The Tracker (7 page)

“Would it be all right if I took a look at him?” Arden asked. The guards shrugged and he followed the twinkling paths to the barn. Silence was reigning over the grounds again as everyone went inside or back to their posts around the property.

Arden opened the door and slipped inside. Overhead lanterns along the corridor cast pools of yellow light on the floor. At the far end of the barn, a groom was brushing down a horse and speaking to her in a friendly singsong. The wagon had been unhitched and rested near the wall, the cage still within it but now empty. There was no sign of the tracker.

A beast like that would be able to escape a regular horse stall. Arden looked more keenly at the enclosures partially illuminated by the lanterns. The horses were in shadows except for one leaning his head over the top bar. Beyond that one were two enclosures with bars that ran up to the ceiling. Arden walked over and peered in. Within was tack, a large cat sleeping precariously upon a saddle.

“Help you, sir?” the groom asked.

Arden hadn’t heard him coming, or the horse he was leading. He turned and the groom’s eyes widened. “You’re that penchant fellow, am I right? Came today to see about the beast.”

“I would like to take a look at him,” Arden said. “Could you tell me where his stall is?”

The groom patted the mare’s neck and said, “I got to give her a good feeding and watering, but you can find his cage yourself. Just walk down that way where I was grooming and you’ll see him.”

“Thank you.”

“He won’t be happy to see you. He isn’t happy to see anyone, is he? He caused such a fuss and bother today that Arra said no food and water for him tonight. If he can be quiet, he’ll get it tomorrow. Best way to cope with him. He’s a bit of a mess at the moment, but don’t worry. We’ll scrub him up good and proper before we give him to you.” The groom led the mare on to an empty stall. “Come now, good girl. Some pebble in that shoe, huh?” The mare nickered at him.

Arden retraced his steps past the door and glanced into the stalls on either side. They held horses and ponies and tack. Some were empty and swept clean. He passed the horse he had ridden to Brazia and then his companions’ horses. They were sleeping.

All of the brushes and combs the groom had been using were tidily put away, but a bucket had gotten left out. Water was murky within it, bits of hay floating on the surface. A sloppy plate of food was beside it, holding a torn-off hunk of bread and cheese, and an apple with a large brown spot on the side.

Then Arden saw the tracker. Leaning against the bars of an enclosure far too small for him, he was a quiet and miserable sight in torn clothes. His feet were bare and his ankles shackled. A chain ran from the shackles and connected to the ones around his wrists. A lantern dropped its light on him, revealing lips cracked from dehydration, dirty skin and straggling hair, bruises and thinness. His eyes were closed.

If Arden hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was a human man in there. Unlike the mermaids with their fish tails, nothing about this beast was remotely animal. Cleaned up and put in better clothes, he would have looked like any workingman on the streets that Arden had traveled down all day.

The water and the plate of food had been left just beyond the creature’s reach to taunt him. Arden knelt down beside the cage for a better look. The ceiling was too low for the tracker to stand, and the bars of the floor were covered in the thinnest blanket of hay.

The tracker’s eyes opened and he gave Arden an angry look. Hardly believing that this beast had such a good grasp of human tongue, Arden said, “Would you like some water?”

Silence. Perhaps the animal could only swear. Arden leaned back to the bucket and drew up a brimming ladleful of water. He offered it to the tracker, whose eyes turned from angry to desperate. All of the energy from outside was gone; he was broken down now. Sliding over the bars to the end of the enclosure nearest to Arden, the tracker looked at the water in disgust. His voice came out raspy when he attempted to speak, and he cleared his throat. Still it was raspy when he tried again. “Would
you
drink out of that? A rusty old barn bucket that sits by a pile of horse clops? Water with hay and dust in it?”

“No,” Arden said.

“Then why are you offering it to me?”

Astounded at this beast, Arden said, “Can you drink from a cup?”

The tracker held up his hands, which were human-shaped, and displayed them in mockery. “Do you see a reason why I could not?”

