinched, their clothing patched and mended. The price of food in that market was as high as I’ve ever seen it, anywhere.
Before we set out next morning, the boss had me help him sort and file receipts, and check his ledger. I was leaning over his shoulder when a waitress on the other side of the room dropped her tray—the perfect moment, and I seized it. It’s no harder to pick an inside pocket than an outside one, if the vest is unbuttoned.
But that meant Will’s rescue had to happen today, before the boss checked his pocket—the sooner the better.
I briefed Michael, who was going to create the distraction.
“Everyone’s eyes have to be on you. Particularly Will’s driver. Can you manage that?”
“Yes.” He sounded unnervingly certain.
“Are you sure? The cart may rock when Will goes over the side, and he’s got to get that bag up right behind the driver. That’s something a man will notice unless he’s really distracted. Or in a magica haze.”
“I can’t promise the last,” Michael said. “Though I’ll try. But Chant and I can manage the first.”
His eyes were bright, and the corners of his mouth kept turning up. Michael, being a mad knight errant, actually enjoys this kind of thing.
It gives me nightmares.
I let Michael pick the place, since the first move was his. Jack, who was a master of distraction, had once told me that it was like a dance. You had to trust your partner to be in the right place at the right time, or the whole pattern would fall apart. But when he’s there, when the pattern runs, then it’s a work of art.
And for all his craziness, Michael delivered.
We’d encountered Jack last summer, when we got entangled with a troupe of players and a gang of wreckers—not connected with each other. Well, only one of the players had been part of the plot. It had been a terrible mess, but some might say we’d won. Not those who’d died at the wrecker’s hands, but some.
Jack hadn’t done any of the killing, but Michael was still determined to track him back to his employer and bring them both to justice. He’d been nudging us in the direction of Tallowsport ever since we left the troupe, and I’d been trying to nudge us away. Whatever else had passed between us, I didn’t want to see Jack punished. Taking down his employer, that I’d have been fine with…except that doing it would probably get us killed.
Will’s cart was toward the front of the line today, which was bad because most of the train would be perfectly positioned to see him climb out. And then they’d have another chance to spot him hiding in the bushes as they drove by.
Michael chose a place where the brush on the near side of the road was thick, and the far side more open. When I saw him draw Chant up beside the driver, I took a slow loop around the front of the train to give him time, and then headed back down the line on the opposite side from him.
Riding up to Will’s cart, I could see at a glance that his magic had failed. Michael looked harassed and the driver looked puzzled—no doubt wondering why Michael had been talking to him all this time.
It had to be now. A sort of bright terror flooded my veins, and everything intensified. The bird song from the bushes sounded sharper; the cool air cut into my lungs.
As I rode past the driver I cast a small brown purse into the bushes beside the road, then tossed the key into Will’s lap. Michael’s odd behavior had warned him, and he caught it.
Seeing me approach, Michael had finished his conversation and ridden on. He was now two carts ahead, exactly where we wanted everyone to be looking when the show started.
Then the show started.
Chant snorted, then shied sideways into an ox team, which I hadn’t expected.
The oxen were too heavy to shy, but they moved aside rapidly and the driver, shouting, brought them to a stop.
“Stop the train,” I shouted, riding between Will’s cart and the one behind it, blocking that driver’s view.
This precaution may have been unnecessary. I just had time to see Will bend to the shackle, when Chant followed his sideways leap with a lunging kick that drew cries of alarm and excitement from everyone in sight. The ox-drivers brought their teams to a halt, watching as Chant crow-hopped across the verge, followed by another of those incredible airborne kicks.
I knew that Chant was tourney trained. In fact, I’d seen Michael ride him in tourneys. I’d never seen anything like this. He planted his front feet and hurled his heels skyward again, and I realized that this wasn’t for tourney; this was the training of a war horse.
Michael’s father was a man of the old school, in more than disowning disobedient sons.
By the time I dragged my gaze from this amazing equine display, Will had a potato sack up on the seat and was wrapping his blanket around it.
He could afford to take a moment to get it right. His driver, like all the others, was standing up and yelling, completely unaware of what was happening behind him.
Will finished the job and rolled off the cart into the bushes, neat as could be. I’d have liked to tweak that blanket a bit, but there was no way I could touch it unobserved.
Michael chose that moment to let Chant’s antics unseat him…or maybe he really was bucked off. It certainly looked lik
e it; he went flying through the air, and hit the ground with a bruising splat.
