Oath Bound (Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

outriders and admiring his horse. Both of the little
girls had drawn close to Dingus, who was letting them gape at—even touch—his
pointed ears.
    The sun broke the
horizon, and Farid whirled into action. “All right, my darlings, it’s time to
go! Into the wagon with you,” he cried over his shoulder as he ran for his
horse. He swung himself onto its back and fit his feet to the stirrups. The
white mare trotted to the gate. Farid drew his broad falchion and urged the
mare to rear up, waving the sword so it flashed in the sun. “We ride!” he
shouted. Vandis settled himself on the floor of the wagon, and Kessa scrambled
in behind him. They sat among the family’s belongings. Dingus lifted the two
little girls, who shrieked with glee as he rolled them over the side. Aisha
shifted her baby in his sling and snapped the reins, and the mule team drew
them away. At the last moment, Dingus caught the back of the wagon and vaulted
gracefully in.
    It went far better than
Vandis had dared to hope. The long summer days rolled one into the next, mile
after mile, across the broad plain. The winds kicked dust through the sparse
grass, short and browning where caribou had cropped. Before two days had
passed, Kessa had made friends with most of the caravan guards—under his and
Dingus’s sharp watch, of course—and she joined them each morning for drill,
excited to use her new hand-and-a-half.
    For once, socializing
came easily to Dingus. As unhappy as he’d been about traveling with the
caravan, he was delighted now. Farid’s girls weren’t the only children around,
and before dinnertime the first day he’d collected them all like chicks under
his lanky wing. Even Hussein, the baby, had been caught in an enchantment woven,
as far as Vandis could tell, of silly rhymes and sillier faces.
    However he charmed them,
their parents loved it. The little ones’ naked idolatry left them free to talk
amongst themselves, or better, to Vandis. He gathered plenty of tidbits about
Muscoda’s borders, though nothing from within; he wasn’t too big to admit, had
anybody asked, that he’d checked to assure himself that no Muscodites were
traveling with Farid. None of the People had joined the caravan, either, though
there was a family of human carters hauling fine wool up from Wealaia. Vandis
spent a couple of days riding on their wagon, listening to the news—which
wasn’t much—and filling their ears with pro-half-blood rhetoric, but Dingus’s
distracting their three rough-and-tumble sons did more for that cause than
anything Vandis could have said.
    Just now he strode back from Aisha's wagon, carrying the
middle boy kicking and squalling over his shoulder. He deposited the child in
the wagon with his parents. “Now you stay here and have a time-out ’til you’re
good and ready to say sorry to Dimi for kicking him, and don’t you bug your ma
and dad neither.”
    “He kicked me first!” the little boy yelled, right next to
Vandis’s head.
    “ No, sir, he did not. I saw the whole thing, and you
didn’t act right, Joey Bob, so you just sit here ’ til
you can.”
    “ You’re not fair!” Joey Bob
screamed at the top of his lungs. Vandis winced and covered one ear. “I hate
you!”
    Dingus made
an elaborate gesture of apathy and walked away. The boy’s mother gasped. “Did I
just hear that, young man? Were you talking ugly to Parsifal just now? Because
I truly hope my ears deceive me!”
    “Huh!” Joey
Bob slid down in the wagon and kicked the side, rattling the board. “Parsifal’s
mean! He’s just a—just a dumb old dingus, that’s what!”
    Vandis pretended
to cough into his hand while Joey Bob’s mother put a solid slap upside the
boy’s head.
    Eventually, even Vandis
grew bored. He’d heard all the gossip he was likely to. He did enjoy the
compliments that flew his way about Kessa and “Parsifal,” but he’d be relieved
when he could call his Junior Dingus again. He’d gotten accustomed to the name,
and