Magic Steps (3 page)

Again the duke and his great-niece exchanged looks, the girl’s startled, the duke’s level. “Uncle,” said Lady Sandrilene, reaching for the duke’s reins.

He shook his head at her. “This is something that re quires my attention, my dear. You have a problem of your own to solve just now.”

She frowned up at him. “I suppose so, but—,” She looked at Pasco, then back at her great-uncle.

The duke leaned down to cup her cheek in one hand and spoke too quietly for Pasco to hear. She replied, her voice just as soft; he spoke again. At last—very reluc tantly, it seemed to Pasco—she nodded, and stood back. Immediately a man and a woman detached themselves from the squad of guards, moving their horses to stand by hers. They looked at Pasco, Osa, and Grandmother Netmender in a tough, memorizing way that Pasco knew very well. Hey seen it often enough on the faces of his own family: that habit of weighing people they’d met to decide who might be trouble, and who might not.

“Join me when you have concluded your business here, Sandry,” the duke told her.

To the messenger he said, “Come along.” He rode off, the boy and the squad of guards at his heels. A barrel-chested man who sported a sergeant’s twin yellow arrowheads on his sleeve caught Sandry’s eye and nodded to her before he followed the duke.”

Pasco watched them go, thinking of what he’d over heard, Murder at Rokat House was a serious matter. He crossed his fingers and flicked them at the departing riders, sending luck for Uncle Isman in their wake. He would need all the luck he could get, particularly once Summersea’s rich folk heard of the death of one of their own,.

Sandry looked at Pasco thoughtfully as her uncle rode off. There were no two ways about it—something would have to be done with this boy. Untrained magic broke out in uncontrollable ways and could do consider able damage. She’d had that lesson drummed into her head over the past four years. From the glow of magic she’d seen as Pasco danced, his power wasn’t such that it might flare up ‘without warning, but that could change at any moment.

Sandry was no stranger to the ways of charming, clever boys. This one would bolt the moment he thought he could do so without offending a noble, and he wouldn’t come back unless she did something to make him. Besides, she had the duke to think of. She did not want him putting his hard-won health in danger again, not on his first day outside Duke’s Citadel.

“Murder at Rokat House,” Pasco murmured. “That’s got a jagged edge to it.” How would Papa look into it? he wondered. Who might have done such a crime? There were all kinds of possibilities, as he knew from listening to the harriers in the family talk about their work. There were all sorts of angles to consider.

“How so?” asked Sandry. She needed to decide what she could do about the boy right at this moment and what she could put off to another, more convenient time.

“Only that Rokat House is the biggest importer of myrrh around the Pebbled Sea,”

Pasco explained, thinking aloud. Working it out as he’d been taught, he briefly forgot her nobility and her prettiness. “They’re from Bihan, but they’ve houses in every big port. That’s serious coin, and headaches for the harriers—,”

“Harriers?” she interrupted. “What does that mean?”

“Provost’s Guards are called harriers,” he told her, still trying to remember his lessons on crime. “For the brown leather and the blue shirts they wear. Folk say it’s a bit like some harrier hawks. And the watch-houses, in each district, they’re called coops.”

Sandry nodded, to show her understanding. This was an aspect of town life that she had never considered.

“Anyway, they got to get right to the case and catch who done Jamar. Killed him, that is. The other Rokats here in Summersea’ll be on his grace like pods on peas till the murderers gathered up. Begging your ladyship’s pardon.” He yawned, and excused himself again. “Not that you need worry. Like as not, they’ll have the killer in a cat’s whisker.”

Sandry looked at him, amused. “You sound very sure of that.”

Pasco shrugged. “Mostways, a murderers known to the one they killed—that’s what my kinfolk say. Family, a friend. It’s easy enough to track ‘em down.”

“So are you going to take up provost’s work, too?” Sandry inquired.

The boy grimaced. “Both sides of my family are in it. It’s not like I have a choice.”

“If you were a mage, you’d have a choice,” Sandry remarked slyly. If she could make learning magic attractive to him

Pasco shook his head, his face set. “Lady, you don’t know my family. The only kind of mage they’d want me to be is a harrier-mage, one that tracks blood back to the one that shed it. One that can lay a truth-spell on folk I never heard of no harrier mages dancing what they do. I never heard of no dancing mages, either, not ever”

Sandry fidgeted. She had to catch up to her uncle. Before she could do that, she had to make this boy understand what had happened to him and his need for study.

