The first trap was on the road itself. It looked like a woman in a white dress being dragged off the road by three men with the narrow filed teeth of Bargainers. Glancing over at Liskin, I saw he had drawn his sword and was preparing for a heroic charge. I whacked him across the visor and said, "It's a trap!" He gaped at me in surprise.
At the sound of my voice the "woman" turned toward us. Her hair and skin were as dark as mine; her nose was as high arched and delicate as my mother's had been. Her voice was ragged with desperation as she cried out, "Help me! Help me! Why won't you help me?"
I should know better by now, but it got to me. It always got to me. Alev, in contrast, was pretty callous and could even make conversation with the traps until they vanished in (I guess) frustration.
"Go to hell," I muttered desperately; it was the best I could do, usually.
"Help me!" she screamed. "Help me! Why won't you help me?"
"Shut up," I muttered. "You're not real."
It went on for a while longer until the Enemy gave up and the illusionbait disappeared. Left behind (because it was real, not illusion) was an immense man-trap-or horse-trap, really, since it was made to catch our horses as we gallopped to the rescue. I dismounted and went forward to move the thing out of the way and break it with my truncheon. Liskin remained on his horse as lookout, which was in accordance with the Rules and (for once) good sense besides.
"Be careful!" he called to me as I hustled the shattered trap over to the side of the road. "There's sure to be a Bargainer or two nearby in the wood!"
"You think?" I grunted as I hurled the broken metal into the woods. At that moment I was glaring eye-to-eye with a Bargainer crouching in the brush alongside the road. He made no move toward me, nor I to him, but he smiled at me, showing his teeth filed sharp as needles.
My irony had been lost on Liskin. "Of course!" he said. "There had to be someone on hand to attack us and haul the bodies into the wood!"
"I've learned a lot from riding with you, Liskin," I remarked, backing carefully toward my mount. I could not see any companions to my Bargainer out there. Possibly he was alone. If so, he could be killed and his body hauled out of the woods, which was a good thing, in theory. In practice, it was a little early in the night to start collecting corpses; no god knew how many we would be hauling by the end of the night. It would be extremely bad if we had to stop before dawn and burn some bodies on the road. Also, there was the possibility that the Bargainer I saw was not alone-that he was just another form of bait. I weighed the alternatives, reflected that it was Liskin, not Alev, who was watching my back, and decided to let the Bargainer go.
He apparently made a similar decision about me. At least, he made no move against us as I remounted and we rode away.
"We'll have to tell the pair riding east from Caroc tonight about this," Liskin said, after a while.
"Right."
Still later he asked, "How did you know it was a trap?"
"The woman was my sister."
He thought about this for a while, and then just had to say, "But she could have been travelling east from Caroc-"
"Naeli's been dead for six years or more," I told him. "She was lost in the woods."
Liskin was silent for a long time. Finally he said, "I'm sorry." (That's what you're supposed to say, isn't it? It's one of the Rules.)
"Her own damn fault," I replied, to get him to shut up. It worked. But it didn't work with Naeli. Nothing ever worked with her.
Naeli's last child, a girl, had been born two months after the death of the father. (He'd been a miner and was killed in a cave-in.) At that time she was living with her husband's stepparents, but about a month after the birth they began wondering aloud how she was going to help pay the expenses of the household. She took the hint, as only Naeli could, and stormed out of there. She stormed all the way from Rendel's to Caroc-not so easy, seeing that she had three boys and an infant girl to tend to-and moved in with me.
At the time I was a journeyman jeweller, working for a crafty old half- Coranian named Besk. I was doing well enough to support my sister's family. And, although there was only one kind of work for women that paid a decent wage, Naeli helped out where she could. She worked a plot of ground behind the house, selling some of her produce, feeding the rest to us. (She referred to us collectively as the Enemy and pretended to mourn each individual vegetable. She would cry out absurd names she had invented for each tomatoroot, then shout, "But no! Their suffering is on their heads! They were born like vegetables, let them die like vegetables! Let their piths be accursed and their names be forgotten!" And the children would laugh, scandalized, and even I would grin. Except for the people she cared about, Naeli took nothing in the world seriously, including the Enemy.)
Naeli was half crazy, anything but a rule-keeper. She was a good mother, though. She taught her children how to read, both Coranian and Castellan, and the two oldest sons were apprenticed out-one to a blacksmith, the other to a carpenter. It wasn't easy to achieve this: sons were supposed to follow the trade of their fathers; that was the first law of the Guilds. But Naeli was tireless in her petitioning, bribing when she could afford to; she insisted that none of her sons would go to the mines to die like their father (in a cave-in) or his father (withered away by some illness breathed in deep under the earth). And she had her way: her youngest son, Thend, we agreed would be Besk's apprentice, or mine, when the time came.
So she took care of her sons and loved them. But it was her daughter, Fasra, who truly held her heart. She doted on the girl, spoiled her, labored long hours at the petty labor permitted to women so that Fasra could have a dowry. And her affection was not misplaced: Fasra was a lovely child, with silver-pale hair, clear brown skin, and two black lightning bolts dwelling permanently in her storm-dark eyes. She was clever and engaging, too; everybody was fond of her.
But it was clear, from the moment she took to her own feet, that Fasra had a will of iron, which she was not inclined to have anyone temper. And Naeli could rarely bring herself to discipline the girl (at once the last remnant of her husband and the radiant mirror of her own youth) as she should have, so matters grew worse. Fasra, at first merely strong-willed, grew contrary; "no" meant yes to her, and "yes" meant I won't.
One day, when Fasra was around seven years old, she was invited on a picnic with some of her friends; they were going to pick wildberries in the woods. The mothers of the children were to accompany them, but Naeli could not go. It was market day and she had a load of vegetables ready to sell. So she told Fasra she couldn't go. Fasra disagreed, and finally Fasra had her way. Naeli committed her to the care of one of the other mothers in attendance, a friend of hers, one of the thousand and one people she knew in Four Castles.
The children went on their picnic. The forest is a strange and beautiful place during the day, but still forbidding in comparison to the ordered life of town and castle. During the morning the children stayed close to their protectors, terrified by the approach of the smallest chipmunk. But, as the day approached noon, the terror receded; the children wandered farther through the green woods and golden clearings, seeking out skeneberries and clusterfruit and the three types of mushroom they had been taught were good to eat.
As noon gave way to afternoon Fasra found herself with less in her basket than most. It wasn't because she wasn't clever or hadn't been taught. But she was moody and contrary. She looked for berries in the shade and mushrooms in the sunlight. It took her much of the day to learn that things grew where they grew, and not where she thought they should.