War Maid's Choice
Page 31
“I’ve...heard it said, yes, Mother,” Leeana replied primly.
“Good. A frontal attack, that’s the ticket. A surprise assault,” Hanatha’s eyes gleamed with what Leeana realized was genuine humor, possibly even delight. “An ambush, before he can get his defenses erected.” She gave her daughter another very direct look. “Was that approximately what you had in mind?”
“Something very much along those lines, actually, Mother,” Leeana admitted, feeling the blush heating her cheekbones.
Her mother considered her for several moments, then smiled.
“Good,” she said again. “And now that that’s settled, my dear, would you care for a little more lemonade?”
Chapter Eighteen
“Well,” Bahzell replied, his own tone rather more pacific and consoling than his companion’s as Walsharno moved smoothly up the approach road towards Hill Guard, “I’m not so very surprised as all that, I suppose. I’m thinking there’s never a sister been born as didn’t think her brother was after poking his nose where it didn’t belong. Not a one of mine ever did, any road.”
“And mighty handy I’m sure you find that when it’s time to be pestering Gayrfressa,” Bahzell observed shrewdly. “And not so much when it’s time for her to be pestering you.”
“Ah, but himself wouldn’t be so very pleased if I were to take it into my head to be starting to lie just because the truth’s one as you’re not so very fond of.”
“My mother,” Brandark remarked to no one in particular from where he rode at Bahzell’s side, “always told me it was impolite to have a conversation in which not everyone present had the opportunity to participate.”
“Did she, now?” Bahzell looked down at the Bloody Sword with a smile.
“Yes, she did.” Brandark tilted his head back to look back up at his towering companion. “Of course, now that I think about it, I believe she also mentioned something about Horse Stealers’ ideas about politeness and manners in general being just a little backward.”
“Now, that I won’t,” Bahzell told his companion, smiling at Walsharno’s mobile ears. “If it’s an insult you’re mindful to give him, then I’m thinking you should figure out how to do it yourself and not be dragging me into it. I’ve insults enough for him of my very own.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Brandark’s eyes glinted. “Well, I’ve got some for you that I’d considered trotting out, but I thought better of it.”
“You thought better of it?” Bahzell flattened his ears, regarding the Bloody Sword incredulously.
“Yes, I did,” Brandark said virtuously. “I was inspired by something Vaijon pointed out to me before he left with Yurokhas, actually.”
“Aye?” Bahzell’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “And what would that have been?”
“He simply pointed out that it’s both unjust and unfair to challenge an unarmed man to a duel.”
“Did he now?” Bahzell glanced up at the curtain wall and towers beginning to loom before them and his expression turned speculative. “I’m wondering how high someone would bounce if someone else was to be tossing him off the main keep’s battlements?”
“Lady Hanatha would be very upset with you for making such a mess in the courtyard,” Brandark said severely.
“Aye, there’s that,” Bahzell acknowledged. “Still and all, I’m thinking she’d likely consider why it might be I’d gone and done it, and she does know you. Taken altogether, I’ve no doubt she’d be willing enough to forgive me as long as I promised to be cleaning up the mess my own self.”
Brandark laughed, conceding the round, then cocked his head inquisitively.
“Still, I have to admit the two of you have managed to pique my curiosity. Should I assume Gayrfressa’s been up to something?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Bahzell shrugged. “I’ve no more idea why than Walsharno, you understand, but she’s taken it into that head of hers to be paying us a visit.”
“She has?” Brandark reached up and rubbed the tip of his truncated ear thoughtfully. “All the way from Warm Springs.”
“Aye. I thought as how I’d caught just a trace of her yesterday, but it wasn’t until this morning Walsharno and I were sure of it.” Bahzell flipped his ears. “Not that she’s said a thing at all, at all, about why it might be she’s here.”
“She’s always struck me as fairly independent-minded for a courser,” Brandark observed.
<“Fairly independent-minded”?> Walsharno repeated, and tossed his head with a superb snort.
Bahzell chuckled, but Brandark and Walsharno had a point. A very good one, in fact. Gayrfressa was a courser, with the innate sense of corporate identity they all shared. Individuals, yes, all of them were that. But they were constantly aware of themselves as a component of their herd, as well. Yet Gayrfressa had...not less of that awareness, but a stronger sense of her individuality to set against it. She was far more likely to go her own way than any other courser mare Bahzell had ever met, and he certainly knew her well enough to realize that.
