Rap had wondered how many of them would ever return, and if they were wondering the same.
He had wondered how it felt to be a sword in the imperor’s army. Did it make a man feel important? Or very unimportant? Strong or vulnerable? Proud? Ashamed? Scared? He recalled what the outlaws in Dragon Reach had told him about freedom.
One thing driving did do was give a man time to straighten up his thoughts and lay them out in rows. The Imperial posts were set about eight leagues apart, usually in little villages or in market towns. At those he would turn in one team and hire another. The ostlers would try to browbeat him, of course, always. Anxious to hire out postilions to ride those horses, they would insist that even a faun couldn’t handle six from the box. They would refuse to believe him when he said that a shoe was ill-fitting or a fetlock sore before he had even lifted the animal’s foot. And so Rap would apply a hint of mastery, and get whatever he wanted, and despise himself for doing it.
But he was circumspect, for there was magic everywhere. Ancient ruins and tiny cottages still held faint vestiges of occult shielding. Here and there he saw things or people blurred by a curious shimmer that suggested they were not what they seemed. In the towns he often sensed the ripples of the occult at work; at night in the great houses he would feel Sagorn prowling the library or Andor recruiting a winsome servant maid to cheer his bed. He knew when Thinal took up a collection for a good cause.
Before the expedition had even departed from Arakkaran, the princess had produced some brooches and strings of fine pearls, requesting that Sir Andor sell them to finance the journey. Perhaps she had a rough idea of what first-class passage cost on a fine ship, but she obviously did not grasp the expense involved in bowling along the Great Way in style at twenty-five leagues a day.
And yet perhaps she suspected, for she always became uneasy and fretful when Andor wandered off to visit the markets in the cities. Pawnshops were his objective, of course, although they were never mentioned. The ongoing finances were being unwittingly contributed by the princess’s hosts, her friends, and Thinal was her agent. Rap wondered if Inos would have found it funny, as Gathmor did. He didn’t.
But if the princess did guess that she was thieving, she was willing to do even that for Inos.
And here, at last, was the turnoff. He did not doubt, for a mage needed few directions. He slowed the coach to a stop before the awe-inspiring gateway. A man came running from the gatehouse, tugging his forelock for the gentry. He swung the flaps, and Rap sent the team cantering up a long driveway, graveled and wide. Rich parkland stretched out on either hand, and turrets showed over the trees ahead.
Now Andor had replaced Sagorn, and the princess was peering into a hand mirror. They’d done twenty-two leagues today, less than usual. Tomorrow they would try to do better. And tomorrow, as every day, Rap’s premonition would lie even more heavily on him. It scratched at him constantly, telling him to turn back, turn back!
Eventually the journey would end. Of course he might go mad first, but otherwise the spires of Hub and the waters of Cenmere must inevitably crawl up out of the smoky distance. Then he would discover what awful destiny awaited him there behind the fearful, agonizing white glare of his foresight. The magic casement had given him three prophecies, and two were left to come—and yet, somehow, he thought that the white glare took precedence over those. He dared not pry at the future now, to find out.
In Hub, perhaps, would be Inos. The princess was confident of that, or tried to be so. Rap hoped so. He would like to see Inos again, to cure her scars and to assure her that he bore no ill will. What would she care, though, for a stableboy’s forgiveness? Who was he to forgive?
There was nothing to forgive.
He spoke a thought to the horses, and the great coach rolled gently to a halt before wide steps and a massive archway surrounded by centuries of ivy.
Even before Gathmor had dropped to the ground, a great door flew open. As happened on so many evenings, a middle-aged lady in a fine gown came racing down the stairs with her arms held wide, shouting “Kade! Aunt Kade!”
11
The nearside front wheel caught in a pothole; the carriage lurched and a spring broke with an audible crack. Horses shrilled in fright, and the rig bounced to a shuddering, canted halt.
For a few moments Odlepare sat and listened to the roar of rain on the roof. Beyond the windows, all was black—or as near to it as no matter.
He could hardly believe that there would be only one pothole on a major highway within a hundred leagues of Hub, but even if there was, the king’s coach would have found it as surely as swallows return in the spring.
“What’s happened?” Angilki demanded, the sulky, pouting expression of his doughy face just visible in the last, faint gleam of evening.
“A broken spring, I fear, your Majesty.”
“That’s very inconvenient, Odlepare.” At least he could remember his secretary’s name now. He had tended to forget it during the first few weeks.
“Yes it is, Sire. We shall not make Hub tonight.” His Serene Majesty, King Angilki the First of Krasnegar, Duke of Kinvale, et cetera, had noticed a milestone that morning and had been convinced by it that he was within one day’s drive of the capital. Thereafter nothing would satisfy him but to prove it. Who was Odlepare to point out that Hub must be considerably larger than Kinford, or even Shaldokan? Reaching the extreme outskirts at this hour would not solve anything.
“Extremely inconvenient! You are not suggesting that I spend the night in this diabolical contrivance, are you?”
“’I am sure there will be an inn somewhere nearby, Sire.”
With the fat man’s luck, though, it would be considerably less comfortable than the coach would be. But of course the fool had insisted on pushing on after sunset. He could always be trusted to push his luck, King Angilki, and he invariably had the worst luck imaginable. Angilki the Unruly. King Angilki the Last. The rain had not stopped since they left Kinvale, and yet every night someone had remarked with regret on the glorious weather that had just ended. Angilki brought winter with him. Very likely the sun broke out as soon as he departed.
Someone was going to have to go out in that downpour . . .
It had been the fat capon’s fearsome mother who had conscripted Odlepare for this Evil-begotten journey, summoning him to her sickbed.
“Without proper guidance,” she had said, “my son is more likely to arrive in Krasnegar than at Hub. I have decided you are the only one of his regular confidants who can tell east from north.”
Odlepare had resigned on the spot.
She had bought him back with a promise of a bonus equal to ten years’ wages. He had counted every minute of those ten years going by. Accidents and temper tantrums, absent-mindedness and endlessly repeated dissertations on the next round of renovations planned for Kinvale . . . He had aged twenty years in the last six weeks. Had it only been six weeks?
God of Greed, forgive me!
A rap on the door. Odlepare pulled down a window and recoiled as icy rain slashed in at him. “Yes?” The postilion, sodden: “We have a broken spring, Master Odlepare.”
“His Majesty surmised as much. Have you by chance observed any inns or hostels recently? Even a private establishment of quality?”
Any of the minor gentry would be honored to provide hospitality for a benighted king—at least until they discovered just how benighted a king could be. The postilion could not possibly be wetter had he spent ten years underwater, so Odlepare need not offer to go exploring himself.
“There is an inn just across the road, master.” Odlepare shuddered. This was going to be even worse than he had expected.
“It’s called the Soldier’s Head,” the postilion added hopefully.
“And I expect it will smell like it. You had better send someone across to count the bedbugs.”
His humor brought him a black glare, warning him that he had spent the day inside the coach, while the postilion and coachman and footmen had not.
“There is an inn across the road, your Majesty,” Odlepare reported.
“Excellent. Where is the umbrella?”
“I recommend a cloak also, your Majesty . . .” It would take more than an umbrella to keep a shape like his dry in weather like this.
Using all of the interior of the coach, King Angilki the Unwieldy struggled into his voluminous sable overcoat. Odlepare found the umbrella, the door was opened, and the two footmen helped their master to clamber down, while Odlepare attempted to hold the umbrella overhead. It leaped in his hand and then turned itself inside out. By that time he was already soaked and it was too late to hunt up his own cloak. He climbed down, unaided.