Bald and stout, the innkeeper Master Rigo greeted her at the bar. His florid jowls quivered with joy. “A fine evening! Gods, I cannot thank you enough for coming to the Blue Piper. Wine, milady?”
“If you please.” Nesaea slid onto a high stool.
The innkeeper ducked his bulk behind the bar, popped up a moment later with a brimming cup of house wine. Nesaea sipped the sweet blend, dropped a pair of coppers on the bar.
Master Rigo pushed the coins back with a happy wink. “Your Maidens have earned their keep ten times over.” He swabbed a nonexistent spot with a clean rag, then tucked it into the apron tied about his ample belly.
There were two more inns and half a dozen taverns in the riverside village of Cliffbrook, all as rundown as the Blue Piper. Nesaea had chosen the place because Master Rigo seemed intent to make the best of what he had. Stains marred the rolling wooden floor, but he kept it swept clean. Rusted iron chandeliers hung from sagging rafters, but the serving girls kept the wicks trimmed on the candles, and did not allow the dripping wax to build up and hang like globs of melted cheese. The windows were scrubbed clean, no matter that they looked out on a street packed tight with parked merchant wagons.
The innkeeper looked from Krysala to Nesaea. “Don’t expect I can talk you into staying on a few days, mayhap a week?”
“We Maidens never stay in one place so long,” Nesaea demurred.
Master Rigo’s face fell. Just as quickly, he brightened. “If your travels ever bring you near to Cliffbrook again, you and your girls are more than welcome at the Blue Piper. Free food and wine, if you return.”
“My thanks,” Nesaea said.
Master Rigo bobbed his head, then bustled off to serve another customer.
Nesaea leaned on the bar, a finger tracing old scars in the bloodwood slab. She did not expect to ever venture so close to the Shadow Road again, or the Gyntor Mountains. Southern Qairennor, Trem, Unylle were all territories more to her liking. And the earnings were better. After what had happened at Fortress Hilan, all that with Lord Sanouk and the demon-god he had treated with, this part of the world had lost what little appeal it held for her.
She shivered, recalling the cramped tomb Sanouk had sealed her into, while deadly potions gnawed at her mind and rotted her insides. Dark sorcery had given Sanouk a resistance to all the poisons that afflicted her. Others had been trapped with her in those lightless catacombs, each condemned to suffer a different form of death in order to safeguard the outcast brother to the King of Cerrikoth. Most had escaped. A few had not. Had it not been for Rathe, Nesaea might still be there, forever held between life and death, slowly overcome by madness wrought by perpetual agony.
Thinking of him soured her mood. Rathe had saved her, then left her with that jumped-up chit, Erryn of Valdar. The self-styled Queen of the North had quickly found her power, and with it the boldness to pursue a man whose heart belonged to another. At least, that had been the way Nesaea saw it. With men like Rathe, you never could tell.
“Rathe, a king?” Nesaea scoffed under her breath, recalling Erryn’s clumsy attempt to get Rathe into her bed. Nesaea gulped the last of her wine, knowing she was being unfair. Rathe had, after all, denied the girl’s ridiculous offer. In the end, he had done what he thought best, drawing those who hunted him away from Valdar and Erryn, but also away from her.
And I let him go
.
“She’s come far,” Fira said, hopping onto a stool.
“Who?” Nesaea asked, glad for the distraction. She had promised herself not to think about Rathe. Fira always helped distract her, save those times when the fire-haired woman got too deep in her cups, and started lamenting Loro’s absence. Just what the woman saw in Rathe’s vulgar companion remained a mystery, but her strange affection oft brought a smile to Nesaea’s lips.
“Krysala, of course,” Fira said.
“I suppose.”
“You
suppose
? Gods, when we found her, she was nothing but a grubby waif, scurrying about the sewers like a common rat. Look at her now, and tell me you can imagine her filching your apples.”
