“Once before, I employed a Free Amazon on a mission no man would undertake. It was a scandal, at the time.” She looked at Lorill with a mischievous small smile, as if, Magda thought, she were evoking a shared memory. “So it will evoke no great scandal-or if it does, no more scandal than I can bear-when it is known that I have sent a Free Amazon to Sain Scarp to negotiate in my place for my son’s release. And if Rumal di Scarp should chance to hear it rumored that my son Kyril is safe at Ardais, then he will only think that he has captured instead some kinsman or fosterling of our house, whom we are redeeming out of kindness or a bad conscience; and he will sneer at us for being so gullible, but he will take the ransom anyway and be glad to get it.
“I think I know enough of the Free Amazons to make it possible for you to pass as one, unchallenged. But there may be dangers by the way, child; can you defend yourself?”
Magda said, “Everyone in Intelligence-man and woman alike-is trained in unarmed combat and knife fighting.”
Rohana nodded. “I had heard about this,” she said, and Magda wished she knew how this information had come to Darkovan ears. Probably the same way we learn things about them!
“Go back, now,” Rohana said. “Arrange for the journey, and for the ransom, and come to me at dawn tomorrow morning. I will see that you have the proper clothing and necessities, and that you know how to carry yourself as a Free Amazon.”
Montray burst out, “Are you really going to do this harebrained thing, Magda? Free Amazons! Aren’t they lady soldiers?”
Rohana laughed. “It is easy to see you know nothing about them,” she said. “Indeed, it is comforting to think there is something you Terrans have not managed to discover about us!” Magda had to grin ruefully at that. “Yes, many of them are mercenary soldiers; others are trackers, hunters, horse breakers, blacksmiths; midwives, dairy-women, confectioners, bakers, ballad-singers and cheese-sellers! They work at any honest trade; for one to serve as a messenger and negotiate in a family feud is completely respectable, as such things go.”
“I don’t give a damn whether it’s respectable or not,” Magda told Montray, and Rohana smiled approvingly.
“Good,” she said. “Then it is settled.” She gave Magda her hand, with a kindly smile. “It is a pity, but you will have to cut that lovely hair,” she said.
Chapter EIGHT
Magda woke in the gray dawn, hearing the thin patter of sleet on the roof of the travel-shelter. It was her seventh night on the road, and until now the weather had been fine.
She had till midwinter-night. With anything like reasonable weather, she had ample time. But could anyone expect reasonable weather in the Hellers, at this season?
From the far end of the shelter she could hear the soft stamping and the rustling breaths of her saddle horse and the pack animal, an antlered beast from the Kilghard Hills, better suited to the mountain weather than any horse. She wondered what time it was; it was still too dark to see.
It did not occur to her to regret-or even to think about-her chronometer. Like all Terrans allowed to work undercover on any planet anywhere in the Empire, she had undergone a long and intense conditioning, designed to make it virtually impossible for her to act in any way not consonant with her assigned character; and there was no item, in all her luggage and gear, of off-world manufacture. This was a habit of years; everyone in Intelligence learned the almost hypnotic mechanisms which meant that the moment she left the Trade City, Magdalen Lome of Linguistics was gone, left wholly behind her; even her name was gone, packed away in a very small corner of her unconscious mind. Magdalen had no precise Darkovan equivalent; when she was a small girl in the mountains near Caer Donn, her Darkovan playmates had called her Margali.
She turned over restlessly in her sleeping bag, raising nervous fingers to her shorn head. It felt cold, strange, immodest.