by Carol Berg
“Paulo!”
Most of the boy was lost in the folds of an enormous cloak. D’Natheil took a firm grip on Paulo’s ear, transforming the boy’s scowl of freckled ferocity itno a forlorn wince.
“Ow!”
Much to the consternation of both prisoner and captor, I started laughing, laughter such as only those who have lived at the edge of danger for days on end can produce.
“The most excellent ferocious boy!” said Baglos, and with only a momentary glance of apology at his grim master, broke into a lively chuckling that rang through the moonlit forest.
“Don’t see what’s so blasted funny,” the boy mumbled.
D’Natheil had remained unremittingly somber since seeing the conscript gang. But as the disgruntled Paulo hitched up his oversized garment, a glint of amusement danced about the edges of the Prince’s eyes. And then, as if the spark had touched fuel, he burst into a convulsion of merriment. I had never heard him laugh. Deep and musical, it seemed to come from the same deep-buried reservoir of joy as his rare smile. It might have been the sun piercing the clouds after a year of storms.
I could not keep my eyes from him, for somewhere in the resonance of his good humor was a note which made my blood burn as it had not in ages of the world. Thus even as I enjoyed the mournful resignation on Paulo’s dirty face, I mocked myself for “widow’s lust.” I laughed until tears came.
“Oh, Paulo,” I said, once I could articulate a word. “What in the stars are you doing here?”
“Nothin’ better to be at,” he said sullenly.
“Than running away from home again and chasing us into the wilderness? Surely there are a thousand things better for you to be about. Your gram will be frantic.”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh, no!” And so did the world swallow up our good humor.
“Put away one too many a tankard while I was off to Grenatte. Dead drunk she was. Then just dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as her, I guess.”
“Who’s to care for you, then?”
“Don’t nobody want to. Well, Sheriff had said—But he’s gone off and not come back. Dirk Crowley said as Loopy Lucy might take me, but I didn’t want no part of an old crow like her. I can do for myself.” D’Natheil had released the boy’s ear, and Paulo squirmed a bit to untwist the voluminous cloak. “Gasso said he’d trade me this horse for my two silver pieces and whatever was in Gram’s room, and I thought that was fine, so’s I took the deal and rode up to your place. Thought I could watch it for you till Sheriff come back. Didn’t steal nothin’. Just ate what was goin’ to rot. And today I saw this’n come through and look about.” He jerked his head toward D’Natheil.
“And you decided to follow him?”
“Nothin’ better to be at. He’s a sight more interesting than Loopy Lucy. Got a sword and all.”
“You were welcome to the food. Was everything all right at the cottage?”
“Right enough. Those men—the priests what scragged the highwaymen—they searched right through it, but didn’t take nothin’ as I could see.”
“You saw the three priests search the cottage?” . . . they were up at your place . . . The echo of Graeme Rowan’s report sent a shiver through me.
“They left it all careful like, so’s you couldn’t tell nobody had been there.”
“So they came to my house straight from Grenatte, then?”
“Nope.” He hesitated for a moment. “Went to the village first.”
“To Dunfarrie? Whatever for?”
“Talked to somebody. Askin’ about you . . . who you were and where’d you come from and was anyone with you.”
“How did they find my cottage, Paulo? It’s very important. How did they know where to go?”
The boy dug a toe into the dirt and kept his eyes away from me. “Somebody told ’em where it was when they first come from Grenatte. Somebody took ’em up there.” With every answer, the words came slower and quieter. “It was the same person what told ’em everything about you, and about the Prince, and about where you’d gone with him—off to Valleor.” The boy kicked a rock so hard it flew into the trees, flushing out three deer who leaped across the road through the moonlight.
I laid my hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Paulo, sometimes we can be mistaken about people, and it hurts very much when we find out they’re not as honorable as we believed. But the truth is important, especially when lives depend on knowing whom we can trust. Was it a friend of yours that told them?”
Paulo nodded, and he mumbled so softly I almost could not hear him. “Jacopo done it. Sheriff said they must’ve made him.”
