went surreptitiously to Kessira.
When they had finished, the sun was gone and
the storm building to full force. Tarma peeked out
the curtain of tent-canvas at the front of the shel-
ter; the fire was already smothered. Tarma noticed
then that the light-web gave off a faint illumina-
tion; not enough to read by, but enough to see by.
"What is—all this?" she asked, waving a hand at
the light-lattice. "Where'd it come from?"
"It's a variation of the fire-shield I raised; it's
magical energy manifesting itself in a physical fash-
ion. Part of that energy came from me, part of it
was here already and I just reshaped it. In essence,
I told it I thought it was a wall, and it believed me.
So now we have a 'wall' between us and the storm."
"Uh, right. You told that glowing thing you
thought it was a wall, and it believed you—"
Kethry managed a tired giggle at her partner's
expression. "That's why the most important tool a
magician has is his will; it has to be strong in order
to convince energy to be something else."
"Is that how you sorcerers work?"
"All sorcerers, or White Winds sorcerers?"
"There's more than one kind?"
"Where'd you think magicians came from any-
way? Left in the reeds for their patrons to find?"
Kethry giggled again.
"No, but the only 'magicians' the Clans have are
the shamans, and they don't do magic, much. Heal-
ing, acting as advisors, keepers of outClan know-
ledge—that's mostly what they do. When we need
magic, we ask Her for it."
"And She answers?" Kethry's eyes widened in
fascination.
"Unless She has a damn good reason not to. She's
very close to us—closer than most deities are to
their people, from what I've been able to judge. But
that may be because we don't ask Her for much, or
very often. There's a story—" Tarma half smiled.
"—there was a hunter who'd been very lucky and
had come to depend on that luck. When his luck
left him, his skills had gotten very rusty, and he
couldn't manage to make a kill. Finally he went to
the shaman, and asked him if he thought She would
listen to a plea for help. The shaman looked him up
and down, and finally said, 'You're not dead yet.' "
"Which means he hadn't been trying hard enough
by himself?"
"Exactly. She is the very last resort—and you
had damned well better be careful what you ask
Her for—She'll give it to you, but in Her own way,
especially if you haven't been honest with Her or
with yourself. So mostly we don't ask." Tarma
warmed to Kethry's interest, and continued when
that interest didn't flag. This was the first chance
she'd had to explain her beliefs to Kethry; before
this, Kethry had either been otherwise occupied or
there hadn't been enough privacy. "The easiest of
Her faces to deal with are the Maiden and the
Mother, they're gentler, more forgiving; the hard-
est are the Warrior and the Crone. Maiden and
Mother don't take Oathbound to themselves, War-
rior and Crone do. Crone's Oathbound—no, I won't
tell you—you guess what they do."
"Uh," Kethry's brow furrowed in thought, and
she nibbled a hangnail. "Shamans?"
"Right! And Healers and the two Elders in each
Clan, who may or may not also be Healers or sha-
mans. Those the Crone Binds are Bound, like the
Kal'enedral, to the Clans as a whole, serving with
their minds and talents instead of their hands.
Now—you were saying about magicians?" She was
as curious to know about Kethry's teaching as Keth
seemed to be about her own.
"There's more than one school; mine is White
Winds. Um, let me go to the very basics. Magic has
three sources. The first is power from within the
sorcerer himself, and you have to have the Talent
to use that source—and even then it isn't fully
trained by anyone I know of. I've heard that up
north a good ways they use pure mind-magic, rather
than using the mind to find other sources of power."
"That would be—Valdemar, no?"
"Yes!" Kethry looked surprised at Tarma's knowl-
edge. "Well, the second is power created by living
things, rather like a fire creates light just by being
a fire. You have to have the Talent to sense that
power, but not to use it so long as you know it's
there. Death releases a lot of that energy in one
burst; that's why an unTalented sorcerer can turn
to dark wizardry; he knows the power will be there
when he kills something. The third source is from
creatures that live in places that aren't this world,
but touch this world—like pages in a book. Page one
isn't page two, but they touch all along each other.
Other Planes, we call them. There's one for each
element, one for what we call 'demons,' and one
for very powerful creatures that aren't quite gods,
but do seem kindly inclined to humans. There may
be more, but that's all anyone has ever discovered
that I know of. The creatures of the four Elemental
Planes can be bargained with—you can build up
credit with them by doing them little favors, or you
can promise them something they want from this
Plane."
