So once I had filled the waterskins, I stood stupidly in the mud, stroking Jasyr’s neck and rummaging in my saddle pack, hoping to find my cloak and something to eat. The morning felt chilly, as my shirt was soaked and muddy from my adventures in the damp Windham gardens. All I found in the pack was one spare shirt - an ugly, useless green silk thing my mother had dug out of Tennice’s attic - a change of undergarments and leggings, the silly-looking hat I’d worn as part of my “disguise,” a blanket, two cups, one spoon, a small pot, and my flint and steel. No cloak and not so much as a dry biscuit to eat. Then I remembered I’d left the cloak in the gatehouse at Windham wrapped around a pile of leaves. And as for the food -
“You won’t find nothing in my kit, neither,” said Paulo, as if he had read my mind or heard my stomach rumbling. “All in the gray saddle pack. You threw it into the corner of the gatehouse. Remember?” He wasn’t finished being angry with me yet.
“We’ll just have to figure out something. Stop in a village and buy what we need, I suppose.” I turned out my pockets and found exactly twelve coppers. About enough for half a dozen mugs of ale or three loaves of stale bread. I glanced at Paulo.
“At least you didn’t steal from the Lady before you stabbed her,” he said. “I gave her the silver from selling the horses and the pony trap.”
No point in arguing guilt or innocence again. “So you don’t have any money, either?”
“Not a copper. Looks like if we want to eat, I’ll have to go begging. Most people will give you something if you look sorry enough. Bad as I look, that ought to be easy… unless they see you with me, wearing your own mother’s blood.”
“I’ll go hungry before I beg a stranger for a meal.”
“Then you’ve never been hun - holy great demons!” Paulo just about jumped out of his skin when Vroon popped out of a willow thicket just beside him, bowing and chuckling. The other two followed right after him.
“We’ve come to accompany you on your way,” said Vroon, gaping at a pair of moorhens skittering across the sluggish water. He waved his small hand away from himself and his friends. “Pay us no mind.”
Tired of Paulo’s surliness, I tried asking Vroon a few of the questions that had been bothering me, such as where he’d come from, why he was looking for me, and how he got into my dreams. But no matter how loud I spoke, the three acted as if they couldn’t hear me. It was so annoying that I soon turned my back on all four of my companions.
But Paulo wasn’t finished with his grumbling. “Too proud to ask for help. That’s nothing new. Serve you right to starve.”
“We can’t be seen until we’re farther from Windham. The Prince is not going to give up finding me so easily.” But he wasn’t likely to come searching until my mother was all right… or dead. Even as I voiced the thought, I was disgusted with myself. Vile… what kind of creature was I even to think such things?
“That leaves stealing, then, if we’re going to eat. You’ll make a thief of me. Get me hanged or worse. I didn’t steal even when I was a nub in Dunfarrie! Curse this day everlasting!” He threw a rock into the stream so hard it startled a flock of lapwings, who flapped their way noisily upriver, and Jasyr, who almost stepped on my foot.
I dodged the horse, but ended up on my knee in the mud. As if I weren’t wet enough… filthy enough… vile enough… “Blast it all, you pigheaded oaf! Just leave, then.”
“Better an oaf than a murdering sod.”
“I swear I didn’t hurt her. I couldn’t.” Powers of night, couldn’t he understand how I felt about my mother? The two of them - my mother and Paulo - were the only reasons I was a human person. And I didn’t even know if she was alive.
“Cold-hearted bastard… just leaving her like that.”
“What good would I have done her, staying there to get my throat slit? If anyone in any world can help her, it’s my father. You know that better than anyone. He won’t let her die. He can protect her.” I had risked using sorcery to call him.
“Who else could have done it? You had the bloody knife in your hand.”
“I pulled it out of her after she was down. I don’t know why.” Stupid to pull the weapon out of a wound like that. “Everything was dark… confusing. I was walking up to her. I heard the strike” - felt the strike deep in my own gut - “and she fell. I just don’t know. I didn’t see it.”
“Lying coward.”
“Thickheaded dolt!”
We traded insults and curses for half an hour. I told him he should stay here and soak his head in the stream while I went looking for the truth. He told me I wasn’t going to throw him away like a gnawed bone. That got us back to how hungry we were and how ridiculous it was that we didn’t know what to do about it.
Meanwhile, the wide, leathery man and the scrawny black runner examined our horses. They didn’t touch the beasts. Just sniffed at their skin, studied their legs and flanks, their hocks and tails and hooves, and stared into their eyes as if trying to read their thoughts. Vroon was more interested in Paulo and me, poking his head in between us and watching our faces as we yelled at each other.
When Paulo and I finally ran out of anything new to say, we mounted up as if we had thought about it at the same moment and started back along the muddy bank toward the road. Vroon and his friends trailed along behind. As I turned northward on the highroad, the three of them vanished.
Paulo shaded his eyes and stared up the road, as if the three might have just sped away exceptionally fast, rather than disappearing in midair. “Maybe they don’t like our prospects. Looks like the wide one eats pretty regular. Do you figure they’re gone for good this time?”
“I don’t think so. They came for more than just getting me out of a scrape.”
I just had no idea what that reason might be, and I was too relieved at the moment to figure it out. Foolish to get so angry over nothing. Careless. Dangerous. Why did meaningless things bother me so much? It didn’t matter what Paulo thought of me.
Before we’d covered another league, a streak of green light split the air above the road just in front of us. I wasn’t too surprised to see our three friends show up again. But now Vroon and the wide leathery man rode horseback, while the runner jogged along beside us on his long, thin legs.
The brown man offered me a wad of cloth. “Yours?”
I reined in Jasyr and took the bundle. Everyone else pulled up, too, and gathered around as I shook out the cloth. It was my cloak. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you. How did - ?”
“And this to be the other’s?” said the runner in his rumbling voice, holding out a bulging gray saddle pack to Paulo.
“How did you get these?” I asked, suspicious. I didn’t see how they could have sneaked past the Prince or Radele. “Were the people still there? What was happening? My mother… a woman with hair the same color as mine… was wounded. Did you see - ?”
“Great magics were happening,” said Vroon. “We could not see into them.”
Great magics… healing, I hoped. I ignored the hard look from Paulo and tried to stay focused on the present. I could do nothing for my mother. “So you just walked in and took our things without anyone noticing?”
“We are skilled at acquirings,” said Vroon, and the three joined in their now familiar wicked chuckling. “None saw us.”
Paulo had already opened the bag and pulled out a handful of flat biscuits. One was halfway to his mouth, when he stopped and offered it to the runner who was staring at the dry lump with his glittering amber eyes even wider than usual. “Are you hungry, too… uh… sorry, I didn’t get your name?”
The runner waved the biscuit away and bowed his head. His skin glowed blue-black like polished onyx. “No name belongs to me as yet. No gift of a name.”