go!”
“Kij doesn’t know that we know it’s her!” Odelia pointed out. “We’ll be on our guard!”
Ren shook her head. “She can’t trust her luck that we haven’t guessed. She’s in too deep. She has to be sure that when she strikes this time, she gets us all. She’s taken our husband, printed this damn story, and left a trail to follow. It’s a trap!”
“And we’re supposed to sit back and let you ride off to get killed, and do nothing?” Lylia asked.
“You’re supposed to stay here and make sure our little sisters are safe, or have you forgotten that they’re between the Porters and the throne too?”
Her sisters exchanged guilty looks.
“You think Kij is going to lure us upriver and then attack here?” Trini asked.
“Quite possibly,” Ren said. “Our mothers might be mostly retired, but they’re still a force to fear. If Kij kills us upriver, unless she counterblows here too, against the palace, then she’ll be facing a very angry Queen Mother Elder.”
“Go upriver,” Trini said quietly. “We’ll guard against the Porters here.”
Raven broke her silence. “It would be best if none of you go. I can take a boat and fetch Jerin back.”
Ren shook her head. “Much as we love Jerin, he figures in this only as bait, and as a royal husband for whoever comes out alive. I need to go upriver and nail Kij to the nearest tree.”
“You can’t arrest a duchess on her ducal grounds, Captain,” Trini added. “You don’t have the power.”
Raven’s mouth quirked into a grin. “It might be fun to try, though. She wouldn’t be suspecting it-a common arrest is much below her own sense of self-importance.”
“I don’t want her warned,” Ren said. “I have a feeling that we’ll have only one shot to get her. I want to make the most of it. Raven, take the boat you just comman-deered to Sparrows Point. Get the Red Dog.
Bring it back. I’ll ready a platoon of marines here.”‘
Raven eyes widened. She controlled a grin, and then bowed slightly. “Yes. Your Highness.”
As Raven hurried off, Lylia crowed with delight. “A gunboat? Ren, that’s truly evil! Blow that bitch out of the water!”
Ren grinned, and swatted Odelia with the newspaper. “You! You’re eldest while I’m gone, unless Halley shows her face, which she may once she sees this paper! Kij has done us a favor there. Send troops to the Herald, find Kij’s mole there, and root her out. I don’t want any more articles that smell-ever so mildly-of treason.”
Odelia gulped at the promotion, and nodded, eyes huge.
“Trini, have a fast messenger go on to Annaboro and let Jerin’s family there know what’s happened. I’ll send one on to Heron Landing once I get upriver. Send word to our cousins-Kij might try to eliminate them too. Send out messengers to the Queens Justice for news on Jerin-Kij will be expecting us to do that, and we don’t want to disappoint her.”
Trini nodded solemnly.
Ren turned last to Lylia. “Call in troops; fortify the palace. The youngest aren’t to go out. Keep our mothers in, if you can. Remember that Kij’s favorite weapon is poison.”
Lylia nodded, and then suddenly hugged Ren tight. “Take care of yourself. Get Jerin back!”
Ren blinked back sudden tears. “I will. Go on, now. Kij has her plan in motion. We’ve got to get ours going too.”
Jerin wasn’t aware Cira was following until her big roan muscled beside his. She reached out, caught him by the waist just as he registered her presence, and jerked him sideways onto her horse. Taken by surprise, he was left with the choice of falling between the horses. perhaps to be trampled, or letting her settle him onto the saddle in front of her.
To his shame, his body chose the latter, clinging tightly to her.
“Where the hell did you learn to ride?” Cira growled, reining her horse sharply and turning suddenly down a side track. His horse raced on without him. She held him tight with one arm, and stripped the pistol from his belt. “You certainly have pluck, I have to say that!”
“Let me go!” He swung at her awkwardly with his free hand, but she dodged the blow.
“What a little lion cub.” Cira laughed at him. “Hush! Quiet as you can! Here they come!”
The shack was a torch in the night behind them. She had tucked her horse into a thick grove of sumac, screening them from the road he had been racing along. Horses were coming, a rolling thunder.
Jerin stopped fighting Cira to be quiet. She held him close, stroking his hair. Her heart pounded under his cheek.
The river trash rode past, dark forms moving through night, hooves drumming on the dry earth.
“It’s okay. We’re safe now.” Cira lowered him to the ground but kept hold of his forearm. “Get on behind me. I can get you back to the palace without so much as a blemish on your reputation. It will get all hushed up, no one the wiser.”
He hesitated, not sure what to do. A throbbing pain in his ankle reminded him that running on foot wasn’t an option.
Cira tightened her hold on him. “Alone, you’d be at the mercy of every woman that sees you.”
She was right. If he didn’t run afoul of a family desperate for a husband, then there were the women that would use him to establish a crib. Much as he didn’t trust Cira, his chances were better with her.
He scrambled up behind her. “Where are we?”
“Halfway to Hera’s Step.” Cira clucked to her roan and guided it out of their hiding space. “This is the main road into Sparrows Point. If we stay on it, well be caught between them and the damn hat-wearing bitches that hired them.”
“How do I know you’re not lying to me?”
Cira chuckled. “I’ll try not to push my credibility with you. Fen and her women went that way; we’ll go this way. How about that?”
“Will it take us downriver to Mayfair?”
“We can’t go downriver. We have to cut across a dozen fields and get upriver.”
“Why?”
“We’re just north of Snake Run, and it’s all white water and deep fast pools. We can’t ford it. We’ll have to go all the way to Queens Highway for a bridge across. With us riding double, those river rats would catch us before we could get to where we could buy fresh horses.”
“It would have been better if you left me on my horse.”
“I’m hoping they think you were thrown. I don’t know many women that could have kept their seat through that. If they believe you’ve been thrown, they’ll have to be searching for you to be on foot, or unconscious, in the dark.”
For a plan conceived at a full gallop, it seemed sound enough.
Jerin pointed out the one flaw. “But won’t they think you’ve caught up with me, like you have?”
Cira’s shoulder lifted under his chin. “I tried to give the impression that I thought everything was a lost cause, and started out in the opposite direction. Whether they believed any of it, is another thing.”
They went as quickly as they could, crossing open fields in reckless bursts and carefully picking their way through cave-black woodlots and windbreaks. With the gray of predawn came a thick fog, whiting out the land- scape. Steamboat whistles echoed from the distant river like cries of great hunting beasts.
The roan, lathered and winded, couldn’t go any farther. They dismounted and found that Jerin’s ankle was weak, but he could limp.
“We’re almost to Sarahs Bend,” Cira said as she helped Jerin to a hay barn standing like an island in the fog. “It’s just a half mile down the road. The Queens Justice here is corrupt. I think the Hats have the lieutenant in their pocket. Fen might think I pulled wonders getting her and her women free, but all I had to do was mention the Hats and drop a few crowns, and someone forgot to lock their cell door.”
“I’m supposed to believe you’re not one of them after comments like that?” Jerin asked.
The barn was in good repair, with no windows and a door padlocked against passing river trash.
Cira tested the heavy lock with a tug. “Fen was a means to something bigger.”
“And I’m just a means to something bigger too?”
Cira gave him a hurt look and then turned away, studying the barn for another entrance. “I’ve been hunting the Hats for over a year. Fen is getting me closer to knowing who they are.”