He didn’t seem very convinced. If she could prove he was a mage, though, he would have to give in. “Make a bargain with me,” she suggested.

“A bargain for what?” he asked warily.

“I’ll meet you here, tonight, when the boats come in,” she said. “If their catch is better than it’s been in the last month or so, will you agree to talk some more about magic?”

He shook his head. “And I’m telling you, lady, you’re plain mistook. I’ve got no magic.”

Sandry frowned. “You say the word like it’s a disease.”

He bowed. “Beg pardon, lady. I meant no disrespect.”

“Have we a bargain? We’ll meet here tonight, and we’ll see who has the right of it.” If he’d had any training, he would have felt her magic hooking into his.

With an invisible hand she teased out a strand of his power and pulled it to her, attaching it within herself. It was as fine as a single thread of silk, but with it in her grasp, she would always be able to find him. “Pasco, I want to catch up with my uncle,” she said tardy. “Have we a bargain?”

He nodded reluctantly.

Sandry mounted her horse once again. Her guards drew up beside her, looking down at Pasco with level brown eyes. “Until the boats come home, Pasco Acalon,”

Sandry told him.

Again he bowed deeply to her.

Sandry nodded to her escorts, and turned her mare back toward the city. Once they reached the road, she set off at a smart trot, hoping to find the duke before he got too involved in this murder.

Pasco watched her ride off, shaking his head. He had little experience with nobles or mages, but he’d never heard of those people behaving as she did. Was she even as pretty as he’d thought, or was it just her bearing, and her dress, and those lovely blue eyes?

He oughtn’t to meet her back here when the boats came in, Would a lady even know so commonplace a thing as the time a fishing fleet returned? If she didn’t see him that afternoon, she would forget this idea of him and magery. Everyone knew the nobility was flighty, ex cept for Duke Vedris.

Pasco looked around and found just Osa, napping be side his rowboat. Osa’s father had gone off fishing without paying for the dance.

So I’ll have to come anyway, to see if they still want to pay me, thought Pasco, wandering over to the sand where he’d danced. Dawn had. come: in the sunlight he could see the patterns made by his feet and the rope net.

Pasco grinned. Suddenly the idea of an Acalon who danced magic was as funny as anything, a joke and a half.

“I have it,” he told the air and a few seagulls that had landed to pick for clams as the tide went out. I’ll be a dancing harrier, only ‘stead of putting my hand on the lawbreakers, I’ll—I’ll dance ‘em into my coop!”

“Are you done being foolish?” Osa demanded, getting to his feet. “I’ve chores to do yet today. And don’t you have law and baton-fighting lessons?”

Pasco yelped, and ran to his friend. “No lessons till later,” he told Osa, helping the other boy to push the boat into the water. “But I promised Mama I’d help sort one of the storerooms this morning!”

They jumped into the boat as it floated free. Each of them took an oar this time, and began to row.

When Harbor Street filled up with gawkers a block from the scene of the murder, Sandry’s guards did not ask whether she wanted to push on or not. Like the other residents of Duke’s Citadel, Kwaben and Oama had learned weeks ago what happened when Sandry wished to join her uncle and was kept from doing so. They urged their mounts ahead of hers and began to open a path with their booted feet and with their horses. People com plained until they saw who barged through so rudely. Then they made room for the girl and her escort.

The four Provosts Guards at the door of Rokat House were less willing to help.

Their leader, whose sleeve bore a corporal’s single yellow arrowhead badge, was not impressed by Sandry’s rank. “It’s not a fit sight for a lady,” he said, his face expressionless.

Oama dismounted so she could speak quietly to the man, ” Corporal, think about this.”’ She was a straightfor ward young woman with bronze skin, a long, straight nose, and sharp brown eyes, who wore her black hair rolled and pinned tightly at the back of her head. Her skills as a Duke’s Guard and part of the elite Personal Guard were considerable: Sandry had watched her and her partner, Kwaben, at combat practice and had been impressed. “You don’t want to vex her,”

Oama continued. “Really.”

The corporal shook his head. “Captain Qais would boot me for it, and he’d be right.”

