The Art of Stealing Time

ELEVEN

“Lady Gwen! Lady Gwen!” I stopped, watching with growing misgivings as a squire ran up and immediately began tugging my arm. “You’re late! Master Hamo will be most upset.”

“Late for what? No, wait, it doesn’t matter. I’ve done the armor fitting, so now I get to go see my mothers.”

“Late for training! Master Hamo trains all the new warriors, and his lordship said you are to attend because you have no experience fighting.”

“His lordship who? Or whom. No, I think it’s who.”

The teen didn’t even look at me, just kept tugging me onward until we were clear of the tents. “His lordship. The man in charge of all of us.”

“Yes, but what’s his name?”

“I can’t tell you, for I do not know.”

“Oh, him. Well, you can tell Doug that I’ve done what he asked, and now it’s my time.”

“There ye be,” a deep, bell-like voice bellowed as the squire, who was now behind me shoving me forward with both hands on my back, pushed me into a roughly circular patch of dirt. A massive man stood there, barechested, with metal bands about his wrists. He had no neck, was bald, and stood with easy grace for someone who apparently had muscles on his muscles. He hefted a great sword that was taller than me, and nodded. “Ye look like ye have the makings of a fighter. Lad, her sword.”

The squire behind me stopped shoving me and darted to the side, returning with my borrowed Nightingale sword.

“Look, I really don’t have time for this—aieee!” I hadn’t even finished speaking before the massive man, who I assumed was Master Hamo, swung his equally massive sword at me. It was parry or die, and parry I did, all the while feeling sure that just that defensive act alone would result in my losing an arm.

“OK, so I was wrong,” I panted, blocking another thrust, the Nightingale singing as I swung her through the air. “That doesn’t mean I want to waste an hour fencing with you. Hey!”

Master Hamo had evidently just been toying with me, because I suddenly found myself flat on my back, my head ringing with the impact of it upon the dirt.

“That’s what ye get for not paying attention,” Hamo said, looming over me so that he blotted out the red, roiling sky above. He looked like a mountain in man form. “If I had wanted to, ye’d have been dead. As it was, I hit ye with the flat of me sword.”

“How about you don’t hit me with anything,” I snapped, woozy enough that I took the hand he offered, which hauled me abruptly to my feet.

“I won’t if ye learn what I’m about to teach ye.”

The events of the next hour are painful to recount, so I shall draw a veil over them. Suffice it to say that I ended up in the dirt pretty regularly every couple of minutes, but by the time the hour was up, I was dodging, spinning, and parrying almost all of Hamo’s blows.

“That be enough for today. Tomorrow we’ll work on yer attack skills. Give yer sword to the lad. He’ll see to its care until ye have a squire of yer own.”

“Every individual atom in my body hurts,” I complained as I hobbled over to the waiting squire. He looked about sixteen and wore the anxious puppy-dog look of perpetual worry and admiration that I was coming to realize indicated one who hoped to be a warrior someday. “It’s not as much fun as you might think,” I added.

The squire blinked at me, then bowed and trotted off clutching my sword.

“Right, now I see my moms,” I croaked to myself, and limped with a bent back toward the direction of Ethan’s camp. I moved with all the grace of an elderly crab, and my body screamed for a hot bath and a soft, comfortable bed, but I had to check on my mothers before I could give in and collapse into a ball of mewling, whimpering Gwen.

“Oy! You there!”

“Oh, for the love of . . . no. Not going to listen,” I said loudly, one hand on my back as I continued on my way.

“You! Hold up!” another voice called.

“Not on your life.”

Two men rushed up from where they were loitering on the fringe of the camp. I ignored them, brushing past them to the tree that had been felled and dragged over to make a bridge across the stream.

One large hand shot out and grabbed my arm, right where Helene had left bruises. I yelped. “Watch it! My arm was sore to begin with.”

“We’ve got you now,” the arm-holding man said. Wearily, I gave him the once-over. He was big—not muscles-upon-muscles-big like Hamo, but what I thought of as club-bouncer big—with tattoos of snakes that circled his neck, and dragons that emerged from under both sleeves of his shirt to run down the length of his arms.

“Unhand me, knave,” I said in my best Renaissance Faire manner.

“What did she call me?” Arm-boy asked the second man.

He was just as big and bulky as the first guy, and like him, had copious amounts of ink, but his tattoos consisted mainly of nude women in various poses. “A navel. The daft-witted hen called you a navel.”

“Like an orange?” The first man squinted at me. “Did you call me an orange, missus? Why did you call me an orange?”

