Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart (43 page)

No, eventually Queen Valora would receive a report that her ambassador and his party had been set upon by bandits—if possible the report would hint that these were ruffians out of Hawk Haven, a thing not unheard of this close to the border. All had been slain but for the baron's lady companion, and she was suffering from acute amnesia—doubtless brought on by shock and her own terrible injuries.

The beauty of the scheme was that Queen Valora would be in no position to publicly protest. To do so would be to risk that the Dragon Speaker would inform King Tedric of Hawk Haven and King Allister of the Pledge what cargo her messenger had carried.

These allied monarchs might well decide that Queen Valora's punishment for toying with sorcery would be a more permanent demotion than she had suffered at the close of King Allister's War. Even her closest relations would not dare openly support Queen Valora when they learned she had dared dabble in sorcery.

And New Kelvin? Grateful Peace's own home would be doubly safe—protected once by the artifacts they would then hold, protected twice by the fact that they alone of all the nations in the known world had never proclaimed a hypocritical aversion to sorcery. Everyone would fear that they possessed the knowledge and power to turn those artifacts against them.

Despite decades of intrigue on many levels, Grateful Peace was impressed by the intricate simplicity of the plan. Nor did he feel any particular guilt about betraying Queen Valora. He had no doubt she intended to double-cross New Kelvin—almost certainly as soon as Baron Endbrook had learned the nature of the enchanted artifacts. If not then, after she had settled the score with Bright Bay and Hawk Haven.

What
did
concern Peace was that the skeleton of this plan had come from one mind—that of Lady Melina Shield—and that she herself was at least temporarily safe from being herself put out of the way. She must suspect—if she didn't outright
know
—that the thaumaturges would not suffer her death until they had learned everything she knew about sorcery.

Peace wondered uneasily what other plans Lady Melina had in mind, what safeguards she had laid in place lest she be betrayed in turn.

T
he plum orchards that had given their name to the town were bare now, their tall compact forms stretching toward the sky like spiky fingers lightly clasped or perhaps the bones of a fan slightly extended. They surrounded the town on three sides, connected to it by firmly packed dirt roads that were cobbled from just outside the fringes of the town into the town proper.

The sudden transition against the flat, bare land gave the town something of a pretend look, reminding Waln of the doll cities his children constructed from wooden blocks and other odds and ends.

Most of the buildings in Plum Orchard proper were constructed with rock from the river. Some houses were made of smoothly worn cobbles, but a more popular choice seemed to be jagged rock broken into chunks about the size of a healthy pumpkin and roughly mortared together. The result was surprisingly attractive, the uneven edges catching the sunlight and giving it back flecked with mica or shining from various shades of quartz.

Not many of the buildings exceeded two stories—creating the impression that higher walls would have collapsed under the sheer weight of stone. The tallest was a guard tower near the river. From chatting with innkeepers along the way, Waln had learned that the tower commanded the crossing to New Kelvin and that no one used the ferry without paying their toll to the local government.

Plum Orchard was a Crown city, technically under the administration of Grand Duchess Rosene. The elderly grand duchess, however, preferred to spend her time in the capital city and collect her rents from a distance. When she died, the city would revert to the Crown. Had King Tedric had any surviving children, one of the next generation of grand dukes or duchesses would have been granted the right to collect the rents.

Idly, Baron Endbrook wondered to whom the Crown would give this plum. He grinned at his own joke, then soured, for he had no one with whom to share it. Lady Melina would not find a mere pun amusing and while Waln was willing to chat with Fox Driver as a means to fill those long hours on the road, he had learned in his days as a sailor of the danger when a hireling thought himself too much his employer's equal.

Waln tucked the joke away in memory so he could include it in his next letter to Oralia. He planned to post one from here before they crossed into New Kelvin. Lady Melina did not seem to notice Waln's daily epistolary efforts. She certainly never wrote to anyone—not to the son who now administered her estates, nor to any of her four daughters.

Their travel had spent the first part of the day. Obtaining travel permits and declaring their trade goods would take the rest. Waln settled Lady Melina in a midclass inn called the Rocky Pink, which had come well recommended by one of his casual gossips. To his disappointment, the establishment maintained a separate wing for female travelers and, when offered, Lady Melina accepted a room there.

