Fool’s Quest

I didn’t want her to give me anything. I bowed my head and walked slightly bent over so no one could look into my face. The tents were awaiting us. Their roofs were rounded on their half-hoops, the canvas bleached white, and I supposed that from a distance they could have been mistaken for mounds of snow. Yet we had not bothered to move that far from the road, and the horses were hobbled and pawing up the snow, searching for frozen grass. Any passing traveler would surely note them, and the brightly painted sleighs. And the tents of the soldiers were brown and pointed, and their horses a mix of colors. So why bother disguising our tents? Something niggled at me about it, and then as I drew closer, a wave of sleepiness spread over me. I yawned hugely. It would be good to rest. To get into my warm blankets and sleep.

Shun was plodding along beside us. As we drew closer to our tent, I became aware of several soldiers watching us. Hogen, the handsome rapist, still sat his horse. His long golden hair was smoothly braided, his mustache and beard carefully combed. He smiled. He had silver hoops in his ears and a silver clasp to his cloak. Was he keeping watch? He looked down at us, a predator watching prey, and said something in a low voice. Standing near Hogen’s horse was a warrior with half a beard; his cheek and chin on the other side were sliced like a pared potato, and not a whisker grew out of the smooth scar. He smiled at Hogen’s jest but the young soldier with the hair as brown as ripe acorns just followed Shun with dog’s eyes. I hated them all.

A growl bubbled up in my throat. Odessa turned her face sharply toward me and I forced a belch up. “Pardon,” I said, trying to sound sleepy, embarrassed, and uncomfortable.

“Dwalia can help you, Shaysim,” she comforted me.

Shun moved past us and into the tent, trying to move as if she were still dead to all things, but I had seen the tightening in her shoulders when the gawking soldiers had spoken. She was a small cat walking bravely past snuffing hounds. By the time I stood in the entrance, shedding my snowy boots, Shun had burrowed under the blankets and was out of sight.

I was very certain I did not want Dwalia to help me with anything. The woman frightened me. She had an ageless face, round and yet lined. She could have been thirty or even older than my father. I couldn’t tell. She was as plump as a fattened hen; even her hands were soft. If I had met her as a guest in my home, I would have guessed she was someone’s genteel mother or grandmother, a woman who had seldom done physical work. Every word she had spoken to me had been in a kindly voice, and even when she had rebuked her followers in my hearing, she had sounded grieved at their failure rather than angered by it.

Yet I feared her. Everything about her set Wolf-Father to snarling. Not noisy growling but the silent lifting of the lip that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. Since the night they had taken me, even in my foggiest moments I was aware that Wolf-Father was with me. He could do nothing to help me, but he was with me. He was the one who counseled silence, who bade me conserve strength and watch and wait. I would have to help myself, but he was there. When the only comfort one has is a thin comfort, one still clings to it.

Strange to say, despite Shun’s whispered words, I still felt that I was the one more competent to deal with our situation. What she had said had woken me to a danger I had not considered, but had not given me the sense that she was going to be the one to save us. If anyone could save us. No. Instead her words had sounded to me as if she bragged, not to impress me but to bolster her own hopes. Assassin’s training. I’d seen small sign of that in her during our weeks together at Withywoods. Instead I had seen her as vain and shallow, focused on obtaining as many pretty things and delightful distractions as coin could buy. I’d seen her wailing and weeping in terror at the supposed moaning of a ghost that was actually a trapped cat. And I’d seen her flirting with FitzVigilant and attempting to do the same with Riddle and even, I felt, my father. All in the name of getting what she wanted. Flaunting her beauty to attract attention.

And then men had come and turned her own weapons against her. The beauty and charm and pretty clothes she had deployed to her own ends could not save her from them. Indeed, they had made her a target. I wondered now if beautiful women were not more vulnerable, more likely to be chosen as victims by such men. I turned it over in my mind. Rape, I knew, was injury and pain and insult. I did not know the full mechanics of it, but one does not have to know swordplay to understand a stab wound. Shun had been hurt, and badly. So badly that she was willing to accept me as some sort of ally. I had thought I was helping her when I had claimed her that night. Now I wondered if, indeed, I had dragged her out of the frying pan and down into the flames with me.