Fool's Quest (27 page)

Shun stumbled, or pretended to stumble against me. As she caught herself on my shoulder, she pinched me hard. “Sleepy,” she warned me on a breath. Her mouth barely moved.

“Shaysim, are you well? Did your bowels move in a satisfactory way?” Odessa spoke as if chatting about my bowels were as courteous a topic as the weather.

I shook my head at her and put my hands low on my belly. I felt sick with fear. Perhaps I could disguise fear as discomfort. “I just want to sleep,” I told her.

“Yes, that's a good idea. Yes. I will tell Dwalia of your bowel problem. She will give you an oil for that.”

I didn't want her to give me anything. I bowed my head and walked slightly bent over so no one could look into my face. The tents were awaiting us. Their roofs were rounded on their half-hoops, the canvas bleached white, and I supposed that from a distance they could have been mistaken for mounds of snow. Yet we had not bothered to move that far from the road, and the horses were hobbled and pawing up the snow, searching for frozen grass. Any passing traveler would surely note them, and the brightly painted sleighs. And the tents of the soldiers were brown and pointed, and their horses a mix of colors. So why bother disguising our tents? Something niggled at me about it, and then as I drew closer, a wave of sleepiness spread over me. I yawned hugely. It would be good to rest. To get into my warm blankets and sleep.

Shun was plodding along beside us. As we drew closer to our tent, I became aware of several soldiers watching us. Hogen, the handsome rapist, still sat his horse. His long golden hair was smoothly braided, his mustache and beard carefully combed. He smiled. He had silver hoops in his ears and a silver clasp to his cloak. Was he keeping watch? He looked down at us, a predator watching prey, and said something in a low voice. Standing near Hogen's horse was a warrior with half a beard; his cheek and chin on the other side were sliced like a pared potato, and not a whisker grew out of the smooth scar. He smiled at Hogen's jest but the young soldier with the hair as brown as ripe acorns just followed Shun with dog's eyes. I hated them all.

A growl bubbled up in my throat. Odessa turned her face sharply toward me and I forced a belch up. “Pardon,” I said, trying to sound sleepy, embarrassed, and uncomfortable.

“Dwalia can help you, Shaysim,” she comforted me.

Shun moved past us and into the tent, trying to move as if she were still dead to all things, but I had seen the tightening in her shoulders when the gawking soldiers had spoken. She was a small cat walking bravely past snuffing hounds. By the time I stood in the entrance, shedding my snowy boots, Shun had burrowed under the blankets and was out of sight.

I was very certain I did not want Dwalia to help me with anything. The woman frightened me. She had an ageless face, round and yet lined. She could have been thirty or even older than my father. I couldn't tell. She was as plump as a fattened hen; even her hands were soft. If I had met her as a guest in my home, I would have guessed she was someone's genteel mother or grandmother, a woman who had seldom done physical work. Every word she had spoken to me had been in a kindly voice, and even when she had rebuked her followers in my hearing, she had sounded grieved at their failure rather than angered by it.

Yet I feared her. Everything about her set Wolf-Father to snarling. Not noisy growling but the silent lifting of the lip that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. Since the night they had taken me, even in my foggiest moments I was aware that Wolf-Father was with me. He could do nothing to help me, but he was with me. He was the one who counseled silence, who bade me conserve strength and watch and wait. I would have to help myself, but he was there. When the only comfort one has is a thin comfort, one still clings to it.

Strange to say, despite Shun's whispered words, I still felt that I was the one more competent to deal with our situation. What she had said had woken me to a danger I had not considered, but had not given me the sense that she was going to be the one to save us. If anyone could save us. No. Instead her words had sounded to me as if she bragged, not to impress me but to bolster her own hopes. Assassin's training. I'd seen small sign of that in her during our weeks together at Withywoods. Instead I had seen her as vain and shallow, focused on obtaining as many pretty things and delightful distractions as coin could buy. I'd seen her wailing and weeping in terror at the supposed moaning of a ghost that was actually a trapped cat. And I'd seen her flirting with FitzVigilant and attempting to do the same with Riddle and even, I felt, my father. All in the name of getting what she wanted. Flaunting her beauty to attract attention.

