Crossroads of Twilight

managed to win four of the next seven, with one draw. Tuon was satisfied when she won and determined when she lost, with none of the temper tantrums he had feared, no scathing comments aside from insisting on calling him Toy, not very much of that icy regal hauteur, as long as they were playing anyway. She purely enjoyed the game, laughing exultantly when she pulled him into a trap, laughing in delight when he managed a clever placement to escape. She seemed a different woman once she lost herself in the stones board.

A flower sewn from blue linen followed the paper blossom, and two days later, a pink silk bloom that spread out as wide as a woman’s palm. Both handed to Selucia. Her blue eyes increasingly set in a suspicious frown when they rested on him, but Tuon told her she could keep the flowers, and she stored them away carefully, folded in a linen cloth. He let three days pass without a present, then brought a little cluster of red silk rosebuds, complete with short stems and glistening leaves that looked as real as nature, only more perfect. He had asked the seamstress to make it on the day he bought that first paper flower.

Selucia took a step, reaching to accept the rosebuds with a curl to her lip, but he sat down and put the flowers beside the board, a little toward Tuon. He said nothing, just left it lying there. She never so much as glanced at it. Dipping into the small leather bags that held the stones, he plucked one from each and shuffled them between his hands till even he was unsure which was where, then offered his closed fists. Tuon hesitated a moment, studying his face with no expression, then tapped his left hand. He opened it to display the glistening white stone.

“I’ve changed my mind, Toy,” she murmured, placing the white stone carefully on the intersection of two lines near the center of the board. “You play very well.”

Mat blinked. Could she know what he was up to? Selucia was standing at Tuon’s back, seemingly absorbed in the almost empty board. Setaile turned a page in her book and shifted a little to get a better light. Of course not. She was talking about stones. If she even suspected his real game, she would toss him out on his ear. Any woman would. It had to be the stones.

That was the night they played to a draw, with each of them controlling half the board in irregular pools and patches. In truth, she won a victory.

“I have kept my word, Toy,” she drawled as he was replacing the stones in the bags. “No attempts to escape, no attempts at betrayal. This is confining.” She gestured around at the interior of the wagon. “I wish to take walks. After dark will do. You may accompany me.” Her eyes touched the cluster of rosebuds, then rose to his face. “To make sure I don’t run away.”

Setaile marked her place with a slim finger and looked at him. Selucia stood behind Tuon and looked at him. The woman had kept her word, mad as that seemed. Walks after dark, with most of the showfolk already in their beds, would do no harm, not with him there to make sure. So why did he feel that he was losing control of the situation?

Tuon agreed to go cloaked and hooded, which was something of a relief. The black hair was growing back in on her shaved scalp, but so far it was little more than long fuzz, and unlike Selucia, who very likely slept in her head scarf, Tuon had shown no inclination to cover her head. A child-sized woman with hair shorter than any man not going bald would have been remarked even in the night. Setalle and Selucia always followed at a little distance in the darkness, the lady’s maid to keep a protective eye on her mistress and Setalle to keep an eye on the maid. At least, he thought that was how it was. Sometimes it seemed they were both watching him. The two of them were awfully friendly for guard and prisoner. He had overheard Setalle cautioning Selucia that he was a rogue with women, a fine thing for her to be saying! And Selucia had calmly replied that her lady would break his arms if he showed any disrespect, just as if they were not prisoners at all.

He thought to use these walks to learn a little more about Tuon — she did not talk much over a stones board — but she had a way of ignoring what he asked or deflecting the subject, usually to him.

“The Two Rivers is all forests and farms,” he said as they strolled along the main street of the show. Clouds hid the moon, and the colorful wagons were indistinguishable dark shapes, the performers’ platforms lining the street merely shadows. “Everybody grows tabac and raises sheep. My father breeds cows, too, and trades horses, but mostly, it’s tabac and sheep from one end to the other.”

“Your father trades horses,” Tuon murmured. “And what do you do, Toy?”

