The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  “He knows what we are! He knows what we’ve done! I say we kill him!”

  “Kill him! Finish him off!”

  “Nay! Hold, there, Red! Put down your knife!” That was Bartholomew, speaking quickly. “What profit is in it for us if we kill him?”

  “We must be rid of him!” That was Dog-Ears. “This Lord Arno will be after us soon enough, if what this cursed one says is true. We’ll have to abandon camp. We’ll have to run, even split up. I say we kill him.”

  “Kill him! Kill him!”

  “We could gain coin and bread if we sell him at the slave market with the women. He’s strong and healthy. He’ll bring a good price from the Salian merchants.”

  Where were Rage and Sorrow? He could not see, nor could he hear any trace of them. Ai, God, were they dead? Had the bandits killed them? He had been careless, such a fool, to turn his back even for a moment.

  The current caught him and dragged him under.

  XXI

  TRUST

  1

  SANGLANT slid from wakefulness to sleep so imperceptibly that the transition happened while she blinked. Heribert tucked blankets in around him as Liath beckoned to Hathui.

  “I pray you, give me a report of what has transpired while I have been gone.”

  “Have you a day for the telling?”

  Liath smiled wryly. “I have not. Tell me what is most important. I can learn the rest later. Come, you can speak to me while I sit with my daughter.”

  “I’ll stay with Prince Sanglant,” said Heribert.

  Liath found Blessing attended by an old man whose naked torso was entirely tattooed with intertwined animals. His eyes widened when he saw her, and he backed away respectfully, humming in his reedy voice. The sound shuddered up and down her spine like the wandering of an unfinished spell, seeking an entrance.

  Others bowed, acknowledging her: the Kerayit healer and a trio of anxious Wendish attendants—the young woman with the peculiar skin color called Anna, a youth by name of Matto, and a young lord named Thiemo who seemed sweet on Anna and annoyed with Matto, although he and the other youth were of an age and might surely otherwise be expected to be friendly companions.

  They are not so much younger than I am, thought Liath, but she felt immeasurably older. She had traveled so far that at times she felt as if she had aged one hundred years in the space of a few days. Still, as she stood over the pallet on which Blessing lay, she could not imagine being old enough to be the mother of a child who appeared to be twelve or so years of age.

  Nor was she. Blessing was barely four years old; it was only the aetherical link to Jerna that had accelerated her growth. Would her little girl burn brightly and live only a brief span? She might soon be older than her parents, tottering around in her second childhood and losing her memory of what had passed for a life.

  It was too painful to consider.

  “What is your name? What are you?” Liath asked the old man.

  He nodded. “I am Gyasi. I am shaman of Kirshat tribe. I owe my life to this one.” He indicated Blessing. “So I serve her.”

  “Have you any sorcery that can wake her?”

  He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, lifting his chin—a negative response. “This is powerful spell. I know not. I am helpless.”

  She stared down at her child, fallen so far away from her. Anna worked a comb through the girl’s thick hair, and Liath wondered idly if it wouldn’t be more practical simply to cut it short. Was her daughter vain of her hair? She did not even know such a small, intimate detail. She knew nothing of her, not really.

  Blessing was a stranger.

  “Hathui, I pray you,” she said, voice choked with tears. “Tell me the tale of the years I have been gone.”

  The sun had reached the zenith by the time she emerged from the tent. Sanglant still slept. The griffin napped beside its mate, content to doze in the noonday sun. The soldiers had moved the skittish horses upwind. As they went about their tasks, the men circled warily around the griffins. They kept their distance from Liath as well.

  They all treat me as though I’m something dangerous.

  She called Captain Fulk to her and asked him to have Resuelto saddled. “I will ride back to the centaur camp.”

  “How many do you wish to escort you, Your Highness?” he asked.

  “No escort. Heribert, you’ll stay with Sanglant?”

  “So I have been doing these four years,” he said, but he kept looking over at the griffins. “Is it safe, my lady? Will they attack us once you are gone?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Are you sure you’ll have no escort, my lady?” asked Captain Fulk. “See there.”

  He gestured toward a tent shaped differently than the Wendish campaign tents—a mushroomlike felt shelter lying low to the ground, more a bulge than a tent. Three stocky young Quman men loitered under the angled awning, gazes fixed on the griffins, but after a moment Liath saw that Fulk was pointing toward two men standing in the shadow cast by the tent. They edged forward rather like starving beggar children might creep toward a forgotten crust of bread left lying on the roadside, trying very hard not to draw attention to themselves or the crust. They wore threadbare robes cut differently from those in the west and their red caps came to a curling point.

  “What are two Jinna men doing here?”

  “They were among the slaves your daughter freed from the ship. We offered them their freedom, but there’s none here who can speak to them. I don’t know if they stay because they don’t know they are free or if they’ve nowhere else to go. They’re good with horses. They do their share of work. We’ve no complaints of their service, even though they’re heathens.”

  The two young men dashed forward. Fulk leaped out, drawing his sword.

  “Hold, Captain!” It had been a long time since Liath had spoken Jinna; she could read it better than speak it, but the basic words did not elude her. “Honored sirs, it is better if you approach with prudence.”

