“Nor’s it getting lighter,” Alix said, “what with the sun going down. Best we find somewhere to hole up ’til dawn.”
Some wet and desperate minutes later, Alix slid from Brigand’s saddle, laid a hand on his heaving flank, and said, “All things considered, Brig, one could do worse.”
The rain had indeed worsened, becoming a proper storm. But that had been a stroke of luck, after a fashion: the first flash of lightning made Brigand shy, but the second had revealed the bones of a tumbledown old farmhouse a hundred yards off the King’s Road. Knowing she’d find no better, Alix had turned Brigand for it at once, walking him through tall, weedy grass with teeth-gritting slowness and listening for the hooves of her pursuers all the while.
The third lightning flash came when they reached the house, and then it really set to raining.
Alix sheathed her rapier with some reluctance and squinted into the gloom. Brigand and she stood beneath the ragged stub of half a ceiling, what had once been the second story of the farmhouse. To judge by the footprint of the place, someone had been rich once, long ago. But there was no telling what had become of the land, nor did Alix much care to guess. Horses she knew, and cattle on her mother’s side, but farming held no interest.
She peeled off her riding gloves with two wet pops and stuffed them in a saddlebag. Deeper in it she found a bundle wrapped in cheesecloth, which she pulled out and unwrapped to expose a few soggy crusts of bread and half an apple. Alix crammed two of the crusts in her mouth and held out the apple to Brigand, who took it in a single bite.
“My thoughts exactly, old boy,” she said around a mouthful of damp bread. “Well, we may be hungry, wet, dirty, tired, broke, and recently on the receivers’ end of a good old-fashioned cheating, but we’re safe. And if Alix Bon Vallu is one thing in this world, it’s fashionable.” She looked down at the mud caking her boots nearly to the knee, ran a hand through her wilted hair. “Excepting tonight, one supposes. But if I’m two things, Brig, it’s fashionable and lucky. The chance those red-shirted buggers even spot this skip is good as nil, and even allowing that they might, would they really bother coming over for a sniff?”
High above, thunder boomed. The lightning came instantly, a great sheet that lit the farmhouse with fugitive daylight, and Alix saw two sodden men in red tabards looming in the arch of a fallen doorway. The larger of them was soaked through and dripped noisily on the half-buried flagstone floor. The smaller—slightly smaller—one was shielded from the weather by a wide-brimmed black hat and a ragged mail shirt, but his face was dark with fury.
“Gents,” Alix said. “I appreciate your boss forgot to pay me, but you didn’t have to come all this way in the rain.”
“You owe Lord Flensy two silver for that pie you nicked.” A raindrop plopped off the shorter guard’s hat.
“And he owes me a gold and six for the urgent overnight delivery, so what say we call it square?”
“Just let’s have the silvers, miss, or you could come along back with us,” said the other guard. He had a broad, open face and hands like dinner plates, which he raised as though to demonstrate his capacity for grabbing. “We don’t want a tussle.”
“Don’t we just,” said Alix, and in a single smooth motion slipped her rapier from its sheath, whipped it around to slap Brigand on his rump, and chucked the bread in her hand at the angry, hatted guard.
He swatted it away, while the tall guard stepped forward to snatch at the reins of Brigand, who was rearing and snorting rather dramatically. Alix was already on the move. A few light steps brought her to the doorway. A lunge—not her classroom finest, but neat enough given the state of affairs—put the tip of her rapier through a gap in the mail under the hatted guard’s armpit and sunk it two inches into the oak doorframe.
“You stay there,” she said.
As he struggled to free his chain shirt from where she’d pinned it, Alix eyed the other guard. The big bugger had settled Brigand with a lump of sugar from somewhere and was approaching Alix with those paws outspread. She circled Brigand’s rump with a hasty backstep but couldn’t put any distance between them, and a few heartbeats later, sensed damp stone at her back.
“Grab her, Trout!” shouted the fellow in the doorway. He’d pulled off his hat and tossed it to the ground, as though that would help, and was tugging at the handle of Alix’s rapier with both hands, though from an admittedly awkward angle.
Trout shook his head. “C’mon, miss, trapped’s trapped. That was a neat trick pinning the captain, and I like your horse, but it’s over.” He shrugged. “Just I mean, look at these hands of mine.”
“One must grant they’re really something.” Alix shuffled along the wall, but Trout kept pace with her easily, and there was a corner coming up. “Ever consider putting them to use in the postal trade? Horses like you back.”
“Trout, quit wasting my time!” the captain yelled. “Grab her and unstick me already!”
“Sorry, miss.” Trout shrugged. He reached for her, his hands blocking out the world like a blindfold. “It’s really not personal, just… is that an Underbender?”
