‘Lass, they both looked as if they’d been in a fight, not a bad one, but bruises and such. And that Skinny, he carries a bow in a case at his saddle. Short bow, horn-backed and double curved, Great Kesh style.’
With that he nodded to them and went about his work. Flora looked around as the two girls ate. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said, glancing up at the roof.
It wasn’t very high—seven feet at most, likely kept low to make the main room easier to heat. The rafters were roughly-adzed pine-trunks, and the planks pegged over them had generous cracks, probably to save expensive sawn lumber; bits of straw stuck through them.
The singing below their room had died away. Flora and Lorrie lay prone on the boards; Lorrie had her eye to a crack, and they’d carefully picked out a clear place between two of the planks. Loud voices came up from the table below them, harsh and slurred. Flora shivered a little.
Jimmy was right, she thought, remembering the quick hot glint in the eyes of the sergeant who’d flung her into the cart in the sweep of Mockers in Krondor. I’m well out of the trade.
‘It’s them,’ Lorrie whispered.
She was white-faced; Flora realized suddenly it was anger, not fear. Killing anger.
‘It’s the two who took Rip,’ she said, her voice like ice crackling on a winter puddle when you stepped onto it, crackling and letting things ooze through. ‘And burned my home and killed my parents.’ Flora patted her shoulder awkwardly; she’d lost hers early, and from what she remembered they were no prizes anyway.
Then she pressed her eye to the crack again. There were four of them sitting around the table and the picked remains of several chickens; she could recognize Skinny and Rox from Lorrie’s description. Bad ones, she thought, wrinkling her nose; she could smell the stale beer in their sweat, and the jerkins that had never been cleaned, with old blood on them and worse, and the neat’s-foot oil on weapons. Badder than most.
Skinny smiled too often, and Rox not at all. They did look as if they’d been in a fight lately; Skinny had a fading shiner, and Rox a set of puffy knuckles on his right hand. The other two were nondescript men, nothing out of the ordinary about them except an unusual number of scars, hard feral eyes that showed occasionally when they tilted back their flagons and greasy dark hair that swirled back from their foreheads.
One of them took something out of a belt-pouch and shook it in his closed hand—dice, probably. ‘Come on, you two,’ he said. ‘Let’s see some of that gold you were boasting about. I can feel it calling to me—wants to rest in my purse, it does.’
‘Sure it would if I were fool enough to use your dice, Forten.’
Forten’s fist closed on the knuckle bones he had produced; perhaps he would have made something of it, if Rox had not been hulking on the other side of the table. From where she lay, Flora could see Skinny’s right hand, where the fingers brushed the hilt of the knife tucked into his boot.
‘And we haven’t got all of it, yet, not the fee for the new one,’ Skinny said.
Forten grunted as he put away his dice, then poured more wine from a pitcher into his mug. ‘Bad enough those little ‘uns hiding and skulking in the walls. Fair near broke my head, where they’d rubbed grease on them stairs by the main gate. That new one, he could be real trouble if he got loose, big as a grown man. Bugger him anyway. The Baron and that wizard’ll sort him out soon enough.’
The mercenaries fell silent for an instant, looking uneasy; one or two made signs against evil with their hands, and they all drank.
Flora turned her head. Lorrie’s face was blazing with hope. They drew back to the other corner of the room, speaking quietly. ‘That’s them!’ Lorrie said. ‘The new one—big as a man—that must be Bram. And the little ones, they must be Rip, and some other children!’
Bram yes, Flora thought. And maybe it’s your little brother. More likely than not, yes.
She nodded, and Lorrie went on, her smile fading: ‘They must be in the manor, though. How could we get in? It’s like a fort, and guarded, and . . . you know what the innkeeper said about the castle.’
Flora shivered. ‘That it feels wrong? Yes. But—’
‘But we’ve got to get them out,’ Lorrie said. ‘And soon. You heard. Something special planned for Bram!’
The girl from Krondor nodded, tempted to shiver again. Then she thought rapidly; things she’d heard from other girls, and from other Mockers. ‘Wait a minute,’ she breathed. ‘I think we can get in! And those hired swords will be the way we can.’ She felt in her skirt pocket; the little sack of ‘something special’ was still there. Jimmy knew what he was doing when he left me some of this! she thought. ‘Here’s how we’ll do it.’