“Thanks.” The only two people not yet accounted for were down as E. and S. Ledbury. Oh, yes, and here was Reville down at the bottom, R. Townsend, a late entry like the awful Sukey. “Look, Mrs. Ledbury, the rules say—”
The lady looked at him chillingly. “Miss Ledbury, if you please, young man. Professor Ledbury is my brother. He is a very learned man and naturally a trifle vague. You cannot expect him to bother with your rules. He is above them, and I disregard such things. Sit down beside me here, Eldred.” She turned her back on Blade and fetched some crochet out of her bag.
Reville grinned. “Leave her. You get people like that.”
Blade nodded ruefully. He and Reville sat on a bench together, but where Blade sat with his robes twisted and had to get up again to put them straight before he strangled, Reville sat with his silk-lined cloak thrown back and his rapier elegantly in a convenient position, all in one smooth movement. He saw Blade look. “I practice a lot,” he explained. “I spend an hour every—”
He broke off as Shona made her entry. Shona came down the stairs carrying her harp and wearing her green bardic robes, and she came with such an air that Blade could have sworn that not one Pilgrim noticed that the robes were creased all over and ragged where they had been unraveled to make magic reins. “Good evening,” she cried ringingly. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am the official bard to your Pilgrim Party.”
Everyone’s head turned, even Miss Ledbury’s waved helmet, and there were cries of admiration, interrupted by Mother Poole calling out, “Oh, do come and sit with me and Dad, dear!”
Shona did not leave the stairs straightaway. She stood three steps up, staring across the taproom, and seemed to Blade slowly to come alight. It was as if the life in her, which had not been there since the bard handed her the scroll, came welling back into her, and then welling up further, until Shona was twice as alive as she had been, brimming with life, glowing with it. Miss Ledbury’s lips pursed. Her head turned to look in a certain direction, disapprovingly. Blade turned to look the way Miss Ledbury and Shona were both looking and saw Geoffrey Sleightholm on the end of both gazes. He was looking back at Shona with the same sort of dawning of life.
Oh, dear! Blade thought. I wish it had been Prince Talithan now! It was not just that Mr. Chesney’s demon did not allow anyone to leave this world or any Pilgrim to stay here. It was worse. As Shona crossed the taproom and went to sit beside Geoffrey—just as if there were no one else there besides the two of them—Blade surreptitiously unfolded his list again. Yes. There it was. “G. Sleightholm X, P or E.” The X meant that Geoffrey was expendable, and the other letters meant that Blade was to arrange to have him killed either by pirates or by elves. Blade could only hope that Shona got over Geoffrey, or they found they didn’t really like one another, or quarreled, or something, before the expendable part had to happen.
Blade did not sleep well that night. It was not just Shona, although she was part of it. To his terror, Shona and Geoffrey clearly liked one another enormously. Blade kept thinking of the way Shona had been after the bard handed her the scroll and realized that she might be worse after Geoffrey was expended. And there was no Callette here to help her either. But there were many other things on his mind, too.
Some of it was the way all the Pilgrims seemed to rely on him and kept asking him things, even how to eat their suppers. He was not sure he could stand being in charge to this extent. The worst was when he had to show Dad Poole how to use the toilet.
Another difficulty was Geoffrey’s sister, Sukey. Maybe it was because her brother was suddenly only interested in Shona, or maybe she was going to do it anyway, or just because they were both small, but Sukey attached herself to Blade. She sat by him, she smiled at him, she stroked his arm, and his beard, and she wriggled herself up to him, saying, “I’ve always wanted to know a real wizard!” Apart from the fact that Blade knew he was not yet a real wizard, quite apart even from the fact that he did not like Sukey, she offended and embarrassed him. And other people. Dad Poole kept giving him troubled glances, and Miss Ledbury gave looks which raised her eyebrows up above the steel frames of her glasses.
By this time, anyway, Blade hated Miss Ledbury even more than he disliked Sukey. She had a notebook in her crochet bag. Blade knew she was the one reporting to Mr. Chesney. She made notes on everything, unclipping a pencil with efficient mauve fingers and scribbling it down whenever anything new happened or got mentioned. She scribbled in code or shorthand. Blade had looked and found he could not read a word.
