by K. Johansen
“I’m not a good person to be standing next to, Jo,” he said, as if they had been having that conversation anyway. “I like you.” He shrugged. “Care about you. So I didn’t want you there. I’ve been having bad dreams and—something’s looking for me. I’m not even sure what. Nothing good. I shouldn’t have let you—”
“You didn’t even come back to the fire to tell me.” That burst out in anger, deciding her. No apology. “I know we weren’t—I never expected— I wasn’t looking for you to marry me or anything, but Jayala damn it, you just rode off!”
“ I know.”
“Of course you need to go to your son,” she said. “I’d have understood that. Great Gods, of course you have to go to him. No matter how well-fostered he is, he’s your child, with an army moving on where he’s housed. But you could have—”
“My—is that what Lazlan said? That I was going to the castle for my son?”
“Aren’t you?” She was a fool and it had been a lie for her comfort…
He shook his head, a hand over his face. Laughing. He was laughing. “I suppose I am, at that…Oh, Jo. Things I didn’t want to have to tell you. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“Well, all the scowls I got from Tibor—he’s quite right. I’m too old for you.”
“I’m the one gets to decide that. You’re not that old.”
“Reyka and Lazlan are my kin. My brother…he and his wife were the first to take the pastures at Dyers’ Hill, where the alkanet grows.”
“What do you mean?” Was he some late-sired child of Reyka’s grandfather? Old men did get up to such things, and a bastard born long after a man had adult grandchildren, heirs, yes, such a child might end up adrift, rejected, estranged, taking the caravan road.
“Wait till you meet my son.” Something was amusing him. But then he sobered. Shook his head. “Go back to the warband, Jolanan. Really. You’ll be safer.”
“No.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know—you.”
“You don’t.”
“All that matters, I do.” Kind. Gentle. Passionate.
Patient in teaching. Wise in war.
All secrets. Maybe lies.
She didn’t care, just wanted…him. Touching her. To feel his warmth to her fingers, skin, muscle, the strength of him.
The way she felt she was real, when he looked at her. That he saw her, though she was half a ghost to everyone else. To herself.
“I’ll come with you. What does one lance more or less matter? One less mouth to feed through the winter, that’s all, and they’ll have a hard enough time of it as it is.” She added, which sounded childish the moment the words left her mouth, “You can’t make me go back.”
“No.” He looked old, then. But when she took his hand, his fingers coiled around hers. Didn’t look at her, though. “Better pack up and ride, then.”
Not that she had anything to pack. She took the kettle down to the river to scrub it clean.
The day grew almost summer-hot as the sun rose, and they didn’t push hard, sparing the horses, who had had too hard use and too little rest these several days. Their noon rest in the shade of a solitary spreading poplar, its leaves flashing silver in the sun as a light breeze stirred them, turned into half the afternoon gone, slow and sweet and…an apology, maybe, on both parts. Water and stale flatbread, with blackberries that were growing along the riverbank, unravished by birds. By evening they had not yet come to the castle, though it was near enough. The hills here were dry, stony, the thin grass between the barren bones grazed short, though there were no sheep or cattle to be seen. A jackal was yipping, somewhere farther east, a lonely sound.
“We could push on,” Holla said, reining in. “But…if you don’t mind porridge again. One last night?”
“Before what?”
“You might look at me differently tomorrow.”
“No.”
“Don’t promise what you don’t know you can keep, Jo.”
“You’re being annoying.”
“I know.” He drew a deep breath.
“Don’t,” she said. “Nothing changes. Don’t say anything. I want you. I don’t know why. I like the sound of your voice. I like the way you smile when you look at me. I like the way you make me feel.”
That smile, then.
“I didn’t mean—” Well, actually, she did. “Not just that. If you really don’t want me, tell me, and I’ll ride back. Say it and I’ll leave you alone. If not—you’re stuck with me till the Westrons kill us.”
“We might just get fed up with one another,” he suggested.
“At this rate it won’t take long.”
He grabbed her. Hugged her, hard, mashing her face into his neck and she didn’t mind. “I am sorry I didn’t come back to tell you I was going,” he said into her hair. “I am a fool, and I hurt, you have no idea. People keep dying. I didn’t want to be hurt, seeing you hurt by my leaving. I’m a coward, and how could we hurt each other so much when we hardly know one another, a few nights between us? And I am going to hurt you more, things I need to tell you, and I want you, too, I do.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“Cold hells, Jo, you need to know—”
“No. Tomorrow. Whatever it is, tell me tomorrow, deal with it tomorrow, at the castle. One last night in the grass like you said, alright? Like it’s the harvest festival or the midsummer races, and we’ve gotten clear away from our fathers and mothers and aunties for the first time ever among the tents and the corrals—”
“—and brothers,” he said drily.
“And brothers, with a flask of ale—”
“—and a blanket.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“It’s been a long time.”
“Was she much like me?”
“Mm. Shorter. Plumper. Not so—” He held her off, far more sombre than his words. “I don’t even remember her name. Shall we make a fire, eat?”
“Not hungry. Later.”
She was ravenous, but it could wait.
