Letitia’s answering kiss was ferocious. After a moment of devouring me, she began to speak against my lips, fingers busy with buttons: “Oh Sweet Lord that was amazing! I could feel you all around me—and the light—and—Endeáril, if that’s what magic is like then how do wizards find time for anything but loving?”
I laughed, wrapped arms around her to feel the twin delights of her skin and her gentle power against me, pulled her frenzy into a pace that would allow us to enjoy in consciousness.
“It’s not always like that,” I murmured against her mouth, and applied myself to enjoying her flavors and textures. I could make love with Letitia all day, and enjoy the process, but now I remembered: it was the other thing, the flow of power and the delight of directing it, that I truly craved. Soon I would be mad with the need for more, but for the moment I felt like one does after the first course of an elaborate meal: ready to slow down and enjoy, but far more aware of the depth of my hunger. I had no idea how to fill that need without breaking my vow.
It was a good thing I had a lover to keep me occupied until I figured it out.
29. Beneath the Surface
They were serving lunch when Letitia and I finally arrived in the inn’s main room. I took it as a mark of how far beyond hunger I’d gone that I ate two bowls of what was doubtless a thoroughly unremarkable stew, relishing it nearly as much as I had the meal in the top-flight inn at Nemetona. The company was simpler, too: we ate surrounded by tradesmen and travelers less readily identified, none of whom I recognized. Evidently the rest of our companions still slept.
I was thinking about climbing the stairs and lying down for a few hours myself when Rohini’s man Thurro walked in. He hurried to our table to deliver the news that Amien had found a boat and the company was assembling outside the stable. So much for sleep: we sped upstairs to gather our possessions. I pulled on still-damp boots, donned mail and sword belt, picked up my bags and the terrible wreck of my harp, and accompanied Thurro and Letitia to the stable.
Someone had already tacked out my horse: I had only to load up my gear and lead him outside. In the yard I discovered most of the party already present, waiting beside their horses.
I met the second group of Rohini’s men, to whom I’d forgotten to introduce myself yesterday: Corrib, Pirres and Seihar; the brothers Calbo and Tibas, between whom it was difficult to distinguish; and Retogen, who evidently hailed from the same clan as Olin. There were no young men among Rohini’s crew, I realized: only Seihar looked as if he might match me in age, and the rest of them were probably a decade older. I suspected a year of sleeping outdoors hadn’t improved anyone’s looks; all of them were weatherbeaten and shaggy. But they shared a patient, spare fierceness and the sort of bone-deep bonds that require few words to be exchanged.
When Rohini’s second-in-command Busadi arrived, they greeted him with the blend of respect and affection that represents the best a commander can hope to achieve. He assessed them all with a practiced eye, and I recognized the way he cataloged them: Corrib was sufficiently deficient in sleep that he would err in a way Busadi could predict and now planned to compensate for; Tibas carried his arm in a way that suggested a shoulder wound of long history was troubling him. Busadi himself was suffering the sort of stiffness that comes from an abrupt change in sleeping arrangements. Strange how unaccustomed comfort can make the muscles lock up.
Iminor and Nuad entered the yard. I greeted them with a polite nod, watching as Iminor continued to play the perfect consort: inquiring after the quality of Letitia’s sleep, which she admitted had been poor; assuming most of her burdens without any commentary. Today it all had the quality of things done because they were appropriate rather than because they would be appreciated or even necessarily matter.
His careworn aspect was my doing. If I would never come closer to possessing Letitia than the occasional tryst, then why didn’t I back away and give him the space he deserved? He was too noble to be so betrayed. I was diminishing all of us. Hadn’t I decided to love Letitia like I did the rest of them, after all?
Finally I remembered: reality crashed over me, robbing me of breath. His grief was my fault, two dozen times over: the rest of our companions weren’t going to wake up and join us. No crowd of familiar Tanaan faces would gather in this yard. We would go forward without our friends today.
How was it possible I hadn’t thought of them since this morning? I hadn’t even thought to cut my hair.
That wasn’t my prerogative. I was the cause of their deaths, not the one bereaved.
I realized Iminor was watching me. Reluctantly I met his eyes, trying hopelessly to steel myself against all the flavors of condemnation he had every right to heap on me. There was nothing I could say.
But what I saw in him was shared grief and a surprised respect. As if he had just developed the suspicion that I might be human, after all.
Might have been, perhaps: after a second I glanced away.
Amien strode into the yard and unhitched his horse, abstracted worry written in his face. He glanced around, automatically tallying riders—then stuttered to a stop, gaze fixed on Letitia.
“Letitia!” he said, as if her very presence startled him. I knew he saw the wards I had created for her, as clearly and disconcertingly as I always saw his.
Horror swept over me: with one unplanned utterance he would bring untold humiliation on both Letitia and Iminor. Her honor would be completely wrecked on this side of the mountains, no matter what the Tanaan rules said; Iminor would be forced to confront the certainty that he’d been cuckolded at the precise moment when the matter was revealed in public, with no time to master his emotions in private or work out how to proceed. It would all be my fault.
