Dragon's Bait (6 page)

The innkeeper hesitated and Alys nudged Selendrile. The gold was useless—there was no way a pair of orphaned peasants could come by gold—but she'd had him put a few of the silver and copper pieces in his pocket. Now he took one of these out and held it to the innkeeper.

"This'll get you your lodgings and a bit of
supper if you haven't eaten yet," the man said. "Breakfast comes with the room. Odelia," he called to a girl who was cleaning one of the tables. She looked just like him except for the fact that she had more hair and was obviously a couple of years younger than Alys. "You and your sister get a room set up."

"This way, please," the little girl said. She led them through the kitchen, where she introduced them as paying customers to another girl. This older one put down the spoon she was using to stir a kettle of soup and gave Selendrile a long, studied stare.

Here it comes
, Alys thought.

With admirable calm, the older sister said, "We need to get straw for the bedding." She flung her arm around her sister's shoulders, but Alys saw her fingers dig into Odelia's upper arm, and the younger girl's confused expression as her sister hustled her outdoors.
Run, run
, every instinct warned Alys.
They're going to raise an alarm
. Selendrile was looking around the kitchen, oblivious to it all, peeking into the corners, looking under the counters. "We've got to get out of here," Alys warned him in a frantic whisper.

"We just got here," Selendrile pointed out, picking up a clay pot lid as though he'd never seen one before.

The two girls returned, carrying armloads of straw. Alys caught the hurried glance Odelia gave Selendrile before she lowered her gaze. "This way," she murmured.

But that wasn't fear which was causing her cheeks to redden. Alys glanced at the older sister, who was staring at Selendrile again.

Oh, heaven help me—they're flirting with him
, she realized.

The two sisters led them to an upstairs room and began stuffing the straw into the mattress.

Alys tugged on Selendrile's arm. "There's only one sleeping pallet," she hissed at him.

He'd been looking out the window at the people in the street below, and he turned to her with a blank expression that could have been either lack of understanding or his usual give-nothing expression.

"What's that?" the older girl asked, straightening.

"There's only one sleeping pallet," Alys repeated.

"There's hardly room for two."

"Yes," Alys said, finding her patience wearing thin at the smug tone, "but there are two of us."

"But this one's wide enough for two," said the younger girl, Odelia, "and you
are
brothers." Both girls seemed on the verge of a giggling fit.

"Of course we're brothers"—Alys was balanced between annoyance and panic—"but we need two sleeping pallets."

Selendrile came up behind her and flung his arm around her shoulders in imitation of the older sister's protective gesture. Somehow Alys kept from jumping out of her skin. Selendrile told the girls, "My brother kicks and snores terribly."

This time the girls did burst out laughing, but, leaving, they promised to bring up more bedding.

Alys sat on the sleeping pallet and rested her head in her hands and waited for the thudding of her heart to slow down. "I think I'll stay here until I've calmed back down," she muttered between her fingers. "Barricade the door for a year or two, will you?"

Selendrile stooped down beside her, his leg
brushing against her arm. This time Alys
did
jump. But there was no way to move back to put more distance between them, not without scrambling over the mattress. "Staying in the room makes no sense," he said. "We've got to go out and mingle with the townspeople."

Alys sighed.

The worst part of it was knowing he was right.

T
HE THING WAS
, Alys thought, Selendrile made a passable human.

No, that was being unfairly snide.

He made a very good human.

At first, when they'd just come down into the inn's common room, she had been able to watch him watching others, his responses a half-heartbeat too slow as he gauged others' reactions. Made judgments. Learned. Soon he no longer glanced at her to see what emotions his expression should indicate. He didn't wait for her to answer when somebody asked him a question. It was together that they wove their story of how their farm had been destroyed by a dragon and how, with no family surviving, they
had made their way to Griswold. When somebody asked why they hadn't gone to Saint Toby's, which was closer, Alys gave the same answer she had to the guards, "No work," but Selendrile added, "Well, that and..." And he let his voice drift off, so that everybody looked at Alys, as the more talkative brother, to finish the thought.

