Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (17 page)

In time, another man came down from upstairs, a wizened, spade-bearded little cricket in black who looked like a decayed gentleman from one of the more down-at-heels cities of the Peninsula with his starched neck ruff and darned, soot-gray hose. He settled himself beside the two blockheads in the padded coats who were drinking ale and talking in quiet voices; eventually they all went upstairs to bed.

Starhawk became uncomfortably aware of how her voice and Fawn’s echoed in the empty common room and how dark were the shadows that clotted under its smoke-blackened rafters. Outside, the wind groaned louder over the rocks. Its sound would cover that of anyone’s approach.

She was glad enough to leave the hall. By the light of a feeble tallow dip, she and Fawn climbed the narrow corkscrew of stairs to the cold room under the rafters.

“Well, these beds will have a use, after all,” she commented wryly as she dropped the door bolt into its slot. Fawn laughed and pulled one end of the heavy log frame away from the wall. “Not like that—here. We’ll lift. No sense telling that old cutthroat downstairs what we’re doing.”

It was a struggle to barricade the door quietly. Halfway through their task, a sound arrested the Hawk’s attention; she held up her hand, listening. The inn walls were thick, but it sounded as if others in the place had the same idea.

Fawn unrolled her bedding along the wall where the bed had been, carefully arranging it to avoid the major leaks in the roof. “Do you really think they’ll try to rob us in the night?” Her voice had gotten very quiet; her eyes, in the flickering light of the already failing dip, had lost the ebullience they’d shown downstairs. Her face looked shadowed and tired. Starhawk reflected that for all her bright courage, Fawn did not travel well. She looked worn down and anxious.

“I almost hope so,” the Hawk replied quietly. She blew on the flame, and the room was plunged into inky darkness. “I’d far rather deal with it here than on the road tomorrow.”

Silence settled over the inn.

Between her travels, wars, and the long watches of ambush, the Hawk had developed a fairly clear estimate of time. At the end of about three hours, she reached over and shook Fawn awake, talked to her in the darkness for a few minutes to make sure that she was awake, then lay back and dropped at once into the light, wary, animal sleep of guard dogs and professional soldiers. She surfaced briefly when the rain lightened an hour and a half later; she heard the drumming of it fade to a soft, restless pattering in the dark, like tiny feet running endlessly across the leaky thatch, and, below that sound, the soft murmur of Fawn’s voice, whispering the words of an old ballad to herself to keep awake and pass the time. Then she slept again.

She wakened quickly, silently, and without moving, at the urgent touch of Fawn’s hand on her shoulder. She tapped the knuckles lightly to show herself awake and listened intently for the sounds that had alerted the girl to danger.

After a moment, she heard it: the creak of a footstep on the crazy boards of the hall. It was followed by the sticky squeak of wet leather and the clink of a buckle. But more than any single clue, she could sense, almost feel, the weight and warmth and breath gathered in the darkness outside their door.

Starhawk sat up, reached to where her sword lay beside her on the dirty floor, and drew its well-oiled length without a sound. With luck, she thought, Fawn would remember to have her dagger ready; she wasn’t going to warn anyone that they were awake by asking aloud.

A single crack of light appeared in the darkness, a thin chink from the yellowish glow of a tallow dip. In the utter darkness, even that dim gleam was bright as summer sun. Then she heard the scraping of a fine-honed dagger being slid through the door crack under the bolt, pushing it gently up. There was a soft, indistinct plunk as it dropped backward out of its slot. Then came another long and listening silence.

Fawn and the Hawk were both on their feet. Fawn moved back toward the window, as they had previously agreed; Starhawk stepped noiselessly toward the barricaded door. The slit of light widened, and bulky shadows became visible beyond. There was a jarring vibration, followed by a soft-voiced curse, rotting their eyes for a pair of impudent sluts. A heavy shoulder slammed against the wood, and the barricading bed grated and tipped back as the huge shape of a man slid sideways through the narrow gap.

The door opened inward and to the right. The intruder had to enter left shoulder first. Killing him was as easy as sticking a frog. He gasped as the sword slid in, and his knees buckled; there was the stink and splatter of blood, and Starhawk sprang back as others slammed and pushed the door in, cursing furiously, falling over the body and the bed, and dropping the light in the confusion. The Hawk went in silently, hacking and thrusting; voices shouted and cursed. Steel bit her leg. She thought there were three still living, blundering around in the darkness like blind pigs in a pit.

