Courage of falcons

by Holly Lisle

  "It would be," Ry agreed.

  "So. I asked around about you just a bit. You've been quiet about your reasons for being in this appalling mud hole. Very circumspect."

  He nodded but said nothing, and after a moment of uncomfortable silence, she smiled again. "And you're now going to be circumspect with me." Her head tipped to one side, birdlike, and her enormous black eyes blinked.

  They both waited. He felt her nearing her actual objective, and he could not on his life imagine what she wanted of him and his men.

  Again she smiled, and again spoke into the silence. "Since you will not tell me your troubles, I will leave them for later. You may someday wish to confide in me." She shrugged. "You have clearly fallen upon hard times. You are no more Sonderran than I am. You are purely Calimekkan; you are, unless I miss my guess terribly, estranged from your Family, with no one in the world save these your two friends; and you are short of money and uncertain about the direction you should next take with your life."

  Ry laughed and said, "You could not be more correct, Parata. You are an exquisite judge of the truth."

  Rrru-eeth lay her head back on the curving arm of the couch and watched him through heavy-lidded eyes. "If I'm lucky, I will prove an equally good judge of character."

  Ry waited.

  "I miss my lover and my friend. I know you aren't him. But nothing I can do can bring him back, and you remind me of him so much that when I see you I almost can't breathe. I want you to be my concubine."

  Ry thanked every god whose name he could recall in that instant for years of diplomatic training and years of practice in hiding what he was from the world; had he not had it, he would have burst out laughing. Or maybe he would have strangled her. Instead, he simply nodded. "A... fascinating offer, Parata."

  Her smile was intended to be seductive. "Isn't it?" she asked. "Of course I will keep Greten she and I do so enjoy each other's company. And no doubt you would enjoy both of us. Together. You will want for nothing." Her smile grew more suggestive. "Nothing."

  To Ry's left, Yanth had grown so still he seemed not to breathe. But beneath the table his right foot, crossed over his left knee, bounced up and down so fast it was nothing but a blur in the corner of Ry's eye. To Ry's right, Jaim moved bits of crust across his dessert plate, staring downward as if he thought to read his future in those crumbs the way seers read the patterns of the leaves left in a glass of tea.

  And Ry sat weighing all the meanings in her offer, and considering what he could say that would get him what he wanted. A trap lay in the room, in the puzzle she presented him, in her words and her actions he could sense it in the sudden weight of the air in his lungs and the heaviness of the food that lay in his knotted gut and the way her eyes and Greten's watched him while trying hard to appear not to. He needed to thread his way through the trap without springing it, and he could not see what it was or even where it lay.

  At last he decided that all he could do was be the man he truly was. "I'm a freeman. And a fighter," Ry said quietly. "As are my friends. We were not born to spend our days being bathed and perfumed and powdered, nor our nights primping and dancing and posturing for the entertainment of owners. I don't think I could turn myself into a stud for pay. I won't pretend we aren't in trouble we are. And I won't pretend that an offer of a secure bed and secure pay doesn't fall pleasantly on the ears. But not that way. My men and I could offer you our services as bodyguards," he said. "We could protect you and your friends and servants." He looked at her and shrugged slightly. "But, Captain, I cannot sell myself to you as your toy. I couldn't guarantee that the, ah, toy would even work under such circumstances."

  She closed her eyes and sighed, but her smile grew broader. The feeling in the air lightened, and he sensed that somehow, that answer was the right one.

  "You do sound so like him." She sat up then, and the seductress fell away from her and left in her place a woman used to getting what she wanted. "He could never have been a woman's plaything, either." She rubbed her hands together briskly and said, "Please bring me the gifts that I sent to you."

  He removed the items from his pouch, and slipped the ring from his finger, and carried them to her. "You wish to have them back?" he asked, placing them in her hand.

  She waved off the suggestion with a dismissive flick of her wrist. "I would not give a gift only to demand it back if I didn't get my way. But let me tell you about these," she said. "The little tree it was something Ian had done for him when we were in the islands of the Devil's Trail. He said the tree was his Family's crest. He claimed to be of Sabir birth, but his name was Ian Draclas, and though he owned this ship, which is of Sabir make, he never flew the Sabir flag."

  Ry said, "If he were one of the uvestos, that would not be so hard to understand."

  "Uvestos?"

  "In the highest Families, children born illegitimately who are acknowledged by their Family parent but not by that parent's legitimate mate still have certain Family rights. They cannot use the Family name, nor can they hold position within the Family or inherit title or land. But they can claim Family kinship, inherit and receive Family properties, and pass on these rights to their own children. These people and their sons and daughters are uvestos."

  "Ian never called himself such to me, but the story he told me would make him one of these." She looked at Ry. "So that was him. Uvesto. Unlike him, you are truly Sabir, are you not?"

  "Not anymore."

