01 - The Compass Rose

by Gail Dayton

  “Keys, love.” Torchay turned her to face the table and pointed past her. “Fetch me the keys, Kallista, and we’ll go find the others, make sure they’re all right.”

  “Yes. Keys.” Holding her intention firmly in her mind, Kallista swayed back to the table and picked up the keys. She picked up a dagger as well. “You’ll loan me a blade, won’t you, Torchay? I need one. They took mine away.” She frowned as she crossed the space back to him. “I had one. I took it from that woman, but I don’t know where it went.”

  “Of course, love. As many blades as you like.” He took the keys and reached through the bars to unlock the door while Kallista turned back for another dagger.

  Torchay joined her, replacing as many of his blades as he could in the instant he allowed. “Come along now, love. We’ve got to be getting out of here. That one’s superior will be along again before long.” He took her elbow and steered her down the corridor, a naked sword in his other hand, hurrying her faster than her feet would move.

  “I feel fuzzy, Torchay. My feet are all stupid. And my head. It feels stupid too.” Kallista frowned, stumbling after him. “I wasn’t this stupid when I stopped that woman from hurting our baby.”

  “I imagine the drugs are still taking hold.” He paused to peer around a corner and ducked back quickly.

  “Kallista, listen to me, love.” He caught her face in his hand and turned it up so his open eye blazed blue into hers. Why was he calling her ‘love’? He was doing it a lot. “Kallista, you must do what I say, do you understand me? You have to look after the baby, and let me look after you. Don’t go charging into a fight while you’re…fuzzy. Will you promise me that?”

  “Your poor eye.” She laid her hand gently against his cheek. “Your beautiful face.”

  “Promise me, Kallista.” He hissed the words out with a desperation that got through the haze in her mind.

  Promise…? Oh yes. She nodded. “I won’t fight unless I have to. Promise.”

  Torchay slid her hand from his cheek to his mouth where he pressed a kiss to her palm. “I love you,” he said. Then he drew his second sword. “Stay behind me, but don’t get too close.”

  He seemed to be listening to something. Kallista dragged a few more fragments of her mind out of the fog to listen and heard footsteps, the rattle of weapons. They grew closer, and closer yet. Torchay stepped away from the wall and spun around the corner.

  It took Kallista several precious seconds to gather herself and follow. Torchay fought, one against four, his blades flashing too fast for her fuzzed mind to follow. Only two of the enemy could attack at once in the narrow confines of the hallway. Torchay drove them back a step at a time, but Kallista could see that the beating he’d suffered was taking its toll.

  “Go back,” one of the rear guard turned the other about. “We’ll loop around the cell block and come at them from the back.”

  “The witch—” The other man hesitated.

  “She’s been neutralized. She can’t work her magic.”

  Couldn’t she? Her men were cut off from her but—

  The rear pair of guards fell back, then turned to run. Torchay laughed, attacking harder, but it wasn’t a good thing. He didn’t speak Tibran, didn’t know what they said. She had to warn him, had to help. She’d promised—but that was about fighting. Could she call—

  Kallista lifted a bare hand, willing a spark to light. She couldn’t reach her men or their magic, but the lightning belonged to her alone. She fought nausea that threatened to double her over, fought pain that near blinded her, but lightning danced from her fingertips. “Torchay, down!”

  He ducked, and she let fly at the men he fought. One of them dropped. The other screamed in terror, then attacked all the more ferociously. Footsteps, more guards coming. Kallista battled through the pain to call her lightning again.

  Torchay dispatched the man he fought, put away a sword and grabbed her arm, ignoring the blue flare coating her hand. He dragged her down the hall, almost reaching the next turn before the guard’s reinforcements arrived. He let go and drew his second blade again, pushing her back a pace before he flew at these new opponents.

  Kallista looked behind them, trying to force words from her numbed lips, to warn Torchay of the men circling around, but she had no time. She gathered up the spark she still held and threw it lashing down the hallway. The men staggered, screamed with fear, but came on. Once more she reached and through the pain, past the lightning, she brushed against a faint sense of Fox.