No. That wasn’t right. Rowan was the betrayer, not Jacopo. The sheriff had met the Zhid in Grenatte, talked and laughed with them. They said he’d been of great service. And there was the button, of course, and Teriza’s story of the Leiran in the dark jacket with shiny buttons, his pursuit through the forest, his presence in Yurevan . . .
“Who told them?” I grabbed Paulo’s chin and forced him to look me in the eye, daring him to say it again, ready to yell at him that he was misguided at best, a tool of evildoers at worst, refusing to credit him, even as my heart and soul understood that he spoke truth.
“It was Jacopo.” The boy’s gaze did not waver, as if he knew that his best testimony was himself. His thin, freckled face displayed only sorrow and simple truth, forcing me to accept how dreadfully I had erred.
I had determinedly ignored ten years of observation that demonstrated nothing but Rowan’s unremitting honesty. No strength of evidence had convinced me of his guilt—I could have come up with a hundred different explanations of buttons and light-haired Leirans. But I had listened only to my personal humiliation and seen only the hateful emblem on his coat. Even his “threat” to be wary of Paulo’s and Jacopo’s life was certainly a willfully misinterpreted warning.
Everything was so clear, now I was forced to look: the night of our feast in the meadow, the night the Seeking of the Zhid had come upon us like a summer hurricane. Jacopo’s leg had been hurting him, and I could imagine him sitting and smoking a pipe on one of the stone fences between the edge of the forest and Dunfarrie. Away from the trees. Away from the house. It was on the next morning that he’d changed his mind about warning Graeme Rowan. He had denied the reality of our experiences on the ridge and insisted on knowing who I was going to see, even wanting the name—questions to which he had no need for answers. How had he known I was in Montevial? How had he come to be in the Street of the Cloth Merchants? I squeezed my eyes shut as if I could hide the truth again, but all I saw was Jacopo’s old sea coat, dark blue with brass buttons—the jacket he’d worn every day since he’d come home from the sea.
D’Natheil led us to a clearing a safe distance from the road, and as we settled in for the rest of the night, I remembered the message I had sent to Jacopo earlier in the day. Not only had I revealed our departure from Montevial, but I had told him that Rowan had accused him of connection with the murderers. Would the Zhid have any use for Jacopo if he’d been discovered? Would they allow Rowan to roam freely with his knowledge of their wickedness? My detestable pride had likely murdered Jacopo and Rowan together.
Over our tea and bacon the next morning, Paulo, not Jacopo, was the first topic of conversation. Baglos told the boy that we had no use for him, and so he should take himself somewhere else.
I wouldn’t hear of it. Fear and self-reproach and hard earth had made for a long restless night, leaving me snappish and out of patience. “We must either take him back to Dunfarrie where there are people who will see to his welfare, or we must keep him with us. A boy on the road alone . . .” While a mournful Paulo saddled the horses and strapped our loaded packs on them, I explained to D’Natheil and Baglos what happened to children who had no one to care what happened to them. An indenture agreement would be signed by a local magistrate, and it would stipulate that the child was to be given his keep in exchange for his labor un
til he turned sixteen. In other words, it was free labor for as long as you could squeeze out a day’s work, and, as the master had no interest in the children after age sixteen, he could starve them or give them tasks that would cripple them. Most were dead by sixteen. A less than perfect boy like Paulo would have no chance at all.
“We’ve no time to take him back to his village,” said Baglos. “We must find the Gate.”
“No. Going back would be very dangerous.” I wasn’t yet ready to explain the extent of my rock-headed stupidity.
“Then the boy must stay with us,” said D’Natheil simply, leaving Baglos with no argument and me relieved.
When I told Paulo that he was to accompany us on our travels until such time as we could return him to Dunfarrie, he stood at least a hand’s breadth taller. “But you’ll have to earn your keep,” I said, “and obey any one of us without question.”
“Whatever you want, miss. I promise.”
