Lady's Pursuit (Knight and Rogue Book 6)

by Bell, Hilari

  “All right. We catch up to them, following far enough back that we can keep our eyes on the coach.”

  “If we can see them, they can see us,” I pointed out. “But let’s assume we can skulk through the woods, or keep enough distance that they don’t connect the three of us with the four people who attacked them at the bridge. Then what?”

  “Then we’ll be near enough to strike when some opportunity presents itself! Hiding behind them like this, we’ve no way to seize a sudden chance. We have to be able to see what’s happening to her!”

  “No, we don’t.” Kathy spoke up before I could. “Rupert, what chance do you think is going to occur? And one that would let the three of us overcome six professional swordsmen? Men who’ll be expecting us, particularly if we follow them as closely as you suggest. I hate not knowing what’s happening to Meg, too. But unless we can figure out where they’re going, and beat them there in time to get help from the sheriff, we have no choice but to wait till they hole up somewhere like they planned to do in Tatterman’s keep. When they do that, we will go to the sheriff. But they won’t stop if they think we’re still behind them.”

  The maid carried a tray over as Kathy finished, and unloaded our plates. She set the bone, on its own clean plate, on the table and departed.

  So when I heard him sniffing, and felt the dog’s body vibrate against my leg, I thought he was smelling the bone.

  “I wish they’d head a bit more to the west.” Rupert picked up his fork and put it down again, probably thinking about what Meg was eating now. “If they’d go into my Uncle Roger’s fief, he’d send out—”

  The dog shot from under the table and clamped his teeth, not into the bone, but in Rupert’s sleeve.

  Rupert wasn’t hurt — the beast had only cloth between its jaws — but he emitted a startled yelp. Several women screamed.

  I was startled as well, but I knew what to do.

  “Bad dog,” I said sternly. “Let him go at once.”

  I may have known what to do, but the dog didn’t. His teeth remained fixed in Rupert’s sleeve, though his gaze slid toward the table.

  Rupert showed more courage or more idiocy than I had, gripping the dog’s jaw with this free hand and trying to pull it down. Having seen that the dog wasn’t running through the room savaging people, those ridiculous women stopped shrieking. I grabbed the bone and offered it to the dog — who completely ignored it, though he looked a bit wistful.

  Kathy came around the table to grab the beast’s muzzle, and between them she and Rupert pried his jaws apart.

  “Bad dog,” I repeated, as he sank back to his haunches.

  He crouched even lower, and I thought he was ashamed. But as it turned out, he was pulling back the bowstring for another shot. This time he leapt under Rupert’s arm and snatched his plate, yanking it off the table to the floor. The gravy-coated beef landed with a splat, but some of the fresh peas that had accompanied it rolled twenty feet before they stopped.

  I understood why the dog preferred Rupert’s dinner to his, but his method of expressing that preference might explain why he was a stray. I grabbed his collar to keep him from claiming his prize, but he made no effort to do so, sitting solidly on his haunches and ignoring, not only my scolding, but also the absurd commotion his antics had produced.

  Honestly, from the sound of it you’d have thought he’d torn someone’s throat out, instead of just dumping a plate — something that happened in taprooms all the time.

  I pointed this out to the serving maid, the tapster, assorted diners, the innkeeper’s wife, and the innkeeper himself when he arrived on the scene. But in the end, we were banished to our rooms. At least they let us take the food we’d been served, though we had to pay for another meal for Rupert. That second serving, which arrived from the kitchen very quickly, was less well-dressed than the first.

  The dog strolled up the stairs behind us, seeming completely unrepentant.

  “Well, he’s getting over his excessive timidity.” Kathy’s face was alight with unvoiced laughter.

  “I thought dogs were trained not to take food off the table,” I said. “Though if one of those hounds had done the same there wouldn’t have been half the fuss, and if that woman’s little dust mop had done it everyone would have laughed. They’re just prejudiced by your appearance,” I added, to the dog. “Don’t let them upset you.”

