In Fatal Fashion
“He what?” Faru cried. “By whom?”
“By your sons, my lord. Before I had the opportunity to stop them. Barda climbed up the exterior of Lord Vanu’s house and …
heaved the boy through the upstairs front window.
Thereby expressly disobeying your orders, my lord.
The boy remained alive and, as far as I could tell, substantially uninjured. ”
Vanu couldn’t suppress—didn’t try to suppress—a broad grin. Mikhi looked up at him.
“He’s all right after all?” she signed. “Something about a window?”
“Is this true?” Faru demanded, glaring at Vanu.
“He’s alive,” Vanu signed to Mikhi. “He’s at our house.” To Faru he replied, “If Padunu says so, I’m sure it is.”
Mikhi repeated that aloud without missing a beat. She made it sound exactly as dry as Vanu had intended. She was so good at this.
“Insolent child,” Faru hissed.
“Don’t speak to my daughter like that.”
“Da, do I really have to translate that?”
“No.”
Padunu, apparently sensing that there was some insult to him implied in all this, said stiffly, “I assure you, Lord Faru, I have been strictly truthful. As I always am.”
“Hello, Da, Lord Vanu. Padunu! You’re back so soon?” Khatu came strolling out of the great house, Barda on his heels, their mother following like a herd dog behind a couple of wayward sheep.
“I have informed your father of your disobedience,” Padunu announced.
“We knew you would,” said Khatu cheerfully. “How did you like our present, Lord Vanu?”
“He looks like he liked it,” said Barda. That must have been because Vanu was still grinning.
“We just thought it would be a waste,” Khatu went on. “Chopping him up and throwing him over the wall the way you wanted us to do.”
“We thought you’d reconsider if you got a chance to really get to know him.” Barda made a jerking motion with his hips, just in case his meaning wasn’t clear.
“So we chucked him in your window.”
“Expressly flouting your father’s orders!” cried Padunu.
“Nah, we were flouting Lord Vanu’s orders. Hey, Lord Vanu? That’s why we’re begging his pardon now.”
Most of the time, Khatu Gukhártu displayed all the shrewdness of a wood mushroom, but he had his moments.
“They weren’t my orders,” said Vanu.
“Oh, whoops!” said Khatu. “Da, you’re lucky, then. Hey? If we’d done what you said, Lord Vanu would be mad.”
You could almost hear Faru grinding his teeth. He said nothing.
“So what did you think?” Barda persisted. “How did you like him?”
“Haven’t seen him,” said Vanu aloud. He didn’t like to make Mikhi translate any part of a conversation about his enjoyment of the lowland boy. “Been out.”
Khatu and Barda exchanged surprised looks.
“Oh, we thought you were home when we made the delivery.”
“When?”
“About noon.”
Well, that was peculiar. It was mid-afternoon now.
Noon was about when Vanu had heard the brothers arguing with Padunu outside his door.
If they’d put the boy in through the upstairs front window—that was his bedchamber.
He’d been in there. He’d gone up to put away blankets, not long after hearing the commotion outside, and the boy had not been there.
Had he? This was all so absurd already …
Vanu gave Khatu and Barda a long, sceptical look. Barda flinched visibly, and Khatu’s bright grin dimmed a little.
“Padunu can tell you—we did do it,” said Barda.
“He must still be in there,” Khatu suggested.
“Scared to death, the poor thing,” said Gurti reprovingly.
Vanu looked at Mikhi. “I will go look.”
“What are we doing?” she asked as she followed him back toward his house. The others were trailing behind. “I didn’t understand a lot of that.”
“We’re going to look for my bride.”
“The bride hunt! I’ve always wanted to do that. I can help, can’t I?”
“Of course.”
He was enjoying himself, enjoying the absurdity of it, Khatu’s antics amusing as usual, Faru’s discomfort always satisfying. And the lowland boy was not dead after all.
“Hey, Padunu,” Barda was saying, “you’re the expert—does it still count as the bride hunt if it’s in the groom’s house?”
“I will not dignify that with an answer!” The shaman could never pass up an opportunity to talk, so he immediately contradicted himself by saying, “The very premise of the sacred tradition of the bride hunt dictates … ”
They had reached Vanu’s door. He turned to the following crowd of Gukhártus and signed, “Wait. Here.”
He thought they probably all understood that well enough without translation, but Mikhi repeated it anyway in her best battlefield roar, and that was highly satisfying. He went into the house with her, grinning.
“Where did they put him?” she asked.
“Through my front window.” He looked up the stairs toward his bedchamber.
“Did you not notice him?” Mikhi gave him an incredulous look.
