by Devin Madson
Yes.
“No!” Leo screamed, pulling away. Behind him the priests shifted awkwardly like men waking from sleep.
“No, stay back,” Leo said, thrusting out a hand as one drew close. “Keep away, I—”
Crouched upon the grass, his chest heaved and he pressed one hand to the side of his head, the other shaking as he kept it stretched out to guard against them approaching. They looked at one another, looked at me, and did not move.
Leo lifted his head, his eyes dark, haunted pools as they met mine. “Please, Kaysa. I need your help.”
I jolted awake, my heart pounding so fast I was sure for a terrible moment it would fail.
“Miss Marius?” Captain Aeneas. “Is everything all right? You shouted in your sleep.”
“It’s Kaysa. He found her. We have to go back. We have to save her.”
“Who has her? Leo?”
“Yes. Unus. I’m sure. You said he was different and this one was different. They’re at Eravum. We have to go back.”
He looked at the box, but it was the empress who spoke. “No. We keep going. There’s nothing we can do to help her now.”
What? You saw him. You saw—
“Yes, I did, better than you, apparently. How can we fight a man who can control people? No, we go to Esvar. We see what we can find out. It’s the only way.”
Fuck that.
I made to move, but the empress stuck out one of our arms. “Please tie me to the cart, Captain.”
“But Your Maj—”
“Just do it. Now.”
4. RAH
A camp full of people stared at me. No, not a camp, a settlement. These Levanti had built huts and palisade walls, and I stared as I was carried along, people bustling out of our way. It wasn’t that Levanti didn’t know how to build. We built temples and groves, and when we wintered, we often made storage huts, but this looked so… permanent.
“Out of the way, out of the way,” Yitti grumbled as he and Himi set me down beside one of the fires. “Make space, damn it, surely you’ve seen an injured man before.”
The curious onlookers didn’t disperse, merely stepped back and stood watching and whispering.
“Why are they all staring at me?”
Yitti tilted his head. “Because you’re Rah e’Torin. Or because your face is a mess. You choose.”
Since Yitti had won our challenge, it ought not to have been his job to pick me up off the forest floor and carry me to safety, but he had, and I had not yet found the voice to thank him. My ability to speak seemed to dry up completely when a man in all-too-familiar clothes stepped forward. I had worn just such a band of knotted fabrics around my waist and carried just such a bag, half healing satchel, half horse box, with a special pocket in the side for writing implements and the book every whisperer carried to note the seasons and the grove produce, the movement of herds through their areas and the interchange of blood from one herd to another. I had left mine behind the day I had run from Whisperer Jinnit. The notes of an apprentice whisperer exiled far from home would be an interesting read. It took the unanimous vote of the whisperer conclave to exile one of their own.
As the man approached, a faint frown marred his otherwise handsome face. His head was shaved, and given how closely he appeared to adhere to tradition, the mark of an apprentice whisperer was sure to be upon the back of his head. I could still recall the light touch of Whisperer Jinnit’s brush as he painted mine on every morning, taking his time about it and humming, though I had been restless. No doubt he had been trying to teach me patience.
“Ah, a new arrival,” the man said. “I am Derkka en’Injit, apprentice to Whisperer Ezma e’Topi.”
“Whisperer.” My mouth was dry. “A whisperer here?”
“Yes, she’ll be along in a moment. Nothing interrupts her daily check of the horses, so for now you’ll have to put up with me.”
Yitti had already dropped his own satchel and was pulling out a wooden bowl and thread and bundles of herbs. “There’s no need for you to do that, Captain Yitti,” Apprentice Derkka said. “I am well able to take care of him.”
“I’m sure you are, but I inflicted the wounds, so I’ll tend them before I go.”
The apprentice’s brows rose, and getting no explanation from Yitti, he looked at me. “I challenged and lost. My name is Rah e’Torin.”
Despite the onlookers and the mutterings, he looked genuinely surprised. “Well, the famous Rah e’Torin, what a pleasure to finally meet you. That explains all the interest.” He jerked his head in the direction of the crowd. “You’re rather famous around here.”
