Ten Arrows

Chapter 9

"Are you certain your cheek is alright?" Talia asked, eyeing my face with a concerned expression. "It looks like it hurts."

"I've had worse. My leg, for one," I said, gesturing to indicate my walking stick as we walked down the busy street. When I'd gone back to Tucat Keep to pick up both Talia and my longsword, I'd decided to change clothes, though I'd kept the cane.

Talia adjusted her hold on my arm and peered over at the cane, and she wrinkled her nose at it.

"That's another thing - why have you been walking around with that lately? I thought you'd made a full recovery. Has your leg been bothering you again?"

"What, this?" I held up the cane and eyed it critically. "You mean, people actually use these things to help them walk? The only reason I picked this one up was because I heard it was the latest fashion. You don't think it makes me look particularly courtly and suave, darling?"

She chuckled softly at that, and held my arm a bit tighter as we walked. I resolved to make more statements of that nature in future, especially if they kept resulting in that sort of thing. Having a breathtakingly beautiful woman on your arm is a wonderful thing in and of itself, but having that same breathtakingly beautiful woman smile and pull herself closer to you, well, it's in a category all its own.

I smiled, and we walked, neither of us talking much. The silence between us was a comfortable one this time, much more so than some of the strained, awkward silences I'd encountered recently. The night air was sitting somewhere between 'warm' and 'cool', and the breeze was so gentle that it barely caused the street lamps to flicker. A perfect evening. Life was good.

For me, it was the second time I'd walked down this particular road today, though now that the cool blanket of night had settled it was hardly recognizable as the same street. Lamps were burning brightly on either side of the roadway, and the only carts in sight were of the push-cart variety, belonging to the dozens upon dozens of merchants who were busily hawking their wares.

Echoes of my morning's activities still resonated in the streets, and had been ever since we'd begun our journey. The streets were also abuzz with rumors that the prince had been robbed, though the stories varied from street to street.

As we walked through my territory and people figured out who I was, they would come out and thank me, or cheer, or praise my name, or offer me tokens of their esteem in the form of, well . . . whatever they thought I might like. Many times they'd offer these same tokens to Talia, who would often raise an eyebrow at me, smile at my tenant, and then graciously decline whatever she'd been offered. She hadn't remarked about any of these happenings at all so far.

The Harvest Festival was a mere week away, and, as always seemed to occur, farmers and other countryside folk had already begun pouring into Harael, and the 'pre-festival' was well underway. The street smelled of summer sausages, and lamb, and fried pastries, and flowered mead, and a cacophony of other things that resisted my attempts to describe it, the overall aroma changing with nearly every step we took.

In addition to the farmers, there were street clowns, musicians, puppeteers putting on shadow plays, you name it. In fact, we'd just come from a street-corner performance involving five similarly-attired ladies performing acrobatic feats that made onlookers gape, occasionally contorting themselves into pretzel-like configurations that seemed to defy logic and reason. Once, both Talia and I had been convinced that one of the girls had actually managed to break a limb while twisting herself through an impossibly small metal hoop being held at waist height by two other girls. In the end she seemed to be fine, and had a smile on her face that I would have found impossible if I'd attempted even a third of what she'd just put herself through.