A numb ache in Rossamund's left shoulder, near where he had been shot, woke him. He rubbed his shoulder, but that only made it hurt more. He was still so very tired. He had survived his first night alone. Crawling cautiously out from his haystack burrow, he peered about. It was early morning, the sun barely over the horizon. Showing against the pale sky were giant windmills marching away to the eastern horizon in long, staggered rows. Although the very flatness of the land made him feel conspicuous, it also let him see if he was being followed. As far as the eye could see in the early dawn, nothing moved on the road or the fields about except the great sails of the mills.
Yet the fear of a patrol from the Spindle still dogged him, and Rossamund struggled through the fields for an hour. Soon it became too wearisome to tread in the soft soil and he was forced onto the road. He walked on and on but met no one else. After a while the way was intersected by a path. There was a single sign there, pointing down the main roadway. The Vestiweg it said-or Vesting Way-the road to High Vesting. He was on the right road and upon it he would stay.
The day became unusually warm and remained so. A southeasterly breeze came, welcome and cool, as luggage and harness began to weigh on him. Eventually the valise became too hard to carry on his back and he resorted to towing it along behind him by the straps, its metal bindings dragging dustily in the sandy gravel. With stubbornness beyond his years, he walked on steadily, his thoughts completely taken with reaching High Vesting. Stops were frequent, and Rossamund always looked furtively about as he rested. The boy found that he was not as alone as he had first felt: cows in sturdily fenced pastures lowed and chewed; birds of many kinds-warbling magpies, shrilling mud larks, tetching wagtails and silent swallows-dashed about, often calling, chasing off strangers, hunting insects that also flitted hither and thither. Of the insects the birds' favorite seemed to be the large wurtembottles. These fat black flies from warmer northern lands insisted on bumbling about Rossamund's face, neck and especially his ears. No matter how often or how furiously he thrashed and shooed them, these wurtembottles returned to their lazy harassment. There was a moment as he stepped along that he thought he spied a person-a farmer perhaps-cutting across the fields far to his left, but he could not be certain who or what it was and dared not call out. Other than this the road had been eerily empty of any other traffic. Having grown up surrounded by people, crowded with them, he had thought space and solitude a golden prize. Now isolated and far from comfort, he wished very much to be pressed by the crowd once more.
Onward, onward. He had to get to High Vesting.
Fortunately Rossamund still carried enough food to keep him from desperation, including that day's main meal: a sludge that used to be the dried must and the now almost gluelike rye bread. Craumpalin had once said that hunger was the best sauce, and Rossamund could not have agreed more as he took to the bland slop with relish. The supper was still soggy enough to even wet his thirst. This was important, for although he had enough to eat, he had little water. Rossamund had filled his biggin with the Humour's dark waters and tried to conserve it on the way. It tasted like composting leaves, yet by the unseasonably hot day's end it was almost gone. He did not know exactly what would happen when one had no water, though he knew that it had to be bad. By sundown he could see distant trees growing in scruffy stands along the road and hoped a source of water might be among them. When he finally reached them he discovered no water, and so walked on. When, a mile later, he settled to sleep in a cavelike gap between the boughs of a huge boxthorn, he had drunk his last mouthful from the biggin.
Huddled in the shelter of the lonely tree, Rossamund stared into the gathering dark with equally increasing disquiet. A nameless fear that something or someone dogged him made every shadow jump and loom. As the unfriendly night weighed down, punctuated as it was by distant, frightening noises, he sought to distract himself by humming happy, peaceful hymns, as he had heard Verline do for a troubled child. Still the deep dark oppressed. He hummed on softly, hoarse with thirst, until somehow he coaxed himself to sleep. A sound stirred him. It was early morning, the sky pale, the still air cold again. His throat rasped with pain, but he had survived a second night.
The sound came again, unusual and out of place.
