King of Assassins: The Elven Ways: Book Three (10 page)

“Y
OU LEFT HOSMER THERE? In the circle of fire? In the middle of plague?” Nutmeg’s face looked at her, shock-white, her eyes stricken.

“Yes.” Grace hung her head down, unable to look at her sister’s face any longer.

“How could you?” Nutmeg swung from one to the other.

“There was no choice. You have to understand that.”

Tolby clasped Sevryn’s shoulder in response. “I know that, lad, no need t’explain further. We have to accept what’s been done. Hosmer is a smart man. I’ve raised him to know how to deal with contamination, be it an orchard or a sick animal. He’ll make do.”

“He shouldn’t have to make do,” Lily said tightly. She would not look at either Rivergrace or Sevryn as she spoke, one of her hands twisting in her apron.

“It will be fine,” Tolby reassured her.

“You’re his sister,” Lily added, unrelenting, to Grace. “How could you leave him?”

Rivergrace’s mouth worked, but no words came out. She cleared her throat and tried again. “To protect Nutmeg. I have to keep her safe if I can. He was on the other side.”

Meg looked at her wildly. “Did I ask for protecting?”

Tolby stepped forward, his voice dropping. “That will be enough. From everyone. What’s done is done, and Hosmer is a man full grown. He’s a son of mine, and he will do the job he took on when he took th’ uniform of the City Guard. Settle that within yerselves, for I won’t hear another word on it. Understand?”

Lily turned sharply on her heel and left for the kitchen where the pans and crockery could be heard clashing upon the tables and shelves. Tolby grunted as the noise reached them.

Keldan tilted his head at his father. “They still have to leave.” He beckoned at Sevryn and Rivergrace. “But the streets to the gates are cut off.”

“Aye. Through the fields, I’m thinking.”

“Can we get out that way?”

Tolby’s eyes narrowed a bit in thought, and the corner of his mouth quirked as though he bit down on the stem of a pipe in rumination. “Mayhap,” he answered, finally. “Mayhap.”

Even that answer was a bit more certain than the actual probability, Sevryn thought, as he sat his horse and watched Keldan and Nutmeg at the edge of the vineyards, where the rock rose to meet the ground and the bases of the vines were old, gray, and gnarled, until they sprouted fresh green sprouts to join the framework meant to hold them as they grew. The perimeter of the vineyards, however, stood as a wild tangle of old, never trimmed or cropped vines, unproductive yet singularly determined to weave together, as high as one man standing upon another’s shoulders. Still, the barrier didn’t look insurmountable.

“You’ll not be getting through this way,” Nutmeg threw over her shoulder. She rode their stout little mountain pony stallion who had mellowed in his years in Calcort, it seemed, and only snorted in mild annoyance at being held to bridle and saddle at Nutmeg’s hands.

“And why not?”

“No one ever has. It’s been warded since even before th’ time of the Mageborns, is all we were told. Cannot your own eyes see?”

“I’m not that trained,” Rivergrace murmured. “I can see a kind of weaving, but that just may be the vines. I don’t think I could manipulate it. If it were water or fire . . .” She shrugged.

Sevryn ran a fingernail along the edge of his jaw in thought. He’d been trained by Gilgarran, but it didn’t come easily to him. Daravan’s taunt about thin blood echoed through him for a moment. He narrowed his eyes, glowering at the edge of the vineyard, and then he caught it. An immense, golden wire weaving that reached high enough to stave off even a catapult hit. Little things could get through: mice, bees, songbirds, but nothing of substance. The barrier stood as nothing a Vaelinar would make; he would tweak and bind together the natural threads of the earth, but this stood like an alien edifice, something smelted out of will and metal. He let out a whistle. “I can see why no one’s breached it yet.” His horse did a lazy turnabout, and Sevryn put the side of his boot flat into his side to halt him. “What makes you think we can get out this way?”

Keldan grinned, as he shadowed Nutmeg, and came around the end row of vines. “Because there’s a backdoor, a-course.”

“Naturally,” said Grace dryly as she pushed her horse past Sevryn.

He did not like backdoors. Traitors could make use of them. Keldan saluted his frown as if reading his mind, saying, “Not this one. You’ll be lucky to get your horses through it, and the only reason you’ll make it through is because you’ve magic of your own.”

“And you know this because?”

“We’ve been through the gate. Or Garner has, mostly. There’s an archway, more like a short cave, and it leads out to a wash above the river. He said it made his skin crawl, told us not to try it. Made it sound like we’d be skinned alive if we did.”

“Keldan,” warned Nutmeg.

“He did!” Keldan leaped onto his horse, which he rode without bridle or saddle, and wrapped one hand in the mane. Both tossed their heads at the same time. “Thisaway.”

Scowling, Nutmeg fell in behind him, and just shook her head at Grace when they traded looks. Sevryn brought up the rear, warily, making sure they had not been followed. He did not fear the Raymy breaking quarantine, but assassins were another matter. Having failed, they would be back. Not the Kobrir, but the others, he had little doubt. He’d had private words with Tolby. They could, and would, use the quarantine to mask Nutmeg’s comings and goings as much as they could, but there would be those who would come, by rooftop if they had to, past the City Guard. The only question in their minds was when. It would be best in any plan to do the deed before the child was born, because once there was a baby and its sex was known, its death had to be suspect. Someone would always try to put forth a half-Dweller, half-Vaelinar heir, valid or not. That’s how fortunes were made in the shadows. No, it would be better by far for Tressandre’s plans to have mother and unborn child indisputably dead. Tolby had told him as much, and Sevryn uncomfortably agreed with him. Impetuous Nutmeg had not thought of those consequences, of any of them, really, except the immutable condition of love.

