Damn and blast! Two steps and I was sprawled on the forest floor, my mouth full of dirt and pine needles, my chin stinging. I scrabbled forward, trying to get my treacherous feet under me, half turning backward, expecting to see his hands reaching for me again. But the man had not moved a step. Instead he had extended his hands palms up, as if dedicating a sword at the temple of Annadis. Ripping my skirt loose from the brambles, I lurched to my feet and backed away, then turned and darted a bit more carefully down the hill. One last glance over my shoulder showed him take a single step in my direction, sway drunkenly, and crumple earthward. I didn’t stay to watch him hit.
* * *
By the time I reached the lower boundary of the forested hills, neither feet nor pulse were racing any longer, but my thoughts lingered back on the ridge. Those unbelievably blue eyes might have been the single spot of color in a painting rendered entirely in shades of gray. He hadn’t the look of any poacher I’d seen locked in the Dunfarrie pillory. Desperate, but without the ravenous derangement of a starving peasant. Skilled at violence, but lacking the reckless competence of the professional thief. He hadn’t broken my neck.
The stream pooled in a weed-choked depression at the edge of the trees before meandering sluggishly across the dry meadow. Shooing away a cloud of gnats, I dropped to my knees by the pool and doused my face and neck, wincing as the cool water stung my scraped chin and the skin left raw and bruised by his wide hands. I didn’t care what else he was. He was a brute. I’d wager that all of them were brutes—villain and hunters together.
Mumbling oaths like a common soldier, I straightened my skirt and yanked at my shift, which had gotten uncomfortably twisted beneath my shapeless tunic. As if my clothes weren’t threadbare enough, I’d have to pull out my cursed needle to repair the rips. Drying my hands on my skirt, I set out across the meadow toward the squat, sod-roofed shack that was my home and the weedy garden that kept me living.
After a few hot hours of work, the immediate annoyances of turnip beetles and wire-like threadweed had pushed the incident to the back of my mind. The threats of persistent drought and harsh Leiran winters hung over my head like a heavy-handed schoolmaster, requiring me to work as hard as I could manage from dawn to dusk every day of the year. The work occupied only back, shoulders, and hands, though; my intellect was as dull as the flat, unvarying landscape east of the river. As I yanked at the stringy weeds choking my tender plants, I kept a wary eye on the ring of trees that bounded the meadow, but the morning’s misadventure soon took on the quality of an uncomfortable dream… until the hunting party arrived.
In late afternoon, five horsemen came galloping across the meadow from the direction of the village path. I kept at my work. No use in running. No use in wishing for a weapon more serious than my scratched dagger, still solidly and discreetly fixed to my thigh under my skirt. I didn’t even look up when the dust of their arrival settled on the turnip leaves, and the massive presence of five snorting, overheated horses surrounded me. We take small victories where we can.
“I don’t get many visitors,” I said, yanking a snarl of threadweed from the dry soil.
“Isolation does not suit you, my lady.”
My eyes shot upward to the trim, dark-haired man who urged his mount into the middle of the garden and halted right in front of me. “Darzid!” I searched deep for the proper expressions of contempt, of wounding, of hatred, furious that words of sufficient pith and clarity would not come at my beck. Captain Darzid—my brother’s right hand, his chief aide, his lieutenant in all things despicable.
He jerked his head at the cottage. “After all these years, my first visit to your charming little refuge, and, sadly, I’ve no time to dally.” As ever, amusement glinted in eyes as cold and sharp as black diamonds; the smile that creased his tanned, trim-bearded face held no more warmth. “I’ll have to return for a tour another day.”
“Are you here to exhibit your wit, Captain? Or perhaps to demonstrate your skill at confronting dangerous women? I’m sorry no infants are available to slaughter, or you could display your inimitable courage. But then, you didn’t bring Tomas to show you how it’s done, did you?”
Darzid’s smile only broadened as he waved his companions toward the cottage and the solitary copse of willows and alders clustered about a muddy spring two hundred paces away. Two soldiers dismounted and entered the house; two rode for the copse. “Your brother is otherwise occupied today. He’ll be as surprised as I to learn that this hunt has led me past your doorstep.” His long thin hands— the grotesque scarring on the palms the result of some long-ago battle, he’d once told me—stroked the neck of his restless stallion. “Ah, lady, when will you realize that your battles are lost and your grievances long forgotten? These men don’t even know who you are. Our search has nothing to do with you.”
Returning my attention to my work, I shifted down the row and yanked on a spike-leafed thistle as if it were Darzid’s honeyed tongue. “So who is it you seek? Has some peasant failed to tithe his full measure to our king?”
“Only a horse thief, the ungrateful servant of a friend of Duke Tomas. Your brother owes the lord a favor and has sent me to chase down the rascal. He seems to have vanished hereabouts. You’ve not seen him—a tall man, so I understand, young, fair-haired, a bit unsteady of temper?” Darzid’s words were cool, unruffled, mocking, revealing nothing of his true purpose, but then, I would have expected flames to shoot from his mouth before I would have expected truth. Yet, in the pause as he awaited my response, I felt something more—a pressure, an intensity I had never noted in all the eighteen years I had known this meticulous soldier who hovered in detached deviltry about the bastions of power. I glanced up. He was leaning toward me from the saddle, all smiles vanished for that moment, his very posture trying to squeeze an answer from me. Darzid cared about this matter. It could be no simple thief he was hunting.
“I’ve seen no thieves today save you, Captain. And as soon as you leave, I’ll drink fish oil to rinse the taint from my mouth and burn dung to cover the stench.” Childish taunting, not worthy of my training in scholarly debate. But words helped diffuse the pressure of his scrutiny.
As I turned back to my work, the four soldiers returned with negative reports. Three more riders remained half hidden under the eaves of the forest. They hadn’t expected much trouble from me, I supposed. I shuddered when I noticed the three—an inexplicable reaction, for the day was warm and soldiers had no power to frighten me.
Darzid nudged his mount to the edge of the garden and paused, speaking to my back. “So, a wasted venture. Good day, Lady Seriana. Behave yourself. Have you a message for your brother?”
I plucked off three beetles that had left the soft green leaves looking like ragged lacework, squashed them between finger and thumb, and flicked them into the dry grass beyond the garden.
Darzid snorted and spoke a clipped command. The five men spurred their horses, rejoined their fellows waiting at the edge of the trees, and disappeared down the forest path toward Dunfarrie.
For an hour I worked. Dug weeds. Hauled buckets of water from the pool to dribble on the beans and turnips. Salvaged what vines and plants I could from the horses’ trampling and threw the ruined ones onto the waste heap. Refused to think of anything beyond the task of the moment.
The sun sagged westward. I stared at the ax waiting beside a pile of logs I had dragged from the forest on a wooden sledge roped to my shoulders. Then I ripped the grimy, blood-streaked rags from my hands, threw them on the ground, and strode back across the meadow, past the pool, and up the hill into the wood.
CHAPTER 2
The long body sprawled face down across the muddy stream bank. I sat on a stump just inside the circular clearing and watched him for a while. A squirrel screeched and nagged at me from an oak limb. Finches and sparrows rose in a twittering cloud beyond the stream, then settled back down on the very branches they had just deserted. High in the forest roof, the leaves shifted in a breeze that could not penetrate the stillness below. No sounds of horses or hunters intruded.