There was a collective gasp of surprise. Jerin glanced up and noticed that every eye was focused on the door to the dining room. He turned and found Princess Ren leaning on the doorjamb, watching him with a slight smile on her lips. The memory of her kisses burned suddenly across his senses, and he looked down.
Heria, Blush, and Leia slid between him and the princess, the set of their shoulders pure defiance.
"Heria." He turned her toward the cook fire. "The egg sandgla.s.s has run out. Get the eggs from the fire. Blush, start the potato pancakes now, so they"ll be hot with the eggs. Leia, run out to the barns and let your sisters know that breakfast will be in ten minutes."
"Jerin!" They protested in chorus, their eyes locked on the princess.
"Go!" he said kindly but firmly, giving each a small nudge.
They went to their appointed tasks, though it was clear where their attention remained.
"They don"t trust me." Princess Ren came to the high cooking table that he worked at, and took a seat on the stool there. The black-haired captain took Ren"s place at the doorway; she seemed to view the kitchen full of knives and children with a mixture of anxiety and bemus.e.m.e.nt.
"Family history makes us leery." Jerin scooped up baby Kai and slid him into a high chair battered by nearly three dozen babies. He tickled a pure baby giggle out of his brother and spoiled him with a spoon dipped in the maple syrup. Princess Ren watched him and he found himself watching back. Her eyes were deep green, deeper than her sister"s. Her red hair, like a flame, was spun from threads of red, orange, and gold. Her skin was creamy white and unblemished.
He found himself wishing they had taken that final step the night before. He blushed at the thought and looked away.
"What happened to make you leery? Your family lose a husband or a son?" Princess Ren asked.
"Well, actually, it ran the other way," he admitted. "Our grandmothers kidnapped our grandfather during the War of the False Eldest. He had not come willingly."
The princess reached out for the maple syrup and he tapped her fingers out of habit. She looked up at him, startled, while he stared at his spoon, horrified.
"Ummm, no fingers." He dipped a spoon into the syrup and handed it to her.
She smiled at him and lapped the spoon with the tip of her tongue, making a show of licking it clean. It recalled her leaning over him, her tongue touching his bare skin. His body responded to the memory. His blush became a complete burn as she noticed his arousal in his trousers.
"It"s sweet." she murmured, "but not as tasty as you."
He felt tike flipping a towel over his head and hiding. He felt like running from the room in embarra.s.sment. He felt like leading her upstairs and letting her use her tongue on him again. The last put shudders of desire through him.
He struggled to find a less intimate subject. "How is your sister?"
Amus.e.m.e.nt fled Princess Ren"s eyes. "She tried to get out of bed and failed. She nearly fainted when she stood up."
"I"m sorry."
Ren frowned a moment, then shrugged. "I"m thankful she"s alive."
Jerin finished slicing down the ham, his hands trembling so much he had trouble controlling the sharp knife. "So," he said, trying not to seem as anxious as he felt, ""you"re going to be staying another night."
The smile returned to Ren"s face. "If not more."
He looked at her. Wanting her, wondering how he was going to resist her.
"Riders!" came a call from one of the princess"s women, and the kitchen went still.
"It"s Eldest! It"s Eldest and the others!" Leia"s voice followed the call.
There was a general rush for the door to see their seven elder sisters return. Corelle, not surprisingly, ran to meet them, talking low and fast, making sure they heard her side of the story first. They had apparently already heard some version of the news. Their horses were lathered and blowing from a hard riding. Their rifles sat in saddle holsters, instead of being wrapped well and strapped to the back of their saddles. Eldest gave Corelle a scathing look as she dismounted. She unholstered her rifle, saying, "See to the horses. We"ll talk later." She threw her reins to Corelle and came on to the house.
Eldest looked first to Jerin, then scanned the children for the other boys. Seeing that the family"s greatest a.s.sets were safe, she locked gazes with Princess Ren.
"Your Highness," Eldest said quietly, handing her rifle to Heria without a glance. "Welcome to the House of Whistler."
"Thank you. Eldest Whistler."
Heria ducked away to return the rifle to the gun rack. The other children stood, waiting for orders.
Eldest glanced about the kitchen at the food threatening to burn unattended. "Get breakfast on," she stated. "We"ll wash up and eat, then talk."
So this was what little Whistler girls grew up to look like, Ren mused, studying the recently returned elder sisters. If the Whistler family had been a motley crew during the War of the False Eldest, they had weeded out all the variants in the last two generations. Without exception, the Whistler clan was black-haired, blue-eyed, and good-looking. The military heritage that showed in the children as broad strokes became unmistakable in the women. Regulation short haircuts, clothes tailored along the lines of an infantry uniform, rifles in hand, and six-guns riding low in tied-down hip holsters. Beyond the outward appearances, there was the military precision to the way they rode in-handing exhausted horses, damp greatcoats, and weapons to younger sisters-and they settled wordlessly to the breakfast table smelling of horses and lye soap. Food was eaten in tense silence, broken occasionally by a younger sister trying to report a wrong or misadventure. Eldest Whistler silenced the girls with a look.
