Sasharia en Garde Read online

  The cadet vanished.

  A short time later there was the sheep, the nickname ostensibly chosen for his white hair. War Commander Randart knew his brother liked the prince, despite his fashionably tailored brown velvet war tunic that had never seen any semblance of war, that long white morvende hair hanging down his back, and a diamond in his ear. Popular Jehan was, but he was also more a fop than a commander. Why couldn’t Orthan see that?

  Orthan sighed. He wanted his son to be king, but he didn’t want anything bad to happen to the prince. Somehow . . . somehow, he hoped, it would all work out. Until then, no use in worrying. Dannath would have his way no matter what.

  “What color would you call that?” Jehan asked, indicating the pale shade of the ocean.

  “Blue,” Randart said with obvious patience. “Your highness, forgive me but it might be better if you don’t . . . visit civilians . . . when we’re under orders.”

  “She sings,” Jehan explained.

  Orthan restacked already neat papers, keeping his face hidden. The runner cadet in the corner watched, his eyes wide.

  “Have you ever heard Faleth ballad-style?” Jehan continued, head to one side. “It seems to have its roots in Ancient Sartoran—”

  “Very well, very well, perhaps another time, your highness?” Orthan soothed, eyeing the war commander uneasily.

  Orthan completely misunderstood his brother. The king persisted in believing Jehan might one day wake up and exhibit even a faint interest in the requirements of a future king. The king believed it, Orthan hoped for it in a vague way—and Randart watched for it.

  If he discovered any hint of competence in Prince Sheep, Dannath Randart would arrange for a fatal accident. He really did not want to have to do that. Not in a kingdom where every single person who wasn’t plotting was busy gossiping. Far better the king suffer one more disappointment, and get so angry he took care of the heir problem all by himself. And there would be a trained heir, at the top of the academy, loyal, strong, handsome: Damedran Randart.

  “We can talk about ballads later.” The war commander pitched his voice to be heard by the cadet runners on duty outside the office. He was very careful to present himself as the devoted friend and supporter to the prince. For the benefit of all those listening ears, he added in a gentle, coaxing voice, “But your highness, the king has requested me to convey his wishes to you. Now, about the games . . .”

  Everything according to plan.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The ship’s boy rowed me to the main pier, which was very long, with small boats coming and going to drop off or pick up people whose ships couldn’t afford closer-in anchorage fees. This meant a hefty hike ahead of me.

  The two sailors at the bows tied us on, and the ship’s boy touched my arm. I stared in surprise at his crimson face as he mutely held out a bag that chinked promisingly.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Collection took up by the crew.” He blushed even more, if that was humanly possible.

  I took pity on him and climbed out, confining myself to a little wave, and I began to duck and sidestep my way through all the busy people on the pier.

  The long pier led me past the capital ships pulled alongside. One had to be the navy’s flagship. I kept my head low, scarcely looking at it, though no one paid me the least heed. But I felt as if eyes crawled over me like bugs as I hustled past its length.

  I slowed a little when passing Prince Jehan’s yacht. Every line of it evoked the power and arrogance of princes, to the exquisite carving of laughing dolphins all round the rail. This work of art rocked at the best docking spot in the entire harbor. Yet it was obviously empty of any royal butt sitting in its gorgeous cabin. Its crew looked bored as they polished the gleaming wood and re-flemished their pristine ropes.

  Near the end of the pier the crowd thickened. A few steps more and I’d reach the quay at last. I was finally on my own.

  Everywhere I looked walked, patrolled, and lounged brown-clad warriors. Even the ones whose hands held pastries or drink carried a full complement of weaponry.

  I didn’t know if they were on guard, or about to embark in the navy ships I could see anchored in neat rows along the inner bay, or on leave for the academy games. I didn’t want to find out because it was certain to be the hard way.

  I gave myself a mental shakedown as I trod down the last few warped wooden boards of the long pier, stumping a little in an effort to get my land balance back. A good look around made it clear that civilian sailors dress in every imaginable style, tending toward the loud when on shore looking for fun. The career doesn’t select for the delicate and dainty, so there were plenty of women of my size around.