“This won’t be the safest road, but you’ve shown yourself resourceful in the past, and we’ll expect nothing less of you now. And most importantly, you’ll hear and see many things you can’t tell anyone, now or ever. Our lives and yours will depend on your silence. I think you know what I mean. Are you willing?”
Paulo grinned and ducked his head, probably the nearest he’d ever come to saying thank you.
“To start,” I said, “I think you’ll have to care for the horses. Baglos dislikes it very much, and I know you’re good at it.”
While I told Baglos what I’d said to Paulo, the boy flung his arms about the neck of my little roan and buried his face in the beast’s ruddy coat. Perhaps some good had resulted from all this.
By the time we were two days on the road to Tryglevie, the four animals were fast friends with Paulo. They nosed his neck and his pockets and his thin brown hands at every opportunity, and he had but to click his tongue and they stood ready for whatever he wished of them. I soon came to believe the boy was able to read the beasts’ minds as clearly as any J’Ettanne. On the third morning of the journey, as the boy gave me a leg up, I grumbled that the roan didn’t seem to be learning my commands very well. Paulo asked why I didn’t use my horse’s name, as that would make him listen better. When I said that I didn’t know the beast’s name and hadn’t had the time to think of one, the boy stared at me in scornful disbelief. “Name’s Firethorn,” he said. “Don’t know why you never figured it out.”
“And what of the Prince’s horse?”
“He don’t want a name just yet. He’s thinkin’ on it.” I wasn’t sure whether Paulo meant D’Natheil or the horse. “The other one, now, he’s Polestar.” Appropriate for the horse of the Guide.
“And yours?”
Paulo flushed and gently stroked his horse’s neck. “Molly. She’s naught but a broke-down mare, you know. Just right for me.”
We rode onward into the west.
CHAPTER 28
Three days’ hard riding brought us out of the great forest and into the rocky foothills of western Leire. It was harsh country, afflicted with wild extremes of weather and dotted with poor settlements, suitable for little but grazing sheep. I could well believe such a place was the Writer’s home. In his journal he had forever lamented the unpredictable weather and rocky soil that made it so hard to feed his family, he was forced to sell the talent he would rather give freely.
As soon as we left the forest, we began to inquire at every house and village as to the whereabouts of Yennet and the ruins that lay nearby. Villages the size of Yennet rarely appeared on any map, and even those who had heard of the place were vague about its location. One said it was directly northwest. Another said it lay just east of the great bend where the Glenaven met the Dun. Another said it was no ruined castle, but a nobleman’s quarry that adjoined the village. A traveling tinker we met at a roadside well seemed the most reliable source. He claimed to have visited Yennet. “Two years ago, that was. Wasn’t hardly anyone living there. Folks too poor even to have a kettle needed mending.” But he drew us a map showing Yennet about halfway in between something he marked as Pell’s Hill and a ruined castle from the times before Leire had a king. Pell’s Hill was likely an ancient barrow known as Pell’s Mound, a site Karon had always hoped to excavate.
We set out on the tinker’s route, still with no sign of pursuit. About twelve leagues west we were to watch for a fork in the road, the rightmost continuing west and north to join the main route that ran from Montevial all the way west to Vanesta. The less-traveled left fork, hardly a road at all, would bear slightly southeast to skirt Pell’s Mound, then angle straight south to Yennet.
The second day from the tinker’s well dawned overcast, and the thickening clouds glowered and grumbled as the morning progressed. Thunder rolled across the rocky fields, and at midmorning the black sky erupted into chaos.
Baglos was in the lead, hunched down in the saddle, his gray cloak pulled up tight against the lashing rain. Paulo on his Molly followed behind the Dulcé. Sometime near midday, the boy reversed direction and stopped, blocking the road and forcing me to stop in my turn. I yelled at him in irritation. “Keep moving, Paulo. We’ve no wish to be out in this any longer than need be.”
