by Sonia Lyris
Certainly he seemed real enough, she thought, still staring. Smelled real enough, setting her feelings into a tangle.
A dark room. Metal against a grindstone.
Could the Lord Commander mean to have him question her again?
“Another contract?” she managed.
“No. I am beholden only to myself now.”
“Then why—”
“I can’t stay long or the guards will wonder. How does it go with the Lord Commander?”
“He demands answers, doesn’t like them, then threatens me and sends me back here.”
He examined her face, and she felt his look like a touch. “There will come a time when you must show him what you are capable of, Seer.”
“My words do nothing.”
“Innel is a wolf, Amarta.”
That was so; every time the Lord Commander talked to her, she felt a rush of fear, closely followed by anger.
Fear is a shadow.
“Yes,” she said, recalling his words in that dark room. “The wolf is real. The wolf bites. But the shadow—”
“Amarta,” he said, putting his fingers to her lips to silence her, the touch a shock. “Listen: he is a wolf. But so are you. That is what I came here to tell you, and what I could not tell you before.”
* * *
The sun began to dip to the west. Innel and Lismar watched the single Teva making his way toward them, carrying a white flag high on a pole. As he arrived he said nothing, only handed to an aide a rolled message, then turned and galloped away.
The aide handed Innel the message. He read the broken Arunkin written there, and snorted, handing it to Lismar.
Release our horses and people immediately.
“Now what do you advise, General?”
“There is a time to do what is clear and obvious. No more delay. Attack.”
Surrounded by guards in the dimming light of evening, Amarta was taken from the wagon through the camp. She inhaled the cooling breeze greedily, happy to be smelling something other than herself.
They passed through a city of tents, horses, and red and black uniformed soldiers. Someone, somewhere, was sharpening a blade. She shuddered.
Vision tickled, and she pushed away the flickers. She did not want to see any of these people’s futures.
At a large pavilion she was pushed inside. Candles burned in an overhead chandelier of silver and copper. Heavy red and black silk lined the walls, embroidered with the monarchy’s sigil. Two intricately carved center poles held up the heavy canvas and glinted with inlaid gemstones.
So much wealth. It was, truly, astonishing.
Then she saw the long table, at which sat the Lord Commander and the general. Across from them sat five small men and women.
“This”—The Lord Commander waved a hand at her—“this is the seer. She predicts what will happen. To see the future is to see beyond deception. Tell me again, Teva, that you know of no gold mine.”
“Again, Lord Commander, we deny—”
Amarta met Jolon’s gaze. He paused briefly then looked back across the table.
“—violating any law, and furthermore—”
“Your girl knows this man,” the general said.
Could she hide nothing at all? The Lord Commander stood and walked to her.
“How is it that you know this Teva?”
He had saved them from the shadow hunter—from this very man before her—even at the risk of Emendi lives. He had given them the hidden city, safety, and—for a time—something like a home. He and Mara had been generous when she and her family were most desperate. He was one of the few people who had helped her who had not suffered for it.
Yet.
She remembered how they had met, as she told him his shaota was pregnant, that the baby would be a colt. It would be born and grown by now. For an absurd moment she thought to ask him whether she’d been right.
“Seer,” the Lord Commander said sharply. “I asked you a question.”
She tore her gaze from Jolon.
“Need I remind you of your obligation?” he asked, voice low.
Lifting her bandaged left hand, she said: “I think you have reminded me enough, ser.”
“Then answer.”
Fair is what you take.
“Our contract says I answer your questions about the future, ser. Nothing was said about the past.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Lord Commander,” Jolon said. “Release us. We can still calm the rippling waters, but as time passes, it will be too late.”
He turned to the Teva. “I know gold is coming from Otevan, Teva. I have enough evidence to convict you before the queen. I give you one more chance to tell me what I need to know.”
“We deny breaking any laws—”
“Seer, where is the gold mine?”
The wrong question, not the sort that she could really answer, which he ought to know by now. She thought to say all this.
“You fight the wrong battle here, Lord Commander,” she found herself saying. “It will end in death for so many—”
He turned, very fast, grabbed her shoulders, fingers gripping painfully, and shook her hard, taking her breath away. Then he released her. She stumbled backwards.
“My patience runs dry, girl. You keep your sister and nephew safe by virtue of this contract whose edges you keep testing. Very well, I will rephrase: What must I do to find the gold these Teva hide?”
He is a wolf.
Breathing hard, she sifted through the rushing roar of futures, discarding image after image of the screams of soldiers.
The feel of her fingers, rubbing together, something gritty and wet between them. It was red. It glinted.
But so are you.
Blinking in the candle-and-lamplit pavilion, she moved her fingers over each other as she had in vision, staring at her empty hand. Was there any future in which the Lord Commander got what he wanted without blood?
“There is gold here,” she said. “A lot of it.”
The general snorted. “I am shocked to hear this.”
No, not what he wanted. What he needed. What was that?
