response, she twitched the silk shawl back, and Waras got a good look at her face for the first time.
'Eh!' said the captain, forgetting words, and recovering himself with a tincture of grace. He nodded at the caravan master, as though the wordless exclamation had been meant for him, and turned back to Anji so deliberately it was evident he was having trouble not staring. She was pleased to see him shaken even in this small manner. When thrown into the wilderness, one must use every weapon at hand. 'I can't allow any of you to bide within the walls. But a bath seems fair. I'll allow you two men for your own personal guard, ver, and four to escort you, verea.' He nodded at Mai.
'We were to meet a reeve here,' added Anji.
'That reeve was the one who alerted us when we reached the border crossing,' put in Master Iad hastily. 'He came in advance of us. You must have heard the entire story from him already.'
Captain Waras had a certain measure of dignity; he had heft and seriousness. 'Given the severity of the accusations, I'd like to take a look at the prisoner. Get a statement from him, his name and clan. If he's alive, that is. Or did you bring in a dead man?'
Master Iad bristled. 'We brought him in alive, so he could testify. See for yourself!' He unlatched the door, opened it, whipped aside the canvas drape, and stepped away.
Mai had lost track of Shai, but now he stepped into view. He had a clear line of sight into the wagon's interior, and the look of consternation and shock on his face could not have been copied by any traveling performer as they acted out a tale. Within that gloom sat the prisoner, cross-legged on the wagon's bed, chin slumped to chest as if sleeping. There was a sudden cold silence, like an unexpected stirring of icy wind into a hot hot day.
'What is it, Shai?' asked Anji, who stood at an angle from the opening. He could not see inside.
Mai already knew. She knew that look on Shai's face. It was the look he always got when he unexpectedly saw a ghost. Always the same look. Always the same.
' 'A dart, a dart in my eye, how it stings!' ' murmured Shai.
'He's dead,' Mai whispered.
Captain Waras and his men collected more guards and escorted the Qin troop farther down along the river's shore until they reached a side channel in that area where the river became a delta. They forded a shallow channel and fetched up on a small island. Easy to guard and hard to escape from, Anji said, because easy to hear the sound of horses crossing the sluggish backwater.
In this camp, the men had up their tents and set to work with the single-minded concentration she most admired about them. They had leisure now for a hundred tasks. Horses could be groomed properly, weapons polished, knives sharpened, clothing mended, harnesses repaired, pots polished and scrubbed clean. They set to these tasks with a will, all the while seeming to ignore the guards set around them. Yet she knew they were ready to fight. None strayed farther than an arm's length from his favored sword or bow except when they went, in shifts, to wash themselves in a clear-flowing branch of the river; even then some stood guard while others dunked and splashed.
There was plenty of driftwood for campfires. She washed herself as well as she could, although it was not the same as a proper bath. She mended clothing because she had a neat hand with the needle, especially on the delicate lengths of silk. Anji worked alongside the other men, sharpening his sword and polishing his harness.
In truth, despite the threat hanging over them, she was glad for a pair of days where they weren't moving. At first, her worst problem was bugs. But as the first day passed, and a second came to its close, she found herself made restless by anxiety.
'What will happen?' she asked Anji. It was late in the afternoon of the second day. He was seated beside her, replacing one of the leather straps fixed to his saddle. Stripped of grime, and polished, the silver fittings on the saddle gleamed.
He paused to consider her question, then lifted his head and stared across the shallow channel, the fence that bound them to this islet. He marked the placement of the Olossi militia on the far shore and then looked beyond them toward the distant escarpment that marked the high country to the south. There, Mai could just make out the narrow ribbon of road crawling down the long slope down which they had come two days ago. She had felt so hopeful, then.
' 'A dart in my eye,' ' he mused.
They had gone over the ghost's words again and again. It was the only phrase Shai had heard before the corpse and the wagon had been hauled off by Captain Waras's men; naturally, they had been given no chance to examine either.
'How did we miss the killing? Who wanted him dead?'
Anji had no answer.
32
Keshad sat on a mat under a Ladytree. Off in the distance he heard the river's lazy voice, and the haunting call of a dusk wren. Yesterday morning he and Zubaidit had walked free, out of Olossi. They had walked relentlessly, neither of them flagging. In two full days, they had trudged more than twenty mey on West Track. It would take a caravan three or four days to cover as much ground.
He stared at the string of coin draped over his palm. 'How could you have had that many debts racked up in town? How often were you allowed to leave the temple? How could any slave spend that much money?'
Bai was sprawled in grass just beyond the farthest reach of the canopy, eyes closed and a smile on her face as a fat golden rumble bug looped lazy circles around her head. For reasons beyond his comprehension, two ginny lizards had accompanied her when she had left the temple. Big enough to be intimidating, they were, fortunately, small enough to be carried. Both had spiky frills along their backs; both, he'd discovered, shifted in color depending on their mood and other less obvious changes. They had disconcertingly alert gazes. At the moment, they basked beside Bai, watching the rumble bug with what appeared to be friendly interest. Neither the ginnies or Bai responded to his voice.
'Bai! We only have eighty-four leya left. Oh. And twenty vey. But we can buy a day's ration of rice with twenty vey. To be split between us!'
She sighed contentedly, without opening her eyes. 'I can earn coin, or a night's lodging. Don't worry, Kesh. You worry too much.'
'I'm not worrying! I'm being realistic! How are we going to establish ourselves in a new town with so little seed money? We can't afford to pay a leya here and another there for lodging and food as we travel. We can't afford a ride in a wagon. We'll have to walk the entire way. Not at the prices these villages charge. That man at Crow's Gate wanted two leya for us to ride in the back of his cart, only as far as Hayi Fork. That's robbery! And in that village we just passed through, they wanted a half leya apiece just to stay the night in their empty council house! Because their own Ladytree was so ill-cared-for that it had blown down in last year's storms. That's why we have to sleep out here under a wild-lands Ladytree like the paupers we're going to become.'
She rolled up to sit. 'I heard most of this same speech last night, didn't I? Anyway, I like 'out here.' '
She scritched Mischief under her chin and rubbed Magic on one puffy jowl, then rose lithely to her feet. She moved differently; the change was impossible to ignore. His strongest memories of her naturally involved the years they had been little children together, when she had followed him everywhere, cried when she skinned her knee, or asked him for help at any and every least obstacle, whether a barking dog or a splinter in her finger or a shadow that had to be circumnavigated. Now she strolled to the traveler's hearth with a feral glide and poked in the ashy remains with a stout walking stick she had cut for herself yesterday. It looked like she was stabbing a man to make sure he was dead. The ginnies ambled after.
The light deepened, made hazy by the heat. The wayside was quiet. They were the only travelers to stop here beside the road. Every one else was likely relaxing in a tub of hot water at an inn. Certainly they had seen no traffic in the hour since they had left the last village behind.
'Doesn't it seem strange to you?' he said, watching her prowl in ever-greater circles around the hearth, pacing out the roughly oval clearing as she searched for certain plants the ginnies liked to eat. Magic had paused,