Now Kwaben dismounted to support his partner. He was over six feet tall, black as sable, and honed like an axe. His shaved head, combined with sharp cheekbones, lean cheeks, and wide-set eyes, made him look as sleek and deadly as a panther. He was as dangerous as he ap peared.

Sandry stayed on her mare. She would impress no one if she dismounted—the stubborn corporal was taller than she by a head. Instead she sorted through her magic until she found a particular cord. Shaped from her own power, it connected her to Duke Vedris.

“Uncle, ” she said clearly, feeling her voice roll down that magical tie, “I want to be let in, please.”

Everyone stared at her, even Kwaben and Oama. Onlookers in the crowd drew the gods-circle on their chests. The Provost’s Guards were made of sterner stuff.

Their hands stayed by their weapons.

Overhead, on the next story of the building, glass windows swung outward on hinges. The duke and a man with the same light brown skin, lean cheeks, and quirky eyebrows as Pasco leaned out.

“My dear, this is not the kind of thing a young girl should see,” called Vedris.

He could hear Sandry when she used the power she had bound to him, but without magic of his own he could not reply the same way.

Sandry looked up at him. He seemed tired, though she doubted anyone who did not know him well would guess that. He was also shaken, though that was some thing she felt rather than saw. “I’m no stranger to bad things, uncle. I really must insist.”

Kwaben and Oama traded looks. They had heard her say that only once, on the day of the duke’s heart attack, when his servants had tried to keep Sandry out of his room. After she had lost precious minutes in argument with them, she had finally insisted, in just that tone of voice. When they refused, every thread in the hall outside the duke’s rooms—from tapestries, carpets, and even the servants’ clothes—unraveled and came to life, cocooning them all. Sandry had gone to her uncle and had spent the rest of that day with the healers, keeping him alive with her magic until they could strengthen his heart. Kwaben and Oama had never forgotten it.

Now, leaning out of the second floor window, the duke grimaced. He knew that Sandry had seen things girls her age were supposed to be protected from: the bodies of hundreds, including her parents, rotting from plague; people dying in battle of human and magical causes; the survivors of fire, flood, and other disasters.

“Admit her,” the duke said to his uniformed compan ion. The man began to argue as they closed the windows.

Sandry waited and tried not to drum her fingers on her saddle horn.

After a couple of minutes, the man who had tried to argue with the duke yanked open the door and spoke quietly to the guards. They looked at him, startled, then parted. The man, who wore a captain’s pair of concentric yellow circles on his sleeve, waved Sandry in sharply.

She dismounted and passed her mare’s reins to Kwaben. “Stay with the horses,”

she told her guards. “I think the rest of Uncle’s escort are on that side street.” They nodded.

The provost’s captain stood aside as she walked into the building, then closed the door and lowered the thick oak bar that locked it. To her eyes door and bar gleamed with the pale traces of magic. So did the dimly lit hall that went to the rear of the building on this floor, and the narrow stair that reached the upper stories.

“Please reconsider, my lady,” the man told her gruffly. This is not an occasion for noble sightseers.”

Sandry met his eyes. “You are Captain Qais?” she inquired.

He bowed stiffly.

“I will not reconsider,” she said flatly. “My great-uncle has been ill. He tends to forget it, so I remember for him—and, it seems, for you. Where is he?”

“Upstairs, my lady.”

Turning her back on him, Sandry climbed. The gleam of spell-signs lit her way; none of the stair lamps were burning. Since the captain didn’t have her power to see magic, he missed the next step—they were uneven, to trick robbers into banging their toes just as he did. He cursed; when she looked back at him, he waved her on.

When she reached the top of the stairs, two hallways lay before her. One led to the rear of the building; the other cut across it. In the hall to her right, she saw only a flagstone floor, lamps in wall sconces, and closed doors. In the section to her left, the hall sported complexly pat terned silk carpets—spelled, like everything else she had seen, with magic to protect and confuse anyone who was not allowed there. The lamps on this side were set in polished brass fixtures and circled with precious glass. Two mahogany benches were placed here.

On them sat the three surly bodyguards who had attended Jamar Rokat earlier that morning, all in manacles. They looked confused, bewildered, and angry. Three Provost’s Guards stood over them, baton weapons in hand.