“Did you realize how well sound carries out of those rooms?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. “I’ve never seen anyone blush like those poor boys.”
“Blame Gard,” Tarn said, trying to look blameless. “I am discreet.”
“Tell someone who might believe you,” she retorted, yawning. “It’s been clear all night. There’s a hint of light in the sky, so you’ve only got an hour or so before we need to be on the road.”
“Go and sleep away those hours,” he told her and took the lamp to pick his way upstairs.
The morning settled coolly around him as he stepped out onto the top of the tower. The air tasted fresh. The moon was full and bright above him, and the first faint hints of light showed to the east, behind the shadows of distant mountains. There were lions on the corners of the rooftops too, but they were less weathered than the ones by the door and still snarled into the four winds. Tarn sat on the parapet between them and watched the dawn steadily spread across the sky.
As the sky brightened, he began to realize how wide Gard’s storm had become. It filled the valleys below them, swirl upon swirl of shadowy sand, broad enough that it blurred into the horizon. Tarn had seen weather elementals harness a storm before, but never on this scale. A storm, once started, created more in its wake, spawning and swallowing smaller flurries. It was the danger of weather magic, and all summoned storms eventually tore themselves apart.
This one, despite its vastness, was still focused on them.
How powerful was Gard? Although his body was still lax and aching from their coming together, Tarn shivered a little, hunching his shoulders against the cold air. He had met elementals turned gods before and disliked them all. Gard might have a temple, but he didn’t have the arrogance of those old gods, who had treated the love and devotion of their many followers as a right rather than a gift. Spirits arose out of nature all the time, and many vanished just as swiftly. Those who learned to take nourishment from the fears and joys of the living things in their locality survived. From Tarn and his kind they had learned that love, most of all, would sustain them and make them strong.
There was a balance to be kept in the world, though. Once an elemental was loved so widely that he saw himself as a god, many forgot that they owed care in return, and grew bloated and rotten on the power. There had been more than one mad god in the Shadow’s retinue of old.
Gard was too young for that, Tarn comforted himself. Gard loved his desert with a reckless, blazing passion. He would not walk down that road to arrogance and sloth. Tarn would not let him.
The sun broke over the horizon, washing the golden stones of the tower with light. The first promise of warmth fell on his face, and he remembered instead that Gard had been worried for him, in among his indignation.
The scuff of feet on the stairs startled him out of that pleasant memory, and he turned to see Esen scrambling out onto the roof. The wind caught her loose hair as she stood up, sending it whirling up behind her head in black ribbons, and she laughed suddenly, putting her hand up to catch it.
Tarn had never seen her laugh freely before, and it lit her face so brightly he could see for a moment why young Zeki had lost his heart. Smiling back, he said, using one of the few bits of Selar he had learned, “Good morning.”
Her face went fierce and solemn at once, and she said, “Tarn, I need—” Then she stopped, pressing her mouth shut, the corners of her lips turning down.
He shouldn’t be surprised that she spoke trade tongue. She was the child of a caravan town, after all. It was just that she had never spoken to him before.
“Esen,” he said, as softly and as gently as he would to a frightened horse, and held out his hand. “Let me help you.”
She still did not speak, but now her eyes narrowed in clear dislike. She swung around, tossing her head, and stalked to the parapet’s edge, wrapping her arm around the neck of one of the stone lions and glowering toward the east.
Carefully, Tarn went over to join her. For a while, he just watched the morning sun glitter on the swirling storm below them, waiting for the tension to seep from her shoulders. With the wind forcing her hair back, she looked as fierce and merciless as the stone lion under her arm. Once the silence became less oppressive, he commented lightly, trying to pull together whole sentences in Selar, “The sun is bright. We are looking toward Tiallat, yes?”
She hunched her shoulders up.
“Did you sleep well?”
She turned her head, and he saw her mouth was set in a sneer. Then, once she saw he was watching, she raised her fist to her mouth, pressed her tongue into the side of her cheek and made an unmistakably lewd gesture. Her eyes were hard and her brows tight with disgust.
