Tamar’s eyes were very wide. After a moment she looked at Del, seemingly for confirmation. Del didn’t smile, but neither was she rude. She nodded once, confirming my words. Tamar stared at her a moment longer then looked back at me. “Young man, if you’re riding with a Northern woman trained on Staal-Ysta, the very least you should know is that she’s a sword-singer.”
It was my turn to stare. But Tamar turned back to her stew, breaking up a floating layer of grease with her ladle. Her spine was utterly straight. I looked at Del, who shrugged. Then looked at my plate.
As if she could see with the back of her head, Tamar said we could take food and drink to our rooms. Fresh out of words, I walked from the kitchen swiftly, carrying mug in one hand and a plate full of stew, cheese, and bread in the other. Del followed.
“Fetch that girl home!” Tamar called.
Del and I, after eating and returning plates, spoons, and mugs, dragged my mattress off the bed and put it in her room on the floor, along with my things. Her mattress joined it. Now we could sleep closer to one another than an entire room apart. I no longer cared what Tamar might say.
While it was not our habit to go to bed immediately after dinner—at home, Sula wouldn’t let us anyway—this time we took Tamar’s advice, ‘advice’ being a kinder word than ‘order.’ We lay down side by side. I shoved arms beneath my head and stared at the ceiling.
Del snugged herself close to me, hips and shoulders touching. “You’re worried,”
I released a heavy sigh. “We’ve got to find her soon.”
Del’s sigh matched my own. She pressed hands against her face, then ran them over her hair to the mattress and let her arms flop down against it. “Yes.”
“Raiders didn’t kill you.”
“No. I thought they would. They killed everyone else save my brother. At first, I was too young to know what they saved me for. Just like Rashida.” I recalled then that Rashida was fifteen or so, the same age as Del when she was abducted. “But I learned, and so will she. If she hasn’t already.”
“They’ll come for the horse fair tomorrow. They must, if they mean to sell any of them, and they certainly won’t want to keep all of them. What did Neesha say? The horses were ‘coin on four legs’? Well, that’s what these raiders want. Coin in exchange for horses.” I stretched a lid out of shape as I rubbed an eye. “We should have found her.”
“We’ve done what we could today,” Del said. “We even gained assistance, with Eddrith. I saw no red-haired man in any of the taverns I visited, and you saw neither man nor horses. We can’t conjure her, Tiger. But we have clues: a man with red hair—as I said, that’s not common—and horses with shorn manes.”
“But they may not come here precisely because there’s a red-haired man among them and horses with shorn manes. They may go to another town, another fair, if they know Harith’s horses are identifiable.”
Del thought that over. “And they might even go south.”
“What?” I levered myself up on an elbow to look at her more easily. “That’s a long ride from here.”
“And no one there knows a red-haired rider, probably. Certainly no one knows Harith’s horses. Not so many, at least.”
I swore and flopped back down on the mattress. “But do they know where the oases are? Have they any idea about the Punja?”
“It’s too bad they saw you with Mahmood’s caravan. You could hire on as a guide and work from the inside.”
I thought about that a moment. Unfortunately, what Del said was true. I remembered the man. He would remember me. “I don’t think it’s possible.”
“No,” she agreed regretfully. “It was only a wish.”
I went very still. I didn’t even blink. “Wait…”
“What?” Del asked. “What are you thinking?”
“If you were a raider,” I began, “and you wished to come to Istamir, would you keep yourself to the main part of town? Would you go the smithies and liveries there, where passers-by would see you? Or would you find a smith and an hostler where no one would think to look for raiders or stolen horses?”
Now Del was still as well. “I did ask him about a red-haired man,” she said. “I said I was trying to avoid him.”
“And he told me he hadn’t seen any horses with shorn manes.”
We thought about that for a moment.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
And I, “First thing.”
Chapter 30
THE BLACKSMITH WAS DRINKING ALE and eating bread and sausage for breakfast. He sat on a section of a sawn tree stump, set between smithy and livery. Black hair needed washing, and he took no care whether he dripped ale down his shirt by taking too large a swig. But black eyes were watchful, taking in passers-by, grinning to himself if he found one amusing.
Del and I wandered up. I went to peer into the as yet unfreshened coals, while Del stood on the other side of the smith, studying something else. He glanced at her, nodded his head hello, stared a moment longer, then returned his attention to the street. He ate the last chunk of crusty bread, drank down the final swallow of ale, set the mug on the ground and rose.
“Well now,” he said. “You don’t have to be a blind man to know you’ve got business here other than shoeing and stabling horses.”
“Business, yes,” I agreed. He looked again at Del, at me, and grunted. “Together then.”
“So we are,” Del said lightly.
“I see you’re not hiding that sword anymore,” he told me. “Makes me wonder why you did at all. A good reason, maybe. For you.”
Del unsheathed her sword. In the doing of it, she diverted the smith’s attention from me just long enough for me to bury a fist into his belly and shove him down onto the stump. The mug bounced off and made a whacking sound as it struck the wall. Del took two steps closer, tapped his throat very gently with her sword.
“A red-haired man,” she said.
And I added, “Horses with shorn manes.”
The blacksmith glared at us over the glint of bared blade. “I told you yesterday I don’t know any such man, and I haven’t seen horses with shorn manes.”
“You lied,” Del said quietly.
“I did not—”
But he broke off as I unsheathed my sword. “You know,” I began, “few men, maybe none, would set up custom hidden away back here if they wanted to make a living. Sure, you’d have a few horses to shoe, people looking for oddments, repairs. And the same applies to the livery. It’s too far from the main street. I suspect most of your stalls are empty most of the time. You don’t make much of a living this way. Unless, of course, you have customers who would rather not be known and pay you for silence. Raiders, perhaps.”
Bread crumbs clung to his beard. “I run honest establishments.”