Trickster's Choice Page 4

  Alanna turned vexed eyes up to him. “I’m getting nothing from the mirror, but there are a hundred reasons for something like that.”

  “Like you being exhausted?” George inquired gently.

  Alanna rolled her eyes. “Don’t start with that again, George.”

  “And why not, when it’s true?” he demanded. “If you won’t speak to the king, perhaps I should.”

  Tired? Aly thought, startled. Alanna the Lioness tired? Impossible.

  She looked at her mother’s face and saw lines she hadn’t noticed before, at the corner of those famed purple eyes, at the corners of the Lioness’s mouth. Aly remembered that her mother was almost forty-three.

  “Field duty is a lot less tiring than serving as Champion during peacetime,” Alanna told him. “And I won’t have you saying anything to anyone.” She sighed. “But it could be the reason I can’t find her when I scry. I was never that good at it to begin with.”

  “If she’s not home by the time you sail, I’ll see to it she visits you in the north, to apologize for worrying you.”

  “I’m not worried worried. Aly can take care of herself. I just—bah.” Alanna leaned back against her husband. “Thank all the gods the war is winding down. Will you write to me when she comes home?”

  “I’ll send her with the letter.” George kissed the top of his wife’s head. “Don’t forget, Alan would have told us if there was anything to worry about. He can always tell if Aly’s in trouble. Remember the time the horse threw her and she broke her head. Alan knew of it before Aly got conscious.”

  Alanna smiled reluctantly. “I’d forgotten that.” She reached for her mirror. “Maybe I should give it one more try.”

  “And tire yourself more? I think not.” George took the mirror from her hand and tucked it into the pocket of his breeches. “Why don’t you go get ready for supper? Maude had them cook all your favorites.”

  “All my favorites? They’ll have to roll me north, I’ll be so fat.” Alanna collapsed her spyglass.

  “Ah, but you’ll puke it all up on the trip, so eat away,” George said in a falsely comforting voice.

  “That’s disgusting,” said his wife drily. She turned and left him alone on the observation deck.

  Only when she was gone did George pull a rolled scrap of paper from his pocket. When he read the message, the lines of his craggy face deepened and his broad mouth went tight. Ghost Aly read over his shoulder. It was a brief message in code from Lord Imrah of Legann: She’s not here.

  George crumpled the paper in his hand and stuffed it into his pocket just as Aly sensed her ghost self fade.

  When Aly woke in the morning, she felt beaten all over—and so she had been, she remembered, by slaves fighting for supper. Her eyes were watering. She swiped at them with her hand and winced as she touched the sensitive bruising that ringed them, the legacy of her broken nose.

  Had she really heard a god in her dream? Why would any god show her visions of home? She hadn’t understood that comment about “letters,” or the one about her absence. She wished she had tried to tell her parents that she was fine and would be home as soon as she could get away. It hadn’t even occurred to her, she’d been so caught up in what her parents said. She did know that she would sail north as soon as she got back, to mend bridges with her mother.

  Get sold, learn my way about, get free, get home, she thought, grunting as she struggled to her feet. That’s simple enough. I’ll make it up to her.

  Please, Goddess, she prayed to her mother’s patron deity, let me get sold to people I can escape from in one piece.

  You asked me about slaves. They mean different things to different countries. There are slaveholders throughout the Eastern Lands, though slaveholding is an uneasy subject from Tortall to Maren, for one reason or another. Slaves are expensive, that’s the thing to remember. You need vast lands to make slavery pay. They’re a sign of wealth in the Copper Isles. Owning slaves there says that the master is as rich as any Carthaki lord. In Scanra, slaves are a sign of your skill in combat. It’s the big farms like those in Maren, and in the Carthaki Empire, that need slaves all the time, to work their huge fields. And there’s little their majesties can do about it. We buy back Tortallans taken captive if they can find them, but pirates strike and flee, selling some of their load here and some of it there. They’re careful. They have to be. If they’re caught, their punishment is painful and fatal.

  —From a letter to Aly when she was twelve,

  from her father

  2

  TRICKSTER

  May 4–6, 462 H.E.