It shocked Tarn into taking a step backward. The gesture was all malice and pure ugliness on her young, tired face.
She drew breath sharply, her hands curling into claws, but before she could speak, Raif’s voice sounded from behind them, calm and steady. “Breakfast is ready. Is everything all right?”
Shaken by the hatred in Esen’s eyes, Tarn didn’t answer, but she spoke, something low, sly, and nasty.
“Esen!” Raif snapped and then continued in Selar with a clear, sharp reprimand.
She turned and fled, pushing past Raif to hurl down the stairs.
Tarn caught Raif’s arm, steadying him. “I’m sorry. I must have upset her.”
“She is the one who should be apologizing,” Raif said. “Her words were dishonorable.”
“I could not understand them,” Tarn said, “and she is hurt and frightened. It does not matter.”
Raif’s frown slipped into guilt. He was a handsome man, with a long narrow face and dark eyes rimmed with long lashes, but his mouth was too unused to smiles, and there were already lines on his forehead, though he could barely be twenty. “I had forgotten. Poor child. She has always been very cosseted, you must realize. She is not hard enough to survive what she has faced.”
“Who is?” Tarn asked. “Circumstances make us hard.” Then, because he had assumed they were all strangers, he asked, “You’ve known her long?”
“Since we were children,” Raif said. “Though it must be four years since we were last in Istel.” He smiled suddenly, half his mouth quirking up wryly. “Zeki was still young enough to think all girls a nuisance to be endured, and she plagued him for it.”
“Times change,” Tarn said and relaxed enough to chuckle. He eyed Raif sideways and wondered if he could get some answers to the questions that still plagued him. “You knew her father.”
Raif sobered again. “He was a good man, Enis. He had the kindest, most open heart of any man I knew.” He cleared his throat a little. “You do know that Alagard takes human lovers, from time to time?”
From the very careful way he said it, not quite meeting Tarn’s gaze, it was obvious he had hoped to be one of them. Well, his chance had passed, and Tarn was more interested in history. “Enis was one such, I know. When?”
“Before Esen was born. Her mother died five years ago. Gard always stays friends with the families, for generations sometimes, and he made sure they had a safe place to live. They weren’t lovers again, as far as I know. The moment had passed, but their home was always open to him, and he played his part in raising Esen.”
“All she has left,” Tarn said. Gard’s people were too scattered. The Shadow had left orphans among his hoard too, but there had always been homes open to them. He missed that, the way they had all lived together, falling over each other with loud good humor. He wanted everyone he cherished to stay close under his wing.
“We must all face adversity so that we may grow strong,” Raif said, looking out over the mountains again. “The Dark God alone chooses whether to send it to us in small pieces or in great storms. He knows best what each of us can endure.”
“The Dark God?” He’d never met a deity he liked who used so grandiose a name.
“We believe that the True God has two faces, dark and bright, so evil may never escape
his gaze. There is a balance in all things.”
“And where does the Shadow fit in this?”
“Evil has two sides too. It can come as seduction, gold, and conquest, or by night, as hatred, wrath, and murder.”
“The Shadow uses all of those,” Tarn said sadly, remembering past betrayals, “but only for the sake of destruction.”
“Then we must drive it out of my country,” Raif said and stepped back toward the stairs. “Which we cannot do if we linger here and talk.”
Tarn laughed and followed him. Halfway down the stairs, they met Gard, who scowled at Tarn.
“I didn’t mean to upset her,” Tarn said immediately.
“You never do,” Gard retorted, then shrugged. “I made her cross first, chasing her away.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Have you any idea how awkward it is trying to scrub dried spend off yourself when you have an angry teenager trailing you wherever you go?”
“She doesn’t approve,” Tarn stated.
Gard snorted. “Precious as she is to me, there are some decisions I will not let her make on my behalf. You needn’t worry.”
