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  Had it been that unseen watcher?

  It was as reasonable an explanation as any.

  He was afraid when they kicked their horses into a walk that they would go too fast for him to keep up—that they would punish him for escaping by dragging or half-dragging him all the way back to where they had left the wagon.

  But they didn’t. They kept the horses to a reasonable slow walk. If he hadn’t been trussed up and in the hands of enemies, it might even have been a pleasure, since the woods were cool and they were picking an easy trail for him. He might even have felt some relief, if he hadn’t been so completely uncertain as to their motives; after all, he’d been taken out of the hands of people who absolutely would kill him, and who had means of telling when or if he used Mindspeech. Now he was in the hands of people who had at least taken some care of him and might not be able to tell . . . well, unless he used it on them. Ice and Stone—or their guardians, whatever they were—had certainly been able to tell when that happened.

  There was no obvious path away from the cave for quite some distance, as Mags had already discovered. In fact, it wasn’t until they passed by the remains of a village—scorched chimneys sticking up out of barren earth where nothing grew—that they finally came upon the remains of a road. Mags recognized it immediately; this must be the village that Franse had seen burned to the ground. He wondered what had happened to the villagers. He was afraid to even speculate.

  Mags averted his eyes. The assassins seemed indifferent to the signs of tragedy all around them. It might just have been another part of the forest.

  Because the road formed a break in the tree canopy, the undergrowth was much heavier on either side of the road than it was deeper under the trees. Strangely enough, the wildlife didn’t seem to take too much notice of them. Maybe because it had been so long since anything saw a human being that the birds and animals had mostly lost their fear.

  They walked about half the afternoon before they came to the spot where the wagon had been left, and Mags would never have known it was there if they hadn’t stopped, dismounted, tied the horses to a tree, and gone to what looked like a thicker part of growth at the roadside and begun pulling away greenery. He was astonished. So astonished, he found himself making mental notes.

  They had picked a spot where the undergrowth was set back a bit from the roadside; perhaps this had once been a wider spot in the road. They had fitted the wagon into that spot. Then, somehow, they had found and cut branches from bushes or trees that had not withered in all the time they had been gone. It looked as if what they had taken had mostly been evergreens, which meant they must have combed a good part of the forest around here to find them. He could not tell where they had cut the branches from, which meant they also must have been very careful in their pruning, either taking the entire thing off at the root, or selecting branches from the side away from the road.

  There had been some ivy vines here, and they had parked the wagon in a way as to make the best use of them without cutting or breaking them. But the real genius lay in what he only saw after they finished pulling out the branches and pulling off the vines.

  The basis for the covering was a net that covered the entire wagon and was stretched between two trees as well as thrown over the top of the wagon itself.

  It was a brilliant idea; it certainly would take up next to no room in the wagon storage, and you could easily weave vegetation into it. Working backward, he could see that they had first draped the net over the wagon, tied it up, then made use of the ivy vines, carefully disentangling them from the tree, the undergrowth, and each other and draping them over the net at irregular intervals. Many had been long enough, once untangled, to toss right over the top of the wagon, and they caught and held on the net. An hour or so, and their own natural growth turned their leaves toward the sun, making them look as if they had grown there in the first place. Then the men had tucked the branches in all over the net to fill in the look of a small thicket, complete to the dried grass and dead weeds that looked as if they had grown there at the base.

  It wasn’t just a big lump of vegetation. It blended in to the rest of the thick undergrowth on that side of the road. It just looked as if here it was a trifle thicker, but not at all unnatural.

  The two men scattered the cut branches, and while one came to get the horses, the other untied the end of Mags’ rope from the harness. He held the rope in one hand and looked at Mags meditatively.

  “I can hit you on the head again, and we can load you into the wagon,” he said. “Or you can get in on your own. Which is it to be?”

  He spoke Valdemaran with absolutely no accent, which astonished Mags so much that his jaw dropped. For a moment, all he could do was stare at the man. But when the assassin started to move, he came to his senses.

  “I’ll get in,” he said hastily.

  The man allowed him to lead the way, trussed up as he was. After a moment of study, Mags put his rump against the back of the wagon, jumped backward up onto the back, swung his legs over, and inched his way inside, scooting himself along on his rump and heels and wedging himself in to his captor’s satisfaction.

  “Now that you have seen that it is much preferable to be with us than with those sun-dogs, I expect you to behave yourself,” his captor said sternly, as the jangling of harness up front told Mags that the other man was putting the horses to the wagon, and they were probably going to be away from here soon. His eyes were very hard and very cold. The look in them warned that if there were further trouble, Mags would not like the result. “If they had known what you are, we would have arrived to find you with a slit throat. If they ever catch their other quarry and he tells them what you are, which he will, they will be looking for all of us, and not even the written shield of the head dog will protect us. So I advise you to be very quiet. We have been mandated to bring you home, boy, but that mandate does not include getting ourselves killed in the process. It takes twenty-five years to train to where we are now, and that is an expense in time and effort the Shadao does not like wasting. We will not hesitate to throw you to the sun-dogs if it becomes a question of you or us, and the Shadao will favor our decision.”