Unlike the night before, Jerin and the younger boys sat with the family instead of hiding in the kitchen. Still, Jerin sat at other end of the table, at Eldest"s right hand, with the other boys well barricaded behind their sisters.
Eldest broke the silence, naming a town a day"s travel downriver of Heron Landing. "We were in Greenhaven last evening, when we heard that there had been an attack on the farm. No one knew any details, just that one of our little ones had ridden in for Queens Justice."
"I went for Queens Justice," Heria said, "because Corelle and the others weren"t here."
"Heria!" Corelle cried as if stabbed. "We were just next door."
"You were supposed to be here!" Heria snapped, to which the nine and eight-year-olds added their backing.
"Hush." Eldest Whistler quieted that family dispute with one look and a single even command. "We will talk about that later."
Ren looked down at her plate to cover a bolt of jealousy. Command of a family came so easy for someone who held her position from her first breath, blessed with the name of Eldest. In their cradles, younger sisters were told, "Listen to Eldest-she"ll be Mother Elder when she"s grown." even when the sisters were younger only by months or days. Ren wished she had that luxury in her own family, then, chiding herself for being small-hearted, wished instead that her elder sisters hadn"t been killed, making her Eldest over sisters well practiced at disagreeing with her. She had not, in fact, even been the natural leader of the middle sisters. Halley had commanded Odelia, Trini. Lylia, and herself from the time they had left their cradles until the night Ren had become the Eldest.
Halley was younger by only six months. Six months that had never mattered before.
"We don"t air family problems in front of strangers," Eldest Whistler stated as one who is never argued with. She finished the last bite of her eggs and pushed away the empty plate. "So, Your Highness, what brings you upriver to Heron Landing?"
Her eyes asked, "What troubles do you bring to my home?"
Ren glanced about the table, at the family trained by the best spies that Queensland had ever had and decided that perhaps it would be best to take them into her confidence. "While we didn"t engage the Imomains in full war, it has been a costly effort to keep them off our sh.o.r.es. Our coffers are low, and we can ill afford the drain on tax revenue that smuggling represents. Worse, smuggling on the rivers has increased tenfold in the last decade. The Queens contracted with a family of gun-makers upriver at North Branch to produce guns to be the teeth in our efforts to bear down on the smugglers. Princess Odelia and I decided to do a surprise inspection." Actually, Ren had dragged Odelia into duty, determined the younger princess would act her age and rank. "We had interrupted a raid on the armory. While we managed to prevent the theft of six naval guns, all the small arms and a series of cast-iron cannons were taken. The cannons are our main concern now."
"Cast iron?" Corelle scoffed. "You can"t cast iron barrels uniformly. Under pressure they burst, killing everyone within dozens of feet. No one"s made cast-iron cannons since Deathstriker burst twenty years ago."
Eldest frowned at her sister"s rudeness, but added, "Bronze is the best metal for cannons."
Even after two generations of farming, they remained well schooled in the art of war. Until a few months ago, what they said had been true.
"Unless you want to rifle them." Ren pointed out the true flaw of bronze. "Bronze is too soft of a metal. The friction wears down the rifling in a short amount of time."
Jerin had been listening with his amazingly blue eyes open wide. He leaned to his Eldest sister and whispered, "How do you make a cannon a rifle?"
Eldest answered, obviously aiming her answer more to the very youngest of her sisters than to Jerin. "Rifling is cutting spiral grooves down the bore of the weapon, any weapon. It makes the shot fly straighter, so your aim is truer. Smooth bores, weapons without the grooves, you might as well point in the general direction, pull the trigger, and hope."
Ren nodded at this patient explanation. "The Wainwrights at North Branch proved they could make a reliable, cast-iron, breech-loaded cannon."
"Completely reliable?" Eldest asked.
Ren shrugged. "Extremely reliable-I would call nothing "completely." Apparently the novelty of their method isn"t in the reinforcement of the cast iron forward of the breech-others have tried that and failed-but in the method of attachment." While his sisters listened pa.s.sively, Jerin nodded slightly to indicate he followed the explanation. Ren controlled the urge to smile encouragement to him. "A wrought iron band is allowed to cool in place while the gun is rotated, which allows the reinforcement to clamp on uniformly around the circ.u.mference of the breech. We ordered eight ten-pounders. The Wainwrights called them the Prophets: Joan, Bonnye, Anna, Judith, Gregor, Larisa, Nane, and Ami."
