That's all I needed to hear. I placed my hand over hers and took an oath on a friend's memory.
Good thing she waited until I'd sworn before she told me that her partner was the minotaur I'd brought to Istar's jail only hours ago. Good thing for her, but not so good for Peverell. The mute little kender laughed so hard that he fell out of his chair. And not so good for me. I'd been two days in the minotaur's company and I suspected he'd not readily agree to become my partner in the hunt for Kell. But I was sworn now, and by Touk's memory.
Too, there was all that gold to consider.
Peverell was hot to pick every lock on every door in the jail. When I told him that we wouldn't get in that way, he showed me how deeply he resented this slight to his thievish abilities. Mute he might be, but he'd raised the skills of obscene and insulting gesture to high art. Alyce calmed him, and from there the night's work was no more than the usual game: Get some weapons for the minotaur, some mounts for Alyce and me — no sense getting horses for Peverell or Dinn; Alice said that neither would ride if you paid 'em — then bribe the right guard and pay off the right cleric. The bribe and the payoff were huge, took all the ninety gold pieces I'd earned on the minotaur and a lot more besides. Alyce had to part with her beautiful sapphire necklace.
"I consider it an investment," she said. She cocked a thumb at my empty purse and grinned coolly. "You should, too."
I did. A quarter share of Kell's bounty would make the gold I'd paid in bribery seem like the pittance in a beggar's cup.
I was right about Dinn. He joyfully would have given up all hope of freedom for even the slimmest chance of killing me. But Alyce managed him, and it was something to see her go toe-to-toe with that brute, harrying him in hissing whispers like an angry fishwife.
"Use your head, Dinn," she said. And she insisted — often — that he remember why they were here. She demanded — just as often — that he carry through with what he'd promised.
The kender, over his fit of the sulks, came up close to the tall, red-furred minotaur, gestured elaborately. Dinn growled and shook his horns at Peverell, sullenly asking Alyce to translate.
"He's saying just what you know is true, Dinn. We need you!"
That made some difference, caused the minotaur to subside. "Arr, well," he growled, glaring at me. "Let's do it then."
"Thank you, my friend." Alyce patted his rough-furred shoulder and rose up on tiptoe to kiss that ugly snout (which made him growl and HARRUMPH and shuffle his feet).
I kept one eye on Dinn, for all that everyone seemed happy and friendly together. I'd been the one to shame him by dragging him chained and hobbled into Istar. Minotaurs usually like to erase the memory of shame by killing anyone who knows about it.
An unwelcoming place, the savannah; hot and dry and without landmarks. This is the land of the nomad clans, and there are no borders to cross; nothing to warn you that you're in some clan's territory, for the nomads have no individual territories. Always moving, settling nowhere, the long-braids consider the whole savannah theirs. They have a hard greeting for visitors — a flint-tipped arrow, a lance's stony head.
We went carefully, Alyce and I riding; Dinn loping ahead, a tall, homed outrunner tracking steadily west to the blue-hazed mountains. Sometimes Peverell trotted beside him, unseen but for the parting of the high grass as he went, the wake of a small, mute kender. More often, he stayed by Alyce. Like all kender, he loved to talk, and she had more patience for his silent language — and clearly a greater understanding of it — than the minotaur did.
I was used to riding alone since Toukere and I had parted ways, and I was used to quiet. But soon I found myself liking the sound of Alyce's voice: low because of the danger, thrilling when she was keen on her subject, gentle when she was thinking aloud. Alyce did a lot of thinking out loud, about politics and history and gods.
"I'll tell you something, Hunter-Doune," she said, one blazing noonday when the savannah ran rippling under a hot wind. "I've always heard that gods are about balance, good and neutral and evil all lending their weight in the measure against chaos. I think it's politics that makes heretics, not wrong thinking. Which, if you believe what you hear, is just what this outlaw, Kell, thinks." She glanced at me out of the comer of her eyes. "If you believe what you hear."
She seemed to know a lot about Kell, and I wondered if she'd conceived some romantic fancy for the outlaw. I asked her about this, in a joking way. Peverell, trotting beside us, looked up at me, signing swiftly, laughing silently.
"What'd he say?" I asked.
"Kender nonsense," she said stiffly. "I have no fancies about Kell. A good hunter should know what she's hunting, how the prey thinks, what it will defend, where it goes to hide, where it is vulnerable." She smiled, as though to herself and over private thoughts. "Don't you agree, Hunter-Doune?"
I said I was a bounty hunter, not a boar hunter.
"So you are." She laughed, mocking again. "And a good one who wastes no time thinking about the heretics you hunt. Right?"
"No sense in it. They're nothing more than the promise of gold, payable on delivery." I slipped her a sideways grin. "Thanks to politics."
Again Peverell gestured, his whole bright face a question; this time Alyce translated.
"He wants to know whether heretics are people to you."
I shook my head. "They're profit."
The kender signed again, and Alyce looked at me for a long moment, her eyes all soft and gravely thoughtful, as if she were weighing the balance of me on a scale.
"Empty enough for the wind to howl through, aren't you, Hunter-Doune?"
"Did he say that?"
"No. I did. How'd you get so empty?"
"Tricks of the trade." I shifted uncomfortably to another tack. "Why are you worrying about how I feel? I don't see that YOU'RE holding a whole lot of mercy for Kell."
She looked away, out across the golden, shifting savannah. "My feelings for Kell are… personal," she said. "I'm not a bounty hunter by trade."
"Oh? What'd he do, steal the pennies off your dead father's eyes?"
She winced, and I was sorry I'd said it. I'd come close to some truth, one that hurt.
"Come on, Alyce," I said, and surprised myself to hear how gently I'd spoken. "Don't worry about me and my feelings. They haven't got all that much to do with you anyway, eh?"
The old, taunting light, brittle and bright, came back to her eyes. "Not much," she said, and she laughed.
I thought the laughter was forced.
That's the way we talked during those long, hot days on the savannah. Sometimes she mocked, as she'd done in the Hart; sometimes she was serious, and I liked that best. Soon I began to wish that the kender would stay with Dinn. I was getting to like Alyce's company, the nearness of her, her voice, even her thoughtful, considering silence.
There were possibilities in her silence. At night, as I slept — Alyce wrapped in rough woolen blankets with a tall fire between us — those possibilities changed into dreams in which the minotaur and the kender had no roles to play.
But the kender was with us more often than not, and so we three were together — Alyce, Peverell, and me — when, at the end of our third day of travel, the sun set in a blaze of red and ahead of us Dinn spotted the nomad woman and her child.
My horse danced skittishly, sidled away from the minotaur's horns. Dinn smiled thinly when he saw that, tossed his head so that a horn came dangerously close to the horse's shoulder… and my leg. He pointed to the tall grass where it parted counter to the wind's direction.
"Two," he said to Alyce. "Long-braids."
The nomad woman ran swiftly, though she went hunched over, burdened by the weight of the small boy clinging to her back. The boy's head bounced limply in rhythm to her swift, ground-covering stride. His sunbrowned leg was streaked with blood. The woman's course would take her right across our path.