Jimmy the Hand (43 page)

‘And next
evening, in come Rox and Skinny, laughing, and spending free—a
roast goose between them, and everything of the best. Wine and beer
and spirits, and I had to send Bessa to bed early.’

Flora looked at
Lorrie, and their hearts sank. Lorrie leaned close and whispered,
‘Rip’s here . . . not far at all. Close.’

‘And if
Rip is, and these two men are, maybe Bram is too.’
Unless
he’s dead,
Flora thought.
And that would be a pity. He’s
sweet, and pretty as a picture. And Lorrie’s a friend, I
wouldn’t want her to lose her man before she’s even had
him.

Tael observed
the byplay, crunching an onion between strong yellow teeth. ‘Thing
is . . .’ he said when they looked at him.

‘Yes?’
Lorrie said eagerly.

‘Lass,
they both looked as if they’d been in a fight, not a bad one,
but bruises and such. And that Skinny, he carries a bow in a case at
his saddle. Short bow, horn-backed and double curved, Great Kesh
style.’

With that he
nodded to them and went about his work. Flora looked around as the
two girls ate. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said,
glancing up at the roof.

It wasn’t
very high—seven feet at most, likely kept low to make the main
room easier to heat. The rafters were roughly-adzed pine-trunks, and
the planks pegged over them had generous cracks, probably to save
expensive sawn lumber; bits of straw stuck through them.

The singing
below their room had died away. Flora and Lorrie lay prone on the
boards; Lorrie had her eye to a crack, and they’d carefully
picked out a clear place between two of the planks. Loud voices came
up from the table below them, harsh and slurred. Flora shivered a
little.

Jimmy was
right,
she thought, remembering the quick hot glint in the eyes
of the sergeant who’d flung her into the cart in the sweep of
Mockers in Krondor.
I’m well out of the trade.

‘
It’s
them,’
Lorrie whispered.

She was
white-faced; Flora realized suddenly it was anger, not fear. Killing
anger.

‘It’s
the two who took Rip,’ she said, her voice like ice crackling
on a winter puddle when you stepped onto it, crackling and letting
things ooze through. ‘And burned my home and killed my
parents.’ Flora patted her shoulder awkwardly; she’d lost
hers early, and from what she remembered they were no prizes anyway.

Then she pressed
her eye to the crack again. There were four of them sitting around
the table and the picked remains of several chickens; she could
recognize Skinny and Rox from Lorrie’s description.
Bad
ones,
she thought, wrinkling her nose; she could smell the stale
beer in their sweat, and the jerkins that had never been cleaned,
with old blood on them and worse, and the neat’s-foot oil on
weapons.
Badder than most.

Skinny smiled
too often, and Rox not at all. They did look as if they’d been
in a fight lately; Skinny had a fading shiner, and Rox a set of puffy
knuckles on his right hand. The other two were nondescript men,
nothing out of the ordinary about them except an unusual number of
scars, hard feral eyes that showed occasionally when they tilted back
their flagons and greasy dark hair that swirled back from their
foreheads.

One of them took
something out of a belt-pouch and shook it in his closed hand—dice,
probably. ‘Come on, you two,’ he said. ‘Let’s
see some of that gold you were boasting about. I can feel it calling
to me—wants to rest in my purse, it does.’

‘Sure it
would if I were fool enough to use your dice, Forten.’

Forten’s
fist closed on the knuckle bones he had produced; perhaps he would
have made something of it, if Rox had not been hulking on the other
side of the table. From where she lay, Flora could see Skinny’s
right hand, where the fingers brushed the hilt of the knife tucked
into his boot.

‘And we
haven’t got all of it, yet, not the fee for the new one,’
Skinny said.

Forten grunted
as he put away his dice, then poured more wine from a pitcher into
his mug. ‘Bad enough those little ‘uns hiding and
skulking in the walls. Fair near broke my head, where they’d
rubbed grease on them stairs by the main gate. That new one, he could
be real trouble if he got loose, big as a grown man. Bugger him
anyway. The Baron and that wizard’ll sort him out soon enough.’

The mercenaries
fell silent for an instant, looking uneasy; one or two made signs
against evil with their hands, and they all drank.

