Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [90]
“Would you?” she asked.
“No,” Arvid said. “I might knock them on the head enough that they’d be silent. Put them in a pantry or something.” He thought a moment longer. “Say the boys were in the School, as they ought to have been, and heard something—saw something—maybe my things being taken from my room. They’re discovered—maybe they didn’t think to conceal themselves. It’s not easy to silence two boys and then carry them any distance. I’ll wager they’re still in the School barracks.”
“Nobody’s reported anything.”
“Let me look.”
As they came into the forecourt, Arvid called over two boys carrying a barrel slung from a pole. “When you don’t want to be found, where do you go?”
They glanced at each other, then at the Marshal-General.
“It’s important,” she said. “We think Baris and Tamis are hurt.”
“Well … there’s the back cellar. We’re not supposed to go there, but Baris found a trap-door.”
“Show me.”
There they found the two boys, bound and gagged, both with bruises suggesting they’d fought hard and unsuccessfully and been knocked unconscious. Tears had left streaky tracks down their dusty, bruised faces.
Baris, as soon as the gag was out, said, “It was a Marshal—a Marshal of Gird—I couldn’t believe—”
The other boy, smaller, said nothing; he seemed scarcely aware.
“Get him to the infirmary,” the Marshal-General said. She turned to Baris. Arvid had cut his hands free, and the boy was rubbing his wrists. “So, Baris, can you walk? Or shall we carry you upstairs for a good meal?”
“I—I can walk,” he said. He staggered with his first step, but his gait steadied. He accepted help on the stairs, but beyond the bruises and paleness, he seemed unharmed.
The Training Master insisted on his cleaning up before a meal, but soon enough he was seated in the Training Master’s office with a tray in front of him and the Marshal-General and Arvid seated on either side. While he attacked his food, the adults talked of other things.
As the color came back into the boy’s face and his eating slowed, the Marshal-General said, “Baris, can you tell us now what happened? You said a Marshal of Gird—do you know which one?”
“No, Marshal-General. It was my fault, anyway—”
“What was?”
“Tamis being involved. You know the older boys are in the upper bunks—he had the lower one. I woke up—I needed the pot—and as I was climbing down, I heard something—and I slipped and kicked Tam, by accident. He woke up. Then he heard it too.”
The rest of Baris’s story included seeing a grown man in a Marshal’s tabard in Arvid’s guest-room, stuffing Arvid’s clothes into his pack. The boys had watched; Baris had to keep shushing Tamis, who wanted to ask questions, but they’d been caught when the man came into the corridor. Before they could do anything, the man had knocked Tamis senseless; Baris, shocked to stillness for a moment, found himself gagged with a glove before he could cry out. He tried to struggle, but the man overpowered him with a few blows. A hand at his throat, and the next thing he knew, he was bound and gagged in the cellar, with Tamis beside him.
“Did you see anything distinctive about him?”
“No … well, he had something glittery around his neck.”
“Glittery?”
“I just saw it for a second, when he had my throat—a bit of it, anyway, where his shirt was open.”
“The necklace,” the Marshal-General said.
“I’m sure,” Arvid said. To Baris, he said, “You are lucky to have been found.”
“It was not luck,” Baris said. “It was Gird. I prayed, and I’m sure Tamis did, too. I knew someone would find us. How’s Tam?”
“In the infirmary,” Arvid said. “Luck came almost too late for him.”
“Gird came soon enough,” Baris said.
Arvid sighed. Apparently fear had driven the boy back