Lines of Teva atop shaota, streaming out of sight, A battle horn sounding. A child’s howl, a woman’s cry of anger, horses’ hooves pounding dirt.
“Release the Teva,” she said, sorting through fogs of images. “Offer them the crown’s apology.”
An outraged, wordless howl from the general. “This is sedition you tolerate. Now hear my prediction, Innel: we have come to correct a treasonous wrong against our queen. This is no moment to bleat like a lost lamb.” She looked at the five Teva, now standing. “I tell you why they win, Commander, and you might do well to pay heed: they do not give in.”
To Amarta, Innel said, darkly. “Try again, Seer.”
“Pah!” The general exhaled loudly. “You take this one’s advice over mine? You mock my decades of experience, Commander. Perhaps you two really are relations.” She stormed out of the pavilion.
Amarta realized it wasn’t enough to tell him what would come. She must tell him what to do. But first he had to believe her.
One step closer. But to what?
To a future where the wars of the empire didn’t spread like a killing flood, ever closer to her family.
Something must change. But what?
Under a starlit night a striped horse jumped a fence. Men howled. A horse screamed.
It wouldn’t work, she knew, but she had to say it: “Let the shaota go.”
Finally she looked up at the Lord Commander. He was beyond anger, hands flexing and releasing as if looking for a target.
And indeed, in one of the next moment’s many futures, he hit her hard enough to knock her across the room, sending her into a table at the edge of the large, tented room. In another future she ducked the blow, but his anger only escalated. He called guards. She was overcome. Sent back to the wagon. Captive, again.
No: she was done being sent back to that wretched, stinkin
g prison.
She drew herself upright, and met his furious look, feeling the next moment’s options narrow. “A horse dies in the next few minutes, ser. Then there will be more blood.”
At this, Jolon began a sound, a warbling trill, deep in his throat. The rest of the Teva joined him, their voices combining into a loud eerie call. From outside the pavilion came echoing calls, the shaota’s not-quite whinnies, the sound that was almost like laughing, but wasn’t.
“Don’t let them out,” Innel said to the guards as he left.
Standing at the edge of the corral, Tayre was one among the thick crowd gathering to gape at the five oddly colored horses. The sun was going down, its last rays touching the animals, turning their chestnut-and-ocher striped bodies into lines that nearly glowed.
The horses were restless, testy. The crowd pressing in was not helping.
Suddenly there came a loud sound of song, a warbling, from the commander’s pavilion. The ears of every shaota pricked up. Together they turned to the east.
East. Where the town of Ote was.
Tayre could immediately see where this was going, as he could clearly see what the horsemaster and the large crowd around the corral did not.
Better to be elsewhere. He ducked down, wormed his way backward through the press of people, the space he vacated quickly filled. He backed away until he was well clear, then climbed atop an open wagon, joining a handful of others watching the action.
One of the shaota backed up, clearly—to Tayre, anyway—to get a running start at the fence, which was high enough to keep the much larger Arunkel warhorses confined for a short time when the horsemaster needed to. The first shaota lunged into motion rather faster than he expected, heading for the fenceline.
A sudden, eerie silence took hold as the crowd and handlers realized what was about to happen, then struggled to clear the space where the five horses were now clearly headed.
As the first shaota cleared the fenceline, the crowd scrambled to get out of the way, but they were too thick, packed in too tightly. As the rest of the horses jumped the fence, landing atop the human carpet, there were sounds of breaking bones, roars, and screams.
In the midst of this panic, one white-haired soldier calmly took his spear and launched it in a smooth arc at the next-to-last shaota to land. The spear took the shaota through the neck. As the animal began to twist and buck, flattening even more people as it fell, flailing, the shaota just behind it landed in a small clear area. It made a fast motion, a sort of stutter step almost too quick for Tayre’s eye to follow, an odd sideways motion. As it launched again, jumping to clear the rest of the crowd and follow the other shaota, it gave a final kick. The white-haired soldier who had launched the spear flew backwards. It looked like he would not get up again.
“Oh, shit,” someone next to him breathed.
Now the crowd turned loud, shouting, calling. Screaming. Tayre guessed a tencount or two Arunkin had been killed, another tencount broken in various ways that they might or might not survive.
“Demon horses!” someone called and the cry was taken up. Most were fleeing, some tending to the howling injured.
As he jumped off the wagon, retreating farther from the fray, Tayre wondered if it were time to leave the army. The night would be chaos.
Well, he thought, as he left the action, at least everyone who had been so eager for a good look at the nearly mythical horses now had it.
Amarta heard the sounds of men shouting, breaking, screaming. Then a sharp, inhuman cry.
At this one of the Teva howled and launched himself at the guards. The other Teva exploded into motion as well. A struggle followed, but the greater count of guards overcame the unarmed Teva and tied them, hand and foot, setting them on the ground.
The one Teva man was sobbing, his grief obvious.
His shaota, Amarta realized suddenly. The dead horse she had foreseen. It had been his.
