I WOKE IN THE MORNING in one of the inn’s upstairs rooms, lying on the floor. From where I lay, I could see the webbing underneath the bed next to me and how much it sagged under Pol’s weight. He must have carried me in and laid me out on the rug before going to sleep himself. I looked enviously at his bed, but at least I was on a wood floor, not a stone one. There was a rug underneath me and a blanket pulled over me.
I reached up with one hand and pushed the hair off my face. I usually wore it long enough to wrap into a stubby braid at the base of my neck, but it had grown beyond that in prison. Sometime during my arrest I had lost the tie that held it, and it had been hanging down in my face and tangling into knots ever since. The previous night’s rinsing had washed out some of the dirt, but the tangles were still there. I thought about borrowing a knife from Pol and cutting it all off but discarded the idea. Pol wouldn’t lend me the knife, but he’d cut the hair off himself, and that would be painful. Besides, I liked my hair long. When it was clean and pulled back from my face, I liked to think it gave me an aristocratic look, and it was useful. I sometimes caught small items in the hair at the top of the braid and hid them there.
Still, matted and tangled, the hair was not aristocratic. I pushed it off my forehead for the time being and sat up. Pol’s eyes opened as I moved, and I discarded any thoughts of sneaking away even before I discovered that I was chained to the bed. My ankle was padded by someone’s spare shirt, and locked around it was an iron cuff with a chain that looped around the leg of the bed. Only by lifting the bed, with Pol in it, could I have gotten free. I wondered whose idea the shirt and the blanket had been. Pol didn’t seem like a man sensitive to personal comforts.
I had another wash, this time with warm water in a washroom at the end of the hallway outside the room. The magus and his two apprentices were already there, stripped to the waist, splashing water around as they got themselves clean. They looked up as Pol and I came in, and I could see that they all three expected me to resent more soap and water.
“I washed last night,” I pointed out to the magus. “Look”—I held up my arms—“I’m very clean. Why am I washing again?”
The magus stepped away from the basin that held his shaving water and caught one of my arms. He was careful to grip it above the clean white bandages before he turned my hand over and held it up to my face so that I could see the black dirt still ingrained in the folds of my skin.
“Wash,” he commanded, and before I could protest further, Pol grabbed me from behind and pushed me over toward an empty basin lying next to the others on a shelf that ran waist height along the wall. Holding the back of my neck with one hand, he lifted a pitcher with another and poured steaming water into the basin.
“I can wash myself,” I pointed out to no effect.
He added a washing cloth and soap and went to work on my face. When I opened my mouth to complain, I got soap in it. I attempted to slip away, but could not. The hand Pol had on my neck stretched easily from one side of it to the other. He was merciless to my bruises, and I did my best to stamp on his toes in retaliation. He squeezed harder on my neck until I stopped. He soaped my shoulders and bent me at the waist with another squeeze, in order to soap my back. Bent over, I saw that his knees were within reach. I might have grabbed one and thrown him to the floor, but I didn’t try. This was no time to demonstrate unsuspected abilities. Besides, if I missed the grab, I would only look silly and I had had enough of that.
Pol rinsed off the soap with a pitcher of water. I pulled myself upright and tried to look disdainful, but the bath wasn’t over. Pol marched me across the room to a wooden tub full of water and pushed my head under while I was still howling in outrage. He lifted me out, and while I coughed, he rubbed more soap into my hair and pushed me under again.
When the grip in his fingers finally lessened, I dragged myself away and threw myself, dripping water, to the other side of the bathroom. I watched him warily while I coughed the water out of my lungs. He stood patiently while I twisted water out of my hair. When I snarled that I could have more easily washed myself, he tossed me a towel, and then he lifted one arm and gestured leisurely with a finger toward the door.
His face was almost expressionless, but the corners of his mouth twitched. Jutting out my jaw to conceal the expression on my own face, I stalked down the hall and recovered my shirt and overshirt from the room where I had slept.
“You got my pants wet,” I complained as I pulled on my shirt. The waistband was soaked.
Pol didn’t respond.
