I frowned. Stepped back. Chewed a lip as I considered.
I felt—odd. I had never before seen her as anyone but herself: pale-haired, blue-eyed Delilah, shaped by a cooler sun. She had been Northern from the outset, indisputably foreign, and all the more striking for the difference. But now she was, in color, more Southron than anything else; now looking much like other women, Del lost much of the distinctiveness that attracted every male eye. She was still strikingly beautiful, but in a much different way. In an oddly familiar way, since coloring as much as bone and flesh affects a woman’s appearance.
Comparing the old Del to the new one underscored how men felt when the familiar became something else. Something more tantalizing.
Was this how Umir felt? Attracted to differences?
She was still remarkably beautiful. Skin stain and hair dye could not erase the clarity of her features, the flawlessness of the bones, nor the subtle self-awareness and elegant physical power that set her apart from others.
The dye was very bad. The skin stain muddy. But underneath the dulled exterior lay the gleam of glorious steel.
“Why?” I asked.
She lifted her chin. “I am a Southron woman—a Borderer woman—being escorted to Julah by a hired sword.”
I squinted a little. “Why?”
“Because no one is looking for that; why do you think?”
“Oh, and am I supposed to dye my hair, too?”
She shrugged. “You don’t have to. It’s me who stands out.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “Didn’t we discuss the fact I’m not exactly unknown in these parts? That there are certain physical differences that also set me apart?”
“They will ask for you, of course… but they will also ask for a fair-haired Northern bascha who carries—and uses—a sword.” Del didn’t smile. “Not a proper Borderer woman who buys a sword-dancer for protection, instead of wielding a jivatma.”
“And you think that will throw them off.”
“Either that, or we must split up.”
“No.” I didn’t even waste a moment considering it. “It’s true they’ll ask for the Northern bascha… this might confuse them a little. But only a very little.”
“If it earns us the freedom to reach Julah without being molested—and wherever else we must go—it will have served its purpose.”
I smiled faintly, still assessing a black-haired, dark-skinned Del. “Is this your way of testing my—interest?”
“No,” she answered dryly. “As interested as you are—and as often—I think I could be bald.”
I grunted disagreement. “Bald women don’t excite me.”
Del was speculative. “You could shave your head.”
Aghast: “What for?”
“To see if bald men excite me.”
“Close your eyes,” I suggested firmly. “And then you can just pretend.”
Del’s smile was still Del’s smile, in spite of dye and stain.
So was my response.
Thirty-five
I was cold, cold as ice… cold as stone in Northern mountains wracked by a Northern wind. The air was sharp as a knife, bathing bare flesh in rippling pimples of protest. I shivered, wrapped myself more tightly in the threadbare coverlet—
—and realized I was awake, in the South, and sweating because of the warmth.
I threw back the coverlet, cursing sleepily, and realized the bed was empty of Del.
I cracked eyelids and saw her across the room, sitting against the wall opposite the bed. Just—sitting. And staring at her naked sword, which she held before her face in a level, horizontal bar.
It was an unusual posture, particularly for someone sitting in an otherwise relaxed position. She wasn’t singing for one of her little rituals. Wasn’t honing the steel. Just staring. From my angle, the sword blade blocked her eyes. I saw a chin, a mouth, a nose, and the upper part of her forehead.
I hitched myself up on one elbow. “What are you doing?”
“Looking at my reflection.” Del lowered the blade to rest across her thighs. One hand touched dyed black hair, now dry and lusterless. Her gaze was fixed and unwavering, centered somewhere other than here. It was an eerie, unfocused expression. The hand fell away from hair, landed slackly on tunicked thighs. “Do you know what I have done?”
Awareness sharpened. “What do you mean? The dye? I thought you said it would wash out.”
Del stared blindly at me. “What I have done,” she murmured. And then slumped against the wall with the sword across her knees. Her face was an odd mixture of realization and relief; weary recognition and a transcendent discovery she clearly was uncertain could bring her any peace. She closed her eyes, shivered once, then laughed softly to herself. Murmuring something in uplander incomprehensible to me.
I sat up, swinging legs over the edge of the bed, planting bare feet on packed dirt. “Del—”
Blue eyes opened and stared back. “It’s done,” she said intently. “Don’t you see?”
“What’s done?”
She laughed out loud. Cut it off. Then laughed again, half choked, splaying both hands against her face in a peculiarly vulnerable, feminine gesture. “Ajani,” she said through her fingers.
I blinked. “That was almost two weeks ago. Are you only just now realizing he’s dead?”
Glazed blue eyes stared fixedly at me over stained fingertips. “Dead,” she echoed. And then tears welled up without warning and Del began to laugh.
Awash with helplessness, I stared warily back at her. That she cried out of something other than sadness was obvious, because it didn’t warp her features with grief. She just laughed, and cried, and eventually cradled a sword against her breasts as a woman does a child.
“Done,” she said huskily, when the laughter died away. “My song is truly ended.”
Tears still stained her face, muddying her efforts at making herself Southron. But at the moment that appeared to be the least of her concerns. “Bascha—”
“I had not allowed myself to think about it,” she said. “Do you see? There was no time. There were people after us—”
“They still are.”