Vanu made a face. “I don’t think I am that far gone yet.”
He jogged up the stairs and opened the door to his bedchamber. The room certainly looked as empty as it had when he’d come to put away the blankets. There was no way the boy was in here—was there?
Vanu was a warrior, accustomed to depending on the keenness of his senses.
And though it had been three years since he’d needed to defend himself, his senses had always been keen—surely he hadn’t decayed so much that he wouldn’t notice someone in the same room?
Unless that person was very well hidden.
He noticed again that the dagger belonging to the leader of the Order of Sworn Defenders of the Divine King—a stupid name that was supposed to be a great secret—was missing from its nail on the wall.
But that had been gone earlier, and he’d meant to ask Mikhi if she had it.
She used it sometimes for target practice; it was a beautifully made knife, just the right size and weight for her.
Almost as light, in fact, as those little knives the lowland boy had been carrying when he fell off the wall.
If he had been in here, and had taken that dagger, where had he gone after?
Vanu scanned the room carefully. There was nowhere for a full-grown man to hide in here, no long hangings or alcoves or large pieces of furniture, just the bed on the floor, the chest full of blankets, a couple of baskets, and the cupboard.
The cupboard? Vanu looked at the lower doors built into the wall.
The boy was small, but could he actually have folded himself up inside there?
He approached with an odd stirring of … something—not unease, more like excitement.
He slid one of the doors open with his foot.
It was empty except for a moth-eaten cushion wedged right into the back, exactly as it would have been if something else had recently been taking up all the rest of the space.
So he’d been thrown through the window, stolen a knife—maybe—and hidden in a cupboard. Then he’d gone—where? Vanu had left the house. The boy could be anywhere in the compound. Or he could have gone back out the window into the village. It all depended on what he was after.
Mikhi appeared in the doorway. “Did you find him?”
Vanu shook his head. “Where are Susami and Atari?”
“Dunno. Want me to find them?”
“No. Come with me.”
The stirring of excitement was gone. If the boy had taken either of his girls hostage … There was no reason to believe he’d have done that, but he’d had the opportunity, if he’d wanted it. Vanu didn’t know what he wanted.
Vanu descended the stairs at speed and strode out the back door of the house. Mikhi ran to keep up. Across the yard, Susami and Atari were both sitting in the shade on their balcony, Susami spinning, Atari reading from a scroll.
“Da?” Mikhi said aloud. “What’s the matter?”
“Probably nothing,” he signed back. He looked to see that she had her usual knife tucked into her sash. “Stay with your sisters for now.”
She nodded smartly. She could always tell when he was giving an order.
He’d do a sweep of the compound, but the first thing was to bar the front door of his house. He headed back inside.
Tirtu burst through the door just as Vanu reached it. Vanu stepped back, and Tirtu jumped, startled. And he had obviously been rattled to begin with.
“They’re missing, my lord!” he gasped.
“Who?”
“The lowlanders! Both of them. Your boy and the other one—they’re not in the round house where we put them, they’re not anywhere! What’s going on? What are the Gukhártu boys and Shaman Padunu doing outside your house?”
Vanu sighed and rubbed his thumb along the scar on his right cheek—something Darma had once told him he did when he was thinking about something that annoyed him.
Earth’s heart, he missed Darma.
“Come.” He gestured to Tirtu and strode back out through the front door.
Khatu, Barda, and Padunu were standing in the street looking varying shades of foolish. Gurti stood a small distance away looking stern. Faru was not there, which annoyed Vanu further. This whole situation was primarily Faru’s fault, and he wasn’t even pretending to attempt to put it right.
Vanu pointed at Khatu and Barda, gestured toward Tirtu, and said, “Explain.”
“Uh,” said Khatu, looking like a wood mushroom that had been asked to lead a reconnaissance mission.
“Lord Vanu’s changed his mind about the wedding,” said Barda, with a random brightness.
“I know that!” Tirtu snapped. “At least—my lord? Changed your mind how? You don’t mean you’ve changed it again? Changed it back? You do still want to go through with it?”
“Of course he does!” Khatu chimed in helpfully.
“Well, I knew that. But the bride is missing.”
“We knew that,” said Barda.
“There has been a grave misunderstanding.” Padunu spoke in a loud, shaman-performing-a-ritual voice that startled everyone except Vanu, who had seen him drawing a deep breath to do it. “If I may elucidate the situation.”
Khatu, Barda, and Tirtu gave him blank looks. They probably didn’t know what elucidate meant. Vanu knew that it meant Padunu was going to talk more than anybody wanted him to.