  She frowned a little. "You have the look, the bones, the carriage. And the crest on the hilt of your sword. You had it covered earlier today, but I see it clearly now. Forgive me for noticing, but I do recognize that. And if you ever were a Sabir, you still are. Blood is blood."

  "Not Calimekkan blood," Ry said. "Any citizen can be declared never to have been born, and can be put under sentence of eternal banishment and worse. Not a happy fate." His smile to her as he said that felt strained. He had a hard time making light of the fate he had chosen. Barzanne.

  "You have been disowned, then?"

  "Disowned is such a simple word. I have been declared barzanne, which is not so simple, and not so kind."

  "Then truly you have need of a patron. Second sons and first sons of lesser branches often do. And you have about you that lean and hungry look that I identify with the hunter, the hungry son, the one who desires more than what he can have. You have, unless I miss my guess, a great ambition for power and a great desire to get back all that you have lost."

  Ry didn't care to tell her how far she had missed her guess. The only thing he wanted back was Kait. His Family or what remained of it could go hang itself. But Rrru-eeth would be much happier thinking that she was prescient, and would be much less difficult to deal with if she thought she understood him. So he said, "That I desire with all my heart."

  "Well, I want things, too. I want more than this ship, more than money. I want my own House in Calimekka a great House and a great Family that will be acknowledged the equal of any of the Five. I want to be recognized and accepted, I want to be invited to parties, I want to be envied by human women and lusted after by human men."

  "You aren't human," Ry said, pointing out the obvious and hoping that he wouldn't enrage his hostess.

  "No. I'm not. And Ibera has no place in it for the nonhuman but the Punishment Square or the gallows. Am I correct?"

  "Yes."

  "And still I want these things. I have accomplished so much in my life. I have risen from slave to freedwoman, and from freedwoman to ship's captain, and I will rise further yet. I am still young. Before I grow old, I will be a parata in Calimekka, and a paraglesa, and the head of a powerful Family." She looked past him, and he got the feeling that she was looking far beyond the walls of the room, far beyond Heymar's harbor. Her voice grew soft, and carried in it an undercurrent of rage. "I will own slaves and land and wealth beyond counting, and men will approach me on their knees."

  She fell silent, and Greten and all three men found other places to look.

&n
bsp; Her sharp laugh brought their attention back to her. "Well I do have my plans." She touched the other items she had given Ry. "And you have a place in them. A place of honor." She touched the tree again. "You have the bloodlines to understand honor and apparently you have some personal integrity, too."

  Next she laid a finger on the tiny coin that she had given him. "This is a coin from my people and my land I'm from up around the Wizards' Circle you call Lake Jirin. My own clan is no more, though there are others of my kind who still inhabit the region. This I have kept with me since I was a small child. For years, it was the only thing I owned, and if my master had known of it, he would have taken it, too." She smiled coldly, and he found himself wondering what had happened to her master. Kait had mentioned Rrru-eeth's grim past, and had said she'd had to kill the man who owned her to save a number of children but Ry got the feeling that when she finally did kill him, she had taken her time with it, and had gone not for quickness and mercy, but for slow and exacting revenge. "This coin," she said in a voice edged with ice, "was the price of my sister's life. And it will buy a thousand lives like the one of the man who killed her before it is spent up."

  She picked up the blue pearl and studied it. "These are reputed to be magical. They are supposed to symbolize fidelity, but more than that, they are supposed to enforce it. If you swallow one whole, the story goes that you become incapable of betraying the one to whom you swear allegiance."

  She touched the ring. "And this was Ian's. One of the few things that he held dear that I have in my possession. It is the ring of a Strithian king, and how he acquired it, he never told me. And now I will never know. But it is a symbol to me of many things. Of my eternal love for him. Of the power I desire. Of the transient nature of life, and the way power can pass from hand to hand." She stood and looked down at him. If Ry stood, her head would come no higher than the center of his breastbone, but he sat and let her maintain that aura of command she seemed to want.

  Ry said, "An unusual little collection of objects. Why give them to me?"

  "You won't sell yourself, though you will sell your services. A fine distinction, but one I accept. I want to purchase your knowledge. And your loyalty. And your ambition. I want you to teach me what I must know to deal with Families teach me everything you know about their structure, how they gather power, how they hold it, how they deal with each other."

  "I would do this, but to what purpose?" Ry asked. "You cannot be accepted into Calimekkan society no matter how flawlessly you learn to act like a Calimekkan parata. You aren't human."

  "But Greten is. And Greten will be my... irrarrix." The word trilled off her tongue. "I don't know of such a word in your language, but among my people, the one who holds true power does so from a position of great secrecy. His name is never known. The irrarrix speaks for him, acts for him, stands before the people for him at all times. The arrangement protects both the true master and the servant, for killing the irrarrix when something is done that angers the people accomplishes nothing the true master will simply replace him with another, and will carry on as before."

