She Stoops to Conquer Page 2

of fatigue squeezing through the middle of her brain pressed a little harder with each Gate, but she went back up to the head of the valley and in the next fold over spotted moving figures. A group of people, rushing up to meet a lone walker. Van Raighan meeting his allies.

  She put aside the question of why he’d run what had to be the better part of a mile to meet them and placed a Gate to bring her out along the ridge, closer to them. Have to assume they’d see her sooner rather than later, but if she kept her distance she’d make a pretty hard target. Pevan knew she should return to the town and fetch reinforcements, but her headache had a low opinion of that idea. Could she snatch Van Raighan from the middle of his gang now?

  He stood a little apart from his group, which left her clearance to grab him. Careful timing and doubly careful aim would do it. She’d practised the manoeuvre never expecting to use it, but she knew how at least. There was no sign that Van Raighan and his cronies were going to move on any time soon; Pevan had time to slow down and collect him at a safe speed.

  Pages of painstakingly-memorised charts flipped past in her mind. Fall rates, deceleration due to drag, air time. She sorted the numbers methodically, dropped through her next Gate and started counting. Arms held straight out ahead of her, fingers pointed, she flew close to straight as a javelin, a steep arc almost as good as vertical. Four seconds to its peak.

  Pevan took a last good look at the thief and his friends as she fell, then rolled over in the air so that she dropped backwards through her next Gateway, rising splayed out with the sky like a house-beam resting on her back. Hair that had remained obediently out of the way through head-first falls whipped around her face, threatening to prick her in the eyes.

  She relied on her steady count – two, three – to tell her when to worry about the ground again and concentrated on watching her prey. They showed no signs of having spotted her as she bounced along the horizon, a dark speck against grey sky, but there was no way to make her plan stealthy. Would they see her before she was ready to strike?

  Successive jumps in what Pevan thought of as the pancake position robbed her of height and time in the air. By the ninth, she had less than three seconds between Gates. It left her very little time to execute the plan. Her tenth Gate strained her fatigued Gift as she reached for that patch of grass just beneath Van Raighan’s feet, stretching the aperture as wide as she could push it. Catch an ankle or a wrist on the way through, and she could still break it at these speeds.

  The Gate opened, time slowing for her as suddenly she found herself accelerating towards Van Raighan’s boots. She had time for a tight cry of warning, snatched away by the battering air, and she was on him, right as his fall reversed. She buried both fists in his jumper, careful to keep her arms slack as the fabric – bless him, it was coarse-knit wool, with lots of give – stretched taut.

  His weight yanked against her hard enough to send shocks of pain all the way up her arms, through her shoulders and into her spine. She held on by sheer death-grip reflex as he gasped. The jumper creaked with the strain, beginning to tear. The world spun.

  Confused impressions rushed past. The thief’s eyes met hers, wide with shock above a set jaw. She looked away to see the horizon perform a perfect, nauseating spin. Pain exploded in her knee as their bodies snapped together, bringing his shin into it. The circle of mysterious figures, apparently all too stunned to raise a weapon, whirled past beneath them. Van Raighan’s arm wrapped around her, clinging for dear life.

  The ground came at them from where the sky should have been.

  Just barely, Pevan found enough wit to push open one last Gate. It spat them out just out of sight – she hoped they were just out of sight – over the hill. The angle of the slope gave the planet the last laugh. Soft with fresh rainfall the earth beneath the thick grass might have been, it hit them like a lead brick wrapped in a quilt, side-on, with the ground squashing Van Raighan’s arm into her flank.

  As they slithered to a stop, they rolled apart, both gasping. Pevan curled into a ball against the tightness in her chest, her back to the thief. She doubted he’d have the breath to do much to her before she recovered, and he had to be as battered as she was. Her knee stung so badly from where their legs had come together that she worried for a moment the skin had split, but her skirt had bared her knees and there was no blood seeping through the tights beneath.

  Her wind returned slowly, dragging with it the tally of aches and pains. Besides the knee, her strained wrists were worst, and she didn’t fancy the prospect of pushing herself to her feet. Her wind- and rain-ravaged cheeks itched a firestorm, and Van Raighan had given her a half-dozen other bruises along her legs and abdomen. In total, it was almost enough to push aside the headache and its warning of imminent burnout.

