Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses) (2 page)

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Authors: Sharon Shinn

BOOK: Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses)
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Leaning his arms on the wooden bar, Kardon glanced around the room again. There were two whose lives looked to be already forfeit. One was a slim, nervous young man who sat by himself in the farthest corner of the room and seemed to be drinking his very first glass of ale as he scarcely picked at a hearty dinner. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen and did not look like he had led a particularly difficult life. Kardon guessed him to be some lord’s son who had quarreled with his father and run off to seek a life of adventure. Which would tragically end tonight in this tavern or in the alley out back. So much for stupid young noblemen who didn’t know where they belonged.
The other solitary visitor was also a young man, possibly in his early twenties, sandy-haired, strongly built, and a little raffish. This one, Kardon judged, had had some experience street fighting; he would not be so easily overcome, even if two or three assailants came at him at once. Still, sheer numbers would do him in. He might escape with his life but certainly without his wallet or any other valuables he might have on his person. He was drinking cautiously, nursing his second glass of ale after eating every bite of meat on his plate. Hungry, wary, and tough—but solitary. A waterfront tavern in the city of Dormas was not a place to come without friends.
More thoughtfully, Kardon examined the other two strangers, sitting together at a round table in the middle of the room and engaging in occasional conversation with the regular customers who sat close by. Seafaring folk, by their dress, probably docked overnight at the harbor a stone’s throw from Kardon’s place. Successful at it, too, by the cut of their clothes and their freehanded way of tossing a coin to Kardon or his servers when they brought out fresh trays of food and drink. The richest prey in the room tonight—but the hardest to pluck.
For one thing, there were two of them. For another, the man was black-haired and burly, the bulk and strength of his muscles apparent even under the winter layers of wool and leather clothing. Kardon could see the short blade at his belt and guessed he also carried a knife or two concealed in his boot or up his sleeve. The man
looked
like a fighter, even as he relaxed over dinner. One bell at the front door, one crash in the back room, and he’d be on his feet with a hilt in his hand, unless Kardon greatly missed his guess. No, this one would not go down easily, and Kardon’s friends might find that his sword outweighed his wallet.
It was the man’s companion that Kardon found most curious, and now he turned his eyes to the final stranger. A woman, by the Pale Lady’s silver eye. A woman, whom her companion had addressed as “Captain,” and who held herself so regally that even Kardon, who despised women, could understand why a man might take orders from her. She was seated now, but he had seen her when she entered. She was tall as a man, and dressed like one in leather pants and high boots and a woven vest. Her white-blond hair was cropped so short it stood out around her face in a careless aureole. He had noted her posture when she walked in, how light she was on her feet, how quick and assured her movements were. She was a fighter, too, handy with a blade and not afraid to use it, or Kardon was an idiot. She might look like easy pickings, but Kardon was willing to bet she rarely came off the worse in any encounter. Especially not with that bruiser fighting at her side. He would guess they had dispatched any number of enemies on the high seas or dry land, and wouldn’t object to a little rough-and-tumble now if it came down to it.
As it would. Kardon’s customers weren’t nearly as discerning as the barkeeper himself. They’d see rich woman dressed as a sea captain and think they’d been delivered a bounty straight from the White Lady herself.
“A little more ale, eh, my friend?” the woman called out to him just as Kardon reached this point in his musings. “It’s a nasty night to go back into, and I think I need to fortify myself against the cold.”
“Take care you don’t fortify yourself into a stupor, Senneth,” the man beside her growled. The woman laughed and snapped the fingers of her left hand. Kardon caught a glimpse of smoky white moonstones on a bracelet circling her lifted wrist. It almost made him like her for a moment to know that she wore the badge of the Pale Mother. But even the moon goddess would not be able to protect her tonight.
“You worry too much, Tayse,” she said before lifting her voice to call to Kardon again. “Another pitcher!”
Kardon nodded. “Cammon!” he shouted toward the kitchen. “Our guests need attention.”
