Sasharia En Garde (23 page)

The waiter, a kid of about ten, tapped me on the arm.
“What’ll I bring you?”

“Cornbread with honey-butter, dark ale, and fish chowder,” I
said.

He dashed away, as one of the weavers made an obscure joke
about damask and brocade, and everyone laughed.

Two toasts later the boy returned with a tray on which the
cornbread steamed, fresh from the oven. The weavers began singing a plaintive
song in Sartoran triplets about a wandering silk-weaver seeking the source of
“rainbow colors true.”

A sip of a spicy, almost raisin-flavored ale, a bite of
sweet cornbread, and I was lifting my spoon to try the chowder when a brief
glimpse of a familiar face in the crowd caused me to pause, spoon in the air.

Elva? No, couldn’t be—

She vanished behind a crowd of sailors who suddenly decided
to dance a heel-toe stomper right there in the middle of the floor. I dropped
my spoon when Elva reappeared, braids flying, brown eyes stark in a face so
pale I thought she was going to be sick.

“There you are.” She clutched my shoulder. “Get out. Get
out.”

“What?” I looked down at my food. “What’s wrong with the—”

She pulled my wrist, sending my spoon flying. “You’ve got to
run. Now.”

“Why?” I snapped, getting up to retrieve the spoon.

“Because I followed Owl. I had my suspicions.” She made a
terrible face. “He met up with
him
at
the stable—” She waved a hand toward the far side of the brewery.

“Him? Zathdar?” I stared at the brewery, but just saw
barrels of ale.

“Zathdar!” Elva repeated scornfully. “Oh, you’re in for a
storm, right enough, if you don’t move.” She dropped onto the bench next to me
and muttered into my ear, “It was a stable, at the other end of town. Up behind
the old castle and the warehouses. I
saw
him. They didn’t see me.”

“Saw who? Owl or Zathdar?”

“Both. But he—he—he ditched the bandana. And the horsehair
wig. He’s got white hair—the brown velvet with the king’s cup. Crown over it.
Diamond—” She touched her ear where Zathdar had worn his pirate-battle earring.

Heat flooded through me, followed by a sudden and dreadful
chill.

“Don’t you see?” Elva looked wildly around, and while the
unheeding weavers sang of love and loss, she growled, “He’s
Prince
Jehan Merindar
.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“I thought so, too. But I
saw
him. He went straight to the castle. The guards on the walls
gave him the royal salute, clear as anything.”

Whoosh! My first reaction was the self-righteous, fire-hot
anger of betrayal, followed by the sickening, almost lip-numbing humiliation
that comes of realizing one’s been taken for a fool.

I grabbed my basket and followed her between the tables, the
singing weavers’ plaintive melody blending into the heedless roar of voices
behind me.

Out in the street, glare and the rising dust of early
afternoon nearly blinded us. I blinked, breathing hard as silhouettes resolved
into people, horses, carts, dogs, even a family of geese squawking and
flapping. Children danced in a ring to the flitting summer melody played upon a
pipe. In front of the last booth before the open road, several women teased a
handsome fellow in a brown tunic who seemed to be trying to buy an embroidered
scarf.

All oblivious, most of them happy, and very much in the way
as I scanned and scanned, resisting Elva’s tugs. “This way,” she urged.

I faced her earnest, anxious brown eyes and
knew
that Devli waited somewhere, a
transfer token in hand. “Thank you for the rescue. But I think I’ll take off on
my own.”

Her face reddened. “It’s Devli. Isn’t it? You don’t trust
him.”

“I’m sorry, Elva, but I just don’t trust those giving him
orders,” I murmured as a cart full of melons rolled toward us, shoved by a
brawny fellow not watching where he was going.

She moved to one side. I ducked to the other side of it so I
wouldn’t have to see her reaction, and dove into a pack of sailors, several of
them wearing battered floppy hats much like mine. I still felt outlined in
neon, though so far the few guys in brown tunics around were not searching,
merely sauntering.

All right, Sasha, you
got what you wanted. You’re alone. Pick a direction.

