It was turning into a pleasant day. Recalling that she had promised to go with Galerio to the horse market that afternoon, Julia was glad the weather had cleared. Or perhaps the weather controllers had cleared it.
She considered what to ask Wicket, and decided on the least suspicious of her questions: “What kind of work do you do?”
“Odd jobs, mostly. Farm work, you know.”
Julia reached over and turned his right hand palm up. It was an agile hand, not soft, but certainly not the calloused hand of a workman. “Wicket, there’s never any use lying to a Reader, even if to preserve your privacy she is not Reading your thoughts.” She took his hand between both of hers, finding small calluses on several fingers and a place on the palm that he would use to apply pressure to the end of some tool, perhaps an awl.
“You work with your hands,” she told him, “with tools or instruments. Harnessmaker, maybe, or jeweler.
Weaponsmaker, possibly.”
Wicket’s bright brown eyes widened. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Thirteen.’
“How could you know all that, with so little experience of life?”
“Wicket… didn’t you know it at thirteen?”
“Well, yeah-but I didn’t grow up in an Academy, did I?”
“Neither did I,” Julia told him.
“Oh, right,” he said. “You’re a savage. You’d’ve grown up hiding the feet that you could Read-or you wouldn’t’ve grown up at all.” He shrugged. “I’m a locksmith. Lost me trade when all the Adepts flooded into the Aventine lands-a lock’s not much use, is it, when there’s all these folk around can open it with one twist of their minds.”
“And what have you been doing since?” Julia asked, quelling the suspicion that Wicket had picked far more locks than he had ever installed.
“Bit o’ this, bit o’ that. Pyrrhus and I do mostly bodyguarding.”
“Bodyguarding?” she asked increduously.
“You haven’t seen Pyrrhus in action,” Wicket explained. “Best swordsman I’ve ever seen, and he can shoot an arrow, throw a knife, a spear-a rock, if that’s all that’s handy-and never miss. An’ I guess I just come along as part of the package,” he added with a shrug.
Julia guessed that Wicket had other talents he wasn’t mentioning. “How did you two meet?” she asked.
“He saved my life.”
“How?” Julia asked when she realized he intended to stop there.
He peered at her again, those guileless brown eyes suddenly shrewd. “How come you get to ask all the questions?”
“What do you want to know?” Julia replied.
“Did you know Portia?”
“Yes, I knew her-and yes, she is really dead. There can be no mistake about it. I was in the rapport that killed her, too, Wicket-and my Reading powers were unimpaired.”
“I want to know about her anyway,” said Wicket. “Will you tell me, if I tell you about Pyrrhus and me?”
“Ill tell you what I know,” Julia agreed. “But first tell me how Pyrrhus came to save your life.”
“It was after the fall of the Empire,” said Wicket. “As I said, I’d pretty much lost me trade, so I took whatever work I could get. There was this rich lady, a senator’s widow, who wanted a cask of jewels transported to her country villa. She thought it’d be safer than in the city. I took on the task.”
“A senator’s widow trusted you with her jewels?”
“Why not?” Wicket asked with a look of insulted innocence. “I’d worked for her husband, installed the locks in their homes. I warned her, with all the Adepts spillin’ down into Tiberium, those locks weren’t safe anymore.”
“I see,” said Julia. You frightened her into letting you take her jewels. “But why hire you instead of armed guards?”
Wicket might not be a Reader, but Julia was sure he knew she was interpreting what he said through her experiences as a child in the streets of Zendi.
“A coupla minor Adepts could take out armed guards, and what were they armed for if they weren’t carryin’ somethin’ valuable? So it was safer for one person, lookin’ not worth robbin’,‘t’smuggle the jewels over the roads.
“Only an hour outside the city gates, I was set upon by brigands,” Wicket continued. “Dunno how they guessed I was carryin’ a treasure-nless one of em was a Reader. Disguised as city guardsmen, they were, chargin’ me with theft. They took and tied me to a tree, and broke open the casket. And then they started torturin’ me.”
“Torturing you?” Julia asked. “Why?”
” ‘Cause when they smashed it open, the casket had just a layer of gold an’ jewels across the top, y’see.
The rest was filled with rocks. The minute I saw that, I realized the lady was testing me, as it were-an’
after all, I couldn’t blame her, now could I?”
“Oh, no,” Julia agreed, “you couldn’t blame her.”
“But the thieves insisted I’d stolen the rest of the jewels and hid em, and they were gonna make me tell
‘em where. I kept askin’ ‘era to take me back to the city to ask the lady ‘erself- that’s how I knew they weren’t really city guards.
“Finally,” Wicket continued, “the head torturer took ‘is dagger, and threatened to put my eyes out if I didn’t tell. But I couldn’t tell, because I hadn’t stolen any jewels. He didn’t believe me-but I believed him.”
Wicket was sweating at the memory. “I thought his ugly face was the last thing I’d ever see. But then all of a sudden he fell-with an arrow stickin’ out of his back!”
“Pyrrhus,” said Julia.
“Pyrrhus,” Wicket agreed with a nod. Then, a look of shocked awareness crossed his face. “By the gods, now I know why he saved me. It was that they were going to put my eyes out.”
Wicket covered his face with his hands for a moment, then drew a shuddering breath and let them fall again, gathering control. “Afore they could run, four more arrows took the rest of em, and then Pyrrhus came out of the forest.
“Y’understand, I still didn’t know if I was gonna be killed. It was only one man, but he’d taken out five.
He pocketed the jewels that were there, and then came over to me. You’ve seen how cold his eyes can be. I thought sure I was in for more torture-but he just asked me, ‘Will you go back to the lady with me, and the surviving treasure? Or were you lying?’
“I told him I wasn’t lying. We went back to the lady, told her what had happened-and almost got arrested.
“Turned out her maid had-uh, tried to protect her, she claimed. ‘Twas Pyrrhus figured that out, too-saved me again, from prison or worse.
“The lady apologized all over the place for accusing me, gave me a reward for my trouble, gave Pyrrhus a reward for saving my life and the jewels I had been carrying, and then she hired the two of us to take the treasure to her estate.”
“And you did it?”
Again the look of offended innocence. “Of course we did! D’you think we’d rob a widow?”
No- widows and orphans were considered out of bounds by the thieves and cheats I grew up among, too, Julia conceded. But what she said aloud was, “You and Pyrrhus have been together ever since.”
“Yes.”
“And you never found out anything about his background?”
“He was never very communicative on the subject.” Wicket sighed. “Obviously he was used to schedules and discipline, and he talks educated. I figured younger son of a wealthy family, sent into the military. I always assumed he was a deserter from the army-lot of those, you know, after the Battle of the Bog.”
“Battle of the-?” Julia giggled. “Oh, it was funny,” she said, “when we created that quicksand to trap the Aventine army.”
“Yeah, but not to them,” said Wicket. “You defeat people in battle, outnumber them, outfight them-what’s left will hang together, ready to fight again to the last breath. But you make fools of ‘em, you get a whole army vowing vengeance. But there’s no more unity, ‘cause they don’t trust officers that let them be made fools of.”