Lal said, “I will tell you where we are bound, and why you cannot come with us. We are on our way up into the mountains to seek out a wizard named Arshadin, who plagues our master with terrible hauntings and visions. When we have explained to him that this is an uncivil way to behave, we will return. In the meanwhile—”
“I can help you,” I broke in on her. “You will need someone to find water in the mountains, to search for paths where the horses can go, to carry packs when the beasts must be rested.” Each argument sounded weaker than the one before, but I plunged ahead anyway. “Someone to make your camp and keep it clean—someone who will wait forever where you tell him to wait. I know how to do these things. I have done them all my life.”
“Yes,” Lal said gently. “But we need you to do them at the inn. Listen to me, Rosseth,” for I had immediately started to protest again. “At this moment, Arshadin is hunting for our master. He is sitting in silence, closing his eyes and hunting for him, do you understand me? Our hope, if we cannot reason with him, is not to fight him— for he is a far greater wizard than we are warriors—but perhaps to divert him, to make him hunt us for a bit, while our master regains his own strength.” She paused, and then added, with a very small smile, “We do not yet know how we will do this.”
“Oh, we certainly do not,” Nyateneri mimicked her. “It took all our wit merely to persuade our master to let us go with his blessing—there was none left over for anything like a plan of action. Find mountain, find river, find wizard, do something.” He sighed and shook his head in mock despair. “It lacks a certain precision.”
Lal ignored him, taking my wrists in her hands. She said, “We need you to guard him while we are gone. It will help us greatly to know that he is safe and warm and not alone.” She would have said more, but I interrupted her, pulling my hands away.
“A nursemaid,” I said. “Be honest with me—I have that much claim on you. A nursemaid to a sick old man, that is all you need.” I am telling you what I said.
Nyateneri’s horse pushed past Lal’s, and Nyateneri gripped me between shoulder and neck with the same hand that had caressed me just there, after I had saved his life and my nose was bleeding. I stood up in my stirrups, prying at his fingers. He said very softly, “Boy. There is a world you do not know. In that world there are wizards and mages who could spread you and me on their morning toast before their eyes were quite open, and truly never realize that we weren’t last year’s ice-flower preserve. And among those vast beings, there is not one who would not cast aside every preoccupation, every pride, every loyalty, on the slightest chance of being allowed to sit by that sick old man’s bed. Think carefully about this, Rosseth, as you change his linen.”
Lal made him let go of my shoulder. I think he was so angry that he had forgotten he was holding me. But I was angry, too—I could not believe the rage that took me over then. As I have said, in those days a show of anger was the greatest luxury I dared imagine allowing myself, and at sixteen, the actual emotion seemed already as rare and unnatural in me as the display. I tried to keep from shaking with it as I answered Nyateneri. I said, “There is Lukassa, who refuses to let your master out of her sight. There is Tikat, who is never so far from Lukassa that he could not hear her call him, if she ever would. There is Marinesha, who knows more about sickness than all three of us put together. What can I do for the old man that they cannot?“
“I said it was a guard we needed,” Lal replied. “In the first place, you must keep Karsh from bothering him. We have paid in advance for the extra room, and for the extra cost of Marinesha bringing him his meals. Karsh has no reason to be anywhere near him. Can you see to that, Rosseth?”
I was slow to answer her, not because what she asked would require any special new skill of me—what had my life been so far but learning to manage Karsh?—but because I was still feeling deeply slighted, and particularly furious at Nyateneri, who seemed to take no notice of what he must have known. He said, “In the second place, Arshadin will certainly find our master here, and sooner rather than later. Whenever it happens, there will be danger to follow, such as your Gaff and Slasher has never known. Given the choice”—he paused—“given the choice, we would rather leave someone on watch whose courage and wit and resourcefulness we have observed for ourselves. No one can help us now as you can, if you will.”
To me then, it was the rawest, most contemptible flattery: surely as much an embarrassment to him as to me. I feel differently now. When I still said nothing, Lal took her turn again. “Rosseth, you must know this, too. Those men Nyateneri killed—there is a third. We think it was he who overcame Tikat outside our door. Without doubt, he will follow us into the mountains and trouble the inn not at all, but you must look out for him even so, as much as for any sign or sendings of Arshadin.” She took hold of my hand, but there was no cozening in her touch or her glance. She was not smiling when she asked, “Do you still believe that we are offering you nursemaid’s duty?”
At the inn, the kitchen door slammed loudly, heedless of sleeping guests. I knew that slam, and I knew that Karsh had come out into the cool mist to stand with his hands on his hips and peer around for me. It would be a moment yet before he started bawling my name. I looked back and forth from one to the other of them, these beautiful strangers who knew they could do what they wanted with me, having so quickly overturned and disjointed my life at The Gaff and Slasher that it might as well have been as much a dream as the song about Byrnarik Bay, where someone was going to take me once. There is no finding a dream again; good or bad, there’s no returning to a dream. I said to them, more carefully than I had ever said anything, “What I believe makes as much difference to you as whoever has my throat in his hands makes to me.” Then I got down from Tunzi’s back and walked him into the stable to unsaddle him. I did not turn, and I did not look up when I heard them finally riding away.
THE INNKEEPER
I watched him come toward me, exactly as I had watched him walk away that night when there were dead men all over the bathhouse. Sounds carry far and long on damp mornings here, and I could still hear the hoofbeats even after they had reached the main road. I said, “Wouldn’t take you along, heh?”
He answered nothing at all to that but, “I had to see to Tikat. I am sorry to be late. It was a bad night.”
“There’s naught in the least amiss with Tikat, and well you both know it,” I said. “Nothing wrong with anybody who can turn an addled gape and a tiny bruise on the neck into two full days’ eating at my expense. As for those women—ah, well, cheer up, keep at it. Bound to be a slave caravan or a bandit gang through here sometime soon, and you can run off with them. Steal a younger horse than Tunzi, though—he’d not make it past Hrakimakka’s orchard, if he got that far.” By this time, I was hitting him, or trying to: half-asleep, he was still all shrugs and sidesteps, catching blows on every part of his body that could possibly hurt me and not him. I don’t believe I ever landed one solid clout on that boy after he turned eight or so. I really don’t.
He kept mumbling, “I was not running away, I was not,” but I paid that no more attention than you’d have done. Who wouldn’t run from fat old Karsh and The Gaff and Slasher to follow two beautiful women adventurers away to the golden horizon? I hit him for thinking I’d believe anything different, and for not having the wit and the courtesy to imagine that I might have done the same myself. As well as he imagined he knew me.