Exile. Part 12

She mounted, and he swung up behind her.

"Giddyap," he called, and they launched into motion. I shouldn't have taken her in there, he chastised himself. But something, something deep inside him, had wanted her to understand what was happening in that law office, and the impact it had over all the people struggling to make their way north.

"Who was the other man?" she asked, her back stiff.

Robert knew there might be a danger in talking, if someone came after them and overheard their voices. But there was a far greater danger in her choosing to return to the city. They had to circle the entire basin, and he had to convince her, somehow, that she could not save that child. "The man with the rope was a bounty hunter," he replied, "probably hired by someone on the other side of the Gate to track down a runaway."

"A runaway from what? They called the boy ... I'm not sure."

"A kuro. It's something people do on the frontier." Robert tried to describe the practice as calmly as he had first heard it explained, though his gut rebelled. "It's dangerous, being orphaned on the frontier. There's nothing to fall back on. No schools or orphanages that can take in children. If a family doesn't make it, then it's up to the neighbors or acquaintances, if they are willing. An older youth, of course, can make his or her own way. Find work. But a child as young as that boy back there, if no one takes him, has basically only two choices: to starve or sell himself as a kuro."

Aurelia's fingers dug into his wrist, just above the reins. "You're telling me that boy is a slave."

Robert kept his grip firm. Yes, the boy was a slave, no matter what the law said. There was no practical difference between that boy's life and slavery. "In exchange for someone promising to provide a living for him-or her-no matter what quality of life that might be, the child offers his or her service."

"For how long?"

She was not swallowing any of this. He loved that about her. Only a handful of people Robert knew, his mother among them, reacted so strongly to the concept of kuros. There was, after all, the dreadful alternative. Starvation was a hard death.

"Legally, for the rest of his or her life." Robert gently brought his chin onto her shoulder. "Though I've never seen a kuro over fifteen years old."

"They run away." Her tone rang with justice.

He wished he could let her believe that. It would make it easier for him to keep her here, safe on Horizon. But those children deserved to have the truth told. "More often, they're sold into an apprenticeship." He lifted his chin and lowered his voice. "Or shot."

Her body shuddered.

"For stealing property," Robert rushed to explain, "or breaking a contract. Either is a legal defense. It is," he said, referring to the entire practice, "exactly as awful as you think it is."

She was choking. "Slavery." Her voice vibrated. "Tyralt has never allowed slavery."

He knew she was reciting one of the Rules, one of the tenets Tyralt had been built upon, taught in every cla.s.sroom across the kingdom.

"My father cannot condone this." She was shaking.

"He hasn't ended it."

"Does he know about it? Do you know if he knows?!"

Why would His Majesty care about a handful of orphaned children out on the frontier? That was how Mr. Vantauge had responded to Robert's identical question; he had said it bitterly, making it clear that he thought the king should care, but that it was not reality, and his son would have to learn to live with that.

The young woman in front of Robert looked as though she had no intention whatsoever of living with it.

"It's against the law," she said, reaching for Horizon's bridle.

Robert clutched the reins with his right hand and grabbed her wrist with his other. "Not here."

"Yes, it is."

"Aurelia-"

"I'll go all the way back to the palace if I have to."

"So the guards can kill you in cold blood?" It was rough, his response, and if she hated him for it, that was fine.

She relinquished the bridle. He could see the moment when the truth hit her: that no amount of yelling or denial would save that boy's life.

But she was not like Robert's father. She did not absorb that reality and allow it to harden her.

Instead her body began to shake, as though physically rejecting the idea. "No," she whispered. Robert knew she was not answering his question. "No, no, no, no, no."

He reached for her, but she held him back.

For a moment he doubted whether he should have told her, whether he should have brought her north, whether he knew her at all. Then her empty fingers clenched into a fist, the knuckles of her hand white as she pressed it to her forehead. "I can't ...," she finally said. "I can't allow slavery to exist in Tyralt. I won't."

It was what he had needed to hear, not enough, but a statement of faith: that one day she would change things.

Her shaking turned to a shudder, and Robert wrapped her in his arms as she cried.

