by Bell, Hilari
His silence then puzzled me. On horseback he might well have avoided getting his throat cut, at least for long enough to shout, and my silently snarling dog probably couldn’t have reached him.
When I thought more on that, it occurred to me that this man had been stalking me for over a week, possibly many weeks. Even if he couldn’t immediately kill me, he no longer had to struggle to find me. If I wasn’t careful, I might end up helping him to complete his task! I resolved to be very careful.
But with all these delays, ’twas early in the evening when we finally reached Baron Tatterman’s abandoned keep.
The kidnappers had left the front gate open — indeed, I saw no means by which it could be latched from the outside. Once within, I lowered the bar that secured those great wooden doors, and taking Rupert’s word that the walls were intact, I pulled my prisoner from the saddle and left the horses to roam while we explored the keep.
The front doors were locked, and so were the doors at the back and side. But someone had failed to close the pantry shutters, and that window was big enough for me to climb through, and even drag my prisoner though after me — assisted by True, who kept close watch at his heels.
Beyond a few necessary orders, we hadn’t spoken all day. As we walked through room after room, some vacant, some with furniture shrouded against dust and time, the silence felt different from that of wood and field: older, emptier.
It took a bit of searching to find the room I knew would be there, for ’twas not some dank cellar storeroom, but what had once been a servant’s chamber, on the second floor above the kitchen. I spotted it instantly, for ’twas the only door on the corridor that had a bolt on the outside.
The brass of bolt and fittings shone with newness, in stark contrast to the tough, ancient wood. Inside, the window was high in the wall, mayhap a foot square. There were no shutters, but one un-rusted iron bar had been bolted across it from the outside. ’Twas furnished, after a fashion, with a straw pallet covered by several woolen blankets, and a honey bucket. The blankets and walls were gray, the straw of the pallet tan, and the only note of color in the place was a single blade of straw, cast off in a corner, which for some reason had turned bright red. At least ’twas not the brown of dried blood ... but that only made it more curious.
After a few days, you’d go mad from boredom in this room, and my prisoner looked at it in dismay.
I thought of Mistress Margaret, imprisoned here for weeks, or even months, had we not startled them into flight, and my face must have showed my feelings. My would-be-assassin had opened his mouth to protest, but he not only closed it, he took a step back.
This room had been remodeled by professionals, to hold a prisoner, and I had no doubt of their ability. Indeed, seeing this place made me worry even more for my friends. I had no doubt of Fisk’s competence, Kathy’s good sense, or Rupert’s determination ... but there were six kidnappers.
I’d been forced to send my comrades into danger without me, and that was this man’s fault. But ’twould be foolish to underestimate him and that odd red straw nagged at me, so I made a quick search of the place.
I found Margaret’s note in the only place it could have been hidden, beneath the straw pallet. ’Twas written on the stones of the floor in red wine, using that reddened straw for a pen, and the words were so faint that without the sunlight that streamed through the small window, I wouldn’t have seen them.
But she’d still taken the time and trouble to write it — not a brief note, but a scrawl that covered most of the space beneath the pallet. My captive came to stand beside me as I read.
Stephen 28, 3rd Finday of Berryon. I’m Margaret Merkle, daughter of Stanly Merkle, of Merkle and Mace Woolen Goods, and I’ve been kidnapped. I’m being held by five men, who call each other Wilber, Morry, Angus, Jutt and Rip. There’s also a man who doesn’t always travel with us, but seems to be their supervisor or employer. Wilber is just under six feet tall, in his early thirties, with a paunch, ginger hair and a mustache. Morry is...
She went on to describe all her kidnappers, the masked nobleman who had supervised her kidnapping, and the carriage, inside and out. These long, careful, useful descriptions were followed by an appeal for anyone who found this message to convey it to her father, Liege Heir Rupert Ware, or the local authorities.
By the time I’d finished reading that sensible and courageous document I was so full of admiration and fury I could almost have done my captive some violence.
“This is the woman you’re helping to hold prisoner,” I said. “Those men are the thugs you’re serving. Shame on you, sir. Shame.”
His eyes, still on that brave note, did not meet mine. But his cool mask was in place and he said nothing.
I drew my blade and cut the rope from his wrists. I had to call True out of the room, for my good dog still wanted to stand guard over this man.
But with my assassin locked in that terrible room, I had no qualms about leaving him while I inspected the keep. Mistress Margaret’s kidnappers had evidently intended to make a long stay; both kitchen and stable were well stocked, and someone had recently repaired the kitchen pump and fastened a new bucket at the stable well.
I drew water for the horses, and coaxed them into their stalls by the simple expedient of forking down some hay. Looking at the supplies in the kitchen, I doubted that the men we’d seen had laid them in — few professional bullyboys know what to do with a full shank of smoked ham, much less plain flour and raw oats. ’Twas the cooked sausage and cheese they’d cut into, leaving those things that required preparation. And while I’m a fair camp cook, I hoped my stay would too short for me to need that skill.
Those supplies, which they probably couldn’t use well, implied accomplices beyond those we knew of — but even as the need to rejoin my friends pressed on me, the need to keep this assassin from trailing after them was the more urgent.