“—and never any time to think—”
“Not much more now; we ought to get moving.”
“—nor any time to consider what I must vanquish now.”
That stopped me. “Vanquish?” Oh, hoolies, what now?
Del smiled sadly. “Me.”
I gazed blankly back at her.
“You asked me so many times, Tiger… and each time I gave you no answer, putting off the consideration for another time.”
“Del—”
“Don’t you see? I have finally come to myself. I know what I have done… but not what I will do.” She smiled crookedly. “You said it would come to this. I chose not to listen.”
It was not, I decided, the proper time to rub it in. Instead, I pointed her to another topic infinitely more important. “At the moment we’re sort of in the middle of something else.”
The diversion didn’t work. “All those years,” she said reflectively. “I gave him all those years, with nothing left for myself.”
I waited, deciding she didn’t need my comments.
“He took from me everything I knew in the space of one morning—kinfolk, lifestyle, virginity. With steel and flesh alike he shredded me inside and out—” She leaned her head into one rigid, splay-fingered hand, knotting dull black hair. “And do you know what I did?”
“Escaped,” I said quietly. “Collected blood-debt for your kinfolk, according to Northern custom.”
Del smiled. Such a sad, despairing smile, cognizant of accomplishment as well as recognition of what the task had required. “More,” she said hollowly. “And I gave it to him willingly, all those years on Staal-Ysta, and the others spent searching for him. I gave it to him—Ajani did not insist. He did not require it.” She leaned her head against the wall, combing black hair with darkened fingers. “I did what most people, even men, m
ight have refused to do, or given up along the way when the doing became too demanding.”
“You honored the oaths you swore.”
“Oaths,” she said wearily, “oaths can warp a soul.”
I gazed steadily back. “But oaths are what we live by. Oaths are food and water when the belly cramps on emptiness and the mouth is dry as bone.”
Del looked at me. “Eloquent,” she murmured. And then, somberly, “We both of us have known too much of that. And allowed our oaths to consume us.”
I sat very still. She spoke of herself, but of more; of me, also, putting faith into oaths meant to get me through the night, or through the day beyond. A chula makes his own future when the truth is too bleak to face.
“It’s over,” I said. “Ajani is dead. And if you waste your breath on regrets—”
“No.” She cut me off. “No, no regrets—that much I do not acknowledge… I have sung my song as I meant to, and the task is at last accomplished. Honor is satisfied…” Briefly, a glorious smile. “But I am only just realizing—now, this moment—that I am truly free at last. Woman or man, I am completely free for the first time since I was born to be whatever I choose, instead of having it chosen for me.”
“No,” I said quietly. “As long as you stay with me while there is a price upon my head, you are free of nothing.”
She sat against the wall holding the sword that had been sweet deliverance as well as harsh taskmaster. And then she smiled, and reached for the harness, and put the sword away. “That choice was made long ago.”
“Was it?”
“Oh, yes. When you came with me to Staal-Ysta. When, in my obsession, I made the man into coin to be bartered to the voca.”
I shrugged. “You had your reasons.”
“Wrong ones,” she said, “as you were at pains to tell me.” She rose, began to gather up pouches and collect scattered gear. “After all you gave to me, in the midst of my personal song, do you think I could leave you?”
“You,” I said clearly, “are eminently capable of doing anything you please.”
Del laughed. “That is the best kind of freedom.”
“And the kind you couldn’t know if you hadn’t killed Ajani.”
She paused. Turned to look at me. “Are you making excuses for me?”
I shrugged negligently. “If I started doing that, I’d have no time for anything else.”
“Hah,” Del retorted. But accepted the bone with grace. She, as well as I, is uncomfortable with truths when they border on the soul.
The problem arose when I suggested it was a good idea if I kept Del’s sword with me.
“Why?” she asked sharply.
“Because you said it yourself: you’re a Borderer woman who’s hired a sword-dancer to escort her to Julah.”
“That doesn’t mean you need to carry my jivatma.”
“It means someone other than you should; who in hoolies else is there?”
We stood outside in the morning sunlight, saddled horses at hand, pouches secured. All that wanted doing was us to mount and ride—only Del wasn’t about to.
“No,” she declared.
I glared. “You don’t trust me.”
“I trust you. I don’t trust your sword.”
“It’s my sword… don’t you think I can control it?”
“No.”
I bit back an expletive, kicked out at a stone, sucked teeth violently as I stared at the ground, the horses, the horizon; at everything but Del. Finally I nodded tightly. “Then you may as well wash out the dye and the stain.”
“Why?”
“Because you toting around that sword will draw all sorts of attention, regardless of your color.”
“I’ll carry it on my horse,” she said. “Here—I’ll wrap it in a blanket, tie it onto the saddle… no one will know what it is.”
I watched her strip a rolled blanket off the mare, spread it on the ground, then place harnessed jivatma in its folds. She tucked ends, rolled up the blanket, tied the bundle onto the back of her saddle.
“Can’t get at it,” I observed.
“You’re supposed to protect me.”
“And when have you ever allowed it?”
