Paladin of Souls (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Those will be a week, healing,” he remarked.

  “Probably.”

  As a horse soldier, he had no doubt treated saddle sores before, and diagnosed with authority. He watched a moment more as if to be sure she was going to be all right, stretched his fingers and rubbed his face, then rose and went to turn over the bodies.

  His examination was methodical, and not for looting, for he barely glanced at the rings or pins or purses the corpses yielded. Any papers he happened upon, however, he examined and folded carefully away in his tunic. This Porifors—or dy Porifors; he had not said if it was first name or last—was an officer, no question, and one with a steady head: some military vassal of the provincar of Caribastos, or trained up like such a battle lord. Foix’s letter, it appeared, had either been left with the deserted column or gone with one of the escapees.

  “Can you tell me, Sera, what were the other prisoners in the Jokonan train?”

  “Few, the gods be thanked. Six women from Ibra, and seven men, that the Jokonans judged valuable enough to drag over the mountains with them. And twelve, no, eleven guardsmen of the Daughter’s Order, who had undertaken to convey my pilgrimage, captured by the Jokonan column these … two days back.” Only two days? “I have good hope that one of my guardsmen and some others from my party escaped back in Tolnoxo, when we were first overtaken.”

  “You were the only lady of Chalion among those taken?” His brow wrinkled further.

  She nodded shortly, and tried to think of something useful to say to this intent officer. “These raiders rode under the seal of Prince Sordso, for they had tally officers accounting the prince’s fifth. They came up through Ibra, and pillaged the town of Rauma there, then escaped over the passes when the march of Rauma followed hotly. The one you beheaded over there”—she nodded toward the sad corpse—“was the senior, though I do not believe he was the original commander. As of yesterday, their numbers were about ninety-two, though some may have deserted in the night before they ran afoul of your ambush.”

  “Tolnoxo …” He dusted his hands, rose from the last corpse, and strolled over to examine her progress. She was just tying strips around the pad on her second knee. His meticulous courtesy somehow made her more, not less, conscious of the fact that she was alone with a strange man. “No wonder. You are now less than thirty miles from the border of Jokona. That column covered nearly a hundred miles, these past two days.”

  “They were pushing. They were afraid.” She glanced around the scene. Iridescent green flies were beginning to gather, an ugly buzzing in the damp shade. “Not afraid enough to stay home in the first place, unfortunately.”

  His lips twisted in a sour smile. “Perhaps next time their fear will have improved.” He scratched his beard. It was not the reddish dark of his hair, but lighter, shot with gray. “Your first battle, Sera?”

  “Of this sort, yes.” She tied off the last strip and yanked the knot tight.

  “Thank you for jostling the fellow with the crossbow. A timely blow, that.”

  He’d noticed? Five gods. She’d thought him fully occupied. “You are most welcome.”

  “You keep your wits about you, I see.”

  “I know.” She glanced up at his surprised snort. She said unsteadily, “If you are too kind to me, I shall start to weep, and then we shall be undone.”

  He looked a little taken aback, but then nodded. “Cruel lady, to forbid me to be kind! So it shall be. We must ride now, to a safer place to lie up. Swiftly and with care, for I think yours were not the only stragglers and survivors. I hope we may meet with some of my own, first.” He frowned around. “I’ll send them back to collect these, and their horses.”

  She glanced at the silent scene. The bodies lay sprawled; none of the weary horses had wandered far. The shrieking visions had faded altogether—she did not say, thank the gods—but the ravine still seemed to reverberate with woe. She couldn’t wait to escape it.

  He helped her to her feet; she nodded gratefully. With every minute of rest, her body seemed to be seizing up. Much more, and she wouldn’t be able to walk or ride.

  Or mount. His attempt to give her a leg up failed when she gasped with pain; then he simply took her about the waist and lifted her. She wasn’t a tall woman, but neither was she the willow-whip she’d been at eighteen. Unfair—the man had to be as old as she was, but his strength was clearly unimpaired by whatever years had grayed his beard. Of course, patrolling these marches, he would be in constant training. He swung up on his own tall horse with easy grace. Ista thought the beautiful dark-dappled animal must be of the same breed as Liss’s leggy bay, lean-muscled and bred to speed and endurance.