And then men had come and turned her own weapons against her. The beauty and charm and pretty clothes she had deployed to her own ends could not save her from them. Indeed, they had made her a target. I wondered now if beautiful women were not more vulnerable, more likely to be chosen as victims by such men. I turned it over in my mind. Rape, I knew, was injury and pain and insult. I did not know the full mechanics of it, but one does not have to know swordplay to understand a stab wound. Shun had been hurt, and badly. So badly that she was willing to accept me as some sort of ally. I had thought I was helping her when I had claimed her that night. Now I wondered if, indeed, I had dragged her out of the frying pan and down into the flames with me.

I tried to think of skills that might save us. I could fight with a knife. A little bit. If I could get one. And if there was only one person to fight. I knew something they didn't know. They spoke to me as if I were a much younger child. I had not said anything to correct them. I had not said much to any of them, at all. That might be useful. I could not think how, but it was a secret I knew that they did not. And secrets could be weapons. I had read that, or heard that. Somewhere.

The sleepiness rolled over me again, putting blurred edges on the world. Something in the soup, or the fog man, or both.
Don't struggle,
Wolf-Father warned me.
Don't let them know that you know.

I took a deep breath and feigned a yawn that suddenly became real. Odessa was crawling into the tent behind me. I spoke in a sleepy voice. “They look at Shun in a bad way. Those men. They give me dark dreams. Cannot Dwalia make them stay away?”

“Dark dreams,” Odessa said in soft dismay.

I held very still inside myself. Had I gone too far? She said nothing more and I dropped to my knees, crawled across the spread bedding, and burrowed under it adjacent to Shun. Beneath the blankets, I wriggled out of the bulky fur coat, crawling out the bottom instead of unbuttoning it, and bundled it into a pillow. I closed my eyes almost all the way and let my breathing slow. I watched her through my eyelashes. Odessa stood still for a long time, watching me. I felt she was deciding something.

She went away, letting the tent flap drop behind her. That was unusual. Usually when Shun and I settled to sleep, Odessa lay down beside us. We were seldom out of her sight, save when Dwalia was watching over us. Now we were alone. I wondered if that meant it was our chance to escape. It might be. It might be our only chance. But my body was warming, and I felt heavy. My thoughts moved more and more slowly. I raised my hand beneath the covers and reached for Shun. I would wake her, and we would crawl out under the tent side. Into the cold and the snow. I didn't like cold. I liked warmth and I needed sleep. I was so weary, so sleepy. My hand fell, short of reaching Shun, and I did not have the will to lift it again. I slept.

I woke as if I were a swimmer surfacing from water. No. More like a bit of wood that bobbed to the surface because it had to. My body shed sleep and I sat up, clear-minded. Dwalia was sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed. Odessa knelt slightly behind her and to one side. I looked over at Shun. She slept on, apparently oblivious to what was going on. What was going on? I blinked my eyes and caught a flash of something at the corner of my eye. I turned to look, but there was nothing there. Dwalia was smiling at me, a kind and reassuring smile. “Everything is fine,” she said comfortingly. By which I knew that it was not.

“I just thought that we should talk, so you understand that you do not have to fear the men who guard us. They will not hurt you.”

I blinked my eyes and in the moment before they focused on Dwalia, I saw him. The fog man was sitting in the corner of the tent. I slowly, slowly shifted my gaze in that direction, moving only my eyes. Yes. He was beaming a fatuous smile at me, and when his eyes met mine, he clapped his hands happily. “Brother!” he exclaimed. He laughed heartily, as if we had just shared a wondrous joke. The way he smiled at me let me know that he wanted me to love him as much as he already loved me. No one had loved me that openly since my mother had died. I did not want his love. I stared at him, but he continued to smile at me.

Dwalia scowled, just for an instant, her buttery face melting into sharp disapproval. When I looked at her directly, her smile was in place. “Well,” she said, as if glad of it, “I see that our little game is finished now. You see him, don't you, Shaysim? Even though our Vindeliar is doing his best, his very best, to be hidden?”