  The one thing that I feared might catch attention was my gear bag. Though I’d rolled it to be as small as possible, the faint sheen of its plastic weave could draw the eye of anyone searching for the unusual, and so I stopped at the very first vendor selling baskets and paid what I suspect was a thumpingly dishonest price for a scratchy, loosely woven affair that I soon hated, but it did its job by successfully hiding the gear bag stuffed into its depths.

  This purchase also used up most of the coins in the bag. Either the basket maker was an outright thief or I’d been given enough to cover a day or two’s meals. But that made sense. Sailors would figure a day or so on land, and then one hires out for one’s next voyage.

  Or maybe the Purple-and-orange Pirate would give me some more of his ill-gotten gains when he met me at the Gold to tell me the local news. Did I want handouts? No. I would cash in some of my gems, or work my way along the road. But I was curious about what he might bring.

  For now, I’d just enjoy the market street, which wound in a kind of slightly skewed crescent along the foot of the rocky ridge. Ellir Harbor, overlooked by the combination academy and garrison, was a jumble of old stone buildings and jerry-rigged tents and claptrap houses with doors and window sills painted with bright colors.

  The stone buildings housed the long-term businesses, most sea-related. The rest was seasonal trade, set up in colorful stalls and tents between the dilapidated buildings. These people raised half the market noise with their singing and shouting as they waved brightly dyed pennons and sent enticing smells to lure the crowds who made up the other half of the noise, strolling, talking, looking, laughing, flirting, eating, drinking, and shopping.

  Once chasing. “Thief!” someone cried and the shout rose around me, spreading from voice to voice.

  Moments later the hapless pickpocket slammed to the stone street, straddled by a pair of brown-tunicked warriors. The hapless thief’s tousled head bumped the stone a yard from my feet. Who would be that stupid, or that desperate, to try thievery right under the view of that intimidating castle, with a million guards in every direction?

  I never saw the culprit’s face. A crowd of guards immediately surrounded him or her, and muscled the miscreant away presumably to some lockup. I’d hastily backed away, looking down as I tried to be unobtrusive, but the guards paid no attention to the surrounding crowd except in a general sense, making sure there was no threat.

  They went in one direction and I in the other, thinking along a new path. What kind of courts did they have, and jails, and sentences? I’d asked my mother a few questions over the years, but Canardan’s versions of social government might be different from the Zhavalieshins’.

  It was my growling stomach that shifted my attention from the general scene to the specific. I found the moneychangers directly below the gates to the castle, which ought to dissuade all but the most foolhardy and reckless of thieves. There were several to choose from. I drifted along until I spotted a moneychanger where not only coinage was being changed, but valuables of various sorts, including gemstones.

  For the first time in all those years, I pulled out one of the more modest gems from the box and brought it to that tent, where a short, thin, stylishly dressed young woman about my age seemed to be handling stones of all kinds. I laid it down, my fake s
tory all ready.

  She squinted briefly at it. “Colendi cut, what we call the deep-water sapphire.” She named a price.

  I’d already noticed that though bargaining took place in many of the market stalls, here there appeared to be a standard price for pretty much everything. Not wanting to call attention to myself in any way, I agreed. She counted out three twelve-sided gold coins, fashioned after Sartoran coins, and eleven silver six-siders, then a handful of thin hammered coppers.

  I stuffed them all into the bag the ship’s boy had given me, and returned to my shopping. Now to see what this money was actually worth.

  The sun was directly overhead when I finished buying a good pair of shoes, cotton-lined greenweave that the cobbler adjusted to fit my feet exactly. I traded in the worn old mocs, which would be recycled.

  Hunger forced me up the street toward the Gold Inn, a large building whose merrymakers’ noise eddied out through open windows and doors. The first smells that reached my nose were baking cornbread and braised onions.