  He led the way to the riverbed and turned upstream. She could see his own horse’s prints in the gravel and sand, coming down, but, reassuringly, no others. After a few minutes’ ride, the prints turned to—or rather, from—the thin woods lining the river. The two of them continued on beside the flowing water. Her tired horse’s steps were short and stiff; only the presence of the other horse, she thought, kept it moving. Just like me.

  She studied her rescuer in this better light. Like his horse and sword, the rest of his gear was of the finest quality, but forbore gaudy jeweled studs or metallic inlay. Not a poor officer, then, but serious about his business. To survive twenty years on this frontier, as his beard and the weathering of his face suggested he must have, a man had to be paying close attention to what he was doing.

  That face drew her eyes. Not a boy’s face, fresh and full-blooded like Ferda’s or Foix’s, nor an aging man’s face, sagging like dy Ferrej’s, but a face in the full strength of its maturity. Perfectly balanced on the apogee of its life. Pale, though, for all his obvious vigor. Perhaps the past winter in Caribastos had been unusually dreary.

  A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter.

  What of her and love, after all? At eighteen, she had been lifted up by Lord dy Lutez into the bright, easy, poisoned triumph of her high marriage to Roya Ias. It had spiraled down into the long, dark fog of her widowhood and the curse, blighting mind and heart both. The entire center of her life was a blackened waste, its long years not to be recovered nor replaced. She’d had neither the life nor the learning from it that other women her age could be assumed to possess.

  For all the relentless idealism surrounding virginity, fidelity, and celibacy—for women—Ista had known plenty of ladies of rank in Ias’s court who had taken lovers, openly or in secret. She had only the vaguest idea how they’d gone about it. Such carryings-on hadn’t happened in the Dowager Provincara’s minor court in Valenda, of course; the old lady had held neither tolerance for the nonsense nor, indeed, kept any such nonsensical young persons about her, with the sole exception of her embarrassing mad daughter Ista. In Ista’s two trips to Cardegoss since the destruction of the curse, in the old Provincara’s train for Iselle’s coronation and to visit little Isara last autumn, she had fairly waded through courtiers, to be sure. But it had seemed to her that she’d read not desire, but merely avarice in their eyes. They’d wanted the royina’s favors, not Ista’s love. Not that Ista felt love. Ista felt nothing, on the whole, she decided.

  The past three days of numb terror excepted, perhaps. Yet even that fear had seemed to lie on the other side of some sheet of glass, in her mind.

  Still—she glanced sideways—he was a striking man. For an hour yet, she might still be modest Ista dy Ajelo, who could dream of love with a handsome officer. When the ride was done, the dream would be over.

  “You are very silent, lady.”

  Ista cleared her throat. “My wits were wandering. I am stupid with fatigue, I expect.” They had not reached safety yet, but when they did, she imagined she would fall like a tree. “You must have been up all night as well, preparing that most splendid reception.”

  He smiled at that, but said only, “I have little need of sleep, these days. I’ll take some rest at noon
.”

  His eyes, returning her study, disturbed her with their concentration. He looked as though she presented some deep quandary or puzzle to him. She looked away, discomfited, and so was first to spot the object floating down the stream.

  “A body.” She nodded toward it. “Is this the same river my Jokonan column was riding down, then?”

  “Yes, it curves around here …” He forced his horse out into the rippling water, belly deep, leaned over, and grabbed the corpse by the arm to drag it sloshing up on the sand. It was not clad in Daughter’s blue, Ista saw with relief. Just another illfated young soldier, who would grow no older now.

  The officer grimaced down at it. “Lead scout, it appears. I’m tempted to leave him to ride the river as courier down to Jokona. But there will doubtless be others, more voluble, to carry the news. There always are. He can be collected with the rest.” He abandoned the sodden thing and clucked his horse onward. “Their column had to turn this way, to avoid both the stronghold of Oby and the screen of Castle Porifors. Which was originally designed to look south, not north, after all. Better they should have split up and crept past us in twos and threes; they’d have lost some that way, but not all. They were too tempted by the shortest route.”

