“Must be the inn,” said Shrub. “They play bowls on the lawn next to the river. And bet on it. All day.”
“Bowls?” asked Anya. “What’s bowls?”
“It’s a game where you throw wooden balls towards another wooden ball,” Shrub explained. “They hit each other, knock them out of place. That’s what Ardent can hear.”
Anya listened, but she couldn’t hear anything except the burble of the river.
“How far away?” she asked Ardent.
He thought carefully, ears slowly moving, catching the sound.
“Two or three hundred paces. Around the bend, beyond the willow border.”
“We should take care to be quiet ourselves. Come on. Let’s get the carpet in.”
It took all of them to drag the carpet out of the water. Heavy even before its immersion, it weighted twice as much wet.
“Don’t rip it,” warned Anya as Ardent took a new and firmer hold with his mouth. “We’ll need it later.”
She thought for a moment, then added, “Because it is such a wonderful and amazing carpet. Truly we are very lucky to have … uh … Pathadwanimithochozkal in our company.”
“You got the name right!” exclaimed Ardent, letting go to talk, and the sudden drop of his corner nearly made Anya’s arms get torn out. Because of this, she wasn’t sure whether she imagined it or not, but the carpet had seemed to wriggle in acknowledgement of her words.
They laid the carpet out to dry in a small hollow up against the high riverbank, under the trailing willow branches, where it would hopefully stay hidden. Anya draped her cloak over a long branch in the hope that it might dry too. She took stock of the situation.
“I have the ex-druid’s blood and the witches’ tears,” she said, mostly to get it clear to herself, though everyone else was listening. “Now, here’s my plan. We take a look at this inn to see if it’s a safe place to hide tonight. Then we need to sneak into the city and the League of Right-Minded Sorcerers’ meetinghouse, which is a fortress. We’ll steal some three-day-old hail and cockatrice feathers, get back here, and fly on the carpet to Trallonia Forest—”
Somehow saying it out loud didn’t make it seem easier. In fact, it made it all sound much more difficult. But Anya couldn’t think of any other plan. And they’d made it this far.
“The forest?” asked Shrub. “Why go back there?”
“So I can borrow your mother’s cooking pot and stirring stick to make the lip balm,” Anya replied. She’d noted Martha’s bronze pot and the blackened branch, which she felt must be lightning-struck oak, given that Martha was the sister of one druid and the ex-wife of another. It was doubtless part of the reason her soup was so good.
She continued, “We can get beeswax from someone there, I’m sure; many of the foresters keep bees. Anyway, I’ll make the lip balm there. We’ll send messages to gather Bert’s robbers and the dwarves, and when they arrive we’ll carry out a surprise attack on Trallonia Castle and … uh … defeat the Duke.”
“What about all his weaselfolk and assassins?” asked Ardent, who had been trained in tactics.
“We’ll try to capture the weaselfolk. I’ll, uh … ”
Anya paused, a grimace forming on her face. She willed herself to assume a normal expression and continued.
“I’ll … I’ll kiss them with my lip balm on, and they’ll change back and run away. Some of them might even come over to us, like Smoothie, because they want to change back.”
“Weasels like blood,” said Smoothie doubtfully. “Being bigger and stronger suited most of the ones in the group I was with.”
“We might need more help than the robbers and dwarves,” said Ardent dubiously. “Weren’t we going to go to Denholm’s kingdom and get their knights and soldiers?”
“Change of plan,” said Anya briskly. She looked at Denholm in his cage. The frog looked quite unwell, now a much paler shade of green. “I’m worried that something’s wrong with Prince Denholm. He needs to be changed back as soon as possible. And with Moatie … with Moatie gone, anything could happen to Morven. The Duke is clearly getting more powerful every day, and he might decide he doesn’t need even a puppet queen in Trallonia. So we have to act fast. Besides, I don’t think Denholm’s father, the king of Gornish, has that many soldiers anyway. We’ll have to make do with whoever we can … um … enlist to the cause. The foresters might join me, and some of the druids perhaps … ”
“We’ll have to survive getting into the meetinghouse and out again in the first place,” Shrub pointed out glumly. “At least they can’t turn me into anything else. It’ll just be death, I suppose. Or torture … that’s always a possibility with that lot—”
“Stop it!” interrupted Anya. “Let’s just focus on what we want to happen. Now, you said there was supposed to be a way into the meetinghouse through the sewers. Who could help us find that?”
“A senior thief,” said Shrub. “There’s probably one hanging about the Sign of the Moon. They’d want payment. More than you’ve got, I expect.”
Anya frowned. This questing business was just full of small challenges that built up into bigger challenges, and just when she’d thought she was getting ahead—
Smoothie held up her paw-hand.
“Yes?”
“The sewers under New Yarrow? The ones from the old city? We know them. The otters, I mean. Not me personally. I never wanted to swim there, because they stink if they’re too dry and they’re dangerous when they’re flooded. But other otters go there.”
“Why?” asked Ardent.
“Because the sewers join the river and the river is our bailiwick,” said Smoothie.
“What’s a bailiwick?” asked Ardent.
“Like a demesne,” said Anya. “An area under someone’s authority.”
“Oh,” replied Ardent. “The same as a jurisdiction.”
“Yes,” said Anya impatiently. “Getting back to important matters … Smoothie, could you get the otters to help us find a way into the city and the League’s meetinghouse through the old sewers?”