Emrath Needleslay, as soon as she received word Rainak Redfist had been sighted in Karnagh, had sent messages to every clan. By the time she walked the Connaight Crae to the Standing Stones, those who could not stomach more of Dunkast Ferulaine’s witchery and high-handedness were well upon their way, and the summons, echoing through smaller Stones in every village and town with columns of pink phosphorescence, merely quickened their pace. Riding through the drifts, braving the cold just before the deepcrack-freeze when trees in the deepest forests sometimes explode as their sap turns to ice all at once, the Highlands rose against the Ferulaine.
Banners snapped and fluttered upon cold, smoke-freighted wind, and the bastard clans poured from the city’s gates to meet the challenge. But they were weary from the cold and sleepless nights spent wondering if the ghosts of Kalburn would choose their bolthole to strike next, and their lord’s most fearsome warriors were deep in the choke-tangled streets of the Old City chasing a tired, wounded foreign sellsword. By the time the Black Brothers heeded their master’s silent call, the bastard clans had been broken between the hammer of the fullborn and the anvil of Kalburn’s ancient walls.
No quarter was given, and those who had wished for a seat at the great clan-tables died in the snows. The siege of Kalburn was broken; the Needleslay rode from her Keep upon an albino torkascruagh with Rainak Redfist upon a black one at her side, and none dared call him a kinslayer. Now it was common knowledge that the accusation had been groundless, now it was held to be self-evident that he, and no other, was the Connaight Crae.
I heard of this later, of course. I lay, fever-wracked, on a narrow pallet buried in the earth-heated depths of the Keep, as Gavridar Janaire sought to hold me, and my s’tarei, to life.
Dunkast Ferulaine’s baggage train was taken, and there was much rejoicing over the chests of pale gold stamped with wolf’s head.
The sorcerer himself was nowhere to be found.
Sink Alone
I passed in and out of a deep, thundering red-black cloud. Lightning was white bone, pain-paths sparking, Power coruscating through the halls of a ruined keep. My chest was a cracked egg, a riven stone, a shattered helm.
“…lucky,” someone said, in sharp, clear, sweet G’mai. “On the other side, she would be gone.”
“It hurts.” A ragged inhale. I knew this voice. It was Darik, and I felt only a weary relief that he was alive before pulse and breath both halted. The cloud turned deep and thick as the Pesh alcoholic syrup that passes for wine, toothrot-sweet and capable of inducing vomit if not heavily watered. They drink it straight, but a foreigner, not acclimated, does not dare.
I lifted out of myself, a bird with white wings and a blood-dripping beak freed from its carrion kill at last.
Clash of steel, the battle yell caroming and sliding between my dry lips, the screams and howls of the wounded. Rik's face, glazed with blood and battle-fury. "Fall back! Get back, woman! Fall back!"
The horrible whistling sound, Rik's agonized scream as the quarrel buried itself in his chest. I screamed with him, grabbed his surcoat, and dragged him backward as four more crossbow bolts whistled through the air, thocking solidly down in blood-soaked earth.
He had taken the quarrel for me.
"Leave. . .me!" Blood striped his lips, he spoke under a chaos of sudden screaming. "That's an. . .order, Kaia!"
"Like hell I will!" I screamed, dragging him with hysterical strength, my boots slipping in blood-mired earth, grass trampled, the ululating yells of the tribesmen growing ever closer as I dropped him and drew my bow. The Danhai would not take either of us today.
Not if I could gainsay them. I nocked the first arrow, my dotani quivering in the earth where I'd driven it; the standard of my division-of-one. "No." Through gritted teeth, drawing back the bow as the shapes became visible through the smoke, my jaw aching with tension, "I shall not leave you, Ammerdahl Rikyat, ordered or not. You owe me at dice."
Then the first rider, yelling as he bore down on us at a gallop, longsword out. The arrow, released and whistling, bow sounding thrice more before I had to drop it and grab my dotani, because though I'd killed four of them there were six left, they were too close and I had nothing but my sword and my fury to protect the man lying wounded behind me.
It would have to be enough.
