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“I am a cupid of sorts,” she said, “but I’m not a peeping lecher. History will decide what happened, not you or I.”
“But what did happen? I mean, whether they screwed around or not—what happened next?”
“What happened is they left the mauntery under cover of dark. As you would have been wise to do yourself last night.”
“Where did they go?”
She paused a while and then said, “This is all old business. I suppose it can’t hurt anyone to say.”
“Who are you protecting,” he rushed in, “and why?”
Ah, but that was it, wasn’t it? She admired him for catching her drift. She answered his earlier question, though. “The maunts had once kept a little printing press off the grounds. A sideline to the religious life: producing pamphlets that opposed the warmongering of the Emperor. Rather by accident, the press had been discovered by the Emperor’s men, who more or less destroyed it. But they never traced the sedition to here. The press was housed some little distance, a day’s journey or so from here. I loaded the couple up on a donkey—poor Liir was just barely alive—and I sent them on their way without confiding in my sisters. I thought that was the end of them.”
“You did.” He said it flatly, intending to be as neutral as plaster. Keep going, old lady.
“Yes, but then some short time later—weeks, I think, a few months at the most—Liir returned to the mauntery a final time. He and a soldier of the EC, a minor Menacier named Trism bon Cavalish, had torched the stables of the flying dragons and fled from the Emerald City. It was a case of political action—espionage—I don’t know what you’d call it. But a force of the Emerald City under a Commander Cherrystone gave hot pursuit, and arrived at these walls just shortly after the lads did. This was before I went blind—oh, nine years ago, perhaps? And Liir therefore was perhaps twenty, his companion several years older.”
“Was Liir caught?”
“You know he wasn’t.” Of this she was sure. “Don’t waste your time, Sir Brrr; there isn’t that much of it left. If he had been caught, it would be in the records. And you wouldn’t be here asking about him.”
“You’re right,” he admitted. “But what happened to them?”
“Liir took the Witch’s broom and he left the mauntery from the rooftops. It happened that Lady Glinda was in residence—she was a kind of patroness of the order, don’t you know; years ago she changed her own name from Galinda to the more stylish Glinda. To honor the popular saint, to bury her rural origins, some other reason. Who knows. Anyway, she made an effort to get Trism out as one of her retinue, and it seemed to work at first. The team that was hunting the lads didn’t dare accuse Lady Glinda of treason—not without some kind of proof. She had after all been on the Throne of Oz for a time. She still enjoyed a cherished position in the hearts of her people, though the political climate had changed so much, and for the worse.”
“Naturally. Some of us get accused of treason for no reason. Others who deserve it waft free as a bubble on the breeze. Go figure.”
“Shhh. Listen. When Glinda thought they were safely free of scrutiny, she dismissed bon Cavalish to his own campaigns. She didn’t know that she was being trailed, and that the EC thugs would continue after Trism. They set upon him and beat him up. Brutalized him pretty badly, I heard, before letting him escape. They were sure that he would lead them to the place where he and Liir would meet. There was a romance between them, see.”
“I thought you had arranged for Liir a romance with Candle.”
“Oh, la, romance will find its own outlets, don’t you think?”
He wasn’t about to comment. “So they tracked Trism to the farm.”
“See,” she said, “you know about this already.”
He purred a dangerous sound. The glass cat looked around, alarmed, as if it had discovered a thorn in its own throat.
“I never called it a farm,” she pointed out.
“I have done my research,” he admitted. “Aren’t I allowed that?”
“We choose our own bosses,” she agreed. “Except those who work as slaves. Now in fact, Trism somehow gave those soldiers the slip for a couple of days. Not for long—they had bloodhounds on the job, can you believe it—but for a precious couple of days. Trism introduced himself to Candle, it seems, and what happened between those two—well, that I can’t say.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“As good as the same thing, my dear.”
“But we’re at the nub of it now. Was Trism jealous of Candle? Or vice versa? They shared a lover, after all. Did they go
at each other like wildcats?”
“Is this germane to your investigation, or do I detect a particular interest in sexual jealousy? An uptick in your circulation? Some shallow breathing?”
“Fuck you.”
“If I’d only been so lucky.”
