The magus intended to go down the edge of the Sea of Olives until we reached the nearest town to buy food for ourselves as well as some for the horses. “We’ll take a more direct route home. Now that we have the Gift, the quicker we go the better,” he said.
The horses must have been as happy as I was about the prospect of fresh food. The grazing was poor among the dried-up grasses. We packed up and rode back into the olives until we came to the overgrown maintenance road that turned toward the distant Seperchia. We came to a wide, shallow stream. As our horses stepped into the water, a group of mounted men swung out from behind a patch of dry oak and brambles where they had been hidden. I saw that they had swords in their hands. I didn’t wait to learn anything else.
The magus and I were nearly knee to knee, ahead of the others. I dragged the reins of my horse over to one side, and it stumbled into the horse beside it. I brushed shoulders with the magus for just a moment and then turned the horse on its haunches and drove it with my heels back toward the trees on the streambank. As a branch passed overhead, I grabbed it, using my free hand, and pulled myself up into the tree.
By the time I was secure on a higher branch and could look down, Pol and the magus had their swords out and one of the attacking horsemen was already lying in the water. I watched as the magus proved himself to be a swordsman as dangerous as Pol. Between them they held the three remaining attackers. Sophos was behind them, twisted in the saddle, his back to the fight, trying to get his own sword out of his saddlebag. Ambiades was doing the same, but he’d had the sense to first run his horse onto the bank, away from danger. Sophos, looking in the wrong direction, didn’t know how close he was to being spitted.
I called his name, but he couldn’t hear me over the other shouting, which in retrospect I realized was mostly the magus and Pol yelling at him to forget the sword and hide in the trees. Pol was being drawn out by one attacker, leaving the magus to fight two men and Sophos still unaware of his danger. His attention was on his sword belt, which was caught in the buckle of his saddlebag.
Swearing, I stood up on my tree branch and rushed along its length. I threw myself facedown, lying mostly on the main limb and partly on the outer branches, and reached through the prickling leaves. All that I could reach of Sophos was his hair. I grabbed that and pulled him off-balance just as a horseman slipped between the magus and Pol.
Sophos fell face first off his horse, almost taking me with him. He landed in the mud with his horse between him and the fighting, and if he’d stayed down, he would have been safe, but he struggled to his feet, sword in hand, as the cursed horse moved away. He was left standing with his mouth open, looking at the lifted sword of his opponent.
I closed my eyes, but at the last possible moment he must have shifted his weight and parried the blow aimed at his head. His return to guard position was slow, and I don’t know what he would have done next, being too far off-balance to recover, but he didn’t need to do anything. As I opened my eyes, Pol slid his sword into the man’s rib cage, nearly to the hilt. The man grunted and hung for a moment on the sword before he slid off into the water. There was another splash on the far side of the stream as the magus finished his opponent as well. I pushed myself upright on my branch and moved back toward the trunk of the tree.
There were four riderless horses, stamping around in the muddy stream. When their feet stopped crunching on the gravel and they stood still, looking confused, the magus was able to ask Sophos if he was hurt.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Good. Ambiades?”
“I’m fine.”
“Pol?”
“Nothing serious.” He was mopping up blood from a slice just below his elbow.
“And Gen? I see you found a safe place to wait while we were busy.”
I opened my mouth to point out that I didn’t have a sword to defend myself with, not that I wouldn’t have climbed the tree anyway, but instead I stared at him with my mouth hanging open like a horrified gargoyle. I pointed to his shirt. He lifted one hand, instinctively checking for a wound, before he realized. Hamiathes’s Gift was gone. He looked down at the neatly sliced leather thong lying over one shoulder. He ran his hand over it in disbelief, then felt frantically in the folds of his clothes. He checked the ridges in his saddle and saddlebags before he jumped off his horse and waded into the stream, cursing. Pol and Sophos followed after him, but there was too much mud in the water by then. Nothing could be seen.
