“He won’t show up,” I said hopelessly.
“For your sake, girly, he’d better.”
“Would you ask ransom?” I suggested, hoping that King Kelver might see fit to increase his investment. He had already gone to considerable expense and might not mind a little extra.
“The Game is between Mendost and me,” he said offhandedly. “Why should I want ransom? Ransom will not avenge my honor. Mendost struck me without warning. He did not announce Game before striking me.”
“If he’d been drinking,” I said, “it wasn’t Game at all. It was just bad temper.”
“If it wasn’t Game for Mendost then, he must learn it is Game now,” he said, turning the horse through a screen of trees and down into a hidden hollow where a camp had been set up. “The Herald has delivered my demands by now. He was on his way to your gate when we picked you up.” Porvius Bloster sounded so self-satisfied, so pompous, I knew there would be no reasoning with him. Which is probably why Mendost hit him in the first place. If you are ever captured by someone, pray it is not a stupid, pompous man who sees the whole world through a haze of his own preconceptions. As I analyzed the situation, it seemed fairly hopeless that he would ever believe me. He was not living in the same world I was. He was simply too sure he was right.
There was a tall, greasy-looking post at one side of the camp, and I saw with alarm it had been fitted up with a tether and harness. Sure enough, they put the harness on me, hooked up behind where I couldn’t reach it, and the tether went to the top of the post where I couldn’t reach that end, either. There was a small tent nearby where I could sleep. I could get into the thicket if I needed to go. They weren’t going to torture me or anything. In fact, as they went about their business, it was obvious they weren’t very interested in me at all. I sat in the entrance of the tent, getting familiar with the camp, thinking. It seemed to me the best thing to do was to become invisible.
Now the first rule of invisibility is that you have to be where you can be seen. You sort of blend into the scenery. Never hide. If you hide, people wonder where you are and what you’re doing, so you don’t hide. You do whatever you’re doing right out in front of everyone, but it’s what you do all the time. So I began to wander around, into the thicket and out. Among the trees and out. Into the tent and out. Over near the fire to get warm, then away. Down to the little pool to get a drink. Pick up a few sticks and put them down near the fire. Pick a rainhat berry and eat it. Rainhat berry. Still walking aimlessly around, I set myself to search for shivery-green. It wasn’t common. Not nearly as common as the rainhat bush. Thinking of that, I picked a couple of leaves and put them beside the tent. If it rained, I could use them to replace the rain cape in the saddlebag Misquick had taken home.
I didn’t find any shivery-green that day. Night came. They gave me some food, not very good. They sat in the light of their fire, mumbling to one another. Porvius Bloster had a chain about his neck with a pendant on it. I had noticed it during the day several times and now it was even more noticeable in the light of the fire. He fingered it now, turning it in his fingers. When the others lay down to sleep he sat there, turning it, turning it, at last laying it upon his tongue and sucking upon it as a baby does a sugar tit.
I knew what it was then. I’d never seen one before that I knew of, though there was talk of them in the Demesne, as there is always talk of things exotic and strange. It was a dream crystal. If what I had heard about them was true, it was no wonder he could not deal with the reality around him. He had already dreamed this occasion, dreamed its progress and conclusion. Nothing I could say would disrupt the dream. Too much confusion between the dream and the reality would unbalance him completely, and who knew what he might do then.
I waited, scarcely breathing until he let the thing fall from his mouth and wandered toward the tent. The tent the men slept in was out of reach of my tether, so I couldn’t sneak in on them in the night. I could get up very, very early, however, and start my wander once more. It took until noon to find a plant of shivery-green. Only one plant of it, trembling like a little emerald fountain between the buttress roots of a great tree, with three little seed clusters nodding at the tips of the stems. So. Now the location of it was known, if one could only figure out what to do about it.
I began to be ubiquitous around the fire. When and if the rainhat roots and the shivery-green seeds were put together, the juice would have to get into their food somehow. Once they were asleep for some little time, the tether could be pounded on a rock until it frayed through. Then I could get a knife off one of them and cut the harness. King Kelver’s gift was in my pocket, the scent bottle in the shape of a frog. That would hold a lot more of the juices than was needed.
Invisible. I began bashing up some bark into strips to make a basket. Right away Porvius sent one of the men over to see what was going on, and I ignored him while threading webwillow twigs and bark pieces together. It wouldn’t have fooled a dam for