I leapt into the saddle, tweaked the horse so he startled and reared, and let the inevitable fall take me, tumbling spurs over ears and landing hard enough to blast the air from my lungs. Immediately every eye in the yard was on me. Rohini failed to contain a smirk; several of her men guffawed. Amien cast me a long, considering glance as I lay there in the dust. Understanding passed between us.
He knew everything; of course he knew. He saw exactly what had gone into the creation of Letitia’s new wards; he had been aware when I destroyed his, had doubtless absorbed far more than the bare facts during those few seconds of arcane contact. If he doubted whether he’d dreamed it, he doubted no more. And he recognized at least part of why I’d staged the fall: with a single, silent nod of acknowledgment, he turned his attention on Letitia again.
“Your wards appear to be in fine shape,” he said in a calm voice. “Excellent. We shouldn’t need to revisit them before Sucello, if at all.”
Letitia nodded, eyes on the wizard and a flush spreading across her otherwise-composed face. “Thank you, my lord.”
Amien glanced at me again, some decision I couldn’t identify in his eyes; he closed the distance between us and offered me a hand up. I let him pull me to my feet.
“Do you have any further antics planned this afternoon?” he inquired drily.
I shook my head.
“Let’s go, then,” he said. He clapped a hand on my shoulder, as if I were still a member of his workshop and I’d made a respectable go of a difficult working, and returned to his horse.
The boat Amien had engaged stood waiting by the dock when we arrived. It looked, to my untutored eye, more or less the same as the one we’d left behind at Nemetona: large enough for the party and our horses, but not designed for the comfort of passengers or crew. At least I wasn’t drunk this time.
After the crew cast off, I crossed the deck to stand beside Amien in the prow, grasping the rail as he raised a gentle westerly wind that filled the sail and moved the boat steadily against the current. For the first few minutes I hardly dared to breathe, anticipating an answering blow from Nechton that would send us all into the water. But it didn’t come. For mile after mile we sailed smoothly upriver, gradually gathering a flotilla of rich men’s boats ahead of us as we drew up behind th
em and propelled them more rapidly against the tide. Overhead, the sky stretched blue and nearly cloudless, unnerving in its bright serenity; birds dove after fish in our wake. The ease of it made the skin on the back of my neck crawl.
“What, he doesn’t care?” Amien muttered at last.
I shook my head. “We are playing right into his hands.”
The wizard glanced at me, a frown on his face that suggested he’d had the same thought.
“Damned if I know how,” I said, answering the unspoken question. “Just one more reason to take her to Aballo instead.”
He gave vent to an explosive sigh. After several moments of watching the boats ahead of us, he said, “Do you have intelligence I should know about?”
I had promised Letitia silence. She chose honor over life. It was one of the few things about her I truly understood, despite my own failure in that regard.
“No,” I said, after what had probably been too long a silence. “But I am familiar with her power, and his.”
Amien sighed. “Great Lord Ilesan, I wish I knew what Carina did.”
I nodded. “My lord, I know we need to begin casting strategy—but I won’t be of much use until I’ve slept.”
The wizard cast me a thoughtful glance. “It’s been—what? Since Dromineer?”
I nodded again.
A reluctant smile creased his long face, and I knew he was thinking about my self-inflicted sleeplessness at Presatyn and this morning. I felt myself flush.
“Go, already,” he said, smiling as if my blush amused him further. “Sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Call on me as you will.”
He laid a hand on my shoulder again, for just a moment; I mustered a smile and crossed the deck to the opening through which a man could access the hold.
The place was dark and windowless, the air too still. But it was cool, and the darkness tugged me immediately towards sleep: I lay down on the floor and let the gentle rocking of the boat take me. Water rushed past the hull, lending the interior a soft, soothing hum; the sweet power of the river goddess gathered around me again. I should have fought Her, should have sought to hold myself separate; instead I welcomed Her gratefully in. And in the safety of Her cool dark embrace I slept.
Ruddy sunset light shone through the opening at the top of the ladder when next I opened my eyes. For a moment I lay still, the gentle Presence of the river goddess fading from my awareness, piecing together where I was and why. Gradually I realized the boat was no longer moving: I hauled myself to my feet and climbed the ladder to the deck above.
The boat lay at anchor in the middle of the river, rocking softly in the tide. At least a dozen other boats had anchored nearby. All those other vessels had been riding Amien’s summoned wind, I remembered: when we stopped for the night, they had wisely done the same. We would spend this night surrounded by strangers: far enough apart that our watches would detect any approach before it arrived, but the way sound carries across open water destroying any illusion of privacy. Even now I heard men speaking on several other boats.
I crossed to the rear of the boat and saw to my horse: seeing him fed and watered; brushing him and checking his hooves, for the comforting routine and contact it gave both of us rather than because the short ride we took this afternoon had made it in any way necessary. I spoke to him in tones pitched for his ears alone, offering senseless apologies for the loss of his friends and for making him ride yet another boat, which I knew he enjoyed even less than I. I looked up and discovered Amien leaning against the rail, watching me.