The apprentice set his satchel down on my other side and began to unpack.
“Rah!” Tor stood over me, his mouth open like he had seen a ghost. My first thought was joy to see him safe, but a smile hurt my bruised face and I recalled the circumstances under which we had parted. His shock became a sneer. “Well,” he said. “Injured and in need of saving again. What stupid thing did you do this time?”
It was highly disrespectful, but I wasn’t a captain anymore. Wasn’t anything. Still, Yitti looked over his shoulder. “Mind how you speak there, boy,” he said.
Tor huffed a laugh, but said no more.
“It’s probably best if you lie down while I—while we see to these wounds,” Yitti said, beginning to examine each one. “I did quite a good job.”
“Yes, best to lie down now rather than risk hurting yourself if you pass out,” Derkka said. “Here, Tor, why don’t you sit and keep him entertained while we get this done.”
Tor looked like he would rather have done almost anything else, but the suggestion of an apprentice whisperer is no suggestion at all. He plonked down on the dirt beside my head with a mutinous scowl. “As you wish, Apprentice.” He saluted. “As long as it’s understood I take no pleasure in it.”
“Oh, go stick your head in a water barrel,” Yitti said.
Tor settled stiffly and opened his book. It took me a moment to recall Tor had been taught Chiltaen, but despite my curiosity, I didn’t dare ask about it. Then I couldn’t. Yitti had prised open my leg wound to see how bad it was, making the world spin. Darkness crawled in on a hundred reaching fingers, stealing me away.
“‘And he will’… or maybe it’s ‘he has a blade made… forged… by gods’… no…‘by the one god…’”
Scratching sounded near my ear. My legs were aflame. Yitti and Derkka seemed to be arguing about something, but it was Tor’s voice I latched on to. “A temple? A camp? A house? Fuck this stupid language.”
I tried to ask for water, but a dry death rattle emerged from my lips. The boy didn’t hear and I tried again, opening my eyes upon light so bright I closed them with a wince. I was still outside, the crackle of the nearby fire unchanged. Perhaps I’d been out only a few minutes.
“Oh, you’re awake, are you?” Tor said. “We seem to be making a habit of this. Not the empress stitching you up this time, so you may as well pass out again.”
I glared at him, but the face haloed in bright sunshine looked not the slightest bit contrite. “You did better when she was stitching, but I guess you wanted to impress her, huh?”
“Did I really do so wrong by you?”
Tor looked away. “You should have fought for your people, not for her.”
I let out a heavy breath, trying to ignore the tugging and burning and itching that infused my legs. “Because all Levanti are worth fighting and dying for? Even when they choose poor paths? Or because all Kisians are evil and have no right to fight for their lands now we are here?”
He stared down at the book, eyes glazed. For a moment I wondered if he would apologise. Would see my point. But Yitti shooed him aside to examine my face. The feeling it was swollen and wrong and crusted in blood kept the memory of Sett before me, smashing me into the road with furious fists.
“You’re going to have a few scars here,” Yitti said, touching split skin beneath my eye. I winced. “And maybe here.” He touched my jawline.
“But otherwise once the swelling goes down you should look your ruggedly handsome self again.”
Despite our challenge, despite our disagreement, he was trying to make me laugh. But my thoughts had caught on Sett. He had wanted me to lose, wanted Yitti to kill me. And I had killed him for it.
Yitti’s smile faded. “You didn’t do the wrong thing.”
“That’s a careful way of saying I didn’t do the right thing either.”
“Sometimes there isn’t a right thing. Now close your eyes so I can clean your cuts without burning them.”
Having both Derkka and Yitti working on my wounds was an exhausting barrage of pains, and while I didn’t pass out again, I kept my eyes closed long after it ceased being necessary. I focussed on breathing deep, steady breaths, but restlessness infected me. Gideon was in danger. The Levanti with him were in danger, and here was I lying around, useless and injured.
“Is it really necessary to redo that?” Derkka’s voice came through the gathering mire of fears.
