I was hyperconscious of everything around me: the wind in the trees, the splash of a fish in the lake, a woodpecker’s persistent knocking. Sweat trickled down my forehead. Not many men survived seeing Jane Argo from this angle. Offhand, I’d put the count at “none.”
With a flick of her wrist, Jane knocked the bee from my collar and slapped it to the ground. She crushed it beneath the sole of one knee-high leather boot. “There.”
My voice sounded reasonably normal when I said, “Thanks, but I could’ve just slapped it away myself, you know.”
“Ah, where’s the fun in that?” She looked at her sword longingly. “Was a time I could’ve sliced it in half before it hit the dirt.”
“No, you couldn’t,” I said, wiping the sweat from my eye.
She laughed. If you spent any significant time with her, you realized she laughed a lot, and her voice was incongruously high-pitched and girlish for someone her size. She was my height, busty and wide-hipped but with a wasp-narrow waist. Her broad shoulders were as muscular as a galley slave’s, and she wore a large ring on every finger. Her hair fell past her shoulders, and only the faint streaks of gray in it and slightly deeper smile lines indicated that she was older than she sounded. “Yeah, you’re right, but it’s nice to pretend we once had a mythical prime, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. I tried not to pretend about anything, but that didn’t mean Jane couldn’t.
She turned to the young man tied to a nearby tree. He was scruffy, unshaven, and his clothes were often- patched rags. “So what did you think of my little trick?”
He glared at us and said nothing. The anger in his eyes was plenty loud, though.
“Kids these days are just so hard to impress,” she said as she put away her sword. She wore a sleeveless tunic that showed off her shoulders and barely contained her bosom. She picked up the cape she perpetually wore in any weather and buckled the clasp around her neck.
I’d stopped by Jane’s home, where her no-account husband, Miles, told me I’d find her on the road to Barre Dumoth, escorting a prisoner for trial. Miles was under house arrest, Jane Argo style-his right ankle was chained to a huge rock in the middle of the cottage floor, with just enough slack to reach the out house. Given Miles’s penchant for drinking, gambling, and whoring, I thought it a wise precaution. I ignored him when he tried to bribe me to set him free.
I caught up with Jane and her prisoner in the middle of the forest, and we stopped by a lake to discuss my case. As we talked, a mule-drawn wagon driven by a white-haired old man made its slow way past on the narrow road behind us.
“So you’re going to sea,” she said as she settled the cape around her shoulders.
“Seems like the best place to look for a pirate.”
“And his name is Edward Tew?”
“That’s what he told my client. Don’t know if that was his real name, or just what he called himself. Ever heard of him?”
“There’s a lot of pirates in the world. What about his treasure?”
“What treasure?”
“Come on, you expect me to believe there’s not a treasure involved? Nobody searches for a pirate just for the hell of it.”
“If there is a treasure, I’m not being paid to find it, and I’m not interested in it. Only the guy.”
“Assuming you’re not bullshitting me about the lack of a treasure, why would you even take a job like this, anyway? It’s hard enough to find someone who’s been gone a week, if they really want to stay hidden. Two decades…”
“I like the challenge.”
She laughed again and skipped a stone across the lake, getting an impressive six bounces. “Knowing you, Eddie, I’m guessing this is a favor for a friend. I’d say a girl friend, but I can’t picture that skinny ginger-hair of yours ever tumbling with a sailor.”
“Funny-I can picture Miles doing it.”
That made her laugh even more, until we simultaneously noticed that the mule-drawn cart had stopped in the middle of the road, and its white-haired driver was nowhere in sight. Neither was Jane’s prisoner. The ropes that had bound him to the tree lay in a pile across the knobby roots.
There was no exchange of words, no You go that way, I’ll go this way. We simply drew our swords, she headed up to the road, and I ran into the forest.
I found them first. The prisoner led the way through underbrush still slick from the recent rain, and the older man tried to keep up. Mainly for Jane’s benefit, I shouted, “Stop right there! No need for anybody to get hurt!”
The two men froze halfway up a slight rise. The older one leaned on the nearest tree and gasped for breath. The younger one said, “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“I don’t care,” I said, continuing to move toward them. I held the tip of my sword up so it wouldn’t snag on anything. I knew Jane would locate me by my voice, and I wanted to keep their attention on me. “That’s not my problem.”
“Who the hell are you, anyway?” the young man demanded. “You show up, you jump into the middle of something that’s not any of your business-”
“If you don’t surrender now, I’m the guy who’s going to see what color your intestines are.” I sliced through a hanging tangle of vines for emphasis. “That’s more of a chance than Jane Argo would give you.”
“He’s right, son, give up,” the older man croaked. “We tried our best. We’ll have to trust in Lord Corrett’s conscience.”
“Like hell,” the younger man said, and was about to turn and run, when Jane’s sword suddenly slipped under his chin.
“I don’t like hell, since you mention it,” she said as she grabbed him by the hair. “But I’ll probably go there anyway. Now, don’t move. Pops, get over here and tie your son’s wrists. Do a good job of it and I won’t have to hamstring him.”
“He’s innocent,” the older man insisted, the words barely getting out. He was a disturbing shade of red, and seemed to be having no luck catching his breath.
“Then he’s the one man in the world who is,” Jane said. “Now, do what I say. Please, for everyone’s sake, okay? You’re both out of your league here. Eddie and I do this for a living.”
The old man tried to say something else, but he had no wind left. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed beside the tree, rolling down the slight slope to land in the wet leaves at my feet.
I stuck my sword in the ground and knelt over him. I heard Jane tell his son, “Stay put. If you so much as think about running away, I’ll catch you and geld you before sundown.”
Then she was on her knees on the other side of the fallen man. She bent and put her ear to his mouth, listening for breath. When she found none, she put her lips over the old man’s and repeatedly blew hard into his lungs.
Meanwhile, I ripped open his tunic to expose his pale, still- muscular chest. I put my palm flat over his heart and felt nothing. I drove my fist into the back of my hand, trying to get his heart going again, just as a moon priestess once showed me on a battlefield. Sometimes this worked; most of the time it didn’t. And it was tricky not to break a rib and puncture a lung. But any chance was better than none.
And in this case, luck was with us. After the third whack, his whole body spasmed and he began to cough. Jane looked back at his son, still standing where she’d left him. “Go get the canteen off my saddle. And no funny stuff.”
He left, while Jane and I helped the old man sit up. He was now a bad shade of pale blue, and I knew we’d just stirred the coals and not really restoked the furnace. “My son didn’t do anything wrong,” he wheezed. I admired his tenacity. “He’s innocent, I tell you.”
“Look, pops, let it go,” Jane said patiently. “It’s not for us to say. My job is to take him from point A to point B, that’s all. Guilt or innocence is way above my pay grade.”
He looked at me. “And you?”
“I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
The son returned with the canteen, and his father sipped from it. The younger man looked at Jane and said, “Now what?”