Flora turned her
head. Lorrie’s face was blazing with hope. They drew back to
the other corner of the room, speaking quietly. ‘That’s
them!’ Lorrie said. ‘The new one—big as a man—that
must be Bram. And the little ones, they must be Rip, and some other
children!’

Bram yes,
Flora thought.
And maybe it’s your little brother. More
likely than not, yes.

She nodded, and
Lorrie went on, her smile fading: ‘They must be in the manor,
though. How could we get in? It’s like a fort, and guarded, and
. . . you know what the innkeeper said about the castle.’

Flora shivered.
‘That it feels wrong? Yes. But—’

‘But we’ve
got to get them out,’ Lorrie said. ‘And soon. You heard.
Something special planned for Bram!’

The girl from
Krondor nodded, tempted to shiver again. Then she thought rapidly;
things she’d heard from other girls, and from other Mockers.
‘Wait a minute,’ she breathed. ‘I think we can get
in! And those hired swords will be the way we can.’ She felt in
her skirt pocket; the little sack of ‘something special’
was still there.
Jimmy knew what he was doing when he left me some
of this!
she thought. ‘Here’s how we’ll do it.’

Flora rearranged
her bodice, unlacing it so she could turn under the cloth, giving her
as plunging a neckline as any she had worn while walking the streets
of Krondor. She removed the kerchief she had worn while riding in the
cart, and shook her hair out, letting it fall loose over her
shoulders. She tugged at her bodice one more time, ensuring it showed
enough to make acceptable working clothes. The night had gone cool
and overcast, with the smell of rain on the wind from the sea. That
raised goose-bumps; it did nothing to dim her wide smile as the two
troopers stumbled out of the door of the Holly Bush. A backdrop of
red firelight silhouetted them for a moment, and then their weaving
steps were in the muck.

‘Well,
hel-lo,’ Flora crooned.

The mercenaries
stopped and goggled; it was Forten and Sonnart. Their companions had
headed home earlier, and not quite as drunk.

‘Who’re
you?’ one of them asked.

‘Not the
innkeeper’s daughter with the big teats,’ the other
observed owlishly.

‘I’m
the new girl in these parts, boys,’ she said cheerfully, rolled
a hip and winked, mustering up every trick she had learned to
overcome revulsion; she had lain with more repulsive men in her day,
but that was before she had come to think of herself as having more
to her life than surviving from day to day. Choking down an urge to
gag, she asked, ‘You walking home, or do you want to come to
the stables and ride, first?’

Negotiations
went quickly; the men were practically lowing as they panted after
her, bumping into each other and huffing as they staggered in her
wake around the rear of the inn.

‘This’s
far enough,’ one of them grunted, clutching at her.

‘It’s
muddy and it’s going to rain,’ Flora cast back over her
shoulder. ‘There’s a roof and nice straw and
horse-blankets in the stables. Only a few more steps!’

For all they’d
taken aboard, the mercenaries had a well-developed sense of
self-preservation; they made her go first through the doors into the
darkened stables, and their hands went to their hilts when they saw
Lorrie standing there.

They relaxed
again, grinning, as they saw it was another girl. ‘Ruthia!’
one blurted. ‘This is our lucky day!’

Lorrie held her
hand forward, palm up. As Forten reached for her, she took in a sharp
breath and blew across the hand into his face.

Flora was
already dodging sideways, holding her breath. The stable was a dim
cavern, with only a little light filtering in through the door and
the slits under the eaves, but she’d placed the hickory
axe-handle precisely where it needed to be, and her hand fell on it.

Forten was
already down, falling limp and face-forward in the packed manure and
straw of the stable floor. Sonnart behind him hadn’t got much
of the dust in his face; he gave a strangled shout and managed to
half-draw his sword, a glitter of bright metal in the darkness. Flora
took a firm two-handed grip on the smooth length of dense springy
hardwood.

Thock!

The yard-long
axe-handle landed on his right kneecap with the sound of a maul
hitting a block of wood. The mercenary gave a high shrill scream that
died away to a gurgle as Flora collected herself and smacked her
weapon down again, this time on the back of his head.

Light flared as
Lorrie took a bucket off the lamp they’d brought out. Horses
stamped uneasily in the stalls, and one. snorted as he caught the
scent of blood. Both mercenaries were alive, but Sonnart wouldn’t
be feeling well when he woke up.