I had carried Rikyat through the mud and blood to the healers’s tent. Now I knew what it felt like, each step a grinding, driving the bolt in deeper. One quarrel for him, another for me. Was it luck, or a balancing of a merchant’s scale after I left him to die?
My luck will turn against me, Kaia!
Then he should not have betrayed me. And yet, I felt only weary unsurprise.
You cannot escape what you are. I had fought it, but in the end, I had chosen my life and my temper, and paid for both.
“No!” Janaire yelled, in knife-sharp G’mai. “Breathe, you ungrateful bitch! Breathe!”
Convulsing, blood and lung-fluid spuming from my lips, racked on a cold pallet, and the pain, Mother Moon the agony, a spear in my chest turning, turning, grinding, splinters drawn free of the wound and blood welling, Power biting at torn flesh and knitting lung, windpipe, bone, and pain-path together, muscle twitching and sealing itself against invasion, skin pulled free and flapping grotesquely before melded to flesh underneath. It was cold, and it hurt, another fountain of fluid choked from mouth and nose, stinging.
I could not be dead. It hurt too badly.
More Power, forcing bone to regrow at many times its usual pace, a deep stabbing restless ache as if I were a stripling again with the stretching pains. My ribs creaked like trees under a heavy wind, and the noises I made were a whipped animal’s hopeless pleading. I did not care if I died, as long as the pain stopped.
It did not stop. It went on, and on, and on, and each time I screamed another voice rose with mine, hopeless and hoarse. They say sharing halves a sorrow, but there was no halving this bloody, foaming, sharptooth sea.
Finally, the waves of grinding, furious black pain became a little smaller, more evenly spaced. They receded, leaving me gasping down frigid, knifelike air, and the oppressive weight of Power—two s’tarei and a fully trained adai spending force recklessly—slid away, too.
Kaia. Ragged at the edges, a single word I no longer knew the meaning of. Something behind me, propping me up. Arms around me, and a soft damp warmth against my hair was a mouth that for a moment, I thought was my own. My chest ached, abraded from within and without, and another sea rose to swamp me. This one was dark and cold, and I crawled into its embrace gratefully.
And yet, even then, I did not sink alone.
Not Today
It was a sevenday, all told, of Gavridar Janaire at my side night and day, Darik holding me to life as I convulsed, Atyarik feeding Janaire all the Power he could reach, and Gavrin and Diyan running to fetch bandages, dried herbs, great steaming mugs of sofin, vast platters of food both D’ri and Atyarik plunged into to gain energy for their physical frames, both feeding Janaire vital force as she, in the deathly dream of a healer working at full gallop, plunged her hands into my chest and forced flesh, bone, and nerve-strings to reknit themselves.
Redfist took his turn with bringing the food, stood by the door with his big hands dangling and his hair loosed from its club. After the third day, he appeared with smears of their crimson chalk-paint upon his cheekbones, as is the custom with a Skaialan with kin at death’s door or just past it. They hold weeping in some disdain; the paint—they call it wohedlach—is their open mark of rage or grief. The men paint themselves for battle, and the women for childbirth or when those children have met some misfortune.
When my body could breathe without Janaire’s constant prompting, when the danger of infection from bolt-splinters drawn from the gaping wound was past, and when I lay in the lethargic trance of the newly healed, Atyarik carried Janaire to the room given to their use and they both collapsed to sleep for a day, a night, and another day. Propped upon Darik in a small ska
una room heated by fitful earthfires, his knees on either side of me, my back to his chest, inclined so my lungs would not fill afresh with fluid, I lay as if dead.
On the seventh day, I stirred. There was a glaring pink scar piercing my right breast, and its companion on my back among other marks of battle twitched as my breathing deepened. Bandages crusted with dried blood and lungfluid crackled when I shifted. My right side cramped in slow waves, muscles protesting both over-activity and forced rest. My fingers began to twitch, then my toes. A close, stale, damp warmth filled this tiny room—a skauna, the benches removed and a pallet set against the far back corner. Someone was breathing into my hair, slow regular swells, and my eyelids were almost glued shut. A single candle, lit a half-mark ago, burned in another corner, shielded by a bowl-glass bell.