  My stomach growled as I passed inside a cavernous space obviously decorated by sailors—deck prisms in the walls, the heavy, pointed glass gleaming with refracted colors, which banished indoor gloom. Old helm wheels high up, bulkheads curving between the alcoves, booths divided off by fences made of worn oars. The chairs round the smaller tables were all cut from barrels and cushioned with old sailcloth.

  The heavy, heady scent of fresh-brewed beer underlay the scent of brick-oven baked chicken pies, and bread, and some kind of pepper-and-garlic savory fish chowder. I sat at a long plank table on which cadets and sailors had carved initials and witty sayings in at least three alphabets. A party of weavers took up most of the table, well into a celebration for newlyweds, judging from the toasts.

  The waiter, a kid of about ten, tapped me on the arm. “What’ll I bring you?”

  “Cornbread with honey-butter, dark ale, and fish chowder,” I said.

  He dashed away, as one of the weavers made an obscure joke about damask and brocade, and everyone laughed.

  Two toasts later the boy returned with a tray on which the cornbread steamed, fresh from the oven. The weavers began singing a plaintive song in Sartoran triplets about a wandering silk-weaver seeking the source of “rainbow colors true.”

  A sip of a spicy, almost raisin-flavored ale, a bite of sweet cornbread, and I was lifting my spoon to try the chowder when a brief glimpse of a familiar face in the crowd caused me to pause, spoon in the air.

  Elva? No, couldn’t be—

  She vanished behind a crowd of sailors who suddenly decided to dance a heel-toe stomper right there in the middle of the floor. I dropped my spoon when Elva reappeared, braids flying, brown eyes stark in a face so pale I thought she was going to be sick.

  “There you are.” She clutched my shoulder. “Get out. Get out.”

  “What?” I looked down at my food. “What’s wrong with the—”

  She pulled my wrist, sending my spoon flying. “You’ve got to run. Now.”

  “Why?” I snapped, getting up to retrieve the spoon.

  “Because I followed Owl. I had my suspicions.” She made a terrible face. “He met up with him at the stable—” She waved a hand toward the far side of the brewery.

  “Him? Zathdar?” I stared at the brewery, but just saw barrels of ale.

  “Zathdar!” Elva repeated scornfully. “Oh, you’re in for a storm, right enough, if you don’t move.” She dropped onto the bench next to me and muttered into my ear, “It was a stable, at the other end of town. Up behind the old castle and the warehouses. I saw him. They didn’t see me.”

  “Saw who? Owl or Zathdar?”

  “Both. But he—he—he ditched the bandana. And the horsehair wig. He’s got white hair—the brown velvet with the king’s cup. Crown over it. Diamond—” She touched her ear where Zathdar had worn his pirate-battle earring.

  Heat flooded through me, followed by a sudden and dreadful chill.

  “Don’t you see?” Elva looked wildly around, and while the unheeding weavers sang of love and loss, she growled, “He’s Prince Jehan Merindar.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “I thought so, too. But I saw him. He went straight to the castle. The guards on the walls gave him the royal salute, clear as anything.”

  Whoosh! My first reaction was the self-righteous, fire-hot anger of betrayal, followed by the sickening, almost lip-numbing humiliation that comes of realizing one’s been taken for a fool.

  I grabbed my basket and followed her between the tables, the singing weavers’ plaintive melody blending into the heedless roar of voices behind me.

  Out in the street, glare and the rising dust of early afternoon nearly blinded us. I blinked, breathing hard as silhouettes resolved into people, horses, carts, dogs, even a family of geese squawking and flapping. Children danced in a ring to the flitting summer melody played upon a pipe. In front of the last booth before the open road, several women teased a handsome fellow in a brown tunic who seemed to be trying to buy an embroidered scarf.

  All oblivious, most of them happy, and very much in the way as I scanned and scanned, resisting Elva’s tugs. “This way,” she urged.

  I faced her earnest, anxious brown eyes and knew that Devli waited somewhere, a transfer token in hand. “Thank you for the rescue. But I think I’ll take off on my own.”

