‘Come on, Skinny,’ the bigger one called. ‘You heard the man—he may be sixty leagues away.’
‘The more reason not to get lost in the first league, Rox,’ the weasel-faced man replied, looking down at something in one hamlike fist. ‘Ah, straight south.’
‘Why don’t you set up for a prophet, then?’ Rox gibed. His friend rumbled something that sounded like obscene instructions, and they both laughed.
Jimmy waited until they were half out of sight along the road southward before he brought his horse out and mounted it. Jarvis Coe made a big point about how he could track horses and tell them apart, he thought. He can track mine if he wonders where I am.
After two days, most of the aches of his first ride had simmered down to occasional shooting pains: he was young and supple and strong. Coe still made an occasional mocking comment about his form; especially his flapping arms, but he could usually keep the mild-mannered old horse going in the direction he wanted, even if it seemed determined to amble; the two bashers’ mounts weren’t exactly fiery, snorting steeds either.
This section of road didn’t have much traffic, but it did have enough that one horseman wasn’t conspicuous; Jimmy kept the two he was following at the limit of vision for most of two hours, before they halted at a stream to water their mounts. He ducked aside from the road in a dip that hid him from them and vice versa, found a convenient tree to tether his mount—you had to do that at head-level, he’d learned, or they could step over the reins and do dreadful things—and slipped forward on foot for the next hundred yards. If he could get within earshot without their noticing, he might pick up something interesting about their employer and goings-on in the household of the Baron.
A murmur of voices came from the road ahead. Skinny and Rox were there, standing on the stepping-stones of the ford while their horses stood fetlock-deep in the water, muzzles down and slurping. Jimmy eeled along the ground behind a fallen hemlock that was sprouting a fair assortment of bushes from its rotting trunk and listened.
‘S’odd,’ the bigger man, Rox, said. ‘Look how the needle points straight no matter how you turn it.’
It was evidently something Skinny held in his hand; he extended it towards Rox, and the thick pug-faced man shied back as if being offered a scorpion. ‘It’s magic!’ he said, his voice going shrill. ‘Of course it’s odd. It’s bloody cursed!’ A pause. ‘That house is cursed, too. And that magician—that demon’s lover the Baron keeps around—he fair drips with curses.’
‘This is cursed, that is cursed, you’re not happy unless you’ve a good curse going,’ Skinny jeered. ‘It’s six hundred gold if we bring him in, you fool. With that much, we can retire—buy that bawdy-house you’re always talking about.’
Well, there’s an ambition, Jimmy thought. Six hundred gold. That’s serious money, even for a baron with a town and a farm income. You could buy a modest whorehouse with that, and stock it too—if the girls weren’t too pretty. Who’s this ‘he’ they’re talking about? And a magician? Friend Jarvis will be very interested.
The two hired swords led their horses out of the water and prepared to mount; Skinny stopped them with a soft oath as Rox put his foot into the stirrup.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘The needle quivered, like. See, it moves if I put it left or right, always towards right ahead of us! And I hear sumthin’.’
Jimmy did too, over the purling rush of the stream against its own bed and the flat rocks set in the ford. The familiar hollow clop-clop-clop of a horse ridden at a fast walk.
He looked up, squinting between ferns sprouting from the dead tree-trunk that sheltered him. The ground beneath him was damp; he was down nearly to the river-level, and it took him a minute to make out the rider coming down the low slope toward the water. The horse was nondescript and the tack cheap; the man on it . . .
Well, the lad on it, Jimmy thought. He didn’t think the rider was much more than two or three years older than himself. Rough-cut golden hair, face saved from prettiness by a strong jaw and straight nose, frank blue eyes, an outdoorsman’s tan. His clothes were rough and serviceable, a farmer or hunter’s, perhaps; he had a long yew bow slung over his back, along with a quiver of arrows, and a long knife at his belt as well as the usual shorter all-purpose tool.
‘Greetings, friend!’ Skinny called.
He looked over his shoulder at his friend. Skinny still had the whatever-it-was in his hand; he moved it from left to right at full extension, then nodded with a pleased smile.
‘He’s the one,’ he said. ‘And right into our arms, too! Easy money!’