“I didn’t. I called you a knave.”

He shook his head in dismay. “Now I gots to rough you up a bit. I don’t want to, but I gots to.”

“Aye, you gots to,” the second man agreed. “Can’t have people calling you an orange when you’re not an orange.”

I suddenly wished I had my sword again. “Look, I said ‘knave,’ not ‘navel orange,’ and even if I had said ‘orange’—”

“You can’t rough her up too much, though, Irv,” the second man added after some thought. “Boss won’t like it.”

Irv, who was looking sadly at me, chewed that over for a minute.

“Help!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, deciding that in this case, it was better to seek aid before the situation got out of hand. “Help! I’m being roughed up by two be-tatted hulks who don’t understand medieval-speak!”

“Aye, boss won’t.”

“Help!” I yelled louder and tried to wrestle my wrist away from Irv.

No one in camp so much as looked my way. I wondered where Gregory was, and why he wasn’t where I needed him to be: namely, conveniently located adjacent to the stream. Damn the man for going off and doing his job.

“Better you don’t rough her up at all,” the second man said, having evidently completed some great undertaking of thought processes.

“Aye,” Irv said slowly, then nodded his head. “That way, boss can rough her up.”

“No one is roughing me up!” I bellowed, and making a fist, punched Irv in the nose as hard as I could.

He caught my fist about a quarter of an inch away from his face. “Here, now!” he said, clearly offended. “There’s no call for that! Frankie, did you see? Daft hen tried to smack me in the gob.”

“Aye. Feisty wench, she is. Best we take her to the boss afore she hurts herself. Boss won’t like that any more than he’d like you to rough her up.”

“Helleeeeeeeeeerp!” My last cry for help morphed into a startled scream when Irv bent down and hefted me onto his shoulder. “Put me down, you great lummox!”

“What’s a lummox?” I heard him ask his friend as they crossed over the tree to Ethan’s side of the stream.

“Don’t know. Might be another fruit.”

“Daft hen.”

“Aye, daft hen.”

“I’m not a hen, and I’m not daft. Oh, for the love of the stars and moons, would you put me down?”

“Imagine someone calling you an orange,” Frankie said conversationally as the two men strode along.

“I didn’t—wait a minute. Why aren’t you taking me to Ethan?”

I had fully expected that the two bully boys would go straight into Ethan’s camp and deliver me to their boss, but they didn’t. They made a sharp right at the camp and headed for the woods that ran along the far side of the encampment.

“Who?” Irv asked.

“Ethan! The man who owns . . . runs . . . the camp just there.”

“Oh, him.” Irv made a gesture with his shoulder that had me sliding down his back a few inches. “What’s he got to do with anything?”

“Daft hen doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Frankie offered.

“I’m going to be sick all over you if you don’t set me down!” I warned them.

That did the trick. Irv stopped and set me onto my feet, retaining a hold on my wrist as he did so. “Don’t be thinking you are going to get away,” he warned. “Boss said we wasn’t to let you get away.”

“Aye, he said that.” Frankie nodded and took my other arm in his beefy hand.

“Who, exactly, is this boss?” I twisted around to look over my shoulder at Ethan’s camp, stumbling when the men started forward. I had half hoped to see Gregory lurking about the edges, in the process of thieving, but although I could see people moving around in the camp, we were too far away for me to yell for assistance.

“Boss is boss,” Irv answered in a bewildered tone, as if he couldn’t understand why I hadn’t figured that out.

“Yes, but what is his name?”

“Oh. Tessersnatch. Baldwin Tessersnatch.”

I froze, and was promptly jerked off my feet when the two men kept walking. They paused to help right me. “Tessersnatch?” I cleared my throat when my voice came out a squeak. “The lawyer?”

“Aye, that’s him.” Frankie gave me a pitying look. “You’ve gone and made him angry, you have. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

“No good being in your shoes,” Irv agreed, marching forward again.

My brain whirled those two words around and around. Baldwin Tessersnatch was a mortal lawyer who had ties to the Otherworld, most recently with my two moms. Desperate for funds for their school, they—foolishly, and quite illegally—had agreed to sell, through Baldwin, some incantations to another mortal man.

The dread that filled me at the name turned swiftly to hot, consuming anger. “Well, now. How about that. Baldwin Tessersnatch, the man who threw me off a cliff to my death when I told him my moms wouldn’t be fulfilling the transaction. You know, I think I’d like to see him. I have a thing or two to say to Mr. Murderous Tessersnatch.”

