by Kate Elliott
Strand Five (revealed): Charles Soerensen meant to lead a rebellion against the Chapalii Empire, and so Tess (as Prince of Jeds) had allied herself with Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, the leader of the united jaran tribes.
Strand Six (concealed): The jaran, Jeds, the lands the jaran had already conquered, all lay on an interdicted planet called Rhui, in the Delta Pavonis system. Charles needed the mostly untapped resources of Rhui for his rebellion. To this end, he and Tess had agreed to do what they could to aid the jaran in uniting as much of the western continent of Rhui under one authority—jaran authority—as possible, so that when they needed the resources of Rhui a decade or a century from now, these resources could be swiftly commandeered.
Strand Seven (revealed): Tess was married to Ilya Bakhtiian.
Strand Eight (concealed): Well, she really was married to him. That had happened before the rest of the plan sprang to life. But she had concealed her true origins from him. He didn’t know she came from another planet. He didn’t even know that he lived on a planet, much less that there were other planets with other life or that the universe existed on any but an abstract, philosophical scale even as it rested within the hands of the gods themselves.
By what right did she keep from him, from Sonia, from all of them, knowledge of the stars? She could list the rationales easily enough, one, two, three:
If she hadn’t come here, accidentally, in the first place, they would never have known or suspected anyway; their technology was medieval and their mind-set, however flexible, however laudable in many ways, was primitive.
If Ilya, the greatest leader his people had ever known, knew the truth and how inconsequential it made the vision that had driven him, even before Tess had arrived, to unite the jaran and begin his conquest of khaja—of settled—lands, it would destroy him; it would cut out his heart.
And anyway, now that she and Charles and the rest of the cabal were set on this plan, they had to proceed in complete secrecy; they could not afford to arouse Chapalii interest in any fashion; and so, since Rhui was interdicted, it must stay that way, and there must be no awkward questions asked or betraying traffic to and from the planet other than that initiated years before when Charles had first established a foothold here as a kind of sanctuary from his duties as the first human duke, the first and only human to be granted a rank within the labyrinthine imperial Chapalii hierarchy.
But she still wondered. Should she tell them the truth? And if so, when? And if not, how long could she stay with them, truly? Because in the end she would have to return to Earth.
“Mama! Mama!”
Tess smiled, turning to greet her son. Yuri’s enthusiastic hug almost bowled her over. She laughed and steadied herself with one hand on the grass. With an impish grin, Yuri untangled himself from her and regarded Sonia gravely.
“I beg your pardon, Aunt Sonia,” he said, but Sonia merely smiled in answer and kept weaving. Yuri squatted down to watch her shuttle, and Tess just studied him, this wonderful boy whom she loved with an unsettlingly fierce passion, he and his older sister. Yuri was a sturdy five-year-old, still growing out of his baby fat. He had the world’s most equable temperament, quite unlike either of his parents, and a penchant for silliness. Sitting so still, though, his gentle child’s profile showed him serious and intent.
“Where is Natalia?” asked Tess.
“I don’t know,” he replied with a younger child’s blithe irresponsibility. “What pattern are you weaving, Aunt Sonia?”
“The Moon’s Horns,” she answered.
He grunted, content, and slipped onto his knees in order to watch her more closely. The rising sun shone gold lights through his brown hair. He fit there, beside Sonia, with uncanny ease. At five, he had greater patience for weaving than Tess had, but she was used to patterns taking shape more swiftly, nets and structures that she could build and dismantle at whim. She was trying to learn patience, but she hadn’t mastered it yet.
Instead, Tess rose, touched Sonia on the shoulder and gave Yuri a kiss, and walked down the hill toward camp. The wind fled in waves along the grass, great ripples darkening the ground for a moment as they spread and, at last, faded into the distance. Far off, she saw the amorphous mass of the horse herd and farther still, a glint of white marked the edge of the grazing line of sheep.
A hundred sounds drifted on the breeze, plaiting her footsteps into a greater whole. Tess hummed to herself. She smelled meat cooking. A hawk screamed above, and she tilted her head back to watch it soar on the cold blue bell of the sky. Already it was warm. By afternoon the camp would be well sunk into summer stupor; that was why everyone was so active now, in the cool of the morning. The bright spiral of the tents wound out before her, losing shape as she neared the bottom of the rise and the camp rose up and took shape as an inviting maze before her.
A whoop startled her out of her thoughts. She held her ground against the charge of three horsemen. Girls, to be more exact, on what were supposed to be quiet old sleeper horses. Her daughter grinned at her as she galloped by, chasing her reckless cousin. Tess winced. She could not get used to that child riding that way at such an age. She wasn’t even eight yet.