  The house of Duke Mequen Balitang, Rajmuat, Kypriang Island, the Copper Isles

  Dressed in a light cotton tunic and leggings in the Balitang house colors of red trimmed with blue, Aly sat on a bench in the front foyer of the Balitang family’s rambling town house. She was there to answer the door in case anyone came during the night. In a chest across the entryway was the pallet and blanket she would lay out for herself later. At the moment she was wide awake and planning.

  Her hands were as busy as her mind. Deftly she used pliers and wire filched from the house blacksmith to shape a lock pick. It was part of a new set to replace those that had been taken by her pirate captors. She would be whipped if she was caught with pliers or lock picks, but she didn’t intend to be caught. They were the next element in her plan to return home. With them she could open the smith’s locked cupboard where he kept the special saw that would cut the metal ring off a slave’s neck. The saw would break both the ring and its magic, a spell that would choke her if she attempted to leave the city.

  With one ear cocked for the sound of anyone’s approach, Aly reviewed her plans. Once free of the collar, she would disappear into the depths of the city. Already she was armed with a sharp knife she had stolen from the kitchen on her second day in the house. The law forbade all slaves to carry weapons, but Aly didn’t care. She would always prefer the risk of getting caught with a forbidden weapon to the risk of getting caught without one at a moment when she would need it. With a knife and lock picks a girl of her talents could easily find decent clothes and a cloth to cover her stubbly head. Properly dressed, she could make her way through the marketplaces and help herself to enough coin to buy her passage on one of the many ships that sailed out of Rajmuat harbor every day. Her father had trained her well; she meant to prove it to him. Maybe when she returned he would be convinced that she could take care of herself as a field spy.

  Her plan to discourage buyers who wanted a girl for their bedchambers had worked so well it was a little eerie. She had shown the market a sullen, scowling face that added to the impression made by her cuts and bruises. They marked her as a fighter, and trouble. Still, she had expected to get some bids. None had been offered—none at all. Even those who might like to break a troublesome slave had not blinked when they saw her. After two days of no offers, and the puzzled looks of both her fellow slaves and her sellers, Aly’s owners decided to get rid of her. When Ulasim, the head footman to Balitang House, and Chenaol, the cook, purchased an expensive pastry chef, the slave sellers had thrown Aly in for free, to thank them for their custom.

  To Aly’s surprise, Ulasim and Chenaol kept her. It seemed they needed a slave-of-all-work, someone to obey the orders of everyone in the house. She stayed busy, but Mequen and his wife, Duchess Winnamine, believed that a well-fed slave was a harder worker. Their policy of kindness extended to clothes and even to healers. Aly could now breathe through her nose, although it would show the sign of the break all her days. The scar in her eyebrow was also hers for life.

  Aly almost regretted the need to leave this interesting household. Its sheer size had not impressed her, despite the fact that the Balitangs hired or owned over a hundred servants and slaves in this great residence alone, not counting the family men-at-arms. Her adoptive aunts and uncles in the Naxen and Goldenlake households boasted as many servants, and the Tortallan palace had four times that many people to keep it in ord
er. It was the makeup of the Balitang household and the family that intrigued Aly. If she hadn’t known her parents would be worrying, she might have stayed on for a while to see what kind of people the Balitangs were. After years of lessons in the Isles’ history, detailing the thorough job of conquest done by the luarin, or white, ruling class, she had expected to find all luarin in service and all the brown, or raka, folk as slaves. She had also expected that, as a luarin and a slave, she would need to prove over and over her ability to find tender spots on a raka tormentor’s body before he or she decided to leave her alone.

  Instead the pure-raka cook, Chenaol, had taken Aly under her wing and introduced her to a household that contained a majority of part- and full-raka servants and slaves, in addition to pure-luarin slaves like Aly, purchased as they came into the Isles’ markets. As head cook, the wickedly humorous raka woman ran the kitchens with a firm brown hand and a sharp brown eye, supervising luarin, part-raka, and full-raka servants and slaves. She made it clear to all who came through her door that Aly was to be left alone.

