Barbara Hambly - The Ladies of Mandrigyn

“Where did Ari speak to you?” she asked at last.

“In the square, sir,” Thurg said, swallowing and glancing from her face to Ari’s and back again. “He—he came out of the alleyway the Chief had gone down with that girl and—and walked over to where we were sitting in the tavern. It was getting late. I’d already talked to the innkeeper once about keeping the place open.”

“He came over to you—or called you to him?”

“He came over, sir. He said, ‘You can head on back to camp, troops. The Chief and I will be along later.’ And he gave us this big wink. They all laughed and made jokes, but I asked didn’t he want a couple of us to stay, just in case? And he said, ‘You think we can’t handle City Troops? You’ve seen ’em fight!’ And we—we came away. I thought if An was with the Chief...” He let his voice trail off, struggling within himself. Then he flung his hands out. “It sounds like your grandfather’s whiskers, but it’s true! Ask any of ’em!” Desperation corrugated his sunburned little face. “You’ve got to believe me!”

But he did not look as if he thought that this was at all likely.

They said in the camp that Starhawk had not been born—she’d been sculpted. She considered him for a moment more, then asked, “He came out of the alley, came toward the tavern, and spoke to you?”

“Yes.”

“He was facing the tavern lamps?”

“Yes—they were behind me. It was one of those open-front places—I was at a table toward the edge, out on the square, like.”

“And you saw him clearly?”

“Yes! I swear it!” He was trembling, sweat trickling down his scar-seamed brown cheeks. Behind him, just outside the rippling shade of the awning, two guards looked away, feeling that electric desperation in the air and not willing to witness the breaking of a man they both respected. Frantic, Thurg said, “If I’d sold the Chief to the Council, you think I’d have come back to the camp?”

Starhawk shrugged. “If you’d thought you could get me to believe you thought you were talking to Ari, maybe. I’ve seen too many betrayals to know whether you’d have sold him out or not—but I do find it hard to believe you’d have done it this stupidly. You’re confined to quarters until we see whether the Council sends out the money they promised.”

When the guards had taken Little Thurg away, An shook his head and sighed. “Of all the damned stupid stories... How could he have done it, Hawk? There was no way he had of knowing that I wasn’t with ten other people—which I was!”

She glanced up at him, towering above her, big and bearlike and perplexed, the slow burn of both anger and hurt visible in those clear, hazel-gray eyes. “That’s what inclines me to believe he’s telling the truth,” she said and got to her feet. “Or what he thinks is the truth, anyway. If I’m not back from Kedwyr in three hours, hit the town with everything we’ve got and send messages to Ciselfarge...”

“You’re going by yourself?”

“If they’re hiding what they’ve done, I’m in no danger,” she said briefly, casting a quick glance at the piebald sky and picking up her sheepskin jacket from the back of her chair. “I can fight my way out alone as well as I could with a small bodyguard—and if the Council doesn’t know the Wolf’s missing. I’m not going to tell them so by going in with a large one.”

But on the highroad from the camp to the city gates, she met a convoy of sturdy little pack donkeys and a troop of the Kedwyr City Guards, bearing the specified payment from the Council. Thin and morose, like a drooping black heron upon his cobby little Peninsular mare, Commander Breg hailed her. She drew her horse alongside his. “No trouble?” she asked, nodding toward the laden donkeys and the dark-clothed guards who led them.

The commander made the single coughing noise that was the closest he ever came to a laugh. The day had turned cold with the streaming wind; he wore a black cloak and surcoat wound over the shining steel back-and-breast mail, and his face, framed in the metal of his helmet, was mottled with vermilion splotches of cold. “Our President came near to an apoplexy and took to his bed with grief over the amount of it,” he told her. “But a doctor was summoned—they say he will recover.”

Starhawk laughed. “Ari and Penpusher are there waiting to go over it with you.”

“Penpusher,” the commander said thoughtfully. “Is he that yak in chain mail who threw the defending captain off the tower at the storming of Melplith’s gates?”

“Oh, yes,” Starhawk agreed. “He’s only like that in battle. As a treasurer, he’s untouchable.”

“As a warrior,” the commander said, “he’s someone I would not much like to try and touch, either.” A spurt of wind tore at his cloak, fraying the horses’ manes into tangled clouds and crooning eerily through the broken lines of windbreak and stone. He glanced past Starhawk’s shoulder at the gray rim of the sea, visible beyond the distant cliffs. The sky there was densely piled with bruised-looking clouds. Over the whining of the wind, the waves could occasionally be heard, hammer like against the rocks.

“Will you make it beyond the Gniss,” he asked, “before the river floods?”

“If we get started tomorrow.” It was her way never to give anyone anything. She would not speak to a comparative stranger of her fears that they would not, in fact, reach the river in time for a safe crossing. It was midmorning; were it not for Sun Wolf’s disappearance, they would have been breaking camp already, to depart as soon as the money was counted. With the rapid rise of the Gniss, hours could be important. As the wind knifed through the thick sheepskin of her coat and stung the exposed flesh of her face, she wondered if the commander’s words were a chance remark or a veiled warning to take themselves off before it was too late.

“By the way,” she asked, curvetting her horse away from the path of the little convoy, “where does Gobaris keep himself when he’s in town? Or has he left already?”

The commander shook his head. “He’s still there, in the barracks behind the Town Hall square, it’s his last day in the town, though—he’s getting ready to go back to his farm and that wife he’s been telling us about all through the campaign.”

“Thanks.” Starhawk grinned and raised her hand in farewell. Then she turned her horse’s head in the direction of the town and spurred to a canter through the cold, flying winds of the coming storms.

She found Gobaris, round, pink, and slothful, packing his few belongings and the mail that no longer quite fitted him, in the section of barracks reserved by the Council for the Outland Levies during their service to the town. Few of them were left; this section of the barracks, allotted to the men of the levies, was mostly empty, the straw raked from the bunks and heaped on the stone floor ready to be hosed out, the cold drafts whistling through the leak-stained rafters. The walls were covered with mute and obscene testimony of the rivalry between the Outland Levies and the City Troops.

“I don’t know which is worse,” she murmured, clicking her tongue thoughtfully, “the lack of imagination or the inability to spell a simple four-letter word that they use all the time.”

“Lack of imagination,” Gobaris said promptly, straightening up in a two-stage motion to favor the effect of the coming dampness on his lower back. “If one more man had tried to tell me the story about the City Trooper and the baby goat, I’d have strangled the life out of him before he’d got past ‘Once upon a time.’ What can I do for you, Hawk?”

She spun him a tale of a missing soldier, watching his puffy, unshaven face closely, and saw nothing in the wide blue eyes but annoyance and concern that the man should be found before the rest of the troop left without him. He let his packing lie and took her down to the city hall, shouting down the regular guards there and opening without demur any door she asked to see the other side of. At the end, she shook her head in assumed disgust and sighed. “Well, that rules out trouble, anyway. He’ll be either sodden drunk or snugged up with some woman.” It took all her long self-discipline and all the inexpressive calm of years of barracks poker to hide the sick qualm of dread that rose in her and accept with equanimity the Outland Captain’s invitation to share a quart of ale at the nearest tavern.