Praise, a question, and a rebuke were all twisted together in that question. The boy's moon-face only grew jollier. He wriggled from side to side, a happy dumpling of a boy. “Silly. Silly. My brother looks with a different kind of eyes. He sees me. He's seen me, oh, since we were in the town. With the music and the sweet food and the people dancing.” He scratched his cheek thoughtfully, and I heard the sound of shorn whiskers against his nails. So he was older than I thought, but still boyish. “I wished we had that festival to keep, with dancing and singing and eating sweet things. Why are we not a festival folk, Lingstra?”

“We are not, my lurik. That is the answer. That we are not, just as we are neither cows nor thistles. We are the Servants. We stay to the path. We are the path. The path we walk is for the good of the world.”

“When we serve the world, we serve ourselves.” Dwalia and Odessa spoke these words in harmony. “The good of the world is the good of the Servants. What is good for the Servants is good for the world. We walk the path.”

Their voices ceased, but they stared at Vindeliar almost accusingly. He lowered his eyes and some of the brightness went out of his face. He spoke in a measured cadence, words I was certain he had learned from his cradle days. “He who leaves the path is not a Servant but an obstacle to the good of the world. An obstacle in the path must be evaded. If it cannot be evaded, it must be removed. If it cannot be removed, it must be destroyed. We must stay to the path, for the good of the world. We must stay to the path for the good of the Servants.” He took a huge breath at the end. His round cheeks puffed as he sighed it out. His lower lip remained pushed out in a baby's pout and he looked at the mounded blankets, not at Dwalia.

She was relentless. “Vindeliar. Has anyone seen a festival for you on this part of the path?”

“No.” A soft, low denial.

“Has anyone ever seen, in any dream, Vindeliar merrymaking at a festival?”

He drew a short breath and his shoulders slumped as he said, “No.”

Dwalia leaned toward him. Her kind look was back on her face. “Then, my lurik, there is no festival on Vindeliar's path. For Vindeliar to go to a festival would be for Vindeliar to leave the path, or bend it awry. And then what would Vindeliar be? A Servant?”

He shook his blunt head slowly.

“What then?” She was remorseless.

“An obstacle.” He lifted his head and before she could press him, added, “To be evaded. Or avoided. Removed. Or destroyed.” He dropped his voice and his eyes on that last word. I stared at him. I had never seen a man who believed so completely that someone who apparently loved him would kill him for breaking a rule. With a cold rush up my spine, I discovered that I believed it, too. She would kill him if he veered from the path.

What path?

Did they think I had a path? Was I in danger of veering from it? I shifted my stare to Dwalia. Would she kill me, too, for veering from the path?

Dwalia's gaze snapped to mine, and I could not look away. She spoke softly, kindly. “It's why we came, Shaysim. To rescue you and keep you safe. Because if we did not, you would become an obstacle to the path. We will take you home, to a safe place where you cannot leave the path by accident, nor change it. By keeping you safe, we will keep the path safe and keep the world safe. As long as the world is safe, you are safe. You don't have to be afraid.”

Her words terrified me. “What is the path?” I demanded. “How can I tell if I am staying to the path?”

Her smile stretched. She nodded slowly. “Shaysim, I am pleased. This is the first question we always hope to hear from a Servant.”

A lurch and my belly went cold. A servant? I had seen the lives of servants. I'd never imagined being one, and suddenly knew I never wanted to be one. Did I dare say that? Was that leaving the path?

“So, to hear it from a shaysim of your years is remarkable. Shaysims are often blinded to the idea that there may be a path. They see possibilities, and ways that lead to so many divergent paths. Shaysims born out here in the wide world often have difficulty accepting that there is only one true path, a path that has been seen and charted. A path that we all must strive to bring into the world, so that the world may be a better place for all of us.”

The understanding of what she meant rose in me like a tide. Was it a thing I had always known? I recalled with clarity how the beggar in the marketplace had touched me, and suddenly I had seen an infinity of possible futures, all depending on the decision of a young couple I had glimpsed in passing. I had even thought to nudge the future into a direction that seemed wise to me. It would have involved the young man being murdered by highwaymen, and the woman suffering rape and death, but I had seen her brothers riding to avenge her, and encouraging others to join them, and how they had made the highways safe for travelers for decades after their sister had died. Two lives gone in pain and torment, but so many saved.