When the Baron’s men took Stivyung away, Surah suddenly found herself behaving as she never had imagined before. She ran to her sister’s and told her to pick up Tomosh. Then she threw together a pack and headed west with no definite plan in mind, thinking only to find some of Stivyung’s former comrades and beseech their help.
She did not recall much about her journey into the mountains, except being frightened most of the time. Though she had grown up on the edge of the wilderness, she had never spent nights alone under the trees before. It was an experience she would never forget.
The first sign she was in L’Toff country came when she encountered a small patrol of stern, fierce men, whose spears had the burnished look of deadly practice. They were agitated and questioned her closely. But eventually they let her proceed. Only later, when she passed through the outer hamlets and finally came to the main village of the L’Toff, did she learn that Princess Linnora had disappeared.
That explained the anxiety of the border guards, certainly. Surah began to realize that her own problems were small eddies of a larger storm brewing.
Linnora’s father, Prince Linsee, ruled a virtually independent realm, answerable only to the King of Coylia. himself. This irritated the great lords and the temples. But like the isolation of their mountain home, it was for the tribe’s protection.
In return, the crown monopolized the trade in rare treasures whose Pr’fett had been “frozen” into a permanent state of practice. Each item generally cost some L’Toff a measure of his vital force—a week, month, or a year out of his or her life. The frozen goods were very rare—and coveted greedily.
Relations between the L’Toff and the great nobles had grown worse since the demise of the old Duke, and especially as Baron Kremer’s cabal of gentry and guilds prepared to confront the King.
Obviously the aristocrats would be well served if they had a lever on the L’Toff, the King’s strongest allies in the west. If they had a hostage to ensure Prince Linsee’s neutrality, they could turn their attention fully to investing the cities of the east, with their royalist, antiguild rabble.
Fate had delivered Kremer his hostage against the L’Toff the very same day that soldiers had come to take Surah’s husband away.
When Surah arrived in the mountains, the L’Toff were searching far and wide for their beloved Princess. Linnora had slipped away from her maids and escort nearly two weeks before, claiming in a cryptic note that she had sensed “something different” come into the world.
While everyone respected Linnora’s fey powers, Prince Linsee had feared the results of his daughter’s impetuousness. He suspected she had fallen into the Baron’s hands.
So, too, thought Demsen, the tall, homely leader of a detachment of Royal Scouts that had arrived just before Surah. Demsen was sure that Kremer was holding Linnora in secret, until a hostage was needed to keep the L’Toff passive at his rear.
Surah found out all of this because she was right there in the thick of it. Since she knew something of the situation in Zuslik, Surah was invited to sit at table with Linsee and Demsen and the captains and elders, all of whom attentively listened as she nervously answered their questions.
At the assembly, young Prince Proll had demanded permission to storm Zuslik and rescue Linnora by force of arms. Proll’s courage and charisma influenced many. The younger L’Toff could think of nothing but their beautiful Princess languishing in prison.
But Linsee knew that Kremer’s forces were more than a match for his own in open battle, especially since the perfection of the Baron’s terrifying glider corps. It would take years of dangerous experimentation to duplicate that accomplishment. Long before then, the war would begin.
Linsee had sent a delegation, led by the Chief of the Council of Elders, and Prince Proll, to visit Kremer and inquire. It would probably accomplish nothing, but it was all he could do. Reluctantly, he ordered the defenses strengthened, such as they were.
Surah listened to all of this and came to a numb realization that she would find no help here for her own, personal crisis. If the L’Toff and the Royal Scouts could do nothing to save Linnora, what could they do about a simple farmer—even a retired scout sergeant—whom Baron Kremer had seized on a whim?
Prince Linsee gave her a donkey and some provisions and wished her well. Except for the border guards, no one even noticed when she left.
She returned to find the countryside in an uproar. Preparations for war were well under way, and the area was being scoured for important fugitives.
Life had to go on, whatever the magnitude of great affairs around her. She retrieved her son from her sister’s house and headed home to keep up the farm as best she could, against the hope that Stivyung would someday return to her.
And at home she found the fugitives hiding in her own bedroom.
Surah Sigel sighed and refilled Dennis’s cup with hot thah.
“I’ve not had a big voice in th’ happnin’s of the time,” she said in conclusion. “I’m just a farmwife, for all of Stivyung’s teachin’ me to read an’ all.
“Still, it does seem to me that I’ll have witnessed an’ had a small part in the events.” She looked up at Dennis with an idea. She spoke a little timidly, as if speaking an idea she was afraid he would laugh at. “Y’know, maybe someday I’ll write a book about what I saw an’ tell about all the people I met before th’ war began.
“Now, wouldn’t that be somethin’!”
Dennis nodded in agreement. “It would at that.”
She sighed and turned to stir the coals.
3
It had been years since Dennis had done any useful carpentry, and the tools he used now were unfamiliar. Nevertheless, he started work early the next morning.
He trimmed two long, stout poles from a pair of half-practiced hoes he had found on the porch, then he cut out several flat planks from one of the hay cribs. When Mrs. Sigel returned from her sister’s farm with better tools, Dennis drilled four holes in the sides of a light-framed watering trough, and slid the poles through the holes.
Perched on a stack of hay, her feet swathed in white bandages, Linnora worked on a leather harness. She deftly used an awl to punch holes in straps of hide, in places where Dennis had made marks, then fastened them together with thongs. She hummed softly and smiled at Dennis whenever he looked up from his work. Dennis grinned back. It was hard to feel tired when encouraged like that.
Arth puffed into the barn, carrying a small chair Surah Sigel had donated to the project. He put the chair down and examined the contraption Dennis was building.
“I get it!” The little thief snapped his fingers. “We put the chair in the tub an’ the Princess rides inside. Then we grab those poles an’ lift! I heard of those things. They call ’em ‘litters.’ When the Emperor from across the big sea came to visit our King’s father years back, I hear he was carried aroun’ in somethin’ like that. A couple of our big nobles tried to copy the idea an’ almost had riots on their hands before they gave up.”
Dennis just smiled and kept working. Using a beautiful saw with a serrated gemstone edge, he cut four identical round disks from a flat slab of wood. They were about a meter diameter and an inch thick.
Arth thought for a minute, then frowned. “But we’d need four men to carry this thing! There’s just you an’ me an’ the L’Toff donkey Surah’s given us! Who’s gonna support the fourth side?” He scratched his head. “I guess I still don’t get it.”