"What the hell was that?" Thorne was shouting in Razem's ear. "Are you a prince or a mewling brat who squabbles and settles things with his fists? Grow up, lad! Your sister wouldn't have wanted this."
Razem tried to shake him off. He stared at Arisanat, who still hadn't checked the blood flowing from his nostrils. Kho was talking angrily in Arisanat's ear, a wad of cloth gripped in one hand. Razem closed his eyes. He was such a fool. He wanted to punch Arisanat again. It had felt good to make his cousin feel the pain Razem was experiencing. But he knew he had just ruined everything. There would be no hope of settling things amicably between them now. He slumped back in Thorne's grasp.
"Ysdra." The captain jumped to help Kho convey Arisanat from the room. Razem's cousin looked furious, but said nothing.
Thorne shook Razem. "Little fool." He directed Razem back into a chair. "What would you have done if he'd struck back? He could be flogged for such an offense. Were you trying to provoke that?"
"What? No!" Razem stared up at him. "I would never—"
"Good. That's meaner than I thought you were." Thorne shook his head. Razem wished he could see past him to his cousin. "I'm disappointed in you. I thought you had better sense."
"You heard what he—"
"I did," Thorne interrupted. "And I also know that Kho just the other morning gave you a lecture on self-control." He made a wry face. "I know that because he had to give me the same lecture this morning." He sighed and sat in Arisanat's vacated chair.
"My father's going to kill me."
"He can't. You're the only heir he has." Thorne didn't make that sound like a compliment. "But he might wish he could. You fool, I thought you understood Arisanat was the sticking point in all this."
Razem rubbed a hand through his hair. "I thought I was the sticking point."
"No, you're just being a little shit. Arisanat has a serious grievance against the crown, and he is of the First Family. He has enough clout to make things very difficult for your father, especially if he talks Birona around to his way of thinking." Thorne glared at him. "Have you been so wrapped up in yourself that you honestly didn't know all this?"
"I--You mean--I--" Razem broke off and leaned back heavily in his chair, the breath whooshing out of him. "Do you think Aris will make things difficult?"
"Damned if I know." Thorne rolled his eyes up to glare at the ceiling. "Sleeping gods, if I had known taking the promotion to Lord-Captain would mean I had to wrangle wayward, willful, royal brats, I would have refused the title and run off to Amethir. Marrying one of their stormwitches would have brought me less trouble than this has."
Razem suppressed a flash of resentment and stared at the floor, trying to look properly cowed. He didn't have any right to resent Thorne's words. They were true. He'd been a complete and utter fool. For several minutes he sat and listened to Thorne's breathing while he tried to regulate his own. Finally he murmured, "What should I do, Destar?"
"I haven't a clue, your highness. I don't know Lord Arisanat well. What do you think you should do?"
"Ugh. Apologize to him." Razem groaned. He rubbed his hands over his face. "Beg his forgiveness. Perhaps I could be honest with him about my own reaction to Father's decision."
"Honesty usually is the best choice, as long as you think you can manage it with tact." Thorne slanted his gaze over at him. "And without any more punching."
"He'll probably need some time to cool off," Razem said hopefully, but Thorne snorted.
"When has putting off a foul task ever made it more palatable? Nay, if I am the one giving counsel, I say you should apologize quickly, before this becomes a stone lodged in Lord Arisanat's heart. You and he were close once, weren't you? Closer, at least, when his lordship's brother was alive."
Razem nodded. "We went there every year for Longnight. My sister loved the snow they get in the hills." He swallowed against a sudden thickness in his throat. "I never cared for the cold, but it pleased her so." He shivered.
Thorne rested a hand on his shoulder. "I miss her, too, lad."
Not knowing how to respond to that, Razem simply nodded and went.
***
Arisanat was--for good or ill--easy enough to find. He and Emran Kho were sitting on a bench at the edge of the practice rings. Arisanat still held a red-stained wad of cloth to his nose. The two men did not appear to be speaking. Razem let his steps slow as soon as he saw them.
