One Good Knight Read online

  Andie ran for the knight, her own pain forgotten.

  He was just starting to move as she reached him, and as she knelt down beside him and put out a hand to take off his helmet—

  —he swatted it away.

  “Ow!” she said indignantly, overbalancing and falling to one side. “You hit me!”

  “Leave me alone,” growled a high tenor voice from inside the helmet. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

  If this was a Champion—he certainly was a rude piece of work! “I just wanted—” she began.

  “I know what you wanted,” the knight said rudely. “The Tradition is going to make you fall in love with me, because I rescued you. And the last thing I need is some lovesick girl trailing after me.

  So go away, leave me alone. You’ve been rescued.

  Now go home.”

  “Why? So they can tie me to the stake again?” she One Good Knight

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  retorted, rubbing her sore shoulders. “I lost the lottery. If I go back, I’ll still have lost the lottery.” In that moment, the vague ideas she’d had before knowing she was going to live through this came together.

  “I’m coming with you. You rescued me, so you’re responsible for me.”

  “No, you’re not!” The objection had a bit of a yelp to it.

  “Yes, I am,” she replied. “You can’t stop me.”

  “I won’t feed you,” he growled.

  Whatever happened to all the chivalrous Champions?

  she wondered. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m wearing a Princess’s dower in gold,” she countered. “I’ll buy my own food.”

  “I have a horse. And I won’t hold him back so you can keep up.” This time he sounded smug, and it made her want to slap him.

  She snorted. “In these mountains? A horse will have a hard time keeping up with me. You’d be better off buying a donkey, which is what I am going to do.” Then we’ll see who can’t keep up. “And I can pay you, you know. Reward you. It’s not as if you’d be taking me on for nothing.”

  “My job is only half done. I have to track down that dragon, and I have to kill it. I don’t want your pay, I don’t want your gratitude, I don’t want you to fall in love with me and I don’t want you. Now go away. ”

  She sniffed, and had started to climb stiffly to her feet when she realized that it wasn’t only her shoulders that had been scraped raw. She sat back down 148

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  again and hiked up her dress. So he didn’t want her?

  Fine. That meant he wouldn’t be bothered by—

  “What are you doing?” This time, it was a yelp.

  “I have splinters in my thighs!” she snapped back, not looking at him but at what she was doing, picking them out and wincing every time she did. At least they were sharp slivers, and weren’t leaving anything behind. “They hurt, and I’m not going another step till I get them out. Ow!”

  “You could have had dragon-teeth in your rump.

  Forget the splinters and go away!”

  She ignored him. There were fewer of the things than she had thought, it had just felt like more. To make sure, she ran her hands along the skin of her thighs, ignoring his outraged gurgles, and only then stood up again. She looked around, spotted the formation of rocks where Merrha had said she was going to hide some clothing and provisions, and clambered over the formations until she got to the place. Meanwhile, the knight was moving at last, very slowly, and wincing and grumbling a great deal.

  She wondered if he had broken any bones, then wondered how he had avoided breaking every bone in his body. He must have flown for yards when the dragon hit him with its tail. Why didn’t it kill him?

  Why didn’t it kill us both?

  Maybe it was a miracle. Though why she should deserve a miracle, and not one of the other girls, made no sense to her. In fact, it made her feel horribly guilty….

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  Merrha hadn’t made any attempt to conceal anything—why should she? In the cache, as promised, were a cloak, an old canvas skirt to go over the flimsy dress and a pack. Inside the pack were a pair of her own old shoes (sturdy ones, good for hiking on rough ground), a knife, a belt-pouch for small things, a belt, a fire-striker, a water-skin, and some bread. And one of her favorite books. As she ca-ressed the leather binding of the book, she had to fight to hold back the tears. Iris had put this together while she was learning to pick locks; Iris, at least, had believed she would live, or she never would have placed the book and the bread in there.

  And she would probably never see her friend again.

  The dress made a poor garment, but a reasonable chemise, once she got rid of the trailing over-sleeves.

  There would be no mistaking her for a peasant, but at least she wouldn’t be so obviously a Princess once she got the skirt and cloak on. The sandals, studded with gold rivets and gems as they were, could be broken apart to sell or barter the bits; she shoved them, the rest of her jewelry and the discarded sleeves into the pack, slung the cloak over her shoulders and went looking for the knight.

  She found him at a sketchy sort of camp, well off the trail and out of sight of where the dragon perched. He was just hauling himself into the saddle of a handsome black destrier, a muscular horse with a braided mane and tail, and big, feathery feet. To her mind, the beast looked like an elegant version of a 150

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  plow horse, but then the Acadian Guards didn’t have a cavalry or mounted knights, so she didn’t have much to compare the destrier to. The knight groaned and rattled as he got himself in place. The helmet turned so that the eye-slits pointed in her direction.

  “You might tell me which way the dragon went,” he said.

  She indicated, knowing he wouldn’t be able to follow so vague a direction. “I might point out that you’re going to need a guide.”

  “You’re a guide.” The words dripped contempt.