My pack of sailors headed toward the brewery. I stayed with
them as far as the door. That sense of being watched intensified, so I slunk
round the back of the Gold’s stables and peered out, scanning with care.

The marketplace lay to my left, a long street of tent booths
below the high palisade of sheer rock on which the garrison and academy bulked.
The market street crested to the right, below the bluffs on which the academy
barracks ended in the furthermost tower.

The road on the other side of the crest stretched in a lazy
arc, paralleling the rocky shore against which long breakers creamed and
crashed. Lines of wagons inched their way in a string that curved through
mellow grassy fields to the horizon, the only tree in sight a single clump of
willow growing beside a stream winding toward the shore.

No cover whatsoever, but at least that road lay outside of
Ellir and its bazillion warriors.

I slipped away from my crummy hiding place and headed
straight for that high point, beyond which freedom beckoned.

But right before I reached the top of the market street, not
five hundred yards from the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the
city, my shoulder blades itched. My danger sense had gone into the red zone,
urging me to turn and fight.

I just knew I would hate what I saw. But I had to look.

Past the dancing children. Past the strolling flirts, the
bargaining marketers with their baskets, past unheeding cadets and warriors
obviously on leave, past the dogs and geese and sailors. I stared straight into
a pair of familiar blue eyes, now framed by drifting white hair.

Too late.

Too late, but I turned on my toes and sprinted for freedom,
despite the faster footsteps behind me—much faster.

When I reached the top of the road, the footsteps had almost
caught up so I plunged into a crowd of prentices in one last attempt to shake
my pursuer, and risked a glance back.

The stinker was maybe ten steps away. He hadn’t yelled, and
though some of the people he pushed past turned to stare, and one or two began
to call out in protest, stared, then quickly backed away, no one interfered.

The oblivious prentices didn’t part for me. They shoved past
and stampeded toward the brewery, leaving me alone to face the enemy.

Prince Jehan caught up in an easy step, and stopped an arm’s
length from me.

So for a long, measureless moment we stood there facing one
another at the top of Market Street, the last of the prentices flowing around
us with exasperated looks and a wry comment or two that neither of us paid the
least attention to.

All the things I could say chased through my mind.
You liar! Go ahead and strike me down, see
if I care!
And perhaps most useless of all,
I hate you!
But I said nothing for a breathless, anguished
eternity, as the market crowd walked, strolled, sauntered, pushed, shoved,
talked, sang, sighed past us.

Prince Hurricane stood there, waiting for me to speak.

And so I said, “You must really love making everyone look
like a fool.”

He flushed as if I’d slapped him. But then flicked his head,
as if repudiating my words, and retorted, “You have no idea what you’re talking
about.”

“Oh, so you’re not a liar and a poser?”

“I never lied—”

“No,
Prince
My-family-name-is-Jervaes?”

“But it is.” He spread his hands and flushed again when I
took a quick step back. “My mother’s name.”

“Oh.” Well, that was a nasty little oopsie, but I plowed
right past. “So you managed to tell one bit of truth. What did it cost you?”
Take that!

“Listen. Just listen.” He half raised a hand in a gesture of
appeal, but when I stepped back, he dropped it to his side. His side, at which
he wore a sword. And a knife through his sash. Neither of them touched, much
less brandished. Nor had he whistled up his brown-coated minions. There were
certainly plenty of them about.

But I couldn’t bear another terrible, sickening sense of
betrayal, and so, without examining the motivation behind that, I said, “No.”

His eyelids lifted slightly, giving me half-a-heartbeat’s
warning. Before I could draw breath to move, or even to yell, a thick winter
quilt blotted out the sun and my world was perforce confined to hot,
enshrouding darkness that smelled distinctly of mold.

I began to struggle, though it was futile, writhing and
kicking until a familiar voice muttered next to my head, “C’mon, Princess. It’s
your old friend Owl. You can kick me all you like when we get back to the ship.
If you can reach me. But you can’t be allowed to get us all killed.”

Killed? Say what?

I stopped struggling as I considered that, but before I
could decide I didn’t believe it, something efficiently wrapped me up into a
giant cocoon, and
thump!
I fell onto
something wooden. Things thudded round me, and a horse clopped. I was in a
cart, which jerked and rumbled at a sedate pace back down the street, my face
streaming with sweat in that suffocating quilt. I was so tightly wrapped it was
useless to yell. No one could hear me anyway.

