The Tracker (11 page)

“Go on now,” Keth said. The children fell back, a little disappointed but having fun in their imaginings of terrible and scandalous crimes, and then they ran away with the mystery thrilling them anew.

After Ghirg, they came to a crossroads between pastures. Master Maraudi barked, “Which way?” The tracker took his time in standing up, and then he breathed. His finger flicked left and Master Maraudi turned that way, calling back, “And how old is this scent, tracker?”

Again, the tracker took his time in answering. Bloody and locked in a cage, he still clung to his pride with tight fists. At long last, he grunted, “Several days. Can’t tell you more than that. But it was not today or yesterday when she frolicked down this road with her ill-gotten goods.”

They went on, the wind picking up and ruffling their hair. Keth contemplated their direction, and asked for them to list the names of every village, town, and city to run this way. As a man who had until now never left Lighmoon, Arden knew very little. Dieter could only name a few more, and if the tracker knew any from his time in Odri, he kept them to himself. But Master Maraudi had the wealth of them contained in his head. He recited names for a long time, and when he reached Minkakel, Keth snapped her fingers. “Minkakel!” she exclaimed.

“Does that spur a memory of yours?” Master Maraudi asked. Arden and Dieter rode up closer to hear the soldiers speak. The wind had gotten harder, and now it was blowing without cease and sweeping away their voices with it.

Keth’s eyes were intent on her revelation. “Lady Ques was close in her childhood to the daughter of Lady Timmonsie. No one ever considered that as a place to where she could have fled. They were looking at more recent and firmer acquaintances than this.”

“Minkakel is in a nowhere place,” Master Maraudi said. As Dieter and Arden had never heard of it, he gave a description for their benefit. “Tucked in the seat of The Embrace, but it’s more commonly known as The Arse. It rests below twin hills, the towns little of note, but many of the great instrument makers have traditionally called it home. See a harp or lute or violin, often it was born in the towns beneath the shadow of those hills.”

“I don’t believe Ri Ques has ever been to their manor in Minkakel, or any of the surrounding towns whatsoever,” Keth said. “But Lady Timmonsie and her daughter . . . Brogid, I believe her name is . . . came to Lighmoon several times and those two became fast friends. They still exchange letters to this day, although quite sporadically. No one would suspect her of going to Minkakel; Lady Timmonsie herself has become an invalid in the last few years; Brogid is an academic who does not care to visit Lighmoon on her own. She is not society-minded, and she would be sympathetic. And as the two have not seen each other in person for five years or more . . .”

Master Maraudi slapped his thigh at how this search was shaping up. “The Arse is naught but a few days’ ride.”

“How are we to get her back if she refuses to listen to reason and come?” Arden asked the soldiers. “Are there likely to be guards at the manor that we will have to fight?” Four against an army of guards were not good odds, not to mention that Dieter was just a boy, and Arden was strong but not well versed in combat. The knife at his belt was no match for a sword.

Master Maraudi harrumphed. “The towns below the hills are not poor enough to take out their desperation on a lady of relatively low nobility; nor are they rich enough to lather her in fineries and use her to curry favor in court. No, those aggressions and affections would be directed to the Duke of Encoul as the nearest personage of great rank. Lady Timmonsie has no need of any guard for her manor past one posted at the gate. Is she a paranoid sort, Keth? Lady Imano and her newest husband gut their purse on guards, and for sieges that occur nowhere but in their silly heads.”

“She is not that sort, and neither is Brogid, from what I know of them,” Keth said.

“If there are more guards at the manor than one at the gate, the acquisition likely came through the woman we are after. Yet she has no reason to believe that we are hot on her tail, should Minkakel truly be where she has gone.” He ceased to speak as a woman trotted past on a horse. Arden looked back to the tracker. Wedged into a ball on the floor of the cage, he had his head tucked into his arms against the wind.

“Will
she
fight?” Arden asked.

