“Me too, but I don’t even know if I can get myself to Horches. Or what I’ll do when I arrive.”
“Not fair,” she grumbled. “I wish I’d been born a man.”
“I’m glad you were born, man or woman. I’ll always consider you my friend.”
She looked up, a surprised smile on her lips. “That’s possibly the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. If more men were like you…maybe marriage wouldn’t be so horrible.”
“Um…actually, I have another secret.”
“Gods, Yveni. How do you remember to keep them all?”
“This one I’ve kept for years. I, uh…don’t want to get married at all. I don’t like women. I mean, not like that.”
She reached for the billycan of tea and topped up her mug. “Oh
that
I already knew.”
“How?”
“I just did. You never look at my…you know, breasts. You’re seventeen. You’d look at breasts.”
Yveni’s face was hotter than the fire. “I wouldn’t. It’s rude.”
“It’s what men do. But this I’d really never tell Father. He can’t even cope with male kardips mounting each other. He takes them off to be gelded as soon as he sees it, even if we were going to breed them.”
Yveni resisted the temptation to cross his legs. “I’ve never told anyone except my sister, Serina—not even Gil. My father expected me to be betrothed. We were going to arrange it as soon as my sister was settled.”
“And how were you going to manage that, your graceness?”
“Um. I…thought it would just work out. I tried not to think about it,” he added somewhat feebly.
“Nice surprise for your wife. Though if she was like me, she might be happy. Don’t suppose you’re allowed to marry a man.”
“No. Men who love other men aren’t forbidden or anything, but if one has a duty…”
“That’s a terrible reason to marry someone.”
“But you’re going to.”
“We’ll see. Oooh, now I’m going to be curious for the rest of my
life
because I’ll never know what happened to you!”
“I could write a letter.”
“Father would tear it up.”
“Send a messenger?”
“To our little village?”
“Why not?”
“Would you?”
“I’ll certainly try.”
“I can just imagine Father’s face if you did.” She suddenly punched him in the arm, which made him yelp. “You better not be spinning me a yarn, Yveni of the house of thingy.”
“I’m not. And it’s Elaini, not thingy. You’re very rude.”
“You’re the one raised in a castle, not me. Poke the fire, will you? I’m cold.”
“Anything you say, my lady.” He dodged her fist as he jumped up. Female or not, she had a mighty punch.
She’d have probably quizzed him about it more in the morning, but the dawn broke wet and miserably cold. Jako ordered the camp to sit tight until the rain cleared, so they could only huddle in one of the sleeping tents and wait.
The clouds parted close to noon, and Jako sent Yveni and the others out to gather the herd. Most of them clustered tightly together, heads towards the centre of their group, hairy backsides out. But two were missing.
“Oh that idiot one with the spot on its face is gone again,” Raina said. “And I can’t see the one with the short tail. Jein, you better Call them.”
The youth screwed up his face in concentration. “They’re lost. They’ve wandered too far and don’t know where to go. That way.” He pointed south. “Not that far, beyond those trees. They can’t see us, so they don’t know we’re here.”
“Wonderful. Gaelin, we better go fetch the silly sods. Jein, you start moving them on. We’ll catch you up.”
Jein ran off. Raina shook her head disgustedly as she walked over to Yveni. “I swear kardips don’t have the brains the gods gave mouldy bread. And it
would
have to be now, while it’s all wet.”
“Sooner we go, sooner we’ll catch up.”
“Don’t teach me my job, your graceness.”
Walking through the mud was deeply unpleasant and slow. All the time, they kept calling to the two lost kardips, hoping the creatures might use what little intelligence they had and follow the sound. Unfortunately, these two were the stupidest of a very stupid breed, and Yveni and Raina were almost on top of them before they raised their woolly heads, jerked and then ran over to their humans, kicking up their heels with joy and knocking Yveni over into the mud. Raina, heartless woman, laughed until she was nearly sick at the sight of him.
“You could help me up,” he groused.
“Here.”
She held out her hand, still giggling. He glared at her as he got up. “Just marvellous. Now I’ve got a wet bottom, and this mud won’t dry for ages. You damn things aren’t worth it,” he scolded, shaking his fist at the two young kardips, who gazed back at him with adoring brown eyes, devoid of the least intelligence. “Well, come on. We’ve found the brutes.”
Using a switch to lightly whack the curly backsides of the errant animals and keep them moving, Yveni and Raina trudged through the mud back to the road. He was still cross at her unfeeling reaction to his accident, and she was daydreaming again, maybe thinking of Yveni’s promise to have her work at the infirmary—or plotting a dirty trick to play on him, a major source of amusement for her clan on this journey. Yveni, who’d never liked practical jokes, found it rather tiresome, which of course meant they considered him a favoured target.
“Gaelin.”
He looked up from watching his feet in the slick mud. “What?” He matched his tone to her quiet voice.
“Look.”
He followed her pointing finger. To the east of them, about three hundred metres away, stood a hooded figure on a horse. “Uemirien?”
“I don’t think so. I think we should hurry. Come on. Forget about the beasts. Run!”
She grabbed his hand and tugged, and driven by the urgency in her voice, he let her pull him. Running in the mud was worse than trying to run on ice, but every time one of them slipped, the other pulled them up hard and kept going.
But they couldn’t outrun a horse, and the thud of hoofs soon filled Yveni’s ears. “Keep going!” he screamed at Raina. The kardips scattered in blind panic, squealing and kicking as they ran away. The rider wasn’t interested in the animals. He wanted Yveni, cutting him off from Raina and swinging a vicious looking whip to stop him escaping.
