The boy cowered. Donal put one hand on a narrow shoulder to prevent another stumble. But his attention was more firmly focused on the innkeeper. “Why do you call him a demon?” he asked. “He is only a boy.”
The man looked Donal up and down, brown eyes narrowing. Donal waited for the epithets to include himself, half-braced against another clot of manure—or worse—but instead of insults he got a shrewd assessment. He saw how the innkeeper judged him by the gold showing at his ear and the color of his eyes. His lir-bands were hidden beneath a heavy cloak, but his race—as always—was apparent enough.
Inwardly Donal laughed derisively. Homanans! If they are not judging us demons because of the shapechange, they judge us by our gold instead. Do they not know we revere our gold for what it represents, and not the wealth at all?
The Homanans judge your gold because of what it can buy them. Taj settled his wings tidily. The freedom of the Cheysuli.
The innkeeper turned his face and spat against the ground. “Demon,” he said briefly.
“The boy, or me?” Donal asked with exaggerated mildness, prepared for either answer. And prepared to make his own.
“Him. Look at his eyes. He’s demon-spawn, for truth.”
“No!” the boy cried. “I’m not!”
“Look at his eyes!” the man roared. “Tell me what you see!”
The boy turned his face away, shielding it behind one arm. His black hair was dirty and tangled, falling into his eyes as if he meant it to hide them. He showed nothing to Donal but a shoulder hunched as if to ward off a blow.
“Do you wish to come in?” the innkeeper demanded irritably.
Donal looked at him in genuine surprise. “You throw him out because you believe him to be a demon—because of his eyes—and yet you ask me in?”
The man grunted. “Has not the Mujhar declared you free of taint? Your coin is as good as any other’s.” He paused. “You do have coin?” His eyes strayed again to the earring.
Donal smiled in relief, glad to know at least one man in Hondarth judged him more from avarice than prejudice. “I have coin.”
The other nodded. “Then come in. Tell me what you want.”
“Beef and wine. Falian white, if you have it.” Donal paused. “I will be in in a moment.”
“I have it.” The man cast a lingering glance at the boy, spat again, then pulled the door shut as he went into his inn.
Donal turned to the boy. “Explain.”
The boy was very slender and black-haired, dressed in dark, muddied clothing that showed he had grown while the clothes had not. His hair hung into his face. “My eyes,” he said at last. “You heard the man. Because of my eyes.” He glanced quickly up at Donal, then away. And then, as if defying the expected reaction, he shoved the tangled hair out of his face and bared his face completely. “See?”
“Ah,” Donal said, “I see. And I understand. Merely happenstance, but ignorant people do not understand that. They choose to lay blame even when there is no blame to lay.”
The boy stared up at him out of eyes utterly unremarkable—save one was brown and the other a clear, bright blue.
“Then—you don’t think me a demon and a changeling?”
“No more than am I myself.” Donal smiled and spread his hands.
“You don’t think I’ll be putting a spell on you?”
“Few men have that ability. I doubt you are one of them.”
The boy continued to stare. He had the face of a street urchin, all hollowed and pointed and thin. His bony wrists hung out of tattered sleeves and his feet were shod in strips of battered leather. He picked at the front of his threadbare shirt with broken, dirty fingernails.
“Why?” he asked in a voice that was barely a sound. “Why is it you didn’t like hearing me called names? I could tell.” He glanced quickly at Donal’s face. “I could feel the anger in you.”
“Perhaps because I have had such prejudice attached to me,” Donal said grimly. “I like it no better when another suffers the fate.”
The boy frowned. “Who would call you names? And why?”
“For no reason at all. Ignorance. Prejudice. Stupidity. But mostly because, like you, I am not—precisely like them.” Donal did not smile. “Because I am Cheysuli.”
The mismatched eyes widened. The boy stiffened and drew back as if he had been struck, then froze in place. He stared fixedly at Donal and his grimy face turned pale and blotched with fear. “Shapechanger!”
Donal felt the slow overturning of his belly. Even this boy—
“Beast-eyes!” The boy made the gesture meant to ward off evil and stumbled back a single step.
