The Lady

by K V Johansen

  Run, he said, and went over Mikki’s back as the bear snatched the sword. The dog was faster, and making for the devil, weaving through courtyards and over ruined garden walls, up the mountain of rubble.

  She swung to face him, arms raised, and lightning washed over him, but he flung it aside as if he’d raised an arm. Maybe he had no body, maybe he was light, smoke, the fire of another world, and maybe she was a column of light and liquid flame, but she smelt like an ill and unwashed woman. His teeth met in her shoulder and as he struck he flipped and threw her.

  She landed on her feet with a sword in her hand, came down on him silent, teeth bared in pain or ecstasy, and then she was beside him, where she had not been, and he had not seen her move. Her sword was real enough and so was the slash in his flank. He rolled away and came up on two feet, sabre in hand, circling, drawing her so her back was to the Dome of the Well. He could hold her off longer so, maybe. Maybe. If she would be drawn to fight sword to sword and play him a little while, before she struck to kill.

  CHAPTER XXV

  They rode only a couple of miles from the dinaz before Ghu called a halt. Ahjvar was falling asleep and jerking awake with coughing. Deyandara couldn’t understand why she wasn’t in as bad a state, or worse, but the time when the air seemed to freeze her lungs slipped like water through her mind, past and away, nightmare memory, no more. She eyed the pale dog, running ahead. A demon, maybe? It seemed to belong to Ghu. And Catairanach had called him a spirit, not a man. He seemed like a man when he embraced her, all smoke and old stale sweat and horses, needing a bath as badly as the rest of them. And how had she been able to smell him at all? More proof the dog—it had to have been the dog—was something more than what it seemed. Ghu’s face had left a smear of blood on hers. A spirit should be—she didn’t know what. Shaped of air and light, the servant of some god or goddess of the earth, sent—what, out of Nabban to follow a cursed and undying assassin? To rescue, three times and hopefully she would not need rescuing a fourth, an unregarded Praitannec princess? The gods of Nabban should have greater cares.

  But there were halfling gods in the world, the songs said, human children of gods or goddesses, wizards, some of them, or seers, or ordinary men and women who spoke truth and saw more of the shape of things, and grew into wisdom that shared, a little, in their divine parent’s nature. What Hyllau should have been.

  Ghu led them in under the eaves of a walnut grove, a royal woods, it had been. There was a spring there, godless, no more than a trickle, running away between green mints and bulrushes, but he went to it as if he had known it was there. Ahjvar drank with his face in the water, drank as if he had not seen water in a month, and rolled over among the roots with his arm over his face and his sword flung yards away. He said something to Ghu in the true Nabbani she couldn’t follow, and Ghu answered with what seemed reluctance. Something about waking up, she thought. She drank almost as greedily and moved down the channel to the next small pool to wash herself. Ghu came and prodded her shoulder, then took her arm from the sling and cut the immobilizing bandages off. It hurt, but it felt better that way, too.

  “Don’t use it much for a while,” he cautioned.

  “Yes. Ghu—” She couldn’t ask him about the dog. She knew it had breathed into her; she had felt it, felt her lungs eased, but it sounded so strange to say it. Did you know your dog was a demon, or something? “Are you a physician, too?” That sounded like it was a joke, like she was making fun of him, when he’d said he was a slave and a groom.

  He laughed. “No. But I’ve fallen off a lot of horses.”

  “You?”

  “How do you think I learnt not to fall off of horses? Go to sleep, lady. I’ll watch.”

  “You look not as bad as Ahjvar, and that’s all. You should rest, too.”

  “Later.”

  “Wake me up after a little. I can at least keep watch.”

  “You can keep watch. No ‘at least.’ But later. Sleep now. Not,” he added, “too close to Ahjvar.” His eyes grew solemn, tired. Sad. He was years older than her, she thought. Strange. She couldn’t think he was a boy at all now, even when she tried to see under the smoke and the blood and the grey weariness. She nodded and lay down where the ground was dry and the sound of the running water a comfort. The black-and-tan dog, she saw, had gone to lie by Ahjvar, head on its paws, eyes closed but still alert. Guarding, or guarding against.

  The pale dog curled into a ball, tail over its nose, but it opened half an eye to watch her a moment, and shut it again. It looked as though it were winking.