“Baldwin,” Irv corrected me.

“Daft hen was making a funny,” Frankie said. “At least I think she was. You never know with one what calls you an orange.”

I shook off their respective holds on my wrists and marched forward, saying in a voice that should have dropped the birds from the trees, “Oh, I have several things to discuss with Baldwin Tessersnatch!”

“It’s a good thing that we got to her before that other hen,” Irv told Frankie.

“I wonder if I can remember the spell for shriveling up a man’s testicles,” I mused as we entered the woods. “I know it started off Misbegotten wart on the backside of humankind, but I can’t remember if the second line is Go and boil your bollocks in a vat of rime, or barrel of lime. Hmm.”

“Aye, she gave me the willies, she did.”

“Maybe it’s Shrivel the stones till the end of all time? Damn my crappy memory for spells. Wait—what other hen?” I stopped again, turning to look back at them. “A woman is looking for me? Is her name Holly?”

“Don’t know her name. She never said, did she, Frankie?”

“I’m of a mind that she didn’t, Irv.”

“All she said was that her boss wanted to see you, and that she would see to it that we were paid twice what the boss pays us if we’d help her find you.” Irv looked thoughtful again. “We were tempted, weren’t we, Frankie?”

“We were,” his buddy admitted. “But only until she told us who her boss was, and then we figured we’d be better off with our boss.”

I was a bit confused by which boss was which, but managed to sort it out enough to ask, “Ethan, you mean?”

“Naw, he’s not badass like the hen’s boss.”

“We like Ethan, don’t we, Irv?” Frankie said, apropos of nothing in particular. “We were helping him.”

“He had the wrong idea about how you wage a war,” Irv confided. “He didn’t once think of using a car bomb, or offing the competition’s family.”

Horror filled my veins. “You guys are hit men, aren’t you?” Really stupid hit men, but still, obviously, professionals in the art of killing.

“Not us,” Frankie said at the same time Irv answered, “Yes, but we don’t always do that.”

“That’s right. It’s only sometimes we take care of the boss’s bigger problems.” Frankie didn’t even blink over his sudden change in story. “Mostly we’re the boss’s right-hand men.”

“And enforcers.”

“Sometimes we do a hit or two, just to keep our hands in.”

“It doesn’t pay to get rusty,” Irv agreed.

“Messy.” Frankie nodded sagely. “It can get messy if you don’t keep your hand in.”

I was tempted to run screaming away from them, but given this new and more deadly light on their characters, I felt a little subterfuge was in order. Subterfuge and distraction. “So who is this woman’s boss if it’s not Ethan?”

“Badass,” Irv said, giving me a little shove forward. To my relief, he didn’t try grabbing my arm again.

“Really badass. Badder than the boss, and he’s pretty bad.”

Just the thought of Baldwin had me squaring my shoulders. “Yes, well, you haven’t seen my ass. It’s going to whup your boss’s.”

They both looked at my butt. I made an annoyed sound and charged forward through the woods. I would deal with this woman once I had vented my spleen on Baldwin. “Where is your boss? I want to get him taken care of quickly so I have time to see my moms before I’m due for my shift.”

“Boss is in Cardiff,” Irv said.

I stopped and looked at him. “Cardiff? You mean the town? He’s not here in Anwyn?”

“Naw,” Frankie said. “Boss can’t come into Anwyn.”

“He was banned for trying to sue the boss of Anwyn. Boss said our boss can’t come back. So he sent us to fetch you, said we wasn’t to come back unless we had either you with us or your head in a duffel bag.”

“Now that was a great movie.”

I stared at them both in horror.

“What movie is that, then?” Irv asked his buddy.

“Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag. Don’t you remember? We watched it right before the night we had to take care of those trolls what were making a stink about the boss forcing them to plague folks in Manchester.”

Irv shook his head. “Six heads, that was.”

“Eight. It had that American bloke in it. What’s his name? Italian, he is.”

“It was six troll heads that we collected that night in Manchester,” Irv insisted. “I remember because I thought if we had one more, we could play that dice game with them.”

I took a deep, deep breath, my mind spinning with all sorts of thoughts and plans. I wasn’t going to end up with my head in a duffel bag, that was for sure. I had to leave, to get away . . . but I couldn’t leave Anwyn—not with my mothers and Gregory still here. Plus, there was no telling if the Watch was outside just waiting for me to pop back to the mortal world. I hadn’t asked Gregory about that, but I had a feeling that they might be. And yet, if I told these two that I wasn’t going to leave Anwyn with them (head firmly attached to the rest of me), they’d most likely go down the duffel bag avenue.

