So the thing to do, he thought, was to take up his own bow and his quiver and go off as if he was going hunting—let her guess what the game was—then simply sit and wait in concealment until she either tried to follow or tried the house.
There was a place in the brush just uphill that afforded a clear view of the house and the stable: and there was no sign when he had reached that little knoll, that the girl Taizu might have used it for a vantage. He crouched down in it, he put his bow beside him, he laid out an arrow in case he needed one—still remembering the possibility of bandits. Then he put his back against an accommodating tree trunk and settled in to wait.
The sun rose higher, passed zenith, and the air warmed, the bushes hummed with insects and rustled with the light breeze. He nodded without meaning to, jerked his head up and fought the overwhelming urge to sleep while the cicadas and the sun conspired to numb the mind.
He drowsed as he could, not truly asleep, but at least getting some rest, and watching, between nods of his head.
And by afternoon he was hungry, thirsty, bitten by ants and not a damned thing had stirred but the birds, the insects, and Jiro, who had begun to attack the boards of the stall in a fit of temper.
"Easy, easy," he said, soothing Jiro with his hands, and the old warhorse cow-kicked the slats again for sheer frustration, not mollified by the grain, the water, or the other attentions. A good currying helped, but Jiro had his ears laid back and kept reaching around to nip him, not hard, just Jiro's little way of saying he was damned mad.
Finally nothing would do but he should risk both their hides—put Jiro's halter on and climb up onto his bare back and ride him out into the pen and on into the pasture, back and forth, back and forth, all the while he kept thinking how large a target they both made, and he kept looking back over his shoulder toward the house and the stable whenever they were on the outward course—which he was sure the girl was watching, probably rolling in the bushes in laughter.
Everything was out of joint. Jiro was confused, and he was worrying every time he took his eyes off the clearing, the stable, or the cabin, and thinking at every turn of a half a score of ways a determined enemy could get at him.
Fighting himself again. It was the only standard he knew.
And she was pushing him, not having done a thing. Minimal force. She was doing everything right.
If she was even out there.
Dammit, fighting himself again, and again, and again.
He worked Jiro into a sweat and brought him back to his stall in a better humor than he had left it, dried him, brushed him, all the while watching the edge of the woods and thinking that the one place he could not watch was the back of the cabin, where the woods came much closer; and thinking that it was possible, given the rain-barrel and the woodpile he had been lax enough to have up against the cabin's back wall, to climb up to the roof and get in through the thatch—
If one were Saukendar,..
He was afraid to work behind the house to move the things because if he was working there he could not see the other side: all an enemy needed was a free run at the stable, if she was willing to harm the horse....
... to get him agitated enough to come running down there, straight into ambush. She needed only watch his activities and see what he guarded to figure out what was valuable to him, and how to get him to react without thinking.
Damn.
He cooked a plain supper, ate it sitting in the doorway of the cabin as the sun was going down. He wondered whether the girl had food in that basket, and how long she could hold out and whether she knew how to forage in these mountains.
But a peasant would know the berries and the roots, the edibles and the dyes....
And the poisons...
The rice went a little strange on his tongue when he thought of that. He kept eating. There was nothing the matter with it. Nothing in the tea.
In Chiyaden lady Bhosai had died, they said, of poison on the bottom of a tea-bowl.
Damn, he was thinking back again, back to court, back to the whole damn mess.
Back to his father's teachings, the midnight exercises, the traps his father set for him—
—the things that had kept him alive when three others of the aging Emperor's friends had met with accidents. He had proved the case of lord Riga, but not the connection of the assassin with Ghita—
He should have killed Ghita when he had the chance. But then Ghita had been one of many, and the old Emperor had forbidden—
He set the rice-bowl aside and drank his tea, trying to push all the past away again, while the armor weighed heavy on his shoulders and bound about his ribs, and the sun sank toward twilight.
Change on the mountain was like that, dawn to dark to dawn, winter to spring to winter again—and one day was like another day, one storm like another storm, one leaf like another leaf, from unfolding to fall. Nine years of cycles that, taken together, might be one day, one year, one lifetime all reduced to small patterns. Changing, nothing changed. Once one became a part of the patterns, one's changes became those changes, perfect equilibrium, as perfect as a man ever became.
But it was all one day, all one year, no matter that the man got older, that he fell down someday and died on this mountain, and the grass grew up around his bones, and no one knew....
Dammit, he had given over a night and most of a day to this interruption in his life. That was already too much to spend.
Once he had had a lot of days to spend, before the days had become one day, every day. He saw that now, and was amazed to realize that he had not acquired patience, he had merely lost his flexibility. He could watch an ant crawl across the porch without a sense of guilt for time wasted. But he could not abide this change in the pattern of his life. That was like an old man. It was very much like an old man, a hermit, a crazed, solitary old man of almost-forty.
That idea upset his stomach.
He spent the night in the stable again.
Like a crazy man.
He had his breakfast in the first light of a misty, dewy dawn, sitting in the doorway of his cabin, and thought about shouting out to the woods, to the girl—Come in, let's talk.
But that notion stuck in his throat.
Like two days of rice with no fish, no rabbit.
He had very little smoked meat and no preserved fruits: those came in fall, and he stored them for the lean times, the winter months. In summer he trusted to nature and his garden.
But if the situation dragged on—
Gods, there was no damned sense in his patience. He had, he decided, to hunt the girl down and tie her hand and foot if need be, and carry her to Muigan.
Let the nuns deal with her.
If she had been about the edges of the clearing she had inevitably left sign; and once he started hunting her, then she would panic and make mistakes.
If she was still out there at all.
If she was out there she had had a worse night than he had, that was sure. The night air could turn cold in the mountains even in late summer; and when the dew settled like this, with the passing of rain just to the north, it meant damp blankets and damper clothes: boughs dumped water down one's neck and soaked one's sleeves and breeches and shoes in a few moments of walking.
Good. He hoped for a nice few days of it, as long as the mist got no worse than it was—a light haze that still let one see the edges of the clearing. That was friendlier to him than it was to her.
So long as it got no worse.
He put up his rice bowl, stretched his shoulders against the weight of the shirt, and went back to the porch and around the side of the house, quickly, to get a few sticks from the woodpile.