underwear that started this whole problem.”
Overzealous snores answered him.
“I hate you two.”
Chapter 3
Amaranthe woke to sunlight on her face. It was slanting through a gap in the canvas flap hanging over the lorry gate. The vehicle still bumped and thumped over dirt roads, and an uneasy feeling crept into her stomach. How far were they going? As Sicarius had said, the team needed to return to the city in time to catch the train that would allow them to intercept Sespian’s transport.
Books lay flat on his back, eyes closed, mouth agape. Fortunately, he wasn’t snoring. The drivers might notice their stowaways if thunderous nasal noises competed with the engine reverberations.
Sicarius lay next to Amaranthe, propped against his rucksack. The relaxation of sleep softened his face, and, not for the first time, she caught herself thinking how young he looked for a man with a son who would be twenty this winter. No creases lined his forehead or mouth, and no lines edged his eyes. Maybe it was because he never laughed or changed expressions. Or maybe those horrible travel bars he ate had rejuvenating properties.
Sicarius’s eyes opened and focused upon her. Amaranthe blushed, embarrassed to be caught staring.
“We’re slowing down,” Sicarius said.
Amaranthe nodded, as if she had noticed the same thing and had been about to wake him. She lifted the flap to peer outside. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but she got more fields. Rows of butternut squash and pumpkin, some harvested, some still on the vine, stretched on either side of the dirt road.
Sicarius rose to a crouch. “If we don’t wish to be discovered, we should get out now.”
“We might just be slowing for a turnoff.”
“I’m hungry as a bear fresh out of hibernation,” came one of the men’s voices from the front. “Think we can filch some eggs and ham off Ma Kettle?”
“She’s getting paid to look the other way, not feed your fat caboose,” the second man replied.
“The woman can do both.”
Amaranthe waited, hoping the conversation would steer into more illuminating areas, but the men were done talking. The lorry turned and slowed further.
Amaranthe shook Books’s foot. Sicarius already had his pack over his shoulders and was poised to hop out. He pushed the tarp aside, checked behind them, and then climbed onto the gate so he could gaze out over the front of the vehicle.
“Come,” Sicarius said, ducking back in. “There’s little time.”
Books lifted his head. “Huh?”
Sicarius leaped out.
“Time to go,” Amaranthe whispered, shrugging into her own pack.
She waited for Books to grab his gear before jumping out. They’d timed it well, since the lorry was rolling past a cross section of split-rail fencing. Amaranthe ducked low and followed its contours. While it didn’t provide full cover, it was better than streaking through the pumpkin patch. Books clambered after her. She had already lost track of Sicarius.
“Horrible leader,” Amaranthe grumped, heading for a small shed.
Ahead of the lorries, a two-story farmhouse waited. A number of outbuildings dotted the property as well. Carriage house, canning facility, smoking sheds, a bunkhouse… Amaranthe didn’t see anything remotely resembling a weapons manufacturing factory. Smoke drifted from the stovepipe of the farmhouse and also a chimney on the canning building.
Amaranthe slipped behind the shed and waited for Books. Morning sun beat against her face. Normally she would appreciate it, but not when it would make sneaking about difficult. Rolling hills started to the east, and a few deciduous trees with brown and red leaves lined a distant stream, but fields dominated the nearby landscape.
The two lorries rolled into the carriage house. The tall doors stood open, apparently awaiting their arrival. Though it was hard to see inside the building from her vantage point, Amaranthe spotted a tractor and a wall full of hand tools. No rifles. Nothing that even looked like a forge.
She told herself it was too early to worry that she’d made a mistake and that they were now stuck someplace far from the main road and railway. If nothing else, the men who had driven the trucks would know something. Sicarius might get to question somebody yet.
“Where’d he go now?” Books asked.
“I don’t know,” Amaranthe said, continuing to watch the carriage house.
Two of the men stayed behind to put out the vehicles’ furnace fires while the other two headed for the bunkhouse. Usually such a building would be used by workers hired to help with the harvest. Was it possible these fellows were hired hands who had taken the farm’s lorries to deal with their insidious side business? But, no, the one had said “Ma” was being paid to look the other way.
Books removed his pack and sat on the ground. “It’d be nice if he stayed with us, especially to help with such fraught activities as sneaking into the enemy’s transport vehicles.”
“I imagine he leaves us during such endeavors because we’re more likely to get caught. If he stuck by our sides, he’d be caught too.”
“So, for self-preservation purposes, he abandons us at every opportunity?” Books asked.
“Er, yes, but in doing so he puts himself in a position where he can rescue us if we’re apprehended.”
Books snorted. “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to rescue me.”
“Didn’t you say he came to your assistance the first time you two met?” Amaranthe eased back from the corner. The last two men had gone inside, leaving little of interest to watch.
“Because he needed something,” Books said. “I don’t believe for a moment he’d put us ahead of his own interests, or even that he’d bother to ‘rescue’ us if he had something more interesting on his plate.”
When Amaranthe faced Books, she found Sicarius leaning against the far corner of the shed behind him. She wondered how much of the conversation he had heard. All of it probably. Oh, well. By now he knew his aloof ways had not won him many friends in the group.
“I doubt that. Have you seen the sorts of meals he puts on his plate?” Amaranthe met Sicarius’s eyes and smirked at him. “I wouldn’t call any of those interesting.”
Sicarius held her gaze in return. “Only because your palate is accustomed to sweets.”
Books jerked his head around and cursed under his breath.
“I know,” Amaranthe said. “The worst part about being out here is the distance from Curi’s Bakery.” She hadn’t told him that she paid a university student to buy sweets for her a couple of times a month-she wouldn’t risk going to Curi’s on her own, not when it was a popular stop for enforcers-but a girl couldn’t let outlaw status get in the way of apple cinnamon tarts.
Sicarius said nothing, though she knew he disapproved of her vice. Time to get back to work.
Amaranthe waved to encompass the farm. “I don’t see anything blatantly inimical happening here. It seems I was a tad impulsive in assuming that following those boys home would lead us to the source of those weapons.”
“Perhaps not.” Sicarius crouched and placed the flat of his palm on the ground.
Amaranthe lifted an eyebrow but did the same. Dry tufts of grass scrapped at her palm. She focused on the cool earth beneath them, trying to feel… whatever he thought was worth feeling.
Slight tremors pulsed through the ground, similar to what one might sense touching a railway track when a train was still miles off. More, faint rhythmic clanks reverberated through the earth as well.
“It could be machinery in that canning building.” Amaranthe pointed to the smoke wafting from its chimney.
“We wouldn’t feel that this far away,” Sicarius said. “Also, the banging is irregular, made by man, not machine.”
Books also placed a hand on the ground. “An engine… and a smith at a forge?” he guessed.
Amaranthe stood, her interest in the farm rekindling. “Like someone hammering steel into gun
