“Thus making this matter none of your affair?” the Princess snapped. “What are you then, a Vordainian spy? Or perhaps a smuggler from over-border? He who will not reveal his face nor speak his name cannot thereafter be troubled if we see him as a walking evil.” She repeated the last as if she quoted some saying. “Can you be bought? My offer will be very high—”
Roane wondered at the calm control of the Princess. Instead of sitting in this odorous box with a chain and collar making her fast, she might have been at ease in her own palace, save that she held her voice to a whisper. And now Roane saw that what she had first thought another smear of grime across the side of the girl’s chin was the darkening of a large bruise. Now and then
Ludorica did hesitate between one word and the next, as if she found speaking somewhat difficult.
“Who are those men below?” Roane had a question of her own. That they had so dared mishandle the heiress to Reveny’s throne meant they were not common criminals. And the more she learned of what lay behind this, the better she could plan what to do. Though she already knew she could not turn her back on Ludorica.
“Since I had to play the swooning female, that they use me with less alertness, I did not see too much of them. They wear foresters’ jerkins, I do not believe honestly. And how I came into their hands—” She shrugged and the chain tightened, the collar jerked, bringing a choking cough from her. “That I do not know. I went peacefully to sleep in my bed in Hitherhow. When I awoke I was lying in a bumping cart on a forest track with the rain pouring like to drown me. Doubtless that restored my wits. Then the storm struck us full, bringing down a tree. The cart took the brunt of that to the fore. I gather that he who drove it had no further interest in the matters of this world. They pulled me out and brought me here.
“I do not think you are a Vordainian,” she said, changing the subject abruptly. “If you are a smuggler, you will be given full pardon, with a good purse added to it. Get me loose of this”— she pulled at the collar again—”and guide me to the post at Yat-ton.” She still stared ahead as if she could see Roane clearly.
When the off-world girl did not answer, the Princess set her lips tightly together for an instant and then added:
“It would seem you also have no reason to wish to be discovered by those below. Let this then be a case of your enemy is my enemy, so a truce between us for this one battle.” Again she appeared to be quoting. “Your speech is strange, you are not of Reveny, and you have not the inflection of Vordain, nor the tongue clicks of Leichstan. Unless you are some mercenary from the north— No matter, get me free and you can rest easy on the gratitude of Reveny for your future, and that is no small thing!”
There was pride in her voice, and once more Roane could forget where they were and that she fronted a prisoner and not one seated on a throne.
After all, what could some aid matter? She had already interfered, by merely being here and letting the Princess know it. If she left now, always supposing that she could climb to freedom by the wall way, the Princess, in anger at being abandoned, might call her captors, or Roane, trapped above in some manner, could be discovered. But if she were able to get the Princess away, she could contrive to lose her in the woods. Let the Princess then believe that she was a smuggler, too deeply involved in some criminal activity to be more than wary.
The Princess seemed to think her a man, perhaps because she had glimpsed, by the lightning flash, Roane’s coverall and cropped hair.
*All right.” Roane gave grudging consent. “But that collar—” She leaned over to train the beamer first on the band around the Princess’s throat, and then along the chain to where it had been fastened about one of the bedposts. There was a lock, but she could see no way of forcing it.
Which left the bedpost or the chain itself. Her hand went to a tool on her belt. To use that again went against all she had been trained and taught. It was odd, one part of her mind observed as she drew that rod out of its loop: the longer she stayed here, the more it seemed right and proper that she do as Ludorica wanted—as if the desire of the Princess awoke a companion response from her.
Roane hunched over, trying not to breathe in the fumes of the debris, held the rod out in the beamer’s small gleam, thumbing the right setting. Then she touched the rod to the chain as far from the Princess as she could reach. There was a flash of light. Roane pushed the cutter back in her belt, gave the chain a quick jerk. It broke. She heard a small sound like a sigh from the Princess.
“You will have to wear the collar yet awhile,” Roane whispered. “I dare not cut that so close lo your neck.”
“That I am free in so much is something to give thanks for. But there are still the men below. If you have a dagger—how do you-”
Ludorica had balled the chain up in one hand so it might make no noise as she moved. She reached the edge of the bed box, swung out to the floor, as Roane was doing on the opposite side. The Princess’s white robe, or once-white robe, billowed around her. One of her braids of hair had come undone and the long locks, tufted with debris from the bed, hung about her shoulders. She clawed out the filthy rags with a small shudder of disgust as Roane joined her.
The off-world girl surveyed the Princess’s clothing doubtfully. The only way out was up that toe-and-finger-hold stair, and surely the Princess could not climb it wearing all those folds of cloth. Bringing her charge (for now Roane accepted the responsibility which followed her never-clearly-faced choice) around to the back of the bed, she flashed the beamer on the holes and explained their hope. But facing it now, she found the future more dubious.
“Lend me your daggerl” Ludorica whispered. “Oh”—she made a sound close to laughter—”I do not mean to fight my way free below. But I cannot climb in this.” She gave an impatient tug to the robe.
“I do not have a dagger—” Roane returned. “No dagger? But how then do you protect yourself?” the Princess asked wonderingly.
What Roane did produce was a belt knife, and the Princess seized upon it eagerly, slashing her full skirt front and back, cutting strips to bind the pieces to her legs in a grotesque copy of Roane’s coverall. Before she returned the knife to its owner she tested its point on the ball of her thumb.
“This is like to a forester’s skinning tool, yet different still,” she commented. “You have not spoken your name—nor shown me your face—”
She caught Roane off guard as her hand shot out, her fingers dosing around the wrist which supported the beamer. The impetus of that attack worked. Before Roane could dodge, the other had focused that light to fully illuminate its owner.
Roane broke the other’s grip, but too late. The Princess had had a good look at her, and being quick-witted as she was, she must have noted a lot. Roane was developing some awe of the Other. A girl who had been dragged from her bed, brought to this place, chained up like a hound, assaulted by Roane herself, yet who managed to keep a level head, ask for aid, argue logically on her own behalf— Such was no common person, on Clio or off. And Roane wondered if under the same circumstances she would have done as well.
“You are not a man!” The beamer turned floorward between them, having done its work. “Yet your manner of dress—that I have not seen before. And your hair—so short. You are indeed strange. Perhaps the legends are true after all. If—if—” For the first time there was a tremor in the Princess’s voice. “If you are one of the Guardians then answer me true—it is my right for I am of the Blood Royal, the next Queen Regnant of Reveny—if you are a Guardian, what has become of the Ice Crown?”
To Roane her plea was a mixture of command and petition, and it meant nothing. But a sound from below did. During their struggle on the bed and their escape from it, the storm had been dying; now they could hear the men moving below.