Then she heard Fawn scream, and a man’s heavy rasp of breathing where she guessed the girl would be. A body tangled with hers, hands grappling her legs and pulling her off balance. A hoarse voice yelled, “Over here! I got one!” She cut downward at the source of the voice, then swung in a wide circle with her sword and felt its tip snag something that gasped and swore; the man pulled her down, clutching and grappling, too close now for the sword to be of use. She dropped it, hacking with her dagger; then light streamed in over them, and more men came thundering in from the hall.

The light showed the raised knife of the man who clutched her thighs, and Starhawk cut backhand as he turned his head toward the newcomers, opening both windpipe and jugular and spraying herself in a hot fountain of blood. The first man through the door tripped over the corpse there, then the bed; the second man clambered straight up over all three, his huge bulk blotting the light, and threw himself like an immense lion on the only bandit left standing. He knocked the man’s blade aside with a backhand blow that would have stunned a horse, caught him by the throat, and slammed his head back against the stone wall behind with a hideous crunch. Then he swung around, his square, heavy-jawed face pink and sweating in the faint gleam of brightness from the hall, as if seeking new prey. Past him, Starhawk saw Fawn standing flattened against the wall by the shuttered window, her face white and her disheveled clothing smeared with dark blood. There was a dagger in her hand and a gutted robber still twitching and sobbing at her feet.

The big newcomer relaxed and turned to the jostling scramble of his companion in the doorway. “Don’t drop the light, ye gaum-snatched chucklehead,” he said. “We’re behind the fair.” One step took him to Fawn. “Are you hurt, lass?”

The man who’d tripped unraveled himself from the trampled remains of the collapsed bed and stumbled again over the dead bandit in his hurry to reach Starhawk, who was still sitting, covered with blood and floor-grime, beneath her slaughtered assailant. He knelt beside her, an even bigger man than the first one, with the same lock of brown hair falling over grave, blue-gray eyes. “Are ye hurt?”

Starhawk shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. “But thank you.”

Much to her surprise, he lifted her to her feet as if she’d been a doll. “We’d have been sooner,” he said ruefully, “but for some shrinking violet’s wanting to barricade our door . . . ”

“Violet yourself,” the other man retorted, in the burring accent of the Bight
Coast. “If we’d been the first ones they attacked, you’d have been glad enough for the warning and delay—if the sound of their shoving over the bed had waked you at all.”

The bigger man swung about, like a bullock goaded by flies. “And what makes you think any bandit in the mountains is something you and I together couldn’t handle without even troubling to wake up?”

“You sang a different tune night before last, when the wolves raided—”

“Ram!
Orris!” a creaky voice chirped from the doorway. The two behemoths fell silent. The scrawny little gentleman in the starched ruff whom Starhawk had seen briefly down in the common room came scrambling agilely over the mess in the doorway, holding aloft a lantern in one hand. The other hand was weighted down by a short sword, enormous in the bony grip. “You must excuse my nephews,” he said to the women, with a courtly salaam appallingly incongruous with the gruesome setting. “Back home I use them for a plow team, and thus their manners with regard to ladies have been sadly neglected.”

He straightened up. Bright, black eyes twinkled into Starhawk’s, and she grinned at him in return.

“Naagh . . . ” Ram and Orris pulled back hamlike fists threateningly at this slur on their company manners.

The little man disregarded them with sublime unconcern. “My name is Anyog Spicer, gentleman, scholar, and poet. There is water in the room next to us, since I’m sure ablutions are in order . . . ”

“First I’m going to find that damned innkeeper, rot his eyes,” Starhawk snapped, “and make sure he doesn’t have any other bravos hiding out around here.” She looked up and saw that Fawn’s face had gone suddenly from white to green. She turned to the immense man who still hovered at her side. “Take Fawn down to your room, if you would,” she said. “I’ll get some wine when I’m in the kitchen.”

“We’ve wine,” the big man—Ram or Orris—said. “And better than what this place stocks. I’ll come with you, lassie. Orris, take care of Miss Fawn. And see you don’t make a muff of it,” he added as he and Starhawk started for the door.