  Joy bubbled up, pushed aside the fog for a split second, long enough for her to touch Obed and Stone before the agony broke them apart again. “They’re coming,” she cried. “Our ilian.” And she sent the lightning against the oncoming warriors once more.

  Torchay had no breath to answer. Moments later, Obed and Fox came pelting around the corner, taking down two of the guards as they struck. Torchay spun, elbowing Kallista behind him. She screamed as he took a blow meant for her, the Tibran’s sword stabbing deep into Torchay’s center.

  Obed pushed past her, throwing himself into a long lunge that sent his sword slashing through the Tibran. He caught Torchay as he fell. “We must be gone before any more come.”

  “Yes, gone.” Kallista scrabbled Torchay’s swords up from the blood-soaked floor and let Fox lift her to her feet. He bent as if he meant to throw her over his shoulder. She stopped him. “No. Might hurt the baby.”

  Fox froze. Obed, already around the corner with Torchay, called back, “Hurry!”

  Seizing her by the elbow, Fox propelled her after them. They picked up Aisse at the entrance to the prison, a dead warrior propped there at his post. Stone waited at the gate in the outer wall, another dead guard in the hut behind him. Her iliasti seemed to be littering the ground with dead warriors.

  As they rushed through the night-shrouded city, Kallista never quite lost consciousness. She could smell the blood saturating Torchay’s clothing, staining Obed’s. She heard the clatter of warriors rushing from barracks to City Center. She felt the soft whuff of horses’ breath on her hands as they reached the place where the animals had been hidden.

  “Up.” Fox threw Kallista into the saddle and mounted behind her. “Up the cliff. I know a place, long deserted. They won’t expect us to go deeper into Tibre.”

  Obed held Torchay in the saddle before him. “Do we go on, Chosen One? Or back?”

  “On.” The fog in her mind seemed to be dissipating, the links with her marked ones solidifying now they were close again. And she knew, perhaps as Fox knew his surroundings, that if they turned back to Haav, there would be disaster. “Up,” she said. “To the place Fox knows.”

  “I know it,” Stone said. “I remember it now. I can lead.”

  “Then go.” Obed urged his mount forward. “This one needs rest.”

  And healing. Please, Goddess, he still needed healing.

  The ride seemed endless. Night hid the trail in shadow, slowing their pace until Kallista wanted to scream with fear and frustration. Every second bled another drop of Torchay’s life away. The horses stumbled again and again on the steep path, their shod hooves ringing against the stones so loud she feared they could be heard clear to Haav. Cliffs still loomed above when Stone turned off the main path and seconds later vanished from sight.

  Fox followed behind the animals Stone led and Kallista realized they were riding along a narrow canyon choked with brush and vines. The horses splashed through a tiny stream trickling along the canyon floor. A few moments more and the canyon walls faded back, opening into a tiny meadow ringed with tall firs and birch. An abandoned way house stood beside a pool, the source of the canyon’s stream, fed by another trickle of water split off from the main flow of the Silixus.

  The way house possessed only half a roof, the walls beginning to crumble where the roof was missing. But some shelter was better than none. Stone dismounted in front of the building and hurried to take Obed’s burden. Torchay’s head lolling on his shoulders terrified Kallista.
She didn’t wait for anyone to help her down, throwing herself from the horse into Fox’s arms ready to catch her.

  This was her vision. Torchay lying there beneath the broken roof, hands over his stomach, bleeding into the floor on the edge of death.

  “No,” she whispered, falling to her knees beside him.

  “He’s our medic,” Stone said. “Does anyone else know what to do?”

  Kallista called magic, ignoring the lingering pain and nausea. She placed her hands over his wound and tried to see inside him as she had seen when her mother healed Fox. But she was linked to Fox. She had no link with Torchay. The magic curled in on itself in distress because it didn’t know how to do what she wanted.

  “Naitan.” Aisse spoke at her elbow. “What can we do?”

  “Water. Get me water and start a fire.” Kallista drew one of Torchay’s wrist blades and cut his tunic open.

  Already this reality was different from the vision. He lay on one of the white foreigner’s robes, not mounded-up canvas. Kallista had reached him first, not Aisse. And he had no blood bubbling from his mouth.