Alix stared into the dark star-shapes of Trout’s hands. “Is what a what?”
“Greni Underbender, the painter?” Trout eased off a bit. “Behind you on the wall there, miss.”
Alix, who’d retreated into a position she didn’t quite like to call a cower, straightened up and looked where Trout was pointing. There was indeed a painting on the wall to her left, hidden in the corner and somewhat protected from years of exposure to wind, weather, and storm. Alix stepped closer and squinted.
“Well, stap me! It ain’t Underbender, but you’ve got an eye on you.” She beckoned Trout over with a wave of her hand. “Look at the trees, the proportions are all rummy. Underbender wouldn’t’ve skewed ’em like that. Someone did their best to copy her, though, or I’m a night magistrate.”
“Not half bad, neither,” said Trout, leaning in.
“No it ain’t. Credit where it’s due, Trout, you’re no mean bravo. To care enough for art to stop a fight…” Alix shrugged.
“Lords Below, Trout, what are you doing?” screeched the captain from the doorway.
“Thanks, miss.” Trout squirmed. “It’s an interest, is all. Listen.” His voice dropped to a raspy stage whisper. “I don’t call it right, how my lord Flensy did you on that business of the letter. Then sending us out in weather over a matter of a pie and all. What about if you and that horse of yours went on to wherever you were going?”
“I’d proclaim you a square cove from Lackmore to Sunhollow, Mister Trout. But won’t your chum mind?”
“The captain?” Trout shrugged. “Not if he wants me to tug him loose.”
“I do need my sword back.”
“Let’s don’t tell him that.”
Alix stuck her hand out and Trout grasped it in one of his. It was a damned good thing he’d let her go, she thought as they shook, for his paw swallowed hers so completely she knew at once she’d never have wriggled free once he gripped her.
“Need a lift onto your horse?” Trout asked upon releasing her.
“Not at all,” she said. “But there is something. One can’t help but feel owed a little recompense for one’s troubles. Meanwhile it seems a shame to leave that lovely painting to rot, and I do believe the rain’s clearing. I know a gal with a tavern who’d love to buy it off me, if you’d just help me pull it off the wall there…”
KID GLOVES
Four and a half miles from the city of Lackmore, the Weeping River passes between four colossal granite monoliths that split it into three canals. Each is deep and wide enough to hold a Sunhollow merchant ship comfortably, and they run pin-straight for about a mile before the central canal disappears belowground and the western canal crosses below the eastern via a clever bridge-and-tunnel arrangement. They straighten again just as the central canal reemerges, the eastern and western branches having swapped places like strands of hair in a braid, then all three rejoin in a great crashing, tumbling pool and the Weeping resumes its natural course to wend the rest of the way to Lackmore.
Scholars and bards debate who constructed this diversion, and why. There were carvings on the monoliths once, but millennia of exposure have effaced them. The dwarves take credit, of course. So do the elves—of course. Both folk agree that humans are too young to have done it.
I had pondered this mystery many times, traveling to and from Lackmore with my mother. Now, staring into the ice-choked pool where the three canals reunited, I was contemplating my dinner, which had fallen from my travel bag and was swirling away down the Weeping River.
I lay on my stomach on the frozen ground, reaching desperately. Just beyond my fingers, a canvas pouch holding half a loaf of crusty bread, a stone crock of sheep’s butter, and an end of bacon tumbled in an eddy. My glasses slipped down my nose and I adjusted them against my shoulder. The packed snow beneath me was chilling even through my thick shearling coat, but I did my best to ignore it as I edged farther out over the lip of the pool.
“Come on…” My fingers brushed the side of the pouch, imparting a spin that brought it a hair closer. I almost had it, and the bread didn’t look too soggy. “Please come back…”
A wet plop drew my attention: a second dark shape was whirling in the river now. It took me a moment to identify it, and I gasped in horror when I did.
My gloves.
Despite the winter chill, I had removed them and tucked them into the breast of my shearling before getting onto the ground. I’d had no choice: they were thick, fleecy gloves made of the same ramskin as my coat, but that made them far too clumsy for the delicate work of retrieving supper from a river. Now they, too, had fallen in.
For a moment, all I could do was stare. My food and my gloves were tumbling swiftly away in opposite directions. If I could save anything—and that was uncertain—it would be one, not both.
There was no choice, really. I slapped a hand over my glasses so I wouldn’t lose those as well, lurched halfway over the edge of the pool, and scooped my gloves out.
By the time I had fallen back, soggy and panting, onto solid ground, my bacon and butter were lost under the current. Only the rump of the bread could be seen, standing straight up from the water like the mast of a sinking ship. Then that, too, disappeared.
