Thea let go of him, and the miller shook his head. I mean, he shook his head no. The rest of him was shaking already. Even his voice quivered. "I'm sorry. We have nothing."
"We're not picky," I said. The last couple of miles, the bark on the trees had begun to look good.
"I don't mean we don't have much. We don't have anything. My wife just left for Packett's Corners"—he indicated southeast, exactly the opposite direction we were interested in—"to go to the market."
"This is a mill," Cornelius pointed out. "Surely you have bread."
The miller shook his head. "You don't understand. My wife, she took all the bread to market to sell. I have raw grain. And stone-ground flour. No bread."
I thought he looked genuinely distressed, but apparently Nocona wasn't buying it. "Is it immoral," he asked philosophically, looking at no one in particular, "to knock down someone who doesn't really exist outside of one's own mind and ransack his house?"
Mom groaned in her sleep. All of us turned. About five seconds later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the miller turn also.
He hadn't heard.
He hadn't heard.
He only turned to see what we were looking at. His eyes went straight past Mom, to the horizon beyond her. "Look," he told us, "the wife will be back by midday with meat and fresh vegetables. And she'll start baking too. You're welcome to wait."
We all looked at each other. Cornelius said, "Surely we shouldn't waste a whole day."
"No," I said, real quick.
"No," the others agreed.
The miller shifted his gaze from one to the other of us. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. "There is..." Then he shook his head. "No, well..." Again he became more animated. "But on the other hand if you're really desperate..." He debated himself out of it. "Still..."
"What?" Feordin looked ready to shake him.
"There is
some
bread in the house that I'd forgotten about. But I'm not sure..."
Feordin grabbed him by the shirt. "This better not be a matter of money."
Considering that the man was half again as tall as the dwarf, and twice as wide, it was a tribute to the ferocity in Feordin's face that the miller turned white and stammered, "N-n-n-no. I—it's a matter of overbaking."
Feordin had pulled down on the guy's shirt so that their noses were touching despite their difference in height. "Beg your pardon?" Feordin asked.
"Last week my wife left a batch of bread in the oven too long. We've been using the loaves as doorstops."
Doorstops?
The miller said, "I didn't think to mention them because, really, they're not fit for human consumption." He suddenly remembered to whom he was talking. "Er, uhm, ah..."
And so we sat down on the grassy lawn and had bread to eat. Bread that we had to soak in river water before we could even break off pieces. And the miller only charged us one silver piece each for it. The water he let us have free.
"
Six
loaves," I told the miller as I poured the coins into his open palm. I tapped the top coin. "One for each of us."
"Ah yes," the miller said. "One for the lady, too. I understand." He glanced at the horse, smiled, and nodded. "Lady," he said by way of greeting.
Of course, by then we'd already helped Mom down and she was sitting on the grass with the rest of the group.
"Brain-damaged old coot," I muttered as he went to fetch a sixth loaf.
He tried to feed it to the horse, too. Cornelius, who'd given his loaf to Mom, took it from him. "Now," said Cornelius, wiping his sleeve across his mouth where water squirted out as he bit into his bread, "about our sick companion..."
"The lady," the miller said, giving his friendly grin to the horse.
"We'd like her to stay here."
This was
not
something we had decided, or even talked about. I stopped in midchew and glanced at the others to see if they were any less surprised. They didn't seem to be. Except, of course, for Mom, who had taken maybe three bites of bread, then laid her head down on the grass. "Cornelius," I said.
"No," the miller said.
"Harek," Cornelius told me, "it'd be the best thing for her. She could rest. She'll be safe here." He turned his attention back to the miller. "We'll pay you to watch over her."
"This is no boardinghouse." Obviously the miller had had enough. He turned his back on us and headed inside the mill.
"But...," Cornelius called after him.
I said, "He can't even see her."
"Probably," Nocona said, "the program wouldn't allow for it anyway. There's no telling what would happen if you tried."
Again I said, "He can't even see her."
"Somebody would have had to stay with her," Feordin added, "and the group's divided enough already."
