I kept one eye on Dinn, for all that everyone seemed happy and friendly together. I'd been the one to shame him by dragging him chained and hobbled into Istar. Minotaurs usually like to erase the memory of shame by killing anyone who knows about it.
An unwelcoming place, the savannah; hot and dry and without landmarks. This is the land of the nomad clans, and there are no borders to cross; nothing to warn you that you're in some clan's territory, for the nomads have no individual territories. Always moving, settling nowhere, the long-braids consider the whole savannah theirs. They have a hard greeting for visitors — a flint-tipped arrow, a lance's stony head.
We went carefully, Alyce and I riding; Dinn loping ahead, a tall, homed outrunner tracking steadily west to the blue-hazed mountains. Sometimes Peverell trotted beside him, unseen but for the parting of the high grass as he went, the wake of a small, mute kender. More often, he stayed by Alyce. Like all kender, he loved to talk, and she had more patience for his silent language — and clearly a greater understanding of it — than the minotaur did.
I was used to riding alone since Toukere and I had parted ways, and I was used to quiet. But soon I found myself liking the sound of Alyce's voice: low because of the danger, thrilling when she was keen on her subject, gentle when she was thinking aloud. Alyce did a lot of thinking out loud, about politics and history and gods.
'I'll tell you something, Hunter-Doune,' she said, one blazing noonday when the savannah ran rippling under a hot wind. 'I've always heard that gods are about balance, good and neutral and evil all lending their weight in the measure against chaos. I think it's politics that makes heretics, not wrong thinking. Which, if you believe what you hear, is just what this outlaw, Kell, thinks.' She glanced at me out of the comer of her eyes. 'If you believe what you hear.'
She seemed to know a lot about Kell, and I wondered if she'd conceived some romantic fancy for the outlaw. I asked her about this, in a joking way. Peverell, trotting beside us, looked up at me, signing swiftly, laughing silently.
'What'd he say?' I asked.
'Kender nonsense,' she said stiffly. 'I have no fancies about Kell. A good hunter should know what she's hunting, how the prey thinks, what it will defend, where it goes to hide, where it is vulnerable.' She smiled, as though to herself and over private thoughts. 'Don't you agree, Hunter-Doune?'
I said I was a bounty hunter, not a boar hunter.
'So you are.' She laughed, mocking again. 'And a good one who wastes no time thinking about the heretics you hunt. Right?'
'No sense in it. They're nothing more than the promise of gold, payable on delivery.' I slipped her a sideways grin. 'Thanks to politics.'
Again Peverell gestured, his whole bright face a question; this time Alyce translated.
'He wants to know whether heretics are people to you.'
I shook my head. 'They're profit.'
The kender signed again, and Alyce looked at me for a long moment, her eyes all soft and gravely thoughtful, as if she were weighing the balance of me on a scale.
'Empty enough for the wind to howl through, aren't you, Hunter-Doune?'
'Did he say that?'
'No. I did. How'd you get so empty?'
'Tricks of the trade.' I shifted uncomfortably to another tack. 'Why are you worrying about how I feel? I don't see that YOU'RE holding a whole lot of mercy for Kell.'
She looked away, out across the golden, shifting savannah. 'My feelings for Kell are… personal,' she said. 'I'm not a bounty hunter by trade.'
'Oh? What'd he do, steal the pennies off your dead father's eyes?'
She winced, and I was sorry I'd said it. I'd come close to some truth, one that hurt.
'Come on, Alyce,' I said, and surprised myself to hear how gently I'd spoken. 'Don't worry about me and my feelings. They haven't got all that much to do with you anyway, eh?'
The old, taunting light, brittle and bright, came back to her eyes. 'Not much,' she said, and she laughed.
I thought the laughter was forced.
That's the way we talked during those long, hot days on the savannah. Sometimes she mocked, as she'd done in the Hart; sometimes she was serious, and I liked that best. Soon I began to wish that the kender would stay with Dinn. I was getting to like Alyce's company, the nearness of her, her voice, even her thoughtful, considering silence.
There were possibilities in her silence. At night, as I slept — Alyce wrapped in rough woolen blankets with a tall fire between us — those possibilities changed into dreams in which the minotaur and the kender had no roles to play.
But the kender was with us more often than not, and so we three were together — Alyce, Peverell, and me — when, at the end of our third day of travel, the sun set in a blaze of red and ahead of us Dinn spotted the nomad woman and her child.
My horse danced skittishly, sidled away from the minotaur's horns. Dinn smiled thinly when he saw that, tossed his head so that a horn came dangerously close to the horse's shoulder… and my leg. He pointed to the tall grass where it parted counter to the wind's direction.
'Two,' he said to Alyce. 'Long-braids.'
The nomad woman ran swiftly, though she went hunched over, burdened by the weight of the small boy clinging to her back. The boy's head bounced limply in rhythm to her swift, ground-covering stride. His sunbrowned leg was streaked with blood. The woman's course would take her right across our path.
Answering the instinct of fifteen years, I reached for the coil of rope hanging from my saddle. One good cast and I'd have her and the child roped, down, and trussed.
Alyce, seeing my gesture, said, 'How much for those two, Hunter-Doune?'
Eighty gold, I told her. Forty for each, the woman not being worth more than the child.
Alyce smiled coldly. 'Your share of Kell's bounty is worth ten times that. Are you with me, Hunter- Doune?'
I didn't answer. I was watching the woman run. Although the wind covered our whispering and our mounts were still, something — a silence of birds, maybe — must have spoken to her instincts. She threw a swift look over her shoulder and stumbled, startled to see us. Her eyes were large and dark, like empty holes in a mask of terror. The sight chilled me, squeezed my heart so that it was as if I felt the desperate fear myself.
The woman recovered quickly, hitched the boy up higher on her back, and ran faster.
I took my hand away from the rope, saw Alyce watching me — not weighing anything, not taunting. Rather, she smiled the way you do when you first meet someone and you're thinking that you like what you see. Peverell looked from one to the other of us, then gestured something. His hands flew too fast for me to get his meaning, but Alyce did. A dark scowl replaced her smile as she told him to stop talking nonsense.
They say that the red moon, Lunitari, is the daughter of Gilean, the deity who is the keeper of all the knowledge possessed by the gods. Solinari, the silver moon, is Paladine's son, and he watches over all the magic being done in the world. That night, while the others rested, I walked the first watch and saw these two moons — gods' children, if you will — rising. First to rise was Lunitari. When I squinted eastward across the plains, I thought I saw the tall towers of Istar silhouetted against the red disk, dark like a jagged bite taken out of the moon's rim. Second up was Solinari, and he rose a little north of Istar, avoided the teeth of the Kingpriest's city.
Foolish fancy, eh? Well, I had a lot on my mind — too much for sleeping — and I kept coming back to the memory of how I'd felt when Alyce smiled after I'd let the nomads go.
That was just more foolish fancy. Why should I care how I weighed out in her eyes? Aye, she was long- legged and lovely. Her blue eyes, when they weren't mocking, spoke of possibilities, inspired dreams. She was round — and surely soft and warm — in all the right places, but so was many another woman, and I knew that well enough. The only difference between Alyce and them was that she was a good hand with a sword, good to talk to… and she was leading me to a quarter share of a fine, large bounty.