  The dog, who’d retreated to a corner instead of crawling under the bed, didn’t seem upset. In fact, he gave us a brief tail-wag — the first we’d seen from him.

  In the end, we settled down to finish dinner in a happier state than we’d begun it. We were alert to stop and scold the dog for any move he made on our plates, but he just sat in his corner and watched us eat.

  Kathy insisted that this was sufficiently good behavior that he deserved his bone after all. I didn’t think so, but I wanted her to keep smiling so I agreed. Rupert, whose sleeve had several small holes in it, held no grudges.

  He was still fretting about Meg, but he really didn’t have a plan. Following close behind them would clearly do more harm than good, so he eventually stopped arguing. To reward his good behavior, I agreed that it wouldn’t hurt to reduce the coach’s lead to half a day, though we’d have to be careful not to overrun them.

  Honestly, he was harder to train than the dog.

  I regretted my concessions when Rupert woke me before dawn. We’d agreed to get an early start, but that didn’t mean I was happy about it. I put a leash on the dog to take him out, and said I’d ask the grooms to saddle our horses while Rupert woke Kathy.

  The dog gave me a good excuse not to help the grooms, so I was able to listen to their conversation ... and I was groggy from my early rising, so it took me longer to make the connections than it should have.

  “I suppose there’s plenty in that midden could spoil bad,” one of them was saying. “But I never saw the like of it. Maybe twenty dead, and some still twitching. Mistress wanted to rake off all the scraps from last night and bury ’em, but Master just set a boy to keep other animals away — better than the rat catcher, he says, and cheaper too.”

  My sleepy brain finally woke up.

  “Wait, are you saying that something thrown out from last night’s dinner is killing rats? I thought rats could eat anything.”

  In fact, I could think of only a few exceptions — and all of them were labeled “poison.”

  Kathy and Rupert arrived as I spoke, carrying their own packs, and we all listened to the man’s reply, though there wasn’t much more to the tale. A cook taking an early scrap bucket out to the midden had seen dozens of rats lying dead around it, and run back to report this gruesome oddity. And to get a manservant to carry out the scraps, because whatever had done that, she wasn’t going near it. Looked like a plague scene, it did...

  Ugly thoughts stirred in my nasty, suspicious mind.

  Kathy had no more desire to see dead rats than the cook, but Rupert accompanied me out to the midden where a boy stood guard over the scattered corpses. Dozens of dead rats was an exaggeration, but I counted eight small stiff bodies. And some had probably crawled off to their holes to die.

  I picked up a stick and did some poking, and soon turned up a hunk of last night’s beef. The rats had consumed enough of it that I couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to have been discarded before anything human tried to eat it.

  Rupert’s face was so pale I could see his freckles, even with the inn blocking the new sun’s light.

  “I owe your dog a bone,” he said. “A lot of bones. And no hard feelings about the sleeve, either.”

  I clearly wasn’t the only one with a suspicious mind, but I had to point out...

  “There’s no proof it was the beef that did this. And no way to prove it was your dinner, even if we fed it to some other animal and watched it die.”

  However there were things we could do, even though they weren’t proof, either.

  We went back to the stable, paid a groom an absurd amount
simply to hold our good dog’s leash for a while, and then we all went into the kitchen to annoy the busy staff with our questions. The early morning shift wasn’t composed of the same people who’d fixed dinner, but eventually we managed to get a description of a slim man, who some had thought was staying at the inn and some thought wasn’t. He’d wandered into the kitchen last night and asked a lot of questions about the food, where it came from and how it was prepared.

  He’d been annoying, but since he was probably a customer they’d answered, and aside from that pretty much ignored him. They thought was in his twenties, or thirties, or maybe early forties, with brown hair. Or maybe dark blond. Some said he had a noble accent and some didn’t think so, but they all agreed he was a bit on the short side, and slim.

  None of them could say whether he’d had bite marks on his hand, or not.