Of course, the quickest way to deal with him would be to leave him to starve, but I am no murderer.
Which left only the long solution, alas.
In my youth, I had helped my father’s master of hounds tame dogs that had been abused or turned savage — the one often following from the other. And though some (such as my erstwhile squire) might have argued with me, I was reasonably certain the hound master’s techniques would eventually gentle even the most obdurate man.
They had, after all, worked on Fisk.
The dog returned several hours after we’d made camp.
“You were no help,” I told him. “I’m going to name you Useless.”
He didn’t seem to care, sitting on his shrunken butt and regarding me a bit less warily than usual. He was closer than usual too, and the incident — from which he’d run like the coward he was — seemed to have changed his attitude toward us. Next morning, though he didn’t let anyone but me touch him, he stayed in camp and then accompanied us down the road.
We stopped in the first village we came to, and complained about the hidden stones in the mud hole. The locals knew nothing about it, but after the town’s farrier had removed the poultice Kathy had made and inspected Champion’s scraped leg, he took us seriously. In fact, he promised that if he ever came across the man who put them there he’d give him “a talking to.”
Since the farrier was also the local smith, with arms like ham hocks, this threat was more formidable than it sounded. But we all agreed that the guilty party was some passing wagoner, and that hoping he wouldn’t do it again was probably the most we could do.
The dog was still bypassing villages, but he now walked with us on the road. It was clear that he’d joined our expedition — which I didn’t mind — but if I was going to touch him on a regular basis, there was one thing I insisted on. When we made camp that evening, the first thing I did was put a kettle on to heat some water. Katherine produced the mild soap she used on her own hair, and Rupert sacrificed his expensive, embossed belt to make a collar, cutting it down and punching new holes for the buckle.
; Getting the collar on the dog was up to me, but by dint of shameless bribery — he liked dried meat even better than fresh, maybe because he could chew it for a long time — I got it fastened. He didn’t bolt immediately, so I took that as a good sign, and looped a rope through it to tie him to a nearby tree.
“Bathing regularly is a cornerstone of civilization,” I told him, adding hot water from the kettle to a pail of cold I’d fetched from a nearby stream. “Which makes you a flea-bitten barbarian. Barbarian. That’s not bad name.”
“Still too fierce,” said Kathy. “He’s a kindly soul.”
“He’s a quivering mouse,” I said hopefully, stripping down to an old pair of britches. I’ve helped Michael bathe Trouble, and I knew just how tricky this was likely to be. I was also aware of Kathy’s gaze on my body — so aware that it was a good thing I was both distracted, and in short order drenched with cold, dirty water.
He was better behaved than I expected — by which I mean that he didn’t even try to bite — but holding on to that twisting, yelping, soap-slick form, I ended up calling him a lot worse things than “barbarian.” However, he calmed down a bit for the final rinse, and seemed to enjoy being dried off with my dirty shirt.
I let him out of his collar when I finished — if he ran off, I didn’t want him to get caught on something. But despite the indignant looks he gave me he remained in the camp, possibly encouraged by the scent of cooking stew. And I was proved right about the civilizing influence of a bath, because he let Kathy pet him.
Either that, or his spirit was broken.
“I think someone owned him once.” Katherine’s slender elegance made a wonderful contrast with the mutt’s misshapen oddity, and his tongue hung out in an expression that, on Trouble’s face, I’d have taken for a canine grin. With this dog, one’s attention focused more on the teeth. “He’s been bathed before. He’s had a collar on, too. In fact...”
She went over to the stew pot, and fished out a piece of carrot, tossing it from hand to hand to cool it.
It was hardly surprising that the dog followed her — she’d been feeding him, after all. But then she held up the carrot.
“Sit!” she said crisply, and the dog did.
I had to open and close my mouth several times before I found my voice.
“Well ... well.”
“Good boy!” Kathy gave him the carrot, which he accepted as his due, and she gave me a smug look, accepting my admiration as her due.
Though I still think I was right about the civilizing influence of a bath.
The dog stayed in camp all night. The next morning, by the sacrifice of a few bits of biscuit, we learned that he also knew stay, come, and heel, though he was a bit rusty at that last command.
Thus armed, I put the collar on him before we went into the next village and tied his leash to Tipple’s saddle. But the problem wasn’t that he’d run off, far from it — it was getting him to stay far enough away that the horses didn’t trip over him. At one point he tried to take shelter under Tipple’s belly, and she stopped so quickly I almost went over her head.
His tail was tucked so tightly between his legs that several people glared at us for abusing him. But most of the others glared at the odd and ferocious looking beast, and if he’d been on his own they’d have driven him off with sticks and thrown stones.
“Which is an excellent reason to dislike towns,” I told him. “I don’t blame you in the least. But if you’re going to stay with us, you need to get over that.”
Toward that end, in the next village I insisted on stopping for luncheon, and we sat on the lip of a fountain in the town square to eat it. And slowly, as passersby stared but did nothing more, his exaggerated wariness relaxed until he was willing to lie at my feet instead of trying to hide behind them.
