Northlight (37 page)

Nervous and worse. Something jingled along my spine and sent a dry crawling feeling up the back of my throat. My tongue went thick and gummy. I started to curse to hide how scared I was, and then it came to me I was thirsty, that was all. I couldn't help laughing out loud.

Terris, in the lead, twisted in his saddle and looked at me as if I'd gone berserk. I hauled out my skin of honeyed water and lifted it to him in a toast.

“Drink up, everybody,” he said. “It's just a bit farther.”

I couldn't see a thing as we lined up along the tunnel, then reversed, head-to-tail, took a few steps, and the next thing we popped out into the sweet yellow light of Laurea.

I grasped the hilt of my long-knife and kneed the gray mare forward, but there was no need. We'd come out at the edge of a garden plot, shielded from everything but the cabbages by a hedge of lemon ash and brambleberries. Mother knows what the country people must think of the weirdie there, if they even saw it at all.

I paused, breathing in the fruity ripeness of the berries and the tang of the ash leaves. The slanting afternoon sunlight warmed the leather of my Ranger's vest.

Along the far end of the field, a thread of reflected light marked a creek running east-west, probably a feeder for the Serenity. From the position of the sun, I put us southeast of the city. All we had to do was follow the farmer's market road.

Avi spotted it, deeply rutted and a little muddy from a recent rain. Suckerflies buzzed around our horses' ears, and crickets whined from the patches of wild millet that lined the road.

Jakon shifted uneasily in the saddle as his pony dipped its head to snatch a mouthful. He knew the drowsy calm of the field was just a sham. He couldn't do a damned thing if we met a company of Montborne's men. Even I wouldn't be able to hold off that many. Unlike him, I might get a moment to explain what I was doing here.

“Listen, all of you,” said Terris. “If we run into any trouble, remember that I'm Esmelda's adjutant, which is still true enough. But I've also been dispatched on a secret mission, an — er, clandestine
diplomatic
mission. With an — um, expert agricultural consultant and two Rangers for security. We're escorting the norther ambassador and his spiritual advisor for confidential high-level negotiations with the Inner Council. Got that?”

Avi sputtered, holding her sides. Jakon looked skeptical, as if thinking,
You people really talk like that?
Etch muttered, “Got it? I don't know what half of those words
mean.
”

“It means,” I said, “that he's point man and if anything goes wrong, it's his mama who'll bail us out.”

“Better not be her,” Avi said, no longer laughing.

We walked briskly along the road as the shadows grew darker and cooler. Somewhere in the line of woods ahead of us, a songbat woke up. I said to Avi, “You two've been through enough ghamel-shit from her, it's time you got some benefit of it.”

“True,” added Terris, “but keep your knife handy, anyway. Using Esme's name could be our ticket in or else an instant trip to the nearest prison cell, depending on how things have worked out here.”

Which was not, I agreed, a particularly encouraging thought.

“If things go sour, we split up,” Terris said.

“Split up!” said Avi.

“We can't risk all of us getting caught. One of us has to get through.”

Avi shook her head, chin up, like a whip-shy mare, nose to the sky.

“I know how to deal with Montborne,” Terris continued. “
You
have to get to Esme and make your alliance with Jakon.”

One moment, Avi was the sweet wild girl who made love to me on the Ridge. The next, she turned hard and fierce, eating Jakon's bread and salt, damning him —
daring
him — half-crazy, half-driven. Daughter of the dragon.

Then the flickering images came together and a single fire burned through all of her. She nodded as if she'd known all along this was what she'd come back to do.

“Right.” She glanced at me, but she knew I would stay with Terris no matter what. “Jakon and Griss with me. Etch?”

Etch looked at me, a long agonized look, and turned back to Terris. “Don't ask me to leave her.”

He means me.
I went cold and hot at the same time. As Avi would say,
Drat.

It was near dark when we reached Laureal City and made our way through the outskirts. I kept my eyes sharp, feeling more than a little twitchy from thinking of all the things that could go wrong. The place was too damned quiet. Surely there should be more people abroad this early, walking openly, not darting from one darkened doorway to another. Patrols of City Guards stood at key intersections, tense and alert. We'd have to find a place to leave the horses soon.

