Clarys began to circle her, and Dhulyn turned to follow him, her sword swaying lazily, almost as an afterthought. She looked not at his blade, or his eyes, but the center of his chest. A movement of his shoulders signaled Clarys’ lunge at her unprotected side; Dhulyn knocked his blade up with a negligent tap and stepped half a pace to the left. She sighed and parried two more cuts with casual flicks of her sword. As she thought, the boy was going for showy high strikes only, counting on his strength and reach, and forgetting the lower half of the body completely. As they continued to circle, Dhulyn kept track of Parno, Yaro, Mar, and especially Widow’s Peak in her peripheral vision. She saw several of the Cloud People shaking their heads and felt like shaking her own. What were they about, letting her kill this boy?
“Cry mercy, boy,” Parno coolly advised, in an echo of Dhulyn’s thought. “The Wolfshead will kill you like her namesake kills a lamb.”
“She could not kill a-” Thinking to surprise her, Clarys broke off his circling and attacked without finishing his sentence, coming at her from the side. But Dhulyn was not where he expected her to be. She had stepped inside the reach of his sword and, mindful of Parno’s request, did not gut the boy immediately, but cut him neatly on the left cheek with the tip of her blade. Too bad. Using the minor distraction of the conversation might have worked too, Dhulyn thought as she cut him again on the right cheek-on someone who was not a Mercenary.
Dhulyn parried two more blows-both to her head-before Clarys began to breath more heavily. He was used to the fight being over by now. A few murmurs from among his followers indicated that they thought so, too. Yaro had already turned away and was looking up into the clearing fog. Her Racha bird was coming.
“I have cut you twice,” Dhulyn said, fixing the boy’s eyes with her own. “I am satisfied. I ask you for the last time to renounce your claim.” Pray Sun and Moon, she thought, he’ll notice he’s tiring and hasn’t killed me yet. Many men will learn caution if you give them a chance.
But not this one. She grimaced as Clarys swung at her again, stopping the blow easily with her upraised sword. Time to end this. “I salute your courage, Clarys of Trevel, if not your wisdom.” A twist of the wrist and Dhulyn Wolfshead sent the tip of her spinning sword through the front of Clarys’ throat. He cried out then, the sound flying outward with a spray of blood, though his mouth did not move. Dhulyn heard the meaty sound of his body as it fell to the ground. Watched as his heart pumped its blood onto the stones.
The entire clearing was as silent as the fog.
“Are you content?” Dhulyn said, her breathing even, her sword still raised. She spun around as Parno’s dagger flew past her, and pinned the sword hand of Widow’s Peak to his left side.
The boy went white, and looked down at his hand, mouth trembling, as Parno approached him and took hold of the dagger’s hilt.
“We cut, or we kill,” Parno said, slowly drawing the blade free. There was, as Dhulyn expected, very little blood. “You’ve been cut. Shall I go on?”
Widow’s Peak shook his head, squinting at the thin wound where the dagger’s blade had sliced between the bones of his palm. He touched his side with the fingers of his left hand and drew them back lightly stained with blood. The point of the dagger had barely nicked him. The boy looked from his hand to Parno, to the body of his friend. To Dhulyn.
“We fight every day,” he said. “Clarys trained his whole life.”
“On the day your lives began,” Dhulyn said. “I had already killed.”
Yaro gestured, and two of her men stepped forward to pull the body away from Dhulyn’s feet. “Clarys of Trevel,” the Racha woman called out in a voice of proclamation, “has died during the trial of his Life Passage. His soul will rest content until the Sleeping God awakens and has need of him.”
“Not if the New Believers have any say in the matter,” Parno said, almost under his breath.
Yaro made a face and spit, carefully avoiding the blood on the grass. She turned to Dhulyn, a look of sheepish sympathy on her face. “He beat me once in practice,” the older woman said. She shrugged at Dhulyn’s raised eyebrows. “He wasn’t so much the rooster as he became.” She turned to watch Clarys’ body as it was carried off into the mist. The Cloud People would bear it away and bury it that night. “Still, he never seemed to notice that he never beat me again. Some won’t learn that there’s a difference between practice and killing.”
