Part 23 (2/2)

She opened her eyes and saw Rat kneeling on the descending bank of the failed wadi, making a cairn of stones to guide them back. He'd done this half a dozen times already, through night and morning. In the desert, one did not take chances.

Even behind the protection of the veiling he shaded his eyes to look up at her. ”Nothing out there,” he said. ”That direction-one oasis, ten days journey, and the Rai an-Tzuu camp there this time of year. They hunt teyn, for the market.”

”Our teyn is fleeing with a Crafty woman,” said Shaldis. ”If she wasn't, I'd be able to see her. They may be meeting someone between here and there.” She unhooked the water bottle from her saddle, took a sparing drink. Following Rat's example, she was being stingy even though there were waterskins on both spare horses. ”Will the horses be all right?”

Rat checked both remounts, then swung to his own saddle again. ”Camels be better,” he reported. ”We give them rest in the heat of the day, they good for a day, two days. After that . . .”

”With luck we'll catch our friend within a day.” Shaldis wrapped the dark gauze once again over her eyes. ”Now she knows she's being pursued, this may be the last clear chance we'll have to face her down and bargain with her. This way.”

THIRTY-EIGHT.

Breast deep in the stinking green of the sc.u.mmy pool, the young boar teyn made no sound. The guards had gagged it with a wad of leather and rags, bound it hand and foot before lowering it into the water. From where she stood behind the railing opposite it, Foxfire could see it trembling, see the terror in those huge, pale, dilated eyes.

Belial the crocodile slid through the filthy water. The bow wave of his pa.s.sing sent up a reek to her, like the cesspools under h.e.l.l. She closed her eyes, but she could see the pool, the reptile, the terrified, helpless victim all engraved on her mind like some inescapable dream. Through her exhaustion and her terror she repeated the patterns of the spell, formed up the lines of power in her mind.

He will go away. He will turn aside. There's nothing there.

Belial's eye was like yellow gla.s.s as he turned in the water.

And slipped past the teyn, so close that his scales sc.r.a.ped the huge, furry shoulder.

Foxfire's mind locked around her spells, her body sick with unbreathing terror.

He will turn aside.

Belial turned aside.

Hold the spells. Don't think about anything else.

”You've done it, girl!” Her grandmother's hand tightened like a thumbscrew around her arm. ”You've done it!”

She wanted to twist her arm away and couldn't, couldn't move for fear of relaxing her concentration the tiniest bit.

”Get him out of there,” she managed to whisper. ”Please.”

Red Silk shook her with bruising triumph. ”You've done it!” Her laughter was almost a shriek. She didn't even look at the teyn.

”urthet,” Foxfire gasped, and her brother and Soral Brul began to gently haul on the rope that bound the teyn, drawing it to the edge of the pool.

At the same moment Red Silk s.n.a.t.c.hed one of the wicker cages from Urnate Urla, the chicken within it squawking with protest, and hurled it into the water a few feet from Belial's enormous head.

With deadly speed the huge reptile whirled in the water, snapped up cage, chicken, all.

Red Silk shrugged. ”He was hungry, all right.” Then she cackled again, almost hugging herself with delight. ”You've done it! Your father will dance! You'll be a royal princess, my girl, the daughter of a king! You'll marry whom you will, do as you please.”

Marry whom I will? Foxfire fought not to cry; above all things else she couldn't let her grandmother see her cry. Not if Father has a word to say about it. But she glanced back to the corner of the clammy vaulted cellar, where old Eleven Gra.s.shoppers sat wrapped in her own long arms, quietly watching her, and felt that the old jenny, if she didn't know exactly what was going on, at least sensed her sickened, desperate pain.

She held her breath, trembling, until her brother and the failed Sun Mage had pulled the bound teyn, dripping, from Belial's pool. Then she had to dig her nails into her own wrist to keep from collapsing in tears of relief. Yesterday it had been the same, and the day before, when they'd poured poison down a poor young jenny's throat and had waited an hour, two hours, three hours in sweating heat before it was clear that Foxfire's spells had worked. She'd gone to the compound to check on the jenny this morning-Six Thistles, they called her-and had found her nursing her infant as if nothing had happened. The first young boar they'd dumped into the snake pit had been ignored by the cobras until he'd tried to run. Then he'd been bitten four times, and Foxfire had clung to the rim of the pit, working and reworking the spells of the cure of poison from a distance for three hours, before Red Silk would let one of the guards go down and bring him out.