I was still pulling my overshirt over my head as I thumped down the stairs to the taproom, where breakfast and the others were waiting. The magus and his apprentices were smiling at their food. I threw myself onto the end of the bench and ignored them.
After I had eaten one bowl of oatmeal, I combed my fingers through my hair to get it into some sort of order. Tearing a few knots apart in the process, I divided it into three clumps and wound the clumps over one another to make a short braid. Holding the end of the braid in one hand, I looked around the taproom for inspiration. Over my shoulder I saw a young woman at the bar. I smiled at her and circled one finger around the tip of the braid to show what I needed. When she smiled at me and waved one hand to show that she understood, I turned back to the table to meet the ferocious glare of Useless the Elder, whose name I remembered was Ambiades. I didn’t know what had irritated him, so I directed my puzzled look on my oatmeal bowl.
A few minutes later the girl from the bar arrived with more breakfast for everyone and a piece of twine to tie off my hair. As she went away, she looked over at Useless the Elder and sniffed in contempt, so I had an explanation for the ferocious glare. No friend had I made there, but I wasn’t with this group to make friends, and besides, he sneered too much. I’ve found that people who sneer are almost always sneering at me.
The magus, Pol, and the younger Useless, Sophos, were studiously eating their breakfasts.
“She seems like a nice girl,” I said, and got an angry look from Ambiades and his master. The magus couldn’t have been rebuffed by the barkeep, so I assumed that he didn’t want me baiting his apprentice.
“Very friendly,” I added for good measure before I dug into my second large bowl of oatmeal. It was a little bit gloppy, but there was butter and honey on top. There was a bowl of yogurt nearby, and I ate that as well. Sophos had a smaller bowl, and when the magus wasn’t looking, I slipped it out from under his lifted spoon and switched it for my empty one. He looked startled, and Ambiades stifled a derisive laugh, but neither of them complained to the magus. There was another large bowl that held oranges in the middle of the table, and I was reaching for those when I noticed the magus’s glare.
“I’m hungry,” I said defensively, and took three. Two went into the pockets of the overshirt, and the third I peeled and was eating when the landlady arrived.
She came to ask us if we wanted a lunch packed, but she stopped in surprise when she saw me.
I gave her my best boyish grin. “I clean up nicely, don’t I?” I said.
She smiled back. “Yes, you do. Where did you get so dirty?”
“Prison,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. People went to prison all the time. “I expect you’re glad to get out.”
“Yes, ma’am, especially because the food is so good.”
She laughed and turned back to the magus, who was looking grim. “Was there anything else that you needed, sir?”
“No, we’ll stop in Evisa for lunch, thank you.”
Everyone went to pack up the horses except the magus and me. The two of us remained at the table until Pol sent Sophos in to tell us that everything was ready. There was a mounting block in the courtyard, so I was able to get onto my horse myself, although Pol held its head and Sophos held the stirrup for me and offered advice.
“You don’t have to slither on that way,” he said. “She isn’t going to move out from underneath you.”
“She might,” I replied sourly.
As we rode our horses out of the courtyard, the landlady stepped out of the inn’s front door with a napkin-wrapped bundle in her hand. She reached up to stop my horse with one hand, which was pretty fearless of her, but she seemed to think it was nothing out of the ordinary.
“A little something to eat while you’re riding. It’s a long way to Evisa.” She handed the bundle up to me and added as she did so, “My youngest is down in the prison.”
“Oh,” I said, not surprised. They probably hadn’t bribed the tax collector enough. “Don’t worry too much,” I said as the magus dragged my horse away. “It’s not so bad.” I forgot myself enough to give her a real smile but replaced it with a grin when I saw her face brighten in response.
“What a lie that was,” I added under my breath as we left the inn behind. The road curved away between rows of olive trees. As soon as we were well out of sight, the magus pulled up his horse and mine as well.
He leaned across his saddle and smacked me on the head, then pulled away the bundle of lunch, which I had hung on a convenient buckle of the saddle.
“Hey!” I yelled in outrage. “That was for me!”
