Courage of falcons

by Holly Lisle

Kait watched him lower his crossbow. "I don't envy you your eyesight." She kept her own pointed at the ground and said, "So do we let him in, or go out to meet him?"

  "I think we let him stand with his belly to a crossbow and talk through the slit," Ian said.

  Dùghall said, "I agree with Ian. Let's hear what he has to say before we make any compromises. I could get Ulwe, I suppose. She could read his intentions as he came toward us, and perhaps those of the soldiers in the field."

  Kait nodded. "Get her."

  Ulwe, Alcie, and Alcie's two children hid in the first siege room, behind a secret panel in the wall just behind the great entry. The room had probably been intended originally as a place where the owner could position a platoon of his soldiers when he didn't trust his visitors, but the Galweighs, always secure in their own power, had never needed to use it in that manner. It had been, for them, the first of many secret rooms filled with food, water, armaments, and other necessary supplies and the first of many rooms the conquering Sabirs had stripped bare.

  Dùghall left, and returned a moment later, the little girl following him closely. Without saying a word, she crouched and closed her eyes, and her body went rigid with the effort of her concentration.

  "He hopes you will recall the old codes," she said softly, "because he has no way of knowing the new ones. He planned this... trick. He overcame my father. They have him bound in the tall grass, surrounded by soldiers. He's very angry." She sounded so sad, speaking of her father held prisoner by the men he'd thought would help him win her back. "Your friend will bring you no harm," she said to Kait. "He still loves you the things he does for your Family, he does in memory of you."

  "In memory?"

  "He believes you to be dead."

  "He loves you, too?" Ian said, a hint of bitterness in his voice.

  "He was never my lover," Kait said quietly. "He was always only a friend. The Karnee curse "

  "guarantees you an unending supply of men who will throw themselves on the blades of swords and march into the teeth of death for you, apparently." Ian partially raised the crossbow toward Aouel, then lowered it and sighed. "I'm sorry, Kait."

  "I understand. I'm sorry, too." Ian had not attempted to renew their romantic relationship once Ry left. He had never alluded to that time at all before that moment, and Kait had hoped that he had gotten over her. Apparently he had not.

  "I want to see my father," Ulwe said. "When you open the door for your friend, let me go out to talk to him."

  "That isn't safe," Dùghall said.

  The little girl looked up at him. "I'm not your ward and not your responsibility. I came with you because I chose to. Now I choose to go speak to my father."

  "I would recommend doing that later, when we have things more settled," Dùghall said, but Kait turned to face him and rested a hand on his shoulder. "Let her go talk to him. Now. Life is too uncertain for promises of later." She turned back to the crossbow slit.

  Dùghall sighed.

  Aouel came up the steps and stopped at the top one. "I come to tell you that your enemies have fallen into our hands, and that we who have captured them offer ourselves into your service," he said. "I offer as token of my good faith my own life, and the codes "

  Kait had moved at his first word to unbar the door. Now she finished unbarring it. She opened it and stepped into his view, and for an instant she could see hope warring in his eyes with disbelief. Then his face creased in a broad smile, and he said, "Ah, Kait. Ah, Kait. You're alive. I'll owe Tonn two more lifetimes at least for that."

  Kait was aware of Ulwe slipping past her and hurrying down the stairs, but she only laughed and gave Aouel a warm hug. "Old friend, I owe him at least a lifetime now, too. I'll be reborn a Rophetian for sure, for I swore to him if he just got me out of that airible in one piece, I would dedicate a full life to him. And I thought about you often, and prayed that you were safe. If he answered that prayer, too, I am deeply in his debt."

  She pulled away, and Dùghall said, "We can use the help, Aouel. How many troops have you brought us? And how many prisoners?"

  Aouel didn't answer the question. Instead, he studied Dùghall. "I almost think I know you." He frowned, and Kait could hear the puzzlement in his voice. "Certainly you remind me of someone, and you know me but I swear, Parat, I remember faces, and I have never seen yours."

  "He's Uncle Dùghall," Kait said. She couldn't figure out how to explain her uncle's sudden youth in any brief manner, and finally decided on vagueness. "He's been through a lot since you saw him last."

  Aouel arched an eyebrow and smiled at the understatement. "As have we all. And you..." He turned to Ian.

  Kait again provided introductions. "Ian Draclas, captain of the Peregrine." She turned to Ian, "Aouel fa Asloodke den Kalemeke Toar," she said, giving his full Rophetian name. Aouel, son of Asloodke, born of Calimekka, Full Captain. "First captain of the Galweigh airible fleet."

  The men did not exchange the bows customary of landsmen they simply nodded, one captain to another. Acknowledgment that in their own worlds, they were both kings, and thus spared the posturing of lesser men.

  Aouel turned to Dùghall. "I can see now who you are. I would love to hear someday how these last hellish years have been so kind to you." He looked like he wanted to say more in that vein, but he held his silence for an instant, then added, "Sixty of the men I count as ours. They hold eighteen prisoners. Three of those are lieutenants, one is a master sergeant, and one is Crispin Sabir." The corner of his mouth quirked into a tiny smile as he said that. "He shall not make a happy prisoner."

  "No," Dùghall said. "He won't." He shook his head in amazement. "I would not have thought sixty Galweigh loyalists existed in all of Calimekka."

  Aouel said, "I'm not sure sixty did. Some of these abandoned the Goft Family when it joined forces with the Sabirs. Some came home from the Territories and found everything changed. We've been gathering this counterforce for some time, waiting for an opportunity to rejoin the Galweighs, and uncertain if any true Galweighs still existed. Two days ago, one of the lieutenants let slip that we would be dropping by night into Galweigh House... and suddenly the loyal Sabir troops began having accidents while they trained, or becoming sick at their meals, or getting into trouble in their off-duty time."

  "And now we have both a defensive force and a few bargaining chips," Kait said.

  Dùghall said, "Does Crispin know how many of us held this place?" He shook his head and answered his own question. "If he had known that, he would not have needed such a force."

  "He didn't know who or what you had in here. He thought to prepare for the worst that he might face."

  Dùghall nodded. "Let's bring them in, then. The dungeon cells are clean enough, and if your men will post guards "

  "I'll handle it. We planned for this as much as for everything else. One moment." He stepped out onto the portico and whistled. The circle with prisoners in the center transformed itself into a thick-walled line with soldiers to either side of each prisoner, and soldiers at both front and back.

  Kait watched the formation begin moving forward. "Lot of women in there," she observed.

  "A lot of people dead in the city and food is scarce and money worth next to nothing. Keeping a fighting force becomes harder by the day. Those who stay are those who have nowhere else to go, and no one else who might need them now that times are so hard."

  "I don't like bringing them in here," Ian said quietly. "What if, among those you have judged loyalists, there are traitors? What if, when they come through the doors, the sides switch again and we find that we have opened the House and put ourselves in the hands of our enemies?"

  "I vouch my life on those who have joined me," Aouel said.

  "Ulwe said they were on our side, too," Kait reminded him.

  Still, watching that line of soldiers and prisoners marching toward her, she felt a faint cold chill on the back of her neck, and sensed a rogue twisting in the ropes of fate. Crispin Sabir, she thought, would not
go quietly into prison and Crispin Sabir had the means to make a great deal of noise.

  * * *

  Ulwe stood outside the ring of soldiers. "Father," she said quietly, "I have come."

  She looked at the man, the beautiful creature, who was her father. His lean features and light eyes had marked her own face she could never doubt that he was her father. Looking at him, she could see no external mark of the cruelty and the evil that she had felt inside. How easy it would be to love him. How easy to trust him. If only she could not see what he was, she could be his daughter joyfully.

  Briefly she cursed the Seven Monkey People for teaching her to walk the road and hear its stories. Blind and deaf to the truths it told, she could have run into his embrace and said, Papa, I have waited so long. On her long trip across the sea, that was the way she had envisioned this meeting. She had never thought to see her father bound in shackles, and certainly had never thought that she would be relieved to see him so.

  "Ulwe," he said quietly. "My beautiful daughter. I did not realize you had grown so big." She saw his eyes fill with unshed tears, saw him swallow and look away. "You look very much like your mother. She... was beautiful, too."

  "I had hope we would meet... better than this," she said, trying hard to find something to say that was both true and kind.

  He looked back at her and his smile was self-mocking. "I seem to have overplanned for the occasion." His eyes flicked around the ring of soldiers, then down to his hands bound in metal bracelets, and he sighed.

  The soldiers were watching the two of them. Ulwe stayed well back of their line, sensing their wariness even of her of the uncertainty she introduced. They feared that she would somehow incite her father to rage; that she would try to cause a diversion that would allow him to escape; that she would suddenly draw a weapon and charge the nearest man in a futile attempt to rescue him herself. So she stood very still and kept her hands where everyone could see them, and did not look at anyone but her father.

  "I'm sorry I didn't reach you in time," he said. "I'm sorry I was not in the harbor waiting for your ship when it arrived. I'm sorry that you were taken hostage, that you have had to suffer for my sake. It was for that reason that I sent you away."

  "I know," she said. "I..." She had so many things she could not tell him. So many things she dared not even hint at. She could not let him know that she had not been taken hostage that she had come willingly to the Galweighs because she wished to avoid him. She looked at the ground and said, "I have been well treated. I am well treated still. And they have promised me that they will not hurt you."

  Crispin laughed at that bright, merry, genuine laughter. "How kind of them to tell you so. Dear Ulwe, perhaps they care enough about you that they did not want to fill you with dread. Or grief." The laughter was gone from his face, replaced by pain and regret. "They will kill me. They must, or I will find a way to kill them."

  "They believe you will fetch them a good ransom."

  "They believe wrong. None at Sabir House would pay for my life. Not now. Not the way things have changed. My own brother, I suspect, will dance before the gods on the day my death is announced to him." He smiled slyly, and she caught the first sign of the other Crispin the one who was not her father, but was instead the murderer, the torturer, the lover of power and pain. "Still, I should like to see them try. The negotiations would be... hilarious."