Any wind rider became accustomed to the shapes and patterns of courser personalities, yet Bahzell was even more aware of them than most. When he’d healed the survivors of the Warm Springs courser herd, a part of him had...merged with them. That was the only way he could describe it, and none of the other wind riders he’d discussed it with—and it wasn’t something he discussed even with many of them—had ever heard of it happening before. As nearly as he could tell, he’d acquired the herd sense—the awareness of every other member of the herd, whenever he was within a few leagues’ distance—which set courser herd stallions apart from all other coursers. And his link with Gayrfressa was stronger and richer than with any other member of the herd, perhaps because she was Walsharno’s sister, or perhaps because she was the first of the survivors he’d healed.
It was true enough, he thought, and it worked both ways. Besides—he chuckled at the thought—Gayrfressa was probably the only creature on earth who was even stubborner than Walsharno.
“I’ll allow as that’s a fair enough way to describe her,” he told Brandark out loud. “Still, I’m thinking there might be just a mite more to it than usual this time. She’s not given Walsharno so much as a hint as to why she’s come, and it’s pikestaff plain she’s something on her mind. Aye, and it’s something as has her amused clean down to her hoofs.”
“Chesmirsa!” Brandark rolled his eyes. “Something a courser thinks is funny? I wonder—if I start running now, do you think I can get out of range in time?”
* * *
Bahzell swung down from Walsharno’s saddle in the stable yard. Over the years, he’d actually learned to do that gracefully, despite both Walsharno’s height and the traditional Horse Stealer lack of familiarity with horses large enough to bear their weight. In fact, he looked quite improbably graceful for someone his size, if the truth be known.
He reached up to pat Walsharno on the shoulder, and the stallion bent his lordly head to lip his companion’s hair affectionately, as Doram Greenslope came out to personally greet them.
“Welcome home, Prince Bahzell! Walsharno!” the stablemaster said, crossing the stable yard to bow respectfully to Walsharno. “And to you, too, Lord Brandark.”
“It’s glad we are to be here, Doram,” the hradani replied, and it was true. In fact, in many ways, Hill Guard—Sothōii fortress or no—was at least as much his home—and Walsharno’s—now as ever Hurgrum had been. And wasn’t that the gods’ own joke on hradani and Sothōii alike?
“We’ve visitors,” Greenslope continued as he beckoned two of the stable hands forward to take the pack horses’ leads from Brandark and see to the Bloody Sword’s warhorse.
“Aye, so Walsharno and I had guessed,” Bahzell rumbled, turning towards the stables as Gayrfressa appeared.
The big chestnut mare crossed the bricks towards him with that smooth, gliding courser’s gait, her head turned to the right so that her single remaining eye could see where she was going. The hradani felt a familiar pang as he saw the scars not even a champion of Tomanāk had been able to erase, and her eye—the same amber-gold as Walsharno’s—softened with shared memory as he felt his regret. But it was his memory she shared, and not his regret. That had always astounded him, yet it was true. The loss of her eye, of half her vision, was...inconvenient, as far as Gayrfressa was concerned, although Bahzell would have found it far worse than that if their positions had been reversed. Unlike any other hradani ever born, he’d actually shared a courser’s vision, the ability to see a world totally different from that of the Races of Man. Like the horses from which they had sprung, coursers possessed very nearly a three hundred and sixty-degree view of their world. They saw distances differently, colors were even more vivid in many ways, and they were accustomed to seeing everything about them with a panoramic clarity that was difficult to imagine and impossible to adequately describe. They knew what was happening around them at virtually every moment.
And Gayrfressa had lost that. Any courser—or horse—had a tendency to flinch when something or someone managed to get into its blind spot, for those blind spots were small, and they were unaccustomed to having that happen. Yet half of Gayrfressa’s world had gone black on the day a shardohn’s claw ripped through her right eye socket. That would have been more than enough to turn a lesser creature into a nervous, perpetually wary, and cautious being, but not Gayrfressa. The absolute boldness of her mighty heart refused to back down even from the loss of half her world, and he sensed her gentle amusement at his own reaction to her fearlessness. Because, he knew, she genuinely didn’t see it that way. It was simply the way it was, and all she had ever asked of the world was to meet it on her feet.