“Yes, it needed more.”
Yitti’s words owned no disrespect, but I could imagine the apprentice’s scowl. Whisperers were the most highly trained healers, to whom all others deferred.
“I am well able to attend to his injuries properly.”
“Yes, Apprentice, but so am I. I think it ought to be tighter.”
The tension between them stretched over me, and two pairs of hands went on applying salves and stitches and bandages like two crows fighting over a corpse.
They might have continued until I had no flesh untended, had Istet not approached. “Captain,” she said, and I opened my eyes. She glanced down, but of course she wasn’t addressing me. “Captain,” she repeated. “We ought not linger here.”
“You can leave the rest to me, Captain,” Derkka said. “You cannot be afraid he is going to die now.”
“I wasn’t worried about that.” Curt words, edged in the anger I’d seen back in Mei’lian. Smoke had risen around us as we fought for the Second Swords, his reason the right one, mine far more selfish.
“Yitti, will your path take you near Kogahaera?” I said.
“No, rather as far away from it as we can go.”
He was shoving things back into his satchel, and I gripped his arm. “Please, Yitti,” I said. “He’s in danger. They all are. Please. I can’t get there like this.”
Yitti stood, pulling from my hold. “I have to go.”
I struggled up onto my elbows, but could rise no farther. “Yitti—”
“No, don’t get up, you fool; you’re being held together by bandages.”
“You’ll help?”
He grunted a noncommittal sound and, slinging his satchel over his shoulder, strode away.
“Yitti!”
I tried to rise, but Derkka pushed me back as the world spun. By the time it stopped, Yitti was gone.
“No, the one with the t is ‘bird,’” Tor mumbled beside me, following it with Chiltaen words. Empress Miko’s inflection had been different, but she had muttered to herself a lot too.
“Iidoa,” I said, the first Kisian word that came to mind. “Iidoa lo kaan.”
The empress had greeted everyone with some variant of those words, as had Leo. Tor looked over the top of his book. “Esh lidoosa ma sa mara.”
He rolled his eyes at my blank stare. “After all this, you speak to me in Kisian? You wished me good fortune, so I told you to get fucked. To fuck a sea urchin, more precisely.”
He lifted the book only to immediately lower it again. “Did she teach you that? Or did you just pick it up while following her like she was a mare in heat?”
She had been so warm beneath me that night in the cart, her breath dancing across my cheek, her lips a temptation away.
I made no answer, but Tor laughed. “Missed your chance, did you? Of course you did; if there’s one thing you’re good at, it’s messing things up. The phrase you want is Ao gasho te remeste mot, kaa lo kiish ao falachu sho loa-da.”
“Why? What does that mean?”
“It means ‘I can’t stop thinking about you, please take pity on me and take me to your bed,’ though I might have used rather coarser words. I am but a humble barbarian after all.”
A laugh made my throat hurt and sounded like grinding river rocks, but it spread a reluctant grin across Tor’s face. “Damn it, Rah, just let me hate you.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
Derkka cleared his throat. “You should let him rest now, Tor. I’m all done.”
Horse Whisperer Ezma e’Topi stared across the fire. After her apprentice had finished his ministrations, I had dozed for a while, left alone in the centre of the camp while Levanti went about their tasks. When the sky darkened toward evening, Tor covered a pair of saddles in a pile of old horse blankets to prop me up, the young man surprisingly loath to leave my side.
Ezma was a tall woman, her jawbone headpiece making her even taller. I had once asked Whisperer Jinnit if it was heavy, and he had said it weighed the same as the job’s responsibility, but less than its honour, and I had not bothered to ask again. He had always stooped beneath its weight, but Ezma showed no sign of bending. She stood straight and proud and strong, a true leader in a time when the fractured Swordherds needed leadership more than ever.
“Rah e’Torin,” she said, a touch to her long hair the only sign of ill-ease she showed. “A pleasure to meet a man I have heard so much about.”