  The two men threw themselves down bellies to the ground and dipped their foreheads three times to the earth before rising to their knees and extending their hands, palms up and open.

  “What means this?” asked Fulk, astonished.

  Their postures looked uncomfortably like those of slaves offering submission to a master.

  “What do you mean by this, honored sirs?” she asked, echoing Fulk’s amazement.

  One raised his head. He steepled his fingers and, hiding his eyes behind the “v” made by his hands, replied.

  “Do not disdain your servants, Bright One. Let us serve you, who walk on Earth and speak with human speech. We recognize you as one of the holy messengers of Astareos.”

  “What are they saying?” asked Fulk as a number of Sanglant’s soldiers gathered at a distance to watch. There was nothing to do in camp except stare at the terrifying griffins; these men welcomed a new source of entertainment.

  Liath had forgotten how much she hated being the center of attention of any crowd; and all of Wendish court life was crowds. One could not be a prince without a retinue. No noble lady had ever traveled alone with just her father, making her way through the world.

  One of the Jinna spoke. “If we have displeased you, if we have sinned by calling attention to your presence, Bright One, speak only the word and we miserable worms will slit our throats.”

  “No,” she said hastily. “Do not hurt yourselves. I am surprised, that is all. No matter.” That was the first phrase one learned in Jinna, a word so useful and so complex that it could not be properly translated into Wendish. No matter.

  “What is your wish, Bright One? We are your servants.”

  She did not want a retinue. She had never become accustomed to one. But as she glanced around the camp, seeing the shining bulk of the griffins, the herds, the tents, the patient army of men and women who had followed Sanglant across the wilderness simply because he had asked them to, she knew that what she wished for most—solitude—was to be d
enied her.

  Duty came first.

  “Obey this man, as you have been doing,” she said at last, resigned to her fate. “He is called Captain Fulk. He is a good man. I must go to the camp of the Horse people. When I return, you may serve me.”

  They wept with gratitude.

  She could have wept, with frustration, but she didn’t have time. She didn’t need the burden of their belief that she was something she was not.

  “I pray you, my lady, what do they want?” asked Fulk again, too eaten up by curiosity to take heed of her sour expression.

  “The Jinna worship Astareos, the fire god,” she said at last. “It is no secret that, like Prince Sanglant, I am only half human. By some magic known to the Jinna, they must see my mother’s soul in me. They think I am an angel.”

  “I will agree to attend a council,” said Li’at’dano when Liath returned to the centaur encampment to begin the second phase of her campaign, “but I am not accustomed to the presence of males who claim to speak with authority. They are emotional and unstable. I grant you that a stallion may be a handsome creature, but all he is good for is fighting and breeding. Still, because I have known a few human and Ashioi males who have—what shall I say?—been able to think with the same rigor and intellect as a woman, I will allow all those you mention to join the council. In exchange—”

  This was the part of negotiation Liath hated most: all the stipulations and exceptions and claims and demands.

  “—the child will be given into the care of my people. She will be well cared for, bound around with magic so that she cannot suffer or weaken.”

  “And when she wakes?”

  “If she wakes.”

  “What if I give her to you only to discover that she is being held as a hostage? What if we succeed—as we must succeed—in defeating Anne, only to find Blessing used as a weapon held at our throats, to make us agree to whatever conditions you demand?”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures. You must trust me, Daughter. Are you not my namesake?”

  Liath laughed angrily. “This is no argument.”

  Li’at’dano inclined her head in agreement. “This is no argument, that is true. This is the argument: Already she grows weak. In three or four more days, without a cloak of protection, she will die.”

  Liath set her booted foot on the stairs that led up to Sorgatani’s door and paused there to survey the horse herds that accompanied the centaurs and their Kerayit allies. These horses were nothing like the stocky beasts that now made up fully half of the mounts in Sanglant’s army—the herds bred by the centaurs were powerful and cleanly built, with long, slender legs and big heads. The Kerayit used oxen to pull their carts, but both men and women rode their lovely horses. Right now the members of the tribe labored about the necessary tasks of living while they waited for Li’at’dano’s command to move on, women and men together although working at different tasks. Among the herds she saw mares and geldings and the stallions—the best among the males, the ones left intact. There were foals, from yearling colts down to one lanky, awkward newborn, and foals among the centaurs as well, although not so many of those and all of them female.

  It troubled her.

  She rapped on the door. The younger servant admitted her.

  Sorgatani knelt beside the brazier minding a tiny pot, set over the coals, in which herbs withered and smoked. The scent shot straight up Liath’s nostrils and gave her a headache behind her eyes. She waved a hand back and forth in front of her face to dispel the smoke while Sorgatani chuckled.

  “You should see your face!” The young Kerayit woman rose, gave the bronze spoon she held to the older servant, and sat down on the broad bed. “Sit beside me. There isn’t as much smoke over here.”

  Indeed, a fair amount of the smoke spiraled up and out the smoke hole, through which Liath still saw that same gray shimmer, neither day nor night. In the world above, nothing changed. That surety lent a little peace to her anxious thoughts. She sat beside Sorgatani.

  “I did not expect to see you back so soon, Liath.”

