Vang didn’t say anything to that. Instead, he tripped again, but he stayed quiet.
Everybody but me had argued that we should sneak into the lookouts’ camp and overwhelm them. Ideas for what we should do after that varied. Pil wanted to take a prisoner or two and question them in case the situation had changed since Vang was captured. Halla and Whistler preferred to kill everybody, steal their horses, and move on. Bea felt we should get as much information from them as an hour of torture could produce. She offered to kill them herself. Vang and Affie sniped at each other and didn’t offer opinions.
I explained to everybody that if we killed the soldiers, or captured them, or tied them up in a tree like apples, Leddie would soon figure out we had escaped north. Then she and her horsemen would run us down like we were chubby young pigs. But if we sneaked past her sentries, Leddie may well assume we were still in the bog, and she’d continue waiting for us to break out.
Bea glared at me, but everybody agreed to follow my plan. I hoped it played out better than most of my recent plans.
Pil moved up to walk beside me, a presence in the darkness. She tramped along, not speaking.
After a while, I whispered, “Do you want something, Pil? Or are you just enjoying my energetic presence and fine, manly smell?”
Pil choked a little, and I hoped it was laughter instead of disgust. She whispered fast, “Not that. Yes, I want something, but it’s awkward, really it is. I was wondering if you might agree to . . . if you would ever think about showing me a few things about things. About sorcery things, I mean.”
When I didn’t answer, she kept talking but even faster. “I don’t mean I want to follow you around and do your bidding and that kind of crap, and I don’t want to wash your clothes and clean every darn thing you own twice a week because it’s supposed to teach me something. Just a few things I don’t know, which I guess makes sense, because if I already knew them, I wouldn’t ask you to teach them to me, would I? So, will you?”
I whispered, “You were Dixon’s student. If I try to teach you something, any sorcerer has the right to kill me.”
Pil paused. “Really?”
“Hell no! Screw Dixon and both his homely sisters! I don’t think I can teach you anything useful, though.” I thought little of Dixon as a person. He must have been a canny sorcerer to have survived so long, but he didn’t seem to have served Pil well as a teacher. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure I wanted to compare my teaching to Dixon’s. After what happened to Manon, my history as a teacher was tarnished.
Pil sighed. “Don’t say no. Just don’t.”
I sighed right back at her. “I won’t say no, but I won’t say yes, either.”
“Good!” she whispered.
“I didn’t say yes!”
She kept on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I need help with manipulation. I’m clumsy.”
“Not too damn clumsy with a bow.” Pil had kept the cursed weapon, not caring that I had advised her to get rid of it. Twice more I had almost told her to throw it away, but I kept still about it. She was a sorcerer, and I had no right to give her orders.
Pil whispered on: “And that’s the other thing, which Dixon didn’t know anything at all about. I need to understand enchantments and creating magical things. After all, I’m a Binder and am supposed to make enchanted objects, so I have to know more, and Dixon—he tried, but he was just ignorant on the subject.”
I glanced over at Pil’s outline against the stars. Vang stumbled again and hit the ground with a grunt. “Pil, what makes you think I know a single rat-gagging thing about Binder magic?”
She smiled big enough for me to hear it in her whisper. “In the oracle’s tent, you talked about carrying a magical book there under your shirt. Created by the God of Death. That makes you a thousand times more qualified to talk about magical objects than any person I’ve ever met.”
I did not want to talk about the book, especially since Harik had been threatening me over it. “It’s not the same at all. Forget about it.”
She paused, and then words spilled out of her as if she were pouring them from a bucket. “It might be the same, you can’t know for sure—of course I know you’re the expert since I’m asking you about it, but maybe you need a new perspective, like from somebody who’s stupid about all this, who’ll see things you don’t, or can’t, but you could, if you just knew what they couldn’t see. Like me. What does the book do?”
“Nothing good. Not a single damn thing.” I said it softly, but I knew she could hear.
“But what not-good things does it do?”
I felt sick. “Nothing. Leave it alone.”
“Well, it has to do something! Why would Harik make a book and then just have it do nothing?” She put her hand out in the darkness and touched my arm before moving up to lay it on my shoulder. I shrugged it off.
“Oh. I see.” Pil sighed again. “It’s that important, then. Well, just tell me about the book, and I’ll leave you alone about everything else. I mean, we’ve saved each other’s lives, so you should be able to trust me, at least some, right? Please?”
She sounded like she was asking for no more than a piece of cake. “It won’t help you.”
“Please?” She reached for my shoulder again, patted it twice, and let her hand drop.
I kept walking, pretending