“Fire,” he said. “There’s only the last rounds of bread. I wasn’t expecting to take quite so long on the way. But a fire. There’ll be frost tonight. Find good dry wood, though. We don’t want smoke. The Westron army’s not so far distant, over there.”
“How do you know?” She stared west, west and south, shading her eyes against the low sun. Nothing to see but the rolling land. It might hide much. A haze in the sky. Smoke. The cookfires of a great camp, somewhere folded into the grass.
“What if they’re patrolling on this shore?” A night in the grass wasn’t quite so appealing with that to consider.
“They aren’t, yet.” He answered as though he could know. Stood with his head raised, like a horse listening, smelling, testing the air. “We’re safe enough, another night.”
An eagle circled overhead. He watched it, squinting into the sky. “Long way from the mountains.” Shrugged. “Seriously, Jo. All your wicked temptations aside—no, I’m not going to argue you should go back. But camp or push on? Up to you. Food and fire and a bed with a feather mattress, at the castle.”
“Camp,” she said, because she would believe him if he said there were no Westrons this side of the Kinsai’av yet. One last night in the grass. She wasn’t suddenly afraid of what the morning would bring. She was not.
But as darkness spread over them, they only lay holding one another close, nothing more.
CHAPTER XX
Moth wanted night for this, and night was coming. The Kinsai’aa, Kinsai’av the folk of the road called it, was like a mirror holding fire where the setting sun was caught. On the eastern shore, scattered stands of poplar. On the west, where black shadows should have hidden the water, only stumps. In the east, the full moon was rising behind a bank of towering cloud. Lightning flared distant there, silent. Weather brewing over the far hills.
Moth leaned on the wind and circled, a great wheeling turn over the towers o
f the ferry castle of the First Cataract. The folk of the goddess Kinsai lived there, children of the goddess or their descendants, or waifs and strays come by chance and folded into them, whatever they were. Extended family. Village. Fishers and wizards, scroungers and scholars who carried folk over the river for whatever they could spare, a coin, a song, a bolt of cloth, a baby. The stories told of them had not grown any fewer or any less fanciful over the years. She did wonder what they saw, what they planned, that they had not yet fled.
She did not think them so fey as to choose to die following their goddess.
The waters were empty of any presence of Kinsai, lifeless, for all they teemed with fish and insect, snail and weed. Gone. A great life stilled. She had thought Kinsai might fight. She was one of the great rivers and these only her upper reaches; she ran around the rising of the Pillars of the Sky, through strange southern forests and lotus-filled wetlands where the swans wintered, spread to a great lake, an inland sea. A great goddess there in the lake, sister to Kinsai, one of the mighty, at least in her own land. A silence, waiting, watching…But Sien-Shava must choose, south or east, and Moth thought it was the peopled east and the small gods along the caravan road that would pull him, not the sparsely settled wildernesses below the Pillars of the Sky, where demons outnumbered the human-folk.
Another wheeling circle, eagle spread on the air, hardly a wingstroke needed. Travellers on the road, two riders making a camp…
Well. That was…interesting.
Almost she dropped down.
No. She had no right to put him at risk, to draw the devil’s eye to what he might, so far, have missed. A twist of a feather, the slightest shifting of weight, a long glide and she spiralled lower, narrowing her turn above the camps on the western shore. Holding herself close, silent. Unnoticed by the burning presence below. So far.
Tents and huts both, orderly rows and squares. Main encampment more or less a vast town; others its satellites. Rutted wagon-tracks led to its gates from north and west and south, the arteries that fed it from the new manors that oversaw the conquered Westgrassland folk. Did they think of themselves as bondfolk now, or enslaved? Or did they find something that drew them in the promise of a swift flight free of suffering, to carry them to the Old Great Gods?
She circled, waiting. Watching.
Searching.
Fires burned throughout the camp, brightening as the last sun fled, and she flowed from eagle to owl in a stroke of her wings.
Still she circled. What she sought…
Sien-Shava’s presence burned. He made no attempt to mute himself, to bank his fires. Any wizard would know him, any god. He did not care. He drowned out all else, as if she listened in a gale for the quiet song of some hidden bird.
No hope that she would find Mikki guarded only by soldiers. A hostage would be no use if she could, in any way, put herself between him and the devil.
The patience of the hunting cat. The silence. Hiding. Reaching.
Low, low, silent, feathers whispering against the air. A spider’s web. Chains, human wizardry and devil’s power, iron and blood and song and fire, threads of Jochiz himself, circling and binding the demon, sinking into him, every thread a thousand curving needle-fangs, as if Mikki were swallowed into the mouth of a horror-fish of the deep ocean.
He was caged, a wagon of iron bars and filth. Night, and he was in his daylight form, caught there, an agony that would last till dawn, body wrenched against its nature. A bear, a giant of the forest, pale as straw, claws of ivory torn and broken and bloodied. Iron collar about his neck, inscribed with the binding of his form and sunk into his flesh, chains running to the four corners of the cage. It was not they that truly held him, though.
Gaunt, bones jutting beneath dull and dirty fur, clumped and shedding, matted. As if in a winter’s deep sleep, he hardly breathed. Embers of life burned low. There, a breath, slow and rasping. Stillness again.
