"She is."
"I'm not," Pavek insisted with a force that surprised himself. "I know better than to overreach."
Ruari pushed the kivits down and rose unsteadily to his feet. "I'd kill you."
"She'd kill me first."
"She wouldn't. Kashi's not like that. She doesn't see the evil in a person."
He could think of a dozen things to say, all of which would have set them brawling again. Instead, he extended a finger toward a kivit and tickled the tip of the inquisitive creature's nose.
Ruari sat down again. "Telhami's angry at me. I never saw her so angry. I thought she was going to invoke the guardian and suck my bones into the ground."
"Maybe she wanted to, but none of the other druids at that meeting this morning, except Akashia and Telhami, wanted to send zarneeka to Urik, and I don't think the guardian did either."
Ruari shredded a blade of grass. "Can you really feel the guardian, or is that just more lies?"
"No lies. I'm a lousy liar."
Ruari swore softly and shredded another blade of grass. "I wish you'd never come to Quraite."
"I wish I'd never seen a man poisoned by Laq, then I wouldn't have needed to come. You ready to go home?"
Ruari said he was, but he was weak and wheezing before they left the grove. So they sat talking by the pool, getting past being enemies without becoming friends. The sun was setting when they returned to the village. Pavek went looking for Yohan, but the dwarf was gone, and so were Akashia, two farmers and five kanks: Telhami'd evoked a whirlwind to separate the ripened zarneeka from the sand, then she'd sealed it up and sent it on its way to Urik.
Chapter Thirteen
The air remained cool from the recent dawn when Akashia, Yohan, and two awe-struck Quraite farmers set out afoot from the market village of Modekan, headed for the brilliant yellow walls of Urik. After four day's travel kank-back across the wastelands, the farmers were eager to see the Lion-King's city; Akashia wanted to finish their business quickly, uneventfully.
No one knew what Yohan was thinking-except that he didn't approve, and he hadn't said more than two words at a time since they left Quraite.
It wasn't Modekan's Day for the Urik markets; they had the road to themselves. Akashia had ample time to relax, think, and get anxious again. They took some chances bringing zarneeka to Urik on a day when it and they weren't expected. She could hope that the Modekan registrar had reported to his superiors in the templarate, and that the repulsive dwarf they traded with would be at his procurer's table in the customhouse.
And she could hope that the dwarf would shepherd the zarneeka powder to its proper destination: a thousand folded papers of Ral's Breath powder. But for that hope to become real, she had to hope, above all else, that Just-Plain Pavek was wrong about his former colleagues in the civil bureau.
Akashia believed with all her heart that the chronic aches and illnesses of Urik's common folk were important enough to justify the risks she was taking. She believed, too, that her mind-bending skills coupled with druidry would be sufficient to protect her, her companions, and the three amphorae nestled in the straw-filled cart Yohan pulled.
When she called her spells and her skills across her mind's eye, her confidence grew; then something would catch her attention at the side of the road or she'd see the shadow of Just-Plain Pavek lurking in the corner of her memory, and her calm would shatter.
In her heart she believed Pavek was wrong about Urik's need for zarneeka and Ral's Breath but, try as she might as she walked, she couldn't convince herself that he was lying about the city's danger or the procurer's duplicity. Grandmother had agreed that Pavek spoke what he fervently believed was the truth. He was transparent in so many ways to both mind-bending and druidry; he'd never make a master of either craft-yet he could evoke the guardian and, somehow, he'd managed to enter Ruari's grove after Ruari had hidden himself inside it.
She thought she could have found her young friend's grove and forced herself inside, but by every reckoning she and Grandmother had made, the challenge should have been far beyond Just-Plain Pavek's abilities.... Unless Ruari had welcomed him, in which case one of them might have slain the other, or-worse to consider-the two of them might have discovered that, where zarneeka and Urik were concerned, they were of like minds.
And that would have been the end of the zarneeka trade: Yohan would have stood with them. And the remaining Quraiters, druid and farmer alike, were already more afraid of Urik and Urik's inhuman king than was necessary; they would have supported the recalcitrant trio. Quraite wasn't some idyllic community where everyone's opinion counted with equal weight and the heaviest position prevailed; such communities rarely survived a year, much less the generations that Quraite itself had endured. Grandmother's word naturally and rightfully outweighed everyone else's, but Grandmother would never be foolish enough to drag the community in a direction it absolutely did not want to go.
As she was dragging Yohan to Urik.
The old dwarf trod silently between the traces of the handcart. He'd resisted her attempts at conversation since they left Quraite. Yohan had spoken vehemently against Grandmother's decision to dispatch zarneeka to Urik while Pavek and Ruari were still hidden in Ruari's grove. But in the end, Yohan had swallowed his objections. He'd helped to separate the zarneeka powder from the sand in the ruins of the stowaway. When Grandmother invoked a diminutive whirlwind to whip up the gritty mixture, he'd held a winnowing against it until his feet were buried in grit. She'd stood behind the sieve with a tightly woven basket, collecting enough yellow powder to fill three amphorae. And then he'd harnessed the kanks-all the while looking over his shoulder at the path Ruari and Pavek would have taken if they had returned together.
But the path remained empty, and they'd left the village before sunset without knowing what had happened between the templar and the half-elf-exactly as Grandmother had wanted it.
Because Grandmother was wiser than all the rest of them together. And Grandmother knew the right thing for Quraite to do where zarneeka or anything else was concerned.
"You'll see," Akashia assured her plodding, sullen companion. "Everything will fall into place. You'll be headed home before sundown, I promise. There's nothing to worry about. There won't be any trouble at the customhouse-"
"The elven market?" Her mind filled with the wonders she imagined among its tawdry tents and shanties. She'd heard about the market from the Moonracers since she was a little girl, but in all her fifteen trips to Urik-she'd kept careful count-she'd never done more than trek from the gate to the customhouse and back again. Except, of course, this past time when they'd encountered Pavek, and Yohan had led them to the dyers' plaza where lengths of brightly colored cloth had threatened more than once to distract her from the interrogation.
Any excuse to visit the elven market was an almost irresistible temptation-especially if cautious Yohan was suggesting it.
Then the imagined wonders faded: "We gave our names to the Modekan registrar...."
"Three itinerant peddlers with trade for the customhouse," Yohan recited in rhythm with his walking.
Yohan had been trekking the zarneeka to Urik since before she was born. He'd taught her what to do and say, and she never told the truth about their names or merchandise to the village registrar. "They won't suspect? Won't come looking for us?" He shrugged; the amphorae shifted in the cart. "Not in the elven market. Templars don't go into the market, not alone. We'll be on our way home, like you said, before they start looking for us. If they start looking for us."