Donal felt all the anger and shock swell up. Deliberately, with a distinct effort, he pushed it back down again. The boy was a boy, echoing such insults as he had heard, having heard them said of himself.
“Are you hungry?” Donal asked, ignoring the fear and distrust in the boy’s odd eyes.
The boy stared. “I have eaten.”
“What have you eaten—scraps from the innkeeper’s midden?”
“I have eaten!”
Anger gave way to regret. That even a boy such as this will fall prey to such absolute fear— “Well enough.” He said it more sharply than intended. “I thought to feed you, but I would not have you thinking I seek to steal your soul for my use. Perhaps you will find another innkeeper less judgmental than this one.”
The boy said nothing. After a long moment of shocked silence, he turned quickly and ran away.
In the morning, Donal found only one man willing to give him passage across the bay to the Crystal Isle, and even that man would not depart until the following day. So, left to his own devices, Donal stabled his horse and wandered down to the sea wall. He perched himself upon it and stared across the lapping waves.
He focused his gaze on the dark bump of land rising out of the Idrian Ocean a mere three leagues across the bay. Gods, what will Electra be like? What will she say to me?
He could hardly recall her, though he did remember her legendary beauty, for he had been but a young boy when Carillon had banished his Solindish wife for treason. Adultery too, according to the Homanans; the Cheysuli thought little of that charge, having no strictures against light women when a man already had a wife. In the clans, cheysulas, wives, and meijhas, mistresses, were given equal honor. In the clans, the birth of children was more important than what the Homanans called proprieties.
Treason. Aye, a man might call it that. Electra of Solinde, princess-born, had tried to have her royal Homanan husband slain so that Tynstar might take his place. Tynstar of the Ihlini, devotee of Asar-Suti, the god of the netherworld.
Donal suppressed a shudder. He knew better than to attribute the sudden chill he felt to the salty breeze coming inland from the ocean. No man, had he any wisdom at all, dismissed the Ihlini as simple sorcerers. Not when Tynstar led them.
He wishes to throw down Carillon’s rule and make Homana his own. For a moment he shut his eyes. It was so clear, so very clear as it rose up before his eyes from his memory: the vision of Tynstar’s servitors as they had captured his mother. Alix they had drugged, to control her Cheysuli gifts. Torrin, her foster father, they had brutally slain. And her son they had nearly throttled with a necklace of heavy iron.
Donal put a hand against his neck. He recalled it so well, even fifteen years later. As if it were yesterday, and I still a boy. But the yesterday had faded, his boyhood long outgrown.
He opened his eyes and looked again upon the place men called the Crystal Isle. Once it had been a Cheysuli place, or so the shar tahls always said. But now it was little more than a prison for Carillon’s treacherous wife.
The Queen of Homana. Donal grimaced. Gods, how could he stay wed to her? I know the Homanans do not countenance the setting aside of wives—it is even a part of their laws—but the woman is a witch! Tynstar’s meijha. He scrubbed a hand through his hair and felt the wind against his face. Cool, damp wind, filled with the scent of the se
a. If he gave her a chance, she would seek to slay him again.
Taj wheeled idly in the air. Perhaps it was his tahlmorra.
Homanans have none. Not as we know it. Donal shook his head. They call it fate, destiny…saying they make their own without the help of the gods. No, the Homanans have no tahlmorra. And Carillon, much as I respect him, is Homanan to the bone.
There is that blood in you as well, returned the bird.
Aye. His mouth twisted. But I cannot help it, much as I would prefer to forget it altogether.
It makes you what you are, Taj said. That, and other things.
Donal opened his mouth to answer aloud, but Lorn urgently interrupted. Lir, there is trouble.
Donal straightened and swung his legs over the wall, rising at once. He looked in the direction Lorn indicated with his nose and saw a group of boys wrestling on the cobbles.
He frowned. “They are playing, Lorn.”
More than that. Lorn told him. They seek to do serious harm.