I longed for a bath. For chaabi and flatbread. For a session with Ch’li the iron-fingered in Hain, her hands kneading the aches out of every muscle. For a pot of mead, or even haka, and a game of nothing more interesting or dangerous than Festival dice.
Darik did not move as I slithered from his arms. Deeply asleep, his head tilted back and his mouth slightly open, his cheekbones standing starkly out and his hair still Anjalismir-trimmed, he was the picture of a battle-weary s’tarei. Blood—my blood— soaked his clothes, and I winced. I could not smell the room because my nose was, like my eyes, full of crusted matter, and for that I was grateful.
At least I had not soiled myself. Empty is the way to wholeness, some Hain swordsmen say, but it is also the way to make certain your trews will not be full should night-hunting or rooftop-running end badly.
The stone floor felt wonderfully cool against my overheated palms. I half crawled, half dragged myself closer to the candle in its glass belly-home, craving light. My legs would not quite work properly, and my knees felt as bruised as the rest of me. I propped myself against the wall and stared at the candle, lifting my hands and examining them when I could find the will to do so.
Calluses from daily practice, thin white knife-scars, my nails trimmed or bitten short. Dirt and dried blood grimed into the creases, the lines Pesh fortune tellers with strings of glittering sequins over their faces claim to read. It took several moments of rest before I could scrub at my face with both palms. The rents in my sherte and jerkin flapped loosely; I was wasted as a dreamweed-chewer.
Healers say the body knows what to do, they merely aid its natural yearning to wholeness. I tweezed aside torn cloth, touched the scar bisecting my right breast, its nipple slightly oval now instead of round. A pang shot through me, the body remembering. I did not think Skaialan healers skilled enough to deal with such a thing. No, only a Haiian or a G’mai adai could possibly have performed such a feat, and even then, not with certainty.
Was it lucky that Janaire and Atyarik had followed, or not? I rested my head against the stone wall and looked at Darik. We are bred to the twinning, we G’mai, and do not survive its breaking. And yet, perhaps one of his will could? Would it have left him free of the burden of a flawed adai?
At least if I had died I would not be called upon to respond to this. It was one thing, to carry a fellow sellsword to the healers’ tents after he had taken a crossbow quarrel for me.
It was quite another to have Janaire save my own life.
I sat in that tiny stone cube, sweating and shivering, my braids half-undone and my skin crawling as I shook like a vavir addict denied the weed. For the first time in a very long while—many a season indeed—I had no idea what I should do next. The silence was all around me, inside me, even the small sound of the candleflame swallowed by a cold far deeper than any even the Highlands could produce. My hands turned into fists. The back of my head met the stone, softly at first, then with more force. Even that produced no noise, just a strange soft sensation down my aching back, briefly halting at the unseen scar where the crossbow quarrel had first met my skin.
A faint gleam showed under Darik’s eyelids. His arms twitched, tensed, and he lunged fully into consciousness and up into a fighting crouch at the same moment. He reached for a hilt, but his hand closed on empty air.
I knew the feeling. My ribs flickered, lungs laboring though I was doing nothing but sitting, and the candleflame in its protective carapace shuddered. Everything flickered, but when the world steadied I found D’ri’s forehead against mine as he crouched before me, his hands warm and familiar around my own, sour breath mingling with mine and the cold cracked in half, falling away in useless sheets and scarves.
“All is well,” he repeated, softly. “All is well, Kaialitaa, little sharpness.”
I found my voice, hoarse and cracked but still mine. “The others?” A clot in my throat, I coughed to expel it, could not even spit. “Janaire? Atyarik? Diyan?”
“All well. The siege is broken, the freeze is upon us, there is nothing to do but wait.”
That was welcome news. And yet, it did not comfort me. “Wait?”
“Yes.” He leaned forward, his hands tensing, biting mine. “Atyarik blames himself, the minstrel is long-faced, the barbarian quarrels with the queen here daily. His temper is almost as short as yours.” He was hoarse too, a painful scraping. Screaming in tandem with your adai will break even the deepest voice, I suppose. “The Gavridar courted mind-scarring, but is resting comfortably.”
