The young man said, “You may take it that way, sir. In fact it was unanimous. You have no idea of how the idea of rescuing Keylinn O’Malley Murtagh would attract a group of cadets. The rest of them are waiting at the port now.”
“Then I can assume—”
“At this moment, we are tarethi-din. That’s correct.” The young man smiled cheerfully and gunned the car over a pothole.
“I’d like to make a request, then,” said Tal, as he fell against the side of the vehicle.
“More careful driving?”
“No. Yes, that, too. My request is that you let me know if I seem to be nearing any contract violation.”
The young man glanced at him. “I’ll bear your wish in mind, sir,” he said, with the usual Graykey noncommittance where commitment was not mandatory.
Spider looked out at the darkness, unreassured.
Chapter 30
An army of elves walked from the woods
Fell and grim, of shadows made.
Earth: Traditional
Four days in a crowded ship with a dozen young and energetic Graykey is an experience unlike any other, Spider reflected. For one thing, they ate like large and growing dogs—and from the bones he found stuffed into the waste chute he concluded that vegetarianism was not a philosophical necessity. And for the first day they all drank cheerfully and enormously from flasks they’d brought in their leather packs.
“It takes seventy-two hours to detoxify,” explained a girl named Skeeter with close-cropped hair and a tattoo of a day lily on her shoulder. “We’ll stop drinking tomorrow, and then we’ll be short-tempered for a while.”
“Ah,” said Spider, thinking that he looked forward to that.
They partitioned the hold into individual sleeping quarters—more or less individual, a number of them shared their bedrolls—and Spider could hear them talking incessantly through the day and night. When they weren’t talking, they were singing, and when they weren’t singing, they were arguing. There was a brief fight on the second day (“the de-tox,” thought Spider) but it was broken up, and whenever Tal came down into the hold, everybody became as polite as well-behaved little children visiting the parents of a friend. They called Spider “sir,” too, although they also invited him to drink with them, which they did not do with Tal.
“A gathrid,” explained one of the boys on the first night, making a sort of “I don’t know” motion with his hand. “One likes to tread carefully.”
Spider wouldn’t argue with him. Remembering Sefill’s warning he said, “Call me Spider—there’s no need for formality, is there? And can I ask you something, friend? Why do some of you wear red headbands and some of you blue?”
The boy touched his red band and smiled. “Sentimental value. It’s our last training exercise together. The Blues are the Gulls, and the Reds are the Herons.”
“Keylinn was a Gull,” put in a girl sitting nearby.
“One of the best,” said another, raising a pewter flask. “She broke the point record for her team in taking the power station at Moliere.”
“Hear, hear!” And everybody drank solemnly.
“Did you hear what she did during Peace Week?” asked the first boy, and somebody yelled tipsily, “Keylinn stories!”
Tal descended the steps, a sheaf of papers tucked under one arm. It was as though someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over the sprawling cadets; the sense of playfulness vanished at once.
Tal glanced at his unpredictable crew. “Keylinn stories? Tell me one.”
“Please tell us,” said Spider. He looked at the silver-coated flask he’d been handed; it was engraved with some sort of coat of arms with wild roses. He took a sip and coughed.
The cadet hesitated, looking to his friends. Then he smiled. “Right. It was Peace Week—this was a few years back—and the Black River Graykey and the Portsmouth Graykey were meeting to try and iron out their differences. They’d been getting a little overly violent, you know? So they were all in the Conference Auditorium at Nemeter, with everybody watching, and their negotiators up on stage. Keylinn was part of the college arbitration team. Well, they went on and on, and partway into it she pulled out a book and started reading. That irritated them enough. Then they had to agree on a day to finalize their treaty, and they couldn’t seem to do it. The Black Rivers suggested one day, but the Portsmouth group couldn’t make it—they offered the next day, but the Black Rivers said they had to attend passage ceremonies—maybe the day after. But that’s our holiday, said the Portsmouth Graykey, are you trying to comment on our founder’s birthday? And Keylinn looked up from her book suddenly and said in a loud voice: “Maybe you can stand on the roof and semaphore to each other.”
The boy grinned, took another long drink, and said, “She got into a lot of trouble, no surprise to anyone; but you know, the negotiators were so embarrassed by the public sarcasm that they agreed to meet the next morning.”
The girl beside Spider said, “I heard about that, but I always thought she was put up to it by the Dean. Because of her reputation—everybody knew Keylinn was a prisoner of her sense of humor. So nothing she did reflected back on the administration, it was just Keylinn being Keylinn.”
“When we do get her back, you can ask her,” said the boy.
“What good will that do? If she was put up to it, she’s hardly likely to say so, is she?”
Both of them fell silent and tugged at their drinks moodily. “It’s just like the Dean,” said the boy. “He’ll never kill two birds with one stone if he can get three for the same price.”
One of the nearby cadets said, “You think that’s what it was when she left? That it wasn’t just a punishment?”
“Shut up,” said the first boy, and he glanced at Spider and Tal. Then he added something in Graykey, or maybe Old Tongue, Spider didn’t know which. Then they were all quiet for about a minute, which was as long as it got when they weren’t