Taj drifted closer to the pile of scrambling bodies. The boy with odd eyes.
Donal grunted. “I am not one of his favorite people.”
You might become so, Lorn pointed out, if you gave him the aid he needs.
Donal cast the smug wolf a skeptical glance, but he went off to intervene. For all the boy had not endeared himself the day before, neither could Donal allow him to be beaten.
“Enough!” He stood over the churning mass of arms and legs. “Let him be!”
Slowly the mass untangled itself and he found five Homanan boys glaring up at him from the ground in various attitudes of fear and sullen resentment. The victim, he saw, regarded him in surprise.
“Let him be,” Donal repeated quietly. “That he was born with odd eyes signifies nothing. It could as easily have been one of you.”
The others got up slowly, pulling torn clothing together and wiping at grimy faces. Two of them drifted off quickly enough, tugging at two others who hastily followed, but the tallest, a red-haired boy, faced Donal defiantly.
“Who’re you to say, shapechanger?” His fists clenched and his freckled face reddened. “You’re no better’n him! My Da says men like you are nothing but demons yourselves. Shapechanger!”
Donal reached out and caught the boy’s shoulder. He heard the inarticulate cry of fear and ignored it, pulling the boy in. He thought the redhead was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, but undernourished. Like all of them. “What else does your father say?”
The boy stared at him. He hunched a little, for Donal still gripped his left shoulder, but soon became defiant. “Th-that Shaine the M-mujhar had the right of it! That you should all be slain—like beasts!”
“Does he, now?” Donal asked reflectively, desiring no further answers. He felt sickened by the virulence of the boy’s hate. He only mouthed his father’s words, but it was enough to emphasize yet again that not all Homanans were prepared to accept the Cheysuli, no matter what Carillon had done to stop Shaine’s purge.
Almost twenty years have passed since Carillon came back from exile to make us welcome again, declaring us free of qu’mahlin, and still the Homanans hate us!
Lorn came up to press against his leg, as if to offer comfort. It brought Donal back to full awareness immediately, and he realized he still held the redhead’s shoulder. Grimly, he regarded the frightened boy.
But not so frightened he forgets his prejudice. Donal took a deep breath and tried to steady his voice. “Do you think I will eat you, boy? Do you think I will turn beast before your eyes and rip the flesh from your throat?”
“M-my Da says—”
“Enough of your jehan, boy!” Donal shouted. “You face me now, not your father. It is you who will receive what punishment I choose to give you for the insult you have offered.”
The boy began to cry. “D-don’t eat me! Please don’t eat me!”
In disgust, Donal shook him. “I will not eat you! I am not the beast your father says I am. I am a man, like he is. But even a man grows angry when boys lose their manners.”
Lir, Lorn said in concern.
Donal silenced him through the link and kept his attention on the boy. “What punishment do you deserve? What I would give my own son for such impertinence. And when you run home to tell your Da, tell him also that you sought to harm an innocent boy. See what he says then.”
Even as he said it, Donal grimaced to himself. Most likely he will send his son out to find another helpless soul. Contempt and hatred beget more of the same. He tightened his grip on the redhead. “Now, perhaps you will think better of such behavior in the future.”
Donal spun the boy quickly and held him entrapped in his left arm. Before the redhead could protest, Donal swatted him twice—hard—on his bony rump and sent him stumbling toward the nearest street. “Go home. Go home and learn some manners.”
The boy ran down the street and quickly disappeared. Donal turned at once to the victim, meaning to help him up, then thought better of it. Why give him another chance to revile me for my race?
But the boy evidently no longer held Donal in such contempt. He scrambled to his feet, tried to put his torn and muddied clothing into some semblance of order, and gazed at Donal with tentative respect. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“No,” Donal agreed. “I chose to.”
“Even after—after what I called you?”
“I do not hold grudges.” Donal grinned suddenly. “Save, perhaps, against Carillon.”
The mismatched eyes widened in shock. “You hold a grudge against the Mujhar?”
“Upon occasion—and usually with very good reason.” Donal hid a second smile, amused by the boy’s reaction.