He was almost more ashamed to face Kho than Arisanat. Kho's lecture about discipline should have stuck in his mind more this morning. Instead Razem had allowed his temper to overrule his thoughts and had made an already difficult situation worse. It was tempting to wait here and watch to see what sort of mood Arisanat might be in before approaching. But no, that was cowardly. Razem may be a fool, but he was not a coward.
He took a deep breath, steeling himself for the humiliation to come, and stepped forward. Kho saw him coming at once. He stood, resting a hand briefly on Arisanat's shoulder, and bowed to Razem.
"Lord-General," Razem said, pitching his voice low and trying to sound humble, "I would speak with Lord Arisanat alone."
Kho bowed again silently and took his leave.
Razem walked closer to his cousin but did not sit. He felt as if he should ask Arisanat's permission before sitting, and besides, he didn't think it wise for them to be too close to each other just now. He couldn't guarantee his cousin wouldn't swing for him, and Razem truly didn't want him flogged.
"I must beg your forgiveness, cousin," he said after several long moments of silence. Arisanat had not even turned to look at him or acknowledged him in any way.
"Must you?" his voice was rough. Razem felt a fresh pang of guilt. His thoughtless reaction had just scraped a blade across Arisanat's still-oozing grief. And it was true that Arisanat had poked at Razem's own sore spot, but that was no excuse.
"Yes, I must." He made his voice firm. "We have always been friends, cousin, and I would not be the one who destroyed that friendship. I have many fond memories of the time we spent together as children. And I was thoughtless in my own grief, unmindful of the grief that is yours, that needs must always be sharper than mine, for the love of a brother. I have felt that grief myself. I was wrong to slight it."
"You were." A simple statement of agreement, nothing more. But the fact that Arisanat was responding to him made Razem breathe a bit easier.
"I must confess something to you as well," he went on. "My reaction, when my father told me of the impending prisoner exchange, was not so eloquent or graceful as yours. I raised my voice to my father in his council chambers. I defied the king to his face. He had been well within his rights to rebuke me then and there. But even with more cause, he did not strike me, as I most shamefully struck you."
Arisanat's shoulders heaved twice. He straightened up, lowering the bloody cloth. "Sit down, you maundering lump. Anyone who looks at us will know we have quarreled, else." There was impatience but no affection in the words. Still, Razem took another deep breath and sat obediently down, and valiantly ignored being called a maundering lump.
"For my part, I apologize for what I said of Azmei," Arisanat said. "I knew it would wound you before I said it." His throat moved as he swallowed. "I wanted to give you some of the pain I have carried all these months."
Razem nodded. "We have both suffered great losses. Perhaps they were not quite the same, but they were both terrible." He licked his lips. "Aris, I need you with me. I do not think I can go to Salishok and accept Jacin Hawk back to our kingdom unless you are by my side." He looked over at his cousin, seeing that behind the dried blood his cousin's face was drawn with grief. "I must have your blessing, or I must defy my father."
It was even almost true. He hated what his father had done. He hated the thought of carrying on with peace talks when the talks were tearing their kingdom apart. If Venra's brother were truly poised to act against the king, Razem must know. And if Arisanat decreed that Razem should defy the king...well, as much as it might pain Razem, he
would know what he must do. He would not enjoy arresting his cousin, but inciting the prince to civil war would be treachery of the highest order.
"Don't be a fool." Arisanat's voice was harsh as his fingers closed around Razem's wrist. "You cannot defy your father, and I would not ask you to."
"But will you grant me your blessing?" Razem whispered. "Will you come with me?"
Arisanat's fingers tightened until they gripped hard enough that Razem's wrist bones creaked against each other. "You know I will, lump." His voice caught as he said the words, but while there was still no affection, there was also no cold formality in them, either.
Razem swallowed hard against a sudden rush of emotion. He had never been as close to Arisanat as he was to Venra, but then the four years Arisanat had on Razem meant he was there to teach the young prince how to pack snow best for building a fort wall and which way to lean to steer a sled the way it should go. Razem was grateful his hasty reaction hadn't ruined all of those good memories in a single instant.
