Chapter Six In Which Everyone Lies a Lot
Chapter Six
In Which Everyone Lies a Lot
I shivered. The air had grown bitter cold, frigid as the plain of ice at the top of the world. My damp clothes had turned stiff and cracked when I moved.
Sam swayed on his feet, half-faint from shock and blood loss. Now I was the one lending a supportive hand.
“Is everyone all right?” the blur asked, flickering back and forth like a child who couldn’t keep still, its words as rapid as its movements.
“Take your leg off, Harry,” Bloody Knee said, limping up to join the rest of the group. “We can hardly see you. Where’s Kit got to?”
“Here.” Another masked man in green stepped from the trees.
“Good work with the wind there.” Bloody Knee’s Ecossic accent was lighter than the others’, with the faintest hint of a Tailliziani lilt. I wondered if he’d been in the country longer. “Max, put your hat on before we die of a chill.”
“Oh, right,” said another of them. “Sorry.” He pulled out a bycoket hat, pointed in the front like a bird’s beak, and jammed it down slantwise on one side of his head until it covered his left ear. The air temperature immediately began to rise, the aching cold warming to a normal autumn chill.
The blur, in the meantime, shifted a bit and resolved into yet another man in green, one leg detached from his body and clutched in his hands.
Well. I’d seen stranger things.
Looking around, I counted six of the masked men in green.
Half a dozen men who appeared astonishingly similar to one another, now that I took the time to study them more closely.
True, there were some obvious differences—one had a hat, one had a bow, one was holding his own leg—but they all were the exact same height and build.
They all had hair of the same flame-red hue, cut to the same length, and their complexions were the precise same shade of pale.
Six pairs of eyes shared the delicate blue of a forget-me-not.
Even the freckles beneath their domino masks speckled their cheeks in roughly similar patterns.
Their looks and speech marked them as Ecossic. They could have been Liam’s identical sextuplet cousins. Why were they here?
Masked men in the woods were usually robbers.
Which meant I couldn’t trust them simply because they’d rescued me.
You would not believe the lengths some villains are willing to go in order to get you to lower your guard.
Child-eating witches will swear up and down that they are innocent old women who happen to admire the architectural properties of gingerbread.
Wolves can make a surprisingly convincing case that they are your grandmother.
Well, ordinary wolves can. If they had eight eyes and legs, that would be a bit of a giveaway.
I didn’t have the faintest idea who these people were or what they wanted. And if life under my stepmother’s rule had taught me nothing else, it was that I shouldn’t put my faith in anyone without knowing what their motives were first.
“I’m a little scratched up, and so is, uh, the lady here,” Bloody Knee said, indicating me. “I think Sam got the worst of it.”
“I’ll be fine,” Sam murmured, shifting more weight onto me. I grunted, my knees nearly buckling. “I just need…”
I eased Sam onto a fallen log. “Stitches,” I said. “Rather a lot of them.”
Sam mumbled something incoherent in response. His wounds were deep, especially the ones low on his left side. They looked bad—far worse than the shallow cuts on my shoulders or the ones on Bloody Knee’s leg if he was still walking on it without wincing.
“Does anyone have any alcohol?” I asked. “The stronger the better.”
“Aye.” One of them passed me a flask. “We cuid a’ dae wi’ a wee dram efter that.”
I could tell which one that was, at least. “It’s not for drinking.
” I took the needle and thread out of my dress pocket.
Good thing I’d kept them there rather than storing them in the chest with everything else.
Just in case I was ever attacked by wolves.
It’s always a good idea to pay attention to my brother-in-law’s cryptic comments.
I used whatever was in the flask to sterilize my sewing tools as well as I was able. It smelled like kerosene. Clem tutted at the waste.
“It lowers the risk of infection,” I said. “Take your shirt off, Sam.”
“No!” Bloody Knee said. “He…needs to keep warm, surely. So he doesn’t go into shock.”
Spare me from the ignorant medical opinions of amateurs. But the whole lower half of Sam’s shirt was so shredded it hardly mattered, so I didn’t bother to argue. Better not to lose the time.
I poured the remaining contents of the flask over Sam’s wounds. He hissed in pain. When they were as clean as I could reasonably get them, I put the needle against his skin.