  “They gave her away, poor lass,” Chenaol had told the household. “She’s got enough on her plate without you lot tormenting her.” It seemed Chenaol’s word was law, regardless of her ancestry. Aly admired the woman. Chenaol was in her mid-fifties, a tart-tongued woman with sharp eyes. There were a few gray streaks in the coarse black hair she wore in a braid down her plump back. Her skin was the coppery brown shade of a full-blood raka, creased with light wrinkles about the eyes and mouth. Busy as she was, she still found time to show Aly the ropes in the rambling mansion.

  The strangeness of this household didn’t end with Chenaol. Ulasim, the brawny head footman, was also a full-blood raka. Of the Balitang’s chief servants, the housekeeper, the steward, the coachman, and the healer were pure luarin and free, as was Veron, the commander of the men-at-arms. The chief hostler, the elderly Lokeij, was a full-blood raka slave who didn’t seem to notice the collar around his neck, and half the hostlers who served under his eye were free and of mixed parentage. If the raka of the Isles were oppressed by their luarin masters, it was a thin, watery oppression in the Balitang household.

  Already Aly had learned that the duke, the master of this house, had taken one of the raka nobility as his first wife and married her best luarin friend for his second. His choices might not have been worthy of note in another man, but Mequen was a descendant of the luarin ruling house, the Rittevons. Did this mean the luarin attitude was softening toward the enslaved raka, or did it simply mean that Mequen Balitang was far enough from the throne that no one cared whom he married? Sadly, Aly wouldn’t get the chance to find out. Her parents would be fretting. She was going home, even if she had to manage all the arrangements herself.

  Her escape would have been easier if she could just visit one of Da’s Rajmuat spies, but Aly didn’t dare. Spies were not to be trusted. Her identity was a vital secret in this new, hostile world. Tortall’s enemies would pay any sum for her in order to use Aly against her family. They might even suspect that Aly knew something of her father’s work. If that happened, they would squeeze her like a lemon. With those stakes, an agent might give in to the temptation to sell her for a profit. Even a faithful agent’s communications to George might be intercepted. Aly had to get out of this one on her own.

  There was a chance that her family might locate her first. Mother couldn’t find her, if Aly’s dream had been true, and the god had made her believe it was. It had been too vivid, too clear, and too convincing for her to deny it. So Mother couldn’t scry her. Her father or Uncle Numair might track her down. Normally she would have expected Aunt Daine to have animals out to search, but Aunt Daine was in the process of having a child. Even the Wildmage couldn’t attend to things while carrying a baby that changed shape constantly.

  Still, Aly wasn’t going to wait for rescue. She would free herself. If that didn’t convince her father she would be a good spy, nothing would.

  Sudden hammering on the house door made her jump. She hid her tools and went to see who was outside. A big white man and two men-at-arms, all soaked to the skin from the warm, pouring rain, strode into the hall. Aly greeted the first man with the deep bow of a slave to someone who was clearly a luarin noble, her palms together before her chest. His men had brown and reddish brown skins, marking them as warriors from either the lesser raka nobility or the bulk of the regular population of the Isles.

  “I know it’s late and doubtless they’ve retired for the night,” the luarin nobleman said gravely, “but I’m afraid you must rouse the duke and duchess. Tell them Prince Bronau Jimajen has come with news of great import for them. Royal news.”

  Aly took the prince’s sopping cloak and went to rouse Ulasim. The likes of her didn’t visit Duke Mequen and Duchess Winnamine in their personal quarters. When she gave Ulasim Bronau’s message, the big raka went pale. “See the prince to the azure sitting room,” he ordered as he struggled into his tunic. “Show his men to the kitchen to be looked after. Ask Chenaol for refreshments for His Highness. Hurry!”

  Aly spread Bronau’s cloak before the kitchen hearth to dry as she passed on her orders to Chenaol. The cook sniffed. “Remember, you have the right to refuse if he invites you to his bed, girl,” she advised as she set out a tray and a bottle of wine. “His Grace will back you. He lets no one force his slaves. Not that many turn the prince down, though. When he visits the summer residences, he goes through maids like grease, a different one in his bed every night.”