  Her face reddened. “It’s Devli. Isn’t it? You don’t trust him.”

  “I’m sorry, Elva, but I just don’t trust those giving him orders,” I murmured as a cart full of melons rolled toward us, shoved by a brawny fellow not watching where he was going.

  She moved to one side. I ducked to the other side of it so I wouldn’t have to see her reaction, and dove into a pack of sailors, several of them wearing battered floppy hats much like mine. I still felt outlined in neon, though so far the few guys in brown tunics around were not searching, merely sauntering.

  All right, Sasha, you got what you wanted. You’re alone. Pick a direction.

  My pack of sailors headed toward the brewery. I stayed with them as far as the door. That sense of being watched intensified, so I slunk round the back of the Gold’s stables and peered out, scanning with care.

  The marketplace lay to my left, a long street of tent booths below the high palisade of sheer rock on which the garrison and academy bulked. The market street crested to the right, below the bluffs on which the academy barracks ended in the furthermost tower.

  The road on the other side of the crest stretched in a lazy arc, paralleling the rocky shore against which long breakers creamed and crashed. Lines of wagons inched their way in a string that curved through mellow grassy fields to the horizon, the only tree in sight a single clump of willow growing beside a stream winding toward the shore.

  No cover whatsoever, but at least that road lay outside of Ellir and its bazillion warriors.

  I slipped away from my crummy hiding place and headed straight for that high point, beyond which freedom beckoned.

  But right before I reached the top of the market street, not five hundred yards from the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the city, my shoulder blades itched. My danger sense had gone into the red zone, urging me to turn and fight.

  I just knew I would hate what I saw. But I had to look.

  Past the dancing children. Past the strolling flirts, the bargaining marketers with their baskets, past unheeding cadets and warriors obviously on leave, past the dogs and geese and sailors. I stared straight into a pair of familiar blue eyes, now framed by drifting white hair.

  Too late.

  Too late, but I turned on my toes and sprinted for freedom, despite the faster footsteps behind me—much faster.

  When I reached the top of the road, the footsteps had almost caught up so I plunged into a crowd of prentices in one last attempt to shake my pursuer, and risked a glance back.

  The stinker was maybe ten steps away. He hadn’t yelled, and though some of the people he pushed pas
t turned to stare, and one or two began to call out in protest, stared, then quickly backed away, no one interfered.

  The oblivious prentices didn’t part for me. They shoved past and stampeded toward the brewery, leaving me alone to face the enemy.

  Prince Jehan caught up in an easy step, and stopped an arm’s length from me.

  So for a long, measureless moment we stood there facing one another at the top of Market Street, the last of the prentices flowing around us with exasperated looks and a wry comment or two that neither of us paid the least attention to.

  All the things I could say chased through my mind. You liar! Go ahead and strike me down, see if I care! And perhaps most useless of all, I hate you! But I said nothing for a breathless, anguished eternity, as the market crowd walked, strolled, sauntered, pushed, shoved, talked, sang, sighed past us.

  Prince Hurricane stood there, waiting for me to speak.

  And so I said, “You must really love making everyone look like a fool.”

  He flushed as if I’d slapped him. But then flicked his head, as if repudiating my words, and retorted, “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, so you’re not a liar and a poser?”

  “I never lied—”

  “No, Prince My-family-name-is-Jervaes?”

  “But it is.” He spread his hands and flushed again when I took a quick step back. “My mother’s name.”

  “Oh.” Well, that was a nasty little oopsie, but I plowed right past. “So you managed to tell one bit of truth. What did it cost you?” Take that!

  “Listen. Just listen.” He half raised a hand in a gesture of appeal, but when I stepped back, he dropped it to his side. His side, at which he wore a sword. And a knife through his sash. Neither of them touched, much less brandished. Nor had he whistled up his brown-coated minions. There were certainly plenty of them about.

  But I couldn’t bear another terrible, sickening sense of betrayal, and so, without examining the motivation behind that, I said, “No.”