  Deyandara woke with a jerk at noise, the sudden roaring of the wind in the leaves as if a great river rushed by, creak of branches bending, both dogs barking and the horses whinnying. She was on her feet before she was fully awake, the small knife she had stolen in the hall in her hand, for what good it would do. Ahjvar was on his feet, his sword drawn. Ghu stood by a little fire and a pair of steaming pots with a dog to either side, but his arms were folded. He looked skywards. Leaves, twigs, tore and spun. There was cloud lit by streaks of fire, white like lightning, red like blood and glowing coals, pouring down before him. And then a woman, standing legs braced, hands on hips, her hair, long and black, still rising and twisting with the wind.

  “You!” she hissed. “You buried me.”

  “Yes,” said Ghu, and caught Ahjvar as he would have put himself between Ghu and the woman. Wizard. Lin.

  “Lin!” Deyandara said, and then, uncertain. “Your hair—”

  “Yes, yes, really, child, you need to learn to see what matters. You should have said, long ago, ‘You’re not half so old as you look.’ Which would have been more perceptive and less true. And why aren’t you with Marnoch?”

  “You left me. You crept away in the night. Ketsim’s men attacked—” She could hear the tears starting in her voice and shut her lips, furious.

  “I was on my way to Marakand, to find the master of the Red Masks.”

  “The Red Masks,” Ghu said softly, “are free and gone. You gave your word to protect Deyandara.”

  He hardly ever used her name. Ahjvar had shifted off to the side, where he had more room to move. As if he were Ghu’s spearman. Lin hardly seemed to notice him.

  “I would have done so. The Red Masks are—were—the keystone of the Marakander occupation. Without them, do you think any rabble of Grasslanders and city thief-takers could hold a duina of Praitan?” But Lin’s anger seemed to have evaporated with the cloud and died with the wind. She sighed, giving him a long, long look, after which she glanced aside at Ahjvar at last, frowning. Then turned to Deyandara, not with her usual amused, superior smile, but solemn, and put her hands together, bowing.

  “I’m sorry, my lady,” she said. “I judged my duty badly. I’m grateful there were others on hand able to save you from my—impulse.” To Ghu she bowed even lower. “I am not,” she said, “become so wise or so patient as I had thought, it seems.” She looked again at Ahjvar, her frown deepening, and said something to Ghu in Imperial Nabbani.

  Ahjvar made some retort, and Ghu smiled. Lin looked a little abashed and gave Ahjvar a brief bow before walking away, with an again-imperious jerk of her chin at Ghu.

  He followed. What man wouldn’t, Deyandara thought. But he touched Ahjvar’s hand as he passed.

  “I made coffee,” he said. “There’s soup. Eat. My lady, see he does.”

  Ahjvar scowled after them and looked as if he would follow. The dogs did, hackles bristling. But then he sighed and sank down on his heels by the fire. “Deya, what is she?”

  “A wizard,” Deyandara answered. “My tutor. But that—” she pointed vaguely skyward, through the leaves. “You saw? That wasn’t wizardry. Was it?”

  “Stories,” he said. “The emperor’s wizards of Nabban could tame the winds. Maybe. But I’d never heard they turned themselves to smoke and lightning.”

  The coffee was boiling over in froth, and he just sat, head hanging, so Deyandara wrapped the end of her sooty shawl around
the handle of the pot and took it off the fire. The other pot was soup, or at least, what looked like chunks of breadroot, famine food, boiling with some very small joints of meat. Squirrel? Two squirrels? It was cooked, whatever it was, and hot, and since Ghu and Lin were having what looked like an intense conversation away among the trees, she rummaged in his bundle and found not only a very old-looking scroll-case but a carved wooden cup for the coffee, a wooden bowl, and horn spoon. She served out about half the soup and gave it to Ahjvar, who seemed only interested in the coffee, wrapping his hands around it, eyes closed, but he did look less grey after he had drunk it. The burns on his arms and face were already healing. He ate when she told him to, throwing the bones of whatever small beast it had been into the fire, and his hands stopped shaking. He didn’t look at her but at the flames.

  She had to speak. She couldn’t ride on with him, not knowing.

  “Catairanach said . . . but I didn’t believe her. She said—is she mad?”