Etch took the lead, down a side street that looked like a half-dried runoff ditch and back between a rank-smelling barnfowl coop and a shed full of bawling milch sheep. He knew where he was going. Not a real stable, he told us with a knowing twist to his mouth. Not a place anyone'd look for horses, but decent and safe. His friend would keep them and our gear out of sight for a few days.

By then we'd either have done what we came for or else we wouldn't care.

We dismounted in outside the narrow yard, keeping only our weapons and what little money we had. Terris emptied his travel pack of everything but the dagger and his first-aid kit.

Etch gathered up all the reins. My gray mare rolled her eyes at him, maybe remembering this was the man who'd slit her throat.

“The ponies are sure to be spotted as norther,” said Avi. “Are you sure you can trust this friend?”

He nodded, and I trusted that sureness. I'd seen a new strength in him ever since we passed the first stockyard. Him and Terris too. Out on the Ridge they both looked to me, just as we all looked to the northers through the tundra ice. But here in the city, Etch knew this place.

“Ye — ah,” Etch said, chewing on the word, “Pince'll keep them hidden for me without needing to know why. He owes me for more than this, though I never thought I'd collect on it.”

We waited out of sight while Etch went off with the horses. The shadows flowed together as the last light drained from the sky. Avi shifted from one foot to the other, then caught herself and stood still. For all the years she'd lived in the wilds, she was city-bred at heart, and besides Esmelda waited somewhere out there. Once I would have said something, a casual curse on dragon mothers.

Once.

I remembered how Avi glided toward Terris, her fingers brushing the hilt of her knife, and the choice I made then. Yet a bit of compassion whispered through me now. I knew damned well it wasn't for Avi I kept on and on, dragging Terris through miles of dust, even throwing my Ranger's vest at Darice's feet. It wasn't Avi I dreamed of all those years.

And now I watched her, twitchy half out of her skin with standing still, eyes like discs of steel in the dark, and I knew it wasn't me she dreamed of, either.

Terris led us through alleys and back streets, zig-zagging our way toward his mother's house. Here he was no greenie kid but in his element, with a sure sense of where the next Guard patrol would be posted. Even Avi followed him without protest. Jakon and Griss moved like shadows in his wake. Etch didn't know the district any better than I did.

We crept along a row of squarish buildings, a small factory, I think. A weedy, overgrown border hedge cast eerie shapes from the solar lights at the nearest intersection. The air smelled of brick and moss-ivy. Terris raised one hand in warning. I flattened myself against a locked door. The others froze in the shadow of the hedge. The next instant, a trio of City Guards strode down the nearest cross-street. One glanced our way, but didn't pause. I let out my breath and felt Avi do the same.

Silently Terris gestured us back and between two of the buildings. We cut across what looked like a delivery area, over a fence and up the next street, angling back the way the patrol had come, backtracking rather than cutting across their route. Every step took them farther away from us.

Around a corner, cobbled now instead of dirt, we ran smack into a knot of hand-held lights, the orange glow of torches.

“Halt! Who goes there?” A shout hailed us from behind the makeshift barricade. Men silhouetted against a smallish bonfire rushed toward us.

“Show your curfew passes and state your business!”

My fingers grazed the hilt of my knife.

Terris, in front, raised a hand to his eyes to shade the glare. For a moment, it was hard to see anything except there was a bunch of them. I couldn't make out their uniforms, backlit as they were, but a sinking feeling in my guts told me they weren't City Guards black.

Military, then...or those kids from Montborne's Pateros Brigade?

A blade whispered from its sheath and glittered in the torchlight. Noiselessly I drew my own. Holding it low by my leg where they couldn't see it, I stepped in front of Terris. I felt rather than saw Avi on his other side, Jakon and Grissem moving to back us. We didn't have time for a fight. We had to get out of there fast — and quietly.

“Eyvian, Stoll, you others, surround them! Look there, we've caught us a pack of curfew violators!”