“What happened? What happened?” cried Ambiades from the bank. He was the only one of us still mounted.
“The stone, the cursed stone,” said the magus. “I’ve lost it in the fighting. Damn it, who the hell are these people?” he said, shifting a body off a gravel bank in midstream.
“Are they all dead?” Ambiades asked.
“Yes, they’re all dead. Get over here and help me with this one.”
They dragged the bodies out of the water, while I sat forgotten in the tree. I very carefully rebraided my hair and watched. When the dead men were laid out on the bank, the magus remembered me.
“Come down and help look,” he told me. He was distracted and was asking more than ordering.
Reluctantly I slipped down from the tree and stepped around the bodies. They were soldiers of the queen of Attolia. One of them was a lieutenant. He was young, and looked younger with wet hair stuck to his forehead and water beading on his face. He’d led the other horsemen as they rode down on us, led them no doubt onto the end of Pol’s sword.
There was one part of his uniform that hadn’t gotten wet, with either blood or water, and its shape—a coleus leaf—caught my eye. After a moment I stooped to scoop a little water from the stream and dribbled it back and forth across the dry spot on his tunic. I soaked the image until it melted into the wetness of the rest of his uniform. The water was cold. It splashed on his neck and pooled in the hollow of his collarbone, but he didn’t mind, and he didn’t deserve to be marked with the coward leaf as he journeyed to the underworld.
When the mark was gone, I straightened up and noticed Pol watching me. I shrugged and wiped my hands on my pants, but my pants were muddy and my hands only ended up dirty as well as wet.
We left the bodies lying on the bank while the magus organized a search for Hamiathes’s Gift. Once the mud had settled, he had us stand in a line across the stream well below where the fighting had been. Staying in line, we worked our way upstream until he was sure we had passed the place where the stone would have dropped. There wasn’t enough current to have moved the stone far, but the stone was no different from any of the thousands of pebbles there on the streambed. Only the magus and I had held the stone. Ambiades had never even seen it. We’d stayed for almost a quarter of an hour, all of us staring at the gravel under our feet when Pol finally spoke up.
“It’s gone, magus.”
The rest of us continued to stare at the streambed.
“Magus.” Pol spoke more firmly, and this time we picked up our heads. Ambiades, Sophos, and I looked back and forth between the magus and his soldier.
“Yes,” the magus finally agreed, after a long moment of silence. “We’ve got to go. Ambiades, get the horses and bring them to this side of the stream. Sophos, see if any of those other horses are still nearby. We should have tied them up. If they have saddlebags, check to see if there’s any food in them.”
Three of the horses were standing with ours—misery loves company—but the fourth one was gone, presumably back to its camp.
“There’s no time to catch it now,” said the magus. “We’ll have to go as quickly as we can.” He pulled himself onto his horse and looked one last time at the stream. “I don’t believe this,” he said.
I watched him until even I felt uncomfortable and looked away, as Pol, Sophos, and Ambiades had done. He’d had the stone for a day and lost it; I should have been pleased. Five days earlier I would have been delighted to imagine what it would be like for him in the court of Sounis when he went back to his kin
g and told him the gamble had failed, but I wasn’t enjoying myself. I told myself it was because I was wet from wading in the stream. Or it may have been that I was afraid of the people who would be coming soon to find out what happened to the lieutenant and his three men.
“All right,” said the magus at last. “All right. Let’s go.” But he still didn’t turn his horse away from the stream. In the distance we heard a shout. The stray horse had been found, but the magus sat, unwilling to give up. He looked at the streambank and the trees around him, as if for landmarks, as if there were some hope that he might return to the place to search again. My nerves communicated themselves to my horse, and it sidled and blew underneath me.
Finally the magus dragged himself away. We turned our horses down the track and kicked them into a gallop. The magus rode beside me, still looking stunned. I don’t know what the others were thinking; I was concentrating on my riding. This was no time to drop behind or, worse, fall off the horse.
