Page 7

Which Features Honesty in a New Light

A chill ran down his spine at the familiar voice. Had he conjured her with his thoughts? He turned around to discover his ears had not deceived him. Seeing Rahma, not only in town but drawing attention to herself, froze his brain. He blinked stupidly at her.

She waved merrily at the group. “How are things going?”

Rais stood closest to her. He turned to face her but didn’t apply the intimidating posture he had first used with As’ad.

“Hello, miss,” he returned the greeting politely. “May I ask who you are?”

“My name is Rahma.” She beamed at the crowd. As’ad had a moment to think that maybe it would be alright. Then her next words froze his heart. “I’ve been following the Pied Piper.”

The village elders turned to look at him with varying degrees of curiosity and/or hostility. The younger set hadn’t yet caught on that a drama was about to be acted out, right here in the streets. Sweat gathered at his hairline. He had never imagined this scenario and his usual quick wits had utterly abandoned him.

“He keeps trying to persuade me to stop,” Rahma informed them, her smile never wavering. “He even found a lovely family with five daughters—can you imagine that, five daughters?—who were headed to the coast and could drop me off at home on the way. Obviously,” she continued, “I didn’t go with them.”

She said that last almost as if it was a joke that they could all share. As’ad could see no way out of this mess, but to his surprise, the crowd seemed to be softening. Two or three of the older ladies exchanged glances, and he heard a couple murmurs about “young love.” His obvious discomfiture about the whole situation seemed to endear him to them. All too soon, and without quite knowing how it came to be, As’ad found himself seated at the head table with the mayor and several of her cronies.

Rahma was there, as well, naturally. She had wrapped the village elders around her little finger simply by telling the truth. As’ad chose to stick to the truth as much as possible in order to avoid inventing details that might trip him up later. Rahma wielded the truth as a weapon. Her absolute unconcern for the judgment of others had them all eating out of the palm of her hand.

She told them about Suha, and then flat-out asked if anyone knew anything about misplaced orphans. One of them mentioned that the married couple who cared for the occasional orphan had been relieved of their most recent dependents. The twelve-year-old twins had long-lost relatives somewhere out west. A sour-faced woman had collected them not long ago. This interested Rahma greatly. Her gentle but direct questions established that the woman was most likely Hadia, and that she had been accompanied by a girl matching Suha’s description, along with two young men. As’ad worried that Rahma was getting her hopes up for nothing. Dark hair and brown eyes described pretty much the entire population of Sharamil.

That night, Rahma and As’ad were welcomed into two different homes to sleep. In the morning, they were gifted a goodly amount of supplies on top of the fee he didn’t ask for yet received anyway. More than one person asked Rahma if she wanted an escort back home. She stubbornly stuck to her plan, though she did unbend enough to send another letter to her parents, and the general feeling seemed to be one of goodwill.

When one of the matrons asked Rahma if she felt safe traveling on with As’ad, he relaxed at this evidence that they weren’t going to blithely allow her to continue her outrageous behavior. She reassured them that he had been the perfect picture of a valiant knight.

“I don’t think I could persuade him to behave dishonorably toward me even if I tried.”

“And have you been trying yet?” a middle-aged woman asked in a confiding undertone that As’ad pretended he didn’t hear. He also pretended not to notice the way Rahma twinkled back at the lady.

Before he knew it, they were back on the road heading west, alone but for a handful of rats and a much heavier handcart. How did this come about?

“Where did the name ‘Pied Piper’ come from, anyway?” Rahma asked, right around the time As’ad lost hope that she would change her mind and return to Qarya. “I mean, obviously the ‘piper’ part makes sense. But what’s the deal with the ‘pied’ part?”

He shrugged helplessly. “I can’t answer that. I’m really not sure where it came from, either.” He kicked aside a pebble in his path. “One day, the town I was visiting just called me that. Apparently, word spread. Now everyone does.”

The moniker was a mystery, but he benefited from the anonymity. No one viewed him as a separate person with a real name, and that buffer provided another layer of safety from the authorities.

“It’s better than the Snide Piper, I suppose,” she mused.

He looked at her askance.

“Or the Tried Piper, which suggests a criminal background.” Before As’ad could object, she threw out a few more. “The Dyed Piper? Fried Piper? Guide Piper almost works.”

“Must it rhyme?”

