She did not move, and made a sound like a kitten.
“All right, hang on,” I said. I put the candle on the floor, took hold of the edge of the bed frame and lifted. It was magnificently heavy, and I felt its weight in my lower spine and knees. I got it tilted enough to squirm under and brace it with my back, and that allowed me to reach Nicky. I touched her bare ankle.
She screamed and exploded out of the cloak like a trapped animal. She drove us both out into the open, and the bed hit the floor with a sound like a thunderclap. The candle fell over and began to roll, filling the room with disorienting shadows. She was all clawing nails and kicking feet, but she was smaller than me and I finally got my arms around her, pinned her to the floor and used my weight to hold her there. “Nicky, it’s Eddie; calm the hell down!”
I retrieved the candle, miraculously still burning, and held it so I could see her face. Her eyes were wide, and her pupils almost covered the irises. Dried blood stained her lips, and a nasty bruise was forming on her left forehead. She again made a noise like a kitten. Saliva dripped from her mouth, and I smelled a rank, sickly-sweet odor on her breath. She’d been poisoned.
“Nicky, can you hear me?” I said, loud and distinct. “Do you know what he gave you?”
She went limp beneath me. I waited to see if it was a trick, but evidently her sense of the world around her no longer included me or anything else real. I didn’t know what poison Candora had used, but I had to act fast to save her, whatever it was. I wrapped her in her cloak and carried her out onto the stairs.
When I hit the second floor landing, three men came up the stairs toward me. We all stopped in mid-step. Two were wide-eyed rich pilgrims who’d arrived with Tempcott, while the third was one of Marantz’s pros. He drew his knife and said, “Put the girl down.”
I was two stairs above him, so I easily kicked the knife from his hand. It clattered down the stairs to the first floor. In the same motion I threw Nicky over my left shoulder and grabbed one of the younger men by the front of his tunic. I shoved him back down the stairs ahead of me, and followed quickly as he took his pal and Marantz’s guy tumbling with him.
There was no room for my sword, and I didn’t want to stop long enough to get the dragon-embossed knife from my boot. At the bottom of the stairs I stomped on the pro’s head as he tried to rise, slamming it into the floor and hopefully taking him out of the game. I was ten feet from reaching the front door when the two backwoods toughs I’d smacked around in the lounge suddenly blocked my path.
Both held wicked-looking, crude knives that would do more damage coming out than they did going in. “You goin’ nowhere,” one of them growled.
I heard outraged voices on the stairs behind me as other pilgrims emerged from their rooms. He might be right.
At that moment a door beside me opened and out stumbled Prince Frederick, his scarf ridiculously askew. He was barefoot and shirtless, and past him I saw a bored-looking girl on his narrow bed. Yawning, he stepped right between me and the bad guys and said woozily, “Hey, guys, what’s with all the slamming and stomping around?”
I never question luck. I grabbed him around the neck and yanked him against me as a shield. I clutched his throat hard enough for him to know I could easily crush his windpipe. Suddenly he was wide awake and completely sober.
“Hey, do you know who I-,” he started to say.
“Not another word,” I snarled. He nodded quickly.
More of the hill people emerged from the sitting room. Guess they didn’t get the fancy rooms upstairs and probably made do with a common area in the back. They filed in behind their brethren; that ten feet to the door was getting longer every minute.
“Any of you toads so much as blinks wrong, and Tempcott’ll need a new walking gold bag,” I said as I shoved the prince forward. He was slight and girlish, his bare torso no more muscled than a ten-year-old’s. He offered no resistance, but merely whimpered and raised his hands as if I held a crossbow to his back. The others stepped aside, grudgingly letting us pass. Any of them could’ve leaped forward and knifed me, but I counted on them knowing how important Frederick was to their leader.
“Open the door!” I snapped. One of the other rich boys hurried to obey. Nicky’s weight made my shoulder ache, and Frederick sweated so much my grip on his throat was beginning to slip. I turned as I went through the door, keeping the bad guys in front of me as I backed out.
And of course, because I’m a total fatalist, I wasn’t at all surprised when a voice behind me, from the porch, said, “Well, this sure looks interesting.”
EIGHTEEN
I don’t have time to banter,” I said. “Who are you and whose side are you on here?”
I heard a thump as the interloper slid down off the porch rail, then the soft shwip as he drew my sword from its scabbard. Just when I was sure I’d feel my own blade at my throat, the voice said wearily, “I suppose I’m on yours.”
I risked a glance, and was more surprised than ever: it was the damn scribe again. He stepped in front of me and faced the doorway full of dragon worshippers. “Okay, listen,” he told them. “I’m really not very good in a fight, so I’ll probably get this sword stuck in the first guy I stab. The rest of you can take me down pretty easy then, but the question is… who’s going to be that first guy?”
No one moved. The scribe mock feinted with the sword, and the others jumped back. He laughed. He had his thumb on the safety catch; he wasn’t as much an amateur as he pretended. “You taking the prince, too?” he asked me.
“I’d just as soon not,” I said.
The scribe grabbed Frederick by the hair and shoved him through the door back into the house. Then he yanked the door shut. He turned to me and said, “What’s wrong with her?”
“Poisoned,” I said.
“My horse is in the street; take her to the moon goddess hospital outside town. I’ll make sure no one follows and then meet you there.” He swung the sword casually. “Wow, a Shadow Slasher III. Nice balance, too, although I always thought they were top-heavy.”
I had no time to argue or try to fathom his true intentions. As he said, his horse-a majestic chocolate-colored stallion-waited patiently in the street, and did not balk when I took the reins, tossed Nicky’s limp body over his back and leaped into the saddle. He took off with only the slightest nudge from my heels, and people jumped aside as we shot through town.
I repeatedly kicked the door of the main hospital building to get their attention, but not hard enough to break it open. Two heavy doors in one night was all I had in me. Nicky moaned softly, limp in my arms. “Hey! Emergency here!”
The door opened and a kindly gray-haired woman wrapped in a robe held up a lamp. She saw Nicky’s pale, sweaty face and immediately stepped aside. “First room to your left,” she said. “Put her on the table.”
One of the apprentices, a young woman clad in a thin sleeping gown, appeared rubbing her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“This girl’s been poisoned,” the older woman said. “Get water heated for a bath. Put sea salt and draw-weed in it.”
The apprentice understood the urgency and scurried to obey. The older woman followed me into the small examination room, opened the red robe and scowled at Nicky’s skimpy loincloth. “Did you buy her for the evening and things got out of hand?” she snapped at me.
“No,” I said. “She’s not a whore; she’s just a girl who got in over her head and fought back.”
She looked at me oddly. “Mr. LaCrosse?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t recognize you without the bandage around your head. You should reconsider whoever gave you that haircut, though. Here, make yourself useful and light the other lamps.” As I followed orders, she lifted the girl’s eyelids, sniffed at her shallow breath and checked her pulse at her throat. Exposed this way, askew and covered in