"At Greenhaven," Eldest reported, "they were saying that the Wainwright place blew up, that their ammo went up and took out the shop and the house."
Ren shook her head. "The thieves killed the family in their beds long before torching the place. They managed to carry out all the small arms, the pistols and rifles, and the Prophets before we arrived. They were trying to move the great naval guns when we rode up, and they set fire to the shop to cover their retreat."
She and Raven had been to the Wainwrights" home several times to see the new weapons tested and to order various guns. While not as prolific as the Whistlers, the Wainwrights had numbered around twenty women and girls with a handsome young husband that they proudly showed off. Not one survived the murderous attack.
Raven cleared her throat and covered Ren"s silence. "It was easy to track the cannons. Each of the Prophets weighs nearly nine hundred pounds and they are roughly six and a half feet long. Multiply that by eight, and it"s quite an operation to move them. The thieves used two coal wagons and made four trips from the gun shop down to a waiting coal barge. Half the town saw them, but thought it was the Wainwrights" normal weekly delivery of coal for the forges."
Ren took up the story again. "The coal barge with the Prophets and small arms left with its load. There were two more barges waiting for the naval guns. The thieves scuttled them to foul river traffic. It gave them several hours" start on us. We might have caught up with them if they stayed on the river, but the barge and its tug ran aground, so they started overland."
"They ran aground above Heron Landing?"" Eldest Whistler guessed.
Ren nodded. "They made a makeshift raft and floated the cannons and other crates ash.o.r.e one at a time. We found a safe landing and unloaded our horses. Odelia"-Holy Mothers knew what Odelia had been doing-"became separated from the rest of us, and was attacked. We think it was more of a distraction than a planned a.s.sa.s.sination."
"So these guns are still in the area?" Eldest Whistler asked.
"Is there a reward?" Corelle asked.
"Do you think the riders will come back?" Jerin asked.
"The riders were probably hired to delay pursuers." Ren sought to rea.s.sure Jerin. "They have no reason to come back. As for the cannons and small arms, the Queens Justice has found no sign of them."
Two of the younger sisters were rude enough to laugh.
Eldest Whistler stood up, motioning Ren and Raven to follow. "Lieutenant Bounder is a good soldier, but she and most of her command are new to the area. Nor does she have many good trackers under her." Eldest led them to the small, well-appointed parlor. There she opened the doors on a cherry cabinet, revealing a set of shallow drawers. She pulled out the top drawer and took out a map. She laid the map on a small side table. "How far upriver from Heron Landing did they hit the sandbar?"
"About five miles." Raven answered. "Bounder said it"s timberland belonging to the Fiddler family."
Eldest Whistler grunted, tapping a section of the map. "I thought it might be there. Look, the river runs fairly straight north to south through all of Queensland, but here, it makes a twenty-mile U east to west, and back again. When you"re on the river, it"s not obvious. The lay of the land fools you; only this ridge lies between the northern and the southern point." Her finger with a torn fingernail traced a short line over the said ridge. "It"s less than three miles, but unless you"ve walked this straight line, or seen the map, you would never guess you could skip so far downriver so quickly."
Ren cursed softly and tapped the downriver part of the U. "I don"t suppose the river is shallow here?"
Eldest shook her head. "Fairly deep. If they brought the guns to here, it would be easy to load them onto another boat."
"Why move them at all?" Corelle asked. "Seems like a lot of work for nothing, when they could hire a boat to go upriver and unload the barge."
Eldest threw her a disgusted look. "It would have been stupid to leave them stranded with the princesses somewhere close behind them. Secondly, this confuses the trail. Think of the trail they would have left if they had hired a boat to go upriver to the stranded barge. Every ship captain they tried to hire, the crew of the ship they finally hired, any pa.s.sengers already on the boat, any ship that pa.s.sed while they were transferring the load, and Holy Mothers knows who else would have known what ship the guns are now on. The princesses could go downriver until they saw that ship and stop it. If the thieves had managed to already off-load the guns, there would be witnesses to where and when.
"By moving the guns, they"re no longer linked to the barge. Picking up cargo is so common it"s invisible in comparison to a salvage job. And, unless you"ve seen a map of the river, it seems unlikely that anyone could move a dozen heavy crates so far downriver in a span of a few hours."
"We"ll never find them again," Ren whispered.
"They"ve only had one day to secure a ship. The guns might still be here." Eldest reached over to the gun rack and took down a rifle. "If they are, we can stop them."
The other Whistlers took this as a signal and armed themselves, down to the little ones, excluding only the boys. For one panicked moment, Ren thought she might have the whole clan ride out with her. Eldest Whistler, however, motioned to the middle and youngest sets of Whistler sisters to put up their rifles, with a firm, "You stay here and guard the boys and Princess Odelia."