“I wasn’t worrying,” Tarn said, and proved it by dragging Gard closer and kissing him fiercely enough to make his point. “You are mine now.”
Gard kissed him back eagerly, but then pulled away to complain, “You keep saying that. It doesn’t make it true.”
“You may think that if you prefer,” Tarn told him gravely.
“I,” Cayl said dryly from farther down the stairs, “would prefer it if you came and ate your breakfast so we could get on the road today. You two may be able to fuck each other blind, but I’d very much like to get home to my own lover one day. There’s a few battles still to fight before then, though. You do remember the Shadow, don’t you, gentlemen? It’s evil. It’s dangerous. It wants us all dead.”
BEFORE MUCH longer, they moved out again. The eye of the storm closed around them as they picked their way downhill, and the mountains vanished as the dust rose around them.
Around midday, Namik raised his hand, calling them close. He pressed his hand to his forehead and bowed his head, saying something in Latai that Tarn couldn’t quite make out.
“My father says,” Raif explained, copying the gesture, “that we have crossed the border. Welcome, friends, to the land of God the Ever Watchful. You stand now in Tiallat.”
Chapter 25: Seeking
AS THEY rode into Tiallat, Gard left the dust cloud hanging over the mountains behind them, anchoring it over the pass in case they needed it for their escape. After days of it roaring around him, Tarn’s ears felt tender without it, making him mark every new noise with a shiver. Birds sang in the low scrub beside the road, and the undergrowth was full of the rustle of small creatures. There were trees here on the windward side of the mountain, firs that covered the slopes with vast sweeps of green, sighing like the sea under the rush of the northeast wind.
Below them, the valleys looked dryer, their green-and-scarlet fields beginning to brown in the first heat of summer. There was moisture in the air, though, and fast streams ran down the sides of the mountains in quick, laughing cascades. It did not look like somewhere the Shadow would dwell.
But Eyr had been a place of beauty once, before the forests rotted and the towers rose like spears of bone.
“There,” Raif said, pointing out across the green plains. “See where the river spreads across the plain? The capital is in the foothills beyond, where the winter snows fall lightly and the summer drought does not bite so hard.”
“And our road?” Cayl asked, shading his eyes with his hand and squinting out. “We’ve always arrived from due west before, along the road from Istel.”
“We take the Mulberry Road. Ran as far as Jaala once, before the Emirate raised the tax on raw silk imports. There’s no market for that or the fruit now, and the farmers have filled their fields with poppies.”
“Ah,” Cayl said, shaking his head, and Gard hissed disapproval through his teeth.
Tarn, puzzled, murmured to him, “Poppies?”
“Did they not use poppy juice to dull pain in your day?”
“No.”
“It’s a bad thing, when misused,” Cayl said. “Seductive and addictive. Now, we’ll need to change our clothes before we reach the farms. Aline, I’m sorry, but….”
She wrinkled her nose but then shrugged. “I knew it was coming, and at least it will hide my hair. There’s not many hill girls who ride the Mulberry Road.”
“Perhaps we should put one on Tarn as well,” Gard suggested lightly.
“He’s going to be my barbarian bodyguard,” Aline said blithely. “Unless…. Tarn, would the Shadow recognize your avatar’s face?”
“We were both in full armor each time we met. I would be surprised.”
“He’ll need to cover his hair, anyway,” Gard put in. “That will make him stand out less, if anything can.”
“Aw,” Aline said demurely. “Gard thinks you’re outstanding, Tarn.”
Esen snorted her opinion of that, and Zeki hurriedly said, “Oh, look, peaches.”
Namik exclaimed, but Esen was already out of her saddle and darting to the tree. She plucked the low-hanging fruit with quick intensity, lifting up her full skirt to carry them, and then headed back to the horses.
“How will you get back into your saddle?” Cayl asked her, smiling easily, and she stopped and stamped her foot, saying something imperious with a sniff.
Gard laughed. “We will just get out of ours. Namik says the peaches rarely ripen this early, and we should be thankful.”
