The Sword-Edged blonde (5 page)

“Damn, how much money was that?” I asked.

“Enough to keep them busy. Now you follow me for a while.”

He cut his horse in front of me and edged along between the crowd and the buildings. His mount was pretty impressive, picking carefully over fallen drunks and uncertain muddy spots, until the crowd began to thin and we reached the edge of town. The road became a highway that stretched north in the darkness. We continued on until we were far enough away we’d get plenty of warning if anyone pursued us. Then we stopped to let our horses rest a bit.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Just doing my job,” he modestly replied.

“Want to tell me exactly what that job is?”

He reached for something inside his jacket. Instantly I had my sword out and at his throat again. “Slow, buddy,” I warned. “No hurry now.”

“Okay, okay,” he said easily. With two fingers, he withdrew a tightly rolled parchment, sealed with wax. “I’m just the messenger.”

I recognized the seal, and blood pounded in my ears as I broke it. I turned so that the glow from town gave me enough light to read. The message was short and, like all the best messages, left the reader with only one course of action. I rolled it up and stuck it in my bags. “I ought to say no,” I told the young soldier.

“He said you wouldn’t,” Anders replied with an easy grin.

“What else did he tell you?”

“That I could trust you. And not to lie to you.”

I nodded. “Good advice. So why did you follow me for so long without saying something?”

“I tried to find you in Neceda, but you left just as I got there. I saw you coming out of that tavern where your office is, actually, but didn’t know it was you until I talked to the barmaid.”

“Did she rat me out right away?”

“Sure. After I gave her five gold pieces and my best smile.
And
she lied about which way you went, but after she described you I knew I’d seen you and which way you’d really gone. I followed you to the river, but by then you were on the boat. I figured I’d keep following you and wait for a chance to talk privately.” He shrugged. “Things kept getting in my way, though.”

“Like those muggers?”

“Amateurs,” he snorted. “If they’d known when to quit, they’d still be alive.”

My full reaction to the message hadn’t hit me yet. “I guess we should get started, then.” I gestured toward the moonlit road ahead. “Lead on, then, Mr. Anders.”

“Sir Michael,” he corrected with another grin. “But you can call me Mike.”

We headed away from Pema toward a place a hundred miles away, and for me, twenty years back in time.

W
e crossed the Gusay, which put us back in Muscodia, and headed north. We traveled the length of Casselward and, at last, entered Arentia in the middle of the night.

The Hornfisher River had been unaffected by the rains to the south. We used a small raft hidden beneath a well-built camouflaged shed that was also stocked with many other things a secret agent like Sir Mike might need.

All kings and queens employed people like him, and they all denied it publicly. But power wasn’t a gift for life, and to hang onto it, sometimes nasty things needed to be done. The best men (and often women) for these jobs never looked the part, and Anders certainly didn’t. He laughed easily, talked a
lot
, and seemed content to let me make decisions about things like places to camp. There was an iron quality to him, though, that I sensed would be quite willing to knock me over the head and bring me to Arentia trussed and thrown across my saddle if I gave him too much grief.

We guided the horses onto the raft and poled it across the Hornfisher. The looming shore had thick forest down
to the waterline, and I wondered if there was room to land even this tiny vessel. The dock, when we touched it, was actually disguised as a pile of driftwood, and only when I stepped onto it did I realize it was solidly anchored to the river bottom.

I don’t know what I expected to happen when I set foot on Arentian soil again—maybe for it to burst into flames beneath my feet or something—but of course it was just dirt, like any other dirt.

We pulled the raft out of the water, tucked it into a depression dug for it and covered it with leaves. Then, leading our horses, we weaved through the trees until at last we hit a trail. I’d have had a hard time following the path in broad daylight, let alone at night, but Anders worked from memory and landmarks I didn’t bother to try to map out.

As we led our horses down the narrow trail through the woods, Anders asked, “Feel strange to be home?”

“This ain’t my home,” I muttered.

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” He seemed genuinely contrite. “I didn’t mean to bring up—”

“Do you hear that?” I snapped, and when he stopped to listen I pushed past him. He didn’t say anything else for a long time.

By sunrise we’d emerged from the woods onto a wide highway that led eventually to Arentia City. These roads were Arentia’s pride, layered with flat, smooth stone dredged from the Hornfisher and other rivers. Creating them had been a tedious process that almost led to a revolution against then-King Hugh II; his insistence on good infrastructure earned him the nickname “Highway Hugh,” and of course the roads themselves became “Hughways.” But once completed, everyone
suddenly realized the advantage they gave: they didn’t become impassable muddy tracks after each heavy rain, and trade between towns became so easy that within a generation Arentia went from a cesspool not unlike Muscodia to the thriving center of commerce it was now.

At least, that’s what they taught us in school. What they left out, naturally, was that the roads were built by press gangs of Fechinians who, after they’d done their jobs, mysteriously died of a disease that left marks almost identical to sword wounds. This massacre was quietly swept under the tapestry, and when Hugh III ascended to the throne two centuries ago, all mention of it was expunged from the official history books. Only the diligence of the Society of Scribes, who made copies of
everything
, kept the memory alive in their hidden archives.

It was a glorious spring day, and everything seemed to be in bloom beneath the wide blue sky. Everyone we passed, whether farmer, trader or soldier, waved or said something friendly. Children laughed, dogs barked. Birds sang. My mood grew more and more foul.

Suddenly I noticed that the road beneath us was not one of the original Hughways, but a new construction; the rocks were a completely different color. “Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t the road used to turn right here and go all the way around old Hogenson’s place?” I asked.