I winced, wished again I could spit. The mass in my throat was uncomfortable, to say the least. It reeked of copper, and its edges were suspiciously soft. “You are angry.”
He did not bother to grace such an observation with a nod. “You are alive. It is enough.” He drew away, rocking back upon his heels. His boots creaked, filthy with dry-caked roofdust.
I did not expect as much, certainly. “Is it?” The dream had changed, left me witless and gasping, a fish pulled to shore.
“How could it not be?” He lifted my dirty hands, examined them minutely. I tried to pull away, but he did not let me and I was weak as a newborn. “I have made a vow, adai’mi.”
“A vow?” I repeated his inflection, too. Soft, precise, informative. It almost hurt to hear him speak in such a manner.
“I have sworn, upon your name, to hunt down this Ferulaine.” A foreign word in the middle of G’mai, and his tone made it a curse. “I will take his head, Kaia. That should please you.”
“What would please me is a bath,” I whispered. “And some chai, and us safe in some other place than this. Darik…”
“I do not care for my own life, Kaia, but yours I will not be careless of.” He pressed his lips to my knuckles, hot shame flooding me.
I could not tell if it was mine, or his. “Careless is not the word for you,” I managed. The cold silence had left me, and for once, I was glad of its absence instead of craving its clarity.
“One day I shall ask you what the word is.” He let go, and stood, a little more slowly than usual. At least my own physical weariness blunted my feeling of his. “But not today.”
“D’ri—”
But he was already stalking for the door. I slumped against the wall, and began the laborious process of trying to haul myself upright.
I could not. I could only rest against the stone, hearing his ruined voice echo in the hall as he demanded food, fresh clothing, and oil for his adai.
Climb to Me
My legs were tremble-weak as a new colt’s, and threatened to spill me sideways each time I gained some approximation of standing. Redfist, with his smeared cheeks, carried me up stone stairs to the half-familiar room Darik and I shared, our gear piled in the corner and the window well-shuttered. I could not even clean myself, D’ri had to attend me in a skauna. I am not given much to embarrassment, but having to be set upon a privy like a child near induced a measure of blushing. Afterward, Darik vanished to attend to his own cleansing, and probably some manner of fresh nourishment.
Tucked under a heavy weight of blankets, I stared at dark ceiling beams and white plaster, listening to blackrock and wood burn in the wide fireplace. Footsteps and voices in the hall
outside kept me clinging to wakefulness; that, and the gnawing under my ribs despite all the sweetened porridge and sofin I could keep in my shrunken stomach.
When the door opened, after a brief token rap, I expected one of the G’mai. Instead, it was Gavrin, a lumpish brown woolen hat clamped over his shag-lengthening hair and his half-Pesh complexion turned ruddy by the chill. He carried a Skaialan gittern, a fine instrument of mellow inlaid wood glowing with several applications of rosy varnish. His boots were new, too, and deep with plush fur. He even looked a bit taller, and broader in the shoulder.
The North agreed with him, apparently. The only thing missing was his usual shy smile, or the small duck of his head when his gaze met mine. He settled in the rude chair next to the bedside, the gittern held close, and began the process of tuning it. His hands, too large and raw-looking for anything else, became fluid and graceful with strings and pegs underneath them.
The fire crackled. I tried to summon a smile. None came. “Another sea-ballad?” I croaked. Mother Moon, save us all from such torment.
He shook his head, the ear-flaps of his new cap moving uneasily. His throat-apple bobbed as he swallowed. Gavrin plucked at the strings, a liquid stream echoing in the dark well of the gittern’s belly. It was a plaintive tune, the thumping rhythm of Skaialan reels slowed and set sideways until muted and mournful.
Then, our lutebanger began to sing in Pesh, the long-crying, moaning tongue of his childhood, and I stiffened in my bed.
He sang of Kaia Steelflower, within who lay a true heart that would give all she had for a friend. That helped me smile, a pained grimace. If this got out, I would have no end of castaways and limpets clogging my keel.
Steelflower in Snow Page 18