Chapter Two

Shoka changed position in the nest of straw he had piled up by the stable wall, rubbed the cramp in his leg—it had been one side or the other all night long, sleep by fits and snatches, and the damned straw prickles coming through the open weave of his shirt and breeches. The ground was stable-soil and stank no matter how clean he kept the place; it was a damp and damned uncomfortable bed to spend the night in.

He had a bit of twine strung across the door-frame and tied to a bucket on the far side. He kept a watch out in various directions, not neglecting the far slope of the hill from the long bare slope of the pasture. He did not know how many he might be dealing with, or whether it was in truth only one mad girl; but he had not lived this long by taking matters lightly.

Nine years on the mountain had taught him to let go his suspicions, to let a leaf fall without suspecting some hand had disturbed it, let a fish jump in the brook without his body tensing, prepared for all the things his father's teaching had set in him, mind and muscle. Go easy, he had told himself year after year, breathe the wind, let the leaves fall and the seasons turn and put the old life away.

That was all the wisdom he had learned on the mountain, the simple art of sleeping sound at night with no traps rigged, the simple assumption it took to walk to the spring unarmed, to watch a fox's antics, to ride old Jiro bareback and doze on his back on the lower pasture, the both of them content in the sun and the summer and the smell of sun-warmed grass.

Now he sat in the dark with his sword across his lap, with straw coming through his clothes and the damp making his forty-year old joints ache: more, every nerve in his body was on edge and his stomach was uneasy with the old anxiousness, his brain working on every detail of the land and every noise in the dark.

Like old times.

Like everything he had tried for years to bury.

Damn the girl—who, by doing nothing, was doing everything right: others who had come against him, by doing something, had succeeded in nothing—and made themselves easy marks.

He waited, and traded views on the house and the clearing, the woods and the pasture. Nothing stirred and Jiro gave no alarms, only shifted quietly at his moves about the stable.

He most expected trouble in the hour just before dawn, and rubbed his eyes and kept scanning the shadows on all sides of the stable for small movements. What chilled his blood was the thought, with him through the night, that all the fool girl had to do, if she was intent on murder, was to fire the woods itself and take out on the trail. If she did that and did it the smart way, from several points about the clearing, it would be a narrow thing to get himself and Jiro down the root-tangled slot of a trail; if she did that, enemies would know the only road down and archers could wait in ambush.

He had been in worse situations, even granted they set the woods afire; but he had hard shift to remember any more embarrassing, trapped as he was by a sixteen-year-old farm-girl. While the sun came up he fought the urge to sleep, trying to think whether there was any possibility he had overlooked, anything an enemy might do; and what approaches bandit allies or Ghita's men might have used and where they might set an ambush.

But at last, with the daylight enough to show the green in the trees and dispel the shadows around the stable, he got up, gave Jiro a bucket of grain and dipped up stale water from the rain barrel outside, with frequent glances toward the woods and the constant feeling that there might be another arrow aimed at him.

Jiro wanted out of his stall, and kicked at the boards, impatient at being penned up on a fine clear morning.

"I know," he said to the horse, and talked to him, reasonably, patting his neck. "Patience. Patience."

None so easy, he thought to himself. He did not think that the girl had left. He felt exposed the whole while he walked up to the cabin, limping in the morning chill—walked, being a fool, because he had felt the fool all night long and he was not going to run now, reckoning by daylight that he knew the cast that bow could make: it was dangerous, but it lacked just a little of sufficient force at any range she could get from inside the forest. If there was anyone with her, they had made no move when they had had the best chance, in the dark, so he reckoned by now that it was not a case of bandits: waiting till daylight when they had had the dark was certainly not their preference; and it would not be the choice of Ghita's assassins, either.

No, likely it was one girl, who was out there being a fool and who had given him a sore hip and an aching shoulder this morning.

It was one girl who was perhaps crazed enough or mad enough to take chances; but with that bow she had to get closer.

Unless she had gotten into the cabin.

He walked up from the side of the porch, walked as far as the door and spun suddenly around the side of the door-frame and into the single room.

Empty. Nothing seemed disturbed. He leaned against the wall and stood there taking account of things, whether anything was missing or in any way disturbed; and thought of poisons, and his foodstuffs on which he had once, years ago, kept protective seals; and he wondered what mischief a madwoman could bring in a basket that large.

Damn, no. He was attributing to a sixteen-year-old girl the things that a cannier enemy might do. He was fighting himself, that was the ghost he had conjured up last night. He was fighting Saukendar, not a peasant girl with a pitiable mad notion of getting her way out of him.

He stirred up the coals in the little cookpit, got a small fire going, between keeping an eye to the outside, and put a little rice and water in a pot. He had his breakfast sitting in the doorway where he could watch the whole clearing, particularly the stable, figuring that the smell of cooking-smoke and breakfast might bring the girl out into the open. He had a sincere hope that she might be more reasonable by daylight, when everything else was sane.

But she did not come.

He put away his bowl and thought then what he was to do, and where she might have spent the night and where she might be now. Watching from the edge of the woods, he thought, and for the first time in years he assembled his silk and steel armor from the oiled quilts where he kept it, put on the sleeves and his armor-robe and laced the body-armor about him.

It settled to his frame with the assertion of old, unwelcome patterns, a ridiculous precaution, he told himself. The girl who was probably hiding in the brush in clear sight of the cabin, would laugh when she saw him, dammit, but he had no wish to die at the hands of a madwoman, or by some stupid girl's blind luck.

He put on his sword; and walked outside, and sat down on the steps of the porch, dourly surveying his kingdom, the clear ground around about the cabin and the stable. For the first time since he had come to the mountain he found himself hampered and hemmed about by what someone else intended: he would have gone hunting; and he dared not leave the house and the stable unwatched; he would have gone out riding, but he would not expose Jiro to the girl's arrows. That left working the garden, in a stone-weight of armor; or sitting and mending his tack or doing leatherwork, the likelier.

No, damn it, there was no way that could go on for days and weeks. She might not have moved last night, but he was sure that she was out there; and no child was long on patience. If she failed to have her way by any easy course, she only would make some further provocation, and something more and something more until she found a way to move him: and that childish game might get someone seriously hurt.

So the thing to do, he thought, was to take up his own bow and his quiver and go off as if he was going hunting—let her guess what the game was—then simply sit and wait in concealment until she either tried to follow or tried the house.