Crown of Renewal(50)

“Now?”

“Now.”

Marshal Hudder’s grange was one of the lowest in the city, backing onto the remains of the old city wall. The wagon with Gird’s Cow had to be held back by ropes on its way down through the streets but arrived safely, the cow figure still intact. A crowd surrounded the grange, many of them parents of the children who had been taken. Some of the women were wailing, arms around one another’s shoulders. Men muttered; most held staves.

“Marshal-General!” That was Marshal Stoll. “You’ve come!”

“As soon as I heard,” Arianya said. “How’s Hudder? And Mador?”

“Bad,” he said. “Marshal Gantol is praying a healing, but you know when the headbone’s split—”

“Where are the child thieves?” she asked. “I heard in a woolhouse?”

“Talin’s. They broke in, knocked down t’old man and his daughter, pushed ’em out, and barred the door. You know where ’tis?”

“Yes. How many children?”

“All that was in school here, like every morning. That would be fifteen or so. And they say they’ll fire the woolhouse if we try to break in.”

Around the tall blank front of the woolhouse—its door shut, the windows shuttered—surged an angry, frightened crowd, growing larger by the moment. Gird’s Cow was a momentary distraction—enough to quiet them so Arianya could hear a ranting voice berating the crowd through the door’s peephole. Whoever that was caught sight of her.

“There’s the problem, yeomen! Calls herself Marshal-General but lets evil mages live. Gird wouldn’t a done that! Gird knew magery’s evil. She’s weak; Gird was strong!”

Behind and around her the crowd growled, a sound that raised the hair on her neck.

“Gird wouldn’t hurt children!” she yelled. “Hurting children is evil.”

“Magery is evil. Child mages is evil. Like rats—kill’m young!”

The crowd heaved itself forward a little. A screech from nearby “My Suli’s not evil! She never done nothin’ mean!”

“You come too close, we burn the house and all in it!”

The pressure of bodies, the smell of rage and terror mixed … and no way at all to break into the woolhouse that Arianya could see.

“I can get in without their knowing,” Arvid said quietly. She hadn’t noticed that he’d come that close; he spoke practically in her ear. “But I’ll need my cloak.” He glanced at the cow. “And a distraction. Can you have them sing about Gird’s Cow? Over and over?”

She looked at him. That narrow handsome face did not look like the Arvid she’d known these past quarters, the peaceful scribe, but even more dangerous than she’d seen the night he had stood between her and her attackers. The way he must have looked in his days as a thief-enforcer. But she had no one else. “How long to get your cloak?”

He flicked fingers where she alone could see them.

“Go, then.”





Chapter Ten

A wool warehouse was nothing like so difficult a target as a thieves’ Guildhouse … except it was broad daylight, the streets full of alert and angry citizens. Arvid began three buildings away in an alley no one seemed to be watching. Buildings here were old and had once been barracks for magelord troops or warehouses for their stores, then merchants’ homes and stores. A staircase, built later, led up to the roof, but he preferred a less obvious way up in case the child stealers had a lookout up there.

Arvid slid into a narrow crevice and went up the angle of two walls to the roof and eased over, staying back near the city wall, where he could not be seen easily from the street. A cautious look … he saw no one on any of the roofs. He picked his way over mossy slates to the next building—only a long step across from one to the other—and then with more care approached the wool warehouse. It was taller than the one he was on, but they shared a wall. At the back of the warehouse, he spotted a gap between it and the city wall, about a man-length wide. A ledge ran across from the roof he was on to a small arched opening in the back wall of the warehouse. He considered the ledge and its inviting approach to the warehouse interior. Above it, a beam projected, just like the one in the front of the warehouse, but without the block and tackle. Why was it even there?

Then he grinned. A bolt-hole, a way out … and a way to remove goods, if necessary. In the old days, a way for smugglers to move goods over the wall without being noticed. Surely magelord troops had lived in the woolhouse once. He looked down; a long drop, but the building did extend to the wall below, leaving a blind space wide enough to fall into and no way to climb out. And—since it was on the highest floor of the warehouse, a warehouse that most people thought backed up right onto the wall—not an exit the mage-hunters were likely to know.