Bitter Gold Hearts

"You get me a chance to talk to them. I'll think of some reason for it."

"All right. But you'd better be careful. Especially with Amiranda. She's a little witch."

"You don't like her?"

"Not very much. She's smarter than me and when she wants she can make herself almost as pretty. Even my own mother always treats her better than me. But I don't think I hate her. I just wish she'd go away."

"And she wants to get away as badly as you and your brother do? When she gets better treatment?" "Better than awful is still bad, Garrett." "How soon can you fix it so I can see Karl?" "It'll be hard. He won't be able to sneak out right now. Domina has Courter watching him every minute. She says the kidnapping won't stay a secret and when the news gets out how much the ransom was, somebody else might try it again. Would they?"

"That happens. There are a lot of lazy, stupid crooks who try to get by imitating success. Your family will be at risk till your mother takes some action to make it plain that folks who mess with her live short and awful lives." "She probably wouldn't even care." She would care even if she had no use or love for her offspring, but I had no inclination to illuminate Amber about the symbols and trappings of power and what the powerful have to do to keep them polished and frighten­ing. "The next step has to be your brother. If he can't come to me, I'll go to him. You arrange something. I'll follow you home about a half hour behind you. I'll hang around outside somewhere. You give me a signal when it's all right to come in. Might as well set it for me to see Amiranda, too. What will the signal be?"

I had chosen a conspiratorial tone. It worked. She got into the spirit of doings shadowed and sinister. "I'll flash a mirror out my window. Give me five minutes after that, then meet me at the postern." "Which window?"

While she explained, I reflected that she had this gim­mick too pat to have come up with it on the spur of the moment. I hoped it was a device she used to sneak lovers inside. If she had been getting away with that, the notion might be marginally workable. If she was setting me up...

But she had no reason that I could see. It was plain that her only interest was laying hands on her mother's gold. You get paranoid in this business. But maybe para­noids get that way because of all the people out to get them.

"Better scoot along now," I told her. "Before they miss you up there and start wondering."

"A half hour wouldn't make any difference, would it?"

"A half hour might make all the difference." "I can get real stubborn when I really want something, Garrett."

"I'll bet you can. I hope you're as stubborn about the gold if we find things getting tight." I guided her toward the front door.

"Tight? How could it get dangerous?"

"Are you kidding? Not to be melodramatic"—like hell! —"but it could get to be a long, dark, narrow valley between your mother and the kidnappers before we get that gold socked away."

She looked at me with big eyes while that sank in. Then she turned on the smile. "Keep that golden carrot dangling out front and this mule won't even see the brooding hills."

So. A little slow, maybe, but gutsy. Old Dean was watching from down the hall, exercising his disapproving scowl. I patted Amber on the fanny. "That's the spirit, kid. Remember. I'm half an hour behind you. Try not to leave me standing in the street too long."

She spun around and laid a kiss on me that must have curled Dean's hair and toes. It did mine. She backed off, winked, and scooted.

______XIV______

I went back and got a big cold one to fortify myself for the coming campaign. I had to draw it myself. Dean had been stricken blind and could hear nothing but ghosts. He was exasperated with me. I downed the long one, drew another, lowered the keg, then went to tell the Dead Man the latest. He growled and snarled a little, just to make me feel at home. I asked if he was ready to reveal Glory Mooncalled's se­crets. He told me no, and get out, and I left suspecting cracks had appeared in his hypothesis. A cracked hypoth­esis can be lethal to the Loghyr ego.

After depositing my empty mug in the kitchen, I went upstairs and rooted through the closet that serves as the household arsenal, selected a few inconspicuous pieces of steel and a lead-weighted, leather-wrapped truncheon that had served me well in the past. With a warning to Dean to lock up after the ghosts left, I hit the street. It was a nice day if one doesn't mind an inconsistent hovering between mist and drizzle. Comes with the time of year. The grape growers like it except when they don't. If they had their way, every Stormwarden in the business would be employed full-time making fine adjust­ments in weather so they could maximize the premium of their vintages.