“Hey!” snarled the cook, the innkeeper’s younger sister. “I didn’t tell you you could go!”
Cooking for an inn was a hot, brutal job at the best of times, and the huge influx of guests had made it worse. Ilna didn’t suppose the woman’s temper had ever been good, however.
“No,” Ilna said. “I told you I was going, back to my bed in the stable for some rest before the ceremony tonight. I’ve done enough work this day for a week’s keep, as you know well.”
Thoughtfully she took one of the round loaves of bread which the baker’s boy had just delivered. Ilna had been snacking throughout the day’s labor, but she didn’t know how Alecto was making out in the stables.
Besides, the loaf would be a handy thing to have if she and the wild girl needed to flee.
The cook opened her mouth to snarl but thought better of it. Normally she’d have bullied a girl like Ilna without mercy, but the slim stranger had an air about her that the cook didn’t care to push. Instead she said, “If you see Arris, tell him to get his lazy butt in here.”
The kitchen was a separate structure at the back of the inn yard, built of stone with a tile roof. The main building, two full stories and a dormer, was half-timbered under shingles, because there wasn’t as much risk of fire. Ilna and Alecto were to lodge in the stable loft in return for their labor, though the cook had seemed willing enough to keep Ilna at work till daybreak.
The inn yard was full of coaches, their tongues lifted against the walls to make as much room as possible. The drivers and some of the passengers slept in the vehicles, but all ate food prepared in the inn’s kitchen.
The cook’s cousin, the ostler, had been glad to hire Alecto. Space for animals in Donelle was as tight as that for humans: a touch and a murmur from the wild girl had calmed a pair of horses restive at being squeezed into the same stall. One beast knowing another, Ilna had thought; but whatever the reason, Alecto’s skill with animals was remarkable.
“Hey, girl, have a drink with us?” a man called from the group clustered against the oven in the yard for warmth on a cool evening.
Ilna ignored the comment, picking her way between wagons parked so that the wheels nearly interlocked. The man let it drop. Despite Donelle’s crowded conditions, there was very little disorder—and less fun. The men packing the inn yard acted like castaways from a shipwreck, not the boisterous, cheerful strangers who filled Barca’s Hamlet during the Sheep Fair.
Though the stable door was open, an overflow of horses kept the interior much warmer than the night outside. The animals whickered and occasionally made timbers creak by leaning against the sides of their stalls, but overall Ilna got a feeling of peace when she entered.
The door of the small office and tack room was closed. Snores through the panel proved the ostler was present and undisturbed. Unexpectedly, the light of an oil lamp wavered from the half-loft where Ilna and Alecto were to sleep.
“Alecto?” Ilna called. She didn’t speak loudly, afraid to rouse either the horses or the ostler. He wouldn’t be pleased to see an open flame in his hayloft; Ilna wasn’t happy with her companion’s idiocy either. Didn’t the folk of Hartrag’s village know that dried grass burns?
There wasn’t an answer, but Ilna heard the rhythms of a voice chanting. Face set, she took the cords out of her sleeve and began knotting them as she climbed the simple ladder pegged to the stable wall.
The lamp hung from a truss in a loose web made from a bridle and a cord twisted from rye straw. Alecto had placed it so that it gave her the angle she wanted both on the figure she’d scribed on the wooden floor and the blade of the athame she used to reflect the gleam into the eyes of the man clumsily undressing before her.
Alecto was nude. Sweat from wizardry and the stables’ warmth dripped down the valley between her breasts. She continued to chant, giving no sign that she saw or cared about Ilna’s presence.
She’ll run to fat in a few years! Ilna thought. And perhaps she would, but for the time being Alecto’s body had a muscular lushness that Ilna could only envy.
The man was Lord Congin, the fellow they’d stopped on his way into the city. He’d given Alecto a look of disgust when he came out from under the spell she’d cast on him. Apparently she’d taken that as a challenge.
Ilna understood the wild girl’s reaction. She’d have felt the same way under similar circumstances, not that the circumstances could possibly ever be similar.
“Let him go!” Ilna said. Seeing Alecto do this brought back memory of the lives Ilna os-Kenset had destroyed in Erdin in that way, using the skill a demon had taught her in Hell.
The lithe, sweating wild woman stopped chanting and looked at Ilna past Lord Congin’s arm. She smiled, breathing hard. “Get your own, girl!” she said. “Or wait till I’m done with this one.”
“No,” said Ilna. She stepped forward, her hands forming a hollow before her. “Take however many men you want, but I won’t let you use your art to do it.”
Alecto laughed like a cat wailing. “Fool!” she said. “How will you stop me?” She shifted the athame, sending the lamp’s reflection across Ilna’s face.
Bronze walls clanged around Ilna’s mind. Every surface mirrored Alecto’s cruelly laughing face. The walls slid closer, squeezing down on Ilna’s selfhood.
She’d expected that from the wild girl, that or worse. Ilna no longer had conscious control of her actions, but her fingers were free. They opened, displaying to Alecto the pattern they’d knotted as Ilna climbed the stairs.
Ilna heard the scream. She tried to open her eyes and found they were already open, peering through a dissolving bronze haze.
Alecto’s dagger clattered to the loft’s plank floor. She pawed at her groin with both hands, shrieking, “What did you do? I’ve grown shut! I’m not a woman!”
“What?” bellowed Lord Congin. “Where am—what’s going on here?”
He tried to walk and tripped over the linen breeches he’d been taking off when the power of the spell left him. His arms flailed. Only Ilna’s quick grab kept Congin from knocking the lamp into the hay still baled around them.
“You—” Alecto cried.
Ilna slapped her, and said, “Be silent!”
Alecto flopped back. Her eyes were open, but she said nothing. She seemed stunned; not so much by the blow as by realizing that Ilna’s power had easily overmastered hers.
“Get your clothes on and get out,” Ilna to Lord Congin. “No, on second thought, get out and take your clothes with you. Now!”
The half-dressed noble gaped at her, then stumbled to the ladder with his breeches and outer tunic dragging behind him. Ilna thought he was going to plunge headfirst to the stable floor, but he managed to get his feet under him after all. Small loss if he had broken his neck, of course.
“As for you,” she said to Alecto, “you’ll be all right. Listen to what I say next time.”
“You said you weren’t a wizard,” the wild girl whispered. She pressed the back of her hand against her cheek where Ilna had slapped her.
“I said you’re not to use your art for that purpose,” Ilna snapped.
She was breathing hard and her right hand stung. Her fingers picked apart the knots of the pattern she held in her left hand. Her eyes held Alecto’s; neither spoke.
“The moon’ll be up soon,” Ilna said at last. “We’ll watch where the leaders, the priests, go when they leave the temple tonight.”
“You said you weren’t a wizard…” Alecto repeated, but her whisper was little more than the movement of her swollen lips.
Garric waited, smiling faintly and controlling his breathing in order to keep the other bandits calm. A cousin of Hame’s was a watchman for this district of Durassa. He’d provided a key to this vacant shop and made sure he was nowhere around when the gang arrived after dark.