I shrugged. “He gets nervous. He needs a lot of contact or he gets a little crazy.”
Amien nodded solemnly. “Me, too.”
A halfhearted smile overtook me. “He misses his friends. He’d just gotten used to them…” I found it necessary to swallow against a sudden tightening of my throat, to look out across the water. “Last night was… bad.”
Amien stepped away from the rail, leaned companionably across his own horse’s withers. “What happened?”
I drew a deep breath, trying to harden myself against the memory. Of course we needed to discuss this: it was a tactical issue. We should have talked about it last night.
Belatedly I realized Amien was handling me as gently as I was my horse. The idea of being managed made me want to buck and throw off the bridle, but I couldn’t figure out where it was. I tried to draw a general’s necessary distance around me instead.
“We walked into a trap,” I said, keeping my voice at a pitch that would carry the words no farther than Amien. I shook my head, glancing away. “The path to the river crossing was mined. How they knew where to lay the trap when we hadn’t even conceived of crossing and it made no damn tactical sense—who knew to lay the mines…”
The shift occurred in my mind again; the horse and I hung in the midst of nothingness as the ground fell away and something dropped behind us; the explosion ripped apart the spot in which that something fell.
“How did you…” Amien’s voice came from some indeterminate place beyond the nothingness. “How did you escape?”
A fist closed around my heart. There was no way I could explain, not even to Amien. Especially not to Amien. He would read all the wrong things into the fact that Lady Tella had intervened for me again. I wrenched myself into the present moment, taking in Amien’s grave face and my own fingers tangled frantically in the horse’s mane. I bent and picked up the brush, began smoothing away the snarls.
“I was at the front of the line. When the first mine exploded—he just bolted. By the time I could see again we were out in the middle of the river.”
“Great Lord Ilesan,” Amien murmured.
“I don’t understand,” I said. My voice sounded choked again. “How the hell did they know to pick that spot?”
Amien shook his head. “How does what we’re doing now feed their strategy? I can’t answer that question, either.”
“I’d give a lot for twenty minutes with that orb,” I muttered. Amien turned a long, troubled gaze on me. “Or one of the Bard’s generals and a vial of ephedra salts. That would work, too.”
Amien gave me another thoughtful look. I glanced down the length of the deck, watching Rohini’s men settle in for the evening’s rest. Letitia, Iminor and Nuad sat with backs against the charthouse, gazing across the water at the southern shore. Up in the prow, Busadi stood looking around with the sort of posture and attention that suggested he’d claimed the night’s first watch; Olin strolled around from the far side of the charthouse and planted himself in the rear. I suspected he’d been maintaining a respectful distance over there for a few minutes, giving us time to finish our conversation. Amien glanced at him, nodded politely—and yawned.
“I’ll split the arcane watches with you?” I said. “Why don’t you get some sleep.”
“Call if you need me,” he said, yawning again, and stepped towards the front of the boat. After a few steps he stopped, turning to look at me again, face falling into the lines that suggested some discomfiting topic was in the offing.
“You were wrong the other day,” Amien said finally in Tanaan, “when you said I make decisions because of the way I bollocksed things up with Carina.”
I nodded. “I know,” I said in the same language.
“Letting her go to Macol without me was the stupidest thing I ever did,” the wizard continued, eyes on something in Letitia’s vicinity. He sighed.
“I think—” He shook his head. “Gods, this sounds stupid. I think I thought that if I ascended to the Prince’s throne—I would deserve the way she… Fouzh.”
It took far too long for me to come up with something to say. For all that, it wasn’t very good.
“Men are idiots,” I offered.
Amien glanced at me, looked away again.
“I know I am,” I said.
Amien laughed, finally meeting my eyes. “Your instincts are truer than mine ever were. You should consider trusting yourself.”
My throat clamped shut at all the layers of meaning I heard in his words. I couldn’t help it: I glanced away.
“Sleep well, my lord,” I croaked, still looking across the water.
“Gods grant you strength,” he said gently, and left me to ponder which gods he meant.
I closed the distance between the Tanaan and myself, slipped down to settle beside Nuad: my back against the charthouse, my gaze on the the southern shore. I should have held myself separate, should have given all my attention to monitoring the arcane. But some tension in my chest abated, just a little, as the Tanaan glanced at me, silently accepting my presence, and returned to whatever woolgathering they were about. Within minutes Letitia had fallen asleep on Iminor’s shoulder. I pushed aside a futile wish to trade places with Iminor, reminded myself I had resolved to give him the distance he deserved, and turned my eyes across the water.
Nagnata looked serene from here, with moonlight tracing marsh grasses on the shore and fields of flax on the land above. The bluffs were not as tall here as they had been yesterday. The moonlit fields, the distant standing stones, the immense old oak spreading its fingers among the stars: they seemed little higher than the deck of the boat on which I sat. I sank into a quiet that was not quite a trance, spreading tendrils of awareness into the aether: the Presence of the river goddess running beneath my consciousness again, the Power that was Esus stretching out and encompassing all the parts of me that should know better and yet could not help but respond to His Call.
The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods) Page 56