Push it through at a ninety-degree angle, close to the side of the wound. Don’t go too far in; keep it just above the fat. Rotate clockwise. The needle should come out straight across from the first hole. Make a loose knot, and then tighten it until the flesh just closes.
Sam clenched his jaw when the needle went in but made no further sound. The others crowded close, watching suspiciously, but relaxed when it became apparent I knew what I was doing.
“What a mess.” The man in the bycoket hat shook his head. “I told you we shouldn’t have split up. And we should never have left the others behind.”
“If we hadn’t split up, we might never have found her,” Bloody Knee replied.
The others? What others? Move down a quarter inch, and make the second stitch. And then the third. Were there more of them somewhere? How many identical masked men could there be?
“Who have we found, come to that?” said the man holding his leg in his arms, hopping forward to get a better look at me.
He glanced over my bedraggled, bloodied clothes and the mess of pumpkin entrails in my hair.
“That’s a pretty red cloak she’s wearing beneath all the mud, but it’s hardly a silken gown. Is this really the princess?”
“Nah, she isnae,” said Clem.
“She might be,” Sam muttered.
“Why don’t we ask her?” Bloody Knee said, turning to me. “Who are you?”
“Before I answer,” I responded, carefully pulling thread through flesh, “who on earth are you?”
Bloody Knee’s eyebrows crawled up above his mask like two indignant scarlet caterpillars. “We’re the people who just saved your life. It’s a bit ungracious to refuse us your name.”
I tied off a stitch and gestured for his sword. “Help me with this? I didn’t bring scissors.”
He drew his blade and gently sawed through the thread.
“Thank you,” I said. “For everything. I’m grateful for your timely arrival, truly.
But that being said”—I took a deep breath—“you are a group of armed men. You appear to have been roving through the forest looking for a wealthy noblewoman. I would very much like to know your intentions before we proceed any further.”
There was a moment of silence while they blinked at me, and then Hat On Ear burst out laughing so hard he had to sit on a stump.
“She thinks we want to rob her!” he managed to gasp out as the others turned their perplexed stares on him.
“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s the masks, really.” I began stitching anew, working on another deep gash. Sam’s fingers tightened on the log.
My suspicions had been eased somewhat by the gales of hysterical laughter, but the possibility remained that it was all a ploy.
“We’re not highwaymen,” Bloody Knee said. “We have no intention of robbing anyone.”
“I see.” I didn’t add that theft wasn’t my greatest worry.
Abduction seemed far more likely. Saving my life would have had little point if all they wanted was jewelry, but a corpse has no value to kidnappers seeking a ransom.
Or, of course, there was a chance they wanted to take me to their lair and force me to keep house for them.
That would be a problem; my stepmother might believe I’d gone with them voluntarily, to avoid the marriage.
Direr possibilities existed as well. I couldn’t discount them. But the men in green had made no threats, and if I was any judge of character, they didn’t strike me as the worst sort of villain.
“We’re King Gervase’s huntsmen,” Bloody Knee told me. “Now, are you the princess or not?”
“Huntsmen,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“So you’re out for a hunt then, I suppose?” I looked up from my stitchery and glanced around. “Without horses, hounds, or hawks.”
He hesitated only for a moment. “We were questing for the stag.”
“All six of you.” Looking for tracks was normally a task for a single person and a dog.
“And isn’t that usually done before breakfast?
” Overhead, the light gray clouds had dimmed to dark gray with the arrival of twilight.
I turned my attention back to the task at hand.
I needed to finish while I could still see what I was doing.
“Our hunting methods are unorthodox but”—he gestured toward the piles of dead spider wolves—“very effective.”
A fair point. I nodded in acknowledgment. “And are the masks also part of your unorthodox approach?”
“Masks,” said Detachable Leg smoothly, “are the latest fashion at the court of Tailliz.”
“Really. So before I arrive, should I borrow one from you, so I can fit in?”
“It’s the latest court fashion we are trying to start,” he amended. “It’ll catch on eventually.”
“This is beside the point,” Bloody Knee said. “We don’t have to explain ourselves to you. We are duly appointed officials of the king. So, I will ask one final time—are you the princess?”
They were hiding something, that much was obvious. Their story was so full of holes that a real hunting party could have ridden straight through it. Which meant I had to decide whether I would be better served by telling the truth or by matching their lies with one of my own.