When we’d covered some distance, we turned into the trees and rode more slowly for almost an hour until we came to another open path.
“They’ll track us,” Sophos said, looking over his shoulder.
“We’ll have to keep ahead of them,” said the magus. I swiveled my head around to look at him. He sounded almost cheerful. He looked cheerful.
“A little danger adds spice to life, Gen,” he told me.
I was stunned at his recovery, and it must have shown. “I’ve had some time to think, Gen. The stone itself isn’t important. Now that we have seen it for ourselves, as well as having the description, and we know that no one else can produce the original, we can make a copy.”
How someone could have held that stone in his hand and then say it wasn’t important, I didn’t know. I almost expected lightning to strike him dead.
“What about the fact that the stone is supposed to carry its own authority?” I snapped. “You’re supposed to look at it and know that it is Hamiathes’s Gift.” We’d all felt that, I’d thought, by the banks of the Aracthus.
But the magus had an answer. “That will be dismissed as superstition,” he said confidently. “We’ll manage just fine.”
All of my work could be thrown away. He would manage. I gritted my teeth.
The magus turned to speak to Pol. “We’ll follow this track into the cultivated groves, then cut through those toward the main road. If they haven’t seen us, we might hide in traffic; if they have, we’ll swing back under the olives and use the maintenance paths as much as possible.”
“What about food?” I asked. My tone nettled him.
“I guess we’ll try to get something in Pirrhea tonight,” he said vaguely.
“Tonight?” My exasperation pierced his bubble of false cheer.
“I’m sorry,” he snapped, “but I can’t pull food out of the sky for you.”
“You’re not going to pull it out of Pirrhea either,” I said. “What do you plan to do, knock on a door and say, ‘Excuse us, there are four of the Queen’s Guard dead, soldiers are searching every road for us, and I’d like to buy a few loaves of bread and some dried beef, please’?”
“And what do you suggest, O oracle of the gutter?”
“I suggest that you should have brought food for five people with this miserable traveling circus of yours. Alternatively, you should have left Useless the Elder and his younger brother at home!”
“He’s not my brother.” Ambiades was offended.
“That,” I snarled at him, “was a figure of speech. Now shut up.” He jumped in the saddle as if he’d been slapped. I turned back to the magus. “How do you propose to get food?”
But the magus had had a moment to think and had arrived at the obvious solution. “You,” he said, “are going to steal it.”
I threw up my hands.
Pirrhea was an old town. Like many, it had outgrown its walls and was surrounded by fields and farmhouses. I walked through kitchen gardens, harvesting whatever my hands found in the dark. I dropped what I gathered into a bag I had taken from a shed at the first house I passed. Once I got too close to a goat pen and the occupants bleated at me. When no one came out to check on them, I went in and collected two cans of goat milk from the settling shelf. I was thirsty as well as hungry and drank one of the cans while I considered burgling someone’s kitchen for leftover bread. I decided against it. Stale bread wasn’t worth the risk, but I did slip into the henhouse of the largest home I passed, to wring the necks of three chickens. I dropped them into a second bag and left town.
The magus and the others were waiting for me in the trees on the far side of an onion field. I hadn’t been keen to risk my neck for them. There had been recriminations of uselessness as we rode. Ambiades hadn’t liked it when I’d suggested he should have been left home. I pointed out that he’d been no help at the ford. He pointed out that I had climbed a tree. I pointed out that I had no sword. He offered to give me his, point first.
When I’d left the others in a rare grove of almond trees outside town, the magus had told me he’d give me an hour, and if I wasn’t back by then, he’d find the town center and shout “Thief!” at the top of his lungs.
In the dark he hadn’t been able to see the contempt on my face, but he could hear it in my voice. “Be sure to shout ‘Murderers! Murderers!’ too,” I said.
His answer had followed me as I walked away. “I’ll make sure that we all go to the block together.”