“And good day to you, lass,” he rumbled, reaching up to wrap one arm around her neck as she rested her jaw on his shoulder. He couldn’t hear her mental voice the way he could hear Walsharno’s, but he didn’t have to. She was there, in the back of his brain, and the depths of his heart, glowing with that same dauntless spirit—older and more seasoned, now, but still the same—he’d sensed on the dreadful day they’d met.
“And who might be seeing after Sharnofressa and Gayrhodan while you’re off gallivanting about?” Bahzell asked teasingly, and Gayrfressa snorted.
She remained a bachelor, without the permanent mate most coursers found by the time they were her age, but she’d done her bit to help rebuild the Warm Springs herd. Her daughter Sharnofressa—” Daughter of the Sun,” in Old Kontovaran—was four and a half years old, one of the almost unheard of plaominos who were born so seldom to the coursers, and her son son Gayrhodan—“Born of the Wind”—was almost two, and bidding to become the spitting image of his Uncle Walsharno. Coursers matured slightly more slowly than horses, but Sharnofressa had been on her own for some time now, and Gayrhodan was certainly old enough to be trusted to the rest of the herd’s care—and surveillance—while his mother was away.
“Not so much unlike us two-foots, after all, aren’t you just?” Bahzell said, reaching up to the side of her neck again. “And would it happen you’re minded to tell us now what it is as we owe the honor of your presence to?”
Gayrfressa looked at him for a moment, then snorted and shook her head in the gesture of negation the coursers had learned from their two-footed companions. He gazed back up at her, ears cocked, then shook his own head. If she wasn’t, she wasn’t, and there was nothing he could do about it. Besides—
“Hello, Prince Bahzell,” another voice said, and he froze.
For just a moment, he stood very, very still. Then he turned, and it would have taken someone who knew him well to recognize the wariness in the set of his ears, the intensity of his gaze.
“And good day to you, Mistress Leeana,” he said.
* * *
“Sure and I’m not so clear what you’re meaning,” he said to his distant companion, and heard Walsharno’s gentle laughter in the back of that overly occupied brain of his.
“I’m not—”
Bahzell stopped, standing on the stair, turning away from the tower to look at the setting sun, and drew a deep, lung-swelling breath.
“It’s not something as could happen, Brother,” he said softly.
“Taking first things first,” Bahzell said considerably more tartly, “I’m after being hradani, and she’s after being human—aye, and Sothōii, to boot! I’m thinking it wouldn’t be more than half—no more than two-thirds, at worst—of all the Sothōii warriors in the world as would be hunting my ears. And after that, she’s after being Tellian and Hanatha’s daughter. A fine thing it would be if such as me—and twice her age and more, come to that—was to be breaking their trust that way! Aye, and her the daughter of the Lord Warden of the West Riding! Wouldn’t that just make such as Cassan and Yeraghor sit up and start sharpening those daggers all over again.”
Walsharno said. There was no irony in the stallion’s tone, only simple thoughtfulness.
“There’s matters of law, and then there’s matters of custom, and finally there’s matters of the heart.” Bahzell’s voice was softer than it had been. “Whatever the law might be saying, there’s those as would use custom against Tellian quicker than spit, if such as me was to be wedding such as she. And I’ve no interest at all, at all, in what the law might be saying, either, Walsharno. Charter or no, that lass will be the daughter of their hearts until Isvaria takes them both, and I’ll not break those hearts. There’s better for her than me, and safer, too.”
He shook his head, ears flattened.
“I doubt the thought’s ever so much as brushed her mind—and if it did, it was never aught but a young lass’s imaginings when she’d grief and worry enough for a dozen lasses twice her age! Aye, and when she’d done no more than turn to an older and a wiser head for counsel.” His lips tightened, remembering a conversation atop another tower of this very castle. “I’d no business thinking what I was thinking then, and a fine fellow I’d be to be taking advantage of a lass so young who’d done naught but cry on my shoulder, so to speak. And that was all it was after being, Walsharno. Naught but a lass in pain and a foolish hradani thinking things he’d no business thinking, with her so young. Aye, and I knew she was too young for me to be thinking any such! And for all it’s true my skull’s a bit thicker than most, it’s not so thick as to think she’d any deeper thought of me than that...and well she shouldn’t have. No.” He shook his head again. “No, there’s things as can be and things as can’t, and all the wishes in the world can’t turn the one into the other, Brother.”