"Was that what I saw fighting beside you when
you took out that wizard back in Brether's Cross-
roads ? Other-whatsit creatures ?"
"Exactly—and that fight is why my magic is so
limited at the moment—I used up all the credit I
had built with them in return for that help. Fortu-
nately I didn't have to go into debt to them, or we'd
probably be off trying to find snow-roses for the
Ethereal Varirs right now. There is another way of
dealing with them. You can coerce them with magi-
cal bindings or with your will. The creatures from
the Abyssal Plane can be bought with pain-energy
and death-energy—they feed off those—or coerced
if your will is strong enough, although the only way
you can 'bind' them magically is to hold them to
this Plane; you can't force them to do anything if
your own will isn't stronger than theirs. The crea-
tures of the Sixth Plane—we call it the 'Empyreal
Plane'—can't be coerced in any way, and they'll
only respond to a call if they feel like it. Any
magician can contact the Other-Planar creatures,
it's just a matter of knowing the spells that open
the boundaries between us and them. The thing
that makes schools of magic different is their eth-
ics, really. How they feel about the different kinds
of power and using them."
"So what does yours teach?" Tarma lay back
with her arms stretched along Kessira's back and
neck; she scratched gently behind the mare's ears
while Kessira nodded her head in drowsy content-
ment. This was the most she'd gotten out o
f Kethry
in the past six months.
"We don't coerce; not ever. We don't deal at all
with the entities of the Abyssal Planes except to
send them back—or destroy them if we can. We
don't deliberately gain use of energy by killing or
causing pain. We hold that our Talents have been
given us for a purpose; that purpose is to use them
for the greatest good. That's why we are wander-
ers, why we don't take up positions under perma-
nent patrons."
"Why you're dirt-poor and why there're so few of
you," Tarma interrupted genially.
" 'Fraid so," Kethry smiled. "No worldly sense,
that's us. But that's probably why Need picked
me."
"She'enedra, why don't you want to go to Morne-
dealth?"
"I---"
"And why haven't you ever told me about your
home and kin?" Tarma had been letting her spirit-
teacher's last remark stew in the back of her mind,
and when Kethry had begun giving her the "les-
son" in the ways of magic had realized she knew
next to nothing about her partner's antecedents.
She'd been brooding on her own sad memories, but
Kethry's avoidance of the subject of the past could
only mean that hers were as sorry. And Tarma
would be willing to bet the coin she didn't have
that the mystery was tied into Mornedealth.
Kethry's mouth had tightened with an emotion
Tarma recognized only too well. Pain.
"I'll have to know sooner or later, she'enedra. We
have no choice but to pass through Mornedealth,
and no choice but to try and raise money there, or
we'll starve. And if it's something I can do any-
thing about—well, I want doubly to know about it!
You're my Clan, and nobody hurts my Clan and
gets away with it!"
"It—it isn't anything you can deal with—"
"Let me be the judge of that, hmm?"
Kethry sighed, and visibly took herself in hand.
"I—I guess it's only fair. You know next to nothing
about me, but accepted me anyway."
"Not true," Tarma interrupted her, "She accepted
you when you oathbound yourself to me as blood-
sib. That's all I needed to know then. She wouldn't
bind two who didn't belong together."
"But circumstances change, I know, and it isn't
fair for me to keep making a big secret out of where
I come from. All right." Kethry nodded, as if mak-
ing up her mind to grasp the thorns. "The reason I
haven't told you anything is this; I'm a fugitive. I
grew up in Mornedealth; I'm a member of one of
the Fifty Noble Houses. My real name is Kethryveris
of House Pheregrul."
Tarma raised one eyebrow, but only said, "Do I
bow, or can I get by with just kissing your hand?"
Kethry almost smiled. "It's a pretty empty title
—or it was when I ran away. The House estates
had dwindled to nothing more than a decaying man-
sion in the Old City by my father's time, and the
House prerequisites to little more than an invita-
tion to all Court functions—which we generally
declined graciously—and permission to hunt the
Royal Forests—which kept us fed most of the year.
Father married mother for love, and it was a disas-
ter. Her family disowned her, she became ill and
wouldn't tell him. It was one of those long declin-
ing things, she just faded bit by bit, so gradually
that he, being absent-minded at best, really didn't
notice. She died three years after I was born. That
left just the three of us."