"And we're getting pretty tired of you making decisions for us," Thea said.
"Look," Cornelius started, "I just thought—"
Mom opened her eyes and whispered, "Put a lid on it, Corny. I wouldn't have stayed anyway."
"In that case," Cornelius said, "at the risk of getting accused of making decisions for everybody, I'd say we'd better get going."
The desert crossing was worse than I'd imagined, and I can say that despite the fact that we met no one and nothing out of the ordinary.
No sand hands.
No giant snakes.
No killer sandstorms or flash floods or sun-crazed nomads.
On the other hand, it was hot. The sand was hot. The air was hot. We were hot. The sand dragged at our steps, leaving us exhausted even as we were just setting out. I could feel the heat through the leather of my boots and once, when I didn't step high enough and pitched forward onto my hands, I singed my palms in the two seconds before I picked myself up.
We wrapped cloth around our faces, hoping that would filter out some of the sand our struggles churned into the air and maybe give the air we breathed a chance to cool off before it hit our lungs. Before we were farther than shouting distance from Miller's Grove, we'd already lit into our water supply.
Despite the shredded blankets we'd wrapped around their legs, the horses balked just about every step of the way. They nipped and kicked and just generally made themselves unpleasant. Mom had dismounted so we could handle them more easily, and there was no telling how long she'd be able to walk on her own. About ten steps, I estimated.
"This is not going to work," Thea said.
"We need to leave the horses," I suggested. "They're holding us back."
"Oh sure, that's easy for you to say," Feordin told me. "What about our treasure? We can't leave that behind."
I said, "It won't do us any good if we die in the desert."
"Oh yeah?" he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"You think you can make me?"
"I think—"
Cornelius said, "I have an idea."
We all turned on him, even Nocona.
"Now wait a minute," Cornelius said over all the shouting and hooting. "Will you just listen to me? I can use my Levitation spell."
I said, "I don't see how that would help. Levitation can get us up off the sand, but it won't get us closer to Sannatia."
"I could levitate the horses," Cornelius explained, "and ... say, two riders each. Felice, obviously. Myself, of course. The rest of you could alternate, take turns: two ride, and two pull the levitating horses along. It'll be a lot easier than trying to drag the horses through the sand."
"Uh-huh," Nocona said, mulling it over. "Why do you get to ride?"
"Because I need to concentrate on the spell."
"Figures," I said.
We used Feordin's magic rope, tying each end to one of the horses. Thea and I lost the draw and got to be the guinea pigs. Or draft horses, however you choose to look at it.
Cornelius shared a horse with Mom. She was looking a little better. The miller's bread must have done her good, for her face had lost that pinched hollowness. But her hair, not combed in the four days we'd been here, no longer hung halfway down her back. It was so tangled, it barely reached her shoulders. And it was coated with a fine layer of sand so that it looked less like the dark and glossy gypsy hair with which Felice had started out and more and more like Mom's own brown-and-gray hairstyle.
Cornelius closed his eyes and concentrated. The horses didn't look too happy about being three feet off the ground, but they soon caught on that this way their hooves were out of the burning sand.
Thea and I started pulling on the rope and Cornelius was right: It wasn't like pulling the full weight of the horses. It wasn't too much harder than just slogging through the sand on our own.
We arrived at Sannatia shortly after midday.
Sand from the desert had blown into the streets. Scrubby grass and weeds had sprouted in unlikely spots, like between the steps in front of buildings and in somebody's window box, where they'd crowded out the flowers.
"Looks like nobody's been here in years," I said.
Nocona, who with Feordin had been guiding the horses, stooped down. "Goblin tracks," he pointed out irritably. "Obviously
goblins
have been here."
"Nobody besides goblins," I corrected. I waited for Cornelius to lower the horses. Mounting and dismounting had been like being four years old again and picking a carousel horse stuck at the top of its leap.
Thea helped Mom down. "You all right?" I asked.
"I just need to sit on something soft that doesn't move," Mom whispered.