  It still welled from his wound, a slow seeping that gave her hope and frightened her to her soul both at once. The wound was small but deep. Kallista turned him to the side and peered at his back. It didn’t go through.

  Obed set a skin of water beside her. Beyond him, Stone was laying a fire, Fox holding flint and steel ready to strike sparks. Kallista tore the cloth from her hair and wet it. She needed to wash away the blood, stop it, mend what was torn inside him, but how?

  Beside her, Aisse was whispering, praying to the merciful face of the One. Kallista could feel her rocking as she prayed, her arm brushing hers. She almost sent her away, but the others were doing all that was needed. Prayer would likely do more than Kallista could at this point.

  Desperate, Kallista pressed her hands over Torchay’s wound again with her own prayer, begging for help. Aisse cried out as magic poured into Kallista.

  She could see. Exactly where the sword had penetrated, what damage it had done, what she must do to repair it. She reached, pulling magic from the men, and spilled it into Torchay. She pushed together torn edges and sealed them, fused blood vessels, sent the blood back into them. She worked furiously, fighting off the death she could feel lurking, waiting for him.

  She caught hold of the faint, echoing link she had with Torchay, created at their first wedding and reinforced at the later ones. It was only a shadow of the links she had with the other men, but it existed. With it, she hauled Torchay back into his body and bound him there with ties of love.

  Torchay’s eyelids fluttered and opened. Kallista caught back a sob.

  “K’lista?” he mumbled through barely moving lips. “What’s wrong?”

  She lifted her bloodstained hands from his wound and saw the raw red of a healing scar. She hurled herself at him. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” She held him tight, her tears soaking his shoulder.

  For a moment, he held tight to her. Then his hand slipped between them to probe his stomach. “Wasn’t I gutted again?”

  “Not quite.” Kallista swiped at her face, pulling back to let him look. “But nearly.”

  He stared at the closed wound, then up at Kallista, eyes wide with wonder. “You did this?”

  Not even her mother could do this much, not all at once. Irysta could have stopped the bleeding, kept him alive, and day by day, bit by bit, encouraged the healing to take place. Reality penetrated.

  Kallista counted four links inside her, four conduits for magic. She turned and stared at Aisse. “I had help. From our godmarked iliasti. Including Aisse.”

  “I? But—” Aisse touched the back of her neck. “There was no—nothing happened, like with the men.”

  Stone tipped her head forward, turned her toward the firelight. “She’s marked, all right.”

  “But it was quiet,” Aisse protested again. “Nothing happened.”

  “It doesn’t have to be splashy or spectacular,” Kallista said, fingers combing through Torchay’s hair. He nestled into her, his head propped against her thigh. “You’re already ilias, already bound. When you accepted the mark, the link was already there. You won’t have to worry about moving too far away from me or any of the rest of it.”

  “Now I’m the only one of us not marked.” Torchay didn’t move from his spot against Kallista.

  “Be glad.” She smoothed his hair back off his high forehead and was caught by a yawn.

  “Rest.” Obed stood. “It will be dawn soon. Can we hide here through the day?” He addressed Stone and Fox.

  “No one followed us from the city,” Fox said in that quiet, knowing way he had.

  “I’ll go back to the road,” Stone said. “Make sure there are no tracks showing where we turned off. The pack trains don’t use the way house. It’s from before the stone roads were built, so we should be left alone here.”

  “Perhaps I can veil the entrance,” Kallista offered. “To discourage the curious.”

  “You can do that?” Torchay tipped his head back to look at her.

  “That’s why I said ‘perhaps.’” Kallista smiled down at him.

  They stayed staring at each other a long, long moment. The way they stared, the look on their faces—the same look on both—made Aisse feel all peculiar inside. An odd little ache that didn’t hurt floated somewhere between her chest and stomach.

  Obed made a strange sound in the back of his throat and turned to walk out. “I’ll get the horses settled.”

  “I’d better get back down the canyon.” Stone stood.

  “Wait.” Fox touched Obed’s knee, stopping his exit. “At the prison, Kallista said something. I want to know what you meant.”