  "I won't let them kill you."

  "Ulwe, chepeete, don't let them kill you."

  One of the other prisoners said, "Parat, is she truly your daughter?"

  "Silence, Sergeant," a guard said.

  Her father looked at the sergeant. The man wore a different uniform than those of most of the rest of the soldiers. He and four of the other prisoners wore solid black, not black and green and gold. Something about the severity of those black uniforms, something about the looks in the eyes of the men and the one woman who wore them, sent a warning alarm through Ulwe's gut. She wished she dared rest her fingertips on the ground to hear what it had to tell her she wanted to know why those soldiers looked different; she wanted to know why their eyes alone of all the prisoners held no fear. Crispin told the man, "She is my true daughter, my chosen heir."

  One of the guards turned to Ulwe and, not unkindly, said, "Go back to the House now, child. This is no safe place for you."

  Ulwe nodded, though she didn't want to leave. She had other things she wanted to say to her father. But Kait would let her speak to him again, she thought. Kait had promised that they would not kill him unless they had to and he was sitting peacefully, letting these guards do what they wanted with him, offering them no threat. "I'll come to talk to you," she told him. "I promise."

  Her father shook his head. "Never pass up the opportunity to say good-bye, daughter. Something I learned when I was younger than you we have no promise that we will meet again. Do what they want you to do escape if you can. No matter what they've told you about me, no matter how many lies you've heard, remember that I came for you as soon as I could." His voice grew softer. "And know that I love you."

  She bit her lip. She wanted to cry, and indeed several tears escaped from her rapidly blinking eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She was the reason he was a prisoner. His chains were her fault. And she believed him when he declared his love for her he didn't know her, but he had made a place in his heart for the person he thought she was, and he truly loved that person.

  "I'm sorry this happened, Papa," she said. "I pray we have long years yet to come to know each other."

  She turned away, and began to walk toward the House.

  "Tell me good-bye, Ulwe. If you don't, there may come a time in your life when you regret that."

  She turned back, feeling a lump in her throat, and said, "Goodbye, Papa."

  "Good-bye, Ulwe."

  She turned away and began to trudge toward the House, fighting to breathe around the sudden lump in her throat, hating her weakness and her childishness.

  The man who had gone to Dùghall and Kait and Ian to declare peace stepped out onto the great stone landing and whistled.

  Behind her, the guards began shouting commands and threats.

  "Up on your feet, you!"

  "Stand still or I'll run you through!"

  "We're marching to the House, and the one of you who steps out of line or trips or coughs or so much as looks at me wrong dies for the privilege."

  She walked faster she did not wish to be in the way of the moving column. She did not want to be the cause of any man faltering or tripping; she did not wish to be the agent, however accidentally, of any death. She heard the first tramping of feet, the cries of the wounded being carried forward, the rattling of light shackles, and she bolted up the steps and into Galweigh House, thinking only of being out of the way.

  But as the soldiers moved their prisoners up the stairway and into the House, something happened within the column. Someone shouted, and Ulwe heard cries of pain, the clank of chains, and thuds. Beneath her feet, the cool white stone reverberated with nearby pain, and cried out with fear and anguish and sudden death.

  She saw the black-dressed soldiers fighting, shackled and weaponless though they were they were using the chains that bound them as their armor and arms. One fell, a sword through her chest, and her red blood pooled on the white stone like a rose on snow, but locked in her dead embrace was a man in green and black, his neck twisted at an impossible angle and a chain around his throat and his eyes staring unblinking into the realm beyond the world. Two of the warriors stood back to back, swinging their chains in blindingly fast arcs, kicking with their feet at any who dared approach. Their chains caught the blades stabbed in at them, and for a moment Ulwe thought they would succeed, but the guards saw that they were the greatest threat and charged them in a mass.

  And they fell, crying out in pain, and bleeding, and their cries turned to bubbling gasps, and they, too, died.

  The air in Galweigh House grew chill. It seemed to swallow the sounds of figh
ting. It blew out the torch lit in the moments following the defeat of the Sabirs by the Galweigh loyalists, and threw the grand entry hall into darkness. Then, in the lightless, airless horror it made of the hall, faint lights appeared bloodred lights that seemed at first to be candles lit within the bodies of the fallen, and then became fires that blazed inside their cores, and at last changed into suns that devoured flesh and bone and hair and blood and left only neat piles of cloth to mark the spots where warriors had given up their lives.

  "Ahh," something whispered in her ear, and she would have screamed, but it passed by her, and she froze, fearing that if she made a sound or moved a muscle, it would turn and devour her as it had devoured the corpses.

  "Ahh." A soft whisper, but that whisper was no sound of her world; instead, it echoed of the charnel house, of the funeral pyre, of the burial mound and the cold dark crypt.

  Slowly, slowly, so slowly she could barely feel herself move, Ulwe slid into a crouch. She splayed her fingertips against the polished stone, and shut her eyes tightly, and sought the roadvoice.