The wind howled past them and shook the grass on either side of the road violently. Master Maraudi flicked a leaf off his trousers and said, “If she refuses to listen to reason, if she fights, we will purchase a second cage, bind her hands, fasten the
holographie
crystal to a part of her person where she cannot remove it, and drag her back to Lighmoon. She can scream her true identity all she wants and people will dismiss it as the ravings of a madwoman being ferried to an asylum.” He chuckled, glanced over his shoulder to the tracker, and said in an amused but quieter voice, “The asylums are full of invisible crowns, men who claim to be the queen’s dead brother, Dagad rest his soul, and women who weep at their misfortune of being the king’s bastard daughters shorted their pretty dresses and jewels. No one will pay her any mind on our trip back.”

“I’ve seen her in the forge-yard with a sword,” Dieter said, also making sure the tracker was not listening. “She’s a good one with a blade.”

“Accomplished, yes,” Keth said, “but not as good as her sister who went to serve with the Odri forces. She can be taken down.”

“Speed up, everyone!” Master Maraudi said. “Let’s see if we can’t make it to Relee or else we’ll be bunking in the grass.”

It bothered them not at all, this man being pulled along in the cage behind them, since they needed his skill to find the princess. But it bothered Arden terribly.

The search party made it to an inn in Relee, the sun reduced to a fading orange streak at the horizon of the western sky. The innkeeper called to her hired girl to care for the horses, and reassured Master Maraudi that they had had occupied cages stop there many times on the way to the prison in Thurma. The fellow in their company would weather the night well in the barn, and they should not concern themselves with him convincing anyone to let him out.

“Water,” the tracker said resentfully.

“Give him nothing!” Master Maraudi ordered as they dismounted. “Nothing out of those packs. A spot of thirst and hunger will encourage him to stay on task in the morning.”

The tracker didn’t shout or swear, kick the bars or try to grab anyone through them. He just sat there, looking defeated, his fingers twitching in his lap. Arden went into the inn and guiltily had a heaping plate of sausage, eggs, and potatoes. Little loaves of soft, fresh bread were delivered to their table and devoured. Then a maid guided them upstairs.

It was a strange inn that could have once been a brothel. The rooms were claustrophobic, each fitting only a small bed and a shelf for belongings. Should the walk to the communal bathroom down the corridor be too arduous a journey to make, an ancient chamber pot was stowed under each bed. Arden passed an uneasy night and was first out the door after breakfast. Dieter was on his heels, but the squire went to the road as Arden turned to the barn. Master Maraudi had given the boy money to purchase a little more food for their journey.

The tracker was awake and chewing on a piece of straw swiped from the barn floor. Arden pushed a meal of meat and cheese and a cup of water through the bars. Then he stood there quietly as everything went down the tracker’s throat in enormous swallows. Dieter returned in short order and everyone else came into the barn for the horses.

Master Maraudi thumped the cage and said, “We won’t have any problems today, will we, tracker?”

“Volos,” the tracker said.

“Pardon?”

“Volos. My name is Volos.”

“I’m not interested,” Master Maraudi snapped. The soldier was only kind to those who did his bidding without argument. “Which way should we be headed?”

“Straight on down this road.”

“Good.”

They got underway. Keth had acquired a map, which she unrolled and consulted as they rode along to search for other cities and towns with which the princess may have had a connection. Cousins and old friends and distant acquaintances were muttered about occasionally, more to herself than to any of them. Master Maraudi and Dieter went in front and spoke in good spirits about the handsies game that was growing so popular. No dice, no cards, it was a strange competition in which one slapped one’s thighs, arms, belly, and various other personal parts in a certain order that Dieter demonstrated atop his irritated horse. As he slapped himself, he said, “It came from the miners in the High Reaches, it did.”

“It’s guffok stupid,” Master Maraudi said. “
Guffok
. Don’t repeat that word around the ladies in the Low Grounds like I did as a boy. Dagad, stop slapping yourself! People are going to think you’re loose in the mind.”

