The Tracker (15 page)

That had been the only part to really catch the innkeeper’s attention. “I told them to backtrack and take King Silver. It’s a faster way to get there than coming through here to reach the lavender road. The lavender is getting too rough for people in fancy clothes nowadays.”

“And what did they say?” Master Maraudi asked.

“They thanked me but went on to the lavender. You can’t convince people who already have the answers, can you? No, you can’t, not young, gold-in-their-pocket lord’s couriers too good to listen to a man who might know the area.”

As they turned to go, he said off-handedly, “Funny thing. The woman now, I told her that she looked a little like the youngest princess. Thought she’d be happy to hear that. What woman wouldn’t? But she turned pale as a ghost and turned away. Maybe she doesn’t think that one is too comely.”

“Princess Briala was here?” asked a patron over a glass of ale at the bar.

“Of course she wasn’t here!” the innkeeper scoffed. “When last did royalty come through here? Better roads than this. We had a woman the other day with hair just like Princess Briala’s, lovely tumbles of black. But the face was different. The princesses all got the queen’s high cheekbones and this girl was pudding-cheeked.”

As the search party returned to their horses and began down the road, Keth said, “The
holographie
crystal is losing its power. She’ll be back to herself soon.”

“Maybe we’ll pass it in the road,” Dieter said. “Or two of them, if the man’s is wearing off, too. What do they look like?” He fingered his pocket where he had slipped his dragon scales, clearly debating if two discarded
holographie
crystals would add to his wealth.

“I doubt she’ll dump them,” Keth said. “The spell within those crystals will regenerate in time. They just aren’t meant to be used day after day. She’s more likely to put them in her pack and let the spell build up again.”

“Her scent has stopped,” Volos announced.

“What do you mean?” Arden asked, aghast. “She hasn’t . . . died?”

“No, that doesn’t make a scent stop. It just changes to something far more unpleasant. She’s holding steady somewhere. Her scent hasn’t moved for hours.”

“Perhaps poor weather has caught her up as it did us,” Master Maraudi said.

“Or she is at the wildlands port waiting for a boat to Loria,” Keth said, and they rode on fast.

****

Riding from first light to last, they were waylaid at times by the odd course the princess had traveled. The
holographie
crystal had to have given up the ghost not long after the inn; she had abandoned the roads entirely when they passed by inhabited land, and never once did her scent trail off to a doorstep for a bed or meal. The horses picked carefully through fields and woods, and at times moved so far away from the road that it was lost to view entirely. For the princess to move so confidently through an area that she had not once visited in her life was strange. It was the man who had to know the region and was guiding her on. The two had camped in a little grove of trees one night, the nearest farm only revealed by a column of smoke rising from its chimney. As the search party passed it, Volos said quietly, “He’s young.”

“The man?” Arden asked, riding beside the cage.

“I couldn’t ferret out his scent earlier with so many people around. But he was the only one here with her, and they are the only ones to have been in this place for quite some time. I can’t say an exact age, but this isn’t the smell of an old man. He is young and . . .” Arden waited as Volos breathed. “This isn’t the scent of a street-scuff. He smells of the sweat of travels, but his clothing does not reek . . . This is a royal man who daubs himself with cologne. A royal man would help a jewel thief? For a cut of the pay? Why would a royal need it?”

Arden looked at him, unable to state the true identity of their quarry, but Volos picked up on the significance of his expression and nodded. It did seem curious to Arden that an Odri lord or, more likely from the age, an Odri lord-ling would assist a princess betrothed to a prince of Isle Zayre to reach Loria, but Arden was not privy to court tempests in the perindens, and they did not seek him out there. It was also curious that the lord-ling would be so skilled in his navigation. This was not a place where the rich lived. The map that Keth had acquired displayed more and more empty space the closer one got to the wildlands, showing occasional villages of no size or importance, and no cities or towns whatsoever.

“This is a man she loves,” Volos mumbled. “Did you love the man who fled you?”

“I did,” Arden said. “He was handsome and quick-witted, and when his eyes were on me, I felt like the only man in the world. I thought he loved me in return. I was a fool. He finds toys in hearts and this I did not see about him until after he’d played so carelessly with mine.” The memories made him feel brittle. Arden had been so naïve and stupid, so willing to see what wasn’t there. “But a Cascades man would never be like that, is that true? Because they have seen
loveliness
.”

“Do not turn those words against me sarcastically. There are cold-hearted people within the pearls. Yes, and yes, we have them here and there. Once there was a boy who delighted me, and I believed I delighted him in turn. He had such soft eyes, wide and honest and warm as a summer morning. I brought him to meet my family at a Sevenday dinner and they talked so pleasantly that I delighted in him even more. But afterwards I asked my brother Cusano if he liked him, and he let silence be his answer. This angered me and I demanded why. He said that my family had loved me since I was nothing but a red-faced, squalling infant that scratched their faces. When I became a tracker, they did not love me more. He wished for me a boy who did not favor me for what I became, rather than who I was.”

He spoke with his voice down. They both were to keep Keth from overhearing. The wheels of the platform crackling on dead leaves helped with that. “I was still angry, but after that Sevenday, I saw this boy differently. How important it was to him, when we met with people from other pearls, to mention that I was the tracker. It did not need to be said over a card game and ale, and yet he could not refrain. He was Oloni and this man here, this man of his was the
tracker
! When he wanted to buy something in a shop, he would say that he was my man, and often it would be given to him for free. I watched in secret as he did this time and time again. He loved me only because I was the tracker, not because I was Volos. I went back to Cusano in shame and thanked him for opening my eyes.”