Foxfire's spells had protected the guard as well. The boar teyn was still alive, and they'd tied up the next one they'd thrown down, to make sure he stayed still.

Afterward, when Foxfire had wept hysterically in Opal's arms in the secrecy of her own room, Eleven Gra.s.shoppers had again tried to comfort them both.

”She said it today,” whispered Foxfire when after two more teyn had been pa.s.sed unhurt through the crocodile's pool Red Silk finally let her return to her room. Opal gathered her into her arms. Eleven Gra.s.shoppers had, in imitation of the maid's habitual tasks, carefully fetched a bowl of lavender water from the wall bench, making both girls laugh. ”She said, 'You'll be a royal princess.' She hasn't the slightest intention of saving the king's life.”

Foxfire wiped her eyes on the bedsheet, where the two girls were now sitting-Eleven Gra.s.shoppers, too, though Red Silk would have whipped them both for letting a teyn, however well washed, sit on a bed. ”'You can marry whom you will,' she said.”

”Well, that's a fairy tale, anyway,” said Opal. She went to the table where a supper of couscous and lamb was being kept warm under a basket. Evening light slanted harsh and golden through the lattices of the window. Beyond, the crests of the Dead Hills, visible above the compound wall, had a weirdly desolate beauty, abstract red shapes against a molten blue sky. ”I heard Soral Brul talking to madam this morning, when I went to get your breakfast. He was telling her that though he can't do magic himself anymore, it's in his blood. He said that your daughter by him would be Crafty born for certain.”

Foxfire was so exhausted that the flash of anger she felt wasn't enough to warm the sinking in her chest. She felt tears begin to leak from her eyes again, but her voice was steady and sharp as metal in her own ears. ”That sounds exactly like the kind of thing that'll make sense to Father. And I'm sure it's never even occurred to that stuck-up Brul that once I have children by him, neither Father nor Grandmother is going to let him live.”

Opal's eyes widened. It had clearly never occurred to her, either.

Foxfire felt a thousand years old.

She took a deep breath as Opal came over to the bed with a bowl of food. Eleven Gra.s.shoppers sprang neatly down and trotted to her own little bed of folded blankets in the corner; she knew if she did this the girls would give her the sc.r.a.ps. The jenny curled herself up neatly, wrapped in her long arms, for all the world like a little old woman in her simple tunic, watching the girls with her wise pale-blue eyes.

”How long did it take us to get here?” asked Foxfire. ”We left Golden Sky not long after sunset, camped once at noon, then got here late in the afternoon. The city should be a little closer than that.”

”It takes the supply trains all day and part of a second,” said Opal. ”I know because I asked one of the drivers to buy me the latest horoscope from Starbright-I got one for you, too.” She went to the loose floor tile behind the wardrobe, under which Foxfire hid the pilfered pottery food bowl she used to talk to Shaldis, and brought out two small squares of yellow paper. They were rather dark from having been washed and reused a number of times. ”They're from two days after the half moon, and that was the day before yesterday.”

She sat again on the corner of the bed, watched as Foxfire scooped up couscous with her bread. Her brown eyes filled with concern beneath the scarred mess of lashless lids. ”You aren't thinking-? We can't.”

”You're not,” said Foxfire simply. ”Because I'm going to poison you-just enough to make you sleep a lot and then be really sick-so Grandmother won't think you had anything to do with my getting away.” She got to her feet, carried her empty dish back to the table, and stood looking through the window at the shallow crescent of the waning moon, luminous in the burning sky.

It was nine days past full. Four days until the dark of its cycle.

”Foxfire.”

”The king saved my life,” said Foxfire quietly, still looking out at the moon. ”I love Father, Opal, and I-I even love Grandmother, you know. But I can't go on living like this.” Her throat tightened, and she forced back the tears that burned the backs of her eyes. ”I can't go on waiting for the next awful thing Father or Grandmother is going to make me do. And even when Papa becomes king, you know it'll be something else. Raeshaldis . . . Raeshaldis left her grandfather. Left her family, because they would have tried to do the same thing to her, tried to make her be just a tool for getting them what they wanted, the way Grandmother and Father are doing to me.”

She turned back, to look into her friend's horror-stricken eyes. ”If I protect the king, he'll protect me.”

”You can't betray your father!” Opal had lived in the same house as Red Silk long enough to speak the words in a nearly inaudible whisper. ”You can't go against your family!”

”The king is the head of my family,” replied Foxfire shakily, though she knew Mohrvine would not see it that way at all.

He'll never speak to me again.

<script>