At a more sedate pace, riding a kind of distant herd on the trio, came another rider. He pulled up beside Tess and swung down in order to give her a kiss.
“Your daughter is wild,” she said accusingly.
“She is not!” Ilya laughed. “She is merely determined. Lara is the wild one, as you well know. Natalia and Sofia are just trying to keep up with her.”
“Lara is wild because her father spoils her,” said Tess, determined to have a pleasant argument with her husband.
“Just as I spoil Natalia?” asked Ilya. Then he grinned, knowing full well what she was about. He caught her face between his hands and stared soulfully down at her. “No more than I spoil you, my heart.”
Tess rolled her eyes. “You’re impossible to argue with when you’re in this kind of a mood.” But she kissed him anyway and then greeted his stallion, Kriye, who nosed at her sleeve, affronted by her lack of attention to him. He was an incredibly vain horse, as he, of course, had every right to be, and smart enough to know what he deserved.
They walked along, following in the general direction the girls had taken.
“I saw a rider coming in,” Tess said. “What news?”
“He rode from Yaroslav Sakhalin’s army,” said Ilya. “Sakhalin has received submission from the prince of Hereti-Manas, but he has reports that the prince of the neighboring land of Gelasti is raising an army, perhaps with Mircassian soldiers among them.”
“Does the Mircassian king intend to support Gelasti?” Then she shrugged. “Well, why not? He hopes they will act as a buffer. If you are forced to waste your strength on Gelasti and the neighboring principalities, then it will go harder once the main force of Mircassia’s army takes the field against you.”
“It isn’t that simple,” began Ilya. She gave him a look. “But I feel sure,” he added hastily, “that you have more to say.”
“No. Not right now. I want to speak again with the merchant from Greater Manas who arrived here last month. The better we understand the relationships between the princely houses of the Yos princedoms, the better we will be able to exploit what seems to me are any number of internecine quarrels within their ranks.”
“Spoken like your brother,” said Ilya softly.
“No doubt,” replied Tess dryly. She felt a stab of guilt. She much preferred war in the abstract, discussing it, directing it, from out here on the plains, never having to see her words put into action. “Did Vasha send a letter?”
Ilya’s shoulders tensed. “Just a few lines, that said nothing.”
“And?” she asked, hearing the silence he did not want to fill.
“No mention of him by Sakhalin at all, but appended to Vasha’s letter was a lengthy diatribe from Katerina on how badly he’s getting along.” He paused. Tess waited him out. Finally, on a let out breath, he finished. “I s
houldn’t have let him go.”
“You should have. Ilya, he had to leave, to go out on his own. You can’t keep him in camp. He has to grow up, to become his own man. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise?” Ilya demanded. This was not the argument Tess had wanted, but she braced herself to carry on with it anyway. “He will never be accepted as my heir in any case, Tess, so what does it matter?”
“He must be accepted as himself. Whatever else comes, will come. We can’t know what that will be.”
“He doesn’t get along well with other people.”
“You have been protecting him, Ilya. He has to learn to fend for himself.”
“He can’t fend for himself. He’s too young. He’s hotheaded and he plays the prince’s son too often.”
“He’s a good boy, Ilya. You know that, damn it. I admit he has too high a sense of his own consequence at times, but he’s willing to learn. But for God’s sake, he’s nineteen now. He’ll never become a man unless you are willing to let go of him.”
“But what if he—?”
“You have to let him make his own mistakes!”
Ilya relapsed into a stubborn silence. Irritated, Tess eyed him, feeling equally stubborn. After a bit, she began to enjoy the sight of him fulminating. He did it so splendidly.
His lips quirked. “I don’t want to argue with you,” he said in a stifling tone.
“You don’t want to, but you like to,” she retorted instantly. “Well, my love, Vasha is riding with Sakhalin’s army now. He’s out of your hands for the time being.” She forcefully restrained herself from adding: And it’s just as well.
“I’d better go see what’s happened to those girls,” said Ilya, choosing evasive action.
But an instant later, two riders came pounding back to meet them. A flushed Natalia, flanked by an even redder Sofia, pulled up before them.
“Lara’s broken her arm!” Natalia announced in a satisfied voice. “She tried to jump old Flatrump over the hide that Grandfather Niko has staked out, and he balked and threw her. Serves her right.”
“How charitable of you, Talia,” said Tess. “I did not, of course, see you following after her at the same ungodly pace.”
