Sasha ran up the increasing incline, aiming booted feet for the nails, knowing that a misstep could break straight through (she'd done it before, playing games on various roofs as a girl). She manoeuvred around the forward triangle panel and rolled onto the upper rooftop from there. Moved along a little way, then simply started kicking with a heel at a likely spot. A wooden shingle broke, and she kicked several more, clearing a space of exposed beams through which dark smoke poured out. One of the big Lenay soldiers might have struggled to fit through it, but Sasha quickly knelt, got both feet in, took her weight on her arms and lowered herself through with a hand-hold reversal, gasping a deep, final breath as she went.
Smoke within the enclosed ceiling space made breath and sight impossible. She screwed her eyes shut, held her breath, and felt about upon the straw ceiling matting for an edge. Pulled it up and threw it aside, drew her sword and plunged it point first through the light planks below. Stabbed repeatedly, then got her gloved hands into the broken gaps in the wood and pulled. They broke easily. Sasha threw them away, sheathed her sword as the lack of air began to burn at her lungs, stuck her head out of the gap below and saw the broad, open space of the training hall divided by multiple tachadar circles amidst numerous wooden ceiling supports. There were more horizontal beams below, and she grasped the edges of her hole, thrust her body out and half-somersaulted upon that grip, legs swinging and catching a beam. She grabbed onto it, swinging upside down by hands and knees, and overarmed to the ceiling pillar, sucking air thinly as the smoke clustered about the ceiling. She grabbed the pillar and slid down the smooth hewn sides to the ground, gasping a deep breath as the air cleared near the bottom.
A crowd of villagers were clustered at either end around the huge doors, which appeared to have been barred and padlocked. “Padlocked from the inside, but not the outside?” was her immediate thought. “How did the person with the key get out?” A crash from the middle of the hall interrupted that thought as ceiling beams collapsed in a clatter of flames, charcoal and sparks. The low ceiling of smoke was growing lower, the visibility already terrible, blocking light from the small windows high in the walls. A hammering sounded above the screams and crackling of the fire—someone trying to hack through a wall with axe or sword. Neither would work, these walls were vertyn hardwood, four times the weight of regular pine and just as many times the strength.
“Stand aside!” she yelled to the villagers. “Get aside, give some room!” They turned in astonishment and pulled others aside who had not heard, clothing held to their mouths, eyes wide with panic. Sasha redrew her sword and examined the padlock, a big, heavy, iron contraption, no doubt imported from the lowlands where such things were commonly engineered. She pointed to the nearest woman. “Hold this lock! Like this. Keep this side facing up! Don't worry, you'll keep your fingers!”
The woman grasped it in fear, held as instructed, and shut her eyes. About her, Sasha was aware, there were children crying. She took stance, trying to relax her shoulders…without a clean breath to take, it wasn't easy. But then, for her, swinging a sword was easier than breathing, and serrin steel was far tougher than iron. The lock broke with a ringing clash and Sasha tore the lock aside, villagers crowding to lift the heavy bar across the door and crash it to the ground. Pressure from inside and out sent it rolling aside and villagers poured out, clutching children and coughing for air.
Sasha remembered the group at the other end and turned back to stare desperately through the smoke…but already they were coming, skirting the flames.
“That's all of them?” Sasha yelled as they came. “No others?”
“That's all!” answered an elderly, coughing man. “They locked us in here, threatened to kill a child on the outside if we did not throw the key out…we…we didn't know the roof was afire until…”
“Tell me later!” She ushered him out, onto the verandah, to find that most of the others had already been escorted across the square to the neighbouring inn. She moved down the stairs and across the square at the old man's side, several women hastening to help.
Halfway across, and a thunder of hooves and motion took her attention left…a horseman came to a skittering pause, several men on foot behind, weapons in hand and assuredly Hadryn from their dark grey cloaks. Their heads were bare, hair closely cropped in the Verenthane way, nearly bare at the back and sides in the northern style. Gleaming star symbols hung prominently about their necks.