The line of horses and ponies came to a halt again, downslope, where the vines were a bit sheltered from the wind, and tangled a little less as they put forth their greenery, spindly and yet lusciously colored, to reach the fork-like frames which would hold them and guide the runners. Sevryn stretched in his stirrups, looking back yet again. Tendrils of the vineyard curled verdantly from their posts, masking trespassers.

Keldan slipped to the ground, twisted the ear of his mount, and spoke a hushed word or two. When he stepped away, the horse relaxed into a stand, disinclined to wander off despite there being no hold upon him.

“The man’s a witch,” he said aside to Grace.

“There are a few among the Kernan. He’s always had a way with animals, especially horses. Didn’t you tell me your mother had a touch of witchery in her?”

“Supposedly she was a weather woman, but that was long enough ago that I find it difficult to remember. I don’t have any of it in me.”

She reached out, her hand brushing his knee in apology, but she said nothing as if knowing that her words might sting even more. They were opposites, he and Grace. Her mother had sacrificed herself to save her child. His mother had sacrificed her child to save herself. Or, with as little information as he had about what had actually happened in his past, so it seemed.

Nutmeg dismounted from her pony carefully, taking a moment to steady herself. She saw Grace watching her and flashed a grin. “Mom and I rigged a sling this morning. Holds the baby’s weight a bit for me, but I won’t be runnin’ anywhere today.”

“You shouldn’t even be here.”

Meg winked at Rivergrace’s scolding tone. “And miss my last chance to say good-bye for a while? What kind of a sister do you think I am?”

“Right now, I’d say it was obvious.”

“That would be the truth!” Laughing, she held her hand up for Grace’s as Grace swung down and, leaning on each other, they followed Keldan over the rocky slope to a bowl-shaped depression. Sevryn kicked pebbles aside as he trailed behind.

“Too rocky here even for vines.”

“Dad always says that it’s good to force the vines, to parch them a bit. Gives them flavor. Says a born-to-it vine-man would curse an over-wet spring, brings fungus to the grapes.”

“So last year wouldn’t hurt the crop.”

“Supposedly not.” Meg paused a moment, to tweak her hair back in place, her curls as recalcitrant as always. She wrinkled her nose at Rivergrace. “Do you suppose—?”

“Probably just as bad. Jeredon had wavy hair himself, you remember.”

Sevryn stopped behind them. “What?”

Grinning, both women looked to him. “We were wondering if the baby would have curly hair. Both at the same time, it seems.”

“Ah.” He hadn’t wondered that, although he had wondered if he would recognize his friend’s tall and slender grace in the child, broad shoulders if a boy and wide eyes if a girl. What of Jeredon would remain? Wavy hair seemed as likely as not. He looked ahead, realizing that Keldan had disappeared. “And where would our horse witch be?”

“Right here.” Keldan stepped sideways out of a boulder, or so it appeared. Sevryn craned his neck a bit as he walked around to see a natural wall of rock jutting out and switching back, a zigzag of an entrance to what appeared to be a cave. A rock-blocked cave. Behind him, he could feel a twitch as Rivergrace shuddered. She did not like closed-in places, for all that the two of them had had their adventures in them. He didn’t worry about her; she’d soldier through. She would be fearless for him, but he could not be for her. The handcuffs he kept secreted in his waistband, now wrapped in a cloth to stop them from burning his skin, the cuffs meant for her, he would fear a thousand years and more until he could find a way to permanently keep them from her. For the moment, it meant getting away from Calcort and then getting his true bearings. He put his hand up to the fallen rocks, seeing if he could put his fingers into the small crevices, worry at them, tumble one or two out of place, breaking the wall down. His touch met a different reality than his vision did: one of solid masonry, not a rockfall. He tried to look at it, at the way of it, but his gaze slid off it unfailingly, again and again.

“Grace. Come have a look at this.”

“Nutmeg says it’s a door, of sorts.”

“Mayhap. Difficult to tell. Look at it with your eyes and tell me what you see.”

He stepped back a pace to make room for her, could hear Nutmeg’s lusty breathing at his elbow. Her body heat radiated about her, warming his arm as well. “Are you all right, Meg?”

“A-course. Just feeling it, a bit.” She gulped down a breath or two. “Be fine in a twitch. Don’t fret at me, it’s bad enough having strangers on the street gawk at me like I should have my belly in a wheelbarrow.”

“That,” said Keldan slowly, “might be an idea.”

Out of breath as she was, her hand flew out fast enough to clip her brother in the ear, bringing a sharp “Ow!” out of him. “My body might be dragging a bit but not my reach or my hearing!”

Grace smothered a laugh as she positioned herself beside the shaded rock. Here, behind the wall of a true rock, and heavily shaded from the afternoon sun, rested the blockage. She put her hand up, palm out, not quite touching. “A door, indeed. Hard to see, but I can. It keeps trying to slip away, as though it’s been greased, but I can catch sight of it well enough.”

“Well enough to what?”

She glanced over her shoulder to Sevryn. “To see it. To see the lock on it. It’s been etched by fire.”

“Can you tell the making of the door? Is it one of ours, or Mageborn, or hedge witch?”

Rivergrace shifted her weight from one foot to another as she considered the object. “That, I couldn’t say.”

Meg ducked her head under her sister’s elbow. “That’s a blacksmith lock on it, and it ought to have tumblers in it, three in all. I’d say any street thief could pop it off, wouldn’t you?”

Keldan, Grace, and Sevryn all looked at her.

“Well, it’s obvious, is it not?”

“That’s just the point. It isn’t obvious, not to any of us. It’s not even
visible
.”