The two-storied inn was made of rough stone in which rose quartz predominated, doubtless the reason for the establishment's name. Floral skeletons suggested that the garden might be planted to continue the theme. Now, like everything else, it was grey and brown.

After their trade goods had been assessed by a mildly interested customs officer, Fox Driver took their equipage to a livery stable—a local branch, Baron Endbrook noted, of the Carter enterprises that had been so dominant in Eagle's Nest.

Waln himself went to pay their fees and obtain permission to make the crossing. He had practiced hiding his Islander accent behind something more neutral and on eliminating the roll from his walk. He fancied he did well enough. The woman on duty, distracted by the quarreling of two young children in a back room, hardly gave him more than a passing glance.

The next morning, Waln and Driver loaded the wagon and horses onto the ferry without the slightest difficulty. Lady Melina assisted to the extent of leading her own dapple grey and carrying the bag with her precious books.

The ferryboat was attached to a cable running between towers on each shore. However, although much of the motive power for pulling the boat across was supplied from the other side, that didn't mean their boatmen didn't have anything to do.

Huge, burly men—no women as far as Waln could tell—they fended the craft off from the rocks using long, heavy poles and lots of heated language. Even here where the White Water was considered fordable, the currents were unpredictable, the foaming waters likely to hide boulders dislodged from higher up the river's course beneath their churning surface.

Waln suddenly understood the preponderance of stone as a building material throughout the town. It must be dredged out by the ton all year round and the first crossing after the spring floods had abated must be reserved for the bravest and most skilled—or at least for the most foolhardy. But enough of the town's prosperity rested upon this fragile crossing to make the risks worthwhile.

Although Waln was a skilled saltwater sailor, he found the splash and foam intimidating, arousing long-held fears of reefs and sandbars that could tear the bottom out of a ship with a deeper draft. But the ferry's bottom was as flat as an iron, and even loaded the vessel drew very little water. Its very size granted it a measure of stability, and the bargemen were very good. They knew themselves skilled and shared with their saltwater sailing fellows the cocky pride that comes from successfully defying the elements.

When they were put ashore on the other side, Lady Melina wanted to continue immediately to Dragon's Breath. Fox Driver didn't quite dare counter her directly, but he spoke to Baron Endbrook in a voice loud enough that the baron knew it was meant to carry.

"The horses are shaken, m'lord. If we hitch them up now one would be likely to do something foolish—and a sprain or the like would delay us far longer."

"Can we," Lady Melina inquired acidly, "buy other horses?"

"What the lady suggests would take as long," Fox replied, still addressing his remarks to Waln rather than to Lady Melina, "as what I'd suggest."

"And that is?" Waln asked, wishing he weren't caught in between Lady Melina's eagerness and the driver's sense of responsibility.

"Let these rest until noon," Fox said. Something in his tone said that he'd intended to suggest waiting until the next day, but that he didn't quite dare. "I'll take them where they can't hear the water so plain and walk the nerves out of them. Maybe give them a bit of hot mash—not enough to bring on colic, just enough to remind them that the world is filled with more pleasant things than raging waters.

"Horses," Fox added, "have too much imagination for their own good."

Waln didn't glance at Lady Melina as he gave Fox permission to do as he had suggested. He could no more insist that the horses be pushed on than he could insist that a ship sail with a cracked mast.

The baron toyed with the idea of insisting that they stay the night in town, but dismissed it. Lady Melina was not the only one eager to press on. Back on the Isles, Queen Valora was waiting for news and he doubted that his intermittent travel reports—mailed less frequently than his letters to Oralia, but still with dutiful regularity—would satisfy her.

Nothing would satisfy his queen but the news that the secrets contained in the three artifacts had been unlocked and that they were being returned to her, ready to arm her for her reconquest—or perhaps merely for her revenge.

W
ith one thing and another, Boar Moon had nearly passed into Owl Moon before the Kestrel party settled in at the Norwood estate. Had it not been for the charge laid upon her by the Royal Beasts, Firekeeper would not have minded the passage of time in the least.

