The Tracker (3 page)

Tolaman’s voice grew even more loud and imperious, drowning out the first lead for the squires nearby. “Enter each exhibit, each pantry, each storeroom, and turn over every rock and saddle and bag of dragon meal. And if you do find her, do not run screaming it through the grounds! Notify me quietly and immediately. Now go.”

As they were leaving, the king’s man called for Tolaman. He flapped at them to go on and doubled back to speak to him. The reason Tolaman wanted to be notified first was so he could claim the discovery for himself. He was a man hungry for glory in a position that offered little. Arden had been tired of him within an hour of their meeting. Seven years of bombast and bossiness had only deepened the tiredness. The only way to contend with him was to keep one’s head low, and Arden had learned to keep his head so low that he was almost tripping upon it when he walked. There had been times after he’d first come that he had imagined running back to the orphanage. The matron there was harried but gentle, and liked Arden for taking care of the horses.

He began at the lowest of the middle branches and searched methodically through the exhibits. A monkey looked slyly at the door when he opened it and Arden thought
shoo
. He had to push his command harder into its mind; monkeys were much smarter than dragons and his penchant was less effective for their intelligence. He could tire himself out using his skill too long with them.

The princess was not with the monkeys, either in the exhibit or behind it, and he crossed the passageway to take a look at the birds. Neither was Princess Briala there. Of all four children of King Heros, she was the one he was most familiar with. Now and then she came to the perindens to set up a chair by an exhibit and practice her sketching of the animals within. Only once had they exchanged words. She had been about fifteen at the time, and had flown around the branches calling for help because one of the dear little dragons was caught in the net. Her black hair was falling everywhere and sweat was beaded on her brow from her franticness.

She watched anxiously from outside as Arden brought in the ladder and climbed up, and she clapped in relief when he freed it. No, she was not very knowledgeable about dragons, who regularly got themselves stuck in everything and occasionally spontaneously combusted if they were so stupid that they swallowed their flames. But she was kind. Arden had liked that about her very much. Although they had not spoken since then, she always smiled at him in passing. Her proclivity to practical jokes was new information to him; Arden paid little mind to the third floor and its inhabitants. Half of the year they weren’t even at the palace but in another of their homes around Odri, or traveling through the nearby lands of Loria, Isle Zayre, and less often Havanath. As Arden’s role was in the perindens, he stayed behind.

From the birds he went to the squelly pools, which were indeed a mess from the clogged pipes. The water creatures fought for dominance by encasing one another in a jelly-like substance vomited up from their gullets, and it did not disperse on its own. When Arden had been lower on the lead chain, he had made a weekly habit of dunking under the surface of the pools to root out the pipes. He didn’t wait for the clog to build up. Stepping around the murky pools as the creatures splashed water on his legs, he checked over the whole of the exhibit. The princess wasn’t there.

From the squelly pools he went to the pasture, which he paced from end to end. No one had ever informed the nag unicorn that she was old; she kicked and farted and ran all about as Arden walked around. Her much younger companions just grazed. Hav horses were wiser than Hav dragons but dumber than the monkeys from Isle Zayre, and Arden had had trouble controlling them when he was thirteen and fourteen. His penchant had grown enough that they no longer fought him when he was doing something deeply unpopular like putting medication in their eyes or squeezing the pus from an abscess.

No princess was sketching the horses from under the deep shade of the trees, or sunbathing down at the stream. The unicorn followed after him to the gate and made a whuffling sound for assistance. He paused his search to take out a towel and wipe down her horn. It needed to be dusted regularly or the sparkling grit fell into her eyes, a task that Mavic hadn’t done in a while judging from how much dust came off into the towel. Delighted to have it gone, the unicorn farted again and ran away gleefully with her tail flying. The boy hadn’t clipped the wings of the pegasus either. It was soon going to lead to the beast’s second escape when he took off to fly around Lighmoon and raid farms of their crops. Arden didn’t fetch the clippers. He couldn’t do all of his work and Mavic’s, too.

Then he searched the rest of the middle branches of the perindens, and finished up at the snake house. The doctor’s children had gone off somewhere else. Looking in all of the small exhibits through the glass, he went behind them to search the hallways. No one was there.

Then he just stood in the quiet, lining up the tasks that he had left to do for the day. None happened to be of too much importance and it was almost time to start the nightly feeding. If Retel and Izac were done with their search as well, they would be in the perindens kitchen preparing everything for Arden and Mavic to deliver.

When he returned to the main passageway, Tolaman was coming down it. “Anything to report?” he demanded of Arden.

“She is not in the middle branches,” Arden said respectfully.

“Then search the higher, you fool!” Tolaman burst at him, slashing his arm through the air to those branches. “I have to do the huts!”

You were to do the higher
, Arden thought. He said nothing, his head down and gaze submissive, but Tolaman’s lips tightened until they were smaller than his wife’s, and then disappeared from his face completely. The first lead strode on and Arden turned back to hunt.

****

The search carried on through the evening and into the night. He could hear it in his hut, voices calling out,
Princess Briala, Princess Briala, do you hear me, Princess Briala?
These were queer circumstances. The curtain lit up from the torches going by outside. Then the voices faded as the search moved on.

Tolaman had searched Arden’s hut and made a mess of his meager belongings. The clothes from his closet were tossed on his bed, and all of the furniture was askew. The cupboards in the tiny kitchen had their doors left wide open, and the lid was off the teakettle. As the princess could not have concealed herself within it, Tolaman had searched it only to be nosy, and to remind Arden that the first lead could do whatever he wanted. Fortunately, he hadn’t found Arden’s stash of money, a small but noble amount in a leather pouch that was hidden beneath a floorboard in his bedroom. Arden wasn’t saving for anything in particular. He just liked to have that heavy pouch of money. It made him feel like a rich man even if most of it was copper and silver, not gold.