  Kallista frowned. “I’m sure I said a great many things that made no sense at all. It was only when Aisse was marked that the drugs finally left me. What particular saying of mine are you asking about?”

  Aisse backed up. She was too close to Kallista and Torchay and that look between them. Fox drew her away from the fire she almost fell into, toward him.

  “You didn’t want me carrying you,” he said, “because it might hurt…the baby?”

  Kallista looked away, at Torchay again. He smiled and rose onto an elbow, setting his hand on her stomach, his eyes locked on hers. It made Aisse’s stomach hurt.

  “Aye.” He turned to look at the rest of them, the glow of happiness so bright in his eyes that it made Aisse ache more. “We’re going to be parents. All of us.”

  “And he’s already scolded me for coming here,” Kallista said. “So I don’t need any more from the rest of you. We just need to finish what we came for and get back home so this baby can be born in Adara.”

  Obed cleared his throat. “Who is the child’s father?” His hands made fists over and over, but Aisse didn’t need to see that to sense the tension twisting inside him.

  “We all are,” Torchay said. “All of us, as Aisse will be second mother.”

  “No, that’s not—”

  Kallista cut Obed off, but gently. “If you ask about blood ties, Stone sired my child. Or Torchay. One of them. When it’s born, the bloodline will be read and we will know. But truly, Obed, it’s as he said. You’re all fathers now.”

  For a second longer, Obed stood motionless. Then he whirled and vanished out the door. Stone caught Kallista’s glance. Aisse could understand their conversation though no word was spoken. Kallista asked Stone to watch over Obed, and Stone agreed. He ducked from the ancient shelter.

  Aisse looked back at Kallista. Torchay had his hand curved over the mound of Kallista’s child, smiling up at her as they conversed in low tones. It hurt her to look at them. Not just because of the baby.

  Yes, that brought back sorrow, but it was an old pain. Aisse would be mother as well. Second mother was better than nothing at all. It wasn’t Kallista’s baby that made Aisse’s eyes burn. It was that look.

  She wanted someone to look at her that way. She didn’t want Torchay to st
op looking at Kallista. She already knew that would never happen. She just wanted him—or someone—to look at her.

  “I’ll get the packs.” Aisse stood, turning her back on the…the new parents. That was a word the Tibran language didn’t have. “We’ll want our blankets. And food.”

  “I’ll help.” Fox followed her outside.

  Obed had stacked the packs near the building’s door and staked the animals on long lines near the pool where they could graze. He was there, brushing them down. Stone was nowhere to be seen, down the narrow canyon, Aisse assumed. She stood beside the packs and stretched, looking up at the stars, in no hurry to go back inside. Fox lounged against the wall behind her, she saw when she turned.

  “Was it hard for you to stay in there too?” Aisse rubbed her arms, bare without the foreigner’s robe and chilled in the crisp fall night air. Her body buzzed with strange feelings. Was this what the men were always talking about, when Kallista pulled magic? “The way he looks at her, it’s…I couldn’t stay.”

  Fox shrugged. “I can’t see it.”

  Oh. Right. Sometimes she forgot that. Aisse frowned at him. “Then, why did you—”

  “To help you. With the packs. Or whatever you need.” He paused and his hand rose toward her face, hovering scant inches away. “Are you looking at me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” It was obvious he wanted to touch her. Why didn’t he?

  “Because I don’t understand you. I want to. Why are you here, with me? What do you want?”

  His hand fell, his head jerked back and bumped the wall. “Nothing. To help.” Fox turned his face away. “I’ll get the packs.”

  Had she—had she hurt him without touching him? The way Kallista hurt Torchay sometimes? And Obed? She hadn’t meant to. “Wait.”

  Aisse put out her hand, touched Fox’s shoulder as he bent. Before tonight, she had never touched any of the men, except for Torchay, or in combat practice. Fox went still, still as his namesake hiding from hunters.

  “Don’t go.” She curved her hand lightly over the point of his shoulder before pulling it back. “Talk to me, Fox. I want to understand. I—did you follow me out?”