Agion walked a few steps down a trail, ducking to avoid the low branches of a pine. He turned about, ducked the branches once more, and returned to the clearing, tracking mud and weeds across the dry ground. Though pulled from their roots, the weeds continued to grow.
“Well? I mean, you’re the one who brought the war up, Agion.”
“Nor should I have done so, little friend.” He squinted down still another pathway into the swamp, as I marveled that he could call me “little friend” after such brief acquaintance, and especially when I would have gladly sold his organs to the goblins for the information he was bent on not giving me. “Now where are they?” he asked impatiently, fidgeting with the enormous, wicked-looking scythe.
“Relax, Agion,” I offered. “You look like a painting of Equestrian Death wielding that thing. Sure you have the right clearing?”
“Passing sure,” Agion replied. “They said to meet at the second outpost if it had not overgrown since we met here this morning and . . . by the gods, I’ve betrayed even more secrets to thee!” He slapped his forehead with a blow that would have left me simple-minded. I had to gain his confidence quickly, before the others arrived. I stood up, walked slowly towards him, talking all the way.
“I don’t know where we are, what the second outpost is, or why they wanted to meet here in the first place. You’ve captured a real blank slate here: I know nothing about the war, what it’s all about, or what damn side the damn centaurs are on, if you’ll excuse my waxing profane and all, but it’s dreadfully frustrating to hear all of this talk about a major world event and not have the foggiest idea as to . . .”
“Th’art rattling, little friend,” Agion cautioned me, raising his scythe in a gesture I mistook for anger. “I think it might be of use for thee to rest thyself a moment, recover thy breath. I can tell thee nothing until suspicion is lifted from thy countenance.” Casually, he sliced branches from the pine tree beside him, so that he could pass under. The branches grew back.
“And what is my countenance guilty of, Agion?”
“Spying, little friend. Had thou been in Solamnic armor, like your friend, we’d have held thee as a prisoner of war—no more. But concealing thy colors is like to spying in wartime.”
I stared woefully up at Agion, who looked down on me with not a little sympathy. A lark sang briefly in the bushes to my left, whether “left” was south or north or whatever. Though the rain was lifting, the situation looked glum and soggy.
“Ah . . . pardon me, Agion, but what’s the common punishment in these parts for spies?”
“My folk seldom wax dramatic, little friend,” the centaur smiled. Then his big face darkened, the spotted eyebrows bunching into one thick line of hair above the bridge of his nose. “For the most part, we drown the poor souls. Take them by their poor little ankles and dangle their poor little faces in pools or in brooks. Facing upstream, of course.
“We suspend them there ‘until they pay the full price for their intrigues,’ as the elders say.”
A pretty grim use of Coastlund’s waterways, if you asked me.
“Does that apply to the young ones, too?”
Agion nodded. “As far as I know. Mind, I’ve never seen a spy put to death, young or old.”
“Does it apply to those dragged unwillingly into espionage—say, those who really have nothing against centaurs, but become spies when it’s a choice between that and death?”
“As I said, little friend, I’ve never seen the putting to death. Nor have I seen any trial where such things are brought to counsel. Truly, I cannot answer thee.”
“Then perhaps you’ve heard things, Agion. Like what is done with someone who informs in a case such as this. Suppose someone were to reveal a network of spies—from mere lookouts and agents among the peasants who live nearby, on up to the ringleaders, some of whom you may already have taken prisoner? And suppose this very cooperative person does so for the promise that his head will not roll when heads roll, or drench when heads drench, if you understand me?”
“I am sure if thou hast such a promise from the elders, thou art safe from harm,” Agion proclaimed seriously.
“But if thou were to uncover a network of spies, thou wouldst betray some of thy friends, no doubt?”
He paused, cocked his head, looked at me curiously.
“That is, of course, if the other two are friends of thine.”
The other two? Friends? I knelt, pretended to pick up something from the ground—a blade of grass, a rock perhaps. I was pretending not to care, though the curiosity was great and I was stringing out my nets blindly, hoping that somehow Agion would stumble in.
“So you caught us all, then? I mean, all three of us?”
The centaur’s mouth was off and running before his brain awoke.
“Only the two for the time being. Thee and the Knight thou servest, though he was much more difficult to bring to ground, judging from the fact that my companions are late in joining us here.
“As for the third, he escaped us up the road. He was the one we saw first, but on open plains too near that Solamnic moat house and at such a distance that we could not hope to capture him. So we found the two of thee, hoping that perhaps all three would be together when we overtook the Knight himself—that the lookout thou settest so cunningly a mile at thy rear would betray thy whereabouts in the hurried attempt to warn thee.”
Agion gave me a puzzled look. I nodded for him to continue. I was thunderstruck by the news of a third spy, but determined not to show it.
“Else the armor might well have been hidden,” he said, “for we had intended to watch thee only, until we heard the Solamnic talk with the militia. Then we had to close with thee, to search thee for what we suspected we would find—and did.”
For now I was sure someone was following us.
I remembered the dark recesses of the library, the movement of dark wings.
Who else could the third man of Agion’s story have been?
So what if I escaped these four-legged kidnappers? Who knew what other forms of mayhem awaited me?
Had Bayard not entered the clearing at that moment, escorted by half a dozen centaurs, I might have tried to strike a bargain with Agion, offering him money, land, half the moat house to escort me safely back to Father’s disfavor and a place of honor in his dungeon—damp and dark and infested with bullies, but safe from scorpions, at least.
Apparently Bayard had not come easily. One of the centaurs nursed an arm in a sling, another a bloodied nose. Nor did Bayard look much better himself—the right side of his face swollen and discolored, his left hand bleeding and clutched in his right, which had little else to do, the centaurs having tied his wrists together. His wrists were burned by the tightness of the ropes.
Without ceremony, the centaurs pitched him to the floor of the clearing, then encircled us both. Lying in a bruised heap on the ground, Bayard smiled ruefully up at me and staggered to his feet.
“It is here and now thou wilt answer for thy conduct, Solamnic,” one of the centaurs proclaimed—a burly specimen whose skin was dark and weathered like a cypress tree. His hair was white, also, but unlike Agion’s, white with age and if not with wisdom, at least with a certain badlands cleverness. Swamp-smart, you might call him.
Apparently the old fellow was the leader. He looked as though he were accustomed to being answered. But Bayard had been jostled a little too much, it seemed. There were cracks showing in his courtesy as he rose to his full height and faced the old centaur.