I weighed the likelihood that I would be able to escape them once we left Anwyn, decided it had no potential for success, and pointed behind them, saying loudly, “Oh my god, look at that! It’s a head in a duffel bag!”

When they turned to look, I bolted, racing through the trees and hurdling both small shrubs and large rocks, well aware that both men were only seconds behind me.

Crashing noises followed me—the sounds of two large men shoving their way through the forest, both shouting for me to come back.

I was fleeter of foot, however, and more agile, and what’s more, I had motivation to give me strength. I stayed in the forest as long as I could before I broke cover and raced for the camp. If I could just get to my mothers, they could cast a spell to protect me from Irv and Frankie. . . . That thought died a cruel death when I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Frankie was about twenty yards behind me, and Irv the same distance behind him.

“Change of plan,” I panted to myself as I swerved around the fringes of the camp and dashed for the downed log bridge. I had a feeling that the two men would not be welcomed in Aaron’s camp if they were helping Ethan, and I pulled every last ounce of strength I had to get myself across the log and into the camp before Frankie caught me.

It was a close thing. He’d eliminated the gap between us, but as I suspected, pulled up short as soon as he crossed the log bridge. I raced down one aisle of Aaron’s camp and up another, losing myself in the confusion of tents and people. It wasn’t until I burst into Doug’s tent and bent double, my hands braced on my knees as I tried to catch my breath, that I realized just where I was.

Doug was taking a bath in a large wooden tub. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Changed your mind and decided to dump your thief boyfriend?”

“No,” I panted, trying to straighten up. A stitch in my side had me clutching my ribs. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt you. Two guys chasing me. Helping Ethan.”

Doug sat up from where he had been lounging against the sloping back of the tub. “Who is helping Ethan?”

“Two men. Chasing me. Big guys. Tattoos. They want my head.”

“Don’t we all.”

I stared at him.

He sighed. “And these men followed you here to this camp?”

I nodded, swearing to myself that I was going to start jogging again.

He stood up, water and sudsy bubbles sliding down his body.

“Eep,” I said, and turned around when he yelled for his squire.

“Tell the guards to capture two of Ethan’s spies who have chased Lady Gwen into our camp. They are located at—Lady Gwen?”

“The log bridge. Or they were a minute ago. You can’t miss them. They’re big guys. One’s named Irv and the other is Frankie.”

The squire nodded and trotted out. I waved a hand behind me at Doug. “Sorry about interrupting your bath. I was a bit panicked.”

“I don’t suppose I could entice you into the tub with me?”

“No,” I told the entrance of his tent and started moving toward it. If he got too pushy with me, I’d simply run out and go to the nearest group of people.

“I thought not. You appear to be quite smitten with the thief. Of whom, it need not be said, I have no knowledge.”

Smitten? Me? I thought about that while Doug made rustling noises behind me that I took to be him dressing. Was I smitten with Gregory? So much so that other people could tell?

“I don’t know about smitten,” I said slowly. I certainly wasn’t going to go into the details of my blossoming relationship with Gregory, let alone analyze my feelings to Doug. “We get along well.”

“Ah. I suppose if you are willing to settle for that, then you will be quite happy.”

“I don’t think I’m settling for anything,” I answered, annoyed.

He strolled past me, now fully dressed, and shoved aside the tent opening. “I see it is almost vespers.”

I followed him out of the tent, ignoring his change of subject. “‘Settling’ implies that I can’t find anything better. I don’t know that I want to spend the rest of my life with Gregory, but I do know that—” I stopped suddenly, realizing that I was doing exactly what I’d sworn I wasn’t going to do. “Never mind. It doesn’t concern you.”

“You say that, and yet it was to my tent you came when you were frightened by these men, not to your lover’s arms.”

“That’s because I don’t know where Gregory is. Your deranged monk woman drove him off.”

“I was naked. You did not leave my tent. You stayed there and chatted with me, pretending that you were not interested in my body, and yet even now I can see the desire in your eyes.” He leaned in close to say softly, “You want me, Gwen. It is written on your face just as it is written in your heart.”

I pushed him back, my lips narrowing. “And you are delusional. There’s only one man in Anwyn who I want, and you are not him. So stop hitting on me, or I’ll make you one sorry no-name warrior.”

“You think to threaten me?” he asked, his eyebrows rising.

“Got it in one.” I turned on my heel and marched away, feeling that was a suitable exit line.