  “It’s him,” said Kathy, as we retreated from the kitchen and headed for the stable. “It’s the same man who was overseeing Meg’s kidnapping. I’m sure of it.”

  “No, we’re not sure,” I said. “We may think it’s the same man, but we can’t even be certain someone tried to poison Rupert, or that the man they’re talking about is the one who did it.”

  “And why would anyone want me dead?” Rupert added. Kathy and I both turned to stare at him, and he grimaced. “I know, I know. But Liam, who’d take my place as Heir is only two, so it’s not likely he’s plotting to seize the throne.”

  “What would happen if he died too?” I asked.

  “Caro would probably produce another heir. She might anyway, and even if someone managed to kill me, Liam, Caro, and all her future children, there are a host of cousins my father could choose a new Heir from, and no way to know who he’d pick. Not to mention the insanity of anyone thinking they could kill the High Liege’s sons and his wife and get away with it.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Well, almost certainly. But we’ve already theorized that one reason for kidnapping Mistress Meg could be to get to you. If you were to die of natural causes — food poisoning, say — and your father, stepmother and brother all died in a carriage accident, who’d become High Liege then?”

  “My Uncle Roger,” said Rupert. “The one whose fief is west of here. But I spent some summers there, after my mother’s death, and I know him well. He loves Father, hates court, and is perfectly happy managing his own estate. The last thing he wants is to become Liege, and his son Corbin feels the same way. After that it gets messy, because the judiciary council would have to choose between Roger’s daughter’s husband or my Aunt Genevieve’s son, and there’s no saying what they’d do. Trying to kill me just doesn’t make sense. Besides, if the kidnappers wanted to kill me, why not do it back when I was banging on the fortress gate?”

  “Because they needed to make it look like an accident,” Kathy said, with a promptness that told me she’d been thinking about it. “But if they’re not trying to kill you because you’re the liege heir... Do you have any personal enemies?”

  I didn’t have to listen to his reply — Rupert wasn’t the kind to go around making mortal enemies.

  Unlike Michael. But Michael’s assassin had not only attacked him twice, he’d ignored a clean shot at Rupert to go after Michael instead. And both his attempts had been ... straightforward. Of course Michael was unredeemed, so if someone wanted to kill him they could just do it. But this still felt different.

  “How under two moons did we end up with more than one assassin on our trail?” I demanded. “This is crazy! We could try to track him down...”

  A slim, brown-haired man somewhere between twenty and forty-five. Right.

  “I don’t want to waste time,” said Rupert promptly. “I want to catch up with Meg. And you said we could get closer.”

  Kathy’s reply came more slowly. “’Twill be a lot harder to track one man, from such a vague description, than a coach with a crest scratched off its door. It could have been an insect that stung Champion, and something else in the midden that killed those rats.”

  Not one of us believed that, but it was possible. And they were right about the difficulty of finding the man, so we set off after Mistress Meg as we’d planned.

  But I resolved, in the future, to listen to my dog.

  “Rat. How about that for a name? He looks a bit rat-like to me.”

  “Under no circumstances,” said Kathy, “are you naming our dog Rat.”

  I liked the possessive way she said “our dog” so much, I was happy to let her veto any number of names. And it seemed our luck had turned in other ways, as well — in the next town they told us the coach had departed on a westward road. Three towns and the better part of a day later, it was certain — the coach was headed west, toward Uncle Roger’s fief.

  I delivered breakfast to my prisoner the next morning by opening his door, with drawn sword in hand, and pushing the tray inside with my foot. True assisted me with a silent snarl.

  Last night I’d shoved in a jug of water and a bit of somewhat stale bread, so he wasn’t starving — I’d eaten little more myself, before spreading my bedroll by the kitchen hearth and going to sleep. I’d been awake the previous night, after all. But he should now be ready to appreciate fried sausage links, hot porridge with cream and honey, and a handful of blackberries from the overgrown ruins of the kitchen garden. Plenty of berries, for the thorny bushes had taken over half the plot.

