Treason Page 0,10

I? So I let your tunic to fall open."

I nodded slowly.

"I thought ye might not want to be known by the soldier, lady. And another bit of news. I had to turn your horses loose."

I sat up quickly. "My horses? Where are they?"

"Soldier found them down the road, a long way, all empty. I hid your things under my own bed."

"Why, woman? How can I travel now?" I felt betrayed, though even then I suspected the woman had saved my life.

"Have ye no feet? And I think ye'll not be wanting to go far now where horses can go."

"And, where do you think I'm going?"

She smiled. "Ach, ye've a lovely face, lady. Pretty enough to be a boy or girl, and young, and fair, like a king's child. Happy the woman to have you for a daughter, or the man to have you for a son."

I said nothing then.

"I think," she said, "that there be no place for you now but the forest of Ku Kuei."

I laughed. "So I can go in and never come out?"

"That," she said with a smile, "be what we tell outlanders and lowlanders. But we be knowing right enow that a man can go in a good few leagues and gather roots and berries and other fruit and come out safe. Though odd things do happen there, and a wise man skirts the edge."

I was wide awake now. "How did you know about me?"

"Ye've got royalty in every move ye make, every word ye say, boy. Or girl. Which be ye? I care little. I only know I have little love for the godlike men of the plain who think they rule all Muellerfolk. If ye be running from the king, ye have my blessing and my arm of help."

I had never suspected that any citizens of Mueller would feel that way about my father. Now it was helpful, though I wondered how I'd feel about her attitude if I were still heir.

"I've packed ye a bundle easy enough to heft," she said. "And fooded and watered it, hoping ye like cold mutton."

I liked it better than starving.

"Don't eat the white berries on oaky-looking bushes in the forest, they'll drop ye dead in a minute. And the fruit with wrinkly bulges, don't even touch that, and be careful not to step on a smoky-yellow fungus, or it'll plague you for years."

"I still don't even know if I'm going into the forest.

"And where else, then, if not there?"

I got up and walked to the door. Dissent was high and dim, with clouds across her face. Freedom hadn't risen yet. "How soon must I leave?"

"As soon as Freedom come," she said. "Then I lead you afoot to the edge of the forest, and there ye stay until just before sunrise. Then off and in. Head east but about a third to the south till ye touch a lake. Then they say the true road to safety is due south, into Jones. Follow no paths. Follow no man shape or woman shape ye see. And pay no heed to day and night."

She brought out woman's clothing from a trunk and held it up to me. It was shabby enough, and old, but modest and virginal.

"My own," she said, "though I misdoubt I ever did fit it on my old corpse, what's swoll up with fat these last year and ten." She laughed, and put it in my pack.

Freedom rose, and she led me out the door and along a path leading due east from her house, and not much traveled by. She chattered as we went.

"What be the need of troopery at all, ask I? They flash a bit of hard metal, dip it in another's blood, and then what? Is the world all changed? Do men now fly Offworld, are we of Treason now freed by all the bloodshed? I think we be like dogs that fight and kill over a bone, and what has the winner got? Just a bone. And no hope of any more after that. Just the one bone."

Then an arrow swicked out of the darkness and into her throat and she dropped dead in front of me.

Two soldiers stepped into the moonlight, arrows ready. I ducked just as one let fly. He missed. The second hit me in the shoulder.

But by then my pack was to the ground, and I buried my dagger in the first man's heart, then kicked the other to the ground. There were ways of fighting that they