“I don’t need you chatting up every barkeep between here and the mountains.”
“I didn’t say a word to the barkeep,” I pointed out in an aggrieved tone as I rubbed the spot on my head where his heavy seal ring had hit. “Not a word. And I was only being polite to the landlady.”
The magus lifted his hand to hit me again, but I leaned out of reach. “You can keep your civility,” he snapped, “to yourself. You don’t talk to anyone, do you understand?”
“So, so, so. Do I get my lunch back?”
No, I didn’t. Magus said we would have it later. I sulked for the next hour. I looked at my saddle and ignored the passing scenery—I’d seen onions before—until we rode by a field being harvested. The sweet, tangy smell woke my stomach. I sat up straight and looked around. “Hey,” I called to the magus, “I’m hungry.”
He ignored me, but I decided against prolonged sulking. It wasn’t going to get me an early lunch, and my neck was sore, from bending over the saddle. I dug one of the oranges out of my pocket and began to peel it, dropping the rinds on the road. Outside the city I had felt like a bug caught out in the center of a tablecloth. Now the world was closing back in in a comforting way. The road rose slowly and dropped into an occasional hollow as we climbed the hills that led up to the mountains in the north of the country. The fields were smaller, and they were surrounded by olive trees, which grew where other crops wouldn’t. Individual orchards were blending together into an undifferentiated forest of silver and gray. I wondered how the owners knew when their land stopped and someone else’s began.
On my left Sophos asked, “Was it really not so bad?”
“Was what?”
“Prison.”
I remembered my comment to the landlady. I watched Sophos for a minute, riding comfortably on the back of his well-bred mare.
“That prison,” I said with heartfelt sincerity, “was absolutely the most awful thing that has happened to me in my entire life.”
I could tell by the way he looked at me that he thought my life must have been filled with one awful thing after another.
“Oh,” he said, and pressed his horse a little faster, in order to widen the space between us.
Pol continued to ride behind me. I looked over my shoulder at him and got a stony glare. I ate my orange and listened to the conversation between the magus, Sophos, and Ambiades. He was asking them questions. He wanted Sophos to tell him the classification of a eucalyptus tree. Sophos went on about this and that and whether it was fruit-bearing. Most of what he said I couldn’t hear, but he seemed to have gotten it right because the magus told him he was pleased. Ambiades had more trouble with the olive tree, and the magus was not pleased. Ambiades shifted his horse a little farther away from the magus, and I gathered that cuffs to the head with that seal ring were not uncommon. The magus asked Sophos for the correct answer, and Sophos gave it, obviously embarrassed for Ambiades’s sake.
“Sophos seems to have been paying attention, Ambiades. Would you like to hazard a guess why this sort of classification is important?”
“Not really,” said Ambiades.
“Do it anyway,” said the magus.
“Oh, I guess it’s so you can tell which trees should be planted where.”
“Go on.”
But Ambiades couldn’t think of anything else.
Sophos tried to help him out. “If you found a new tree, you might be able to tell if you could eat the fruit if you knew it was just like an olive tree?”
“If it was just like an olive tree it would be one,” snapped Ambiades. I put all my weight onto one stirrup and leaned over. I wanted to get a look at Sophos’s face to see if he was blushing. He was.
“Of course,” the magus pointed out, “if you can’t classify an olive, Ambiades, you wouldn’t know one if you saw one, would you?”
I leaned over on the other stirrup. Now Ambiades was blushing. He was scowling as well.
“Try again with the fig tree,” said the magus.
Ambiades poked and guessed his way through that classification, and I lost interest. I was getting tired. I ate my second orange.
Long before we reached Evisa, I was exhausted. I complained constantly that I was tired, but no one seemed to notice. I was also hungry. I told the magus I would starve in the saddle if I didn’t get something to eat, and he finally, reluctantly, opened the bundle with my lunch in it. But he insisted on dividing it equally among Ambiades, Sophos, and myself, even though I pointed out that they couldn’t possibly be as hungry as I was.
Ambiades nobly handed over some of his portion to me, but there was something about the way he did it that made my hackles rise.