The nearest tack room had only horses’ things. Arden would have to go back to the servants’ quarters or into the mansion to find a cup. The tracker sighed behind the bars. “And you’re another one I’ll have to do the thinking for. No, don’t bother getting a cup. But please, if you’re going to offer me water, pump some straight from the spout into the ladle. That bucket is an offense.” The tracker pointed to the nearby spout. Arden dumped out the dirty water and went to it to refill the ladle. He came back and lowered, a little water sluicing over the side to the hay. The tracker took the ladle from him and drank deeply. “More?” he asked when it was gone.

Arden gave him a second, and then a third and fourth and fifth. The tracker shook his head after that one, sated at last, and passed back the ladle. Drawing over the plate, Arden flicked a bug from the cheese and offered it. That was wolfed down, followed by the bread. The apple was a wizened, sour thing long past its prime. Chucking it into a stall, Arden found carrots in the tack space. He brought over a handful of the best ones.

“Careful,” warned the groom, halfway up the ladder to his bed in the loft. “He’ll try to convince you to let him out, or get too close and he’ll grab your neck through the bars and wring it.”

“Seen and not heard, boy,” said the tracker wearily. “Didn’t your Maw-Maw ever teach you that? Until you have something worth saying, keep your silly thoughts to yourself.”

Arden wasn’t worried. All he would have to do was override the tracker’s thoughts with his own. Sitting by the enclosure, he watched the beast-man consume the carrots. “If you’re waiting for a grateful lick to the hand,” the man said as he crunched on them, “then pull up some hay, because you’re going to be waiting a long time. If you’re waiting for a grateful lick to some other part of your person, then sorry to disappoint, but I don’t relinquish pleasure to my jailors lightly. Are you a new groom?”

“How have you come by such a command of language?” Arden asked, bypassing the question to one that interested him far more.

“How does anyone? How did you?”

“My mother.”

“Well, it might surprise you, but you’re not the only one in the world with a mother. I didn’t hatch from an egg.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“Arden.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two,” the tracker said. “If you don’t want a lick, are you waiting around for tricks? Should I stand on my head for you? Perform feats of mathematical prowess? Two and two is four. Ten less seven is three. If you get kicked fifteen times and I get kicked sixteen times, how fast will a boat travel down the River Shayle? You think that one is nonsense, but there actually is a sensible answer to it. But maybe you want a discussion of history or Loria-Odri border agreements. Can’t help you there. I’m limited to Cascades mountain matters, by and large. Know where those are? Past the High Reaches in the far northwest? We have little to do with downland folk and downland problems, and your damned Dagad has given you plenty of both. We don’t worship your Dagad. There’s no sense in giving thanks to someone who gives you nothing but troubles.”

The tracker breathed deeply and made a face. “You reek. Maybe the trick you want is a lesson on how to wash your arse after you push out a messy shuffle. It’s a complicated maneuver, I’ll give you that.” He yawned. “Later. Buck up, Arden, you’ll get it one day.”

“He’ll go on and on at you,” called the groom sleepily from above. “Telling stupid stories. Jokes with no answer. Singing. Screaming in the dead of night to wake me up.”

The tracker didn’t look like he was going to scream. He looked beaten and fatigued. His hands lay over his stomach protectively like the food and water inside might disappear.

This
was the creature due to be installed in the perindens after the princess was returned to the palace, and
this
was going to be a problem. People brought their young children to marvel at the beasts. They were not going to find a shrieking, swearing wild man marvelous. Unless Arden was to be stationed in the exhibit all through visiting hours, he wouldn’t be able to control what this beast said. Tolaman couldn’t spare him for so much time. The tracker’s food could be drugged to keep him placid and amenable to floods of staring faces, but that didn’t solve the problem of there being nothing very interesting about him except an ability that couldn’t be demonstrated in an enclosure. And the fact that he could talk . . . the abdication of the runaway princess was to be kept a secret, and he was perfectly capable of braying it at the top of his lungs!