The boy had his huge cloak draped over him and his horse, like Isker women who rode to war behind their husbands, forbidden to expose anything but their eyes. Without poking so much as his nose outside his shroud, Paulo gestured toward a muddy rut that led off to our left into the rain-swept meadows. The soggy landscape was dotted with sparse clumps of pine and birch trees, and massive, oddly shaped piles of granite poked out of the ground like the debris of a giant rock-boring mole. The rut was straight enough, one could imagine it might be a path.
“Good eyes, Paulo,” I shouted over the roar of the storm. “Catch Baglos and tell him we’ve found the turning. I’ll wait for the Prince.”
D’Natheil had lagged behind us all day. Indeed, from our first night out of Montevial, he had withdrawn almost completely from our society. He rarely spoke, and when we camped, he ate little and slept less, patrolling the nearby ground while Baglos or I was on watch, and taking the late watches alone when the rest of us were asleep.
More than half an hour passed until he came into view. Irritated at having to wait so long in the cold rain, I didn’t wait for him to join me, but waved and rode on up the muddy track, hurrying to catch up with Baglos and Paulo. With every step away from the main road, the track looked less like a road and more like a stream. The wind ripped and tangled my cloak, ensuring that no patch of clothing or skin stayed dry, and the gusts felt as if they’d come straight off of the snow-capped mountains to the southwest, making a mockery of my summer clothing. Soon the water and mud flowed from everywhere, and I was losing all sense of direction. As a girl I had delighted in watching storms rumble across the barren hills beyond Comigor. But turbulent weather lost a great deal of its charm when one had no three-foot-thick walls or six-hundred-year-old roof to keep it out.
Baglos halted in the middle of the open downs, Paulo beside him. Sheets of rain and lowering cloud obscured the view in every direction. “I can no longer assure you that we are on the path,” said the Dulcé when I joined the two. “I don’t know what to do.”
My hair stuck to my face and dribbled cold rivulets into my eyes, and my teeth were chattering so I could hardly answer. “How far is it from the fork to the village?”
“The tinker said half a day, but that would be in fair weather. And if we’ve strayed . . .”
“I suppose we’ll have to wait for D’Natheil and see if he can tell us more.”
The Prince had fallen behind again. We had another long, wet wait until he came into view. About the time D’Natheil emerged from the curtain of rain, the hairs on my neck rose, and, not fifty paces from where we waited, a lightning bolt struck a pine tree, exploding it in thunderous fire. I had to haul sharply on the reins to control Firethorn, and Baglos clung to the neck of his mount.
“Can you not guide us,
Dulcé?” asked the Prince as soon as our beasts were under control. His mount had stayed quiet under the simple pressure of his hand.
“No, my lord. To my devastation it is not possible just now. I have no reference in the storm.”
“Then head for those boulders to our right. I’ll be along.” D’Natheil seemed agitated and distracted.
“Yes, my lord.” Baglos turned his jittery horse.
The Dulcé led us toward a huge slab of granite that, in some long-past time, had split and shifted, leaving a great seam down its middle. The split was a boon for drenched travelers, for the two pieces leaned together at the top as if trying to rejoin, creating a deep, but narrow and blessedly dry niche at the base.
Paulo tethered the horses in the lee of the outcropping, and the three of us crowded into the niche. I huddled to one side, sinking to the damp ground and pulling my wet cloak about me tightly. Dribbles of water splattered from the edge of the rock onto the Dulcé’s pinched face as he hunched beside the opening, peering into the gray downpour to watch for D’Natheil. Paulo curled up in the farthest recess of the crack and promptly fell asleep. The boy seemed capable of sleep in any circumstance. I envied him.
A bedraggled D’Natheil soon appeared from out of the storm, leading his horse. In his arms were sticks of soggy wood and some dripping brush. Baglos took the Prince’s horse and settled it with the others, while D’Natheil threw his bundle down in front of me. Crouching down beside it, he blew softly across his palm and passed his hand over the sodden pile. This time the sensation was not lightning. A tiny flame curled up from the pile, and, in moments, a sizable fire was blazing.
I crowded close and relished the moment that my bones began to thaw. “You did that very well,” I said, as soon as my teeth stopped chattering. “I don’t know what I’d have done without it.”