A shift in the light and everything came clear. The bronze-and-red uniforms, the baby-round faces, eyes thrill-bright, more sticks than knives, the faint lingering smell of honey wine. Numbers, fear and whatever the uniform meant now, that was all they had.

I stepped out to face the leader, the big loud kid. “We don't need any passes,” I drawled. “We're
Rangers.
We can go wherever we crotting well want.”

I got the same reaction as if I'd spit in his baby-soft face. He flushed as if he'd never had any brains to begin with, and tried to jab me with his knife. Moved about as fast as a heat-muddled sandbat, too. I pivoted, sent his knife clattering to the cobblestones and finished with him arched back, facing away from me, halfway to kneeling, his head pulled way back and my long-knife across his throat.

“You want to see a lot of blood or you want to put down your weapons?” I asked the other kids in the same unhurried tone. The way I held him, the leader couldn't do much more than gurgle.

There were enough of them to make things messy for us if they had the will and training to fight, which they didn't. The speed of their surrender, though, was not going to convince Jakon that Laurean youth could fight anything bigger than cockroaches. I shoved the kid, uncut and sprawling, into the arms of his friends.

“We're letting you go this time,” Avi said. Her voice dripped quiet menace. She looked as if she'd as soon chop them into little pieces and boil each one separately in acid, as look at them. That dragon mother of hers couldn't have done it any better.

“If even a
whisper
of this secret mission gets out...” She pointed a finger at each one of them in turn. “You will wish, you will pray, you will
beg
her” — a slight tip of her head in my direction — ”to cut your throats, rather than face what
I
have in store for you.”

She took a step toward them. “Got that?”

They nodded, looking about to piss their pants. From the shifting fear-stink, at least one of them already had.

“Go on home!” Avi said.
“Now!”

They scrambled and bolted in their separate ways.

“Let's go,” I said. I was in front of Etch and Terris, feeling the street out like I'd feel the Ridge, a little cocky because I could see so far along the avenues with their wide-spaced trees.

Just as we reached the next branching, where the main avenue continued in one direction and two smaller ones veered to the sides, I heard the slap of boots on paving, behind us. I spun around. Guards, three of them, came pounding down the street. They had weapons out, what kind I couldn't see.

Damn!
They must have heard the ruckus with the Brigade kids.

“Avi, Jakon, Griss!” Terris barked in a voice that would have made a stone jump. “Go!”

He whirled and sprinted down the main street, me and Etch on his heels. A man just stepping from a doorway scuttled back out of our way. Air blurred past me and I hardly felt the stones under my feet. I hadn't run so fast since the morning Pateros was killed. I spotted an alley, felt Terris shift to dart down it —

The next thing I knew there was a
hsst!
through the air and we all had tagged darts sticking out of our rumps. I reached around and yanked mine out with my free hand, pissed as hell for not seeing the attack coming. I stared down at it and its puke-color tags, then my sight went wobbly as if I drifted down a long wavy-sided tunnel.

I couldn't feel my hands or feet. The clatter-skitter of my knife on the pavement sounded like far-off tinkle bells. The last thing I remembered seeing was a woman in a black uniform leaning over me.

Up and down...

Everything blurred, weaving in and out of what was left of my brains. Slung face-down across the back of a galloping pony, I felt too addled-witted to know which way was up. Under the saddle pad, the pony's body rose and fell, lurching so hard my head reeled and spun. I must have been deaf, too — I couldn't hear any hoofbeats. Couldn't smell the wire-grass or the bitter-salt stink of a lathered pony. I was sweating cold, my mouth all cotton.

Up and down...

The next moment my stomach decided it had enough of this
up and down
business. I thrashed around and somehow managed to sit up. My eyes told me I was nowhere near a pony of any kind, let alone norther, but in a half-lit gray room. And, more importantly, something that looked like a porcelain latrine was mounted on the opposite wall.

I reached it just in time and crouched there, my arms tight around the cold, white, disinfectant-smelling bowl, heaving and retching and spitting, dripping ropy green saliva out of my mouth and nose. Feeling like crotting shit.