  Aly nodded and ran to show Bronau to the sitting room. He took a chair with a sigh as Aly hurriedly lit candles, then the braziers that gave these city homes their warmth. As she worked, she reviewed what she knew of this man from the reports. Bronau was not of King Oron’s immediate family, but he was the brother-in-law of Princess Imajane, the king’s sole daughter. His older brother, Rubinyan, had married the princess. Everyone who knew him said that Bronau was a good man in a fight, a commander who had the respect of his men and the affection of the king and his family.

  Aly glanced at him as she got the braziers going. He looked taller than he actually was, being only three inches taller than Aly. He had a warrior’s build, with broad shoulders and heavily muscled thighs, fierce gray eyes, and winged brows over a nose that had been broken once. He wore his reddish brown hair in waves to his shoulders but kept his beard closely trimmed. His big hands carried an assortment of weapon scars. The main flaw in his comeliness lay in the mouth framed by his beard. His lips were thin almost to the point of invisibility.

  Like most luarin nobles, he wore the fashions of the Eastern Lands, remade for a jungle city: elegant blue silk hose and a blue linen tunic over a semi-sheer shirt of white lawn. The tunic was embroidered in the raka style along the collar and hems in a silver design of coiling dragons. He was dressed for an elegant spring party. His blue leather shoes were not meant for walking or riding in the rain, and he wore jeweled rings on every finger, a gold earring with a diamond bauble in one ear, and several gold chains on his chest.

  He caught Aly’s eye and smiled, his face lighting with humor and tremendous charm. “I know. I’m scarcely attired for the weather.”

  Aly gave him a sidelong glance, that of a woman who likes what she sees. He probably saw that look all the time and surely expected it. He smirked at her.

  “It’s not for me to say, my lord prince,” Aly murmured. The relationship between Tortall and the Isles had always been unsteady. She would get a measure of this man now so that she could add to her father’s notes about him when she returned. Their people seldom got the chance to talk to one of the most powerful men in the Copper Isles.

  Bronau’s eyebrows came together with an almost audible snap. “Come here, girl,” he said, beckoning.

  Aly obeyed. There was little danger that he might try anything improper. Under slave etiquette, another man’s slaves were to be left alone, unless the master or the slave involved indicated otherwise.

  The prince gripped Aly�
�s chin with his hand and inspected her face. “Not a drop of raka blood in you, is there?” he asked, curious.

  “No, my lord prince,” murmured Aly, keeping her eyes down.

  Bronau released her. “I don’t like the precedent, keeping luarin slaves. It gives the raka ideas. See here—if these raka dogs bother you, don’t hesitate to tell Duke Mequen,” he told Aly sternly. “He looks out for the slave women, and you can’t trust the raka to behave themselves unless they know there’s a whip close to hand.”

  “My lord prince is too kind,” Aly said, bowing once again. Bronau obviously didn’t know that Chenaol, who could juggle razor-sharp cleavers with ease, had discouraged most problems of that sort. “If you will excuse me, I will bring some refreshment to you,” she murmured.

  Bronau nodded and settled into his chair, watching the embers in the nearest brazier. Aly fetched the pitcher of wine and the tray of fruit, cakes, and cheese the cook had put together to the sitting room. As she set the tray where Bronau could reach it, then poured him a glass of wine, she made sure that nothing in her manner told him that she was interested in giving him more than food and drink. It wouldn’t take more than the right look and the right smile with this man. She would be in his lap with his hand under her tunic before she could sneeze. Chenaol was right: Bronau had a flirt’s air. When Aly got home, she’d suggest to Da that they try one of their female agents with him. Bronau might tell far more than was prudent to a pretty, listening ear.

  Once he was served, she left him. She fetched a mop and set to work cleaning up the water the guests had tracked onto the marble floor of the hall. She was nearly finished when Ulasim raced down the steps from the family quarters. He slowed when he approached the azure sitting room, straightened his tunic, then went in to the prince. Both men emerged a moment later, to climb upstairs.

  Aly watched them go. She’d give much to know what Bronau told the Balitangs. He’d said “royal business”—was that code for problems with the king? It could be. Oron was insane. Most of Rittevon House was these days. Aly’s own mother had been forced to kill a Rittevon princess years before, when that lady started to kill people with an axe. The present Isles king was her uncle, a fearful and unstable man who turned on favored courtiers overnight.