In Fatal Fashion #2
“Lord Vanu expressed his intention to return the lowland boy bride to his own people, which Lord Faru interpreted as an order to himself to have the young man ejected from Umtúshta in fatal fashion.”
“What?”
“Thrown over the wall,” Barda supplied.
“What? No! My lord, you cannot allow—”
“It didn’t happen,” Khatu cut in.
“We had a better idea,” said Barda smugly.
Padunu took up the account again to explain exactly how the brothers had heaved the boy through Vanu’s upstairs front window, including the detail, which he’d left out the first time, that the boy’s arms had been lashed to his sides with rope when they did it.
That part caught in Vanu’s mind. The boy had stolen the snake dagger and folded himself up in that cupboard while he was tied up?
Vanu missed most of the rest of what Padunu and Tirtu were saying because he was wondering how one could do that, and could he have done that—given a much larger cupboard—and coming to the conclusion that he couldn’t.
Though if he thought that someone was going to throw him over a fortress wall if he didn’t—and if he’d been younger and more attached to his life …
Desperation did give you surprising powers.
“Right, let’s split up and search the village,” Tirtu was saying. “They’ve got to be somewhere. I take it, my lord, they’re not in your house?”
Vanu shook his head. If the other lowlander was missing too, it probably meant that the boy had gone back for him. So they wouldn’t be inside Vanu’s compound.
All the same, Vanu didn’t join in the hunt.
He left that to the other men and went back inside, barring his door behind him, to rejoin the girls.
He wasn’t sure what to tell them; he didn’t want to alarm them, didn’t want to disappoint them, and didn’t want to keep them in the dark, either.
It turned out that Mikhi had already given her sisters a fragmentary and confusing account of what was going on, so they were all alarmed, upset, and still pretty much in the dark when he arrived, which made his decision easy.
He explained everything entirely from the beginning.
It was Susami who said fiercely, “Faru cannot be allowed to do things like this to us. We took the decision to make the boy part of our family, and Faru tried to have him killed. It is not right.”
That was both touching—because Vanu had thought Susami was the least certain about accepting his bride—and shaming, because he should have more control over Faru. He’d known that.
“It’s Faru’s stronghold,” Mikhi pointed out. “He’s never going to stop thinking he can do what he wants unless Da goes to war with him, and he can’t, because who’s he got to back him up? Me and Tirtu and the goats?”
“Stop it!” said Susami. “Stop it. Nobody is going to war with the people we live with. I am just talking about what is right. Da needs to marry the lowland boy right away so that Faru cannot try such a thing again.”
That wasn’t quite how Vanu had expected her to see it, but she made a good point.
They were interrupted then, as Vanu heard shouting from outside the compound. Evidently Mikhi could hear it too, because she turned to him and asked, “What are they saying?”
“Catch him and I’ve got him,” Vanu signed as he sprang up from his chair. “I’ll be back. Bar the door after me.”
He ran out into the street. The noise was coming from the gathering place. He wove between the trees by Tirtu’s house and emerged to see the scene unfolding.
They had caught the lowlander guide, the young man who had come up the mountain with Vanu’s bride and been shot in the leg by Khatu. There was no sign of the bride himself.
They’d caught the guide because the man could barely walk, and yet of course Khatu and Barda were crowing and congratulating each other about it as if it was the stuff of sagas.
Barda was holding the guide down on the pavement, though it was clear he wasn’t in any condition to fight his way free.
Faru had just come out of the great house, probably drawn by the shouting as Vanu had been.
“We found him hiding in a root cellar!” Khatu announced.
“He says he doesn’t know where the bride is,” said Barda. “I’ve tried hitting him a few times, but it hasn’t helped. Should I try some more?” He glanced hopefully from Vanu to his elder brother to his father.
“Throw him over the wall,” said Faru coldly. He looked directly across the gathering place at Vanu.
“I don’t think that’ll—” Barda started.
There was a startled noise from Tirtu, who was standing under the trees to Vanu’s left.
“Let him go,” said a low, clear voice that Vanu had never heard before.
The boy must have dropped down out of the tree onto Tirtu. He clung to Tirtu’s back like a monkey, and the snake-handled dagger he’d taken from Vanu’s room was poised expertly at Tirtu’s throat.
There might have been no one else in the gathering place, as far as Vanu was concerned. He barely even saw Tirtu.
The boy—he wasn’t a boy, he was a young man, and he was not dressed in women’s clothes now but in some oversized castoffs from one of the other men.
The way he had caught hold of his hostage, his grip on the dagger, everything about it was so skilled, so beautiful.
He knew exactly what he was doing. Vanu wished he had seen the moment when he dropped out of the tree.
He had tied back his hair, but the thong he had used must have been worn out, and it snapped, sending his hair tumbling. It was ridiculously long, past his waist, and he had to shake it out of his face, a tiny motion. That instant of distraction was all Vanu needed. He moved.