Xulai had asked for his sewing kit and made some arrangement with her clothing before letting him wash the things she had been wearing. In between feeding and cosseting Xulai, he carefully copied a map from a book the librarian had loaned to him, a large book, unsuitable for carrying on a horse. He also made over Jenger’s horse, giving it a shorter mane and tail and some large white spots on the chest and forehead. Doing it right took time, for he actually bleached the hairs rather than merely painting them. Blue was now black, which he deeply resented but understood. One afternoon, Abasio rode him south to fetch the mule he had bought, leading it back to the hidden wagon. As soon as Xulai was fit to travel, he wanted to be on the way south, and since he might have to stay off the road, it would be a slow journey.
He still had two pigeons and a sizeable sack of grain, but he couldn’t carry the birds on horseback, so he’d release them before he left. Perhaps it would be a good idea to send a couple of misleading messages in the meantime, and he spent time composing these, sending them two days apart. One, directed to Wordswell, said, truthfully, that Xulai was recovering from the shock of her abduction and asked him to send that information on to Hallad, Prince Orez, at Woldsgard. Winger would read it first, of course, but that was no matter. It would get to Wordswell and so would the message to the prince.
The next message, to the abbot, said Xulai was being sent to Woldsgard under the protection of men sent by Prince Orez. That would confuse whoever saw it.
The morning after the last message had been sent, they set out, two men on horses, leading a pack mule, one of the men quite young. The older man had reddish hair and a short beard and mustache; he rode a black horse with white blotches. His name was Bram. The younger man wore a large cap of a kind often worn by farm people of the area. His name was Chippy, and he rode a plain black horse. In midmorning, they met a group of riders coming from the east, a couple of traders and their families on their way to Merhaven with a number of hired men along as guards. Bram, being charming, received an invitation for him and his shy young brother to join them.
Chapter 7
The Old Dark House
The archers returned to the Old Dark House by the same route they had taken earlier, arriving early in the morning. The duchess had been watching the road from the tower, and she met them in the forecourt of the castle. Their leader dismounted and bowed deeply.
“We didn’t find him, ma’am. He wasn’t in the tower, and we didn’t find him anywhere near it. His horse was gone. The birds were gone, except for the ones that home there—”
“The prisoner?” she demanded.
“We didn’t see a prisoner, ma’am. We didn’t see any sign there’d been a prisoner. No sign of food or blood or . . . anything in the cell, ma’am. Usually, if there’s a prisoner, shackled, there’ll be . . . like . . .”
“Piss,” she said. “And stink.”
“Nothing there, ma’am.”
She glared. “Did you search the area, look for a body?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. First thing we did. We didn’t have the manpower to make a search over all the forest, but we took a good look everywhere nearby. We found some old bones on a little shelf below the tower where he maybe gutted and butchered a deer, but the bones were just bits, brown, chewed. Nothing that looked human.”
“You brought back everything?” she asked in a razor-edged voice.
He said placatingly, “Everything but the furniture and the birds, ma’am. We didn’t have cages for the birds or a wagon for the furniture, but we can go back and get them at once if you want us to.”
“No,” she snapped, thinking that someone else would have to occupy the tower and the birds could be fetched then. It did not occur to her, as it had not to the archers, that caged birds would have no one to feed or water them in the meantime.
“Just carry the sacks downstairs for me.”
So they did, down the crooked flight of stones into a kind of anteroom where there was nothing to see, though the archers pointedly looked only straight ahead. No one worked for the duchess without quickly learning that curiosity killed in the Old Dark House. When they were gone, she emptied the sacks onto a workbench. A few items of clothing. Supplies for messages: papers, pens, ink, the little tubes the messages went in. A sack of food: dried meat, cheese, a few bottles, some stale bread. His personal things. A comb, a brush with several of his hairs caught in the bristles. Well. Upstairs in her bedroom she had several of Jenger’s hairs. He had left them on her pillow, and she had saved them carefully. These were fresher. She would use these.
She unlocked the door to the room with the machines and went to the fatal-cloud maker. The angled receptacle went in with a tiny click, and she noticed once again how much the receptacle resembled a skull, rounded on one side, angled like a jaw on the other, with a row of little protrusions that looked like teeth. This always amused her. When the device had finished and extruded