Cleaning up did not take long, and he shifted his chair back the way he liked it. Then he picked the grit from his boots over his waste towel, which he would flap out his window later so the hut didn’t smell overly much like shuffle. He thought about his problem with Leefa, stitching together elegant speeches that were sure to dissuade her. Each one fell apart in his fingers. Every avenue led back to screaming in her face. One of the widowers had complained to his first lead, who had gotten Leefa to give up by threatening to report her behavior to her superiors in the kitchen. Tolaman would not intercede on Arden’s behalf in this.

If he was polite, she was encouraged. If he was rude, she assumed he didn’t mean it. If he avoided being seen, she wouldn’t believe that she was the cause. He finished one boot, flapped the towel, and got to work on the second. He could spend his money on a visit to a love penchant, who would give him a potion that would make him appear hideous to Leefa. Usually people bought those when the one they loved persisted in being in love with someone else, and slipped it into their rival’s drink. A potion like that would take up most of what he had in his money pouch, and he resented losing what it had taken him seven years to acquire.

Besides, if he were going to spend his money on a love penchant, it would be for a spell to bring a man to him, not to send a woman away. He thought of the gentlemen and their pretty little daughter at the fountain and was filled with envy. Arden hadn’t even been able to keep a man for two nights in a row, let alone a lifetime and with a child to call their own.

When his second boot was finished, he flapped the towel once more and closed it into a cabinet. Heating up water, he made tea and retook his chair. Then came a brisk knocking on the door. The cup had just touched his lips. Startled, he put it down in the saucer hastily and almost spilled the scalding liquid over his fingers.

His feelings of envy turned to dread. She was back. With curtains for the bedroom, a suggestion that she might warm his bed, a treat she had pilfered from the kitchen to share . . . This was ridiculous. It stopped now. Had she discovered some magic spell this afternoon that had transformed her into a devastatingly handsome man, he still wouldn’t be interested. Her clutching, pushy personality wasn’t attractive to him, and he didn’t want to be favored just because of his position.

The brisk knocking came again and Tolaman shouted, “Arden! Arden, open this door at once! I apologize, sir, my second lead sleeps very deeply.”

Arden lifted the plank and opened the door. A cluster of people was standing on the stoop. The king’s man, two soldiers, and Tolaman pushed inside to fill the tiny room. They thought the princess was hiding in his hut! That was the only explanation that Arden could conjure. “No one is here but I, sirs, madam.” One soldier was a woman. Tolaman hissed at him to be quiet and gave an apologetic shrug to the rest of the company.

Arden had never had cause to speak to the king’s man, and only knew his name was Pietru through Leefa’s gossip. No one called him that but the royal family. It was
sir
or
the king’s man
to everyone else. Something about his roving brown eyes had always seemed hungry to Arden. The man handled the private business of the throne and had once taken the whip away from the Master-at-Arms to apply it himself to a maid who traded secrets of the royal children in their nursery to a newsman for pieces of gold. After her lashing, she was dismissed from her position. It was said the king’s man spread shuffle over her name so thoroughly that she had to move all the way to Loria to find work.

Right now, those hungry brown eyes were taking in every facet of Arden’s hut and his person. Neither had Arden ever spoken to the pair of soldiers. The man was often posted as a guard on the wall or in the courtyard; the woman was a third floor guard. He had bloodshot eyes and a craggy face with a little joviality caught in the cracks, a man who looked old when young; she was smooth and clear and solemn, a woman who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. All three of them had hard forms, callused hands, and a clip to their movements. Soft, tubby Tolaman was a complete contrast. The buttons on his shirt strained at the gut and his scalp shined at the crown like even his hairs weren’t strong enough to hang on to his fleshy form. Before his advancement to first lead, he had cut a brilliant form in the branches of the perindens. Now he limited his exertions to gobbling up third helpings of his wife’s cooking, and pointing out tasks for others to perform.

To have all of them in the living room was making Arden nervous. He hadn’t had anyone in his hut, save Tolaman in his search for the princess and Leefa’s uninvited visits, since the night with Etto. He had never had more than one visitor at a time. Queer circumstances indeed.

The king’s man examined Arden with intensity. “This is the one with the penchant, Master Maraudi?”

“Yes, he is-” Tolaman said.

The male soldier cut him off. “Arden Sadall, twenty years of age, Lighmoon bred and born, brought to the palace at thirteen from the local orphanage. The matron reported him in the yearly penchant sweeps as possibly having the ability for animals, and as Betton was old and dying, it was decided to bring this one in to work. The boy was the only one found of this strain of penchant anywhere in Odri in a decade.” Arden looked at the man with new interest. It was disconcerting to hear one’s personal biography spilling from the cracked lips of a virtual stranger.

“Yes, yes, all penchants are rare skills,” the king’s man said thoughtfully. It was far more information than he had requested, yet he had not stopped the soldier in his recitation.

“But he is not that strong,” Tolaman interjected. The female soldier had faded into the background, as nothing was needed of her for the moment, but to fade was not Tolaman’s way. “In comparison to old Betton’s skill, he is nothing. I can hardly recommend-”

“Do you have another penchant for animals under your lead then?” the king’s man asked. “Do you have the penchant yourself?”

Tolaman bridled. “No. But my point is that-”

“Betton is long gone, Dagad rest him, which I believe nullifies the strength of his skill. This is what we have, and he will have to do.” The king’s man gestured to Arden. “Do you know of any other penchants like this one, Master Maraudi? Off the top of your head.”

“I don’t need it off the top of my head. I rattled around the books of registry and can tell you for sure. There are only three others identified. Two are assigned to the garrison at the Routies-”

“It would take them days to reach here on the fastest horse.”