I’d asked for a spectacular diversion, and he’d provided it. It’s nice, having a partner you can rely on.
Chant, good-natured fellow that he is, stopped bucking and went to sniff at his master. Michael grabbed the reins, as if he believed that his horse might go dashing off. He clambered to his feet as I rode forward, shouting in realistic-looking alarm.
The train boss galloped past me.
“What’s going on here! Why’s the train stopped?”
“Sorry.” Michael’s voice was perfect: breathless, exasperated, rueful. “I think a wasp got him.”
He moved to Chant’s other side and ran a hand down his rump. “Yes, here’s the stinger.”
A pinching movement, something cast away. Chant twitched.
“He got stung badly as a colt. He’s never gotten over it. This one got him deep, too.”
Chant turned on command, a trace of blood bright on his pale hide.
“Are you all right?” I asked. Since no one else had.
“Fine.” Michael bent to check Chant’s weak leg, though even I could see that he was putting weight on it.
The train boss turned to his drivers. Stopped, waiting drivers.
“Show’s over,” he said. “Get moving.”
Once they had, he turned back to Michael. “Your horse all right? Then you get moving too.”
So we did.
* * *
It was more than three hours later when the potato bag tipped over and they realized their prisoner had escaped. Michael and I only heard about it that evening, and it wasn’t luck that we were both near the back of the train when the discovery was made—we’d been finding excuses to lurk there all day.
No one seemed to connect us with the escape, but as we sat near the campfire eating dinner the train boss came over and gestured for us to follow him.
Michael cast me a wary look and I shrugged—both perfectly natural reactions for men called aside by the boss.
“Our prisoner escaped today,” he announced.
“We heard,” I said. He’d started this dance, let him lead. But he stared at us, unspeaking, for a long moment.
“We picked him up in Casfell. I checked the books to be sure. Where’d you two sign on?”
“Ludder,” said Michael.
He stared some more, but we managed to hold up under it. Then he drew in a breath and sighed.
“I decided not to send anyone after him. No way to know, for certain, where he left the train. And he didn’t owe us a real debt, after all. Nothing on the books.”
“Then why were you hold—”
“That sounds sensible.” I interrupted before Michael, could give the game away.
The boss snorted. “All right. But I expect the two of you to work all the way to the Port. And I don’t expect any more trouble, either. Right?”
“Of course,” said Michael.
The train boss walked away.
“He knows it was us,” Michael said.
“He suspects it. If he knew, he might not be so generous. If he could prove it, it would probably be us in the next town’s stocks. He’s not a nice man.”
“Mayhap not, but he’s been generous to us. The least we can do is to go on to the city as he asks. Besides, I think he’s going to pay us. You don’t want to waste this last week’s work, do you?”
So we came to it.
“You just want to get to the city,” I said. “You’ve been pushing us in this direction for six months. You’re going after Jack.”
“Not Master Bannister, so much,” Michael said, “but his employer. That man was responsible for three deaths that we know of, Fisk. Not to mention all those whom the wreckers killed.”
“You can’t blame Jack, or even his employer, for the wreckers’ murders,” I said. “He was just fencing their goods.”
“I still lay those deaths on them, at least in part. But even leaving the past aside, how many more will Jack’s employer kill if he isn’t stopped?”
I had no answer, except that it wasn’t our business—which has never stopped Michael for a minute.
“If we meddle with his affairs, Jack’s employer is going to kill the two of us. I know you don’t care about that, but I do. And it’s not our business! Crime on this scale is the Liege Guard’s job, not ours.”
“They don’t seem to be doing it.” Michael was wearing his I’m-a-knight-errant-expression, which meant he was no longer susceptible to rational argument. But I still had to try.
“I don’t want to go after Jack,” I said. “I won’t go after him.”
Michael’s face sobered, but his accursed, stubborn, noble determination never wavered.
“I can’t force you to come with me. You paid your debt, years ago. You’re free to do as you like.”
But he was going after Jack, and his powerful, deadly boss, no matter what I said. And I wanted to see Michael die at their hands even less than I wanted to see Jack on the justice scaffold. Which meant that I’d have to find some way to help Michael, and pull Jack out of it—while keeping all three of us alive. There are limits to what’s possible, even for me. But…
“You know I can’t let you go alone. You’d get killed in a heartbeat, without someone sensible to restrain you.”
