"Think things through."
She started; for a moment the memory of Tarma's voice was so clear that it seemed as if she'd really heard the words.
"We have to think, Meri," she whispered fiercely. "Like Tarma always says." She screwed up her face in concentration, and tried to dredge up other memories that might help.
"Start with what you know, and go on to what your resources are. Don't waste the first few moments on speculation."
She licked her lips. What she knew -- well, they'd been kidnapped. They were in a wagon, being hauled rapidly away from where they'd been taken. And she knew that sooner or later, someone would come looking for them.
How soon? No, that's a speculation. There was nothing to tell her who it was that held them captive. But at the very least, she should begin by examining their prison.
There wasn't much to examine; there was enough room on the floor for both girls to stretch out at full-length, but not much more than that. The walls were straight and unadorned, and would permit an adult to stand erect. There were no windows, no benches to sit on, but light did leak in through a couple of chinks and knotholes. No help there.
She examined the bulky objects that had been tossed in after them by touch, and discovered to her joy that it was their packs! But it was obvious that they'd been opened, and a quick feel through both proved that nothing in the way of a weapon had been left to them, not even a pair of Meri's scissors. She still had the tiny knife in her boot, but it wouldn't be of much use.
Resources. Clothing, Meri's embroidery, beads and jewelry they didn't steal, and my journal. I suppose we could use drawstrings to strangle someone, provided he held still and cooperated-
She stifled a hysterical laugh. Concentrate! What came next?
"Father will send someone to find us, won't he?" Meri asked, her voice trembling just a little.
"Once he knows we're gone. If he can find us." There didn't seem any point in telling her twin less than the truth. "That could be hard. I don't know where they're taking us, but it's probably far away. And they've got us locked up in this wagon, I bet, so we don't attract attention. If they get onto a trade road, it's going to be awfully hard to track us."
Meri took a shuddering breath, but kept herself under control. "Couldn't we -- leave a trail of something? Like the goose-girl and her pocket of pebbles?"
Kira almost dismissed that as desperate babbling, but something in her seized on the idea. A trail -- maybe that wasn't such a bad idea. There was a chink in the floor, and they could drop something small out of it without much trouble. But what? And how could they keep what they dropped from being seen by their captors? Almost anything they dropped would stand out in the snow--
--snow. White snow. White silk! Silver beads!
"Meri, I need the white silk you got from Jadrie, and the silver beads," Kira said urgently. "Can you find it in here?" She shoved Meri's pack over to her, and hoped that the silks hadn't been looted.
"I think so." Meri rummaged around in her pack in the semidarkness, and finally came up with a handful of skeins of thread that shone pale as moonlight in her hand, and a little box that rattled. "Here. What are you going to do?"
"Leave a trail for people to follow," Kira replied, carefully finding the end of one of the skeins, then snipping off a short piece with her tiny knife. "They should have dogs. They might have Warrl! When they find this silk, they'll know it's us."
Carefully, she fed the silk through the chink, doing her best to keep it from snagging on a splinter. It took three tries, and three pieces, before she hit on the idea of making a funnel with a piece of paper from her journal, but at last she got one to drop all the way through.
Meanwhile, she kept thinking. "We've got to figure out a way to slow everything down," she said, as she continued to thread bits of silk through the wooden floor, alternating the silk with silver beads. "Think, Meri! What can we do to make it hard for these people?"
"Should we try to run away when they take us out?" Meri asked doubtfully.
"They're a lot bigger than we are, and there's more of them," Kira reminded her. "And I don't think they care if we get hurt a little." Or even a lot. "Besides," she continued, "If we try to run away, they won't ever let us out again."
"Could we do something to the horses?"
"Only if they let us get near them." Kira thought about it a moment, pondering the possibilities of burrs under saddles, or crystal beads lodged in hooves, then shook her head regretfully. "I don't think they're going to do that. If we were bigger, we could probably loosen the wheels on the wagon or something -- if we had wine we could get them all drunk-"
Meri thought for a while longer, then said, reluctantly, "What if we got sick? Wouldn't they have to stop so we wouldn't die?"
"They'll know if we aren't really sick, and anyway, they could just leave us in the wagon."
"Not--" Meri bit her lip, and Kira could tell her twin was blushing by the tone of her voice. "Not if it's -- stomach troubles. And lower."
"Stomach grippe? What are you thinking of?" Kira asked sharply.
"Remember my black beads? The ones Kethry told me never to let the baby play with, because they'd make him sick? They took my good jewels, but not those." Meri rummaged in her pack again, and came up with three long ropes of small, dark beads. "They're not really beads, they're seeds, and Jadrek helped me to find out what they were. They don't taste like anything, and if we eat three or four, we'll get sick. Then they'll have to stop to let us -- be sick. Won't they?"
Kira looked at her twin with sudden admirahon. I would be willing to get sick to slow everything up-but I wouldn't have thought Meri would! "I think so," she said, with another thought coming into her mind -- but one she would save, until she had a better idea of what their situation was. "It's worth a try."
* * *
Blood everywhere. I'd thought I would never have to deal with a situation like this one again. Tarma surveyed the carnage impassively, but with a sinking feeling in her heart. The bodies of the ten guards that had lately left the school with Meri and Kira now sprawled in ungainly poses over about a quarter of an acre of trampled snow. Three were down on the road itself, four lay in a ragged line under their dead and fallen horses and had clearly never gotten the chance to struggle free before they, too, were killed, and the remaining three were in a line behind them, where they had made a final stand afoot. Blood stained the white snow red everywhere, and liberal trails of more blood heading off to the south and west showed that the kidnappers had not gotten away completely unscathed.
But there were no dead that were not of the guards in Tilden's livery, so if any of the attackers had died, their bodies had been carted away. A bad sign. Whoever planned this was well organized, well armed, and with a lot of men. And it wasn't a simple bandit-raid. Not one guard had been left alive to send word of the massacre. Those horses that weren't dead were grouped together, heads down, exhausted -- not carried off with the bandits. The two ponies that Meri and Kira had ridden out on stood under a tree beside the road, sadly nosing through the snow and biting at the withered grass they found there.