“He is the Mujhar! King of Homana and Lord of Solinde!”
“And a man, like myself. Like you will be, one day.” He put out a hand and touched the ugly swelling already darkening the skin beneath the boy’s blue eye. The brown one was unmarred. “This will be very sore, I fear.”
The boy recoiled from the touch. “It—doesn’t hurt.”
Donal, hearing the boy’s fear, took away his hand. “What is your name? I cannot keep calling you ‘boy,’ or ‘brat,’ as the innkeeper did.”
“Sef,” whispered the boy.
“Your age?”
Cheeks reddened. “Thirteen—I think.”
Donal gently clasped one thin shoulder, ignoring the boy’s sudden flinch. “Then go on your way, Sef, as you will not abide my company. But I suggest you avoid such situations in the future, do you wish to keep your bones whole and your face unblemished.”
Sef did not move as Donal removed his hand. He stood very stiff, very still, his mismatched eyes wide, apprehensive, as he watched Donal turn to walk away.
“Wait!” he called. “Wait—please—”
Donal glanced back and waited. The boy walked slowly toward him, shoulders raised defensively, both hands twisting the drawstring of his thin woolen trews.
“What is it?” Donal asked gently.
“What if—what if I said I did want your company?”
“Mine?” Donal raised his brows. “I thought you feared it, Sef.”
“I—I do. I mean, you shift your shape.” Briefly he looked at the wolf. “But I’d rather go with you.”
“With me?” Donal frowned. “I will willingly buy you a meal—even a week’s worth, if need be, or give you coin enough so you could go to another town—but I had not thought to take you with me.”
“Please—” One hand, briefly raised, fell back to his side. He shrugged. It was the barest movement of his ragged clothing, intensely vulnerable. “I have no one. My mother is—dead. My father—I never knew.”
Donal frowned. “I do not live here.”
“It doesn’t matter. Hondarth isn’t my home. Just—just a place I live, until I find better.” The thin face blazed with sudden hope. “Take me with you! I’ll work for my wage. I can tend your horse, prepare the food, clean up afterwards! I’ll do anything.”
�
��Even to feeding my wolf?” Donal did not smile.
Sef blanched. He stared blindly at Lorn a moment, but then he nodded jerkily.
Donal laughed. “No, no—Lorn feeds himself. I merely tease you, Sef.”
The boy’s face lit up. “Then you will take me with you?”
Donal glanced back toward the Crystal Isle. What Carillon had sent him to do offered no place for a boy, but perhaps after. Having a boy to tend his horse and other small chores would undoubtedly be of help.
And there is always room for serving-boys in Homana-Mujhar. He turned back to Sef and nodded. “I will take you. But there are things you must know about the service you undertake.”
Sef nodded immediately. “I will do whatever you say.”
Donal sighed. “To begin, I will not countenance pointless chatter among other boys you may meet. I understand what pride is, and what youth is, and how both will often lead a boy—a young man—into circumstances beyond his control, but this case is very special. I am not one for unnecessary elaborations, and I dislike ceremony, but there will be times for both. You will know them, too. But you must not give in to the temptation to speak of things you should not to other boys.”
Sef frowned intently. “Other boys? Do you have so many servants?”
Donal smiled. “I have no servants—at least, not as I think of them. But there are pages and body-servants where we will go, when I finish my business here, and I must have your promise to keep yourself silent about my affairs.”
Sef’s dirt-streaked face grew paler. “Is it—because you’re Cheysuli?”
“No. And I do not speak of secret things, merely things that are very private. And sometimes quite important.” He studied Sef’s face and then brought his right hand up into the muted sunlight. “See this? Tell me what it is.”
Sef frowned. “A ring.”
“Surely you are more observant than that.”
The frown deepened. “A gold ring. It has a red stone in it, and a black animal in the stone. A—lion.” Sef nodded. “A black lion—”
“—rampant, upon a scarlet Mujharan field,” Donal finished. “Do you know what that is?”
Legacy of the Sword Page 2
