Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“Thank you for this,” said Rigg to the woman who had prepared it for him. “I’ve eaten the best bread and cheese of O, a city known on the river for its refined taste, and I think I can fairly say that the servants in this great house eat better than the lords of O!”

Of course he was flattering the cooks and bakers and servants outrageously—but Rigg guessed that few thought them worth flattering. Indeed, how often did Mother come into the kitchen? How many of these servants’ names did she know? By the end of this hour in the kitchen, Rigg knew them all by name and most of them by their history and manners and speech. He had not won their loyalty yet, but he had won their liking, and that was the first step.

“Let me take you to the room prepared for you,” said the baker’s apprentice—a young man named Long, though he was not particularly tall.

“Gladly,” said Rigg, “though I wager it won’t be as warm and cozy as that nook behind the hearth where the kitchen boys sleep.”

“On old straw laid out on stone,” said Long. “Not a comfortable bed!”

“I’ve slept in damp caves and under dripping trees and on frozen ground with only snow to keep me warm. To me, that place looks like the best sleeping room in the house!” Rigg pitched his voice so he might be overheard by the day-shift boys still pretending to be asleep in the nook, and he was rewarded by several heads poking out of the nook to see who would say such a ridiculous thing.

“Snow can’t keep you warm!” said the youngest of the boys.

“You burrow into a snowbank like a rabbit, and the snow all around you holds in your body heat and keeps out the wind.”

“It’ll melt on you and drown you, or fall on you and smother you!” cried another boy.

“Not if you choose the deepest and oldest bank—it holds its shape for night after night, and when I’ve done with such a burrow, it’s used by small animals who never had such a lovely palace to sleep in. You may be in the north here, but you don’t know snow till you’ve wintered in the high mountains.”

With that he turned and joined Long, who led him out into the dining hall, and then on to the corridors of the house. Rigg urged him to go slowly, asking him what each large room was for, and where each door led. As Father had trained him to do, Rigg built up a map inside his head. He saw from the dimensions of the rooms that here and there they didn’t match up properly. Once he knew to look for them, he quickly located the secret passages that had been built into the gaps, for he could see the paths of the people who had used them. The paths wouldn’t show him how to open the secret doors, but he could see quite easily where they were. The house was

a labyrinth: Servants’ stairways and corridors, which were the most-trafficked lanes in the house; the public corridors, which were all that loftier residents and visitors would ever see; and the secret passages, rarely traveled but constant throughout the house. There was hardly a room that didn’t have at least one hidden entrance.

It wasn’t just the rooms that Rigg was scouting, either. He had seen enough of his mother’s path to be able to recognize wherever she had gone; he knew very quickly which rooms she habituated, and which she rarely entered. Her path only ever used one secret passage, and that one only a handful of times. Was this because she only knew of the one, or because she dared not be out of the public eye very often, lest someone think she had escaped?

What surprised Rigg was that Flacommo’s path could not be found in any of the hidden passages. Was it possible he knew the house even less well than Mother?

At the first opportunity, Rigg would search into the older paths and try to find his own path when, as a baby, he had been spirited away. It would be interesting to find out who had carried him, and what route they had taken.

Then he realized: In all likelihood his family had not been living in this house when he was born. No doubt in keeping up the pretense that they owned nothing and belonged nowhere, the royals were shunted from house to house. Well, time enough to track himself down—it would be easy, once he earned some freedom.

They came to the door of an extravagantly large sleeping chamber with a bed that looked like a fortress, it was so high and fenced about with bedposts and canopies and curtains. There was even a stepstool beside it so Rigg could climb up and in.

Rigg stood in the doorway, gaping and admiring for Long’s benefit, while he was actually scanning the room for the most recent paths. No one was hiding in the room—that would be too obvious. But someone had been under the bed only an hour or two ago, and spent a little time there. Some kind of trap had been laid, and when Rigg noticed the faint paths of six akses—the most poisonous breed of lizard known within the wallfold—he knew what the trap was. When the weight of his body bounced on the bed, it would break the fragile cage in which the akses were intertwining themselves, and soon they would follow his body heat and find him and kill him.

“It’s so pretty,” said Rigg, deliberately sounding as young and naive as possible. “But I could never sleep in a bed so high. I’d be afraid of falling out and never sleep a wink. Come on, let’s go back to the kitchen, I’ll sleep behind the fire!” Rigg turned around and rushed away, retracing his own path.

Long tried to protest, but Rigg only turned around, put a finger to his lips, and whispered, “People are sleeping! Don’t wake them!”

CHAPTER 15

Trust

“I’m so sorry,” said the expendable. “One of the versions of Ram Odin did not include the word ‘immediately,’ and therefore his order was complete a fraction of a second before all the others. He is the real Ram Odin.”

Ram gave a little half smile. “How ironic. By specifying that you should act at once—”

The expendable reached out with both hands, gave Ram’s head a twist, and broke his neck. The sentence remained unfinished, but that did not matter, since the person saying it was not the real Ram Odin.

• • •

Rigg fell asleep almost as soon as he lay down among the tangle of boys in the space behind the fireplace. The one wall was quite warm from the fire on the other side; the opposite wall was cold from the late autumn air beyond it. Rigg chose one of the unloved spots near the cold wall, partly because that’s where the most empty space was available, but mostly because he was used to sleeping in the cold and preferred a bit of a chill to overheated sleep.

He woke only four hours later, as he had schooled himself to do, in the silence of the dark hours before dawn. The nook was fuller now—the late-shift boys had taken their places as well. Most of the boys’ hair was damp from sweat, for even as the fire slackened during the night, the boys’ own body heat kept them warm. Rigg himself, despite keeping his back against the cold wall, was too warm, and he stepped outside into the courtyard to cool off before beginning his morning’s work.

In the garden there was no one keeping watch—what mischief could anyone do inside the courtyard, unless he were a thief of herbs and flowers? Rigg knew, however, that if he approached the front gateway or the servants’ entrance, there would be guards to challenge him. Even if he walked around in the garden he might attract notice. So he chose a place near the door to the kitchen—the pepper door, it was called, because the cooks sent servants through it to gather fresh herbs—and sat on the ground. The air now was quite cold. Soon the basil would die back, and then, when the snow came, the thyme. Only the woody-stemmed rosemary would last the winter.

To Rigg, the garden was almost as artificial and unnatural as the wood-floored interior of the house. Nothing grew wild here, and there was no life more complicated than a few birds, which were not allowed to nest here. Insects left paths, but so thin and faint that even if he wanted to, Rigg would not be able to single out individuals. It was just as well—for every vertebrate creature’s path there were ten thousand insect paths, and if all paths glowed equally wide and bright in Rigg’s mind the insects would blot out everything else.