“It is the Cronenverdt bitch!” yelled the horseman to the others, their eyes wild with the fury of recent combat, sweaty, dirt-stained and, in several cases, bloody. “We may have lost Perys, but this trophy shall be ours!”
“Run!” Sasha yelled at the straggling villagers, who ran for the inn. The horseman spurred his mount, pounding straight for her. Sasha switched her sword to her left hand, and waited. For a charging warhorse, it seemed to be approaching very slowly. Everything did. The Hadryn's face was contorted with rage and the lust of revenge. And Sasha felt a wave of hatred, calm and smooth, like fire in her veins.
She rolled aside at the last moment, the rider's sword flashing empty air, performed a simple roll to one knee, a hand to the knife at her belt, and threw. The knife struck the passing rider in the side and he clutched at it with a cry.
The first of the foot soldiers reached her at full pelt and unloaded with a huge swing fit to cleave her in two…Sasha sidestepped with a neatly angled, swinging deflection, and slashed him open from behind as he skidded by. The second swung high, low and sideways, Sasha fading smoothly before each, feet and hands shifting in unison. A third came at her flank with a ready blow, and Sasha reversed the parry into a swivelling footing-change that took half a length from the new attacker before he realised he was in range. Her swing cleft head from shoulders, before reversing in turn to slash at her original opponent, low backhand to high overhead…his footing entangled as his defence struggled to make that difficult transition, his guard faltering, and Sasha split him across the middle with a vicious cut. A fourth charged with a roar, a huge man with bare biceps rippling beneath his sleeveless tunic…Sasha saw the basic pattern of his attack before perhaps even he did, and simply invited the right-quarter cross that she knew would follow the halfstep fake and thrust. Deflected it straight past its target as he overbalanced, her blade circling in that singular, foot-sliding movement to remove arm and head in quick, precise succession.
Silence, then. She stood amidst the gruesome, human carnage she had wrought, and looked about. She felt amazingly calm. Sound seemed to come at her as though from underwater. Colours appeared strange, almost tactile. The black smoke roiling above seemed impossibly black, and ominous. The blood that spurted and flooded about her boots was the deepest, reddest of reds she'd ever seen. She swung slowly in her stance, a sliding pivot in the centre of the dirt courtyard between neighbouring buildings and the burning hall. Behind, guardsmen were staring at her. Blades limp at their sides, paused as if halted in mid-rush, having come to her aid but finding themselves far too late for assistance.
Jaryd Nyvar was at their head, staring as if he'd seen a ghost. Sasha took a long, slow breath and stepped carefully past the ruined corpses, her boots already splattered red with blood. Jaryd made the Verenthane holy sign repeatedly. A Verenthane guardsman did likewise. Another made the spirit sign, then another. Further along, a guardsman had removed the rider she had knifed from his mount. He sat upon the dirt now, clutching the knife wound in his side, guarded at blade point. The wound, she noted coldly, appeared several finger-breadths away from his heart. More throwing practice was in order, it seemed.
“Your Highness…” Jaryd said hoarsely as she passed, eyes filled with utter disbelief. “I…please, Your Highness…”
From the verandah of the inn, a crowd of villagers stared and gasped amongst themselves.
“Synnich-ahn,” she heard the reverent, frightened murmur. “Synnich-ahn.” With wonder.
She paused before the fallen rider. He stared up at her from withi
n a grimacing, battle-stained face. Hatred and fear battled for supremacy in his eyes. Sasha met his gaze directly with a stare of utter contempt.
“Where are your gods now?” she said.
THE COLUMN RODE FROM PERYS in the early afternoon, short five of their number. Two were dead, and another three bore wounds too severe for them to continue. All remained in Perys, confident of the goodwill and care of their hosts. Thirty-one to three. It was, Sasha reflected, an abject lesson in the importance of basic tactics.
She was almost surprised at herself for finding the time to think on such things through the turmoil and heartbreak of the scene at Perys. But above the suffering, and any simple human compassion, there was strategy. Such was the lesson that Kessligh had driven into her—that the lives of soldiers, and indeed the lives of an entire people, would in times of war become dependent upon something so simple as a commander's decisions and deployments. If Kessligh and Captain Tyrun had not been so competent many more families of Tyree would have been mourning the loss of a son, brother or father at Perys.
