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I hugged the invisible fencepost, telling myself I was being stupid. Get it over with, and maybe he’ll listen to you. Just do it and don’t think about it—great advice, except that it was Pritkin and, despite everything, that made it different. Weirdly enough, I thought a stranger’s eyes would have bothered me less.
“I don’t have the map,” I repeated, trying not to notice that it was really cold and that my body was reacting predictably.
“I regret that I cannot take your word for that,” he said stiffly, and it almost sounded sincere. It also sounded implacable. When I still didn’t move, I felt him come up behind me. “I find this distasteful. Do not make it more so by forcing me to search you physically.” His tone left me in no doubt at all that he’d do it.
I took a deep breath. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“What?” He sounded confused. I guess they didn’t have that saying in English yet.
“Do the reveal thing on yourself and I’ll turn around.”
“I’m not hiding anything!”
“Neither am I! And fair is fair. Or are you just looking for an excuse to do that search?”
Pritkin muttered something that sounded fairly vicious. “My clothes are warded! Even if I wished to accede to your demand, it would not work on them.”
“Then strip.”
“I beg your pardon?” He sounded almost polite suddenly, as if he believed he couldn’t possibly have heard right.
“Take them off.”
“And let you curse me without protection?” I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the sneer in his voice.
“You’ll still have your shields,” I pointed out. “And if you’re so worried that I might overpower you, keep your weapons on.” There was silence for a long moment. “If you’re any kind of gentleman, you’ll do it,” I added, getting desperate.
I held my breath, sure that it wouldn’t work, that he couldn’t possibly fall for that old line. But I guess it wasn’t so old in the 1790s, because the next moment I heard more muffled swearing and the soft sounds of clothes being pulled off. “Very well,” a pissed-off voice said after a few seconds. “Now will you turn around?”
“How do I know you really did it?”
“Are you questioning my honor?” He sounded incredulous.
“Let’s just say I’m not feeling especially trusting. Make the post opaque again, and come around front. If you haven’t lied to me, I’ll step out from behind it and we’ll get this over with.”
Pritkin didn’t bother to swear this time. The rocks suddenly went opaque and he stomped around in front of the post. He was carrying a gun in one hand and still wearing a knife in a sheath strapped to one calf, but he hadn’t bothered with the rest. I guess that was meant to make a point about how unlikely my beating him in a fight would be.
“Now keep your part of the bargain,” he said through gritted teeth. Or maybe he’d clamped them to keep them from chattering. He did look cold, I thought with no sympathy whatsoever.
I sized him up as green eyes glared at me past a curtain of red-gold hair. He made no attempt to cover himself. How noble. Then I got a good look at him, and my eyes widened. Despite the temperature, he didn’t really have any reason for modesty.
“As soon as you turn around,” I finally managed to say. He started to argue, but I raised an eyebrow. “It’s only fair.”
Pritkin threw up his hands, but he did turn around, flashing those fascinating dimples. This time I didn’t pause to admire the view. As soon as his back was turned, I grabbed his clothes and the orb, tore open a ley line and disappeared.
Chapter 22
It hadn’t been difficult to snag the line with the orb’s help, especially when I already knew where it was. Getting anywhere, I soon discovered, was a little harder. With Mircea, I’d thought of the lines as rivers of power, but this one was more like the rapids, with bumps and currents and eddies battering me every which way.
The bubble of protection provided by the orb kept the energy stream from frying me, but that was about it; there was no steering wheel, no seat belts and, worse, no brakes. I was slammed against first one side and then the other, before the thing flipped totally upside down, dropping me the length of my body before I was caught by the bottom of the sphere. It was the carnival ride from Hell, and I didn’t know how to get off.
I gathered my stolen booty into a wad and hastily tied my skirts around it to keep it from getting slung all over the place. Then I set about trying to figure out how this thing worked. Through trial and error, I found that I could maneuver the small circle of protection by pres
sing on one side or the other of the orb, although it was nowhere near as easy as Mircea had made it look. A small rotation could cause me to go careening off in that direction for what felt like a mile. I quickly learned to scale back my movements, caressing the orb with tiny motions of my thumbs.
It was about as easy as trying to guide a plastic beach ball through the incoming tide using chopsticks, but slowly I got a little better. I managed to position myself close to the side of the line, which is where people seemed to enter and leave. The current was rockier there, not as stable as in the middle of the stream, and I got buffeted about even more as I tried to bump the bubble back into my world.
The ley line seemed to have a kind of skin stretching over it formed of extra-thick bands of power that made leaving even trickier than I’d expected. Every time I pushed at the line, it pushed back, forcing me to have to spend time maneuvering back into position again. But finally I managed to rock just the right way and half of the bubble cleared the energy field.