To cut those threads, those chains physical and devil-woven—there was death set in them, death rooted in his heart. She felt it in her own, a searing fire, waiting, watching, ready to rise, to consume him from within, body, demon earth-soul.
She came down beside the wagon, landing lightly, barefoot, drawing Keeper as she touched.
Guards in leather kilts and scale shirts covered by red tabards at the four corners, token, symbol, or to keep the prisoner from doing some harm to himself if he woke, she supposed. No use to her.
Except as the horn blown at the hall’s door. Declaration and summons.
She killed the first as he turned towards her, mouth opening, and went the circle of the wagon sun-wise. Took the second’s head as he lowered his spear. The third was running for her. She stepped aside and caught his thrusting spear, jerked him to her and onto Keeper’s blade, went over him to the fourth, who had fallen to his knees.
She split his skull, helm and all.
The air ripped.
She stood with a foot on a wheel’s spoke, cleaning her sword on the tabard she tore from the dead man.
“Sien-Shava,” she said and sheathed Keeper, dropped Lakkariss in its scabbard into the cradle of her left arm.
“Jochiz,” he snarled in correction. And that was a spark of light in her heart. Whatever he did, whatever he planned, he was still the same mind. Despising the human soul that made him and the human name he had borne.
She knew the shape of him, still.
“If you will.” She spoke Northron. People gathered, running up in pursuit of their abruptly translated All-Holy. Men and women in formal robes, red and white. The colour of the Lady of Marakand. Not, she supposed, a coincidence. Though perhaps a lack of imagination. A court of priests. Officers, knights in scale shirts enamelled red, barelegged save for their greaves, sandalled, in the Westron fashion that had been a thing of statuary and tomb-relief even when she was young in the world.
“He will die if you even draw that,” Sien-Shava said.
She shrugged. “And you will still die, regardless.”
“You were never my match, King’s Sword.”
“Oh, Islander, I’ve been many long years on the road, and not peaceful ones. What have you done? Made yourself a priest and the voice of a false god, hiding in a cave? And besides, when did we ever try ourselves? You only hope yourself my better with the blade.”
“You were always afraid to fight me, even for the entertainment of the hall. Afraid to test yourself so far before your brother’s eyes.”
She shrugged. “You can tell yourself that. I didn’t come to fight.”
“Proud Vartu will ally herself with the All-Holy messenger of the Old Great Gods? Am I a fool?”
“Shall I answer that, Sien-Shava? Shall we trade words till we drive ourselves to blows and the sword’s edge after all? I came to make a bargain.”
“For what?”
“You know what I want.”
“You are perverse. That’s a beast. An animal, no matter that he speaks like man. No matter that he sometimes takes the form of one. You disgust me.”
“You really mean that.” Which was startling. “You’ve listened to your own priestly rantings too long, Jochiz.”
“Humanity has perverted you.”
“Humanity has perverted us all. Some more than others. Tu’usha learnt that.”
Mikki flinched and moaned. Careful.
“A bargain,” she said flatly.
“You have nothing to bargain with, no threat to make. You see I hold him in my hand. All I need do is close it, and he is gone. All you can do is stay out of my way, until—we shall see, in the end, what use your black sword is.”
“That,” she said, “is my bargain.”
“What?”
“Give me my man. My bear, my lover, my husband, Jochiz. Free of your chains and your spells and all your bindings. Give me Mikki, and let us go over the river unhindered and out of your way, and I will give you Lakkariss.”
“Lakkariss?”
“The sword.”
“Nor
thron name. It’s nothing of the north.”
She shrugged. Almost a smile. “It’s bloody cold, though. You’ve got to admit it suits.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “I admit I envy what you’ve crafted. What price did your soul pay to summon that from the darkness and the ice? How did you dare even set hand to it?”
“Those secrets I keep. It’s something I could never shape again.”
The priests, the officers, watched, and frowned incomprehension. Foreign words, and not an educated folk. Whispered behind hands, heads together. A woman armed like a soldier—almost the only woman so—was edging around through the crowd. A man likewise, going the other way. She raised her free hand, pointed. Swept it down. Dropped the woman to her knees. Then the man.
“All-Holy!” the man cried out.
“Be silent!” Sien-Shava roared in Tiypurian. “I speak with a devil. Do not presume to interfere. Such matters are beyond your understanding.”
She might as easily have stopped their hearts. Maybe should have.
“It’s something you should never have shaped at all,” Sien-Shava said to her, conversational and in Northron again. “You’ve murdered Ogada. You’ve murdered Ghatai. You’ve murdered Tu’usha. Dotemon, Jasberek, where are they? I reach to them and I find nothing. Emptiness. Dead at your hand as well?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps they hide from me as well. It might be they have allied against you. Or me. Or against us both. You are drawing great attention to yourself, Jochiz, and Jasberek never did like—”
“I fear Jasberek no more than I fear you. You, Vartu! You made this thing and set out with it to make yourself the only great power on this earth—and now you’ll give it up for the sake of a demon beast you used to rut with? I find it hard to believe.”
“I’m serious.”
“You think I’ll release him, while you hold that?”