They left their Hadryn prisoners within the care of a Verenthane monastery along the valley from Perys. Leaving them in Perys, to the tender mercies of the townsfolk whose families they had slaughtered, was out of the question.
Sasha gazed along the old monastery walls as she rode beside them, turning back in her saddle to contemplate the single spire that thrust skyward above a magnificent sprawl of Lenay hillside. With its small, arched windows placed high in the walls, the monastery seemed as much to shun its beautiful surroundings as to revel in them. The Goeren-yai in her soul rebelled at the feel of it—dark, worn stone, unsmiling and welcomeless.
“How long has it been here, do you think?” she asked Kessligh, as they rode two abreast behind Damon and Captain Tyrun, the forward guard in full armour and banners ahead of them. Not that the banners could be seen for any distance through the thick pine forest…but then, there was always the prospect of ambush from Taneryns thinking them a Hadryn column, or vice-versa.
“Torovans have been coming here for centuries,” Kessligh replied, eyeing the monastery's dark walls with an unreadable eye. “Verenthaneism moved from the Bacosh into Torovan perhaps six hundred years ago. There was a century then, before the Cherrovan Empire, when Lenayin was wide open to Torovan missionaries. Goeren-yai didn't take any more kindly to attempted conversions then than they do now…but if these foreigners wanted to spend the effort hewing stone and living alone in the wilderness, well, they weren't bothering anyone. I'd guess this one is somewhere between five and six hundred years old.”
Sasha nodded—it had that look to it, of age and constant use. “Damon,” she thought to call forward. Damon glanced over his shoulder, turning in the saddle in order to see her past the obscuring helm. “How old a building? Did you see the foundation stone above the door?”
“The year 309, it said,” Damon answered, and Sasha pursed her lips. Five hundred and forty-eight years old, then—it being the year 857 by the Verenthane calendar, since the gods had presented Saint Tristan with the Scrolls of Ulessis, in the Bacosh province of Enora. The number meant something to Verenthanes. To Goeren-yai, it provided merely a convenient yardstick against which to measure time.
“The Cherrovan didn't mind these monasteries?”
“No,” said Kessligh. “Cherrovan weren't bothered by much, back then. Or at least, they didn't find a few monks in the wilderness threatening.”
“There's an old ruin off the road to Cryliss,” Sasha countered. “The stones are blackened, it looks as if it might have been put to fire a long time ago.”
“Yes, but that's Valhanan. There's no monasteries around Valhanan or Tyree. Or much of central Lenayin, for that matter.”
“Why?”
“Because the good, tolerant folk of Valhanan burnt them all down and put the inhabitants to the sword, of course.” Sasha gave him a frowning look, questioning his sincerity. Kessligh shrugged. “Good people can have bad histories, Sasha. And bad people can have good moments too in their past. Not everything the Cherrovan did in their occupation was bad either…a lot of very good, enlightened Cherrovan formed allegiances with Lenays, and worked with them for the common good. The Udalyn especially met and worked with many such. I met some, in the war—Cherrovans who had married into Udalyn families and ended up fighting their own people for the liberation of Lenayin. I don't doubt their descendants are still alive in the Valley of the Udalyn, those that survived. All forgotten today, of course.”
“I thought an enlightened Cherrovan was a contradiction in terms,” Sasha remarked.
“I asked a serrin about that once, when I was young and naive. She was well-versed in Lenay history, her uman had taught her the accumulated tales of more generations of Lenays than any Lenay human could possibly hold in his head. I asked her if, from the serrin point of view spanning countless centuries, the Cherrovan were a particularly bad or barbaric people. She was quite surprised at the impetuosity of the question, coming from a Lenay…or at least an adopted Lenay. “Young man,” she said, “I believe the Lenay expression is that your implication is like the pot calling the pan black.” Over the span of the last thousand years, Sasha, the most barbaric, bloodthirsty warmongers in all of Rhodia were the Lenays. That's one reason the Torovans are so keen on recruiting us to fight in the Bacosh—they hope that the simple fear of a Lenay army in the lowlands will frighten the Saalshen Bacosh into conceding ground without a fight. They tell tales of Lenay warriors in Petrodor that would make your blood run cold. The Lenay ‘enlightenment’, such as it is, is a very recent phenomenon, I assure you.”