  “As if you could find your way out of Ethanos without help.”

  She narrowed her eyes and gritted her teeth. “I have studied every map ever drawn of Acadia.”

  Which was the truth. “I have committed them all to memory.” Stretching the truth a bit. “And I’m the best guide you’re going to get.” Marginally true, if what she suspected was the case. If it was…he was going to have a hard time finding any guide.

  Without waiting to hear his answer, she stalked off in the general direction that the dragon had flown. But if her memory was correct, as they exited the valley she was heading in the specific direction of the same village that Merrha’s family was from.

  They probably wouldn’t get there until tomorrow morning, but she had bread, water and a cloak. She wouldn’t starve or sleep too hard. And it might be possible to find other provisioning along the way.

  The destrier stepped carefully along in her wake One Good Knight

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  as the knight followed her up the rocky path deeper into the mountains. This was not the sort of trail that a horse cared for at the best of times, and it had been drizzling this morning, making it slippery. She took a grim satisfaction in getting so far ahead of her reluctant companion that she often had to pause for the horse to catch up.

  This was goat country, goats being the only livestock you could successfully raise here among rocky, tall hills, tough grass, weather-beaten trees that were mostly acacias, weather-beaten bushes that were mostly gorse. It had neither the advantages of the coast, nor of the mountains, and it was very hard to find your way here. Things you thought were trails turned out to be goat-tracks that thinned away to nothing, then vanished altogether on the rocks. Afoot (though she badly wanted some ointment for her legs and the skin on her shoulders) she was able to scramble ahead, find out if they were on one of those dead-end tracks, and scramble back before the knight had gone too far along it. If the frequent backtracking made him doubt her boasted ability as a guide, he didn’t say anything, and the contempt for her that oozed
from him was more than enough to cover every possible defect in her character twice over.

  She almost regretted attaching herself to him. The gray clouds were clearing off, the weather was rapidly improving, and she could have enjoyed hiking out here—slowly—without him. But she needed the 152

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  protection he represented. Short of being able to do something clever, or lucky—and she thought she had probably used up her store of good luck for the next decade—she would never be able to defend herself against an attacker. And at least she knew the knight was safe to be around.

  Though, every time a little contemptuous sniff or an exaggerated sigh came out of that helmet, she regretted her decision.

  They made their way into the mountains in silence right up until about noon, when the knight said, as reluctantly as if the words were being pulled from him with tongs, “If we see a stream, we should stop. My horse needs to be watered.”

  “All right,” she replied. “There’s a stream in the next valley.” And more than your horse needs tending to.

  Actually, since they had found their way to one of the regular trails that appeared on maps, she knew that there was a stream and a habitation in the next valley, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. Two could play at the “surly” game.

  Truth to tell, even though she didn’t strictly need a rest, she wanted one. And more to the point, she wanted what she might be able to get at the manor-farm that she knew was there. Like ointment…

  So when they edged their way down the steep slope to the lushly grass-covered banks of the stream, she waited just long enough to be sure that the knight really was going to dismount and stay for a bit, then followed the stream down to where she One Good Knight

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  knew the farmhouse was. Or at least, where the map she remembered said there was a farmhouse.

  Farmhouse was a little bit of a misnomer, because this was an estate, but the absentee-owner lived at the Court of Ethanos, and the place was run by a Steward who never saw the Court and wouldn’t recognize her. He might recognize her as an escaped sacrifice, except that no sacrifice had ever escaped before. And she had a good story ready to explain why she had gold to barter—though she took the precaution of twisting off three links from the chain she had worn as the maximum she would bargain with, and hiding the rest. No point in making whoever she met greedy by showing too much gold.

  Each of those links was worth three gold thalers, and she now knew that much gold would buy a good farm hereabouts.

  It was a big house, indeed; surrounded by a low stone wall, meant mostly to keep livestock out of the gardens, it was made of more mellow, old stone, with a fine red-tile roof. It looked big enough to support a staff of twenty, more or less. Plus the owner and his family, when they chose to visit. She slipped around to the back of the house, by the kitchen garden, and found the kitchen door. The good smells coming from the place nearly knocked her over, and her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t had much appetite last night nor this morning.

  But as she had hoped, lunch was over for the work-ers, the household servants and the Steward, and now 154

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  the kitchen staff was just sitting down to enjoy their own meal when she tapped at the door frame.

  There were six people sitting around the big wooden table in the kitchen, and all six heads swiveled to look at her. She tried not to stare at the food, but her stomach growled again.

  “Don’t need kitchen help, girl, if that’s why you’re here,” the woman at the head of the table said. She was plump and red-faced, with a big floury apron tied over her skirt, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her hair bundled up under a cap. She looked stern, and there was a frown line between her brows, but the staff didn’t look overly cowed and they were all well-fed. So as long as Andie trod carefully, this was probably someone she could work with.

  “Don’t need to hire on, mistress,” she said, bobbing a curtsy. “Goin’ home. Tarrant Three Pines village, up west in the mountains. Just need some provisions, mistress.”