Everyone looked sadly at the chickens when the magus said there was no time to cook them. Pol tied them to his saddle, and we headed off into the dark, eating handfuls of raw vegetables and crunching grit in our teeth.
“There’s a livery stable on the main road at Kahlia,” the magus said. “We can steal a change of horses there.”
I choked on the spinach I was chewing. “We can what?”
“It’s another two hours’ ride if we push the horses.” He went on, ignoring my interruption. “We can find a place to camp by the road. There are enough travelers that we won’t be noticed. We’ll get a couple of hours’ sleep. Pol, you could put the chickens into the fire, and then we’ll get the horses and ride on. We should lose them when we cut away from the main road, away from the Seperchia’s pass to Eddis. They won’t expect that.”
“You are going to use the same trail back home? Why not just ride for the main pass?” Ambiades asked. “It’s closer, isn’t it? And once we’re in Eddis, we’re on neutral ground.”
“Once we get to Kahlia we’d be closer to the main pass,” the magus agreed. “But they’ll have all the roads blocked, and I’m not sure we could sneak through. The land around the pass is mostly open fields. They won’t expect us to cut back inland, and we should slip by them.”
“I think the main pass would be better,” Ambiades said hesitantly, giving the magus one last chance.
“It’s not your job to think,” the magus told him.
Ambiades tossed his head, and I thought he might say something, but he didn’t.
“About those horses…” I said.
“You’ll do your best, Gen,” said the magus, “and if your best isn’t good enough, we’ll all—”
“Go to the block together,” I grumbled. “You said that before.”
No one said anything more until we stopped on the road just outside Kahlia. The magus was as optimistic as ever. Pol seemed to take everything in stride, and Sophos didn’t know enough to be frightened. Only Ambiades was as nervous as a cat too close to a fire. Sophos had forgotten that he was keeping his distance from his idol, and he tried to chat with Ambiades as they unsaddled the horses, but Ambiades didn’t answer.
Pol kindled a fire in a traveler’s fire ring and cut up the chickens to cook. The fire ring was just a circle of stones mortared together. There was one every fifty yards or so on the roads outside large towns. They were built for the merchants who stopped their packtrains outside towns to camp. There were several packtrains camped near us that night, and smaller groups of traveler
s with just one wagon or no wagon at all. It was warm enough that a tent or a blanket roll would do. There were a few guards posted, but they weren’t watching for us.
We all slept, except Pol. The magus woke me before he woke the others and gave me careful directions how to get through town to the livery stable near the opposite gate.
“Bring the horses out there. Pol will be waiting for you. The rest of us will be up the road with the saddles.” He seemed as carefree as Sophos, but he didn’t have Sophos’s excuse.
“Do you have any idea how impossible this is?” I asked him.
He laughed. “I thought you said you could steal anything.” He gave me a shove on the shoulder and started me down the road.
“Things,” I hissed to myself as I walked, “don’t make noise.”
The moon was still up, and there was enough light to see the road in front of me. When I got close to the town walls, I could see by the light of lanterns burning by the gates. They were open. They probably hadn’t been closed for years, but there was a guard in the archway.
He was supposed to be watching for suspicious people—like me. I couldn’t think of a plausible excuse for coming into town at such an hour, so I avoided the problem altogether by circling away from the gate and climbing over the wall out of the guard’s sight. I dropped down into someone’s backyard, then worked my way between buildings until I found a wide street that I hoped was the one the magus had mentioned in his directions.
I hurried through absolutely empty intersections, listening at every corner for the footsteps of the watch, but I met no one. I was on the right street, and I found the livery stable and the inn next to it without trouble. Both were closed for the night of course. Wooden shutters were pulled over the windows of the inn, and the gates to the courtyard were closed. I listened again for the watch, and when I heard nothing, I pushed open one gate after lifting its post off the ground so that it wouldn’t scrape. The post fit into a gap between the flagstones so that the gate wouldn’t swing closed again.