  “And the surest, if they knew the river went to Jokona. They seemed to have trouble with their directions. I don’t think this line of retreat was in their original plan.”

  His eye glinted with satisfaction. “My b … best advisor always said it must be so, in such a case. He was right as usual. We camped upon this river last night, therefore, and took our ease while the Jokonans delivered themselves to us. Well, except for our scouts, who wore out a few horses keeping contact.”

  “Is it much farther to your camp? I think this poor horse is almost done.” Her animal seemed to stumble every five steps. “It is my own, and I don’t wish to lame it worse.”

  “Yes, we could almost have tracked these Jokonans just by the ruined horses they abandoned in their wake.” He shook his head in soldierly censure. His own elegant mount, for all its hard use that morning, appeared superbly cared for. A slight smile flitted across his face. “Let us by all means relieve your horse.”

  He shifted his horse up to her side, dropped his reins on its withers, reached across, plucked her from her saddle, and balanced her sideways upon his lap; Ista choked back an undignified yelp of protest. He did not follow up this startling move with any attempt to steal a kiss or other shameless familiarity, but merely reached around her to take up his reins with one hand and catch up her horse’s reins to tow it along with the other. Leaving her to wind her arms around him for security. Gingerly, she did so.

  His cool strength was almost shocking, in this proximity. He did not reek of dried sweat, as she had expected—she had no doubt she stank worse herself, just now. The congealing blood, stiffening in dark patches on his gray tabard, had little odor as yet, for all that a chill of death seemed to hang about him. She rested in the curve of his arm away from the dampest stains, intensely conscious of the weight of her thighs across his. She had not relaxed in the circle of a man’s arms for … for as long as she could remember, and she did not do so now. Limp exhaustion was not the same thing as relaxation.

  He dropped his face to the top of her head; it seemed to her that he inhaled the scent of her hair. She trembled slightly.

  He murmured in a voice of concern, “Now, I’m only being kind to your horse, mind you.”

  Ista snorted softly, and felt his body’s tension slacken a trifle at the reassurance of her half laugh. It was wonderful to imagine letting go one’s guard, if only for a moment. To pretend that safety was something another could give as a gift. It could only be for a few more moments; he would certainly not have blocked his sword arm with her in this way if they weren’t nearly within sight of his camp. But presumably, as long as she pretended, so would he. So she clung, and let herself be rocked along, her eyelids drooping.

  Hoofbeats on gravel, a shout; she knew it was friends before she even looked up, for no new tautness flowed into his easy embrace. Your dream is done. Time to wake up. She sighed.

  “My lord!” cried a horseman. One of a trio in gray tabards, she saw through her eyelashes, trotting down the river’s side in the sunny midmorning. The mail-clad soldiers broke into a canter and pulled up around them in a laughing mob. “You have her!” the speaker continued. “I might have known.”

  Her rescuer’s voice was amused, and possibly a trifle smug. “I should think you might.”

  She considered the heroic picture they presented atop the dappled warhorse, and what a fine show it made for this lord’s men. It would be gossiped about tonight in his troop, no doubt. And so a commander maintained his mystique—she did not begrudge him the calculation, if calculation it was. If, as a man, he had also obtained some bonus of pleasure from this courtly cuddle of her exhausted self, well, she could not begrudge that either.

  The men vented a spate of brief reports: of prisoners taken, of the area secured, of wounded treated or transported to the nearest town in carts, of bodies counted.

  “We’re not done rounding up all who fled, then,” said their commander. “Though I begin to doubt the accuracy of our alarms from my Lord dy Tolnoxo. We seem to have only ninety Jokonans to account for, not two hundred as he claimed. You’ll find five more dead ones downstream. One that I pulled from the stream about three miles down, I think must have fallen when we first struck their van. Four more near the mouth of a ravine a mile or so farther, where I caught up with them attempting to make off with this lady. Take some men and collect them and their horses and gear, and put them with the rest, to be listed.” He tossed the reins of Ista’s horse to one of the men. “See carefully to this beast—it belongs to the Sera, here. Bring its gear to my tent. I’ll be found there for a little. Have any who were involved in delivering the captives from the baggage train report to me at once. I’ll ride to inspect the wounded and prisoners in the afternoon.”