“It’s a challenge, see?” Dieter said, but stopped his slapping. “How far can you repeat the rhythm? Then you drink ale if you win, no ale if you lose, and someone new challenges you. But it’s hard to keep winning when what you keep winning is ale, and you have to drink your winnings right there when the loser gives them to you. Or else you’ve insulted the loser. We did tabletop handsies one time and I was winning round after round up there, but then I finally fell off because the world was getting so dizzy.”

“It wasn’t the world getting dizzy,” Master Maraudi said.

Every time Arden looked up, the tracker was staring at him. When it grew too uncomfortable, Arden said, “What?”

Just like they had checked on him the day before for reassurance that he was not listening, now he checked on the others in the same way. Then he addressed Arden in a soft voice. “Would you like to hear a story, Arden?”

He didn’t wait for Arden to reply. “Once we were tracking and I thanked him for helping, my brother Humber who always came with me. I was sixteen at the time, he was seventeen, and we had been tracking together for five years then. But he did not accept my gratitude. Instead, he looked ashamed.”

The tracker checked on the others once more. Master Maraudi and Dieter had moved even farther ahead; Keth was still mumbling over her map. Bringing his lovely green eyes back to Arden, the tracker said, “He sank to his knees and begged for my forgiveness. He confessed that he had felt spitefully toward me long ago, that I was a tracker and he was not, that I received such glory upon my returns with the lost while he stood in the shadows. This he had complained about to our mother, half-expecting her to beat him for not appreciating how our family’s circumstances had risen. But she did not beat him. She commanded him to attend me on every track and learn. Not to be a tracker, which cannot be learned, but wisdom. It did not take him long to gain that wisdom, he told me that day. Before he came along, he only saw me arrive home to embraces and gifts and honor, cheers and applause ringing up to the sky. He resented the apparent ease of my life.”

The tracker shifted in the cage. “Then he tracked at my side, over and over again, and saw what he had not seen before. It was lonely, tiring, dangerous work. Sometimes it was very aggravating, especially when we were trying to herd animals back to their pens. Sometimes it was very sad, because we did not reach people in time to save them. Then we had to drag their bodies back. Sometimes it was very joyous, like the time we found the leatherman’s little boy and girl who had played a game in the woods and gotten lost. Not
that
game.” He rolled his eyes about Dieter’s drunken handsies.

Then he resumed his story. “Farther and farther away they had wandered in trying to find their way home. They’d survived a night of inhospitable weather and would not have survived another had Humber and I not reached them. We carried them back, poor things, cold and shivering and weak. And there was such a party when we emerged from the woods with the children alive in our arms! The leatherman ran to me and seized his daughter, covered both of us in kisses and demanded the best food and drink be brought to me. The leatherman’s wife ran to Humber and seized her son, covered both of them in kisses and demanded the best food and drink be brought to him. This was what had made Humber jealous before, when I alone received these accolades. But now he had his wisdom. We were crushed with fatigue from the journey and wanted nothing more than to go home and sleep. Yet we could not walk away from such a display of gratitude. The entire pearl was there to feast and dance and praise us, to present us with the finest of meats and wine and tokens. Am I boring you, Arden? Would you rather . . .” The tracker drummed on his belly and head.

“No,” Arden said. In truth, he was very interested in this story, and it gave him an excuse to look into those pretty eyes.

“All this Humber told me while on his knees. By then he had had his wisdom for long, and I asked why he continued to track with me when he had nothing left to learn. He said that he continued because he did not like to think of me doing this alone. To go after a herd of stubborn animals was not a task for one man. Even two could barely handle it. To drag back a body on mountain slopes was not a task for one man either. The grief of it was better shared, as was the difficulty of pulling the sled uphill. To chase down the living without having to carry a heavy pack of supplies . . . to have Humber there made everything easier. It was his duty as my brother to help me, he said, and his pleasure.”

“Still the right way, tracker?” Master Maraudi shouted back.