Dhulyn turned to look at her young noblewoman and smiled, her lip curling back, knowing her face was marked by Clarys’ fountaining blood. Mar turned away and was abruptly sick in the grass.
Five
“MANY OF THE OLD BELIEVERS have come to us, those from the cities, especially.” Yaro led the way down a steep and rocky path to a stream running along the bottom of a narrow vale. They were only over the ridge from the Caid ruins, but with the snow falling the previous afternoon, the stream had been easy to miss. Dhulyn followed closely, carrying the empty water bags and taking care not to crowd Koba, the Racha bird balancing on the Cloudwoman’s shoulder.
Koba cocked his head, and shook it slightly from side to side. “True,” Yaro said, in answer to some remark only she could hear. “Those who were content to stay in their shrines and hold their tongues were left there; especially the unimportant shrines, which held no relic of the god. But since the priest Beslyn-Tor has become head of the Jaldean sect-” Yaro stopped and turned to face Dhulyn. “You know there are others besides us Clouds who follow exclusively the Sleeping God?”
Dhulyn nodded. More than half the soldiers she’d fought with were followers of the warrior god, praying before each battle that if they should fall, they might sleep with him until they were needed again.
“Things have changed with the Jaldeans since Beslyn-Tor became their head, up there in Gotterang. They’re saying he’s been touched by the god, knows things he cannot know, and sees more than a man can see. And there are others who have been visited in the same way.” Yaro reached the water, and her Racha bird dropped off her shoulder to perch on a nearby rock. Yaro crouched at the edge of a small pool, dipping up the cold water into her hand and tasting it, smacking her lips with pleasure. “And there are many new priests now.”
Dhulyn set the water bags down next to Yaro, and passed the Cloudwoman the first one. “And what do they do, these new priests?”
“Preach against the Marked, as far as any of us can make out,” Yaro said as she maneuvered the opening of the first water bag under the surface of the pond. “This new heresy you say you’ve heard from the Finder in Navra-he reached us, by the way, we heard by Racha from Langeron-the Sleeping God must be kept asleep, our safety lies in his unbroken dreaming, and the Marked are the incarnation of evil in the world, trying to awaken the god and destroy us all. That nonsense.”
“But the armies would rebel-”
“And are being told they’re already the soldiers of the god, already fighting to keep the world safe.”
Dhulyn frowned, rubbing her temples with her fingertips. “We are more sensible in the southern ice,” she said. “The Sun and the Moon are always with you, the Weather gods, and the gods of the Hunt and the Herd.”
“We’re not so changeable here in the Clouds either.” Yaro exchanged her full bag for the next empty one. “We’ll keep to the old ways.”
Dhulyn waited until the third bag was filled, and then the fourth, before sitting down next to the Racha bird; Koba blinked at her companionably. Yaro pushed the stopper into the final water bag, dried her hands by running them through her hair, settled herself on a patch of last year’s grasses, and leaned back on her elbows, legs stretched out before her.
Dhulyn leaned forward. “You spoke of the old ways, Brother,” she said. “I must ask you…” She tapped her own face, indicating where the tattoos marked Yaro’s. The Cloudwoman lowered her eyes, nodding. After a moment she looked up again, but not at Dhulyn, at her Racha bird. Koba turned his head, returning her look first with one eye, then the other, before n
odding in turn.
Yaro sat up, crossing her legs and resting her hands on her knees.
“I lost my first Racha,” she said. Her eyes unfocused, as if she no longer saw the world around her-the stream, the pool, and Dhulyn Wolfshead-but the past. Koba left his perch next to Dhulyn and half flew, half hopped until he was beside Yaro, crooning deep in his throat, a keening sound. “I was very young, and I found him, you see, fallen from the nest.”
Dhulyn made a querying note in her own throat and Yaro glanced at her. “It does happen,” she said. “Rarely, but it happens. Perhaps too many chicks hatch, perhaps there is a shortage of food that season, and one chick or more is pushed or falls from the nest.”
“But the trial,” Dhulyn said. “I thought for the bond to form, there had to be a trial?” That was why bonding with a Racha was usually part of the Life Passage.