"That and...," Alys repeated, wondering what, if anything, Selendrile had in mind. He sat chin in hand, elbow on tattle, and in the flickering light of candles and hearth, his purple eyes appeared soft and gentle though she knew they were really hard and cold. She had taken note of the way the women in the room watched him, as though pretty eyes and a sweet smile were any indication of what a person was. She decided he
didn't
have anything in mind but was only trying to make things more difficult in order to watch her squirm. "Saint Toby's is not a nice place," she said with a sigh, which seemed to her to be appropriately vague and totally dull, but suddenly everyone, even Odelia's older sister, was waiting for her next words.

Alys rolled the cup of ale that had come with their dinner between her palms. Didn't
anyone notice that Selendrile hadn't taken a bite of his meal, had never once sipped from his cup? "The thing is—"

"And this is very hard to talk about...," Selendrile interrupted, which might have passed among the listeners as explanation for her hesitation, but put her no closer to what to say.

Still, she looked at him appraisingly. If he wasn't determined to see her make a fool of herself, what was he up to? Alys realized she'd been so intent on explaining themselves, on fitting in, that she'd come close to losing sight of their purpose here. Explaining how Atherton had falsely condemned her would do no good. The people here had no more reason to believe her than her own townsfolk, especially if they'd been recently harassed by a witch of their own. On the other hand, if she couldn't get the Inquisitor in trouble by accusing him of what he'd done, she might get him in trouble by accusing him of something he hadn't done. "The thing is," she said, "someone stole things from the chapel in Saint Toby's."

It seemed to her that stealing from the Church had to be the worst of crimes, and from the expressions of the people around her, they
agreed. Except for Selendrile. She couldn't tell what he thought.

"The poor box was ripped out of the wall," she continued, "the silver candlesticks snatched right off the altar."

"Who would do such a thing?" someone asked in a voice of awed horror.

"Inquisitor Atherton—"

Selendrile gave her a swift kick under the table. While Alys tried to be unobtrusive about rubbing her ankle, he said, "Inquisitor Atherton came to Saint Toby's to see about some girl who was accused of witchcraft."

"Not," Alys stressed, "that there was any real—"

Selendrile sat abruptly back in his chair, dragging his hands across the table so that he struck his cup and sent it spinning into her lap. "Sorry," he said blandly as she jumped to her feet and wiped ineffectively at the wetness.

And what was that look supposed to mean?

"Anyway," he finished her story for her, "what with all the commotion of the theft and the witch trial, nobody from Saint Toby's was in a hospitable mood. We were rushed out of there so fast we didn't have a chance to tell them
about the dragon. And then, coming here, we had no way of knowing if we'd left the thieves behind us in Saint Toby's or if they were about to waylay us on the road."

One of the townsmen shook his head. "Leave it to Atherton to get caught up in a witch trial while thieves are happily stealing the shirt off your back."

This seemed a fine opening to Alys, but Selendrile tipped his head at her the way he'd first done when he'd been in dragon shape. "My brother and I have had a very long, hard day." His voice had just the right edge of weariness to it so that Alys could have sworn that he'd just lost his parents and everything he had in the world in the past two days.

The crowd parted for them, though Alys could hear the background murmur of people saying, "Terrible thing," and "What's the world coming to?"

She waited until they were back up in their room before turning on him. "What was that for?" she demanded, hands on wet hips and aware of how she stank of ale.

He flashed one of his colder smiles. "I didn't want you accusing him."

"I thought that was the whole point."

"Better to play naive and let people draw their own conclusions." He held his arms out straight and slowly turned.

Checking to see if the room was big enough for him to resume dragon shape, she realized. It wasn't. Which was probably a good thing; she doubted the floor would have held his weight.

He sat down on one of the sleeping pallets and looked up at her as he took off his boots. "What do people say when they're about to go to sleep together?"

"We are
not
about to go to sleep together," she informed him in a voice that was too loud, suddenly aware of how close the narrow room forced the two pallets to be.