  “Not mad,” he said slowly. “I don’t think mad. That thing in Marakand is mad. Catairanach is merely obsessed, on one point alone, past reason. And that is the root of evil. I think.” He opened his eyes and looked at her, really looked at her, thoughtful, not annoyed, or disdainful, or seeing her some burden he had to deal with. “I wonder if Hyllau poisoned her, too, fed that all-consuming instinct of a mother for the protection of an infant child, made it grow into that obsession? Catairanach has not acted as a goddess for the whole of her folk since, oh, my grandmother’s day, I think, given the stories I’ve heard. Maybe longer. The hag used to boast she’d been lifetimes in the womb of the goddess, before she ever was born into the world.”

  “Catairanach said you were—she wants you to marry me, and she says you’re my—if it’s true, that’s—wrong.” Deyandara blushed and poked a few sticks into the fire. It was a small fire, mostly old twigs, and they burnt up quickly.

  “I’m your grandfather’s grandfather. Or possibly your great-grandfather’s uncle.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You could do a divination. Draw wands. You’re a wizard, if you’re—him.”

  “What difference would knowing make? Hyllanim was a baby, always about underfoot.” He grinned. “He had an honest wizard for guardian and regent, who did well enough by him. He was as good a king as he could be in a bad time, and his fratricidal children didn’t quite destroy the duina between them.” He was still watching her. “You want to ask? But you know the story of the day of the three kings, little bard.”

  “I’m not a bard.”

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t poison your father.”

  “I’ve poisoned people. I make my living at killing.”

  “You didn’t poison your father.”

  “I was sleeping with my father’s wife,” Ahjvar said. “Before he married her, and after. I had no intention of marrying her myself. I was young and stupid and besotted, but not quite stupid enough for that, even then. It was easier, because she had no intention of marrying me. I wasn’t king yet, you see. So she married my father, who was. And Hyllanim was born, and I doubt even Catairanach knew who his father was. The hag certainly didn’t. I suspect he was mine. The curse, my curse, struck so strongly on his line and his land, when it was half myself I cursed. But that was later. After a couple of years Hyllau was more than a little weary of being wife to an old man who hadn’t quite managed to see through her but who certainly had more wits about him than she liked in a husband and kept her firmly in her place as his pretty young bride, and not the power over the duina she thought she should be. So she decided it was better to be a young widow, and bride of a younger king more easily led by his—more easily ruled in bed. She poisoned the old man one night.

  “I loved my father,” Ahjvar said softly. His voice had grown softer, slower, and the Nabbani words she never noticed, because even in the high king’s hall everyone spoke that way, were dropping out. “And we had done nothing but fight, since Hyllau came to the dinaz. She poisoned him. So I went to kill her. She had been born with far too much of a goddess’s power of will over the world. Most gods have more sense than to let so much of what they are pass to a mortal child. She—we burned. I don’t know if she meant us both to die together, when she saw I had come to kill her, or if she thought, being what she was, she could survive it. In the dawn I was still alive, in the ashes. Catairanach bound Hyllau’s ghost into me, and it kills to keep itself alive. And that is why I have nightmares and why you’re not safe sleeping in the same room with me. You do look like her. Somewhat.”

  He carefully poured the dregs of the coffee into his cup, carefully wrapped both hands around it. They were shaking again. She was glad he had added the “somewhat.” But she couldn’t think what she could say, as he drank the coffee. She wanted to put a hand on him and tell him it was all right, but what was? He flung the grounds hissing on the fire.

  “Deya, do you want to be queen of the duina?”

  “Marnoch and the lords who rode with him named me so. But the goddess won’t bless me, and anyway, you’re—”

  “I’m not fit to be king. I know what I’ve done, the past ninety years, even if Catairanach chose to ignore the irony in her fine speech to Hicca’s folk. Catairlau—is dead. Ahjvar’s no king and would be better hanged. But what do you want?”

  A horse and a dog and songs. That was all she had ever wanted. To be that . . .

  “A singer,” she said slowly. “To make songs, and carry them. To put myself into what I do, to be a bard in truth, to learn, this time. Not to be a child, in—in tempers and haste and spite. I can’t do what Marnoch does, lead men. I know it. I’m just a banner to them. Marnoch made me queen because he thought it was right to do so and he needed to show his command was sanctioned by a queen, to try to unite the lords. Ketsim stole me thinking he could do the same thing by marrying me, placate the goddess and save his folk from the pox. My brother Durandau will use me to rule the Catairnans. Hicca would have killed me to deny me to Durandau and Marnoch both.”

