“I would feel the same way, if I were not the magician,” Ramon said. “Our honor. guard cannot be feeling too sanguine themselves, escorting a creature so capricious and powerful as a Marid.”
“Yet they perform their duties faithfully.” Jimena bestowed smiles on two or three of the guards. They looked back with surprise, then turned forward and bore their pikes with greater determination. Jimena turned the smile on Ramon. “A little gratitude is never wasted.”
“Especially from a beautiful woman,” Ramon agreed.
“Your nursemaid certainly showed no shyness in her going,” Lakshmi said.
Looking ahead, Jimena saw the footprints going in the door of Bordestang’s grandest inn. “No, not a bit of shyness, nor of shame.” She frowned and rode with her face set.
They dismounted at the inn door. One of the guards held the reins of all the party while the others followed their lord and lady through the portal, Lakshmi leading.
Inside, all was merriment and the music of viols and hautboys.
The tables of the common room had been folded back against the walls and the benches set against them. A score of well-dressed couples paced through the figures of a dance, laughing and chatting as they moved. A glance at broadcloth, fine wool, and linen showed them to be gentry—squires and their dames, burghers and their wives, with here and there a knight and his lady. The glowing footprints vanished in the throng.
Jimena, however, only had to look closely at the laughing, chattering throng before she saw a familiar young face above a velvet dress, laughing, batting her eyelashes at each of the young men in her square, and replying to their flirtations with sallies of her own.
“There!” Jimena snapped.
“I see her,” the sergeant said, and strode into the center of the dance. Couples broke apart as he strode toward them, their exclamations of anger dying as they saw his livery and the half-dozen guards behind him. Lady Violette too looked up, frowning at the sudden ending of her dance—then saw the grim-faced soldiers and screamed.
The male dancers at once pressed forward, shouting at the sergeant, but one elbowed his way to the front, the sword at his hip proclaiming him a knight. “Why do you disrupt our merriment, Sergeant?”
“This lady’s presence is required by the castellan, Sir Knight,” the sergeant replied evenly, sure in his duty.
Lady Violette turned pale. “It was not I! I had no choice! He made me do it!”
Lakshmi strode straight through the throng, eyes blazing, and dancers and soldiers alike stepped quickly aside for her.
Jimena hurried to catch up, dreading what the angry djinna might do. “I think we might obtain more information if I question her, Your Highness.”
“Well, if you must.” Lakshmi stepped aside, but her glare would have stripped paint.
“Now, my dear,” Jimena said to Lady Violette, striving for gentleness, “I must tell you that this young woman beside me is a princess of the djinn, whose children have only this morning been kidnapped.”
Lady Violette screamed and fainted dead away.
“None of that!” Lakshmi snapped, and twisted her hand in a gesture as she rapped out a staccato couplet.
Lady Violette turned a fall into a stagger and looked about her wild-eyed, disoriented by what had proved to be merely a moment’s dizziness. Then she saw the djinna’s anger and Jimena’s sympathetic smile, and moaned.
“Pluck her purse and search it,” Lakshmi snapped.
The sergeant drew a dagger. Lady Violette screamed, but he only cut the strings of her purse and took it from her belt, then upended it over his palm. A stream of gold coins cascaded down, overflowing his cupped hand and piling up on the floor.
“Who gave you that?” the djinna snapped. “He!” Lady Violette cried, tears streaming down her cheeks. “He who compelled me to bring him the babes!”
“I pity you,” Lakshmi sneered, “if the prospect of gold is a compulsion.”
“Tell us who he was, my dear,” Jimena said, much more gently.
“I do not know! He gave me no name, only promised me gold if I would bring the babes to the postern, and a lingering, agonized death if I did not!”
“He knew the weak link in the chains that protected your grandchildren, surely enough,” Lakshmi said, with total condemnation.
Lady Violette flushed but could say nothing.
“Tell us his appearance,” Jimena urged.
“He was in his middle years, with black hair and beard, and wore a robe of midnight-blue, with a hat that was sort of a cone, bulge-sided and rounded at the top! More than that I cannot tell you!”
“And you brought the children to the postern gate, where you gave them to him?” Ramon asked, choking on his own anger.
“I did! Oh, blame me not, for who would have protected me from him?”
“Lady Mantrell or I!” Ramon snapped. “Then he bade you flee?”
“He did, for he said my head would roll when you learned of this! Oh, spare my life, I beg of you!” Lady Violette sank to her knees, sobbing.
“Spare her? Why?” Lakshmi demanded. “She felt not the slightest remorse until we caught her—indeed, she was so eager to spend her guilt-gold that she could not even wait till she had passed from the town! She has nothing more to tell us. Shall I kill her quickly, or slowly?” She caught Lady Violette’s hair and yanked her face upward, drawing a dagger from her bodice.
The male dancers shouted and thrust forward, drawing their own weapons. The soldiers readied themselves to hold off the dancers, but Lakshmi gave them only one dark look, and they bowled away backward in a wave.
The sergeant’s parade-ground voice rose above the din. “Beware! She is a princess of the Marids, the most powerful of the djinn! Seek not to oppose her will!”
“Yes, but your will need not be quite so apposite, Your Highness,” Jimena said quickly. “Lady Violette kidnapped Queen Alisande‘s children, after all, not your own. It is for the queen to judge her.”
Lakshmi glared down at the cowering woman for a minute, then said, “You are right. She is for the Queen’s Justice.” She let go of the woman’s hair.
Lady Violette fell, sobbing with relief.
“Do not be too merciful,” the djinna snapped. “She did not think her crime very great, or she would not have stopped at so near an inn. She is a silly, vain, and foolish thing, and as such is a ready tool for evil. She feels not an ounce of remorse for her deed, but only for being caught.”
“That is all true, I doubt not.” Jimena bent a sorrowful gaze on the teenager. “I fear you must dwell in the dungeon, poor child, until Her Majesty returns. Still, we shall give you the most comfortable cell that we have.”
“No, n-o-o-o-o,” Lady Violette moaned as the soldiers dragged her to her feet. “Not the dungeon!”
“Be glad you still have your life!” Lakshmi snapped, and turned on her heel to follow Jimena. She caught up with her quickly and demanded, “How could you be so gentle with so vile a traitor?”
“Why, because I had you to rage at her and revile her,” Jimena said as though it were obvious, and hurried out the door. “Come, Your Highness! Let us ride back to the postern door without delay! Perhaps there is still some trail to be found there, though if a sorcerer is the true kidnapper, I suspect he will have covered his tracks far too well.”
“A sorcerer?” Lakshmi frowned as they mounted. Then her face cleared. “Of course! Midnight-blue robes, a conical hat—he would be a magician, would he not? Had his robes been white, I would have thought him to be a magus indeed, one of the priests of Ahura Mazda or Agni, before the prophet Zoroaster reformed the religion of the Persians.”
“One of the magi?” Jimena exclaimed, staring.
“Perhaps he is,” Ramon said, frowning, “but has not yet heard of Zoroaster. Tell me, who was their god of evil? Angra Mainyu, was it not?”