“I saved him from a wolf,” Yaro said. She breathed deeply in through her nose and, blinking, turned to the living bird beside her and smiled. Koba rubbed his hooked beak against her right cheek.
“That was considered enough of a trial, you see, and we were bonded.” Yaro cleared her throat. “We were two months together,” she tapped the faded tattoo of feathers on her left cheek, “when I fell ill of a brain fever. I was near death for days.”
Yaro looked up, and Dhulyn saw the young girl, and the young girl’s sorrow and loss in Yaro’s face. Her living bird pressed his head against her, and both closed their eyes for a moment.
“My Racha, my-” Yaro pressed her lips tight, as if she could not say the bird’s name. But, gaining strength from contact with her living bird, she opened her eyes and continued. “My first Racha died during my fever. I fell into what all who saw me thought would be the final sleep, but Sortera the Healer came.” Dhulyn looked up and Yaro nodded. “Two weeks before she was expected, she came and Healed me. But when I finally woke, I was alone, my bond broken, and that she could not Heal.”
Dhulyn cleared her throat but remained silent when Yaro again touched the faded tattoo on her left cheek.
“I believe it was the Healing that kept me from following my soul into death,” she said. “But I believe I should have died before ever Sortera came. My Racha gave me his life, and that is how I lived long enough to be Healed.
“I could not throw away his gift, but neither could I remain in the Clouds and see around me every day the space where my soul was not. So I went to serve the Sleeping God another way.” This time Yaro touched the green-and-gold tattoo above her ears. “I have no talent for scholarship, and I feared the meditative life, so I became a Mercenary Brother.”
Dhulyn nodded her understanding. Though she did not know where the belief originated, she knew the Clouds considered the Scholars, the Jaldeans, and the Mercenary Brotherhood to be three orders of the ancient priesthood of the Sleeping God, and therefore three disciplines open to any Cloud who chose to leave the mountains.
“In the Brotherhood I found another kind of bond; you will understand me, you are Partnered. But while I was Healed, still I was not whole.”
Dhulyn touched her own tattoo, her Mercenary badge, traced her finger along the black line that threaded through the colors. The line that showed she was Partnered. Did she understand? She had always believed in the bond of Partnership. But now, after Parno’s insistence that they return to Imrion, and especially after her Vision of his child-was it possible that he might leave her, leave the Brotherhood as Yaro of Trevel had done, and return to his House? Marry? Father children? Did this mean their souls were not one? She pushed the thoughts away. Today’s worry today, so said the Common Rule.
“One day,” Yaro was saying, “I found myself thinking again of my home, the color of the sky above the mountains, the smell of the pines. Alkoryn Pantherclaw, who is Senior Brother to us all here on the Peninsula, advised me to make a visit home.” Yaro looked at Dhulyn from under her lashes. “My coming was seen as the direct intervention of the god. My cousin Evela, who had been a toddling child when I left my clan, had become a young woman, a Racha woman. Two days before I arrived she had fallen ill. Of a brain fever.” Yaro leaned forward, elbows on knees. “My bond had been broken, and I lived. It was hoped I could help my cousin do the same. But it did not fall out that way.”
“Was the Healer…?”
“Arrived too late. This time it was my cousin who died, having given her soul to her Racha, who lived.”
Koba keened again, this time a throat-rasping cough that had almost the sound of a sob in it. Yaro rubbed Koba’s face with her hands, smoothing the feathers, somehow not cutting herself on the razor-sharp beak.
Dhulyn looked from woman to Racha and back again. “But that’s not possible…” She let her voice die away.
“So it was thought.” Yaro looked Dhulyn directly in the eyes. “The Healer came too late to save my cousin, but when she came, she had a Mender with her. They, Healer and Mender, saw that there were two of us, each with our broken bond-and so together they Mended us, and we were Healed.”
It had to be true. The bond was there, obvious. Real.
“You were Mended and Healed?”
Koba hopped up to Yaro’s shoulder as the Cloudwoman raised herself to her feet. “Together they did what neither could do alone. Koba and I were broken, sick at heart. Now we are whole.”
