Fade frowned, almost scowled. “Fade, too.”
“No, Fade,” Tavi said. “You have to stay here.”
“Going.”
“We have to travel light,” Amara said. “The slave stays.”
Fade threw back his head and let out a howl like a wounded dog.
Tavi choked and lurched toward the man, covering his mouth with one hand. “Quiet! Fade, they’ll hear us!”
Fade ceased howling but looked at Tavi, his expression steady.
Tavi looked from Fade to Amara. The Cursor rolled her eyes and gestured at him to hurry. Tavi grimaced. “All right. You can go. But we have to leave right now.”
Fade’s mouth broke into a witless smile behind Tavi’s hand, and he started chortling. He held up a hand to them, dashed inside the smithy, and emerged a few heartbeats later bearing a battered old rucksack on his back and muttering excited, nonsense phrases to himself.
Amara shook her head and asked Tavi, “He’s an idiot?”
“He’s a good man,” Tavi said, defensively. “He’s strong and he works hard. He won’t get in the way.”
“He’d better not,” Amara said. She slipped the knife away into her belt and threw her bundle at Fade. “I’m hurt, he’s not. He carries mine.”
Fade dropped it and scraped a bow to Amara as he picked up the bundle of blankets and appropriated gear. He lifted that one to his other shoulder.
Amara turned to lead them away from Bernardholt, but Tavi put his hand on her shoulder. “These men. Won’t they catch us if we’re on foot?”
“I’m not good with horses. You’re no earthcrafter. Is the slave?”
Tavi glanced at Fade and grimaced. “No. I mean, he knows a little metal. And he makes shoes for the horses, but I don’t think that he’s an earthcrafter.”
“Better we walk then,” she said. “One of the men after us is, and he can make the horses do what he wants to.”
“On horseback, they’ll be faster.”
“That’s why we’d better get going. Hopefully they’ll be here until morning.”
“Meet me at the stable,” Tavi said, and hurried off toward it in the growing dark. Amara hissed at him, but Tavi ignored her, moving to the stable doors and inside.
He was familiar with the animals of Bemardholt. The sheep milled sleepily in their pen, and the cattle took up the rest of the room on the same side. On the other, the hulking gargants lay blowing lustily in their sleep in their burrow— and behind them, Tavi heard the noise of restless, nervous horses.
He slipped silently down through the stable, before he heard a sound in the loft, above him, the storage space between the rafters and the peak of the roof. He froze in place, listening.
A tinny voice said, from the loft, “Between all the excitement yesterday and then last night, it’s been one thing after another. Though I suppose it isn’t anything compared to the life of a gem merchant, sir.”
Tavi blinked. The voice was Beritte’s, but it came as though through a long pipe, distant and blurred. It took him a moment to realize that it sounded the same as when his aunt spoke to him through Rill.
A woman’s voice, strange to Tavi and near to hand, murmured with a sort of languid laziness, “There you see, love? He has a drink now, and we’re able to pay attention. Sometimes it’s nice to hurry.”
A strange man’s voice answered with a low growl. “All this hurrying. When we kill them and finish the mission, I’m going to lock you in a room in irons for a week.”
The woman purred, “You’re so romantic, my love.”
“Quiet. I want to hear what he’s saying.”
They fell into silence while tinny voices came down to Tavi on the floor. He swallowed and moved very quietly, forward, past the spot in the loft the voices came from, and down to the stalls where the strangers’ horses had been put.
Though their gear had been removed, the horses still wore their bridles, and the saddles had been stood on end on the floor beside them, ready to be thrown on and cinched, rather than resting on the pegs on the other side of the stables and their blankets drying on the ground.
Tavi crept into the first stall and let the horse smell him, keeping a hand on the animal’s shoulder as he moved to its saddle and knelt beside it. He drew the knife from his belt and, quietly as he could, started cutting through the leather of the saddle’s girth. Though the leather was thick, his knife was sharp, and he cut through it completely in only a moment.
Tavi repeated the gesture twice more, leaving the stall doors open and cutting the other two saddles to uselessness. Then he went back, gathering up the horses’ reins, keeping his motions as slow as possible, and led them out of their stalls and back down the stables toward the doors out.
As he passed the spot in the loft where the strangers lay, Tavi’s throat tightened and his heart hammered in his chest. People, people he had never seen and did not know were there to kill him for reasons he could not fully understand. It was all too strange, almost unreal — and yet the fear in him, something instinctive and all too certain, was very real indeed, like a trickle of cold water gliding slowly down his spine.
He had led the horses past the loft when one of the beasts snorted and tossed its head. Tavi froze in place, panic nearly sending him running.
“Fear,” hissed the woman’s voice, suddenly. “Below us, the horses.”
Tavi jerked on the reins and let out a loud whistle. The horses snorted, breaking into an uncertain trot.
Tavi let go of the reins to dash ahead to the stable doors and throw them open. As the horses went through, Tavi let out a scream that warbled into a high-pitched shriek, and the horses burst out into a run.
There was a roar from behind him, and Tavi glanced over his shoulder in time to see a man, even bigger than his uncle, come crashing down from the loft, a naked sword held in his fist. He looked around him, wildly, and Tavi turned and fled into the darkness.
Someone seized his arm and he almost screamed. Amara clapped cold fingers over his mouth and dragged him into a run, north and east, toward the causeway. Tavi glanced around behind him and saw Fade shuffling along under the weight of his burdens, but no one else seemed to be following them.
“Good,” Amara hissed. He saw the flash of her teeth in the growing dark. “Well done, Tavi.”
Tavi shot her a grin and one to Fade as well.
And that was when the scream came to them, from behind the walls of the steadholt proper, clear and desperate and terrified.
“Tavi,” Isana screamed. “Tavi, run! Run!”
CHAPTER 19
Tavi ran.
His muscles were sore and the myriad scratches felt horrible, sending curling ribbons of pain through his skin, but he was able to run. For a while, Amara ran beside him in silence, hardly limping at all—but after a quarter mile, her motion became uneven, and on her exhales she started letting out whimpers of sound. Tavi dropped his pace a bit to run beside her.
“No,” she gasped. “You have to keep going. Even if I don’t get to the Count, you have to.”
“But your leg—”