She looked at him. “At this point? Yup!” Her fingers began twisting her braid around. “Hide Piper? No, Hide the Pi—No. Lied . . . to Piper?” she sounded out with a forming grimace. “Nah.”

Her hand got too tangled in the braid and she accidentally tugged her head to the side. This didn’t stop her rambling.

“Dried? Tied? Chide? Eyed? Well, I should hope so,” she muttered the last to herself, then continued at her regular volume, “Bride, cowhide, seaside?”

“How about the Wide Piper?” As’ad offered, unable to resist any longer.

Rahma burst out laughing. “Can you imagine? Everyone would expect you to come waddling into town!”

He felt a surge of pride for making her laugh.

She wiped at her eyes a moment later. “Well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

She smiled at him, and he smiled back without thinking.

“Awww, you do like me.”

He dropped the expression. “I’m tolerating you until I can safely make you someone else’s problem.”

“Oh, naturally,” Rahma agreed easily. “One of these days, you might actually succeed.”

They walked in silence for all of seven steps before she changed the subject.

“Have you really been doing this for years?”

He frowned a question at her.

“Back in Nahr. During negotiations, you said that we were paying for your years of expertise.”

“Oh.” He slowly started nodding. “Right. Uh . . . I’d guess it’s been”—his hand moved side-to-side in the air—”maybe a year?”

“A year of this con, or a year of living on your own like this?”

As’ad wasn’t too keen on the shrewd look in her eye. “I mastered this use of the pipes about a year ago,” he stated, hoping she would catch his tone and leave it alone.

“ This use? How else can you use the pipe?”

His next words were slow and enunciated clearly as he turned comically wide eyes on her. “To. Play. Music.”

“Bah.” Rahma threw her hand toward his shoulder and rolled her eyes. When he left it at that, she shook her head. “You really haven’t experimented with anything else?”

As’ad blinked.

“What if you can do more with it? Maybe even something useful!”

Her emphatic hand motions were back. He moved over to stay out of her flailing range.

Rahma stopped to put both of her hands on her hips, and he automatically paused, as well. She leaned forward to stare into his eyes. The sunlight caught in their depths and brought out a mahogany hue As’ad had never seen before. It distracted him from her next words.

“I know you don’t like pulling cons. This could be your ticket to something else.”

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” he answered without thinking. “Hey, wait! What do you mean, I don’t like pulling cons? I’m very good at it.”

A satisfied smirk settled on her lovely face. “There. You see? You couldn’t flat-out refute my statement, so you tried to distract me by pointing out your skill.” Her eyebrows rose. “Being good at something doesn’t mean you like it.”

As’ad stared stupidly as she spun on her heel and continued walking down the road. She called over her shoulder, “I, for one, am very good at finding grubs in the crops. That doesn’t mean I want to do it. I learned out of necessity.”

After a beat, he began moving again. He rolled her words around in his mind for the next leg of the trip. Rahma mercifully stayed quiet for longer than he had previously thought possible, and he was able to work through his thoughts in peace.

That night, as they sat around the campfire and played—or tried to play, in Rahma’s case—with the rats, As’ad worked up the nerve to ask her a question.

“How do you know I don’t like pulling cons?” He wanted to add a stick to the fire to avoid looking at her, but they were running low, so he examined his fingernails instead.

“You don’t take as much money as you could, for one thing,” she stated.

“So?” He risked a glance in her direction, but Rahma kept teasing Fat Carl, who had sidled near, with her braid.

“That tells me you aren’t greedy.”

Fat Carl rolled over on his back, revealing the V-shaped patch of white under his neck that looked like a collar against the brown of the rest of his fur. She gave him a piece of fruit, and he chirped happily before delving right in with his round belly still exposed.

As’ad shook his head. That rat behaved nothing like any of his other pets. Then he remembered what they were discussing.

“Maybe it’s because I don’t want to get caught.” He leaned back on his hands. “A little less money more often works out mathematically to be much more profitable than prison.”

Rahma met his practical expression with an unimpressed one. She shifted to face him fully. “Your attitude about the whole thing is what first made me pay attention.”

“What attitude?”

“Oh, you know. Little things. The dread that creeps into your voice when you realize it’s time to do it again. The way you were eating less so I could have enough but our food stores didn’t shrink as fast as they should.”

A growing heat burned at As’ad’s cheeks. She had noticed that?

