icebox, made from a cut-down refrigerator in the usual way. They didn’t look much different from what she remembered, skins of dark-olive shade and tightly curled hair, the elder round-faced and the younger thinner. Their faces were drawn with worry, though, and there was a wariness to their eyes that hadn’t been there before. The kitchen smelled pleasantly of soap and wax and the roses and dahlias which stood in vases on the window-ledges, and faintly of cooking.
And there was a pregnant blond woman sitting at the table too, with a two-year-old boy squatting on the tile floor by her side and a cup of chicory non-coffee before her. She was extremely pretty, but slightly puffy around the eyes, which were a little bloodshot too.
Juliet Thurston! Ritva thought, keeping her face bovine-calm and uninterested. Rhaich, Rhaich! Siniath faeg!
She mentally added a phrase which translated literally into the Common Tongue as: An individual excessively attached to their mother in a carnal manner who is also the offspring of a female Warg.
The tired eyes scanned across her listlessly, then came back. The wife of the ruler of Boise yawned and said: “Lawrence, go play in the living room.”
“No!” the boy said.
Lawrence Jr. was a handsome-looking lad, and he grinned with a gap in his white teeth as he used a two- year-old’s favorite word; both his parents were well made, with the long-limbed build he showed promise of. His eyes were a brightly alert dark blue, and his hair curly and brown with light streaks from the summer sun. He was clad in a miniature version of Boise’s army uniform, complete with small boots.
“Lawrence, do I have to tell you twice? The third time comes with a spank.”
“ ’Kay, Mom,” he said.
His air was cheerful, just a child whose attention had been gotten, and he picked up the painted wooden cavalrymen he had been marshaling and gallumphed out of the kitchen making horse-noises. The living room was visible from here, but far enough away that a soft-voiced conversation couldn’t be heard.
Ritva wasn’t openly armed; the little knife on her belt was the universal tool nearly everyone carried. The blade was only four inches long, but it was honed shaving-sharp, and it was good steel. A step, a blow, a slash…
No, she thought. I can’t kill cut a mother’s throat in front of her toddler, and her with child. Better to use it on myself.
That was illogical, she knew. In war she’d be perfectly ready to pull the lanyard on a trebuchet and send a five-hundred-pound boulder over a city wall to strike whom it would, and this was war. Some things went deeper than logic, though, or beyond it. Everyone was looking at her; the listless, slightly slumped body language was gone and her body was quivering with alertness, her weight up slightly on the balls of her feet and everything flowing smoothly.
Juliet’s face had firmed too. “Mary Havel, isn’t it? Or the other one?”
Three slight gasps, and then she saw recognition dawn on the others, too. Very carefully she spread her hands and kept her own voice level and light.
“ Mae govannen, my ladies,” she said. “I am here to see if you need our help. I am Ritva Havel, yes.”
The fog seemed to clear from Cecile Thurston’s eyes as she peered and then slowly recognized the Dunedain too; it had been only the one meeting, several eventful years ago, after all. Her daughters sat bolt-upright, and the eldest said: “Elvellon!” she said: The elf-friend!
Ritva held up a soothing hand at the clumsy Sindarin that followed. She remembered that Shawonda had been entranced by the Histories even when they first met; she guessed shrewdly that she’d fled into them since as a refuge from her troubles since, and as a source of strength and hope in a world whose foundations had crumbled beneath her in a welter of treachery and blood. The Rangers got a fair number of recruits from exactly that pattern of thought and feeling.
“In the Common Tongue, nethig,” she said; that meant little sister, and brought a tremulous smile.
Juliet’s reaction surprised Ritva most of all; she buried her face in her hands for a moment and started to cry. Not what she would have expected given their previous acquaintance, at all. Doubly so before a stranger.
“I take it,” she said carefully, “that you want to leave too, ah, Mrs. Thurston? Leave your husband?”
“Oh, God, yes, please, he’s not Martin anymore! Since he came back from Bend… he, he, he hit me. And then he said if I argued with him again he’d cut out my tongue, that I didn’t need that to breed.”
Cecile Thurston gave a grimace of distaste, and the two girls stared at their sister-in-law with shock and dawning horror; evidently she hadn’t said that in front of them before.
“I can’t… I can’t bear the thought of him touching me again!”
Well, that settles that, Ritva thought. This can’t be a put-on to set me up. Cunning elaborate plans like that only happen on the spur of the moment in stories. She’ d just yell for the guards, and I can’t get out of here. And I’ve hardly ever seen anyone so frightened…
She remembered fighting the Seeker who’d cut out Mary’s eye; his own gaze, like a spiral downward into a depth that wasn’t even black, was nothing, un-being where even meaning was no more. Then she tried to imagine waking up and seeing that on the pillow next to her, and felt a rash of sweat break out under her arms and around her neck, along with a twist in the stomach.
“Euuuu,” she murmured to herself.
Juliet scrubbed at her face, and called mastery back to herself with a series of deep breaths. “How… what can you do?” she went on steadily.
Ritva shook her head. “This change in your husband, it happened after he came back from meeting the Prophet, Sethaz, in Bend?”
“Yes. Before then, he was… he was Martin. Now it’s as if there’s two people in his head, or another one that can put Martin on like a mask. ”
Like one of those grubs that eats out an insect from the inside, Ritva thought. Only with the soul as the host. I won’t say that, though.
Cecile was glaring at her daughter-in-law; Ritva could fill in that too. As long as it had merely been a matter of parricide and usurpation, Juliet had been all for it. Only once the whole web of betrayal had turned on her had it become bad. The older woman took a deep breath and obviously pushed the matter aside for later. She did say: “It wasn’t Fred, was it.”
The inflection didn’t have a question in it. Ritva replied gently but firmly: “No. It wasn’t.”
Then: “Do you have a map of the city?” she said. And to Juliet: “When is your… when is Martin due back?”
“The day after tomorrow,” she said. “There’s a report of some sort of force moving through Nevada… but there are always Rovers and bandits down there.”
And we went through that way for a while, Ritva thought; it was the path that avoided Boise’s all-too-active patrols.
“Can you get out of the Compound?” Ritva asked. “Taking all here with you?”
Juliet cast a quick glance at the others. Ritva caught it and went on: “The mission is to rescue Lady Cecile and Janie and Shawonda… Fred’s kin. To them we have a debt of honor. You were no part of our plan and it’s an added risk.”
The bloodshot eyes were shrewd. “And you need them to undermine Martin’s position.”
“Yes. Will you, too, denounce him?”
Juliet took a deep breath. “Yes. Yes. I can’t stay, I can’t.”
“Then we have little time. Ah, thank you, Shawonda.”
The girl spread a map of the city out on the kitchen table; it was a modern one, showing the walls. “Now, can you get all these outside the Compound walls?”
Juliet nodded, her fists clenching. “I… I think so. Yes. As long as Martin isn’t here. For a little while at least. But there will be guards, at least two platoons of the Sixth.”
“ That I think we can take care of. Show me where it’s credible you’d go…”
When they had finished Ritva nodded briskly. “Here, then.” She tapped a building. “This shopping expedition is credible?”
“The commander will be pleased. He’ll think it means I’ve persuaded Cecile and the girls to be, uh, cooperative.”