Lorrie drew her
belt knife, teeth showing in what was most definitely not a smile.
Flora hurried over and caught her arm.

‘No!’
she said.

Lorrie turned on
her. ‘Why not?’ she said fiercely. ‘They work for
the man who had my brother kidnapped and my parents killed!’

‘But
they’re not the ones who did it,’ Flora said. ‘I
wouldn’t stop you if it was. But if we kill these two Tael will
get into a lot of trouble—hanging trouble—swine they may
be, but they’re a baron’s men-at-arms, Lorrie!’

‘And you
heard what they said about Bram!’ Lorrie went on, but the wild
look was dying out of her eyes, and she stopped trying to tug her arm
free of Flora’s grip.

‘Ah,’
Flora said. ‘Well, I had a thought about that.’ She held
up two dried pinecones from the tinder-box of the smithy. ‘You
see how all the leaves on the pinecones run one way?’

‘Yes?’
Lorrie said, puzzled.

Half an hour
later, two cloaked and hooded figures rode down the highway from the
Holly Bush towards Baron Bernarr’s manor. One of them scratched
disgustedly.

‘Didn’t
they ever boil these to get the nits out?’ she said.

‘It could
be worse,’ the other replied.

‘How?’

‘Let me
tell you about Noxious Neville, some day,’ she replied.

The Baron
groaned, and again clutched at his sheets. But now dream and memory
were blurred, as were waking and sleeping. He drifted from knowing
what night it was, lying in his bed, to thinking he was a younger
man, facing terrible choices.

He stood looking
in horror at his wife’s pale form, life draining from her as
blood pooled in the bed, the midwife clutching the crying baby.

A voice at his
elbow. ‘I can help.’

Without looking
he knew it was Lyman. ‘What can you do?’

‘Cover the
lady, and leave the room,’ commanded the visitor and it was
done.

Then he was
outside the room, the midwife already gone with the child to give it
up to the wolves. But . . .

Bernarr’s
eyes fluttered, and he realized it was night and he was alone, and
the baby was now a youth, chained away in a secret room. He groaned
and rolled over, clutching the pillow as he shut his eyes.

Lyman said, ‘An
hour is but an instant, and a day but seconds within that room. She
will abide while we seek a way to keep her from Death’s Hall.’

Healers came,
chirurgeons and a priest of Dala, and another from a sect down in the
desert of Great Kesh, but none could revive the lady of the house
when Lyman lowered the time spell. Each time he failed, he vowed to
redouble his efforts to find a way. And each time Bernarr accepted
his vow, he felt more darkness seize his mind and heart.

Soon, Lyman had
become a permanent member of the house, given his own rooms and
places for his servants. Books were purchased and scrolls and tomes
sent by collectors across the breadth of civilization. No matter what
the price, Bernarr paid, but no solution was found.

Then the books
of dark magic appeared, and blood was needed. First animal, but then
. . .

Bernarr sat up,
a scream torn from his chest, a man tormented beyond endurance. He
forced his eyes open, willed himself awake and pushed himself to the
glassed doors leading to his balcony. Throwing aside the sash, he
opened the doors and stepped out into the cold night darkness. Only
two more nights. He took a deep, cold breath of air. Then he
whispered, ‘In two nights, it will be over.’

The storm raged.

‘Meg!’
a voice bawled outside the cottage.

Thunder rumbled
outside, and flashes of lightning filtered through the boards of the
shutters. Rain hissed down on the thatch, but it was tight and showed
no leaks as yet.

Jimmy looked up
from putting a final edge on his dagger; Jarvis was already throwing
his cloak around his shoulders.

‘Meg!’
the voice shouted again, and this time it cracked in an adolescent
squeak.

Jarvis opened
the door; a boy blundered in. Jimmy put his age at about two years
older than himself, with a revolting crop of pimples that he’d
been spared himself so far, praise be to Banath, God of Thieves. The
lad was dripping from the steady rain outside, and panting as if he’d
run several miles—which the rich spatter of mud that coated him
to waist-height also bore out.

‘Come in,
boy,’ the cottager growled; Meg brought a cup of something hot
and herbal from the small pot she kept on the side of the hearth.

‘Why,
Davy, what are you doing out on a night like this?’