Del’s smile was fleeting: white teeth flashed in a muddy face. “Then I guess we’ll both have to learn something new.”
I grunted. “Guess so.” And climbed up onto the stud.
The Punja thinned as we neared the Southron Mountains jutting up beyond Julah. The sand was now pocked with the rib cage of the South’s skeleton, the knobs of a spine all broken and crumbly and dark. Wispy vegetation broke through to wave spindly stems, and spiky, twisted sword-trees began to march against the horizon, interspersed with tigerclaw brush. Even the smell began to change, from the acrid dust-and-sand of the Punja to the bitter tang of vegetation and the metallic taste of porous smokerock, lighter by far than it looked. The colors, too, were different. Instead of the pale, crystalline sands in shades of ivory, saffron and silver, there were deeper, richer hues: umber, sienna, tawny gold, mixed with the raisin-black of crumbly smokerock and the olive-ash of vegetation. It made the world seem cooler, even if it wasn’t.
“So,” Del said, “what do we do once we reach Julah?”
I didn’t answer at once.
She waited, glanced over, lifted brows. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered.
“You—don’t know?” She slowed the mare a pace. “I thought you said we had to go to Julah.”
“We do.”
“But…” She frowned. “Do you have a reason? Or was this arbitrary?”
“It’s where we’re supposed to go.”
“Is Shaka Obre somewhere in Julah?”
“I don’t know.”
She let a long moment go by. “I do not mean to criticize—”
“Yes, you do.”
“—but if we are to go into the dragon’s maw once again, don’t you think there should be a purpose?”
“There is a purpose.” I slapped at a bothersome fly trying to feast upon the stud’s neck. “The purpose is to find Shaka Obre.”
“But you don’t know—”
“I will.” Definitively.
“How do you know you’ll know?”
“I just will.”
“Tiger—”
“Don’t ask why, Del. I don’t have an answer. I—just know this is what we have to do.”
“In spite of the danger.”
“Maybe because of the danger; how should I know?”
“You don’t think it’s odd that you’ve brought us down here with no certainty of our task?”
“I think everything’s odd, bascha. I think everything we’ve done in the past two years is odd. I don’t even know why we’ve done it, or are still doing it… I just know we have to.” I paused. “I have to.”
She digested that a moment. “Is this all part of the sandcasting the old hustapha did?”
“Partly.” I left it at that.
“What else?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“I might.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just—know.”
“Like you ‘just know’ we should go to Julah.”
I scowled. “You don’t have to.”
Del gritted teeth. “That’s not the point. I’m here, am I not? I just want to know what we may be facing. Is that so bad? Is it not appropriate? I am a sword-dancer, after all—”
“Del, just let it go. I can’t give you the answers you want. All I can say is we’re supposed to go to Julah.”
“And where after that?”
“How in hoolies should I know?”
“Ah,” Del murmured.
Which contented neither of us, but was the best I could do.
Dark, ragged rock, all chewed and twisted and jagged, glittering with ice. Cold air bathed bare flesh; fogged a rune-scribed jivatma; flowed through the narrow throat into the mout
h beyond and wisped away into warmer breath. Not the dragon near Ysaa-den, but an older, smaller place, all twisted and curdled and fissured: dark hollowness rimed with frost—
“Tiger?”
I twitched in the saddle. “What?”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m just thinking. Isn’t that allowed?”
She arched a single blackened brow. “Forgive me my intrusion. But it is nearing sunset, and I thought perhaps we should stop for the night.”
I waved a hand. “Fine.”
Del scrutinized me. “You’ve been awfully quiet the last few hours.”
“I said I was thinking.”
She sighed, aimed the mare in a diagonal line toward a cluster of tigerclaw brush, said nothing more. Disgruntled by my own snappishness and Del’s questions, I followed. Dropped off the stud and began to undo buckles and thongs.
Stopped. Stared blankly at my hands: wide-palmed, scar-pocked hands, showing the wear and tear of slavery as well as sword-dancer calluses. But as I stared the scars faded, the palms grew narrow, the flesh a darker brown. Even the fingers were changed: longer and narrower, with a sinewy elegance.
“Tiger?”
I glanced up. I knew it was Del, but I couldn’t see her. I saw the land instead: a lush, green-swathed land, undulant with hills.
—I will unmake what you have made, to show you that I can—
“Tiger.” Del snagged the mare’s reins into tigerclaw brush and took a step toward me. “Are you all right?”
—I will destroy its lush fertility and render it into hoolies, just to prove I CAN—
Del’s hand was on my arm. “Ti—”
—I will change the grass to sand—
I twitched at her touch, then shuddered. Stepped away, shaking my head, and rubbed at the place she had touched me. My hands were my own again, with no trace of what I’d seen.
No trace of what I’d heard.
Del’s blue eyes, in a dark face, were avidly compelling. “Where do we go?” she asked. “Where is Shaka Obre?”
Without thought, I pointed.
She turned. Stared. Glanced back at me, measuring my mood. “You’re sure?”
“Yes—no.” I frowned. Slowly lowered my hand. “When you asked, I knew. But now—” I shook my head to shed disorientation. “It’s gone. I have no idea what I meant.”
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