"Thank you, Aris. That means more to me than I can say."
"You'd best think of a few things to say before your father hears about this." Arisanat's voice was dry as he released Razem's wrist and stood up. "Come. We should have the conversation you called me here to have."
Chapter 3
"Get up."
Jacin Hawk looked up from the book he had been reading. It was an old one, predating the current Tamnen-Strid crisis by at least a century, and it was a love story, which wasn't his usual preferred reading, but it was better than the zealot poetry he'd been given last month. "What?" he grunted.
The guard standing outside his cell door was probably a decade younger than he was, if not more. Certainly no older than twenty-five. He shifted his weight and rested a hand on the doorframe. "The king has sent someone to see you. You ought to be presentable."
"As if I give a damn." Hawk turned his gaze back to the book, licked his thumb, and carefully turned the page. He knew it would anger the guard. It was meant to. Though he had been left here to rot for six long years, he had taken care to never become a tractable prisoner. He might not be the Tamnese Hawk any more, leading a line of charging swordsmen against the thieving Strid, but he would not be meek under the threat of confinement. Not when he had faced down death and laughed.
"Get up, damn you!" the boy snapped. "Commander Ayowir will be here in just a few minutes, and I won't have you disrespectful or dirty."
Hawk didn't look up. "Come in and make me, then." He had to fight to suppress the smirk that wanted to crawl across his lips. The younger ones always had less self-control. Hawk almost enjoyed the company of a few of the older guards. The ones who remembered the days before the invasion, who had grown up without constant warfare. Hawk himself had been sixteen when the Strid attacked the Kelischad Mines, and it had been another three years before he went off to war after that. This boy, though, had grown up in a country constantly at war. What did he know of real life?
"Winds take you," the boy growled, and the clank of keys told Hawk that he was coming in. Was this audience truly all that important, then? What made it different from the hundreds of other encounters he had had with Commander Ayowir over the years? She was a hard woman, but she'd always seemed fair.
With an exaggerated sigh, Hawk closed the book and set it aside. He hadn't been enjoying it, anyway. It was just something to pass the time. He had a lot of time that needed passing, these days.
"Very well, what is it you want me to do? I only have the one set of clothes. I had a bath two days ago and I've hardly exerted myself since then." Hawk stood. "Is she such a delicate lady she'll swoon at the sight of my unshaven face? I haven't held a blade in six years, by her orders, so she'll have to excuse it."
It was an exaggeration. He'd been given knives with his dinner for the past three years, ever since they decided he wasn't going to escape. And once a month they tied him to a chair and shaved him. He supposed they were afraid he would slit his own throat if they let him shave himself.
He'd given it thought, actually, but his nature had never been one inclined to despair, and he had calculated that his maintenance would cost the Strid more than burying him would. He liked the idea of inconveniencing the enemy by simply continuing to draw breath.
"Tamnese scum," the boy spat, and cuffed at him. "You will stand out of respect and give the Commander your attention."
Hawk caught the boy's wrist in one hand. Not tightly--he didn't want to frighten the boy into drawing his sword. He just wanted to remind him that Jacin Hawk was not someone to toy with. "Watch yourself, boy," he muttered, making his voice hard. "I have known the Commander longer than you've been out of swaddling. She and I have come to our own understanding."
"That's enough, Hawk," said a calm female voice. Ayowir was a tall, rangy, rawboned woman with a ruddy complexion. She wore her long blonde hair plaited back from her face, exposing an ear with a chunk missing. Hawk had been forced, grudgingly, to respect her, first as they faced each other across the disputed leagues of the Kreyden District, and then as her captive. She had never been friendly with him, and never would, but they had each other's measure, and there was, as Hawk had said, an understanding between them. "You've embarrassed him. I'll have to assign him somewhere away from prisoners now." She didn't look at the boy as she spoke of him. Hawk did, just long enough to see the boy flush red as a battle flag.