“Who are you?” Yveni yelled. “What do you want?”
The man had a black cloth over his mouth and head—only his dark eyes were visible in his mask, like a demon’s face. His black horse snorted and reared, as strange and hostile as its rider.
“What do you
want
?” Yveni repeated.
The man advanced, tossed the whip so the handle became a club, and swung it suddenly, hitting Yveni on the temple and driving him to his knees, dazed. He felt hands on his collar and belt, lifting him, and his feeble struggles could do nothing to stop the man.
But then he was dropped, and Raina shouted furiously at the man, spitting curses. Yveni crawled away from the horse, trying to clear his vision to see what was happening. He heard a sickening thud, and a sound as if someone had fallen to the ground. “Raina…”
Footsteps, and the hands on him again. He fought as best he could, but the man shook him like a dunel would a rabbit and threw him over the neck of his mount. Yveni’s hands were quickly tied behind him, the horse moved as the rider climbed into the saddle, and they galloped away, the motion sickening in his confused brain.
Who was this? One of Konsatin’s men? How could they possibly have found him so quickly, or at all? He struggled to think against the nausea of the blow and the jolting motion. He was close to fainting by the time the horse stopped moving, and quite unable to tell how far they’d gone or in which direction.
The man dragged him off the horse, and Yveni promptly collapsed onto the mud again. He thought he would puke, but since no one touched him for a minute or so, he got his breathing under control and his stomach to stop rebelling. His head hurt like fury though. He heard people shouting in his own language, but with a Karvin accent.
Slavers
, he realised with a flash of sickening insight.
Someone came over and dragged him upright. Another person with a hidden face. “I’m not a child,” he said in Tetu. “You have no right—”
The man smashed a fist across Yveni’s face. “Shut up, boy. You’re a child because I say you are. Get over there.” He yanked Yveni around and shoved him towards a small group of Uemirien children all huddled around a fire, staring at him with huge, frightened eyes.
Another man quickly seized him and put a chain around his waist. This was connected to that on a young boy, then Yveni’s knife was pulled from his belt and his hands freed. The man shoved him to the ground. “Be quiet and behave, or you’ll be beaten, boy.”
“I’m not—”
A vicious blow landed across his shoulders—a whip strike. “Shut up!” the man roared. “Are you deaf as well as stupid?”
Shocked by the pain, Yveni hunched over and didn’t reply. He heard a grunt and footsteps walking away from him.
None of the children spoke, even when he was able to sit up again, his shoulders still burning from the whip. There were eight of them, all apparently under fourteen, all chained. Several clung to their companions, so he guessed they were either siblings or from the same clan.
“Hello,” he whispered. “I’m…” Quickly he realised that he dared not reveal his real identity here, not to Karvi. “Gaelin. What’s your name?” he asked the boy to whom he was chained.
The boy checked to see if any of the adults were about. “Tilin,” he whispered. “I’m seven. I want my mother. I want my sister.”
Yveni put his arms around the child and hugged him carefully. “I know. They’re very bad men.”
“Can you help us escape?” The girl looked to be one of the oldest children.
“I’ll try. Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. I don’t speak what they speak.”
“I do. Maybe I can find out. What’s your name?”
“Jair,” she told him. Hesitantly the others named themselves. All of them wanted to know if Yveni could help. He lied and said he hoped so, but in his heart, he didn’t know how he could. He was one against at least four—no, five—men with horses and guns and whips, and even if he could free himself, he could never take these eight children with him. Not out here. Only if he could somehow kill all of the men, and he had no training in such things at all. He knew how to use swords, guns, and bow and arrow, but hand-to-hand combat wasn’t considered a necessary ducal skill. He could imagine his father’s horrified reaction if anyone suggested it should be.
He tried to calculate how far they had to be from Karvis, no easy thing with his headache. Lild lay about a hundred and sixty kilometres from the border. Jako had calculated how far they’d travelled only the night before—about four hundred and fifty kilometres. Yveni didn’t know the exact direction of travel, but they had to be at least three hundred kilometres from the border. A man on horseback could travel that in three days. The cart standing to the side, hitched to two great carthorses, would be slower, but if the slavers were on their way back to Karvis, it could take them as little as a week. Not much time to free himself or anyone else.
The children, he discovered, had all been chained together. An effective way of preventing escape, even if children of such differing heights and ages could work together, which they probably couldn’t. The slavers paid little attention to them, talking among themselves. “How long have you stopped?” Yveni asked.
“A while,” Jair said, which didn’t tell him much. “I think the rain slowed them down. Too muddy.”
Which meant when the ground dried, as it had already, the slavers would be off again. “Where do you sleep at night?”
“A smelly tent. I don’t like it. Please, where’s my sister?”
“Safe at home with your mother.” Yveni prayed it was true. Had these monsters killed to rip these children from their families? He was sure they’d be prepared to. “What’s your clan called?”
“Gdikini,” Tilin said, stumbling over it.
“Gdikini,” Yveni repeated carefully. “Now, listen to me, all of you carefully. I want you to be brave and not cry, understand?” He hugged Tilin again. “It might be a while before you can go home. You might have to work for other people, go to strange places. But remember two things. If you’re ever free to come home, you must remember the name of your clan and a place called Grekil. Say that.” They solemnly repeated it. “Your clan name and that place. Remind yourselves every night before you go to sleep. Each year, there’s a big meeting of all the clans in Grekil. If you go there, tell people your clan name, they can tell you how to get home. Understand?”