Sasharia En Garde (51 page)

As for Damedran, Ban had never actually envied him his
exalted position, not after the first time he watched his fellow ten-year-old
leave his uncle’s chamber after a thrashing. Though Damedran’s father was the
head of the academy, everyone knew he obeyed his older brother in everything,
including how to raise his son.

Red said in a make-peace voice, “King or war commander,
what’s the problem?”

Bowsprit slewed round in his saddle, studying Ban’s long
face, then he slewed back. “When Red puts it that way, what
is
the problem?”

Ban hunched his shoulders, glowering between his horse’s
flicking ears. She was aware of the animals on the civilian road on the other
side of the hill, though none of the humans were.

Ban said slowly, working it out as he spoke, “I think it’s
the secret part of the mission. And the fact that it’s
us
. And not any of the guard. Think of it. Your uncle could send
any of the top scouts, any of his honor guard, who are all picked for skill and
speed and all that. I mean we’re about the best in the academy, with one or two
exceptions—”

He paused for the hoots and scornful comments to die down,
then continued. “—but we’re still academy. Why isn’t he sending any of them,
when they are so much better?”

“Yeah.” Bowsprit slewed around again. “Yeah!”

“We don’t have orders to, ah, kill her, or anything?” Ban
asked in his most surly voice in an effort to hide his anxiety.

Not that it worked, because Damedran felt the same way. “No!
No. We’re to capture her in secret. No one to find out who she is. Tie her up
so she can’t do magic. Report to my uncle via message box. And then take her to
wherever he says. Only to him, he kept repeating. Not to anyone else, and not a
word to anyone, either.”

Silence fell between them as they reached the bottom of the
hill. They were in arrow shot of the city gates, and the military road was
about to blend with the crowded civ road.

“I don’t like it,” Ban said as the two roads converged, and
Damedran made a short gesture meaning
shut
up
!

This time Ban obeyed, and they fell in just behind a wagon
full of bushels of vegetables, driven by a very shapely girl who kept looking
round in a pretense of checking her cargo.

Bowsprit and Red sat up straighter, sneaking peeks at the
girl, who scoped them out pretty thoroughly from under drifting black curls.
The boys tried to catch her eye when she looked their way. The rest of the time
they were checking out her figure instead of watching the road, until Damedran
caught them at it. He pulled his riding gloves from his belt, leaned out and
whapped Red.

“Pay attention,” he snarled. “What if that pirate has spies
tracking us?”

They all looked around, radiating furtiveness.

Satisfied that the passing farmers and merchants were not
secret spies, Damedran said in a low voice. “Now, here’s what we’ll
do . . .”

None of them gave a second look to the scruffy, scrawny
red-haired man slouched on the back of a tired horse, who plodded two wagons
behind them. The kingdom seemed to be filled with plain, wiry red-haired men
who served in stables or at table or sewed or cobbled or did masonry.

The same was not true of this scruffy red-haired man—known
at this end of the continent only as Owl—who was finally close enough to
identify them.

He’d first spotted them as the military and civilian roads
topped separate hills and started down toward the fork. He always watched for
military roads and who might be on them, going where.

His glimpse of a patrol of cadets had taken him by surprise.
The boys looked familiar. He’d ridden along in frustration, peering as they
vanished and reappeared again, hidden by hedgerows and the last hill, and then
never-to-be-cursed-enough wild ferns growing alongside the roads.

He dared not gallop or in any wise call attention to
himself. If that really was Damedran Randart and some of his pack of rats, they
might possibly recognize him from his menial labors around the academy.
Unlikely, but he wasn’t going to take the chance. It was too strange to
encounter them here, so far from Castle Cheslan and the rest of the army.
Surely they should be at the center of the war game.

Everything seemed to conspire against him, including the
angle of the bright sun turning them into silhouettes, until at last the two
roads merged. A few moments later the one riding point turned his head, long
blue-black hair swinging, as he whapped the red-haired boy with gloves—and Owl
stared in amazement. That was indeed Damedran Randart.