Rossamund quickly blinked away the sleepy grit and listened. Morning birds welcoming the rising sun with their calls-these had not woken him; the buzzing of the wur tembottles waiting for him to evacuate his thorny room-neither had these. Then it came once more, this sound, and remained, getting louder: a jangling, steady clop-clop-clop, then the unmistakable snort of a horse.
The musketeers of the Spindle have come for me! He turned his body and craned his head as quietly as possible to see if he could catch sight of his pursuers through the spiny tangle of many intertwined boughs. Up on one elbow, neck stretched to straining, he did see something and it was not a company of musketeers, but rather a landaulet-an open four-wheeled carriage with a folding top drawn by a single, heavy-looking and mud-brown nag. It was being driven by a figure with a pronounced hunch, his face hidden behind the upturned collar of a dark maroon coachman's cloak and beneath the shadow of a thrice-high of almost matching color. Behind the driver reclined an elegant passenger of unclear gender in clothes so fine that Rossamund could tell the refinement of their cut from his obscure vantage point. As the carriage came near, the elegant passenger called with the clear ring of an educated woman's voice. 'Well, stop here if you must! You know I have places to be and can't be troubled by every quibble or suspicion. But, stop I say, if it will cease your twittering!'
Accordingly the vehicle was pulled to a halt just before the boxthorn.
Rossamund froze.
There was a pause, and then the woman's voice spoke clearly again. 'Go on then, I shall wait!'
The driver obediently got down and began to swing his head about as if searching, revealing his face-or what should have been a face. Instead it was a rectangular wooden box pocked occasionally with small round holes on its front and two larger openings, one on the lower end of each side. Thick leather straps held it to his head. A sthenicon! Rossamund stared, horrified. The driver was a leer! Rossamund knew there was no escaping a leer: the sthenicon revealed every scent of every living thing big or small that moved within an area of a mile or more. What is more, they were reported to be able to see things everyday folk could not, to peer into secrets and search in hidden regions. The box-faced driver shuffled nearer to the overgrown boxthorn bush and peered within, his head swaying and poking forward. He became still. Rossamund sucked in a breath and lay very still, every nerve and fiber straining, waiting.
How he wished he had not lost his cudgel. How he regretted the spoiled bothersalts.
Eventually the box-faced driver stepped back to the landaulet and appeared to address the elegant passenger, as the latter leaned over and both heads nodded, at times with pronounced emphasis. A conclusion seemingly reached, the woman alighted from the carriage and, straightening her fine clothes, stepped with determined poise over to where the driver had stood before the boxthorn. She wore the most luxurious and unusually cut frock coat of deep scarlet, buttoned and buckled at the side, and the shiniest, blackest equiteer boots Rossamund had ever seen. The hem of the coat hung low and flared extravagantly, rustling as she approached.
She stopped and squinted vaguely into the little grove. 'In here, you say?' she asked over her shoulder. Her chestnut hair was gathered up behind her crown in a bun, held with a pointed comb pinned by a hair-tine ending in a clenched crow's claw. Long wisps of flyaway fringe danced in any small movement of air.
A frown.
A sigh.
She leaned forward. 'You in there, little one,' she called quite softly.
Rossamund did not know what to do.
'We've certainly no intention to harm you, so you can stop pretending you're not there and come out.'
Maybe she spoke the truth? Maybe she had water? Rossamund was about to act when his leg was gripped and tugged. Involuntarily he screamed and kicked with his free foot. This too was grabbed and he was pulled out from his hiding-hole into the blinkingly bright morning, hanging upside down-valise and all-in the irresistible grip of the driver. Rossamund squealed like a little piglet, struggling violently-but all his twisting and writhing did not alter his position.
'Put me down, you looby!' he spluttered, serving up the worst curse he knew.
The box-faced driver ignored his almost foul language and carried him around to the roadside, where he held him out in much the same way someone might have held a frantic, just-caught fish. Rossamund continued to twist and writhe.
The elegant woman approached him as someone might approach a cornered snake.
'Now, now,' she soothed, 'put him down, Licurius. We've said we'd not harm him, so we had better not now, had we?'