"Well, I'm planning to go to sleep." He took off his shirt. "Of course, you're welcome to stay awake if you choose."

"Stay away from me," she warned, as furious as afraid. "Just stay over there away from me."

He managed the same innocent look he'd done downstairs for the women of Griswold.

But she knew better.

She turned her back so she wouldn't have to
look at him and lay down in her damp, smelly clothes, as close to the far wall as she could get. "They say 'good night,'" she told him.

But he was too busy laughing to answer.

I
T WAS MIDDAY
when Alys woke up, and Selendrile was gone.
Wonderful
, she grumbled to herself, and went downstairs without waiting for him.

Her meal was the same as last night, except this time the soup was served cold and the bread warm. "So where's that handsome brother of yours?" asked the woman who was working in the kitchen.
The mother of the two girls
? Alys wondered, unable to decide whether the woman had been one of those present last night, or whether Selendrile's reputation had already begun to spread.

Alys shrugged and took her bowl out into the common room. Only a few people were here this early. She recognized a couple of faces, and smiled and nodded back at the greetings she got, but chose a table by herself.

What am I doing
? she asked herself. She couldn't just continue to blunder around, hoping that things would fall into place and that
Selendrile would pull through and help her when she needed it. She forced herself to think of Atherton—though her mind had a tendency to shy away from the turmoil of angry feelings he stirred up. Assuming the best about him, he might have been unaware that Gower and his family were lying to get her father's shop and land. Assuming the best, he might have been so eager to solve Griswold's dragon problem that when he'd found a maiden to offer to the dragon he hadn't cared.

Alys tried to focus her feelings of rage. All right. She and Selendrile had made up their own lies, had said that someone had stolen from the little chapel in Saint Toby's at just the time Inquisitor Atherton had been there. Would the people of Griswold draw the conclusion that Atherton himself had been the thief? Possible, she decided, but not definite. Would they believe it if she and Selendrile could get some of Selendrile's gold into Atherton's possession? She thought back to the faces of the townsfolk last night, when she had first mentioned the Inquisitor's name. She hadn't been concentrating, because Selendrile had been attacking her with foot and ale. Still, she didn't think she'd seen any
smiles, any softening of their expressions the way she'd have seen if somebody had mentioned Father Joseph's name in Saint Toby's. And at least one in their audience had complained about Atherton's preoccupation with witch trials. Surely he couldn't be popular. Not with his high-handed manner and the amount of satisfaction he obviously got from condemning people to death. She remembered the large gemmed crucifix that would be as showy and out of place in this town of simple homespun and rough-carved furniture as it had been in her own village. Surely the people here must resent him, and surely resentment was the first step toward convicting him.

The second step was hers.

The second step was confronting Atherton.

A
THERTON'S HOUSE
was behind the church, off the main street. Alys knocked, knowing that if he wasn't home, her plans would be delayed even more, but the idea of seeing him again—of letting him see her—was almost enough to send her back to the Green Barrel to wait for Selendrile. She braced herself, but still wasn't prepared.

The Inquisitor himself flung open the door without her having heard footsteps approach. "What is it?" he asked, standing close enough to spit on. He hadn't changed at all. Which, after two days, shouldn't have surprised her. But the knowledge that he had condemned an innocent victim to be devoured had left no physical trace on his face. His pale brown eyes regarded her
coldly. Surely she hadn't changed either, and he would see through her silly disguise.

She tugged her cap lower over her forehead. "I ... I ... "

"
What is it
?" he repeated, patience gone in die span of two stammers.

He didn't know her after all. Her plan, such as it was, was safe. So far. It wasn't much to go on, but it was all she had.

She found speaking easier if she didn't look at him, and she lowered her gaze to the dusty street. "I come from Tierbo," she said, trying to match the regional accent to disguise her voice. "There's a man there what got himself possessed. Done speak in voices, he does, and throw fits. He got a gleam in his right eye what ain't normal and his left eye's all clouded over and turned up in his head like. My da says, 'Better get the priest,' he says, 'before somebody gets hurt.' Will ya come?"