"We really should begin," Cornelius said. "There's a lot of territory to cover."
I gave a hand to Nocona, who hadn't stood up from examining the tracks. I half expected him to consider it an insult to his Indianhood or something, but his ankle must have been sore enough so that he didn't care. He'd probably done more than sprain it; he'd probably chipped or cracked the bone, or it'd have healed by now. Even my arm was half healed. He lugged himself up heavily and turned his face away so I wouldn't see him wince.
"Let's try the barracks first," Feordin suggested, "since that's right here."
It was spooky walking down the streets that the inhabitants had deserted—or from which they'd been snatched—twenty years earlier. Goblins had vandalized the place. Doors were kicked in so that they hung on their hinges and rattled in the breeze. Feather mattresses had been tossed out of windows and gotten sodden from the rains. Wooden furniture had been used for bonfires in the middle of streets. There hadn't been a systematic looting: goblins aren't interested in treasure the way people are. But it explained the lights at night: goblins don't like daylight. Whatever they do, they do at night. It just didn't explain what had happened to the townspeople.
At the barracks we all got out our weapons, to be ready just in case. We assumed the defensive position. I kicked in the door and Feordin and Thea went in ahead of me; Mom dragged herself in after me; Cornelius and Nocona guarded the rear.
No need for SWAT team tactics. The dust was thick enough to taste, and our feet left footprints. Obviously we were the first to pass in years. Storerooms, sleeping rooms, dining hall. Nobody and nothing. All the weapons were gone, though little else seemed disturbed.
"What do you think?" Feordin asked, indicating the stairs to the second floor.
"I think it's a waste of time," Nocona snapped.
The rest of us all looked at each other, anxious that Nocona, the most levelheaded of us, was becoming short-tempered with the pain of his injury.
"Well," Thea said, a study in diplomacy, "where do you think we should look?"
It didn't work. "Don't you get snippy with me," Nocona warned. He turned on his heel and stomped out. Well, it was more like stomp, step gingerly, stomp, step gingerly.
Cornelius said, "Maybe we should try the Wizards' Guild HQ."
"How will we know it?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Shouldn't be too hard to find."
He was right. It was the one that was a big, black hole, about twenty feet deep in the ground and wide enough to hold a midsized playground. There was a sign in the front, which said
WIZARDS' GUILD
, and it was only slightly singed by whatever had taken down the building.
"Ooops," Cornelius said.
Mom leaned against me.
Nocona sat down on the curb and massaged his ankle.
"Do you think we should go to the Street of Temples?" Thea asked.
"Sure," Feordin said. "Why not?"
"Because," I said, "there have got to be hundreds of places we
could
go that are 'sure-why-not?' places. If we go to every one of them, we'll still be looking tomorrow evening when we get zapped back to Shelton's basement."
"So?" Cornelius said.
"So, we've got to slow down and analyze. What have we got so far? Someone—we don't know who—has kidnapped Princess Dorinda and, apparently, brought her to Sannatia. Right?"
They all looked at me with varying degrees of impatience.
"So, what are the possibilities? One: the princess is dead, killed during the abduction or after."
"Oh, no," Mom said.
"What're you getting at, Harek?" Nocona asked.
"Possibility number two: the princess is alive but being held captive. I prefer that possibility, because if she's dead, then this whole thing is pointless."
Cornelius sighed and muttered, "Talk about pointless
"I'm trying to look at this logically," I said. "If you'd rather just flail about blindly—"
"Just say what you've got to say," Thea told me.
"If Princess Dorinda's being held captive, the question is why."
"
Why?
" Thea repeated.
"Why is anyone held captive?"
"For the ransom?" Cornelius suggested.
"Good. What else?"
"To force the relatives to do something," Nocona said.
"Or to prevent them," Thea countered.
"Maybe," I said.
Feordin said, "Perhaps the princess has some information about something, which somebody wants."
"Could be."
"I can't think," Mom said. "Which is it?"
"
I
don't know," I told them. "I'm just exploring the possibilities."