Page 29 of The Boy Bride

She nodded smartly. She could always tell when he was giving an order.

He’d do a sweep of the compound, but the first thing was to bar the front door of his house. He headed back inside.

Tirtu burst through the door just as Vanu reached it. Vanu stepped back, and Tirtu jumped, startled. And he had obviously been rattled to begin with.

“They’re missing, my lord!” he gasped.

“Who?”

“The lowlanders! Both of them. Your boy and the other one—they’re not in the round house where we put them, they’re not anywhere! What’s going on? What are the Gukhártu boys and Shaman Padunu doing outside your house?”

Vanu sighed and rubbed his thumb along the scar on his right cheek—something Darma had once told him he did when he was thinking about something that annoyed him.

Earth’s heart, he missed Darma.

“Come.” He gestured to Tirtu and strode back out through the front door.

Khatu, Barda, and Padunu were standing in the street looking varying shades of foolish. Gurti stood a small distance away looking stern. Faru was not there, which annoyed Vanu further. This whole situation was primarily Faru’s fault, and he wasn’t even pretending to attempt to put it right.

Vanu pointed at Khatu and Barda, gestured toward Tirtu, and said, “Explain.”

“Uh,” said Khatu, looking like a wood mushroom that had been asked to lead a reconnaissance mission.

“Lord Vanu’s changed his mind about the wedding,” said Barda, with a random brightness.

“I know that!” Tirtu snapped. “At least—my lord? Changed your mind how? You don’t mean you’ve changed it again? Changed it back? You do still want to go through with it?”

“Of course he does!” Khatu chimed in helpfully.

“Well, I knew that. But the bride is missing.”

“We knew that,” said Barda.

“There has been a grave misunderstanding.” Padunu spoke in a loud, shaman-performing-a-ritual voice that startled everyone except Vanu, who had seen him drawing a deep breath to do it. “If I may elucidate the situation.”

Khatu, Barda, and Tirtu gave him blank looks. They probably didn’t know what elucidate meant. Vanu knew that it meant Padunu was going to talk more than anybody wanted him to.

“Lord Vanu expressed his intention to return the lowland boy bride to his own people, which Lord Faru interpreted as an order to himself to have the young man ejected from Umtúshta in fatal fashion.”

“What?”

“Thrown over the wall,” Barda supplied.

“What? No! My lord, you cannot allow⁠—”

“It didn’t happen,” Khatu cut in.

“We had a better idea,” said Barda smugly.

Padunu took up the account again to explain exactly how the brothers had heaved the boy through Vanu’s upstairs front window, including the detail, which he’d left out the first time, that the boy’s arms had been lashed to his sides with rope when they did it.

That part caught in Vanu’s mind. The boy had stolen the snake dagger and folded himself up in that cupboard while he was tied up? Vanu missed most of the rest of what Padunu and Tirtu were saying because he was wondering how one could do that, and could he have done that—given a much larger cupboard—and coming to the conclusion that he couldn’t. Though if he thought that someone was going to throw him over a fortress wall if he didn’t—and if he’d been younger and more attached to his life … Desperation did give you surprising powers.

“Right, let’s split up and search the village,” Tirtu was saying. “They’ve got to be somewhere. I take it, my lord, they’re not in your house?”

Vanu shook his head. If the other lowlander was missing too, it probably meant that the boy had gone back for him. So they wouldn’t be inside Vanu’s compound.

All the same, Vanu didn’t join in the hunt. He left that to the other men and went back inside, barring his door behind him, to rejoin the girls. He wasn’t sure what to tell them; he didn’t want to alarm them, didn’t want to disappoint them, and didn’t want to keep them in the dark, either. It turned out that Mikhi had already given her sisters a fragmentary and confusing account of what was going on, so they were all alarmed, upset, and still pretty much in the dark when he arrived, which made his decision easy. He explained everything entirely from the beginning.