Why? The only thing Owl was sure of was that Randart was
behind it, for some purpose sinister and sneaky. Surprise inspection for the
local garrison, maybe?

The urge to write a note to Jehan gripped him, to be fought
off. One thing that would call attention to him would be scrawling a note on
horseback, and whipping out a golden case to put it into. Owl knew that he’d be
seen. Circumstances were lamentably predictable that way.

So once they were through the city gates, he deliberately
turned his horse up a different street than the main street, which led straight
to the garrison. He dismounted when he found a quirk between two old alleyways,
moss growing between the bricks. He slid off the horse and kept it between him
and the alleyway intersection as he pulled out his chalk and a scrap of paper
from his pack, and wrote:

Damedran here. Know
why? Should I do anything?

He tucked it into the notecase and leaned tiredly against
the horse to wait. Jehan might answer right away, if he was alone. But if he
wasn’t, it could be half a day. Or longer. So he’d give himself a breather. If
nothing came, it meant Jehan was away from his rooms.

As he stood there absently running his hands over the neck
of the drooping animal, he thought back over the exercise in frustration the
past weeks had been. Like losing the princess during the very first storm that
ended the summer and discovering she’d vanished. He’d ridden as hard as he
could along the river road, pausing only to arrange for changes of mount, until
he reached the foothills below the border mountains.

Here the road narrowed, leading directly to Moonsky Lake at
the border. He’d asked at the inn where absolutely everyone stopped, and
despite coins and exhaustive questioning, discovered no trace of any tall woman
fitting the description of Sasharia Zhavalieshin.

So he’d ridden all the way back to the last inn he’d seen
her at, wishing he’d dared sleep inside the first time. But that enormous
wedding party and all those harvesters had convinced him to ride on to the next
inn and wait for her to catch up. That was before the big storm.

He hoped that the inn folk remembered her. A description,
some added coin, and the innkeeping pair told him they did indeed remember her.
She’d helped that night, and further she’d carried a letter for them to the
Three Falls Inn in Zhavlir . . .

Zhavlir? On the other side of the river?

Owl got a room, sat down, wrote a bitter letter, tore it up.
Wrote another saying only that he’d found the right road. Sure enough Jehan
wrote back:
Waste no time. Find her
.

So here he was again, after another mad dashing ride. Now he
only had to locate the inn.

He yawned, leaning against the horse. “Just one more ride,
old friend,” he murmured, making a mental promise of bran mash as he himself
thought longingly of a good pull on some fine dark ale . . .

While he was trying to find the energy to get himself back
in the saddle and seek the inn, Damedran and his posse had ridden straight to
the garrison in the middle of the town, sent a servant in to get directions to
the Three Falls, and rode the few blocks to reach it.

They dismounted in the stable yard, Damedran saying, “The
trail is at least a week old, so she can’t still be here. But in case, I want a
perimeter. Make certain you can all see one another. No yelling, no attention.”

The others obeyed while Damedran walked into the inn. A
teenaged girl clearing a table took in his long stride, his swinging black
hair, the sword at his side, blushed and ran into the kitchen. He never gave
her a glance, but made directly for the tall man at the counter.

He said, “Master Innkeeper? I’m looking for an old friend I
was supposed to meet on the road. A woman with honey-colored hair, one of her
names being Lasva. Very tall. Carried a letter for you.”

Until the mention of the last, the innkeeper had looked
puzzled, for he’d served plenty of tall women with honey-colored hair, and
Lasva was a very common name. But the letter?

“Ah, the sailor! Very nice person. You come from the west,
then? Your accent is good. Are those not guard colors?” He indicated the brown
tunic.

“West?” Damedran repeated, as confused as the innkeeper.

“Yes. What was it . . . somewhere west of
Colend . . . Bermund? Hanbria? No, I think it might have been
Tser Mearsies. Yes. My wife made her a map, see. She can draw a mighty fine
map. She puts things like rivers and forests and mountains in it, little tiny
ones. Not like real ones, if you get my drift, but to represent—”

Damedran waved a hand. “I comprehend. So she rode west, did
she?”

The man shrugged. “One can only assume so, if she asked for
the map to help her get home again.”