  The cook’s frown deepened. “Turned out, were you?” she began, but Andie shook her head, and let some of the tears she’d been holding back flow.

  “Been serving House Tarrant in Ethanos. I was the five-year servant to the daughter of the house. They brought me up from there when the young milady came out of the nursery,” she said, naming the family of last week’s lottery loser and keeping her eyes cast down. “She lost the lottery.” Watching through her lashes, she saw the disapproving expression on the cook’s face fade, turning into embarrassment. A One Good Knight

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  five-year servant was a girl who contracted to serve for five years in order to build up enough money for her own dower; often, a family from far away from the capital would hire a five-year girl out of one of their villages to be their daughter’s handmaiden when she was in that in-between stage of “old enough to leave the nursery” but not “old enough to consider for marriage.” It was reckoned that such girls were “safer,” didn’t have haughty airs, and were less susceptible to wheedling and bribery.

  “So, they don’t need me anymore. Paid me my five years with some of mistress’s dower-jewels, so I’m off back home.” Most people didn’t keep a great deal of actual coin money around, and under the circumstance she had just described, that was a reasonable thing for a family to have done in order to pay five years’ worth of wages at once. She fished in the pocket of her skirt and held out the three links of gold where the cook could see them. “I’m needing a few things….” she began. “I turned up with just the clothes on my back, and that’s pretty much how I left them, except for my pay.”

  The cook smiled slightly.

  Andie trudged back up the bank of the stream with a full stomach, and a very full pack with a rolled blanket tied atop it. In the pack was a real chemise (not new, of course, but clean), a wooden spoon, a small clay pot to cook in, a wooden pot of ointment and another of pine-sap liniment, a wedge of homemade soap, a wooden comb, a pot of soothing scented 156

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  lotion, a wax-covered round of goat cheese, a second loaf of bread, some dried figs, a bag of dried peas and a little bag of salt. Strictly speaking, she did not need the soap, but it was one of the cook’s little specialties, scented with rosemary, and it had smelled so good when she passed where it was sitting out to cure that she’d asked for a wedge of it, too. The cook had looked sharply at her, then at her hands, which, while not as fine as Cassiopeia’s or any of the other ladies Andie had been with, were certainly not all that dis-similar to Iris’s. A lady’s maid had to keep her hands softer than those of other servants; she gave her mistress massages, tended her hair and skin and handled her fine clothes.

  “Ha. Aye, you’ve been a lady’s maid, right enough.” That must have clinched the story in the cook’s mind, because the cook was a great deal more sympathetic after that. While some servants might run away from a bad master, a lady’s maid was generally treated so well that at least half of them elected to remain after their five-year term, rather than going home with a dower, and turned into full household servants with yearly fees, two suits of clothing, bed and board, and a raise in pay every year.

  But no one would want to keep the girl who only reminded them that the daughter of the house, rather than the servant, had lost the lottery. The cook had thrown in the little wooden pot of rosemary hand-salve as a gift. Andie thought, rather wryly, that she was going to need it.

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  Actually, there were a great many things she was going to need, but that could wait until they got to Merrha’s village, Rocky Springs in the holding of House Kiros. If Merrha had thought there was any chance that Andie would survive the dragon, she would have known that was where Andie would go next.

  In fact, if Merrha came to check after the dragon was gone, she would find the signs of fighting, the empty manacles, the pack g
one. She would probably try to get a message out by heliograph.

  Andie wouldn’t dare stay at Kiros Rocky Springs—especially not if some of what she suspected turned out to be true—but there would be people warned she was coming and prepared to sell her what she needed and not talk about it afterward.

  When she got back to where she had left the knight and his horse, she found the latter tethered and grazing, and the former with his helmet and some of the pieces of his armor finally off. Not the mail shirt or trews, but the bits of plate, which he was inspecting with a frown. The frown deepened when she entered the clearing.

  “Damn,” he said ungraciously. “I thought you’d run off.”

  Irked, she threw the packet of bread and cheese she’d gotten for his lunch at his head rather than in his lap as she had intended. Quick as a snake, he snatched it out of the air before it could hit him.

  “You’re welcome,” she said sarcastically, before he could utter a word. “I told you I could fend for myself.”

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  The frown became a full-fledged scowl. Which was rather sad, since underneath that sour expression, he wasn’t bad looking, if you liked the androgynous sort—absolutely beardless, so he was probably no older than she was, with somewhat angular features, which was a bit unsettling to someone used to softer, rounder faces, but by no means was he ugly.

  He looked exotic, and he had a generous mouth that unfortunately was set in an ungenerous expression.

  His hair was reddish brown with a wave to it, and his eyes were green—which was also a little unsettling to someone used to brown eyes and black hair.

  “Why didn’t you fend yourself into a job, then?”

  he demanded. “Get yourself out of my life. I told you, I don’t need you, and I don’t want you!”

  From the sudden sharp whiff of liniment that wafted to her when he matched an emphatic gesture to that statement, she suspected that he did need her, even if he didn’t want her. He was bruised all over at the least, and at the worst, might have cracked bones.