Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [112]
Something small smacked Sasha in the face. He batted at it with a yell, and found himself with a handful of paper bird.
“—speak of the devil and it shall appear,” said Sergei in a voice heavy with irony.
“Bah, I need a light now!” Hoping he wouldn’t somehow hurt or insult the bird, Sasha held it carefully in his teeth while he fumbled through his pack in the dark, looking for his fire-striker and the tiny lantern he had bought.
Suddenly it became much easier to see, and he dug through his things for a good long moment before a polite cough made him look up.
The Horse held some sort of glowing ball between his long ears.
Sheepishly, Sasha stopped going through his pack, took the bird out of his mouth, and let it unfold. He peered at the tiny writing, shaking his head, until Sergei somehow made the ball glow brighter.
“Saints! How can she write so small?” Carefully, he puzzled through the words. Some of it repeated what he already had learned from the Queen’s scholar. But one thing was completely new.
“This Jinn was imprisoned in a bottle, she says,” he told the others. “One of the maidens was there when it was released by her master. She thinks the bottle has the spell to imprison him again on it, and perhaps—” he felt a sudden excitement “—perhaps even the Jinn’s True Name!”
“None of us are mages, to force the thing back into its bottle,” said Gina doubtfully.
“You won’t need to be a magician if you have the thing’s True Name,” said Sergei decisively. “Even a child could command it by its True Name.”
“They’re hunting for the bottle now,” Sasha continued. “She thinks that they are all safe for now, and says not to make any attempts to rescue them until they find the bottle.”
“That makes good sense,” Sergei said, as Sasha stared at the tiny heart at the end of the message, and felt his cheeks growing hot. And not just his cheeks. It was a good thing it was dark….
Even in the middle of terrible danger, she was thinking about him.
He felt amply rewarded for the way he had handled the Queen.
Then, as he watched, the ink slowly faded from the page, and the now-blank paper seemed to wait, expectantly, for him to fill it.
“Should I send it back?” he asked the others, looking up.
“No,” Sergei said immediately. “It’s too dangerous. If that Jinn can sense spells, every time the bird goes out or comes back, he will know.”
Sasha looked down at the blank paper in his hand. “Wait for my answer,” he told it firmly.
The paper shivered as if a breeze was about to pick it up. Then, slowly, it refolded itself and a paper bird lay quietly in his hand.
Sasha searched for a place that was safe to put it, and finally settled on folding it inside a piece of paper, which he put inside the coin pouch that he emptied of coins, and put that inside a stocking, which he carefully folded up, folded the second one around it, and wrapped the bundle inside his spare shirt, which went into his rucksack. If the bird could get out of that, it would be because The Tradition had decided it should.
Sergei clapped his ears together and the globe of light vanished. “I’ll be going,” he said, with a nod of determination. “So don’t worry, Sasha, I’ll find a way to get to her and tell her the bird isn’t coming back yet. You keep track of those Copper Mountain miners. We’ll need to make sure that when they break through, the girls have that bottle, know the spell or at least the Jinn’s True Name.”
With that, the Little Humpback Horse turned and galloped off, except that instead of galloping down the slope, each step took him higher and higher into the air, until at last, he vanished from sight.
They all stared after him in silence for a long time.
Then the Wolf said, genially, “Well, Prince Fool, I don’t suppose you thought about how you’re going to spend the night on the mountain, did you?”
“Uh,” Sasha admitted, sheepishly. “No—”
Maybe the bottle isn’t actually in the Castle at all. That had been Katya’s first thought on waking, and she had hurried into her clothing, made an excuse