Penrys felt two of Chang’s screen of scouts while they were still a couple of miles away from the encampment.
“Shall we let them find us?” she asked Zandaril
“Seems kinder than shaming them by slipping past.”
They walked into the open, and Zandaril put his fingers to his mouth and gave a piercing whistle. Penrys could sense their sudden change of direction.
“They heard you,” she said.
She shrugged her pack off to give her back a rest, and rotated her shoulders to loosen some of the stiffness. Surprised by a huge yawn, she caught Zandaril grinning at her.
“What?”
“Didn’t get much sleep last night?” he asked, trying to look innocent, and failing.
She examined him—hair finger-combed, beard coming in, clothes dirty and torn, a rag holding up the top of one boot, and a smug leer on his face.
“You’re no better off,” she retorted, and smiled. His pride in pleasing her was obvious, and very touching.
She’d known the basics of what to expect last night, of course. What she hadn’t expected was the tenderness of it, the way they’d kept exchanging casual affectionate pats as they packed up the cold camp in the morning. Would it be even better, if we let our minds be intimate in the same way? If his people hadn’t told him that was wrong? She wanted to know what her touch felt like to him.
Getting back to the expedition would change everything. No more privacy, just the two of them. She hated to see that end.
The sound of hooves alerted her.
“Show your face,” Zandaril said, and he made sure the hood of his own cloak was well back.
One scout circled behind so that they came in together from different directions, with their lances at the ready.
The nearest one reined in abruptly when he got a good look at them, as they waited with their packs at their feet. “You’re back!”
He waved the other one off. “You go return to patrol. I’ll escort them in.”
“D’ye need any help?” the scout asked them, as he looked them over.
“We’re fine,” Zandaril said. “What are we, a mile out?”
“That’s about right,” the scout said.
“Are the others back?” Penrys called up to him.
The scout turned his horse as if he hadn’t heard her, and started off at a slow and lazy walk toward the army.
She looked at Zandaril and saw the same puzzlement in his eyes.
*Doesn’t trust us?*
He shrugged. *Maybe wants someone else to tell us. Maybe he doesn’t know. We can wait—won’t be long.*
In just a few minutes, Penrys heard the familiar noise of the daytime camp, talking, shouting, the clang of the farrier.
The first troopers they met called to the scout with friendly jibes, until they saw the two wizards, one of them limping, and then they stood their ground in silence. That core of silence spread, and people assembled on the edge of the avenue between the tents and watched them walk in.
Penrys’s ears shifted back on her scalp. What’s wrong? Didn’t they expect us? Are we that late?
She saw runners ahead of them apparently carrying the news of their arrival back into the camp, and she exchanged a look of uneasiness with Zandaril.
He nodded to people he knew, and a few of them made jerky acknowledgments, but the mood of the camp was tentative and uncertain.
At last, they reached the command tent, where Chang himself stood outside the entry, waiting for them.
He glanced up at the scout who’d escorted them in. “Thank you. Back to your duties now.”
The scout turned his horse and walked off, and the men that had gathered behind them parted to give him room. It was so quiet, Penrys could hear when he got past the edge of the crowd and set his horse to a canter.
Zandaril cleared his throat. “Are we the last ones back?” he asked Chang.
Chang’s eyes flicked to Penrys’s neck, and then looked at them both for a long moment. “You’re the only ones back.”
Penrys sat alone on a camp chair, next to Hing Ganau’s wagon. Two guards stood watch. Even Hing was kept away, though Penrys had asked the guards to let him go through the wagon and find her some clean clothes, and get soap and a bucket of water for her so she could wash.
They wouldn’t let her inside the wagon, so she’d held her cloak wide around her and washed as best she could with a rag under it, changing into fresh clothes a piece at a time. The cold water suited her rage, kept it alive.
Chang was still questioning Zandaril when she’d finished, so she’d begged a comb from the wagon and another bucket, and she knelt down and washed her hair, in front of the guards and the curious bystanders that they were unable to effectively disperse, angry enough that she ignored any glimpses they might have of her alien ears.
I don’t care what they suspect. I’m going to look my best when they accuse me.
The guards looked embarrassed at this semi-public bathing, and she was icily glad. Three weeks we spend, almost end up slaves, and this is what we get? No one’s even asked about Tak Tuzap. Let the monstrous Voice eat them all.
Her stomach growled, but no one had offered food. She glanced up to the empty sky. I could fly away now, and who could stop me?
Both their packs were in Chang’s tent and they wouldn’t let Hing bring her a book from the wagon, so there was nothing to do but brood. She stretched her legs out in front of her and slid down in the chair, leaning her head back and letting her wet hair drape over the canvas to dry in the chill air.
She closed her eyes, but she was too angry to drowse. She didn’t want to interrupt Zandaril by mind-speaking him. He knew how to reach her when he was ready.
What was wrong with everyone? She felt the mood of the crowd—they were apprehensive and afraid, but of what? Of her? Of Zandaril? Of the two sets of enemies in front of them, that Zandaril was telling them about?
She scanned the camp—no Rasesni natives, no other wizards besides Zandaril. What had happened while they were gone?
Zandaril held a tight rein on his temper. No one had given him a seat, and he stood, rigid, before Chang’s table. Only Tun Jeju and the guards shared the command tent with him.
The first blow had come when Chang ordered Penrys off, under guard, without explanation and over his protest. He’d had both of them stripped of their packs, first, and their pockets emptied, and Tun had laid out all of their possessions on the table along the tent wall, where he was now poking through them. No one said what they were looking for.
One guard had even tried to remove Penrys’s chain, and been baffled. Zandaril had winced internally at her cold and stony expression as he’d fumbled with it.
When Tun picked up the two arrow heads with their bloody shafts, he looked over at Zandaril and raised an eyebrow.
“We were in a fight over on the Horn,” Zandaril said. He spoke as little as possible, but Chang’s eyes slid down to the boot flap tied around his leg.
Tun pulled the Rasesni books and the two bags of power-stones from Penrys’s pack and favored him with another quizzical look.
Zandaril told him. “You saw those yourself, the night we went through the Rasesni spy’s belongings.”
Bits of the cord and rope had been saved and were stretched out on the table, and those had bloodstains, too. The remnants of their food were examined—fragments of cheese and sausage, hard bread and dried fruit.
Spare socks, dirty clothing, a wrapped piece of soap, an iron pan. Two wooden bowls. Spoons. Knives and firestarters. Canteens. The leftover rags from Penrys’s shirt.
Tun looked at Chang and shook his head.
“Where is it?” Chang asked, coldly. His Kigali features struck Zandaril as stern and alien.
“Where is what?” Zandaril replied. What are they doing to Penrys while this is going on?
“The juk. The device.”
“What are you talking about?” He was too angry to be polite about it.
“The one that’s used to enslave.”
He closed his eyes as red washed over his memory of running, as he’d thought, to his death, over the cliff. To escape enslavement.
He opened them again and glared at Chang, all deference gone. “You can grill us all day if you like, or you can explain yourself to me. Better, you let us tell you our story, bring back Penrys. We’ve done nothing wrong, nothing!”
He turned his head and spat on the carpet under his feet, and heard with satisfaction the indrawn breaths at the insult. This is how you treat disrespect, with a waste of precious water. I am shirqaj, warrior, as well as bikraj, and you Kigaliwen would do well to remember it.
“I am ally, not one of your men. You can get truth from us, or whatever lies you already have,” he said. “Your choice.”
He looked for a camp chair and took it, and sat down uninvited, crossing his arms. “I was you, I’d listen to us. Big problems over there.” He cocked his head to the west. “Very big.”
