“Perhaps my lips are chained.”
“Perhaps the Master of the Wild Hunt chains you to his purpose.”
Her gaze held a whisper of the wild fury of lofty winds where an eru might climb, when she is free to fly as she wishes. I could not see her third eye, but I knew it was there. “Perhaps I am not the only one who is chained. Chains reach deep and rise high, little cat. They may be anchored in the depths of the Great Smoke, or pull against us from the heights of the tallest peak. Do not mistake the servant for the master.”
I thought of the courts atop the ziggurat feeding on the blood my sire brought them. Picking up a stone, I tossed it into the water. “I have been thinking about chains.”
“Cat! Over here!” Rory knelt at the wall of a byre. “It’s all dried now, but Vai pissed here.”
I saw nothing except scuffed ground and what looked like half-formed letters scraped into the dirt and then obscured by footprints. “You can distinguish different people’s urine?”
“Can’t you? I shall never understand you Deadlands people. How do you distinguish who has been poking around where if you can’t smell?”
“There’s a thought I am grateful had never occurred to me before now.”
A scrap of leather cord had been half shoved into a hole scraped under the byre’s wall. I got hold of it and fished out the empty ring of an ice lens. The sight so congealed my legs that I sat down with a thump.
Rory pried my hand open to see what I was clutching. “He left this here on purpose, so we would know he is with Drake.”
All along the road to Arras and then on to Audui, every isolated staging post had been burned. Worst, at one hostel the corpse of a magister had been stuffed headfirst down a well. When we pulled him out by the rope tied around his feet, the seeping blisters over every bit of his reddened skin told the story of how he had died.
“Over here.” Rory beckoned from beyond the hostel’s vegetable garden to an old and falling-down outhouse. He indicated a row of three stones and a pearl jacket button.
The mansa came up behind us. “Four stones for Four Moons House. The estate of Four Moons House lies on the Cantiacorum Pike. If they stay on this road, they will pass it. If Andevai attempts an escape there, he can hope for assistance.”
“I don’t think Vai will risk drawing Drake’s anger down on the House, or on his village. And I’m certain he won’t abandon the other mages.” But I rubbed the dirt off the button and tucked it into my bodice.
The mansa insisted we break our headlong pace and spend one night at Audui’s resplendent mage inn. In truth the amenities of a bath, a change of underclothes, the promise of a comfortable bed, and a decent supper improved my mood considerably. The steward in charge told us there had been a plague of fires tormenting the countryside, a freakish set of frightful blazes no one could explain although they had passed as quickly as they had come.
“How long ago?” I asked over a delicious meal of soup, roasted beef, yam pudding, fish in dill sauce, and apple dumplings.
“Just yesterday did all the reports come in, Maestra,” said the steward in charge. “One of our own young grooms escaped a terrible fire yesterday at West Mile Post just four miles west of town.”
“Can we talk to him?”
The lad was brought, white and trembling. He had a tendency to jump every time a door closed elsewhere in the inn, but Bee hastened forward to take hold of his hand as if he were a long-lost kinsman. No lad his age could resist her radiant glamour.
“You are the only one who can help us!” she exclaimed. “What was your name again?”
“They call me Rufus, Maestra, for my red hair.”
“Tell us everything you saw, Rufus!”
“It was all fire, Maestra,” the lad whispered in a hoarse voice. “But the man gave me a message.” His gaze flashed toward me. “He said there would be a woman with black hair and golden eyes come after him. I was to speak to her when I saw her.”
Had Vai managed to get a message to me? Hope surged.
“Go on,” said Bee in her most encouraging tone.
The lad handled the words as cautiously as a knife. “He said, ‘Nothing you can do will save him.’ ”
I recoiled as if struck.
Bee smiled. “Very good! Thank you for remembering. What did he look like, the man who spoke those words? Had he red hair and white skin, like yours?”
He nodded, gulping down a sob. “He did burn the whole compound, Maestra.”
“Had they prisoners?” asked the mansa. “Any they treat differently from the rest?”