“Do you think the coming of Verenthanes with Grandfather Soros made Lenayin a better place?” Sasha asked sombrely.
“A central authority in Baen-Tar made Lenayin a better place,” Kessligh replied with surety. “This conflict between Taneryn and Hadryn may be contained because of what we are doing right now—companies in the service of your father riding to put a stop to it. In previous centuries, that didn't happen. Lenayin is a nation now, not just a squabbling rabble. And Verenthaneism is the glue that holds the provinces to your father's will.”
“So you think Verenthaneism has made us better?”
“I didn't say that. Glue is glue. Verenthaneism serves its purpose where fractious ancient beliefs and loyalties could not. It makes Lenayin one. But any other glue may have served as well.”
There was nothing quite so lonely, Sasha thought, as sitting watch at camp after a battle. The log beneath her was hard, the air far colder than a summer night had any right to be, and there was no light but the brilliance of a billion stars. From about the camp came the sound of men snoring, or a horse snorting. Alone in the dark, a watchman's thoughts were his only company. And his memories.
A twig snapped. Sasha stared into the darkness, hands grasping the sword by her side. A rustle of pine needles. “M'Lady Sashandra? Are you there?”
Jaryd's voice. She could see him now, very faintly, a shadow in the blackness. She wondered if he would go away if she remained silent. “I'm here,” she said instead. “Sitting down, on the log.”
The shadow approached. She did not know why she'd invited him over—like most Verenthane nobles, Jaryd Nyvar was a pain in the neck. Perhaps, she thought wryly, she was just as much the fool as those idiot noble girls who giggled and whispered at the tournaments. Sitting alone on guard watch, even a demon of Loth might be welcome company if his eyes were handsome and his shoulders manly.
The log shifted as Jaryd settled beside her, wrapped tightly like her beneath cloak and blankets. “I couldn't sleep,” he explained. He spoke in little more than a whisper, but in the vast, empty silence, it seemed as loud as a yell. “Damn but it's cold!”
“Northerly wind and no clouds,” Sasha replied, standard knowledge for any Lenay who lived in the wilds. “Westerlies can be even worse, the wind comes straight off the mountains. Some Goeren-yai say unseasonal weather means the spirits are disturbed.”
Sadly, it was too dark for Sasha to see either his handsome eyes or manly shoulders. This conversation, then, would rest entirely upon the strength of his personality. She nearly laughed. “Aye,” she agreed.
“Did you make a wish?”
“No.”
“Then what were you thinking of?” Jaryd pressed.
Sasha sighed. “My mother,” she said quietly.
“Ah, Queen Shenai.” As if he'd known her personally. Jaryd was perhaps only a year older than Sasha—he couldn't have been more than six when the queen had died, in childbirth to Sasha's youngest sibling Myklas. Sasha nearly snorted. “She was very beautiful. My father says she was a wonderful queen.”
“I knew her only a little,” Sasha admitted.
“I can recall the days of mourning,” Jaryd continued, very much in love with the sound of his own whisper. “My family all wore black for seven days. My mother also died young, in childbirth. So sad a thing…and yet so noble, to die whilst giving life. A far more Verenthane end, I fear, than most warriors shall meet—dying whilst taking life.”
“Perhaps if the priests would allow Verenthane women to use the serrin's white powder,” Sasha remarked, “all these women needn't die young at all.”
Though his face remained unseen, Sasha could sense Jaryd's consternation. “But it is against the gods’ will!”
“It's against the priests’ will,” Sasha retorted. “Serrin women can fight, play music, make arts, conduct trade…all the things that men do. It's far easier when you're not pregnant all the time, I gather. I wonder what amazing things Lenay women would discover they could do if given the opportunity.”
“M'Lady…” said Jaryd, appearing to fight down an amazed smile, “what is a woman, if not the opposite to a man?”
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