Orris—the handsomer of the two brothers and, Starhawk guessed, the younger by several years—raised sharply backslanted dark eyebrows. “Me make muff of it?” he asked as he gently took Fawn’s arm and removed the dagger that she still held in her nerveless hand. “And who fell over his own big feet blasting into the room like a bull through a gate, pray? Of all the gaum-snatched things . . . ”

“Be a fair desperate gaum would take the time to find your wits to snatch ’em . . . ”

Starhawk, who sensed that the brothers would probably argue through battle and world’s end, caught Ram’s quilted sleeve and pulled him determinedly toward the door.

There were no more bandits at the inn. They found the innkeeper, disheveled and groaning, in the room behind the kitchen, amid a tangle of sheets in which he said he had been tied after being overpowered. But while he was explaining all this at length to Ram, Starhawk had a look at the torn cloth and found no tight-bunched creases, such as were made by knots. The woman said sullenly that she had locked herself in the larder from fear of them. Both looked white and shaken enough for it to have been true, but Starhawk began to suspect that by killing the bandits, she had demolished the couple’s livelihood. She smiled to herself with grim satisfaction as she and Ram mounted the stairs once more.

“You’re no stranger to rough work, seemingly,” Ram said, his voice rather awed.

Starhawk shrugged. “I’ve been a mercenary for eight years,” she said. “These were amateurs.”

“How can you tell?” He cocked his head and gazed down at her curiously. “They looked to me as if they were born with shivs in their fists.”

“A professional would have put a guard on your door. And what in the hell does ‘gaum-snatched’ mean? That’s one I never heard before.”

He chuckled, a deep rumble in his throat. “Oh, it’s what they say to mean your wits have gone begging. Gaums are—what you call?—dragonflies; at least that’s what we call ’em where I come from. There are old wives who say they’ll steal away a man’s wits and let him wander about the country until he drowns himself walking into a marsh.”

Starhawk nodded as they turned the corner at the top of the stair and saw light streaming out of one of the rooms halfway down the hall. “In the north, they say demons will lead a man to his death that way—or chase him crying to him from the air. But I never heard it was dragonflies.”

They came to the slaughterhouse room. By the light of the lamp she’d appropriated from the kitchen, Starhawk saw that the greasy little man who’d spoken to Fawn was the one Orris had brained. It was a good guess, then, that the innkeeper had indeed been in league with them.

Ram jerked his head toward the door as they passed it—“What about them?”

“We’ll let our host clean up,” Starhawk said callously. “It’s his inn—and his friends.”

Orris and Uncle Anyog had moved the women’s possessions to their own room while Ram and the Hawk were reconnoitering. Beds had been made up on the sagging mattresses. Fawn was asleep, her hair lying about her in dark and careless glory on the seedy pillow. By the look of his boots, Uncle Anyog had been investigating the stables. He reported nothing missing or lamed.

“Meant to do that after we’d been settled,” Starhawk said, collecting spare breeches, shirt, and doublet from her pack and preparing to go into the next room to wash and change. “Maybe they didn’t mean to take you three on at all. If you asked after the two of us, the innkeeper could always tell you we’d departed early.”

“Hardly that,” Orris pointed out. “Else we’d overtake you on the road, wouldn’t we?”

“Depends on which direction you were going in.”

In the vacant room, she took a very fast, very cold damp-cloth bath to get the dried blood out of her flesh and hair, cleaned the superficial gash on her leg with wine and bound it up, and changed her clothes. When she returned to the brothers’ room, Uncle Anyog was curled up asleep on the floor in a corner; Ram and Orris were still talking quietly, arguing over how good a bargain they’d really gotten on some opals they’d bought from the mines in the North. Starhawk settled herself down with a rag, a pan of water, and a bottle of oil, to clean her weapons and leather before moving on. The night was far spent and she knew she would sleep no more.

Orris finished pointing out to his brother some facts about the fluctuation in the price of furs and how opals could be held for a rise in prices—neither argument made any sense to Starhawk—and turned to her to ask, “Starhawk? If you don’t mind my asking—which direction were you bound in, you and Miss Fawn? It’s a rotten time to be on the roads at all, I know. Where were you headed?”