They rode north, breaking free of the Asyan Forest and entering the Fallchutes River Valley, here a wide, gra.s.sy plain in both directions; but this, Robert knew, was seduction. The valley was a wide mouth leading into a shrinking ravine known as the Crevice, until ultimately only the steep mountain rock of the Quartian Shelf would line the dramatic plunge of the Fallchutes River into the frontier.

At first, wary of followers, he kept her to the less-traveled eastern side of the river. Then when he had no other choice, he spent his seventh gold piece, an exorbitant fee, hiring a ferry. He and Aurelia joined the flow of other travelers headed north, those fortunate enough to have escaped the claws of the Lion. This did not, however, ensure anonymity.

Her Royal Highness seemed driven to strike up as many conversations as she could. He was stunned by the revelations she obtained from people she had barely met, people running from debt and poverty, loss and oppression. Robert found himself torn. He admired her skill and desire to learn, but he had hoped the would-be settlers would provide her with sufficient camouflage.

She betrayed that hope at every stop. At Fort Laiz, she exposed a trader for trying to sell a lame horse. This was followed by a heated discussion on water rights at the Fyonna Trading Post. And then a conflict at Kezlar Township concerning the practice of selling flawed materials to travelers.

Robert valued her need to fight injustice. But her failure to blend in terrified him.

By the time they rode up to Fort Jenkins, he longed to detour around and head straight for the Gate. However, darkness had fallen. And the high, rapid sound of a set of pipes and the spirited romp of fiddles skirled through the warm summer air, joined by the joyous shouts, stomps, and whistles of a dance in high swing.

Before Robert had even finished hitching the stallion, Aurelia had been whirled away into the festivities. She was laughing, her head thrown back, excitement rampant on her face. A far cry from the elegant, fuming princess he had witnessed less than three months ago at her sister's coming-out party.

The thought set Robert stumbling, and he seated himself on a rare open seat, the unoccupied half of a hay bale. She was so alive. Kicking her heels. Twirling. Not at all concerned with how people would view her.

Though here, just as everywhere else, people were drawn to her. Not just the men, who had begun to form a line to dance with her, but the women and children as well, pulled in by the sheer joy on Aurelia's face.

She was a stunning revelation in contrasts. One day fighting mad, the next spinning in glory. It was right, he thought, that she could see both the beauty and the starkness of this region. So many people shuttered themselves from one or the other, letting the darkness embitter them or the light blind them to the flaws. Somehow she saw both.

She isn't a Falcon anymore, he realized. For years he had called her that, a nickname only he had used. And cherished. But not once on this entire journey had he felt compelled to refer to her by the old moniker. There was something royal in the name and strong, but not ... free.

Not as free as the young woman dancing before him.

"H'llo there." A man in a blue vest and c.o.c.ked hat interrupted Robert's thoughts, blocking his view. "Would ya be willin' to give up yer seat fer a grandmother?" He pointed toward a slender woman with a long white braid down her back and a catacomb of laugh lines on her face. Her foot was tapping, and her arms were swinging to the music.

"I told ya that's not needed," she said.

But Robert stood at once, and the man disappeared.

The woman did not sit down. "Sorry 'bout my grandson. He's off his head at the moment for a piece of gold petticoat."

Robert slipped into his frontier dialect. "That's all right, ma'am."

"Lad like you, what'er you doin' sittin' over here on a hay bale?" she chuckled. "Find yer own shade of petticoat."

Robert's eyes went right to Aurelia.

"Ah, she's a red one in a brown facade, isn't she, boy? Line's a mite long, though."

Robert sighed.

"Course there's a fine blue one over there"-the woman pointed at a girl with a sapphire skirt swirling up around her coffee-dark legs-"and a yellow charmer over there." She motioned toward a pet.i.te, dimpled figure spinning with her arms over her head.

Aurelia's laugh sailed out from the dance floor, and Robert's eyes instinctively returned.

"Mm-hmm," the woman chortled. "Course you could jus' join the line. Or then maybe you could try dancin' by with one those other petticoats on yer arm and see if the color yer lookin' for don't bend in yer direction."