Jolon caught her gaze. He looked to one side, then the other, then back at her, blinking oddly. It took her a moment to realize he was giving her an Emendi signal. She did not at first recognize it; it had been too long.
He repeated it.
Help us, he was signing.
A glance around the room. She could not imagine a way to free the Teva, not with so many guards.
But she didn’t need to imagine; she could ask vision. Was there a way?
Distant screams. The flicker of fire. Guards distracted. In an improbable moment guided by vision, she strolled past the Teva, dropped a knife on the ground out of view of the guards.
They would cut their bonds. One by one, passing the knife along behind them. And then—
No and no: she had a contract. To free the Lord Commander’s prisoners was far from any reasonable interpretation of her oath.
Sorry, she signed to Jolon. So sorry.
His look of disappointment tore at her, as did the continued weeping of the man by his side.
The Lord Commander returned. He looked around the room. At the Teva. At her.
Stepping close, he dropped his voice. “The Teva heard your prediction, Seer. Now there is a dead horse. Are you foreseeing the future or creating it?”
“I did not kill that creature,” she answered angrily.
“Predict something useful for me, then.” His tone matched hers.
Many columns of fire. Sparks against a starry sky.
“You can still rescue this, ser. But it must be soon. Go to the Teva leaders with a white flag. You must—”
“Your visions are not serving me well, girl.”
“—apologize to them. Otherwise, ser, there will be so much blood and death and you—”
“Can you predict nothing else?” he asked loudly.
“Can you do anything but slaughter?” she demanded.
She could see she’d gone too far. Faster than she expected, the back of his hand snapped to her face. She turned a little, just enough, changing the distance a tiny bit. His hand barely brushed across her cheek.
He reached for her shoulders. She twitched her upper body. His hands fumbled, failing to find grip. Next he lunged for her neck. A fast rock-step back and forward. His fingertips barely missed the front of her neck.
She was in the same position from which she had started. Making a point that she hoped he understood.
His eyes widened briefly and his hands dropped to his sides. His expression turned hard. “I have your sister and nephew, Seer.”
“What?” she breathed. “No, you don’t. You can’t.”
“But I do.”
“Our contract. You said—”
“Safe, I said. And they are. Very safe. Indeed, it was the only way I could be sure they would be safe, to use my power to keep them so.”
Amarta gulped for breath, dread and pain lancing through her. A tightness gripped her throat; fury threatened to overcome her. She sank into a haze of seeing, pawing through the futures that fanned out from this moment.
She craved this man’s destruction. Not merely his death, but to somehow tear him apart, to take everything for which he cared and rend it to shreds.
In many futures she next launched herself at him with a howl, ready to tear, hit, bite. But the struggle was short-lived; she had never before used vision to attack someone and did not know how. Vision agreed and told her this would fail. He and his guards would knock her to the ground, tie her. Her options ended.
In other futures, she yelled at him, revealed to him the worst things the future might bring him.
But telling him changed the very outcomes she predicted, and her threats became empty, his faith in her eroded even further.
And nothing changed.
She stood still, vibrating with frustration, mute with anger.
“They are well,” he told her. “Do you understand?”
“That was all I ever wanted. Them to be safe. From you.”
“And they are. Our contract is intact. Do you hear me? I simply needed to be sure of your cooperation.”<
br />
Where was the future in which she was no longer captive to this man? The one that made of her a wolf?
“Take her back to her wagon,” he said to his guards.
You can do this, Seer.
“No,” she shouted. “I won’t go back.”
He put up a hand. The guards stopped.
Flashes of metal. Howls of anger.
Moments were passing. The future was shifting. Options were closing. In truth, the battle had just now begun.
He reached for her, then hesitated, fingers hovering. “Come,” he said instead, walking to the edge of the partitioned area at the rear of the pavilion.
What else to do? She followed him to the back, behind the heavy drapes, where there was a large bed. A world away from a straw mattress in a stinking wagon.
“Don’t challenge me, Amarta,” he said, voice low. “You will obey me, or your family—”
“You won’t hurt them, ser. Not before you leave Otevan, and by then you—”
By then he might not be able to. Flickers of how Innel sev Cern esse Arunkel might finish this battle were still foggy, unclear, and changing.
He might survive. He might not.
She had no idea if her family were safe from him or not; she had simply lied. In a way. Foresight had told her that to say this would give her a moment more to act, a moment more of his attention before he called his guards.
And there it was, the answer to his earlier question: Did she make the future or predict it?
Sometimes both.
In the next moment, guards would drag her back to her hot, smelly captivity. She could not slip through a net of twenty strong men.
Yet.
“I what, Seer?” he prompted, and she knew from vision that this was her last chance to change the path forward.
“You will wish you had listened to me.”
“I am listening to you now,” he growled.
But he was not.
“It has already begun,” she said.
“What has? Tell me, damn you.”
She turned her gaze away from him, staring at the hanging tapestry. A deep red silk with the monarchy’s sigil in black brocade, like a field of blood over which was laid an iron blade and pickax.