Damedran bit his lip against letting out any curses, turned
away, then turned back. He pulled out his coin purse and laid several heavy
golden six-sided coins on the counter, but kept his hand on them. “Did she
happen to mention any other places?”

He shrugged again, but his wife appeared, drying her hands,
glanced from the coins to Damedran. Her tired face took on a wary look. “Is
there a problem? She was a very nice young woman. Even neatened her room when
she left. They don’t always, the young.”

“I think someone we know sent her wrong,” Damedran invented
desperately. He’d never been good at lying on the spot, he always had to think
them out first. “But she was going to meet me, and I was east, see, not west.”

“You don’t look anything like her.” The wife smoothed stray
hairs off her forehead and narrowed her eyes. “Family, you say?”

“Friends. Ah, my older sister is a sailor too, see, and they
got to know each other. And, well, I’m trying to find her.” Running out of
ideas, Damedran fought against losing his temper again.

The wife looked up at her tall spouse, who gazed down with
an air of helpless question, and when a customer yelled out, “Innkeep! Is that
ale ready, or must I fetch it myself?” the man whirled away and the woman gave
a tiny shrug. “Well. Not my business, I guess you could say. She did ask a bit
about Bar Larsca Valley. Said she was looking for a friend. I think she might
even have said a sailor, come to think on it.”

Damedran grinned. “Ah. Listen, I don’t want any more mixed
messages. It’s not likely anyone else would ask. But if they do. You’ve
forgotten, yes?” He took his hand off the coins.

She smiled, sweeping them into her apron. “I’m always happy
to help a nice young woman like that. Indeed, sir.”

Damedran almost ran out, signaling to Ban as he did. Ban
waved at the next cadet down, and they soon assembled in the courtyard.

“Bar Larsca Valley,” Damedran said. “Right back where we
started out!”

“Unless she’s at the other end,” Ban put in. “You know, at
the mountains.”

“Why would anyone go to the mountains?” Red asked.

Damedran ignored them. “Or she went to Tser Mearsies. But
why would she go there?”

“Escape us,” Ban said dryly.

“Not in Bar Larsca.” Damedran shook his head, thinking of
Castle Cheslan sitting at the southeast end of the valley. “Anyone would tell
her about the siege game. You’d think. So maybe she did go to Tser Mearsies
after all.”

“And leave her ma behind?” Red put in.

They all looked thoughtful at that, turning to Red with
expressions very close to respect. Red blushed. “Well, I wouldn’t. Leave my ma.
If—”
If I knew she was a prisoner of the
king.
He might get himself into trouble if he said any more, and so he
flapped his hands out from his sides, looking skyward.

Damedran was done with the conversation anyway. “Back to the
garrison. New mounts, and we’re on the road. Remember, we’re at least a week
behind her.”

They returned to the servants, who had been holding the
reins of the horses all this time. They remounted and rode sedately out,
remembering the order not to call attention to themselves.

One they reached the open road, they could loosen the reins
and gallop with the wind.

They reached the garrison at the same time as Owl reached
the inn. He walked up to where Mistress Innkeeper was polishing the counter,
her expression distracted. The common room was empty except for a table of
drunks at one corner, with whom Master Innkeeper was obviously trying to
reason. In the kitchen a pair of young teens were busy frosting pastries. Both
glanced at Owl, then went back to work, obviously losing interest.

Owl felt the inward tingle of magic—an answer from Jehan.

He laid a silver coin on the counter. “I was told that your
relations sent a letter via a young woman, tall, wheat-colored hair probably in
braids. I would like to know where she went, if you remember?”

The woman glanced from the coin to Owl’s face, her jaw
tight, her hands thrust into her apron pockets. “Couldn’t rightly say,” she
finally replied.

Owl sighed. “I may as well get a room, then. Send word to
the stable I’ll pay for a bran mash for the mount. Name’s Owl.”

He sat in a corner, looking about. The man was dealing with
the drunks, the woman had vanished, the teenagers were busy in the kitchen,
talking and working.

He pulled out the golden case and found a rolled paper on
which Jehan had written: