How she hated the touch of his old man’s hands! Alyssa affected not to notice his hand, looking down, instead, to brush off an imaginary speck on her brown velvet skirt.
“I . . . I don’t . . . remember.” The hand dropped back to the mattress, exhausted even by that simple effort.
“That’s exactly why you must rest, Dervlin.” She twitched at the corner of his blanket. “Stop wasting your strength harassing the nurse to bring you visitors and get on with your recovery. The healer was quite firm about that on his last call—no visitors.”
The startled brown eyes of the chierra nurse glanced up at her, then fled back to the patient again. Alyssa grimaced. Unfortunately the healer had said no such thing and the creature was very well aware of it. Her memory would have to be adjusted to agree with Alyssa’s official version. She sighed. Hopefully, she could leave that chore for Jarid’s return; he was much more proficient at it.
“Try to rest now, Dervlin, and I’ll come back to see you later.” Much later, she amended mentally, trying to hold down her pace to a brisk walk as she headed for the door.
Closing the heavy, carved doors behind her, she leaned against them and locked her hands together to keep them from shaking. Why didn’t the old bastard have the good taste to simply die and let them all get on with their lives?
Jarid had promised his uncle would be gone in a matter of days. Now he actually seemed to be recovering. She ran a hand over her burning cheek, then straightened her back. She had a house to run, as well as an estate, both of them almost totally hers at last.
The image of her grandfather’s face began to coalesce in her mind.
Grandfather! A feeling of uneasiness washed over her, but she quickly hid it behind her shields.
Alyssa, child, how is your husband? He projected an aura of warm sympathy.
Worse, Grandfather. She leaked a nuance of deep despair through her shields. Much worse.
* * *
Setting her water bucket down in a rare patch of golden sunlight, Haemas shook her head as she held up her blistered palms. Alyssa had always insisted her stepdaughter was too “boyish and unladylike” to do anything but disgrace the name of Tal among the High Houses. If Alyssa could see her now, fetching and carrying for a bunch of chierra thieves . . .
She rubbed her stinging hands over the breeches they had given her and sighed. Alyssa had always been so condescending, even that first day when Dervlin Tal had brought her to Tal’ayn as his Lady.
Haemas remembered Alyssa’s tiny perfect figure and sighed. Even though she was so much younger, she was a full head taller than Alyssa and her stepmother never let her forget it.
“Do try to stand up straight, child,” Alyssa would say in that refined voice of hers. “No one will offer a matrimonial contract for a big lump like you if you don’t at least try to move gracefully. And eat something. You’re no bigger around than a rail.”
‘Move gracefully,’ Haemas thought. She wondered what was happening at Tal’ayn, now that—
An icy shiver gripped her and a warning throb behind her eyes made her gasp. It would not do to think about any of that.
Just overhead, she heard the leaves whisper as the silsha slipped along a slender branch. She looked up and laughed as the great beast reached down with a wickedly clawed paw. Matching its foot with her hand, she marveled at its size. Even with her six fingers spread wide, the silsha’s paw was much bigger.
“There you be.” Cale rounded a tree and stood there, glaring at her with his strange blue eyes. “It’s time to leave.”
Haemas looked down at her boots. “I’m not going.”
“Don’t recall nobody asking your leave on the subject, your high-and-mightiness.” He crossed his arms across his threadbare shirt.
A low rumbling snarl broke from the silsha, and Cale’s dark face paled. “And look at this! We can’t even get the ebari into camp as long as that—thing be anywhere near!” He glanced uneasily at the black beast draped over a low-hanging limb just above his head. The silsha wrinkled its lips back from fierce white incisors, then washed its foreleg with its rough tongue.
“Eevlina told you to send it away.” He moved prudently out from under the dangling claws. “Get rid of it. It’s high time we was off to Dorbin.”
Haemas sighed, then looked up into the narrow-muzzled black face. Go away and hunt, she told it reluctantly. Far away.
The silsha slitted its hot yellow eyes and panted. You come away! Come to trees!
Haemas conjured up images of indolent wild ebari and fat tree barrets. No, go and hunt now. Come back and find me later.
Small one must come. The silsha stretched out a foreleg and touched her face with a velvet paw.
No! She motioned at the beast. Go hunt!
A wave of frustration emanated from its mind as it rose to all fours, stretched its long body sinuously, then leaped effortlessly into the branches above. Loneliness washed over her as an angry growl reverberated back through the trees.
“Finally!” Cale blotted his perspiring forehead with his sleeve. “Now maybe we can get down to business.”
Haemas turned and followed him back through camp to the waiting ebari on the other side. “You mean now you can go steal something.”
“Of course.” He seized her from behind and hoisted her into the saddle.
“Quit blathering with that demon’s whelp and help your old Gran on this Mother-forsaken beast.” Eevlina gathered her tattered homespun skirt and glared over her shoulder.
Cale hastily bent over and locked his hands together, grunting as he took the heavy-set old woman’s full weight. Then he looped Haemas’s reins over his wrist and swung up onto his own shaggy ebari. He kicked his mount, towing hers along beside him.
She settled back, adjusting to the ebari’s thumping, loose-jointed gait. If he thought that she, a Lord’s daughter, however disgraced she might be, was going to steal horses for a bunch of chierra bandits . . . well, the joke would be on him. She would never find the nerve to pull it off.
She reached out for the silsha’s mind, but either it was far out of her range or it had shut her out in some way. What was it old Yernan, her tutor, had always said to her?
“‘Shut the world out or it will shut you out.’“ She closed her eyes and began to block out the distracting information that her senses provided. First, sight, of course. Then she closed off her awareness of the forest noises and the voices as the raiders discussed their strategy for Dorbin. Then she blocked out the ebari plodding beneath her, the ever-present twinge in her stiff shoulder, the hard curve of the saddle.
Still unable to center, she paused, wondering what she had forgotten. Then it came to her—the smells. She shut out the sweaty musk of the ebari, the damp scent of green things underfoot, and the faint acridness of perspiration.
Then she floated without distractions in the center of her own thoughts, trying to see if the silsha followed. Gradually she became aware of a line, some sort of tie that led from her mind to—somewhere else.
It was not of her making. She had never seen anything like it. Following the line through the gray otherness, she tried to see where it led. Just when she was beginning to get a glimmering of the source, she felt herself falling.
“Mother above!” Cale’s voice exclaimed.
She hit the ground with a head-bouncing thud.
Cale leaped down and pulled her up into a sitting position. “If you aren’t the most accident-prone youngster I ever seen!” he grumbled. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you sleeping were meant for beds?”
She blinked, trying to see through the spots dancing in front of her eyes. The back of her head throbbed with an insistent ferocity. She closed her eyes and checked for the invisible tie; now that she knew where to look, it was easy.
It was still there.
* * *
Pulling the roug
h gray cloak closer around his face, Jarid congratulated himself on the effectiveness of his disguise. The old chierra still making his way up the road to the rocky cliffs of Dorbin would only remember that a youthful thief had pushed him down and torn it from his hands.
The fact he had willingly handed it to a Kashi lord had been blocked in his mind forever.
Jarid smiled. He could almost relish staying among these simple, unresisting minds where a Talented man could take anything he wanted. It was quite unlike the Highlands, where he’d had to fight for everything he wanted, then fight even harder to keep it.
For the first time he understood why many of the lesser Houses had moved down to the lower elevations. Even a relatively unTalented Kashi could live like the highest Lord among these five-fingered animals.
He stepped up to the stone-block gatehouse before the town wall of Dorbin, projecting an image of brown chierra eyes. The heavy-browed guard gave him a surly look. “What be your business in Dorbintown?”
Jarid held out the copper. “I’ve come for the fair.”
“You carrying any iron or other metal goods?”
Jarid stiffened as the man pulled his cloak aside to check his belt. Brown hair and brown eyes, he projected strongly at the guard. You see only brown hair and brown eyes!
The guard blinked, then rubbed his whiskery chin. “No iron,” he said. “One copper.”
Jarid flipped the coin at him and pulled the hood tight around his head again before he entered the town. Puzzled, he put his hand on the shoulder of a solitary man standing in front of a disreputable looking tavern. “Why is no iron brought into Dorbin?” he asked, laying a compulsion on the half-drunk man to answer.
The man’s bloodshot eyes blinked mistily at him. “Dorbintown be famous for its iron, friend!” He patted Jarid’s shoulder. We don’t allow no shoddy outside metals to be sold at our fair!”
Jarid released him and watched the man maneuver unsteadily down the unpaved street. No outside metal. He fingered the cold blade of his dagger underneath the cloak.
Then it should be all the more exciting and puzzling for this dull, provincial town when a certain pale-skinned young girl was found here with a contraband dagger buried up to the hilt in her Kashi back.
HAEMAS’S head still ached from her fall when they rode out of the forest’s leafy silence into the soft gray light of dusk. Jagged limestone cliffs rose in an unbroken wall on the other side of a reed-choked river. She smelled the dankness of mud and wet stone.
Cale reined his ebari in and indicated the cliffs with his chin. “Dorbin lies above on the other side.”
She rubbed fretfully at her throbbing forehead and squinted; she could just make out a single squat tower in the distance, but the effort made her head hurt even more. Closing her eyes, she sagged back in the saddle. They had been riding all day. All she wanted was a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” A rough hand shook her arm. “Don’t you go sleeping on that ebari again!”
Haemas cracked her eyes open.
Eevlina’s grizzled face stared back. “I’ve got big plans for you, whelp, and you’d better come through.” The old woman whacked the girl’s ebari across the hindquarters with her stick. Haemas grabbed for the creature’s long neck as it leaped forward, nearly jerking its reins from Cale’s hand. He cursed, then rode back under the trees, towing her mount after him.
“We’ll camp here tonight.” He swung a leg over and dismounted, then tied his ebari to a tree. “We’ll hit Dorbintown tomorrow.”
Haemas pulled one foot from the stirrup, then slid down the beast’s warm hairy side and stood there, clinging to the saddle, trying to make her knees lock.
“How about calling us up a nice juicy tree barret for dinner?” Eevlina’s voice bellowed in her ear.
Talk to something and then eat it? Nauseated, Haemas blinked at the old woman’s beak-like nose for a long moment, then let go of the saddle. Her knees buckled and Cale caught her arm.
“I told you we should have rested.” he said to Eevlina, as he steered the girl away from the ebari’s milling feet and eased her to the ground. “She’s not made of iron, you know.”
Haemas pressed her fingertips against her aching temples. She wasn’t cut out for this. What point was there to a life that existed only to roam the Lowlands and steal? She had to get away from these people.
Cale’s footsteps walked away. “Gran,” he said after a moment. “Brew up some of that assafra root what’s good for headaches and the like.”
“For her ladyship over there, I suppose?” Eevlina’s voice was caustic.
“Only if you want her fit to get you a few horses tomorrow.” Cale paused. “Shame to come all this way and get nothing, though. I hear there’s always some fine stock at Dorbin Fair.”
“One piddling fall on the head and the whelp’s half-dead,” Eevlina fussed. “Them lords and ladies must be an all-fired puny lot!”
Haemas heard the sound of wood being broken for a fire, then, a short time later, the crackle of flames. She hunched against the scratchy tree bark, shivering in the cooling air and longing for the silsha’s companionable warmth.
She would have liked to see if it was anywhere near, but her head ached too much to even think about trying to find it. Every time she tried to concentrate, the throbbing intensified until she could hardly see . . .
She must have dozed off, for the next thing she knew, Eevlina was pressing a wooden cup of hot liquid into her hands.
“Drink this,” the old woman ordered harshly, then surprised Haemas by laying a work-roughened hand across her forehead. “No fever, at any rate.”
Haemas sniffed at the cup and wrinkled her nose at the acrid-smelling dark liquid.
“You drink that, you little wretch, or I’ll skin your scrawny, pasty-skinned body myself!” Eevlina’s gray eyebrows knit together, marking a fierce line across her ravaged face.
Haemas gulped hastily, trying to swallow the foul smelling stuff quickly so she wouldn’t have to taste it. Just about the time the first swallow hit bottom, though, her throat began to burn and she started to cough.
“Don’t suppose I made it a mite too strong, do you?” Eevlina wiped her callused hands on her skirt and stood up, smiling craftily. “I must be getting old.”
Cale gave the old woman a dark look as he thumped Haemas’s back. “That’ll be the day.”
When she could breathe again, Haemas wiped at the tears on her cheeks. “My head does feel a little better.”
“Course it do,” he said stiffly, taking the cup back. ”Nobody in these parts knows herbs better than Eevlina.” He tossed a tattered blanket at her. “Shut up and get some sleep.”
Hugging the worn material to her chest, Haemas pillowed her head on her good arm and curled up next to the tree. Lying very still, she could hear the trickling of water as the river swirled against the gray cliffs.
* * *
She awoke with a start, a cold shiver running through her that had nothing to do with the mild spring night. She had been dreaming, but for a moment she could not remember of what, and then she knew: Jarid.
But it had been so strange, not really like a dream at all. He had seemed to squat next to her as she slept, whispering threats in her ear while she lay powerless to wake.
Hugging the ragged blanket around her shoulders, she stood up and nervously surveyed their meager camp. In the scant moonlight filtering down through the trees, she could just see Cale sleeping a few feet away from her, his dark-haired head turned away. Eevlina and the rest were only featureless lumps rolled up in their blankets closer to the waning fire. Overhead, the treetops rustled in the night breeze.
“Here, what do you think you’re up to?”
The fierce whisper startled her, and she whirled around. Holnar’s bearded old face emerged from the shadows.
“I . . . thought someone was here,” she said, “in the camp.”
“Likely story.” He spit into the dirt, narrowly missing her foot. “You just thought you’d get out before the rest of us and keep all them horses for yourself!”
Haemas stared at the one-handed old man.
“Go back to sleep.” He shoved her elbow irritably. “Go on or I’ll wake Eevlina and then you’ll really be sorry!”
They would all be sorry if that happened, she thought, but she lay back down, this time beside Cale, and closed her eyes. As she drifted back to sleep, though, a nagging thread of fear insisted that somehow her cousin with the bright-gilt hair had really been there.
* * *
So close! Jarid cupped his hands around the clumsily-made white mug and let the warmth of the dark tea seep through into his hands. A crooked smile played across his lean face, but no one in the inn’s common room paid him any heed. He permitted this bunch of cattle to see only a shabby stranger with dark hair and dark eyes, just like everyone in this Light-forsaken town.
The bedraggled little beggar should be arriving tomorrow, however, according to the plans he had lifted from her sleeping mind. Then he would finish this miserable business so he could return to the Highlands and take up his rightful place as Lord of Tal’ayn.
He chuckled to himself and shook his head. Imagine his skivit of a cousin taking up with a bunch of chierra thieves, of all people! Uncle Dervlin should be turning over in his grave right about now.
That is, if the evil-tempered old man had finally had the sense to die and leave them all in peace.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the peddler walk through the inn’s front door and sit down at a long table littered with crockery and tankards.
“Cittar!” The innkeeper, a tall bony widow, broke into a broad smile as she wiped her hands on her apron. “What brings you here this time of year?”
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