  “Here I am.” She smiled. “I am come to negotiate, but I’m discovering how little I like it. When I traveled with my father, just he and I all those years, we made a decision and acted. We had no one else to placate or argue with or persuade.”

  “You lived and traveled alone, without kinfolk or tribe? Without herds? With no servants or companions? No cousins or aunts? Had you no mothers?”

  “I had no mother.”

  “No mothers!” The confession shocked Sorgatani, but she recovered quickly. “I am seeing there hangs a tale from those words.”

  “So there does. If you travel with us west, to fight our enemies, then I can tell you that tale at length.”

  Sorgatani had a lively, expressive face and the bright eyes common to people who love life. It was as much this vitality that made her beautiful as the actual pleasing composition of her individual features.

  “Is this how you open your negotiations? You are too blunt. You must begin by discussing the season, and whether a spring storm will drive away the warmth and how much it will rain before summer. Then you go on with complimenting my lineage, my herds, and the clothing my servants wear. We share the tales of our grandmothers. That is just to begin. The day after next you may come finally to the point of your visit. Meanwhile, I must entertain you as befits a guest.”

  She beckoned. The younger servant padded forward to offer them both steaming cups of dried leaves steeped in hot water.

  “What is this?” asked Liath. The brew had a minty smell, heady and tantalizing.

  “We call it khey. I do not know if there is a word for it in your language.”

  “I don’t think so.” Liath sipped, and sighed. “That is good.” She drank again before settling back to regard Sorgatani. “Can I be blunt? We must move quickly. It will take many months to travel back to the west. We haven’t much time left. It will be difficult.”

  “You intend to travel by land all the way back west. That might take years! The west is very far away.”

  “How else are we to go?”

  “Oh!” said Sorgatani. “Oh.” She fiddled with her earrings—today she wore tiny golden pigs dangling on delicate chains. “If nothing has been said to you, then I do not have permission to speak.”

  “Must you have permission to speak?”

  “We are the daughters of the Horse people, given into their hands many generations ago. As daughters, it is our duty and obligation to obey our mothers.”

  “Your ‘mothers.’ But not your fathers. Where are all the male centaurs?”

  Sorgatani stared at her blankly, hand dropping away from the tiny pigs. Liath might as well have said, “Where are all the talking dogs who rule as dukes among you?”

  “Do they kill them?” Liath pressed.

  “Do they kill who?”

  “Do they kill the colts?”

  “Of course they don’t kill the colts! No good herdsman does so. The choicest ones are held aside to be puras, and the rest are gelded. Geldings make sturdy and reliable mounts. We can trade them, too, since we’re known for the quality of our horseflesh. We trade along the oasis road. They prize our horses and pay well for them in silk, gold, spices, and khey, these leaves you drink.”

  “Sorgatani. Where are the male Horse people?”

  Sorgatani set down her cup and clapped her hands. The younger servant brought a tray of candied fruits, which she offered to Liath before taking some for herself. They were both sweet and spicy, tingling on her tongue as she waited.

  “I see what you are asking,” Sorgatani said after she had savored an apricot and a pair of peach slices crusted with sugar. She licked her lips for the last grains of sugar. “They are with the herds.”

  “With the herds?”

  “Yes. Of course they never leave the herds.”

  Liath drained her khey, pursing her lips at the sweet aftertaste. “What about the old stories of the Bwr assault on t
he Dariyan Empire? Their great general was Azaril the Cruel.”

  Sorgatani nodded gravely. “It’s true she earned her name, and in the end the Horse people suffered because of her ambitions. They never recovered their strength after losing so many in her campaigns.”

  “But Azaril was a male, wasn’t he? He took female prisoners hostage and forced them to marry him. There’s a famous story about a saint—”

  She faltered as Sorgatani chuckled.

  “Is it said so, in the tales made by your people? Perhaps they saw what they believed must be true. I can only tell you what I know. Not all of the Kerayit tribes live beside the Horse people. We have grown more numerous than them. The remnants of the Horse people have retreated to their most ancient pasturelands as their strength wanes. I was sent away from my tribe to be the apprentice of the Holy One, so now I have lived among them and know some truths about their kind.”

  Liath could guess the rest: the centaurs had left their males behind to guard what was most precious, their homeland and the core of the herds. It seemed obvious now, but Sorgatani’s expression made her think there were things left unsaid.

  “Are you glad to study with the Holy One?”

  “It is the greatest honor. She is eldest among the Horse people. She is a powerful shaman.”

  “Do you ever wish you could go home to your tribe?”

  Sorgatani shrugged, saying nothing, although a tear glistened on her cheek.

  2

  AT sunset Liath rode back into the Wendish camp. Her Jinna servants ran up. One took Resuelto; the other offered stew and mare’s milk while deftly opening a camp chair so she could sit.

  “Where is Prince Sanglant?” she asked as Captain Fulk hurried up to her.

  “He sleeps within the shelter of the tent, my lady.”

  “My daughter?”

  He frowned, the gesture furrowing a shadow between his brows. “The same, my lady. The healer has certain arts. She has managed to sit Princess Blessing upright and work a bit of broth and honey down her throat.”