Sometimes she looked at me in such a way as to make me want to be what she seemed to hope I was.
Empty? Maybe once. Maybe still, but Alyce, when she looked at me with her eyes soft, a little hopeful, and gravely thoughtful, made me think that she might be able to fill some of those empty places in me.
I shook my head hard, as if I was trying to shake out this nonsense. It was nonsense, I told myself. Isn't one woman just as good as another on a cold night?
I was looking at the silver moon when I thought that, so I guess you could say I was praying for something, maybe for an answer, or a way to understand why it mattered to me what Alyce thought.
Of course, Solinari didn't have much to say about it. The children of gods have their own business to tend.
When the moons were past their heights I left my watch, stepped carefully around the sleeping minotaur, and sat beside Peverell at the campfire. He gave me a sideways look, then signed something to Alyce. When I asked her what he'd said, she didn't answer right away. I had the idea that she wasn't thinking about how to translate, but whether to. Finally she repeated his gestures, slowly, the way you enunciate each word for the hard of hearing. A long reaching up with both hands to cup something, an abrupt dragging down motion.
'Sun setting,' I guessed.
'Right.'
She raised four fingers, and I suggested that this, coupled with the first gesture, meant four days passing.
'Right again.' Her blue eyes danced as she made the fists-and-clasp gesture I knew to mean friend. 'You know that one. How about this?'
She repeated Peverell's last gesture: slammed her right fist hard onto her level left palm. Then she mimicked his expression: wide-eyed, drop-jawed surprise.
'What do you think that means, Hunter-Doune?'
'I have no idea.'
She moved her lips in a secret little smile. 'It's the whole point of what Pev said. I'll leave you to consider it.'
I spent the night listening to the wind sigh down the starred sky, thinking long and hard about Peverell's gestures. Might be, I thought, that Peverell's fist-in-palm gesture meant an ambush. If so, perhaps he and Alyce were anticipating Kell's surprise to find himself at last taken. And that in only another four days. But nowhere in that interpretation did Peverell's friend-gesture fit.
Last, before I made ready to sleep, I remembered Alyce's secret smile.
Now I remembered this wasn't the first time I'd seen her smile like that. The first time was in the Hart's Leap, right after she'd hunted around trying to find an oath for me to swear. An oath that maybe I wouldn't have given if I'd known it was Dinn I had to help break out of jail.
Cold and creeping came suspicion.
Might be, I thought, that there's another way to interpret Peverell's gestures and Alyce's secret smile. Might be they were having a laugh over how surprised I'd be to find that the oath she took on her father's sword signified nothing but a means to an end — the minotaur's release from jail, the capture of the heretic Kell, and a third share of the bounty instead of a quarter.
Four days. Friendship. And a violent, smashing gesture. Surprise.
Alyce — her considering looks, her soft eyes, her surprised pleasure when I let the nomads go? What were those things? Bait, maybe. Four are better than three on the savannah — until the three got where they needed to go.
Time to get out. Time to cut my losses and get out.
I stayed — for the sake of the gold, I told myself. What I didn't admit — didn't even know then — was that I'd foolishly come too far down the road of fancy to turn back.
Alyce kept to herself after that night. Quiet and brooding, she spoke to Dinn only when she had to, and spoke to me hardly at all. She had something on her mind, and if she talked to anyone about it, that one was Peverell — who seemed to know about, and maybe even sympathize with, whatever troubled her.
They conversed in his silent, graceful language of gesture, and so I had no idea why she'd grown so suddenly distant.
We left the savannah three days after we saw the nomad woman and her child. We made camp that night in a blind canyon, a long slot of stone and tall, rising walls. No need to post watch there. The only way into the canyon was in clear sight of our camp.
We'd no more than built a fire when Alyce looked around to find the kender missing. 'Dinn,' she said. 'Where'd he go?'
The minotaur made the kender's fist-hitting-palm gesture.
'Damn! I told him — ' She glanced at me, then took another tack. 'Dinn, are you sure?'
Dinn shrugged. 'I'm never really sure what he's trying to say, but that is my guess.'
Ah, she wasn't happy with that answer. Nor was she very happy when I asked her what the gesture meant. Blue eyes glinting, she said, 'It means that that kender's going to find himself in some big trouble next time I see him.'
She said no more.
As we ate, the red moon cleared the high canyon walls, spilled light over the stone, made the shadows a web of purple. Alyce, who'd displayed a wharfman's appetite at the Hart, picked only absently at her food. When she tired of that, she bunched a rough woolen blanket into a pillow and stretched out before the fire.
She lay silent, staring up at the narrow sky, the gleaming stars. The fire's flickering glow made her pale cheeks flush rosy, her dark hair shine, but I only watched that from the comer of my eye. Dinn, sitting in the night shadows and honing his daggers, had the most of my attention. He worked with sure, even strokes and sometimes sparks leaped from the steel and stone. When that happened, the minotaur would look up at me, his dark eyes gleaming, his large yellow teeth bared in something like a smile.
'Doune,' Alyce said after a while. 'We're near Kell's hideout. Tomorrow, we'll be playing a whole different game.'
I looked away from Dinn, not liking the sound of that. 'What do you mean?'
She looked at me, her eyes neither soft and thoughtful, nor brittle and jeering. She wasn't smiling. Her expression was unreadable.
'Doune,' she said. 'Can I trust you?'
I answered evenly, though I didn't know where the question was leading. (And, no, it didn't remind me of my own doubt. Doubt had haunted me for the past three days.)
'I swore I'd deal honestly with you, Alyce.'
She nodded. 'On your old friend's memory.'
I said nothing, remembering Peverell's fist-hittingpalm gesture, repeated again tonight. Ambush for Kell, or betrayal for me? I didn't know, and I waited to see where Alyce's questions would lead. Dinn put aside his daggers, watched and waited, too. But he wasn't watching Alyce. He was watching me.
Alyce said, 'Doune, you also said that bounty hunting is just business. Can we trust you to stand by us, no matter what we find tomorrow?'
I laughed without humor. 'Unless this Kell of yours has an army with him. Then you can trust me to do what anyone with sense would do — cut my losses and run. Live to hunt another day, eh? This is a strange time to be talking about that.'
She shrugged. 'Not really. Tell me, Hunter-Doune, what would you do if — '
A loud whistle — a sudden pattern of sharp notes, shrill enough to make the hair stir on the back of my neck — broke the night silence.
'Goblins,' Dinn rumbled, reaching for his daggers.
I scanned the dark heights, saw nothing but shadows and the baleful eye of the red moon gleaming. I listened hard for Peverell's whistle, but heard only the ghostly echo of night wind trapped in the canyon. Then, darkness become solid, goblins lined the heights, black against the moonlit sky. I counted a dozen. Although distance might fool the eye about details, I knew that the least of them was taller than I and more muscular than