"Might at that." Robert grinned and asked the woman her name.

"Well now, most folks refer to me these days as Grandma, but was a time when I was Stella May and a fine shade of petticoat myself."

Robert held out his palm. "May I have yer hand fer a dance, Stella May?"

She burst into her own special ring of laughter and accepted his offer, then led him straight out into the center of the fray. "And where are ya from, lad, and which way are ya headed?"

He dropped into a quick, well-rehea.r.s.ed response, saying he had been a courier for a wealthy man and was intent on making his own way on the frontier. A new life.

"So this is yer first trip north then, lad?" Her eyebrows quirked at him.

He nodded.

Aurelia swirled past without glancing his way.

"Myself now," said the older woman, "I've been across the Gate four times. Spent almost a decade on the frontier."

The song stirred itself up to a high finale, then broke, but the woman's feet were still tapping, so Robert twirled her into the next tune.

Aurelia had moved on to her fourth partner.

"Ya know, lad," the woman said, "there's lots of folks as head to the frontier to start new lives. When I first went over the Gate, the talk was we'd all starve and end up trapped over there on our lonesomes, but every year there's more folks. Even talk 'bout a princess."

Robert almost ran into the man playing the pipes, an act which elicited a slur of notes and a rude shout from the musician, but the woman just laughed and continued, "'Twas all the twitter two months ago when folks were sayin' she'd run off with that boy from the palace. But then, when they started sayin' he wasn't from the palace a'tall but from the frontier, well, you know that made fer all manner of speculation. Course most folks don't think she'd have the wherewithal to make it north. They think she prob'ly run off with her frontier boy to some fancy court somewhere."

That was a good rumor. He should encourage it.

Aurelia's feet danced past once again, and Robert tried very hard not to look up. Partner number six.

"Now me," Stella continued, "I like to imagine, and I think there's a chance Her Royal Highness might head across the Gate fer the same reason as every other gal. Jus' wantin' to make a new life."

Aurelia's laughter sailed again, and Robert gave in to the compulsion to seek her out.

She was spinning on what was now the opposite side of the dance floor, just in front of the fiddlers.

Then a large man wearing a fur belt with a chain strung through it grabbed her by the arm.

Robert's spine stiffened at the forceful contact.

Stella May followed his gaze. "Reckon that was inevitable," she said, shaking her head.

"What?" Robert's steps slowed.

"Jenkins." She nodded at Aurelia's new partner. "Founder of this here fort. And used to gettin' what he wants without waitin' his turn."

Fort Jenkins. Well, that made sense.

"Don't know as how I'd let him take my petticoat out for a spin," said the woman. She elbowed Robert. "Ya might want to make this a good time t'interduce yerself."

He took a step in Aurelia's direction, then turned back. "'Twas a real pleasure, Stella May."

"And a real pleasure bein' Stella May again," she said, "'specially talkin' to a courier like yerself from central Tyralt, with such a fine frontier accent."

Curse it!

She held onto his arm for a moment. "And jus' so ya know, lad, ya shouldn't think nothin' of my imagination. Mos' folks don't listen to the meanderin's of an old lady's mind anyhow."

No use for regret.

And no time. Jenkins had removed his hat and was holding it lower than appropriate on Aurelia's backside.

Robert plunged into a gap in the dance s.p.a.ce and hurried through the romping figures. He had to pull up behind the wild capers of a man dancing with a jug of frontier whiskey.

Just behind Aurelia. "I don't care how many walls you've built with those hands," she was saying. "You will remove them from mine."

Jenkins chuckled. "I'm thinkin' a pretty gal like you don't have any walls. Course I'm willin' to check." His left hand reached for her skirt.

Robert grabbed the hilt of his sword.

But Aurelia spun, wrenching herself out of the man's grasp.

Jenkins tried to follow. And crashed head-on into the capering man's whiskey jug.

Gla.s.s shattered, shouts rose on all sides, and wild applause erupted from the crowd.

We will not, Robert thought, be pa.s.sing the night at Fort Jenkins.