“Bacon and eggs, sir?” inquired a far-too-perky maid as she skipped toward the kitchen.
“God, no,” I managed.
“Rough trip?” inquired Orgos, observing this rare instance of non-gluttony.
“Grim,” I said, and left it at that. The three of us returned our eyes to the fire, lost in our own thoughts.
Mithos joined us and announced that he had got us a pair of rooms. “You can rest for a while if you like,” he said.
“I’ll stay down here,” said Renthrette, “in case the Empire comes looking. . ”
“They won’t,” said Mithos. “They lost interest in us the moment we left their territory.”
“Still,” said Renthrette, ignoring him. “I’ll wait here.”
Mithos nodded minutely, understanding, and walked away. It was unlike her brother not to be here first, raring to go with his axe at the ready, and I had just assumed that we would find Lisha silently studying maps at the breakfast table. Their absence was worrying.
I followed Mithos, chose a bed, lay down, waited for the room to stop spinning, and, as dawn was breaking with an irritating flurry of birdsong, fell asleep.
I awoke to find some kind of meeting going on around me. Actually, “shouting match” might be more accurate, and that despite the fact that I had been snoring away pleasantly.
“We can’t just leave them behind!” Renthrette was shouting, her face as strained as her voice. “We have to go back.”
“If we go back,” answered Orgos, “we endanger them far more than we help them, as well as putting ourselves at risk.”
“Is that the issue?” Renthrette snapped. “Are we just going to abandon them to protect our own skins? If Garnet and Lisha had got out and we hadn’t, I think the situation would be a little different.”
“Are you listening to me, Renthrette?” Orgos said, biting off the words. “By themselves they might lie low and then slip out of the city unnoticed. If we go back we will only make them fifty times more visible, more recognizable. Lisha, of all people, would understand that. And your brother would be the last person to endanger the whole party unnecessarily.”
“Then why don’t we just stay here and wait?” she retorted. “You said yourselves that the Empire won’t stray out of its own lands to look for us.”
Mithos, who had been sitting silently in thought thus far, turned and said, “They might if they know we’re still here. There are travelers passing through this place on to Stavis all the time. The Empire won’t pursue us if we’re moving away, but if they know we’re sitting less than a day’s ride away. . who knows?”
Renthrette dropped angrily into a chair and sighed. Seeing what looked like a convenient break in the conflict I sat up and said, “I could murder that bacon now.”
“I could murder you, Hawthorne,” snarled Renthrette, “very easily. This is all your fault. As usual.”
I thought that a little uncalled for, but I knew better than to get in the way of the tigress protecting her cub. Well, sibling, actually, but you take my point. Her pale cheek was flushed and hollow, her eyes cold and hard, her slim lips tight, and there was a strand or two of golden hair straying unheeded into her face: appealing, in a homicidal kind of way.
“Do I smell sausage?” I muttered, attempting to slink out of the room with a semblance of preoccupation.
“Whether you do or not, you aren’t getting any,” Orgos remarked, his eyes still on Renthrette. “You’re getting fat again. And we’re moving out in ten minutes.”
“What?” I exclaimed, almost as outraged as Renthrette. “I’m starving!”
“If you ever had been,” the black man responded, “you wouldn’t toss that expression around so casually.”
“I have!” I shouted. “Almost.”
“Do you ever think with anything other than your gut?” Renthrette spat.
I started to giggle uncontrollably.
She just shook her head with the kind of disgust that took me right back to when we first met. As she stormed out and down the steps to the bar, I couldn’t help wondering how I had managed to dispel that mood for those few weeks in Shale when we had almost been friends. Ah, well. What goes around comes up short, and a stitch in time is worth two in the bush. But life goes on, and on, and on. .
Mithos and Orgos merely looked at each other and then set to packing their things.
“So where are we going?” I grumbled.
“North,” said Mithos.
“Not with Mr. Cheery and his traveling clownschool?” I bawled.
“What?”
“What’s-his-name: Diplomat to the Damned.”
“Ambassador Linassi?” said Mithos expressionlessly. “Yes. He has asked us to serve as an armed escort for him on the road, and has purchased a horse to the purpose.”
“He will buy us some basic weapons in Vetch,” added Orgos, “for those of us who came unprepared,” he added with a glance in my direction.
“And in the meantime,” I muttered, “I’ll just bite the arms off any bandits who attack us. After all, I’d risk everything for a total stranger.”
“Who saved your neck when it was on the block,” Orgos concluded.
“I’ll sacrifice my firstborn child in his honor,” I responded, bitterly.
“How about doing the world a real favor and just not having any children at all,” said Orgos.
The ambassador oversaw our final preparations in silence. I’d say he was dour, but there was always that touch of sparkle in his eyes that suggested a disarming private amusement, so I did my best to stay out of his way. Since I was also keeping clear of the more definitively dour Mithos, and Renthrette had reverted to treating me like a mangy and probably rabid dog, that left Orgos. As ever.
I found him sitting on the carriage’s driver’s plate, testing the edge of his sword with his thumb.
“I hate fighting with only one sword,” he remarked. “The balance is all wrong. Perhaps I am getting too set in my ways.”
“Change isn’t always good,” I said, thinking ruefully of our trip into “the North,” whatever that meant.
“I’m not sure,” he answered, looking up into the morning sun. “I was beginning to feel hemmed in in Stavis. A spell on the road will be pleasant. Invigorating.”
In Orgos’s mouth, that last word had an ominous feel. It was like “excitement.” For years “excitement” had conjured serving maids divesting themselves of unwieldy apparel, but when Orgos said it I shivered at the blood-smeared images charging through his head, lances poised to skewer the unrighteous. A spell on the road may indeed be pleasant, but if things got invigorating, according to Orgos’s definition, I might find myself looking for a way back to Stavis. Or somewhere else. Somewhere quiet and peaceful, where adventure means a new kind of beer and excitement follows you upstairs by candlelight. .
“Are you driving?” I asked, changing the subject. The black man nodded.
“The other driver was hired here two nights ago,” he said.
“What was the ambassador doing in Stavis for so short a time?” I asked.
Orgos shrugged. “Why so suspicious?” he said.
I shaded my eyes from the sun to see if this was a serious question. Apparently, it was.
“He just seems to have been exactly what we needed exactly when we needed it. Plus,” I added, as a slightly embarrassed afterthought, “he bothers me.”
“Bothers?”
“You know,” I hissed, glancing around as if he might be behind me, listening with that oddly watchful mirth of his. “He seems so. . I don’t know, calculating. Deceptive? No, that’s too strong. He looks at me like someone looking at a kind of ape, you know? Something that is intriguing and kind of funny because it is almost-but not quite-human?”