“They’ve built a whole new series of roads,” Anders explained. “The king bought rights-of-way across some of the big landholdings to cut travel time down, and trade picked up a lot as a result.”

“Huh.” That explained all the traffic, although not how the king had managed to sweet-talk the various big shots
into something that gave the appearance of patriotism. Arentian nobles weren’t known for being altruistic, and old Baron Hogenson was especially self-absorbed.

As we traveled, I learned that young Sir Michael was the eldest son and namesake of an army general who’d earned his rank the hard way, protecting the border Arentia shared with San Travis to the west. Mike junior attended military school and then took a commission in the regular army. Since Arentia wasn’t at war with anyone he found the distinct lack of action mind-numbing, until a superior suggested he apply for the special operations branch. The screening process alone took three months. His tests included being tossed naked from a ship off the coast of Romeria with orders to retrieve a certain piece of jewelry from a nobleman’s house and return with it by a given date. He’d done so by convincing the scullery maid’s young daughter that he was a merman, and she hid him long enough for him to learn the layout of the house and acquire the jewelry. He even sculpted a copy from melted sugar to give himself more time, and arrived back in Arentia three days early. He seemed very proud of this, and if it was all true, he had a right to be. I’d been to Romeria a few times, and it was a cold, ragged, lawless place where strangers weren’t welcome and thieves were routinely blinded.

Anders had two younger brothers, also in military school, and a sister who still lived at home. Because of the nature of his work, his brothers believed he’d actually been drummed out of the service and now worked as a kind of liaison with merchants who sold things to the military. Once they reached a high enough rank they could learn the truth, and he anticipated that day with intense glee. “Cornel, especially, loves giving me
hell when we’re home together at the holidays,” he practically giggled. “I can’t wait to tell him that while he was learning to turn left on command, I was out sabotaging Ashatana’s naval construction yards.”

“Should you be telling
me
that?” I asked.

He laughed. “I think, given your status in Arentia, it’s safe to tell you anything.”

“My status isn’t quite what you think it is,” I said.

“Not to dispute you, but your status is whatever the
king
tells me it is. And after what he told me, I don’t have any worries about you keeping state secrets.”

There seemed no point in contradicting him further, so I let it go. The conversation (monologue, really) next turned to his romantic life. He was unmarried, although there was a certain young lady in Arentia City on whom he had his eye. Her name was Rachel, she had long dark hair and a bosom of surpassing perkiness. I gathered she was also quite intelligent, and had goals for her life beyond simply marrying some man who’d keep her fed and pregnant. Anders approved of this, and encouraged her education and training as an architect.

“She’s really good; I wish I could tell her more about my own job, because there are times I know she could help. That little shack where we got the raft? I sort of tricked her into designing it for me. I told her I needed a place to store trade goods where no one could find them, and after I gave her a map of the area, she designed the thing so that it worked with the forest to provide camouflage. Pretty smart, huh? There’s nobody in special ops who could’ve figured that out, that’s for sure.”

He continued telling me about Rachel, how they’d met at an art exhibition in Arentia City, and carefully implied that their first date ended the way boys always
hope they will. This didn’t give him a bad opinion of her, though; just the opposite. Her willingness to act on impulse was apparently one of her best qualities.

But solemnizing the relationship was on indefinite hold. “It wouldn’t really be fair to marry her while I was in such a dangerous job, would it?”

“I ain’t the guy to ask.”

“Never been married?”

“Nope.” He was just trying to be friendly, I reminded myself. “Never was lucky enough to find a girl like your Rachel.”

“She’s a jewel, all right. Whenever I have doubts about my job, I remember that I’m doing all I can to keep her and her family safe. That’s all the encouragement I need.”

We stopped in Mahaleela for the night. The town was pretty much the same as I remembered it—one long central road with an inexplicable right angle in the middle of it. The Serpent’s Toe Tavern and Inn was the best accommodation in town, and the desk clerk certainly fawned enough over Anders when the boy flashed his money bag. We sent our horses to the stable, dropped our saddle bags in the room and went downstairs to eat.

Perched on the main road like it was, the Serpent’s Toe catered to a more varied clientele than the regular taverns. Single adult travelers and wealthy families both stopped there, and it dealt with this dichotomy by dichotomizing itself. The main room, where you could get dinner and warm yourself by the fire, was designed to be acceptable to prudish parents: the barmaids wore necklines to their chins, the ale served with dinner was frighteningly watered down, and there were even wet nurses available if the parents didn’t bring their own. Off to one
side was the true tavern where you could ogle the girls’ cleavage and arrange for an evening’s companionship while you drank yourself idiotic on the real stuff. It was an interesting approach to attracting customers, but judging from the crowd in the dining room, it worked.

One family, a Mishicot livestock trader with two wives and a half-dozen kids, occupied a corner table. The kids, as Mishicotian children tended to be, were regimented little mechanicals who lifted their spoons in unison under the watchful eye of their mothers. This kind of iron-fisted parenting was necessary when you might have twenty kids in a household. The younger of the wives, a shapely blonde with dark circles under her eyes, nursed a fussy infant and stared blankly into space. Each time the baby made a particularly loud noise, the other wife, dark-haired and portly, would shoot the blonde a disapproving look. Through all this the head of the household ate ravenously, ignoring everything around him. He was tall and handsome, and scanned the other women in the room with the same rapacious gaze so many Mishicotian merchants possessed. In Mishicot a man measured success by wives and children, and he was clearly on his way up the ladder.