"You don"t have to come." The Queens Justice"s opinion aside, Ren wasn"t sure the farmers were up to riding with her guard.
"I"ve spent my whole life learning how to fight," Eldest stated. "Once in my life, it would be good to actually ride out to battle. I don"t think the chance to ride in the Princesses" Guard will come around twice."
Certainly, it would help to have someone who knew the lay of the land to guide them.
"Glad to have you, then," Ren said, and earned a wide grin from the woman.
They surged out of the house, carried along in a wave of excited, and thankfully now unarmed, children. While saddling their horses, Ren caught sight of Jerin helping his older sisters saddle up. He moved with a.s.surance among the horses, handling the bridles and saddles with ease. As she watched, he kneed a black mare in the middle to make her suck in her stomach. He clinched the saddle girth tight, tied it, and then looked up to meet Ren"s gaze.
He wanted her. She knew the look now, having seen the physical evidence of his desire paired before with his level blue gaze. Just knowing that he wanted her did magic to her body. She dropped her eyes before anyone noticed the exchange. The Whistlers would not be so happy to ride beside her if they knew what she had done with their little brother in the kitchen.
Suddenly the idea of them at her back with rifles did not seem so wise. She glanced at Eldest Whistler, wondering if this was an exercise in revenge.
You"re crazy , Ren told herself as she swung up into her saddle. , Ren told herself as she swung up into her saddle. Eldest just rode in. She wasn"t here to witness anything. You"ve heard everything that everyone had to say to her Eldest just rode in. She wasn"t here to witness anything. You"ve heard everything that everyone had to say to her.
Then she remembered Corelle darting up to her oldest sister, earnestly pouring out some story. Eldest"s flash of anger could have been toward a lax sister making excuses-or at the news their brother had been compromised.
Ren scanned the milling women and children for Corelle. The middle sister stood by the padlock"s gate, holding it open as riders were already trotting through. As if sensing Ren"s gaze, Corelle turned toward her as she rode up to the gate. Cool, calculating resentment filled the girl"s face.
She knows.
Ren kept her face pa.s.sive as she rode past, and tried to ignore the itch between her shoulder blades. Had Corelle told Eldest? Was she riding into a trap?
If the Whistlers fought the way they rode, it was no wonder they won the war.
Showing little evidence that they had ridden all night, the Whistlers led cross-country, over fences and creeks, with seemingly reckless abandon. When one watched, though, not one horse so much as stumbled. Ren wondered if they were attempting an extremely subtle form of a.s.sa.s.sination: ride out with the princess and let her break her own neck trying to keep up.
The last mile they cut through rows of shoulder-high corn, the leaves cutting and grabbing at both sides, and came out onto a dirt path. Fresh wagon tracks crushed the gra.s.s growing on either side of the path. The path ran along the cornfield and, a half mile farther down, dipped into woods. The river was near enough to smell over the bruised corn and the hot horses.
The Whistlers dismounted, tied off their horses, and went silent as wolves into the woods. Ren wanted to follow, but she knew her own value. Her life wasn"t worth the capture of the cannons. There too was the niggling thought that the small woodlot would be a perfect ambush site by the Whistlers. She signaled to her women to ready weapons, wishing she had told Raven of her indiscretion. Now, on the cusp of battle, would be a foolish time to make her women doubt their allies. On the other hand, letting the captain of her guard ride blindly into an ambush seemed particularly stupid.
She fought her conscience while silence came from the woods and one lone cicada droned loudly.
A Whistler came trotting out of the woods and tugged on her cap bill in salute. "There"s signs that a riverboat tied off and something heavy was loaded. No cannons, but there are a couple of fresh graves."
"Show me." Ren dismounted.
A screen of brush in the woods proved to be false, a deliberate attempt to hide the path down to the river. On the high bank some forty feet from the river"s edge, the thieves" camp showed evidence of being used often. River stone shielded a fire pit from the river. Evergreens hid a corral of sapling stringers. A well-beaten path led down to a spring-fed streamlet, a wooden bucket beside it waiting for the next visit. A secretive camp, but one long-standing, not erected overnight. The corral and fire pit both had seen winter. Thinking of the cornfield she left behind, Ren guessed at the origin of the camp.
Beyond the corral, five of the Whistler sisters worked at digging up the graves. Ren signaled to Raven and her women to help with the unearthing and continued on to where Eldest Whistler crouched beside the fire pit.
"Whiskey runners?" she asked Eldest, meaning the original creators of the campsite. Was it just irony that the thieves used a smuggling camp while stealing cannons meant to fight river smuggling, or had they known what the cannons were going to be used for, and stolen them as a preventive measure?