It was late in the afternoon when we reached Evisa. The magus was disgruntled that we hadn’t made better time. He hadn’t reckoned on my outstanding skill with horses.
There was no inn at Evisa, but there was a woman who served food to travelers at a collection of tables under the trees in the town square. Ambiades and Sophos were equally horrified at the lunch—wrinkled olives and hard cheese—but the bread was soft and good. The yogurt had enough garlic in it to kill every vampire in the country. I ended up eating almost everything. It was hard to be a picky eater in the lower city of Sounis and impossible in the king’s prison.
“I told you that they weren’t hungry,” I said to the magus. “I don’t know why you didn’t let me have all the meat pies.” As I spoke, he pulled the bowl filled with shriveled olives out of my hand.
“You’ll make yourself sick,” he said.
I snagged a few more from the bowl as it was carried away, but I let the rest go. He was right. If I tried to force much more into my stomach, it was going to revolt. I tottered away from the table to a patch of grass, where I lay down and went to sleep. It seemed like only a few minutes before Pol was nudging me in the ribs again with his foot.
“Get up.”
“Go away.”
“I’ll get you up,” he warned.
“I don’t want to get up. I want you to go away.”
After he’d made sure that I was thoroughly awake, I told him that I hoped he was bitten by something poisonous in the next bed he slept in. I dragged myself up on one of the tables and looked at Ambiades, who was standing with the horses. “Bring mine over here,” I said. “I’m not moving the table over there.”
But Ambiades was not going to move a step at the request of a worthless and insolent petty criminal. Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful.
For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but I wasn’t going to bow to him. Neither of us moved.
Pol and the magus went on studiously looking at the horse’s legs, leaving Ambiades and me to sort ourselves out. Ambiades had gotten himself into an intractable difficulty whether he knew it or not. He was bigger than I was, certainly, but he had to assume I would put up a vicious and potentially embarrassing fight if he tried to force me over to the horse. Sophos saved him, taking the horse’s reins and walking it over to the table.
Ambiades looked on in contempt, unaware, it seemed, that it was his dignity that Sophos had spared.
“Why didn’t you bring a cart?” I grumbled to the magus as we rode out of the town.
“A what?”
“A cart—you know, a large wooden box on wheels, pulled by horses.”
“Why would I have done that?” the magus asked, amused.
“So that I could be sleeping in the back of it right now.”
“I didn’t plan this trip with your comfort in mind,” he said sourly.
“Damn right.”
The horses ambled up the hills for another hour. The sun was setting when the magus finally grew disgusted and asked me if I thought I could stay on the horse’s back if it trotted.
“Probably not,” I told him honestly. By that time I was too tired to be optimistic.
“You’ll have to learn sooner or later. We’re not walking all the way. Ambiades,” he shouted, “ride back here and show him how to trot.” So Ambiades, who had gotten several hundred yards ahead of us, turned around and trotted his horse back.
“Nice seat.” Pol was just behind me, and I was a little surprised that he spoke without being spoken to first. The magus passed the compliment along to Ambiades, but he only scowled. He seemed as disgruntled by praise as he was by badgering.
“Now you, Sophos,” the magus called, and Sophos obeyed. Even I could see that he didn’t ride as well as Ambiades. I looked back at Pol to see what his opinion was. He winced.
The magus commiserated, “Too bad you can’t take Ambiades home to be duke and let me keep Sophos to be magus.”
“He’s going to be a duke?” I said, surprised. One didn’t usually find a future duke as an apprentice of anyone. I didn’t expect an answer, but Ambiades supplied one of a sort.
“If his father doesn’t strangle him first,” he said.
My lesson in horseback riding became a lesson for Sophos as well. The three of us fell back while Ambiades and the magus trotted ahead.
“Pol thinks you ride like a sack of loose rocks,” Ambiades told Sophos before he left. Sophos reddened, and Pol told Ambiades to get moving. A little later we heard pieces of a lecture the magus was giving him about plant classification and its importance. I tried to pay attention to both the lecture and the riding instructions but eventually gave up and listened to Pol.
