When they stopped to check the last cache of torch materials, she said, “There haven’t been pirates up the river since well after the Cataclysm. All this looks a little more recent than that.”
“It is, but only the shoring up and the widening. The tunnels themselves are as old as I say. Before the elven kingdom finally fell, Qui’thonas used them to get elves into the city when it was too dangerous to make a clear run from the river into Haven. A back door, if you will.”
“How? These don’t connect to the river on the Qualinesti side, do they?”
“They don’t. I hear it wasn’t the favorite route—right through Darken Wood. It got harder and harder at the end. More elves died than were saved. But if they made it, they ran north to Haven through the woods, vanished into caves in the hills, or scrambled through those and to the riverside. If they got that far and safely across the river after that, they dashed for the tunnels and came up behind Haven’s walls.” He shrugged. “And then the elves stopped coming.”
Madoc pointed ahead to a place where the tunnel narrowed. “Up ahead is the way out. Not to the river,” he said, answering her questioning look. “That’s down the west arm of the last intersection.” He doused his torch and, reluctantly, she did the same. “Come with me.”
In the dark, with only Madoc’s after-image lingering, Dezra felt familiar distrust crowding in. He’d been forthcoming, careful not to do or say anything to arouse the distrust. Still, she felt it. If Madoc knew that, he gave no indication. She followed as he went a few strides farther then stopped. He took her hand and put it against the rough wooden leg of a ladder. When Dez craned her neck to see up, she had the sense that wood covered the opening.
“Where?” she asked, instinctively whispering now.
He moved her aside, took to the ladder and slowly lifted the hatch. He gestured, she followed, and the feeble illumination of stars and a sinking moon seemed bright to Dezra as she lifted herself out of the hatch. They stood in a small thicket of conifers of the long-needled kind that didn’t grow naturally in this part of Abanasinia. These had been planted for someone’s pleasure many years ago. They made a screen around the tunnel entrance, thick and dense.
The boom of bullfrogs sounded like thunder, the shrill of peepers like screaming. Dezra smelled the water of a pond nearby, muddy after the rain. She looked around for bearings and caught them at once. Across the road she saw the back of the Ivy. In a high window, light burned in Usha’s new studio. A week ago, Usha had counted her savings and decided she’d be able to pay her debts in the city, pay rent in advance for the room she and Dez had been sharing, and pay for the room across the hall. The decision made, it didn’t take long to carry out. With Rusty’s help and Dezra’s, Usha had trundled her easel and paints, her canvasses and sketches and all the rest across to a much larger space, a room that served as her studio with an alcove for her bed. At this hour, she wouldn’t be painting in such uncertain light, but she might well be writing, reading, or immersed in the play and pattern of light and shadow, dreaming half-dreams and thinking about the work to hand.
One dash across the road would put Dez at the inn’s back door. She turned to say something to Madoc. Swift, he pulled her back into the pines, his hand over her mouth. Instinctively, she twisted away from him. He held harder and pointed out to the road.
Three knights walked by. Lightly armored but well-armed, they made little noise as they went, only the sound of their voices and coarse laughter could be heard.
Madoc waited till they were well gone, then let Dez go.
“Do you see, now, Dezra Majere?” His voice grew cold. “This is why Aline needs me. Sir Radulf changed the timing of that watch only this evening, and he added a man to it. No one who isn’t a knight knew it but me. It’s a safe bet I will know where the watch is every day, in every corner of the city.”
Suspicion flared, and Dezra said, “It’s how you know that troubles me.”
Madoc’s eyes glittered, hard as stone. His expression was no longer congenial. “I know, but telling you how will compromise more people than you or Aline. You say I have no allegiance. You’re wrong. But you don’t know where all my loyalties lie, and there’s no reason for me to tell you. Aline can live with that. Can you?”
Dez made a choice. “I can, and I hope Aline and everyone else won’t die of it.”
He looked up the road and down again. All was quiet. “You’ll have to take the chance.”
“You, too,” Dez said. “If I even think you’re going to be a danger to Aline or to Usha ...” Her hand moved swiftly, the knife flashed from her boot sheath. “You’re a dead man.”
Madoc shrugged as though to say she’d spoken the obvious. “But for now, we work together.”
“For now.”
Dezra dashed across the road and slipped through the shadows and across the garden behind the inn. Not surprisingly, she found the kitchen door bolted. It wouldn’t be opened again until Bertie the cook’s boy roused himself to go out and see if there would be a delivery of produce from the market or whether he’d have to dig around in the kitchen garden. It could go one way or the other. Sometimes the knights confiscated cartloads of produce from the outlying farms, and sometimes they didn’t. When they came back lacking, rumor said it was because farmers were hoarding, secreting their fruit and vegetables in root cellars and caves. It was the kind of thing that put Dez in two minds. Good for the farmers if they were cheating the knights. Too bad for Haven, which would go hungry soon if food stopped coming in.
For now, however, what the knights took, they dropped off at the market, loading the carts of those who could pay good steel coin and ignoring those who couldn’t. Distribution they left up to the carters, for now. Bertie had a kinsman of some degree or another in the carting business with whom he was on good terms. The Ivy was making out well, so far.
Still, we’ll have to do something about a better way inside than waiting for Bertie, Dez thought as she settled down in the fragrant shadows of a honeysuckle hedge to wait for night to end.
10
Usha sat in the cushioned window seat, the city quiet behind her. It was as though all the world was sleeping, and she was a solitary island of wakefulness. She felt so until she turned and looked out the window. Old Keep, high on the hill, blazed with light. Sir Radulf Eigerson was said to seldom sleep; Lady Mearah—said rumor—never did. Usha imagined them pacing the corridor of the place, issuing curt, cold orders to knights and soldiers. A chill slipped down her neck and slid along her spine. How easy must have been the order for a hanging? She remembered Sir Radulf’s ice cold eyes. Not difficult at all.
The scent of the river moved only faintly on the night. The breeze came from another direction tonight, and so the fragrances and sounds of the inn’s gardens drifted through the high windows of Usha’s studio. Honeysuckle and wisteria mingled with the rich odor of dark wet earth, and the peepers still shrilled by the pond across the road behind the inn. Underneath it all, the tang of paint and turpentine remained to speak of a week of her work.
Usha wondered where Dez was now. They hadn’t spoken this morning. Dezra had been up and out early, and she hadn’t come home yet. She was Qui’thonas now, more often with Aline and Dunbrae than at the Ivy. By design or chance, they hadn’t seen much of each other in the week since Madoc had walked her home from the Grinning Goat. Usha wasn’t prepared to lay the blame for that at Dezra’s feet—or not all of it. She hadn’t been able to forget her sister-in-law’s insinuation that Usha’s behavior wasn’t appropriate for a married woman. Still, she wondered where Dezra was.