“But how to deliver them around, without drawing attention or suspicion? There would be stacks of them as high as Chargers . . .” He trailed off.
“If I may remind you, my Lord, Dolls make deliveries unnoticed by anyone who would endanger you or your Plan. Also, Dolls are repaired by other Dolls, and need not be stuffed solely with wool.”
He wasn’t certain whether to laugh or cry. In the end, he did neither. And by the time he recovered himself, the lights had changed to tell him it was time to go down to luncheon, and begin another round of the Fourth Game.
14
Ivar and Alberdina had a lot of things for Delia to do when she brought the last loads of breakfast back to the camp, though they let her eat first. Hauling deadfall to pile up beside the round tower for someone to chop up took the greater part of the morning, followed by hauling luncheon from the Foothold Gate to the camp. Then rolling beer barrels down to the camp. Then hauling water from the lake to the camp to be stored in a couple of those barrels that happened to be empty. By the time supper came around—more travel bread, this time with venison and roasted wild onions and honey—she had done more physical labor than she’d ever done in a single day in her life.
Ivar and Alberdina had not been idle. Ivar had chopped such an enormous amount of wood that it came all the way to the top of the tower wall, and she guessed it was about three cords’ worth. Nor had that been all he’d done, since he’d obviously hunted, killed, gutted, skinned, and butchered that deer.
Alberdina had been hunting as well—food and herbs. She’d found wild onions, swathes of bee-balm to tuck under the bedrolls to repel bugs, a big cache of nuts, and the wild honey she’d given them to eat with their travel bread. How on earth she’d gotten the honey away from the bees, Delia had no idea, and was too tired to guess. She’d found a lot more as well, since she’d been tying bunches of bee-balm and herbs upside down all over the outside of the shelter, but Delia didn’t recognize what all of the plants were.
So Delia didn’t get to see anything of what the mages did to actually create the Gates. Just the results, which were that the four curved uprights glowed faintly once the sun set.
She sat outside the shelter, which was full of equally tired mages, working slowly at the honey-soaked bread and the savory but tough venison. It was worth eating, however tough it was; those wild herbs that Alberdina had found gave it excellent flavor. Alberdina came to join her, and they gazed at the lake, the Gates, and the dark blue sky slowly going to black.
“Is this what it’s going to be like?” Delia asked, with the last piece of honey-soaked bread in her hand, nibbling at it slowly with tired jaws.
“You mean living out here, once we’re free of the Empire?” Alberdina asked. “Probably. Very probably. There’s going to be a lot of hard, physical labor, and everyone is going to have to pitch in. Your servants are going to be very busy doing other things than tending to you. You’re going to have to learn to wash clothing in a stream, and how to do your own mending. You’ll be set tasks like the ones I gave you yesterday and today, things that just need a pair of uneducated hands. It won’t be fun. It won’t be easy.”
“What if I just—don’t come along?” she asked in a small voice, because with the reality of what was going to happen setting in, living life out here in the middle of nowhere didn’t seem in the least attractive.
“Then when the Emperor finds out what we’ve done, and he will, who do you think he’ll take his wrath out on?” Alberdina countered. “It’ll be the ones who stay behind. The farmers and the laborers left, well, he might leave them alone, or he just might put everyone to the sword and move in an entire new population. But you? A known member of Kordas’s household? Anything you can imagine, it’ll be a hundred times worse.”
“So I don’t have a choice.” She felt like crying. What had Kordas and Isla gotten her into? She hadn’t asked for any of this.
“Well, you could always betray us,” Alberdina said coldly. “Then he’d probably marry you off to some old reprobate in his Court that’s gone through four wives already and is looking for a fifth. You’d still have the life of a lady. If that’s what you want, you can get it. Kordas is probably right in thinking that once we close and burn down those Gates, the Emperor won’t be able to find us, so betraying us probably won’t do us any harm. And it isn’t as if you have the ability to tell him where we are.”
Hearing it put that baldly just made her want to cry even more. She hadn’t asked for this! Was that really much of a choice, either hard labor in the wilderness, or being handed off to some nasty old man as a “reward” for telling the Emperor how everyone had fled to escape him?
Wasn’t there a third option?
But she couldn’t think of one.
“Just think of how Isla and Kordas have been feeling all these years,” Alberdina persisted. “Knowing that at any moment, on the Emperor’s whim, everything could be pulled out from under them. That at any moment, the Emperor’s troops could come pouring in, taking literally everything and almost everyone, all to feed his ego and his war machine. And everyone that was left would be starving on scraps and forced to build things back up again just so the Emperor could sweep in and take it all again. I’ve seen it happen to entire baronies. When the Emperor moves in, he takes every person under the age of fifty and over the age of thirteen, he takes everything that can be ridden, eaten, or drunk, and he sweeps out again.” She paused, and Delia wondered what else she was going to say. “I don’t think he’d spare you a second time, and your pedigree wouldn’t save you. He might leave Kordas. He might not. Kordas was educated at the Palace, so he knows the basics of military strategy. The Emperor’s wars need officers as well as soldiers.”
Delia felt cold and numb.
“That’s what the Plan is meant to save us all from,” Alberdina said after a pause. “Seems to me some hard work and blisters don’t look like a bad option.” She paused, and patted Delia on the shoulder. “It won’t be so bad. And you’ll get used to it. Hellfires, you’ve got Fetching Gift, so it’s possible Kordas will have you using that rather than gathering wood and herding chickens.”
“For what?” she asked, bleakly.
“Don’t know. But I suspect there’s a lot of things it could be useful for. Probably the best thing for you to do is to start thinking of them. You’ve got a head on those shoulders, so use it, so you won’t have to do as much work with your hands.” Alberdina chuckled a little. “I know for sure the mages aren’t going to be going out and gathering wood. Make sure you are so valuable doing something else that no one will want you to waste your time working like a mule.”
She got up and left Delia sitting alone in the dark, muscles aching and stiffening, feeling very much depressed. All she could see in front of her were a lot of more or less terrible choices, and no way out of them that she could live with.