After luncheon, we asked our usual questions, learning that Meg’s abductors were roughly a day ahead of us. Fancy coaches were an unusual sight in these small towns and country villages, so we had no trouble keeping up with it. With a little effort we could have caught it ... but then what?
If they’d been stopping for the night at inns, at this point even I would have given up on pleasing the Liege and taken our forged writ to a sheriff, to see what he could do. But the inns in these smaller towns were too respectable for them to risk letting anyone see that they held a helpless girl prisoner. They never did more than order a meal to take with them and change horses, before moving on.
If we could have figured out their destination, we might have gone ahead of them and persuaded a sheriff to arrest them when they came into town. But while they were generally moving north and west, their course was so erratic I wasn’t sure they had a destination.
Catching up with them would only have put them even more on guard, so all we could do was follow, and hope they’d decide they’d lost us and go to ground once more.
This was a conclusion Rupert didn’t much like ... but he didn’t have any better ideas, either.
And at least this left us free to use the inns, because by this time the dog wasn’t the only one who needed a bath.
The grooms’ reaction when I led the dog into the stables convinced me that we’d better keep him with us. We picked up our packs, I took his leash in hand and we went into the inn ... where the first serving maid to see him dropped her tray, spilling an empty teapot and half a dozen cups and mugs. Several of the cups broke, but that wasn’t the dog’s fault. Which I was politely pointing out when the innkeeper appeared to see what the commotion was about.
“Get that ... that... What is that?”
“Chicken is my dog,” I said. He was proving his right to the name by trying to hide in Kathy’s riding skirt, which wasn’t nearly big enough to conceal him. “And either he stays, or we go. We want two rooms, and baths for all three of us.”
I could see the man inflating his prices as I spoke, but he was also looking at the dog. So were two maids, the barkeeper, and half the patrons from the taproom, with more coming to join them as the word spread.
“And a private parlor to dine in?” the innkeeper asked hopefully.
“Certainly not.” Two of the customers from the taproom had hounds beside them, and one lady carried a tiny furball in her arms. “Craven is very well behaved. Sit.”
To my delight, he pulled his head out of Kathy’s skirt and did so. The innkeeper sighed.
“You’ll keep it on a leash? I can’t have something that looks like that running loose.”
“If your patrons are that timorous, then we will. Come along, Mousey.”
“Oh good,” Kathy murmured, as we followed a maid up the stairs to our rooms. “We’re keeping him.”
The maid cast another glance over her shoulder at the slinking beast, clearly demonstrating the problems adopting that dog would entail.
“I’m still working on getting us married,” I pointed out. Without a lot of help from her, though I had sufficient sense not to say so. “It’s a bit early to be adopting dogs. Do you want him? A lot?”
I really hoped she didn’t.
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Kathy said. “Although I do. But you’ve taken him under your wing, and once you adopt someone they’re yours. Forever. You then proceed to mother them.”
“I do not!”
Motherly wasn’t how I wanted Kathy to think of me. If she’d wanted some manly moron, I suppose she wouldn’t have chosen me in the first place ... but motherly?
I didn’t like that idea at all, but if Kathy thought I was motherly, did she like it?
Women are peculiar. Even the best of them.
We all smelled sweeter when we gathered to go down for dinner, and there was some debate about whether to take the dog with us. But he needed to get over his excessive timidity eventually and there was no better time to start than now, so Kathy gave in. Rupert seemed to have something else on his mind and paid no attention to our discussion. I tied a lead onto the dog’s collar and only a few people in the hallway stared at him. Probably
because there were only a few people in the hallway.
As we approached the taproom the scents from the kitchen wafted out to meet us, setting the dog’s nose atwitch. The menu written on the chalkboard by the hearth looked appealing.
We then had to choose between taking a table (more expensive) or seating ourselves at the public board (less private). A small hubbub broke out when I led the dog in, as the people who’d heard stories from people who’d seen him this morning craned their necks to see, and he shrank closer to my boots. He was doing very well, but I decided not to test him with the common bench and we took a table instead.
The chosen Heir to the throne of the United Realm attracted no attention in the taproom — and he wouldn’t have protested, or maybe even noticed, if I’d chosen to share the public bench. This was one of the things I liked best about Rupert, and we seated ourselves at the table in amity — the dog darted beneath it like a rabbit with the hawks hovering. A serving maid bustled up to take our order; roast squab for me, roast pork with white beans over cracked wheat for Katherine, and a bone for the dog. Rupert decided on a slice of the beef that turned on a spit in the big hearth, and at least he waited till the maid trotted off before he spoke.
“How long has it been, do you think, since Meg’s had a bath?”
Kathy’s eyes, which had been bright with the challenge of bringing the dog into a new place, fell guiltily.
“She’s not dining in an inn tonight,” Rupert went on. “She’ll be chained to one of those coach benches, or mayhap sleeping on the ground, surrounded by men she fears. And probably hates.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s high time we got her out of there, and I’m all in. What’s the plan?”
I might not have been so sarcastic if the same thought hadn’t crossed my mind when I stepped into the tub. Mistress Meg’s situation was bothering all of us, but there was no use dwelling on it — so unlike Rupert, I tried not to.
He glared at me now, with angry color rising in his cheeks.