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dagger’s grip, keeping the weapon low, behind the
sideboard and out of sight.
    “Toll bridge,” said the
taller of the two.
    The short man nodded. “Have
to pay the toll.”
    “What’s the toll?” Marco
asked.
    “Depends,” said the tall
man.
    Recalling something the poet
had said, Marco told them, “I’m on a mission from the queen.”
    “Queen Joanna?”
    The name meant nothing to
him. “Transporting prisoners,” he said.
    “You don’t look like a
bailiff.”
    Good point. Marco was dressed in a torn undertunic.
Half his face was sunburned and his head was bandaged. “I was robbed.”
    “Robbed, eh?”
    “My clothes, my sword, my
papers.”
    “Papers?”
    “A carnet from the queen.”
The words were coming to him now of their own accord. They made little sense to
Marco—what was a carnet?—but seemed to impress the bridgekeepers.
    “They take your money?” the
short man asked.
    “What little I had.”
    A shake of the tall man’s
head. “Can’t trust no one on the roads these days. Pity, that.”
    “Real pity,” echoed the
small man.
    The tall man took a step
forward, hand on his hilt. “Show us your hands.”
    Marco let the dagger drop to
the blanket and raised his empty hands. Even weak as he was, he could take
these thieves, but he needed information more than corpses.
    The tall man walked up to
the cart and eyed the hostages. “Them ain’t nobles.”
    His partner followed two
steps behind. “That one’s got a bit of fashion on him.”
    “You can have that one,”
said Marco. “He’s a poet.”
    The short man sneered. “What
good’s a poet?”
    “We’ll take the girl,” the
tall man insisted.
    Marco shook his head. “The
girl’s mine.”
    “The bridge is ours.”
    “The poet, or nothing.”
    The short man spat on the
road. “A poet is worse than nothing.”
    “Agreed,” said Marco.
“Nothing it is, sirrah.”
    The tall man drew his sword.
It was a rusty piece of steel with a ragged edge. Marco was unimpressed. A man
who didn’t know how to care for a sword probably didn’t know how to use it.
    The tall man proved Marco’s
theory by stepping too far forward and brandishing the point in Marco’s face.
That was his first mistake. His second was holding the grip in one hand instead
of two, which left a weakness at the fingers.
    Marco raised his empty
hands, palms out, as if in submission, then clapped them together on the flat
of the blade, his left hand forward, near the center of the blade, his right
hand back, near the tip. The hilt popped out of the tall man’s grip. The sword
spun through the air, landing behind the cart.
    The tall man, startled, went
for the missing sword. Marco took up the dagger as the man passed him. He
plunged the tip into the man’s left eye. For a moment the body dangled,
twitching, suspended on the upraised dagger. Marco tilted the blade down. The
body fell, the eye socket sliding from the steel.
    The short man stood his
ground, his own sword drawn and raised and clenched in a two-handed grip. His
mouth went slack at the sight of his fallen friend. His eyes grew wide. He had
trouble breathing. “You, you, you, you—”
    The long blade quivered in
his hands.
    Marco wiped gore from the
dagger. “Run away, little man.”
    And the little man ran away.

 
    CHAPTER 9
     
     
    In the heart of the forest,
in the depths of the vale, a tangled canopy swallowed the sky. Marco saw a
faint light ahead and in that light he saw a house, a meager daub-and-wattle
cottage fronting the road. Behind it lay a field where sunlight harrowed a
desiccated farm. He saw no animals in the field, no cottars about the house.
The door was shut and the window shuttered.
    As the cart trundled toward
the glade, Marco studied the house. It seemed ancient and out of place. A
memory flickered at the edge of his awareness: a small, laughing boy chasing a
dog from a flock of chickens. The dog barked, chickens cackled, feathers flew.
Not much of a memory, but there it was.