It ought to have been a gratifying speech, but it made a sick feeling squirm inside me. I had done all I could to avoid horse whisperers since returning to my herd, everything about them reminding me of the time I had spent training, of the days I’d wandered the plains alone and the shame that had grown daily heavier since.
I swallowed all of it down in an attempt to look confident. “Whisperer,” I said, lifting tired arms to salute. “Forgive me not getting up.”
“You’re badly wounded?”
Derkka had surely explained my injuries already. “Not so much badly as in far too many places.”
“Inflicted in a challenge, I understand.”
Food was cooking and Levanti gathered around the other fires, but as she spoke I became aware all activity had quietened, even those barely within earshot stilling to listen.
“Yes.” I thought of Sett, of his head rolling onto the road, and immediately tried not to think of him again. Nor of how Gideon would react to the news his blood brother was dead. At my order.
Ezma took a few steps closer and sat down, not quite across the fire like in a challenge, but close enough that my heartbeat sped to an anxious pace. No smile, no welcome, just a hard, determined look I did not like. Surely I had not been there long enough to earn her dislike.
“I have heard much about you, Rah e’Torin,” she said, her tone friendly enough. “There are even some members of your former Swordherd here. And Tor, of course.”
She nodded at the young man still sitting at my side, and he saluted.
“All of them,” she went on, “have quite differing opinions about you, and I find myself unsure whether you are a threat to my people or not.”
“Your people?”
Ezma waved a hand. “A figure of speech. These people.”
Horse whisperers were our guiding hands, the last bastions of law and health, able to be consulted about everything from where to winter to the choice of breeding stock, but the one thing they weren’t and could never be were leaders. They were solitary, owning no herd allegiance, only responsibilities.
They weren’t meant to live within a herd, and watching the way others reacted to her arrival—casting down their gazes and gathering around her—I could see why. Levanti society was pragmatic, no one given power that could not be easily taken away. Being good at your job was requisite to keeping it, yet here was an exiled horse whisperer being treated the way Kisians treated their empress. The way Chiltaens had treated Leo. Like a walking god.
She accepted a plate of food without thanks. Com
fortable in the knowledge of her entitlement.
My ill-ease deepened.
“Tell me, Rah e’Torin,” she said, setting the plate on her knees. “What do you want? Do you want to return to Kogahaera when you are well and serve Emperor Gideon? Do you want to go home? Or do you want to inspire your own uprising of Levanti to take over new lands?”
“I want to save my people.”
“That’s the same answer Gideon would give. The same answer I would give. What does saving your people look like to you?”
I could tell her about Gideon. About the Kisian plans to use us as the Chiltaens had, but doubt itched at the back of my mind. I met her questioning gaze and tried to tell myself my distrust of her was built on my dislike of Whisperer Jinnit, but imagining him sitting with the conclave and judging Ezma unworthy of her position steadied me.
“I once believed ideology could save us,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “That all we had to do was hold to our ways and our honour, and that would be enough. It had always worked before. But did it work because it was the best way to survive? Or because we had never truly been tested?”
She did not interrupt when I paused, just waited expectantly.
“I would no longer make any decision based on ideology,” I said. “When a different decision could save lives. So you ask me what saving my people looks like to me? It looks like as many of them as possible getting out of this mess alive, whatever it takes.”
In the silence, I became aware of how many people had gathered to listen, and as I was unable to see their faces beyond the firelight, it was even more like a challenge, each of us speaking our arguments so the gathered Levanti could vote upon a leader. But she was a horse whisperer and I was no one.
“That is not very enlightening, Rah e’Torin,” Ezma said after a time. “You are, in fact, an unpredictable horse. A troublemaker. Our ways and tenets and ideologies are important because they bring people together for a common cause, and unite—”
“So does the desire to survive.”
She lifted her brows, the pair of them vanishing into the shadow thrown by her headpiece. “I do not appreciate being interrupted, Rah e’Torin. You are not a captain here. You have no standing at all. I ask these questions because you have a history of going against your herd masters’ orders, and I wish to understand why.”