As she followed Yaro of Trevel and Koba the Racha back to camp, Dhulyn was conscious that she should feel honored by the woman’s confidence-and awed at the achievement of the Marked, Mender and Healer. But she went with her eyes cast down, paying special attention to her footing, struggling to keep her face from showing the churning of her thoughts. She found that, after all, she could not rid her mind of the other part of Yaro’s story. That part in which a Mercenary Brother left the Brotherhood, to return to clan and family.
The next day found them with a Cloud escort, following the caravan road west to avoid the Dead Spot, where legend had it that some magic of the Caids had gone badly wrong.
When the trail they followed came close enough, Mar looked out over the silent and empty expanse of twisted rock and sand.
“It looks like a glassmaker’s pot,” she said. As she let the reins fall slack, the packhorse came to a stop. “But only the dirty bits they don’t use.”
“There are three such places in the Letanian Peninsula,” Dhulyn Wolfshead said. “But whether that means that the Caids had their principal places here,” the Mercenary woman shrugged, urging Bloodbone along with her knees. “The Scholars are still arguing over it.”
“But what happened here?” The packhorse followed Bloodbone, and Mar looked back at the Dead Spot over her shoulder. “What went wrong?”
“Only the Caids know,” the Lionsmane said from where he rode behind her.
“The knowledge was lost,” Wolfshead added, “like so much of what the Caids knew.”
“And perhaps for the best, if their knowledge could do this.” Lionsmane gestured with a wide sweep of his arm. Wolfshead shook her head, but Mar couldn’t tell if she disagreed.
Their Cloud escort left them when the road turned northeast once more, though Yaro’s Racha bird Koba soared high above them a while longer, looking out and communicating with his bond mate in their private fashion. The whole morning Mar had kept to herself, unable to fully trust the Clouds, and finding herself looking even at her bodyguards from the corners of her eyes.
“That would be the first time you saw someone killed,” Lionsmane said.
Mar’s neck felt stiff as she nodded in reply. “I’ve seen dead people, but never…” Her voice trailed off as her gaze moved ahead to where the Wolfshead rode several horse lengths ahead of them. All because of me, she thought. Because of some letters from Tenebro House, a young man, younger than she was herself, a boy really, was dead.
When the letters had come, her world had suddenly opened to so broad and wide a thing that she could barely sleep for excitement. She hadn’t been unhappy with the Weavers, exactly, but she’d been just
old enough when the sickness had taken her family to remember what it was like to have a Holding, to know that you were a part, however small, of a Noble House, part of a greater whole. The letters brought the chance of going to the capital and taking up her rightful place as a cousin of that House, and even the possibility of the restoration of her Holding, if she could show how well she understood her allegiance. She had letters she hadn’t shown Dhulyn Wolfshead, letters which had given her a job to do, for which she could be rewarded. Her task had been to hire two particular Mercenaries to guide and protect her instead of waiting for the spring salt caravans. A woman of the Red Horsemen and her Partner, the letters had said. Mar’d had all her friends on the lookout for them, and as soon as Rilla Fisher had seen them come off the Catseye, Mar had practically dragged Guillor Weaver to the Hoofbeat Inn to hire them. Dhulyn Wolfshead and Parno Lionsmane. She’d liked them, and even being on the trail with them had seemed like an adventure, once she’d got over the discomfort and the strangeness.
But the adventure had ended with the sight of Clarys’ blood spilling on the ground.
Mar risked a glance at the Wolfshead’s straight back. Lionsmane gave a great sigh, and she froze.
“Seeing someone killed does make a difference, doesn’t it?” he said, as if he were commenting on the sunshine.
Mar shivered, making the packhorse toss his head. “I must seem such a child,” she said, hardening her voice to make it stop shaking. “It’s not as though I didn’t know what soldiers and Mercenaries do.” She looked up at the golden-brown man beside her. “You’ll have seen many like Clarys?”
“I have,” he said quietly. “The first when I was much younger than you.”
“And killed them, too,” the girl said, her eyes returning to the back of the tall woman with blood-red hair.
The Sleeping God Page 9
