May looked back at the elemental, watching it dance in its jar. “I’m not getting married, Mum.”
“I’m not criticizing, darling. It’s only an observation.” Mum put a hand gently on May’s back. “Now, I believe you mentioned tea? Your gift can heat it up for us.”
THE UNDERBENDER
On a lonely stretch of the King’s Road, somewhere south of Lackmore and north of the Reeve, rain pattered on the thicket. A rabbit huddled under one particularly dense bush, nibbling at a tuber and contemplating his good fortune in finding such a sensible place to wait out the weather.
His head came up, nose twitching, at a sound as yet inaudible to the other creatures holed up along the roadway. He wasted only a moment in contemplation—and rabbit moments are quicker than most—then, with hardly any remorse at the loss of his supper and refuge, bolted.
Soon the sound grew loud enough to be heard over the rain: hoofbeats, shaking the King’s Road with their approach. A pair of thrushes took flight to find somewhere they could sing undisturbed. A moment later a horse came thundering around a bend in the road, hooves churning the earth, spraying mud in a great arc.
The horse was a compact but powerful stallion, built for speed, its flowing muscles and glossy coat unmistakeable even under the layer of filth it wore. A rider bent low over its withers, reins looped around her right hand and a rapier in her left. In her battered leathers she was the same color as her mount, except for the bright yellow bandana around her face, which seemed to have escaped the evening’s rain and muck.
“Go, Brigand!” she shouted, snapping the reins, and the horse cleared the bend and took to the straightaway with a fresh burst of speed. Soon they were gone, lost behind a curtain of rain.
A few moments passed, slow human moments, before a curious fox poked its nose from the underbrush. He sniffed the air in the hopes that horse and rider were truly gone—then yelped and ducked back into the thicket just as the rabbit had.
Two horses much larger than Brigand, bearing men much larger than the rider in the yellow bandana, galloped around the curve. Their crimson tabards were as patchy and mud-caked as their mounts, but on both of them the image of a gauntleted fist clutching a lightning bolt could be discerned.
One was helpless against the rain, but the other wore a battered black hat on his head and a chain shirt under his tabard. “Ride on, you dog!” he shouted. “She can’t run forever!”
Alix seemed unwilling to let go of her rapier, and used her right hand to tug at her bandana as they rode. She gulped down the steamy summer air with such desperation that for a moment, Brigand worried she would inhale the thickening rain with it.
“Lords Below, Brig,” she said, “you’d think I stole the whole pie!”
Brigand, focused on keeping his mistress away from the bad soldiers and rather enjoying the chase, didn’t reply.
“Not to mention,” Alix went on, “if Lord Pinchpenny back there had actually paid up, I could’ve just bought the slice.”
Brigand chuffed in agreement at that. They’d ridden all night to deliver an urgent letter to this Lord Pinchpenny (Brigand had never caught his real name) only to be, as humans put it, stiffed. Alix had returned to the stables fuming and cursing, but with enough presence of mind to steal Brigand’s supper before her own. Nor had she gotten caught doing it, which he appreciated.
Alix, who for all Brigand loved her didn’t seem to speak a lick of horse, replied, “You’re right, old boy. This rain’s looking worse by the minute and while I’d bet the house on you on turf, I can’t say for certain you’ll win a swimming contest.”
Brigand snorted and piled on the speed. He was a fine swimmer.
“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.”