He glanced over his shoulder at the two women ghosting along ten paces back. Setalle might not be close enough to hear, if he kept his voice down, but he decided to be honest. Besides, the show was dead quiet in the darkness. She might hear, and she knew what he had been doing in Ebou Dar. “I’m a gambler,” he said.

“My father called himself a gambler,” Tuon said softly. “He died of a bad wager.”

And how were you supposed to find out what that meant?

Another night, walking along a row of animal cages, each one built to fill an entire wagon, he said, “What do you do for fun, Tuon? Just because you enjoy it. Aside from playing stones.” He could almost feel Selucia bristling at his use of her name from thirty feet away, but Tuon did not seem to mind. He thought she did not.

“I train horses and damane,” she said, peering into a cage that held a sleeping lion. The animal was only a large shadow lying on the straw behind the thick bars. “Does he really have a black mane? There are no lions with black manes in all of Seanchan.”

She trained damane? For fun? Light! “Horses? What kind of horses?” It might be warhorses, if she trained bloody damane. For fun.

“Mistress Anan tells me you’re a scoundrel, Toy.” Her voice was cool, not cold. Composed. She turned toward him, face hidden in the shadows of her cowl. “How many women have you kissed?” The lion woke up and coughed, a deep sound guaranteed to raise the hair on anyone’s head. Tuon did not even flinch.

“Looks like rain’s coming again,” he said weakly. “Selucia will have my hide if I get you back soaked.” He heard her laugh softly. What had he said that was funny?

There was a price to pay, of course. Maybe things were going his way and maybe not, but when you thought they were, there was always a price.

“Bunch of chattering magpies,” he complained to Egeanin. The afternoon sat on the horizon, a red-gold ball half hidden by clouds, casting the show in long shadows. There was no rain, for once, and in spite of the cold they were sitting hunched beneath the green wagon they shared, playing stones in plain sight of anyone who walked by. A good many did, men hurrying about some last-minute chore, children snatching the final chance to roll hoops through the mud puddles and toss balls before night fell. Women holding their skirts up glanced at the wagon in passing, and even when they were hooded, Mat knew what their expressions were. Hardly a woman in the show would speak to Mat Cauthon. Irritably, he rattled the black stones he held gathered in his left hand. “They’ll get their gold when we reach Lugard. That’s all they ought to care about. They shouldn’t be poking their noses into my business.”

“You can hardly blame them,” Egeanin drawled, studying the board. “You and I are supposed to be fleeing lovers, but you spend more time with… her… than with me.” She still had trouble not calling Tuon High Lady. “You behave like a man courting.” She reached to place her stone, then stopped with her hand above the board. “You can’t think she’ll complete the ceremony, can you? You can’t be that big a fool.”

“What ceremony? What are you talking about?”

“You named her your wife three times that night in Ebou Dar,” she said slowly. “You really don’t know? A woman says three times that a man is her husband, and he says three times she’s his wife, and they’re married. There are blessings involved, usually, but it’s saying it in front of witnesses that makes it a marriage. You really didn’t know?”

Mat laughed, and shrugged his shoulders, feeling the knife hanging behind his neck. A good knife gave a man a feeling of comfort. But his laugh was hoarse. “But she didn’t say anything.” He had bloody well been stuffing a gag in her mouth at the time! “So whatever I said, it doesn’t mean anything.” But he knew what Egeanin was going to say. Sure as water was wet, he knew. He had been told who he was going to marry.

“With the Blood, it’s a little different. Sometimes a noble from one end of the Empire marries a noble from the other. An arranged marriage. The Imperial family never has any other kind. They may not want to wait until they can be together, so one acknowledges the marriage where she is, and the other where he is. As long as they both speak in front of witnesses, inside a year and a day, the marriage is legal. You truly didn’t know?”

Sure was sure, but the stones still spilled from his hand onto the board, bouncing everywhere. The bloody girl knew. Maybe she thought this whole thing was an adventure, or a game. Maybe she thought being kidnapped was as much fun as training horses or bloody damam! But he