“Then we go together, as always. My squire.”
Michael clapped me on the shoulder, and his smile was like the rising sun. He knew perfectly well that I couldn’t let him go into danger alone… and he’d used that knowledge against me.
On the other hand, if he was going to lay down ultimatums, then he could hardly blame me for getting…creative.
To my surprise, Fisk made no further argument about going on to the city. I know that in his heart he wanted to bring down Jack Bannister’s wicked employer as much as I did. ’Twas only this Jack he wished to…avoid, I think. At times Fisk seemed to hate the man, and I’ve gathered some great betrayal lay between them. But for betrayal to leave the scars that this one had, there must once have been great trust, and even love.
To me, Jack hadn’t seemed at all loveable. But I wasn’t a teenage boy, learning the skills to survive as a thief and con artist.
If Master Bannister was innocent, of murder at least, I might be willing to spare him. But if the blood his master shed had splashed onto his hands…
* * *
Tallowsport was larger than I’d been able to imagine, and not nearly as…I think “grand” was what I had expected. A shining, bustling richness that nothing else in the Realm could rival.
Traveling at the food train’s slow pace, we reached Tallowsport’s outskirts early in the morning. All towns have craft yards on their outskirts, so at first I assumed that the grandeur I expected would eventually appear. The craft yards were indeed bigger than any I’d seen, noisy and bustling—and even I wasn’t naive enough to expect shine and richness from such places. They ran for mile after mile. Most towns have just one central market, some larger towns have two or three, in different neighborhoods. We passed through five markets, on this road alone during the full day it took us to ride through the town. And the prices…
“A bushel of potatoes sells here for less than we paid the farmers for it,” Fisk told me. “And that doesn’t take transport, warehousing, and the merchant’s profit into account.”
“I know nothing of how food is handled in a place this size,” I said. “Mayhap they stockpile food that doesn’t spoil, to keep the price the same year-round.”
Fisk knows no more of a great city’s food markets than I, but his scowl deepened, and I was reminded that he hadn’t wanted to come to Tallowsport at all.
“Mayhap we’ll be here long enough for you to get a letter from Kathy,” I said, hoping to cheer him. My sister was forbidden to write to me, so she wrote to Fisk instead. And since she’d been sent to court, her letters had become even more amusing. “She never did tell you her scheme to get out of the Heir hunt.”
&n
bsp; “Maybe,” said Fisk. But his expression brightened a bit as we rode on.
The laborers that supported all this industry were housed in tall, unadorned rooming houses, some of them four or five stories high! The folk we saw in streets and yards appeared well-fed, busy, and as happy as folk anywhere. Looking down the lanes I saw laundry lines, strung like bunting between the rooming houses. And if the clothing on those lines wasn’t brightly dyed, ’twas plentiful and not too often patched.
Dusk was falling when the carts finally rolled into a great warehouse, which they said was somewhere near the Old Market. The laborers were taken off to temporary quarters, having been told that some of them could start repaying their travel debt tomorrow by unloading the freight wagons they’d traveled with. I went to fetch True from the cooks, and Fisk went to get our pay.
I’d taken the train boss’s measure well enough that I wasn’t surprised when Fisk returned with two reasonably fat purses. I was surprised by the difficulty of finding a rooming house that had stabling for two horses and would admit a dog. And in a port city, I shouldn’t have been. But eventually, Chant, Tipple and True found a home in a garden shed, and pasture in the rooming house’s fallow garden. The landlady had once been a countrywoman, and had no problem taking care of our horses for a reasonable fee. And her son was enchanted with the idea of having a dog, even if ’twas only for a time.
True was equally enchanted with the idea of having a boy, so I left them to each other. Fisk and I settled into our two meager rooms, with a plan to seek out employment in the morning—as an excuse for seeking the information we had really come for.
The landlady served breakfast, for yet another modest sum, to any tenants who didn’t cook for themselves. Given the size of her house and the good quality of the meal, I was surprised how few showed up for it.
“It’s a bit expensive for most, day to day,” a thin, middle-aged clerk told me, stirring butter and honey into his porridge. “Not that they can’t afford it now and then. Just not every day.”
Several other men, seated around the long table, gave the self-satisfied nods of those who could afford it. They willingly held forth on our prospects for employment, until they learned that Fisk and I weren’t interested in joining a guild.