The Tracker Read Online Free Page B

face. One of the widowers had complained to his first lead, who had gotten Leefa to give up by threatening to report her behavior to her superiors in the kitchen. Tolaman would not intercede on Arden’s behalf in this.
    If he was polite, she was encouraged. If he was rude, she assumed he didn’t mean it. If he avoided being seen, she wouldn’t believe that she was the cause. He finished one boot, flapped the towel, and got to work on the second. He could spend his money on a visit to a love penchant, who would give him a potion that would make him appear hideous to Leefa. Usually people bought those when the one they loved persisted in being in love with someone else, and slipped it into their rival’s drink. A potion like that would take up most of what he had in his money pouch, and he resented losing what it had taken him seven years to acquire.
    Besides, if he were going to spend his money on a love penchant, it would be for a spell to bring a man to him, not to send a woman away. He thought of the gentlemen and their pretty little daughter at the fountain and was filled with envy. Arden hadn’t even been able to keep a man for two nights in a row, let alone a lifetime and with a child to call their own.
    When his second boot was finished, he flapped the towel once more and closed it into a cabinet. Heating up water, he made tea and retook his chair. Then came a brisk knocking on the door. The cup had just touched his lips. Startled, he put it down in the saucer hastily and almost spilled the scalding liquid over his fingers.
    His feelings of envy turned to dread. She was back. With curtains for the bedroom, a suggestion that she might warm his bed, a treat she had pilfered from the kitchen to share . . . This was ridiculous. It stopped now. Had she discovered some magic spell this afternoon that had transformed her into a devastatingly handsome man, he still wouldn’t be interested. Her clutching, pushy personality wasn’t attractive to him, and he didn’t want to be favored just because of his position.
    The brisk knocking came again and Tolaman shouted, “Arden! Arden, open this door at once! I apologize, sir, my second lead sleeps very deeply.”
    Arden lifted the plank and opened the door. A cluster of people was standing on the stoop. The king’s man, two soldiers, and Tolaman pushed inside to fill the tiny room. They thought the princess was hiding in his hut! That was the only explanation that Arden could conjure. “No one is here but I, sirs, madam.” One soldier was a woman. Tolaman hissed at him to be quiet and gave an apologetic shrug to the rest of the company.
    Arden had never had cause to speak to the king’s man, and only knew his name was Pietru through Leefa’s gossip. No one called him that but the royal family. It was sir or the king’s man to everyone else. Something about his roving brown eyes had always seemed hungry to Arden. The man handled the private business of the throne and had once taken the whip away from the Master-at-Arms to apply it himself to a maid who traded secrets of the royal children in their nursery to a newsman for pieces of gold. After her lashing, she was dismissed from her position. It was said the king’s man spread shuffle over her name so thoroughly that she had to move all the way to Loria to find work.
    Right now, those hungry brown eyes were taking in every facet of Arden’s hut and his person. Neither had Arden ever spoken to the pair of soldiers. The man was often posted as a guard on the wall or in the courtyard; the woman was a third floor guard. He had bloodshot eyes and a craggy face with a little joviality caught in the cracks, a man who looked old when young; she was smooth and clear and solemn, a woman who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. All three of them had hard forms, callused hands, and a clip to their movements. Soft, tubby Tolaman was a complete contrast. The buttons on his shirt strained at the gut and his scalp shined