“She’s lucky I did not take off her fingers.” Nesaea remembered the heat of that day, the narrow street jammed shoulder-to-shoulder with hawkers and their custom, curtained palanquins borne by sweating servants, rumbling merchant wagons cutting swaths through the crowds. The port city of Vencio was a city too small by half for all the folk who lived and traded there. Breezes off the Sea of Grelar usually cleared out the stenches of salt, tar, and fish, but the air had been calm the day Krysala tried to snatch a sack of apples off Nesaea’s wagon seat. Instead of reaching for her knife, she had grabbed the girl’s wrist, hauled her up, and plopped her down. That had proven to be the easy part. “She fought like a rat, too,” Nesaea said fondly.
Fira grinned. “Still has that same feistiness.”
“Not so long ago,” Nesaea mused, “you were such a waif.”
“A lifetime ago, and someone’s else life, at that. You and the Maidens have been good to me.”
Nesaea put her back to the bar, dividing her attention between Krysala’s next song, and Fira’s excited chatter about the new dress she had commissioned from a local seamstress. To hear her, no one would suspect she had orchestrated and led the attack against Fortress Hilan. And, in so doing, had inadvertently given Rathe the opportunity needed to end Lord Sanouk and his wicked schemes.
“I tell you true,” a man said off to one side, voice overloud with indignation. “The man be a wizard. Best I ever seen.”
As a dabbler in such arts, those words caught Nesaea’s ear. Many claimed such powers, but most were charlatans, masters of trickery and illusion. She turned slightly to listen.
“Any man can juggle,” another fellow jeered.
“Aye, ‘tis true, but this man did so without his hands.”
“No hands? Then what’d he use, his tongue?” He snorted derisive laughter. “I’d rather a wench use her tongue to juggle my—”
“Not his tongue, you daft fool. Nor was there any wenches about. He used his
mind
for the balls, and naught else.”
“An’ you call me daft? You was tricked, I say.”
“Go see for yourself, then. Sazukford is not so far off. He’s serving as Lord Arthard’s court magician. Goes by the name Sytheus Vonterel. Ask round, an’ folk will know who you mean….”
At the mention of Sytheus Vonterel, the voices faded to the back of Nesaea’s mind. She knew the man, but had not seen him since she was a girl. She had given up hunting him after coming to believe he was dead.
“Nesaea?” Fira leaned close, worry wrinkling her brow. “Are you ill?”
Nesaea shook off her shock. “No … I’m fine.”
Fira looked doubtful, but let her concern pass. “Well, I was asking where are we headed next? Trem, Unylle, perhaps across the Sea of Grelar to Monseriq? You were born there, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” Nesaea said absently, struggling not to let the long-buried memories of her homelands come. Recollections of blood, dust, and the death of all that she had loved. In a single moment, her life had taken a course far different than what she had ever imagined. A course no child in her right mind would want.
“Then it’s time you returned,” Fira said excitedly. “Taking the wagons by ship might be difficult, but we’ve gold enough to hire a small fleet. Besides, I’ve never known a sailor to turn down a pretty pair of eyes—”
“We go to Sazukford,” Nesaea cut in, caught between past and present. To hear forgotten screams mingling with Krysala’s sweet voice made her stomach clench.
“Whatever for?”
With tears in her eyes, Nesaea said, “To find my father.”
Chapter 3
The mountain trail led Rathe and Loro over an ancient stone bridge spanning a river that surged from the mouth of a steep-walled gorge. On the far side, the trail turned hard north to follow the river up into a soggy white curtain of mist. The two riders halted in a patch of grass to let their horses graze.
Loro cast a baleful eye on the river gorge. “Do you suppose we’ll ever get out of these accursed mountains?” Clad in leather jerkin and trousers, a cloak of simple dark wool, with shoulders nearly as wide as he was tall, Loro had the look of an ascetic warrior-priest with a weakness for feasting.
Rathe searched for another way, some indication of lowlands. Where the forest did not block their path, dark granite cliffs did. There might have been more, but he could see nothing beyond the fog. As ever, ravens croaked their gleeful scorn somewhere above.
“North is the only way out of the Gyntors.” Rathe nodded at the gorge. “As that heads north, I’d say we are on the right path.”
Loro shivered under his cloak. “Or, it might be that the mountains go all the way to world’s end.”