  ’Twas an excellent breakfast and he should be grateful ... mayhap, someday, he would be.

  For now, I left him without a word spoken between us and set off to search my temporary home, with True frisking at my heels. Away from my prisoner, he reverted almost instantly to his happy self, a change that was almost miraculous even to someone who knew dogs.

  Because I was looking for them, I found a surprising number of useful things that had been left behind when the residents moved out, particularly in the work rooms where the owners may have assumed there was little of value. But the trowel with the chipped edge would serve well for grubbing out the onions and carrots whose tops I’d seen among the weeds, and that bucket only needed a new handle...

  The rooms the baron and his family had used were pretty much bare, and some of the ceilings in the older wing leaked. But on the corridor above the kitchen, not far from the cell, I found two bedrooms with blankets, pillows and fresh straw ticks. Three beds in each room, which made me think that the two men who’d joined the coach had awaited it here.

  Anxiety for my absent friends pricked, but I couldn’t return to them till I’d dealt with my assassin.

  Toward that end I went out to the stables, and after giving both horses a pat and a handful of berries — the crop was abundant, and they’d only have gone to the birds — I opened my prisoner’s pack and started searching through it.

  His magica crossbow was of considerable interest to me, for I’d not had time to examine it. I could tell little of its nature by looking, except that some magic inhabited it — but studying it closely, I saw that the glow seemed to come from the metal-lined trough and wire string, rather than the wood that surrounded it.

  Any good herb talker can safely harvest magica herbs for healing, and if someone should cut down a magica tree, or accidentally slay some magica beast, a savant could help them make the proper sacrifice. The wood or hide could then, theoretically, be used safely, though few would want to take that risk.

  But the only time I’d seen this glow around a thing that never breathed nor grew was when a few bits of glass were enchanted by a madman, who had wielded magic as easily as a smith used his hammer, or a cook his knife.

  I had magic in me ... but I must confess, my attempt to use it to learn more about the bow was half-hearted. Calm and curious as I was, I knew nothing would come of it. And there were other ways to get my answers.

  I went through the rest of his things, mostly hoping to find something with his name upon it. Instead I came across a notebook, cheaply bound between two squares of stiffened leather. The pages held, not hi
s name, but information about dozens of other men.

  The entries were roughly organized, starting with each man’s name and a thorough physical description, sometimes even a sketch. They went on to list the date of his hearing and the charge of which he’d been accused ... before, every one of them, being marked as unredeemed.

  I knew nothing about the little man, surprisingly gentle, who’d pricked those marks into my wrists. The jeering crowd had thrown muddy slush as he worked, and rotten fruit, though he asked the guards to stop them when the stones started to fly. I’d never heard his name ... but it was there, in my assassin’s notes.

  What wasn’t there were the details I’d given the judicars that proved Mistress Ceciel’s innocence — which had ultimately gotten the charge against her dropped. Only my crime, freeing an accused murderess from gaol, and my failure to redeem myself by returning her to justice had been noted.

  What followed, and not only in my case, were a host of other details that would help someone track or identify the man in question, skills they might use to earn their bread, hobbies that might take them to certain shops, and a precise description of any horses in their possession.

  True, who hadn’t reacted to the scent on the man’s clothing, sniffed at this journal and the hair along his spine stiffened — but ’twas the uneasy chill that swept over me he was responding to, not paper and ink. I gave him a pat, trying to settle my own hackles as much as his, and went on to read the other entries.

  A few of the men had committed odd, or inexplicable crimes that the judicars could find no way to settle. But most were the sons of wealthy influential men, who’d killed someone in a drunken rage, or even deliberately, and been saved from paying that ultimate debt by “the compassion of the judicars attending.”

  There were no pages marked with a dramatic X, or even a name crossed out. But I did find places where a page had been ripped out of the book, and I counted up their number with growing dismay.

  Was this man some sort of bounty hunter, who specialized in tracking down the unredeemed? There was no record of an offer to pay this or that amount, on any of the entries.