He was explaining that the horse’s shoulder lifted not when the foot did but when the foot came down. “Now,” said Pol, “hold up your hand like this.” He held it up as if he were blessing the fields beside him. Sophos imitated him, and Pol smacked him hard in the palm with his fist. When Pol told him to hold the hand back up, he did, but he jerked it backward and Pol’s second blow barely touched him. It was a simple lesson that my father had taught me years ago. If you think you are going to be hit, at least try to move out of the way. My father taught it to me with the flat side of his sword.
Pol explained to Sophos, and incidentally to me, that if you are already rising when the horse’s shoulder bumps your backside, you have a more comfortable ride. So we tried trotting up the road, lifting our backsides just ahead of our horses’ rising shoulders and moving a little faster toward wherever we were going. Very soon I didn’t have the strength to lift myself out of the saddle, and my brains bounced in my head the rest of the day.
We walked the horses frequently to rest them and me, but I was nearly dead by nightfall, and I didn’t see much of the town where we stopped. It had an inn. We went in and I ate, and before I was full, I fell asleep on the table.
I woke up on the floor again, next to Pol’s bed, but this time Ambiades and Sophos were in the room as well, sharing the bed on the other side of me. I contemplated the undignified sort of figure I must have made as I was carried upstairs a second time and winced.
Pol was awake with the first clink of my chain, and I wondered if I could have slept the entire night without shifting. I may have. Or he’d woken often to check on me. When he saw that I was awake, he swung his feet out of the bed and nudged me aside in order to make room for them on the floor.
“Rouse yourselves,” he grunted to the two in the other bed.
Ambiades untangled himself from the sheets and crawled out of the bed. Yawning, he padded over to the chair where everyone else’s clothes were piled. I’d slept in mine. Sophos didn’t move. I sat up and looked over the edge of the bed. His eyelids could have been glued shut.
“Psst!” Ambiades hissed, but it was too late. Pol reached over me and woke Sophos as efficiently as he had woken me after lunch the day before, but at least Sophos landed on a soft bed. Once everyone was up, we all headed outdoors for the benchhouse and a bath at the pump. The sun was just rising over the hills, the sky was blue and clear, but the hollow in which the town sat was still dark. The water was cold, but I was the only one that complained. I warned Pol that if he tried to wash me again, I’d bite.
“He’s probably septic,” Ambiades warned, teasing me in a tone just a little more condescending than the one he used on Sophos.
Pol handed me a washcloth without a word and watched while I scrubbed the last of the prison dirt off my elbows and ankles and the back of my neck. The magus’s soap smelled of honeysuckle.
Inside the inn our breakfast waited: oatmeal and yogurt. There were no oranges this time. “What was the thumping this morning?” the magus asked Pol as we sat down. He was looking at me.
“That one,” the soldier answered, pointing at Sophos with his spoon, “would sleep through cannon fire. One morning he won’t wake up until someone spits him on a longspear.”
Sophos blushed.
“Sleeping lightly is a necessary virtue in a soldier,” the magus pointed out to him, “and it’s not a fault in anyone else.”
“So who wants to be a soldier?” Sophos grumbled at his oatmeal.
“Not me,” I said. Everyone else at the table looked at me in surprise, as if they had forgotten I could talk.
“Who asked you?” Ambiades sneered.
“He did, fuzz-lip.” I pointed with my spoon to Sophos while Ambiades’s hand leapt to his face.
He jerked it back down and asked, “What would scum from a gutter know about being a soldier?”
“I wouldn’t know, not being scum from a gutter. But my father is a soldier, and it’s a bloody, thankless, useless job for people who are too stupid and too ugly to do anything else.” Even if my father and I have come to appreciate each other a little more, I still don’t think much of his chosen profession, but I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it then. My capacity for tact sometimes surprises even myself.
There was a perfect silence at the table while all of us looked over at Pol to see what he would make of this insult to his intelligence as well as his manners. He remained impassive, but the magus told me that in the future I could ignore conversation that was not directed toward me and I should keep my mouth closed unless specifically addressed. I remembered that I had been brought along as a useful sort of tool and not a human being at all.