  Ista roused herself to ask the soldier, “There were some men of the Daughter’s Order, taken prisoner by the Jokonans—are they safe?”

  “Yes, I saw several such.”

  “How many?” she asked urgently.

  “I don’t know exactly, my lady—there are some in the camp.” He jerked his head upstream.

  “You shall be reunited with them in a moment, and have all their accounts of the morning’s business,” her rescuer soothed her. He exchanged salutes with his men, and they all departed in their several new directions.

  “Whose are these excellent soldiers?” asked Ista.

  “Mine, happily,” he replied. “Ah, my apologies; I failed to introduce myself fully in all my haste. Arhys dy Lutez, March of Porifors, at your service, Sera. Castle Porifors guards all the sharp point of Chalion between Jokona and Ibra, and its men are the honed edge of that blade. Five gods be thanked, a somewhat easier task now that Ibra is made all peaceful in the Royina Iselle’s arms.”

  She froze in his gentle grip. “Dy Lutez?” she repeated, aghast. “Are you any relation to … ?”

  He stiffened in turn; his cheerful amiability cooled. But his suddenly studied voice remained light. “The great chancellor and traitor, Arvol dy Lutez? My father.”

  He was not either of dy Lutez’s two principal heirs, sons of the chancellor’s first marriage who had trailed after him at court in Ista’s time. The famous courtier’s three acknowledged bastards had all been girls, disposed to high and lucrative marriages long ago. Dy Lutez had been twice a widower by the time Ista had first met him, his second wife already a decade dead. This Arhys must be a son of that second wife, then. The one whom dy Lutez, in the prime of his manhood, had abandoned at her country estates so that he might go haring off after Ias, at court or in the field, unimpeded. A northern heiress, yes, Ista recalled that much.

  His voice went a little harsh. “Does it startle you that a traitor’s son serves Chalion well?”

  “Not at all.” She turn
ed her eyes up to trace the bones of his face, so close to her view. Arhys must take something in his fine chin and straight nose from his mother, but the appalling energy of the man was all dy Lutez. “He was a great man. You have … something of the look of him.”

  His brows shot up; he turned his head around to look at her in an entirely new way, a muffled, eager urgency. She had not realized how masked he was, until it slipped. “Truly? You once met him? To look at?”

  “What, had not you?”

  “Not to remember. My mother had a painting, but it was bad.” He frowned. “I was almost old enough to be brought to court at Cardegoss, when he … died. I was old enough. But … perhaps it was better so.” The eagerness cloaked itself, settled back to its secret lair. His brief smile was faintly embarrassed. A mature man of forty, pretending not to care for the grief of a young man of twenty. Ista took back her belief in her own numbness, for this inadvertent flash of self-revelation wrenched like a knife in her stomach.

  They rounded a bend in the river to discover its inward curve lapping a meadow edged with woods. The grass was trampled and littered with the detritus of a camp half-struck, dead campfires and scattered gear. At distant horse lines strung between trees, a few men saddled up mounts or tied baggage to mules. Men packed, men sat, a few men slept on blankets or on the bare ground. Some officers’ tents sheltered beneath a grove on the meadow’s far side.

  A dozen men rushed dy Lutez as soon as he came in view, cheering, shouting greetings and questions, pelting him with news and demanding orders. A familiar figure in blue ran stiffly in their wake.

  “Ah! Ah! She is spared!” Ferda dy Gura cried joyously. “We are spared!”

  He looked as though he had been dragged backward through thorn scrub for about a mile, dirty, exhausted, and pale with fatigue, but hale: no bandages, no blood, limping no worse than his own saddle soreness and a few bruises might account for. Ista’s heart melted with relief.