They parted so that Keth could swing the cage around a boulder in a field. When they came back together, Volos said, “To be the tracker is a gift that can be given to anyone in the Cascades. I did nothing to earn it. Just as easily could it have gone to any of my older brothers, or the schoolhouse master, or one of the crier’s daughters. The ability to track is special, yet
I
am not. I am only Volos. Cusano taught me this as his finger traced where my baby nail scratched down his cheek when he was a little boy. Should my ability fade tomorrow, he still loves me. My other brothers will still love me; my mother will still love me. But that boy . . . that boy with the deceptively soft eyes, he would not.”

“And Lith was not that way, I take it,” Arden said.

“No! He never dropped my name at a shop. That would have been repugnant to him. He wanted to be his own man. That mattered to him even more than it should. My special ability did not make him less special. He would have learned this in time, I hope, but then he was taken to the grave.” Volos breathed and turned wistful. “I can smell home in that breeze.”

The ground grew so broken, rocky, and wearisome to travel upon that they went back to the road, but then her scent twisted away from it and returned them to the troublesome process of moving a cage over forbidding ground. At last it became so impossible that Master Maraudi commanded them to stop.

The tracker was removed from his cage. He was heaved up onto Arden’s horse, wrists shackled and ankles left free. Master Maraudi looked up to him in warning and said, “If the penchant reports any problem to me, tracker, any problem at all, then your legs will be shackled again. I’ll have you riding this horse on your belly. It will not be comfortable for you.”

They quit the cage, having no choice in the interest of time, and rode faster after the scents of the princess and her man, which were moving again but did not go far. Farther and farther the scents drew the search party from the roads, until the only ones they came across were barely-used scratches in the dirt. Fairly fresh hoof prints were in it, two horses stepping side by side.

Rumpled black hair was constantly flying back into Arden’s face, and with permission, he braided it. The strands were soft. Ahead of them, Master Maraudi and Keth rode through a thick haze of insects buzzing about in a golden shaft of light between trees. They batted at their heads once through.

“Will you part those?” Volos asked. “Can you with minds so small? I do not wish bugs in my teeth and up my nose.”

“It is with the smallest minds that I exert the greatest control,” Arden said, tying off the braid and looking to the cloud of insects. Dieter rode through them and then coughed violently, leaning over to gargle and spit on the ground. Forcing himself into the bugs’ minds, which took even less effort than the dragons’, Arden parted them like curtains at a theater. They rode through the light unmolested.

“You must be the most popular man at the zoo with your penchant,” Volos commented.

“Quite the opposite. I am the most loathed,” Arden said. “I am the only one with a penchant for animals, and not high enough in position to command their respect.”

“So they hate you for it. We have no penchants in the Cascades, although we know what they are. They are simply not born to our families, just as trackers are not born to yours in Odri. That is a strange magic, the penchants of Odri, Havanath, and Loria. How did you learn of your skill, or did you always know?”

“I knew nothing as a child. I liked animals but never recognized my affinity for commanding them as anything unusual. There were few animals around the orphanage anyway, except the carriage horses. It was the matron at the orphanage who noticed how I rarely had to flick the reins to direct them or make them behave. One was quite naughty when she was driving, but it never gave me as much trouble. She reported me, I was tested, and then I was claimed for the king. After that, I was assigned to the zoo.”

“Do you like the zoo?”

“No.”

“But this you’ll do forever, work in a zoo and surrounded by people who dislike you so? You are a more patient man than I. Humber and I would pay to have someone of your abilities when we’re off to track sheep. It makes us insane to do it. They’re silly creatures and it damn near broke our backs when we were leading back Sor Dane’s ewe and her newborn triplets. We had to carry the babies and sheep don’t look up. So she didn’t see them over her head and had a panic about how they had turned invisible. Running this way and that way in search. We had to walk bent over so she could see them, and this we did in rain and hail and wind for almost a mile upon shifting rocks. But you, you could have just said into her mind to come and she would have followed. Yes, I would have kissed you in gratitude had you been there.”

“Are you trying to lure me to the Cascades?” Arden teased, feeling the tracker’s soft lips on his hand.

“Why not? Is there something in Odri that holds your heart? Come to the Cascades, Arden, we have no one there of your skills and they will be in demand. Perhaps it scares you to think of leaving what you know, even if what you know is unkind to you. But the pearls will not be foreign to you.”

“How could they not be? I have never been there.”

“Places are only foreign when you are alone, and no one is alone in the pearls. You will be taken into a family even as a grown man. And you will not be there three days before some child comes tap-tap-tapping at the door with a plea to command her kitten down from a tree, or Humber and I with long faces and a track to make after sheep. My mother will command your presence at Sevenday dinner because she loves a full table, and she will tell you of every eligible woman in all the pearls until you confess your leanings and she switches to every eligible man. Yes, and within a year, your doorstep will see such traffic as mine in wood for your fire, jams for your pantry shelf, meat pies and baskets of apples. This will happen with the kittens in trees, the sheep in the woods, the pigs freed from fences. Give in the pearls and they give back in spades. And there is a man named Oloni who will be quite interested in you.”

Arden laughed. Dieter turned around and Arden called, “Just a rabbit tripping over its own clumsy feet.” He had to be more cautious when he was in Volos’s company, or the others would suspect he was being hoodwinked.

“Will I have my minute?” Volos asked quietly once the squire had turned away.

“You will have as many as I can grant,” Arden said, and not because he was hoodwinked. He felt instead that Volos was opening his eyes.

“Then fourteen is indeed a lucky number. I will go as quickly as I can, and I will try to find a healing penchant or jeweler to trade these in.” He opened his shirt pocket and Arden peered over his shoulder to a small collection of dragon scales. Those would not feed him for long. Arden opened his pouch, moved aside his carved dragon, and withdrew three silvers and several coppers. He dropped those into the pocket after checking to make sure that no one in the search party was looking back.