“The fact that you don’t keep a full army of trained rats—which would be pretty easy for you—to cause real damage to the villages—”

He held up a hand. “If I left a trail of destruction like that, the sultan’s men would find me in a heartbeat.”

She pointed a finger at him, then shook it. “It’s in the way you can justify all of your actions and make them sound selfish.”

As’ad pulled his arms around his legs to ward off a chill that didn’t come from the evening air. “I don’t think I need to hear any more reasons.”

Rahma studied him for a quiet moment, then pushed herself to her feet and brushed her hands off. “Goodnight, Fireside Piper.”

He watched her walk to the tent, then turned back to the dwindling fire.

“Oh,” she called. “If you’re looking for Alzali, she’s in here.”

“Thanks for letting me know.” It seemed her steady campaign to win his rats’ hearts was beginning to see results.

As’ad foolishly started thinking he was off the hook when they made it through breakfast and almost a full hour of walking the next morning before Rahma reintroduced the topic.

“So,” she announced. “I was working on it all last night.”

“You’re awfully chipper for someone who didn’t sleep,” he teased dryly.

“Of course I slept.” She shot him a look of confusion, then moved on. “Currently, you use the illusion for deception. But ”—she emphasized the word with both hands—“couldn’t you use it for entertainment?”

As’ad hated to wipe the growing smile off her face, but he had to ask, “Who in their right mind would be entertained by a plague of rats?”

Rahma threw her hands in the air with a huff. “It doesn’t have to be rats ! What else can you create?”

His mind blanked. “Uhh . . .”

“You mean you’ve never tried anything else? Ever?!”

“Well, you know,” he scrambled to defend himself against her incredulity. “The first time I made the illusion, I was looking at a real rat. I kinda wished for another one, and there it was!”

“Hmm,” Rahma tapped her chin as she walked. “Can it only duplicate things that you’re looking at? No,” she declared with an outflung hand before he could get a word in. “Your swarm has rats with colors and markings that aren’t part of your six.”

He drummed his thumbs against the cart poles as he considered that.

“And I’ve seen you give them pretty sophisticated instructions through that pipe. So I’m sure the magic isn’t limited to what rats can do in nature.” She patted the air by his face. “I don’t mean to say you make them fly or anything, but that single-minded focus they exhibit just doesn’t track with real rats.”

As’ad ran over his usual process in his head and came to the conclusion that he could get the illusions to do other things, if he wanted. “I bet I could make ’em dance or something.”

“So then the question reverts back to whether or not you can do more than rats,” she mused, seeming not to have heard him. She halted abruptly and grabbed one of the poles. “Here. Trade places with me.”

He acquiesced to her command without thinking. “Wait,” he said after she was in position, “why?”

She grunted with the effort of starting the cart, then took a couple of less toilsome steps as it gained momentum. “Oh.” She stopped. “It would be easier to grab the pipe if the cart isn’t moving.”

“Why am I getting it?”

Rahma wrinkled her nose at him. “C’mon, Misguided Piper. How else are you going to experiment?”

“Oh, right.” Feeling ridiculous for not figuring out the obvious, he quickly unearthed the instrument. A thought poked at him. “You know, I have created the illusion of splashing water, too.”

“When you send the little beasts into the river?”

“Yeah . . .”

“You can definitely do more with that pipe.” Her emphatic nod loosed a curl from her braid, and he was momentarily distracted by the way it grazed her temple.

When he didn’t do anything with the pipe for another minute, she looked at him and motioned with her hands impatiently. “No time like the present. Try something!”

Using the larger, rounded end of the pipe to rub his ear, As’ad looked at her helplessly. “Like what?”

“Well, how good is your imagination?” When he didn’t know how to answer her, she clarified, “Do you need to see the thing that you want to create an illusion of? Or can you pull it out of thin air?”

He hesitated.

Rahma looked around. “Ooh, why don’t you try to make some more trees?” She pointed to a scraggly grove up ahead.

Calling the skeletal, half-dead shrubs “trees” was rather generous. but they provided a starting point for As’ad. He took his time examining the dying plants, then toodled out a couple of measures. The small stand immediately became a grove. Instead of replicating exactly what he was looking at, he had created an image that was similar but distinct. The extra plant life looked as though it had grown at the same time as the originals.

Rahma dropped the cart to clap her hands. “Ooh, very good.”

As’ad frowned as something nudged at the back of his mind. When he figured out what it was, he immediately piped a few notes to end the illusion.