Over the last many days, when not considering the shadowed swordsman he had faced, Rathe had begun to think the same, though a map he saw once named the lands beyond the mountains the Iron Marches. “You wanted the life of a thief. I dare say cold, hunger, and hard paths are the lot of such men.”
“Not along the shores of the Sea of Muika,” Loro said, falling back on his tired belief they could live like bandit-kings on the western shores of Qairennor.
“Once we get through the mountains, mayhap we’ll find the truth of that. Not before. Until then, we ride until sunset. As always.”
“I’ve not seen the sun in days,” Loro said, sneaking a sip of blackberry brandy from the flask he kept under his cloak. Popping the stopper back, he glanced skyward to prove his point.
Rathe craned his neck, found a pale glowing disk just beginning its slow westward fall. “There it is,” he said with forced cheer. He heeled the gray into a plodding walk up the steep trail.
Loro cursed him, but followed.
The air grew colder and thinner as the day wore on. The horses labored up the steep trail, hooves slipping over ice as often as loose gravel. Sprigs of tough grass and clumps of wiry bramble took root in thin soil along the riverbank, spread dripping branches over sheets of crusty snow. Rathe wondered how anything grew here.
“Gods and demons, my arse is sore,” Loro protested. He had lasted a full quarter turn of the glass without a word of complaint. He shifted in the saddle with a scowl. “And my stones, gods be cursed, have grown a bleeding crop of blisters. Show me the civilized man who has ever had to suffer such as this!” His shout could not contend with the voice of the river, a rumbling rush filling the gorge with thunder.
“We stop at dusk, no sooner,” Rathe said.
“Dusk is hours off!” Loro shook beaded water from his bald pate, wrung out his hood, and pulled it back up.
“Not so long as that,” Rathe said.
He guided the gray through an ice-edged stream tumbling out of a treacherous gulley to join the river. Once across, he drew rein to search the chasm of fractured gray rock. A croaking raven took to wing from a briar thicket. A yearling stag lifted its head from the stream, a warning snort steaming from its nostrils. Stunted evergreens grew everywhere, holding to fissures with roots like contorted fingers.
Loro sighed, slumped in the saddle, took a forlorn sip from his flask. “I’m cold, hungry, and have not had the pleasure of a bitter ale longer than is proper. Gods!” he called skyward. “Grant me a great soft wench to warm my bones!”
“Keep an eye out,” Rathe said. “I cannot give you women or ale—and by all gods, I’ll not tend your bloody stones—but if we find a cave or hollow, or perhaps a few trees fallen together, we can have a dry night.”
“I beg for plump teats and a cozy tavern, and you think to offer me a moldy cave or a spidery woodpile? Are you a simpleton, or a man without heart?”
“If you crave affection,” Rathe said mildly, “head back down the trail, rope one of those woolly goats you missed putting an arrow into this morning, and——”
Rathe cut off at a noise behind them.
As one, the men drew their swords.
“What do you see?” Loro asked.
“It’s what I heard that troubles me.” Rathe had not seen any figures in the mist of late, but the watched feeling had only grown stronger the longer they wandered through the mountains.
“Must have imagined it,” Loro said dismissively. “With this river, why, it’s nigh impossible to hear myself think, let alone hear anything else.”
Rathe raised a hand for quiet. As with the branching gullies climbing into the mountains, the river gorge was all of sheer rock dotted with mossy outcrops and small, bristly spruce. No more than a hundred paces at its widest, there was nowhere to hide, unless a man could pass for a tree or a lichen-crusted stone.
“What do you
think
you heard?” Loro asked in a hollow voice.
“A hoof scraping over stone, maybe a sword clearing a scabbard,” Rathe said. It had been a faint sound, barely heard for the river. All at once, the raven winged into the mist, and the stag vanished into dense underbrush.
Loro peered into the shifting fog. “King Nabar’s men?”
“Being as they chased us into the mountains in the first place, who else would it be?” Rathe did not let on that this menace felt different than what he had felt with the shadow-man. Or any man, for that matter.