  “Ketsim.” Ahjvar kept to himself so carefully it was a shock, now that the night was past, when he reached and touched her, a finger resting gentle on the back of her hand. “You all right?”

  It took a moment for her to realize what he was asking. She didn’t even blush, only shrugged. “There was a wedding. He was ill with the southern pox, fevered. He just—he talked a while, told me about his other wives. Then he went to sleep.”

  A snort of laughter escaped him. “I wish you better conversation, next time. But Marnoch will talk of dogs and horses and where the deer are moving.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A lord of the Red Hills? Marnoch’s a name in that family; I’ve never heard it used in any other hall. And what else is a lord of the Red Hills going to talk of, but his dogs and his horses and his deer? Some things never change.”

  “I like dogs and horses and deer.”

  “Not a problem then, unless he talks all night.”

  Now she felt her face heating.

  He grinned. “Not a queen, but a bard. Whom shall we make king?”

  “I can’t just—”

  “I can. And you were acknowledged queen, Catairanach notwithstanding. You have a right to stand aside and appoint your own successor. Probably more than I do. I say, we make a king—or a queen—and damn Catairanach.”

  “Marnoch,” she said. It didn’t require thought. A man of the duina. A man the lords, well, most of them, would follow. A person who’d shown himself fit to be a king, by what he’d said and what he’d done.

  “You’ll not be a queen, but a king’s wife?”

  “He’s never said anything. That’s not why . . .” He was teasing, absurdly lighthearted, as if he’d settled something that had weighed him down. She wouldn’t have thought he cared so much. She hadn’t thought she’d shown so much of what she’d hardly known.

  “Ghu!” Ahjvar called. “Come
eat. We need to ride.”

  Ghu was already on his way back, alone, his face expressionless.

  “Where’s the wizard?”

  “Yeh-Lin went back to the dinaz. She took one of the horses.”

  “Why?”

  “Yeh-Lin?” Deyandara turned the name over on her tongue.

  Ghu shook his head when she offered him the soup pot. “I’m not hungry. You two finish it.”

  He stayed with the two remaining horses while they did so, combing out tangled manes and tails with his fingers. Deyandara washed the dishes and packed them up again. Ahjvar just sat, watching Ghu, putting a fresh edge on his thinned and worn sword.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  “What’s wrong with him?” Yeh-Lin demanded, with a tilt of her head at the blond man, and Ghu said curtly, “He speaks good Nabbani.”

  “A very civilized barbarian,” the assassin growled. He looked half dead and willing to fling himself on her at a word from his master regardless. She felt an uneasy reluctance to have to fight him, though damn, but she wanted to fight something. Or maybe scream and stamp her feet and throw rocks at some blameless, pristine pool of water? Yes, that would be about as helpful. Face it, she was in a temper and a sulk, because that—Ghu, and what kind of a name was that for him to use, a slave’s name—had taken her unawares and gotten the better of her. For a little she had been terrified, till she realized he hadn’t meant to seal her down for good; it had been only a matter of careful working, to unshape the forces of will holding her. Which had given her a pretty good idea of just what he was. Not, as she had first thought, a young dragon, ingenuously flinging that selfsame accusation at her. No, she had the shape of him, improbable, impossible though that was. Not that she was going to let that intimidate her.

  She snorted and turned her back, with a jerk of the head, inviting him to follow. He did. And if he hadn’t, she would have looked an utter fool. She took a few long, calming breaths as she walked, stood stretching and breathing, waiting for him, feeling the earth under her feet, an ancient trunk at her back. She leaned against it, arms folded, eyes, for a moment, shut, finding some calm balance again. There was no point to anger and temper. He had gone out of his way not to hurt her. And he had been right to stop her, had perhaps saved her. What could rushing into the mess of Marakand have done? Old comrades, old tensions, old patterns . . . she had chosen to walk away from that. She was not strong enough, she had just proven so by her temper, to resist falling into old reactions, whatever her tree had thought. Deyandara could have died when she so rashly left her, and she had grown fond of the girl.