Atanial was considerably surprised to receive a visitor.

This time it wasn’t night, but morning. She’d done a long
session of yoga and had emerged from her bath to discover Ananda entering her
room through the servants’ door.

“Please pardon the intrusion. But this is the only way to
have private converse.”

Atanial wondered how the queen got past the guards on the
stairs, then suspected illusion magic. More important was the timing of this
visit. “I certainly didn’t have privacy during my intimate little dinner with
the king, did I?” she asked with some irony.

Ananda laughed softly. “Privacy? With the entire troupe of
players watching the only two members of the audience, and one of them is busy
staring at the other, caressing her neck? Watched also by the servants who had
to stand there all evening with their wine and plates of uneaten food and
unused cushions?”

Atanial had hopped onto her bed. She leaned back against her
pillows and crossed her arms. “So I take it I passed some kind of test, and you
are here for—?”

Ananda’s voice was sad. “There was no test. I would have
come anyway, if you had been here alone. Whatever happened. But my message
would have been warnings. I am going away, Atanial.”

Atanial’s nerves prickled with the cold chill of the
unexpected. “Going away, as in . . .”

“Transferring to a place of safety. What no one except the
prince knows is that his mother, Feraeth Jervaes, and I have been friends for
many years.”

Atanial whistled softly. “Sit down. Tell me more, please.”

Ananda perched on the edge of the bed. “You know that the morvende
do not have what we would call a government. But they do have leaders whose
wisdom inclines others to listen. One such is Tarael of the Eleyad geliath on
the northern continent. He has seen in dreams that Norsunder will move against
the world soon.”

Norsunder
. Atanial
had never quite gotten a grip on the whole concept of a place beyond space and
time, controlled by inimical minds who seemed to have lived for thousands of
years. She’d defined it to Sasha as a kind of hell, one mostly created by, run
by and joined by humans who really, really wanted power. Including, she was
told, the power to live forever. “Soon? As in days? Weeks?”

“Time is . . . time is different, for the
morvende. It’s useless to ask that question, because they cannot answer with
any precision. But it could be this year, or next. Or in five. Probably not as
long as ten, though, Feraeth told me, judging from some troubling events in the
world elsewhere. I waited, and waited, but I think . . .”

Ananda paused, her profile briefly turned toward the window.
The sunlight slanting in touched her frizzy hair into a halo of gold.

“I think there is no more I can do here, that what must be
done will be done, but easier without me. I will go away. I first wanted to
offer you the chance to go with me. The world is changing, and only the young
will be strong enough to survive what is regretfully going to come.”

Atanial impulsively launched herself across the tumbled
bedding and hugged Ananda. “You are a sweetheart. I really appreciate that,
more than you probably will ever know. But while my daughter is in danger and
while Math is . . . missing, my place is here. That might
change, and if I only get this one chance, so be it. But I have to stay and
turn my hand to whatever I can.”

Ananda smiled and stood, her face in silhouette against the
bright window. “I thought it might be so. I did wish to ask. The illusion spell
waits for two to leave, if you are reconsidering. But it will be impossible to
repeat it. Once I am gone, poor Perran will search every stone of this castle,
and he’ll increase the wards.”

“‘Poor’ Perran? I thought Perran and Zhavic turned into Evil
Sorcerers.”

Atanial’s tone was half-joking, but Ananda did not smile.
“They would never turn to dark magic or to Norsunder. There is a terrible rift
between our kingdom’s mages. Some withdrew completely and live behind wards.
The Eban boy is trained by these. Perran and Zhavic felt they had to swear
allegiance to Canardan because he was the king. This was to better protect the
kingdom, for they feared if they didn’t, he might bring in truly evil mages.”

Atanial vaguely remembered Perran. He’d seemed odd back
then. Now she pegged him as the kind of guy who’d be a star at Apple Computers,
designing brilliant software by day, and on weekends entirely taken up with
playing
World of Warcraft
.