"Just doing my patriotic duty to inconvenience you a little bit every day," Hawk said lightly. He released the guard's wrist and the boy pulled it back, rubbing it with his free hand. "What are you here for?"
Ayowir's lips quirked in something that was nothing like a smile, but wasn't quite a grimace. To Hawk's surprise, she didn't answer him at once. "Go back to the duty station and see that we aren't interrupted," she told the guard.
The boy didn't manage to meet his commander's gaze as he saluted her, but he did have time for a venomous look at Hawk. Hawk bared his teeth at the boy. Not a smile.
When they were alone, he repeated his inquiry. "What is this about, Ayowir?"
She pursed her lips, and now that she met his gaze, Hawk could see the confusion in her gray eyes. "Freedom, Hawk. Is that sufficient to catch your interest?"
She sat in the single chair in his cell. In truth, it would have been an actual room, had the door been solid wood instead of an iron grille. He had a small fire pit, a table and chair, a chamber pot and washbasin, and an actual bed. Hawk could complain about many things since his capture by the Strid, but he could not complain of his treatment.
Hawk remained standing, though his leg was beginning to ache.
"Freedom," he said, when he thought he had let enough time pass that he wouldn't sound overeager. "That's a broad concept."
Ayowir shifted back in the chair, her knees settling apart, one foot back in case she had to stand suddenly. She sat like a warrior and studied him. Her eyes roved frankly across his features, and Hawk pictured himself as she must see him: a broken warrior with a bad leg, paler than he had been since birth, thinner than he should be, his light brown face half covered in three weeks' worth of black whiskers that were, these days, more liberally sprinkled with white than he would like. Thirty-six was not so old as all that, he thought, but his captivity had aged him. He wondered if Ayowir still saw the warrior in him. His heart was still a warrior's heart, he wanted to say. But it was not her business what Hawk thought of himself.
"Freedom," she said. "Your freedom, in particular." Her gray eyes were considering.
Hawk stiffened. "I won't betray my country," he spat. They had been over this too many times to count, early on. Why would she return to it now?
"Did I ask you to?" Then she made a wry face. "Recently, anyway. No, Hawk, I confess, I'm being mysterious only partly by choice. The truth is, I know little more than you. But here it is: My king and yours have seen fit to communicate through an intermediary, and the upshot is that Anyet Oler is to be released to us, conditional upon our returni
ng you home in more or less the condition we found you." She did smile then, her thin lips pulling to the right thanks to a scar from her partly-missing ear. "Though I rather think we did a fair job of patching you up, all things considered."
He would have lost the leg--if not his life--if the Strid battlefield combers hadn't found him when they did, and he and Ayowir both knew it. As it was, he was lucky to have kept the use of it. He had rarely had the opportunity to discover if he would limp over long distances, but in his cell, he had only been troubled by it when the rains were coming.
"They would give back the Deranged Duke," he murmured, and was rewarded with a flash of ire in her expression. Anyet Oler was Ayowir's uncle, or something like that. But she didn't speak her reply aloud. Hawk wondered what she would have said. There could be no denying that Oler had waged systematic genocide against the Tamnese people of the Kreyden District. Never mind that half of them had Strid blood in them somewhere, even if it was mostly long generations ago. Things had been tense enough, thirty-six years ago, that Hawk was one of the few half-bloods of his generation.
"Anyet is dying, Hawk," she said finally. Her voice and expression were wiped of any emotion. "To my thoughts, Tamnen is getting a better deal. But we will take him back, if only to bury him among his ancestors so he may rest peacefully."
Gods grant his spirit never rest, Hawk thought. But something stayed his tongue. He wouldn't want to be buried in the land of his captivity. He could hardly blame the duke for that, even if he blamed him for much else.
"What are the particulars, then?" he asked after it became apparent Ayowir was not going to speak again.
She frowned, returning from wherever her thoughts had taken her, and Hawk reflected that he could have murdered the Strid commander just then. Six years ago, he would have. Just two years ago, he would probably have tried. What had happened to him lately?
Stormseer (Storms in Amethir Book 3) Page 4