“Don’t pry, young man,” Miss Ledbury said. “It’s not your place. Eldred, that’s enough beer tonight. It’s too sour. It’ll disagree with you.”
Blade hated the way she ordered her poor vague brother about, and he heartily resented the way she treated Blade himself like a servant. “Young man, fetch the landlord. This stew is uneatable.”
“You may well regard this as the best meal of your tour before it’s over,” Reville told her cheerfully.
Miss Ledbury raised eyebrows over steel glasses at Reville. “I do not intend to indulge in privations just for sport.” And she made Blade fetch the landlord and the landlord provide bread, cheese, and fruit. After that she brought out a special jar of coffee from her bag and made Blade get her a kettle of boiling water and some cream. “No, Eldred, not for you. Coffee keeps you awake.”
Miss Ledbury keeps you awake! Blade thought, tossing fretfully in bed. And Shona and Sukey, not to speak of Dad Poole peering anxiously into the earth closet. But in addition to all this, he kept finding himself doing sums as well. Mother Poole had set him off by telling everyone again that they had sold their house to afford the tour. Someone replied to this, “And I suppose you had to find another thousand credits each for the insurance?”
“Two thousand each,” said Mother Poole, “because we’re older, you see, dear.”
From what the others said to this, Blade was astonished to learn that all the tourists had had to pay Mr. Chesney from one thousand to six thousand credits each in case of accidents, even expendable Geoffrey, and that they did not even get it back if they arrived home unhurt. As he tossed and turned, Blade found himself adding up what Mother Poole had sold her house for—he did not know what a credit was worth, so he called it a gold piece—multiplying that amount by 20 for the rest of the Pilgrims … then by 125, for the other tours … adding in this insurance thing … multiplying that by 125 … then remembering that people paid more thousands of these credits to have Prince Talithan put his sword through Pilgrims … adding that in, too, at an average of two expendables a party … then putting a value on all that gold eleven parties of dwarfs brought in each year … and the answer came out with so many naughts on the end that Blade thought he must have gone to sleep in the middle and multiplied it all by 1,000 by mistake.
He turned over on his pillow and did the sum again. And it was the same huge number of gold pieces. Then he compared this figure with the money that wizards and kings got paid and remembered that Mara was not getting paid at all. It did not take much thinking to work out that Mr. Chesney was making more money in a year than there was in Blade’s whole world. And Blade’s people were the ones who did the work.
“But that’s not fair!” he murmured, and went to sleep at last, as if his mind had been waiting for him to arrive at saying that before it would let him stop thinking.
TWENTY
IN THE MORNING BLADE had to run after kettles for Miss Ledbury again. Then he consulted the pamphlet and discovered they were supposed to be leaving in two hours. But all the Pilgrims had rushed off to look at the market. “How am I going to get them back in time?” he asked Shona despairingly.
“If we have all the horses waiting for them when they get back, we can set off the moment they turn up,” she said. “Why does the exact time matter?”
Because Miss Ledbury is taking notes, Blade thought. “Because we’re traveling with a merchant until the bandits attack,” he told Shona, “and we have to meet him at midday.”
“Let’s go to the horse market then,” Shona said.
The horse market was an enclosure on the edge of town. The banner hanging over the main street now read GRAYNASH HATES THE TOURS, Blade noticed as they went. There was another banner saying the same nailed to the fence of the horse market. Otherwise there was nothing much there except a huddle of horses in the middle of the enclosure and Geoffrey and Sukey Sleightholm leaning on the rails looking at them. Shona’s face lit. Blade’s heart sank. Sure enough, Sukey gripped him by his sleeve and stared into his eyes so intense
ly that he wished he had grown his beard all over his face.
“Oh, Wizard—” Sukey began in the sweet voice she used specially for Blade.
To Blade’s relief, she was interrupted by the Horselady, who came striding out from among the horses. “Here, Wizard—Oh, it’s you under all that hair, is it? Twenty horses for you.”