"Three?"
Kethry hadn't ever mentioned any sibs before.
"Father, my brother Kavin—that's Kavinestral—
and me. Kavin was eight years older than me, and
from what everyone said, the very image of Father
in his youth. Handsome—the word just isn't ade-
quate to describe Kavin. He looks like a god."
"And you worshiped him." Tarma had no trouble
reading that between the lines.
It wasn't just the dim light that was making
Kethry look pale. "How could I not? Father died
when I was ten, and Kavin was all I had left, and
when he exerted himself he could charm the moss
off the wall. We were fine until Father died; he'd
had some income or other that kept the house going,
well, that dried up when he was gone. That left
Kavin and me with no income and nowhere to go
but a falling-down monstrosity that we couldn't
even sell, because it's against the law for the Fifty
Families to sell the ancestral homes. We let the few
servants we had go—all but one, my old nurse Tildy.
She wouldn't leave me. So Tildy and I struggled to
run the household and keep us all clothed and fed.
Kavin hunted the Royal Forests when he got hun-
gry enough, and spent the rest of his time being
Kavin. Which, to me, meant being perfection."
"Until you got fed up and ran away?" Tarma
hazarded, when Kethry's silence had gone too long.
She knew it it wasn't the right answer, but she
hoped it would prod Kethry back into speaking.
"Hardly." Kethry's eyes and mouth were bitter.
"He had me neatly twined 'round his finger. No,
things went on like that until I was twelve, and
just barely pubescent. Two things happened then
that I had no knowledge of. The first was that
Kavin himself became fed up with life on the edge,
and looked around for something to make him a lot
of money quickly. The second was that on one of
his dips in the stews with his friends, he acciden-
tally encountered the richest banker in Mornedealth
and found out exactly what his secret vice was.
Kavin may have been lazy, but he wasn't stupid.
He was fully able to put facts together. He also
knew that Wethes Goldmarchant, like all the other
New Money moguls, wanted the one thing that all
his money couldn't buy him—he wanted inside the
Fifty Families. He wanted those Court invitations
we declined; wanted them so badly it made him
ache. And he'd never get them—not unless he some-
how saved the realm single-handedly, which wasn't
bloody likely."
Kethry's hands were clenched tightly in her lap,
she stared at them as if they were the most fasci-
nating things in the universe. "I knew nothing of
all this, of course, mewed up in the house all day
and daydreaming about finding a hidden cache of
gold and gems and being able to pour them in Kavin's
lap and make him smile at me. Then one day he did
smile at me; he told me he had a surprise for me. I
went with him, trusting as a lamb. Next thing I
knew, he was handing me over to Wethes; the mar-
riage ceremony had already taken place by proxy.
You see, Wethes' secret vice was little girls—and
with me, he got both his ambition and his lust
satisfied. It was a bargain too good for either of
them to resist—"
Kethry's voice broke in something like a sob;
Tarma leaned forward and put one hard, long hand
on the pair clenched white-knuckled in her part-
ner's lap.
"So your brother sold you, hmm? Well, give him a
little credit, she'enedra; he might have thought he
was doing you a favor. The merchant would give
you every luxury, after all; you'd be a valued and
precious possession."
"I'd like to believe that, but I can't. Kavin saw
some of those little girls Wethes was in the habit of
despoiling. He knew what he was selling me into,
and he didn't care, he plainly did not care. The
only difference between them and me was that the
chains and manacles he used on me were solid gold,
and I was raped on silk sheets instead of linen. And
it was rape, nothing else! I wanted to die; I prayed
I would die. I didn't understand anything of what
had happened to me. I only knew that the brother I
worshiped had betrayed me." Her voice wavered a
moment, and faded against the howl of the storm-
winds outside their shelter. Tarma had to strain to
hear her.
Then she seemed to recover, and her voice streng-
thened again. "But although I had been betrayed, I
hadn't been forgotten. My old nurse managed to
sneak her way into the house on the strength of the
fact that she was my nurse; nobody thought to deny
her entry. When Wethes was finished with me, she
waited until he had left and went inquiring for me.
When she found me, she freed me and smuggled
me out."
Kethry finally brought her eyes up to meet her
partner's; there was pain there, but also a hint of
ironic humor. "You'd probably like her; she also
stole every bit of gold and jewelry she found with
Vows And Honor Book 1: The Oathbound Page 3