So they sat in the shade of green trees, eating just-ripe peaches until the juice ran down their fingers. A stream sang beside them, tumbling off the rocks to plunge down in a brief waterfall, and the air was warm through the trees. Gard leaned against Tarn’s shoulder and sucked the juice from his fingers with exaggerated slurps until Tarn kissed him quiet, and all they got for it was a peach stone thrown at their heads.
Gard tossed it back at Aline and then rinsed his face in the cool spring. “I begin to see why Tarn likes stealing other people’s countries. I quite fancy a peach grove or two.”
“I will give you orchards,” Tarn promised. “Once the Shadow has fallen.”
“That’s always the condition, isn’t it?” Gard grumbled. “Never mind. I would grow lazy and sleepy and fat if I lay around and ate peaches all day. I was not made for an idle life.”
“And what do you do all day?” Tarn asked him, as the others began to bustle behind them.
“I watch over my desert,” Gard said indignantly, his shoulders rising. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to keep everyone and everything safe? There’s always some creature, or some entire caravan if we’re talking about humans, walking straight into trouble. The work I’ll have to do to put everything back in balance after this….” He trailed off and then asked quietly, “Tarn, if the Shadow destroys me, who will look after my desert? Will some new Alagard rise out of the wind and take my place?”
Tarn, whose fires burned eternally, at least while he sheltered within a physical form, had never been seriously forced to consider his own mortality. Unsure, he said, “I won’t let that happen.”
Gard twitched his shoulder irritably.
Tarn tried again. “You are the only desert I could ever endure.”
“Better,” Gard sniffed but leaned back when Tarn wrapped his arms around his waist. “Oh, is this how it’s going to be? I show a moment of weakness, and you use it as an excuse to grope me? Typical.”
But he had folded his arms over Tarn’s, linking their hands, so Tarn ignored his protests.
“Enough of that,” Cayl grumbled at them. “Here’s your Tiallatai clothes. Go and change. Gard, can you show him how to wear them without making the rest of us wait an hour while you two get distracted?”
“It doesn’t take me anywhere near that long to distract a man,” Gard said but pulled out of Tarn’s arms to take the clothes. �
�We’ll be good.”
The clothes weren’t much different from the ones they had worn to cross the desert, long-sleeved tunics and loose trousers. The colors were brighter, though, reds and oranges, and long ties hung from the cuffs.
“Only manual laborers show their forearms,” Gard told him, pulling Tarn’s tunic straight. “We’re supposed to be merchants who lost contact with our caravan in the storm. Tie your cuffs tight to show you have no intention of displaying your arms.” He paused, his hand resting on Tarn’s hip. “Hmm, before you start looking like some sour Savattin, I could….”
“Be considerate of Cayl?” Tarn suggested but stole a quick kiss anyway. “What’s next?”
The headscarf was a nuisance, especially when dressed long enough to cover Tarn’s hair, and it didn’t help that Gard stood back and immediately began to laugh. “I shouldn’t have worried. You don’t look Savattin at all.”
“Lucky for you,” Tarn grumbled. His head was already starting to sweat.
Gard grinned and tossed his own scarf on with the ease of long practice, flicking the tasseled ends over his shoulders. “You think that’s mad, you should see what the girls have to wear. The Savattin really don’t like women much.” He pursed his lips. “You wouldn’t think they’d be so terrified of handsome men either, given that, but it’s always so.” He caught Tarn’s look and grinned, slow and wicked. “What? They send caravans out too. Why should they be immune to my tricks?”
“You’re a menace,” Tarn told him, and they went back to join the others. Immediately he saw what Gard had meant—looking at Esen and Aline, all he could see were their eyes. The rest of their bodies were sheathed in layers of drifting fabric, their faces almost completely obscured. Esen made it look elegant; Aline just looked uncomfortable.
“I always end up chewing the blasted veil,” she complained.
Gard grinned at her as he swung into the saddle. “You could talk less.”
Reawakening Page 19