A moment later, Cammon came out through the swinging door, bearing a tray of ale and bread. He went straight toward the table with the sea folk, so he must have been spying at the door. He looked even thinner than usual under his shapeless clothes, as if he had been starving himself just out of spite. Kardon promised himself he’d find the time to give the boy a good whipping sometime in the next day or two. When the weather cleared up, when the customers cleared out, when he found a free moment.
Cammon was setting the tray on the table before the sea folk. “Ale,” he said in his soft voice. “And more bread, if you want it.”
The woman called Senneth, who had been arguing in a low voice with her companion, looked up at his words. “You,” she said. “You’ve got a funny accent. Where are you from, then? Not Gillengaria?”
Cammon shook his head, his unkempt hair falling into his eyes. “No, Captain,” he said. “I’ve only been in this country a month or so.”
“Well? Where were you before?”
He shrugged, his thin shoulders rising and falling under the fabric of his shirt. “Arberharst and Sovenfeld, mostly. We moved around a lot when I was little.”
“We?” she demanded. Kardon marveled that she could actually be interested in the life story of a servant boy—an indentured one at that, with a couple of years to work off before he could consider himself a freeman. But she might be the type whose roving attention was caught by any odd detail—the type who remembered things you’d much rather she forgot. For a moment, Kardon felt sorry for the dark man with her, who no doubt hated and feared her. Capricious people were always the hardest to answer to.
Cammon glanced back at the bar to see how his master wanted him to deal with such curiosity, and Kardon shrugged. Let her talk, for now. Let her interrogate. Her mouth would be stopped up soon enough, if Kardon’s friends had their way. “My parents and me. My father was a roamer, and my mother followed him wherever he went.”
“And how’d you end up in Dormas working as a tavern boy and wearing a slave collar around your throat?” she asked, nodding toward the slim silver torque tight around Cammon’s neck. Kardon watched him put a hand up to it and touch the moonstone on the very center of the collar. Kardon had known from the beginning that this boy could be trouble; he had taken no chances. He had bound Cammon with the Pale Mother’s powerful protective jewel.
“My father died,” Cammon said quietly. “We stayed in Arberharst till the money ran out. My mother’s roots were back in Gillengaria, so we set sail a few months ago. She got sick on the voyage and never recovered. We landed and I—I had to pay for my passage some way. The captain bound me to Kardon.”
The woman glanced over at Kardon, her eyes coolly assessing, and he felt a momentary, uncharacteristic urge to explain himself.
I paid good money for him! I needed an extra hand in the kitchen! I feed him hearty meals every day, except the days he won’t eat them because he’s such a sly and wretched boy.
She looked away, back at Cammon. “Does it hurt?” she asked very softly.
He put his hand back up to the collar. “It’s not really tight,” he said. “It doesn’t choke.”
Senneth lifted her right hand, which unexpectedly held a dagger, and touched the very tip of the blade to the glowing gem. “The moonstone,” she said, her voice quite low but every word precisely enunciated. “Does it hurt when it touches your skin?”
Cammon dropped his hand and stared at her. The cutthroats sitting nearest her table also turned their heads to eye her curiously. The whole room seemed to have grown still and silent, waiting for his answer.
“Yes,” he said finally. “It burns.”
The woman’s fine eyebrows rose. Delicately, she used the flat of the blade to lift up the necklet and expose a patch of red skin under the spot where the moonstone lay. “From what I hear,” she said slowly, “the only ones with anything to fear from the touch of a moonstone are mystics. Are you one of those?”
A whisper went around the room as the other occupants repeated the word.
Mystic . . . mystic . . . mystic . . . Are you one of those?
Kardon shivered, just a little. He was a plain man, mostly honest, not very subtle, and he hated and feared those who were reputed to possess magical ability. Not two months ago, he had been among the crowd that stoned an old woman to death after she was accused of magic in the marketplace, though she shrieked that she was innocent even as the rocks hit her face and stomach. He had had his suspicions of Cammon the minute the sea captain brought him through the door, because there was something about the boy’s delicate face and huge, flecked eyes that radiated an otherworldly wisdom. But greed had won out over Kardon’s uneasiness—a virtual chattel for a very good price—and he had been sure that he could, with force and the Mother’s protection, control such a slight and contemptible creature as Cammon. So he had made the bargain and welded on the collar, and he’d had no trouble with the boy. None at all.