I ate my breakfast in silence. When the magus stood up and said, “We’d better get the horses ready,” I continued to stare at my empty oatmeal bowl until he cuffed me on the back of the head.
“What?” I said. “Were you specifically addressing me? I thought I was supposed to ignore those—”
“I have a riding crop packed in my saddlebags,” he said. “Would you like me to use it on you?” He was bending over me, and his voice was low. I am not sure that anyone else heard, but I understood him plainly. I threw one leg over the bench and stood up.
“Lead on,” I said.
Several extra packages were added to our baggage before we rode away from the inn. While Ambiades, Sophos, and I watched, Pol and the magus carefully arranged and rearranged the loads so that the horses would not be unevenly weighted. I wondered about Pol. He wasn’t a common foot soldier. Sophos and even Ambiades treated him with too much deference. The magus clearly liked and respected him, relying on him to enforce orders addressed to me. He’d probably be the one to use the riding crop if push came to shove.
As we left the town, it became clear why the magus hadn’t brought a cart. There was no road for it to travel on beyond this small nameless town, or nothing that a civilized person, used to the streets of a city, would call a road. The wagon track we’d been following since Evisa had been carefully maintained, its central grassy strip and its verges kept cropped by the goats of each small village we passed through. That route divided, turning east to head along the foothills, or west to intersect the main road that led to the pass through the Hephestial Mountains. We headed straight on the track that showed fewer signs of travel.
We passed a few more farms, and then the way narrowed even further to a skinny, overgrown path with high grass and scrubby oaks growing on either side, sometimes so close that pricking leaves caught at the fabric in my trousers.
The path climbed steeply in places. The horses worked hard. In single file they heaved themselves uphill with a constant clatter of small stones. I gripped the horse underneath as firmly as I could with my knees and worried about slipping off the back end of the saddle at every rise in the trail. I held on with both hands as well, but my arms were in no better shape than my legs, and by midmorning they shook with the strain.
“Hey, why don’t we stop for lunch?”
The magus looked at me in disgust, but when we reached the next open space, he directed his horse onto the grass, and mine obediently followed. I tried to convince it to move into the shade before I climbed down, but it stopped next to the magus’s horse and wouldn’t go on.
“Why doesn’t this damned horse go where I want it to?” I asked, exasperated.
“Stop jerking on the reins like that. It won’t move,” the magus told me.
“So I’ve found,” I said as I slid down. “It must like your horse more than I like you.”
Sophos heard me and laughed. “It’s a packhorse,” he explained. “It’s trained to stop next to its leader.”
“Really?” I looked at the horse beside me in surprise. “Are they that smart?”
“Smarter than you,” said Ambiades, coming up beside us.
“I never heard of a horse that could steal a king’s seal,” I pointed out with a smirk of my own.
“That’s what I meant,” said Ambiades.
“Why don’t you eat hot coals?” I walked over to where Pol was taking food out of the bag. I noticed Sophos staring after me.
“What?” I snapped at him, and he looked away.
Ambiades put the words in his mouth. “He wants to know if you really are stupid enough to bet a man that you could steal the king’s seal and then show it as proof the next day in a wineshop.”
It had been a professional risk, but there was no point in saying so. I turned my back on them both.
We had more bread and olives and cheese for lunch. When I wanted more, the magus said no. “I can’t be sure that we will have more provisions until we get through the mountains.”
I looked at the packages still tied to the horses. “You didn’t bring enough.”
“We should pick up a little more tonight. You won’t starve.”
“No, that’s true,” I said. “You can always give me some of Ambiades’s food.”
The magus gave me an ugly look. “You’ll get your share and nothing else. No one’s going hungry so that you can eat.”
“I don’t see why not,” I said as I lay down in the grass for a nap. It had dried in the summer sun to crackling stalks that poked me in the arms and neck. “I’m a lot more important than anyone else here,” I told the blue sky above me.
No one replied, and after a few minutes I fell asleep.