For one thing, she finally got a chance to know her adoptive grandmother, Duchess Kestrel. Saedee Norwood was a nice enough woman, even if the edge of her tongue could be a bit sharp when she was displeased. However, she was canny, had been fond of hunting and woodcraft in her youth, and didn't believe in young people being idle. That meant she didn't try to keep Firekeeper from running wild. If anything, she encouraged it.

Another pleasant aspect of the trip was being reunited with Derian and Elise, neither of whom Firekeeper had spent much time with since King Allister's War had ended.

But even the wolf-woman's pleasure in her friends' company was troubled by the fact that not one of the wingéd folk had brought news regarding the whereabouts of Lady Melina and Baron Endbrook. Not even Elation's frequent scouting missions turned up any indication of where the pair might be, and Firekeeper came to accept that her prey might be lost to her—if not forever, then for longer than she'd like.

"I wish," she said to Blind Seer one afternoon shortly after their arrival at the Kestrel estate, "that birds howled. Then the crow or gull or whoever knows where those two have gone could howl us the news."

Blind Seer chewed at the edge of one forepaw pad in a philosophical manner.

"It might not do any good even if they could," he replied, "for to whom would they howl? If we howled, no Cousin could carry a complicated message. It must be the same for the wingéd folk."

"True," Firekeeper sighed, "but I cannot simply wait."

"Why not?" the wolf replied. "Waiting doesn't seem any more useless to me than chasing off after game that may not be where you seek it."

"We know," Firekeeper countered, "that they are going to New Kelvin."

"We think we know," the wolf said with slight emphasis on the word "think."

Firekeeper chewed at one knuckle in unconscious imitation of the wolf and his paw. She was still doing so when there was an interruption.

She and Blind Seer had been relaxing in a room the wolf-woman particularly liked—a southern-facing chamber walled along most of one side in panes of glass. The forest on the other side of this glass wall had been cleared away and a lawn—sheep-mowed in the warmer months—stretched in lazy green openness. The sun kept the room moderately warm. Old carpets were heaped deeply on the floor, perfect for sprawled sunbathing.

Norwood family legend said that the glass-paned wall had been built using a remnant of the old magic. Earl Kestrel, who had traveled some in his younger days, said that the New Kelvinese still possessed nonsorcerous means for building just such a room.

Never mind which story was true. The room was open, warmer than the outdoors, and shielded from the wind. Because the humans found it chill—it lacked a fireplace—Firekeeper and Blind Seer could escape the bustle of the house party without being precisely rude.

However, several people had learned the location of this favored refuge and one of these came strolling in at that moment.

Edlin Norwood, Earl Kestrel's son and heir apparent, was a tall, slender youth, a year or so Derian's elder. His face was angular—and rather surprisingly lacked the distinctive Kestrel nose. His features were topped with a cap of black curls, for he wore his hair unfashionably short, on the excuse that otherwise it pulled from its queue and got in his eyes. Those eyes—pale grey and very similar in shade to his father's—danced rather than brooded. All in all, Edlin Norwood was a young man who thought well of the world.

Although, past his majority, and therefore entitled to be called Lord Kestrel, Edlin was more usually styled Lord Edlin, as if he were yet a boy. For Firekeeper, who longed to prove herself a competent adult in either of her worlds, Edlin's permitting himself to be so addressed was a mystery.

Firekeeper had been introduced to .this new "brother"—along with the three other Kestrel children—immediately upon her arrival. Tait, the next in line, was a short, rather chunky lad of seventeen who was caught between a boy's build and a man's. Facially, Tait more resembled his father than not, though his hair was sandy rather than dark. Toward Firekeeper he had been distant, but not unkind.

The two girls, Lillis and Agneta, were still clearly uncomfortable with their newly adopted sister. They were not so uncomfortable that Agneta—age eight—had failed to inform Blysse with cheerful self-importance that although Blysse was the elder by seven years, Agneta was actually the "big" sister because Blysse's recent adoption made her the younger within the Kestrel birth order.