  She let herself flop onto her back, face up to the rain. Her legs demanded a stretch, and she pushed them up the hillside above her, even as the pressure of blood sinking toward her head began to build. Van Raighan, in a similar position a few feet away, burst into hoarse, wild laughter. She tried to frown at him past the pounding ache behind her nose, but she met his eyes and found herself laughing too.

  Well, she’d survived doing two crazy things few Gifted ever tried today. Laughter probably was the best way to stave off the panicky, frantic return of her better judgement. At very least, it gave her the animus to roll over awkwardly and regain her feet. Returning to vertical, and to solid ground, added a spinning head to her woes, but it only took one staggered step to steady her.

  The brow of the hill was only a few dozen yards above them. If she had kept out of sight of Van Raighan’s gang, it couldn’t be by much. The thief still cackled at her feet. Best to be away from here before he recovered enough of his sanity to struggle or shout for aid.

  Pevan felt no obligation to be polite. She spun open a Gate beneath Van Raighan and jumped on him, snapping it shut the moment her back cleared the opening. That left him on top of her, but he wasn’t much of a burden. His heavy jumper, stretched out of shape by her handling, couldn’t disguise the bony hardness of his narrow torso, skeletal testimony to his self-created isolation through the winter.

  She shoved at him, but instead of rolling clear, he levered his shoulders and head up, leaving his legs pinning her down. The pose fell just short of threatening, but Pevan felt the uncomfortable thrill of a tremor running through the man atop her. She met his eyes, surprised to find them twinkling with open innocence, a guileless smile beneath them.

  "Thank you." He spoke quietly, but with his face so close to hers she could feel the tickle of his breath on her skin.

  Hopelessly, she fought a rising blush. "Get off me." Maybe her cheeks were already pink enough from the cold to hide the reaction.

  Van Raighan’s eyes widened, just ever so slightly, and he rolled away into an ungainly crouch. As Pevan sat up, he said, "I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- Well, I didn’t... I’m sorry." He looked down, then away along the valley. "We’d better get moving."

  Frowning, Pevan followed his gaze, but whatever he saw, she didn’t. She’d barely managed to move them from the crest of the hill into the bottom of the valley, testament to the fatigue pounding spikes into her brain. How far from Federas had she come? It seemed unlikely she’d be able to get Van Raighan back home without marching him there.

  His odd choice of wording caught up with her. "What do you mean?"

  "Those Noncs won’t be far behind us." He glanced up the hill. "Unless this isn’t the same valley we were just in."

  "Noncs?" There hadn’t been a reliable report of actual Noncs – feral survivors of the Realmcrash who’d refused the Gift-Givers’ peace – in Pevan’s lifetime. It was just about conceivable that some tribes survived out in the Northern Wild, but only because Van Raighan had no reason to tell that lie. If he’d said the men he’d been talking to were hunters out from Federas or Petrigra, maybe, but why Noncs?

  He sat back onto his ankles and shrugged. "That’s what they looked like to me. I’d rather not go back
and ask them."

  "They weren’t your..?" Pevan pushed to her feet, watching the ridge above them with a new sense of unease.

  "You didn’t get a good look at them, huh?" He drawled. "No, I’m alone out here."

  Which brought up the more chilling thought. "Why did the Wilder who got you out abandon you?" The thief wouldn’t be this confident if he didn’t have something up his sleeve, would he?

  "You won’t believe this, but it was so I could get some time alone with you." Again, he glanced at the floor, lifting a hand to push damp hair away from his face, then looked away up the hill.

  Pevan tried to ignore the chill that shot down her spine. "Well, that doesn’t sound creepy at all. What the hell’s going on, Van Raighan?"

  "I’d really appreciate it if-" A high yell, unmistakably aggressive, cut him off. The Noncs had reached the crest of the hill and were running down towards them. Van Raighan met Pevan’s eyes, his face turning hard. "Later. Let’s get out of here."

  Against a headache that felt like someone had walled off the front of her brain, Pevan focussed. It was all she could do to get a Gate open from their feet to the next brow. Van Raighan dived through with a speed and precision that spoke of arduous practice, and she followed, pursued by the angry calls of