  Mags nodded vigorously to show that he understood; his mouth was too dry with fear to say anything.

  “Good. I see we understand one another.” The assassin pulled down the canvas flaps of the back and tied them closed, leaving Mags in the half-gloom of the interior. After a while, one of the men clicked to the horses, and the wagon started moving.

  Mags sagged against a bag of what felt like oats and wiggled until he was marginally comfortable—although he was anything but comfortable inside. He shook with fear and reaction. He was still in terrible danger, and that little speech had left him with far more questions than answers.

  Unlike the first set of—well, what would you call them? Saboteurs, he supposed. Well, unlike them, this pair spoke flawless Valdemaran. So they must have been carefully prepared so that they didn’t stand out at all once they got into Haven. Like Ice and Stone, they were consummate professionals. Mags was beginning to suspect that catching Ice and Stone had been largely a matter of luck and the right set of circumstances; if that pair’s primary goal had been to get Mags rather than to disrupt the leadership of Valdemar . . .

  I’d’a been in a wagon heading south months ago . . .

  Instead, Ice and Stone had been faced with divided goals, and as a result, they’d failed both missions.

  Clearly these two had a single mission. Get Mags. Like an arrow loosed by an expert marksman, they’d been sent to the target, and they would hit it.

  We have been mandated to bring you home, boy.

  So they did want him alive. But not at the expense of their own lives, so if Franse was caught, and the Karsites caught up with these two, they would probably pretend they’d had no idea he was a Trainee and slit
his throat themselves to prove it.

  Mags had no doubt that they were right; if Franse was caught, he’d have no choice but to tell the truth, and given everything he’d seen about the Karsite black-robes so far, Mags was not entirely sure that being dead would guarantee silence.

  Poor Franse. He devoutly hoped his friend was well away, and not just for his own sake.

  That chief black-robe was . . . terrifying. That was all on his own. Everyone, including the other two black-robes, had been afraid of him, and Mags was as certain as he had ever been of anything that it was for a very good reason.

  Now he was angry. He’d lost his primary quarry. He’d been deprived of the only thing he had managed to capture. And worst of all, he’d been shown up by the two assassins in front of his underlings.

  He was going to make life pure hell for them from now on, so that they remembered very clearly that while the assassins might be bad, they were elsewhere, and he was right here with their leashes in his hand.

  And if he caught Franse, what he would do to the young priest did not bear thinking about for very long.

  Because he had been shown up in front of his underlings, if they learned from Franse that Mags was a Trainee . . . well, a man like that black-robe would take no chance on the quarry escaping a second time or being protected by the assassin pair. He would come with not twenty men, but two hundred. He would come with much, much better magicians.

  And he would come by night, when their demons were free to move and at their strongest.

  So although the assassins had faced down the Karsite priest and his underlings once, even Mags’ captors knew, arrogance aside, they would have no chance in a face-off a second time.

  Aye. They’ll toss me out like rotten fish. Then claim I controlled ’em, or suchlike.

  Hideous as it was, his captor was right. His best chance of survival—unless he could escape again—lay with them.

  14

  They didn’t stop moving all night. Mags figured they were trying to get plenty of distance between themselves and the Karsite hunting party. They also moved on decent roads, which puzzled him for a moment, until he realized they could make much better time that way and that it would be harder to tell which way they had gone. By the direction of the sun through the canvas, he figured that instead of going south, they were actually going north and a little east. That made sense too, if they assumed the Karsites would think they would be going south.

  The upside of this was that they didn’t drug him. The downside was that they didn’t untie him either. They solved the problem of giving him food and drink by coming back there and feeding him a few bites of some odd food that seemed to be composed of dried meat and berries pounded together, and giving him drinks out of the waterskin.

  Bites? It was more like slivers. The stuff was so hard he had to suck on it. It was good though, better than he would have expected if he’d been given the description.

  He tried to concentrate on trivialities like that and not on his predicament. Before sunset, he had not wanted to try letting down his shields, in case his captors were sensitive to Mindspeech. Considering how cautious they were, Mags would expect—if he were in their place—that their victim would try something of the sort as soon as he could. If he didn’t use Mindspeech right away, he might lull them into thinking he didn’t actually have it, that he had some other Gift, or that his Gift was too weak to be of any consequence.

  He didn’t think they actually knew that much about him. They hadn’t addressed him by name, for one thing. He didn’t think they had personally gotten anywhere near the Collegia, because that had been one of the big mistakes that Ice and Stone had made that eventually led to them being unmasked and found, and these people never repeated their mistakes.