  "You could call them puppets, I suppose," Ry said. "But you're right. I know of no such word in Iberish."

  "You see how I can make this work, then?"

  "If you stay hidden. But if you are hidden, how do you intend to enjoy the fruits of your power? The irrarrix"he stumbled a bit over the word, for the double set of trilled r's threw him "seems to me to be the one who benefits most from the arrangement. Men may come on their knees and bow, but they will bow before Greten."

  "In public," Rrru-eeth said. "In public. What they will do in private is something else entirely."

  "I see."

  "Do you?" Those delicate eyebrows rose and fell, and the little feathery wisps moved in the breeze. She studied him intently, and he could see no emotion on her face. "Perhaps you do," she said at last. "You have no reason to love those who banished you. Perhaps you can see your way to understand the need for revenge the justice in having it."

  He smiled slowly. "I understand justice. With all my heart, I understand that."

  "Then you will join me? You will teach me? You will travel with me to Calimekka and help me make Greten a parata there?"

  Ry glanced at Jaim and Yanth. "I follow you wherever you lead," Yanth said.

  Jaim nodded. "You have my loyalty if you choose to sail with her."

  "You have good men," Rrru-eeth said.

  "I do."

  "Then wear the ring I gave you," she said. "Carry the tree and the coin, as reminders of who you once were and who I once was, and as a promise of who we shall become. And..."she held out the blue pearl and dropped it on the table before him "swallow that and swear you will be loyal to me."

  He picked up the pearl and held it between thumb and forefinger. What a waste of a perfectly good pearl, he thought. But he held it to his mouth, and as he put it on his tongue, he thought, What if the tales have some truth in them? He could not swear loyalty to Rrru-eeth; he intended to give her to Ian and see her hanged for her treachery.

  "I cannot swear loyalty to you as a woman," he said, taking the pearl off of his tongue. "In that capacity, another woman already has my oath. And my love."

  "I don't want your love, and I don't require your body. I already have a concubine, and while I might lust for you in my bed, I can satisfy myself in other ways."

  "Then I will swear my loyalty to your office as captain," Ry said, "because that I can give freely, and honestly, and without reservation."

  "As your captain, I will accept that oath."

  He nodded, and swallowed the pearl. With it still smooth on the back of his throat, he said, "Gods attend me." He stared into Rrru-eeth's fathomless eyes. "I swear on my life my undying loyalty to the true and rightful captain of this ship; I am your sword, Captain, to carry out your justice, and I am the hand through which your vengeance will be meted out. I swear myself the protector of your passengers, your crew, your honor, and your name." He spoke his words to Rrru-eeth, but he held his half-brother's face in his mind, and demanded that the gods hear that he had spoken only the truth; he owed his honor and his life to the true captain of the Peregrine, and to its rightful passengers whom these mutineers had betrayed Ian, and Kait, and dead Hasmal, and Ian's loyal men, now also dead.

  Rrru-eeth watched his face, nodded stiffly, and said, "A sincere oath surely the gods heard you. But you should not swear before the gods more than is asked of you. You owe no loyalty to my crew, nor to my passengers. You owe loyalty only to me, and need work for justice only for me. Greten and any passengers we may take on will just have to take care of themselves." She smiled, but the smile was strained.

  The pearl lay warm in his gut, and he thought he could feel that warmth spreading out and flowing through his blood. It was connection where he would never have thought to seek connection Ian, who remained with Kait, now owned a part of him as surely as did Kait.

  Ian would laugh, he thought, if he could hear what I've just done. Sworn my undying loyalty to him and the memory of the men who served him I, who once swore to see him dead by my own hand.

  He turned away from his thoughts and back to the practicalities of the moment. "We need to go back to the inn and gather our things," Ry said.

  Rrru-eeth stood, smoothing the folds of her tunic. The beaded and feathered braids at the outer corners of her eyes swung back and forth, mesmerizing. "You do. And we shall have to arrange places aboard the ship to accommodate the three of you. At the moment, none of the cabins are empty, and I do not wish to have you sleeping in the galley with the common sailors. You must have their respect from the first. So go back to your inn tonight, and you shall take your places among us on the morrow. Join us late in the day. Come the next high tide, we will sail for Calimekka."

  Chapter 38

  Crispin was still bound. The metal around his wrists chafed, and the collar around his neck that forced him to keep his hands up against his chest was as tight as ever. But now he la
y beneath the arch of trees, in soft grass, and the thing that stank of death and whispered perversities and touched him hungrily in tender places was gone. The wall that surrounded Galweigh House lay before him, but he was no longer within its confines. He lay outside of it. His daughter crouched beside him, worrying at the manacles with small, delicate fingers. His triumph he had Ulwe, he was free of the House and its inhabitants, he had somehow pulled victory out of the jaws of defeat.