Some of these problems were for later, but it was imperative that Arden speak to Master Maraudi tonight. The tracker had to be kept in the dark about the identity of the person he was to hunt, and they could not speak of it where he could overhear. Dear Dagad, he could sing it out from the bars of his cage behind Keth’s horse, and then it would be all over Odri in a day. They had to pretend to be chasing down someone else, someone who would spur no interest from passerby should the tracker yell about it.

And in the perindens . . . if he could not be controlled by Arden’s constant presence in the exhibit, if Arden’s skill wore out from overuse as it would with a highly intelligent creature, Tolaman would beat the tracker into submission. Yet those methods had clearly already been used on him, and it hadn’t served to dull his voice.

No, Tolaman wouldn’t do much of the beating. He would make Arden do it. Arden had to find a way to suggest to the first lead that the tracker be withdrawn from the exhibition branches and kept in a cage in a stock room. The kitchen, a back room, anywhere but out in public. But Tolaman would not heed the advice purely due to its source.

This was a mess, a disaster now and a disaster in the making, and to keep the tracker isolated in a stock room was cruel. There had to be a better solution than that. He was of near-human intelligence, likely capable of performing small tasks in animal care, doing some of what Mavic shirked. Yet he couldn’t be monitored every minute to prevent escape attempts, and he was violent.

This wasn’t at all what Arden had envisioned the tracker to be. It had been a most pleasant day, but this was a very unpleasant and overwhelming end. The size of the problems exceeded his abilities to find solutions, so he was going to knock on Master Maraudi’s door in the servants’ quarters until the man let him in and got to work on solving them.

“I’ve seen that look from somewhere,” the tracker mumbled sourly. “Where was it? I remember now. On the village idiot when I was a boy. Scratching his cock and balls and picking gold from his nose in the square, ten words in his hollow of a skull cavity, but even he didn’t stink of shuffle. Zamin usually has standards for his grooms. How did you come about? He must owe you or your family a very large debt.”

Arden was frantic to return to the servants’ quarters. He got to his feet and dropped the ladle back into the bucket. “Good night.”

“No,” the tracker said.

“No what?”

“I can’t bid you good night. Do I look like a prophet? How am I to know what kind of night you are going to have, good or bad? Are you a prophet? I doubt it. You can’t even wipe your arse. I’m not going to have a good night in here, so don’t tell me to try.
Stars light you home
. That’s what you say in the mountains. But I don’t want them to light you home. I hope you fall off that ladder and break your neck. Now, are you going to stare at me all night? I’d like to not sleep on these bars and filthy hay.”

Sleep
, Arden thought into his mind. With a creature this smart, Arden’s penchant wouldn’t be as long-lasting or as effective. Still, the tracker closed his eyes and turned his head away, and Arden hurried out of the barn.

****

In the morning, the tracker was hollering inside the barn as water splashed and guards yelled. The search party had a large, delicious breakfast in the servants’ dining room and then went out to the garden where Lord Zamin had just arrived home.

A fancy carriage was in the driveway, servants again removing packages and rolls of parchment and dashing around to obey the old man’s commands. He beckoned Master Maraudi to come to him. Dieter went to the barn to tack up the horses and reappeared by Keth and Arden only a minute later. “Lord Zamin’s grooms did it for us and put extra supplies in the packs. Cleaned the cobwebs from the cage, too, shined it up fine. Plenty nice, innit?”

“It is never that easy, squire,” Keth said quietly, even though Master Maraudi and Lord Zamin were speaking at a distance. “The king will now owe him a small favor for the use of his tracker, and another for his silence on this affair. The small favors will become much larger ones when the tracker is claimed from him to serve the needs of the Crown. Lord Zamin is the linchpin upon which trade between Odri and Isle Zayre turns, and he should not be antagonized.” Dieter said nothing more about niceness.