“He’s no mystic,” Kardon called, still standing behind the bar and watching. “He’s just a servant. He does my bidding.”
The woman called Senneth turned to look at him, and again he found her gaze unsettling. Her eyes were a crystal gray, wide and thoughtful and impossible to read. She looked like she was having no trouble at all scanning his soul. “Only a mystic,” she said, “is burned by the touch of the Pale Mother’s hand.”
One of the regular customers gave a gruff laugh. “That right, Kardon?” he inquired. “You’re piling up magicians in the back room? What, do you have them doctoring our beer so we fall asleep at our tables and you can rob us blind?”
Kardon himself felt blind with a swift surge of fury. “He’s a boy. He’s no mystic. And I’ll thank you to remember what kind of service I’ve given you all these years.”
Senneth had edged her knife even deeper under the collar, till the point of it rested against the soft flesh under the boy’s chin. He was staring down at her, mesmerized by terror or whatever power she had in her eyes; she was smiling up at him with an expression that seemed to owe as much to rage as mirth.
“What would you do, I wonder,” she murmured, “if I twisted this blade enough to break your collar? What sort of power would you show us then?”
At that exact moment, someone screamed.
Kardon’s attention whipped that way. While almost everyone else had been watching the sea captain question the serving boy, another small drama had been playing itself out in the back of the room. Two of Kardon’s old friends had approached the scrawny young nobleman and backed him into a corner. He now cowered against the wall, arms ineffectually raised before him, looking even more slight and helpless than before. His face was so fine and so white that Kardon imagined he’d rarely seen the countryside outdoors, let alone the rough weather in a training yard. He’d probably never held a sword in his life.
“Please,” he was saying, trying to bat away the weapons pointed in his direction. “I have nothing—but my father, he’ll pay you—if you don’t hurt me—he’s very wealthy—”
“Young handsome boy like you could be worth a lot to us,” purred one of the attackers, poking at the boy’s shoulder and throat with the point of his sword. “I don’t like the idea of a ransom unless the stakes are awfully high, but I bet you’ve got more valuables on you than you even know. What about the pin on your hat here? Is that a set of rubies I see?” And he knocked the hat off with the tip of his blade.
And a cascade of golden curls came tumbling down over the young man’s shoulders.
Over the young
woman’s
shoulders, Kardon corrected himself.
Everyone in the bar was now staring at the events unfolding in the corner. Even dressed in a velvet jacket cut like a man’s, the woman was suddenly unmistakably female, and terrified. Her face went even whiter; she crossed her arms over her chest as if to protect herself. But her attackers were chortling with unrestrained delight—what a glorious catch! what a prize with a dozen fabulous uses!—and they pressed even closer, weapons falling to their sides. One of them even lifted a hand to brush his fingers across her ivory-smooth cheek.
“Don’t touch her,” a cold voice said. Cursing himself for continually losing track of the other players in the room, Kardon cut his eyes over to the last remaining stranger. The sandy-haired man was on his feet, his cloak thrown over his chair, and he had a dagger in each hand. The weapon belt now revealed around his waist showed an array of other small knives tucked in well-worn sheaths. More than a street fighter—a mercenary soldier, trained for one thing only. “Leave her in peace,” he added.
“
You
leave in peace before you don’t have a chance to leave at all,” her attacker snarled. “This isn’t your fight.”
“I make it mine,” the mercenary said calmly. “Let her pass.”
“Fight for her,” the cutthroat said.
Then so many things happened at once that Kardon could not follow them all. The mercenary lunged for the cutthroat. The other assailant swung his sword at the golden-haired girl. The girl crumpled to the floor in what appeared to be a swoon—until her attacker shouted with bewilderment.

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