  Without hanging around the Collegia, or having close contact with someone or an actual informant at the Collegia (and that wasn’t going to happen after the last round!), there would be no real way for them to find out exactly what his Gift was. That sort of thing wasn’t bandied about outside the Collegia or the Circles, and it actually wasn’t even bandied about in those venues. You would generally say if you were asked, or if it was relevant to something you were doing (like Kirball), but otherwise the subject didn’t tend to come up outside of training classes.

  Thinking about that just gave him another source of puzzlement. If he wasn’t being hauled away somewhere unknown because of his Gift, what was the reason?

  Well . . . I do seem to look like someone a lot of these people know . . .

  Was that the answer?

  But why?

  An incredibly wild idea occurred to him. Is there a chance they want me to take this person’s place?

  Oh, that would be insane! How could he possibly do that and get away with it? He didn’t even speak their language, there was not a chance in a million he could fool anyone for any length of time!

  And how would they plan to coerce him into doing it, anyway?

  Then he went cold all over, because he knew very well how they could coerce him. All they had to do was threaten Valdemar and the people he loved. Do this, and we drop the Karsite contract. Do this, or we kill the girl, her father, the Healer, the singer, the Horse.

  And he would. He would do it.

  What other possible choice could he make? He was a Herald. In the choice between his own wishes and the welfare of Valdemar, there was no choice.

  With that nightmare scenario galloping through his mind, along with possibility after possibility of who they could want him to impersonate—or rather, what sort of person, since obviously, even if he knew who it was he wouldn’t recognize what he was—somehow sheer emotional and physical exhaustion caught up with him, and the even rocking of the wagon over good, sound roads in the darkness lulled him to sleep.

  * * *

  He woke immediately when shifting weight in the wagon warned him that one of his captors was on the way back to him. When his eyes opened, it was obvious that it was day again, though from the dim light it couldn’t be long past dawn. It was the second man rather than the first, the one who generally didn’t say much. This close, Mags thought the second man might be a bit older than the first one; maybe five years or so. The man held the waterskin to his mouth—it was still plain water, to his relief. Then he shaved off some more slivers from the food brick and fed them to Mags slowly.

  He tried asking a question or two—simple ones like “What’s your name?” and “What is that food?” but the man just shook his head sternly and said nothing. It was very clear that what he wanted from Mags was silence.

  Well, then, that was what the assassin was going to get. Right now, the best thing Mags could do was cooperate.

  When Mags elected not to ask any more questions, the man seemed to approve. He stowed the water and food brick, then unlocked and rummaged in a box.

  What he came up with was not exactly encouraging, however. It was two sets of heavy leather manacles with chains holding them together and a pair of locks.

  He locked the manacles around Mags’ wrists as Mags’ heart sank, and he did the same with his ankles. These things were going to be even harder to get off than the rope. He had thought he might be able to untie his wrists if he contorted himself enough to pick away at the knot with his teeth, and once his wrists were free, he figured he could wiggle out of the torso ropes.

  But then the man unbound his arms and untied his wrists, leaving him in relative freedom.

  Of course, his arms immediately began to protest having been bound for so long, but he didn’t care. At least now he could change his position in here.

  The man thriftily coiled up the rope and stowed it away. Then he went back up to the front of the wagon. Taking the key to the lock with him, of course.

  The chain between the manacles on
his wrists was quite long, and at first Mags thought that was a mistake—but he soon realized that not only did so much chain give him decent freedom of movement, it also rattled loudly every time he moved. No good trying to rummage through the stuff back here in the wagon, then—not when the sound of the chain rattling too much was sure to bring a head poking through the canvas flaps at the front.

  Well . . . at least he could move.

  He used his relative freedom to make an area more comfortable for himself, in no small part because he wanted something to think about besides all the nightmare scenarios his imagination could conjure up. As soon as the chain started rattling, sure enough, a head poked in through the canvas. But when his captor realized what he was doing, the head retreated again, although the kidnapper continued to check on him from time to time to make sure he wasn’t up to any mischief. Mags had, of course, already found out that any box that might have something in it he could use to escape with, had been locked.

  By the time he had finished, a couple of candlemarks later, he felt the wagon leaving the main road, and almost immediately it lurched to one side, throwing him right into the padded hollow he’d created for himself, using the rolled up net as a kind of coiled, wreath-shaped base. Grimly he set himself to hanging on. This road had to be at least as dubious as the one that had led to his escape. He might even have taken the chance on going out the back again, manacles and all, except that this was broad daylight, it was not raining, and the chain between his ankles was pretty short.

  After about another candlemark of lurching and bumping that made him grateful he wasn’t still tied up like a bundle of wood to be tossed all over the interior of the wagon, he felt the wagon stop.

  He sat up. Were they stopped, stopped? Or had they encountered a blockage? And if they had encountered a blockage, or even a hazard, could he possibly use the chance to escape again?