“I didn’t try to jump!” protested Natalia. “Mother! I’m not stupid.” She patted her bay on the neck. “She’s too stiff to jump.”
“Who balked?” asked Ilya. “Niko?”
Natalia giggled. “No. But he’s scolding her right now.”
“And setting her arm at the same time, I hope.” Tess sighed. “Talia, let me tell her mother. Please.”
Natalia bit down so hard on a grin that her cheeks puckered in. Even Sofia, a preternaturally solemn child, smiled. “It’s too late. Her father saw it all.”
“What did he say?” asked Tess, dreading the worst. Sofia giggled and clapped a hand over her mouth. Natalia preened for a moment, well aware that she held important information like a great treasure. She had her father’s black hair and dark coloring, and spirited eyes. She wasn’t really wild, but it terrified Tess that she didn’t seem scared of anything. “He said that he’ll have to get her a real horse, one that won’t balk.”
“Gods,” muttered Tess.
“Father…” began Natalia coaxingly.
“No,” said Ilya.
“But—”
“No. When you are ready, not before.”
Natalia, thank goodness, did not pout. “Oh, all right,” she said, all reasonableness now. “Lara made a fool of herself, anyway.”
“A practical attitude,” mumbled Tess. The two girls rode off to spread the news, looking gleeful. “It’s true that you spoil your children,” Tess commented, “but unlike Feodor Grekov, at least you know where to draw the line.”
“Your flattery is boundless, my wife.”
“You and Kriye are very alike, you know. You both demand a certain amount of praise. Otherwise you grow peevish.” But she had made the mistake of amusing him. He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes, playing at modesty while she flattered him in tone although certainly not in words. He knew how to look at her just so. Her heart took that familiar awkward lurch and she smiled, agreeably overwhelmed by the sudden warmth of her feelings, and shook her head. “Oh, stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?” he asked innocently.
She ran a hand up his sleeve, brushed under his beard with her knuckles, and traced his lips with the tips of her fingers. His eyes sparked. “Never mind,” she said softly, knowing he knew she was laughing at him. After twelve years, she felt so comfortable with him on this level that it was as if she had always known him. It was the same way with the children: They were now so completely a part of her consciousness of the world that she could scarcely recall the day when they did not exist.
She just held his hand for a moment. Even out here, such simple shows of affection might be considered unseemly. Then she dropped his hand and turned to face the camp. “We’d better go stem the tide which is no doubt swelling even now.”
Ilya raised dark eyebrows and examined the vast sprawl of the camp. “I’m sure if it was quiet enough we could hear Nadine roundly cursing Feodor for all the ills of the world, not to mention Lara’s wildness.”
“She’s such a sweet girl, though. Most of the time.”
“But aren’t all of us like a fine weaving? The pattern the world sees often hides the threads.” Tess stared, his words were so close to what she had been thinking earlier. He had one hand on Kriye’s withers, and he stared over the horse’s shoulders toward camp, that huge, living entity that was itself an unfinished, ever-changing pattern. “We don’t see the warp and the weft that created us, but only the bright design. And some, like Lara, are woven in two faces, a different one on each side of the weaving.”
Was he thinking of her as he spoke? Did he suspect how much she was keeping from him? Tess wasn’t sure that she wanted to know the answer to those questions.
CHAPTER TWO
With Yaroslav Sakhalin’s Army
THE RIM OF THE sun crested the eastern hills and flooded the clouds striping the horizon with a pale light. Vassily Kireyevsky shaded his eyes and looked down at the villa. It was a typical Yossian nobleman’s house: a great house with a central courtyard ringed by a wooden palisade. Outbuildings and livestock pens lay within the palisade, but the fields that fed the inhabitants were outside the protecting wall. A barred gate marked one wall. Four towers studded the corners. In the central courtyard two women emerged through a door and carried buckets out to the well to draw water.
“It’s well fortified,” said Stefan casually, leaning his chin on his arms where they rested on dirt. His tone irritated Vasha. Next thing, he would say that the whole expedition was foolhardy.
The three boys lay close together on a spine of rock on a ridge overlooking the villa. Behind them, at the steep base of the hill, Ivan held onto the horses, his duty as the youngest of the four.
“We don’t have to get into the house,” Vasha pointed out. “We only have to get past the palisade in order to get to the horse pens.
“Well worth the risk,” said Stefan sarcastically, since even from this height they could see that the ponies and horses confined within the pen were the usual sorry excuse for mounts that the khaja bred.
“We can manage without you,” retorted Vasha, stung. But Stefan didn’t stir, and would not. He and Vasha had been the best of friends for too long now for him to abandon Vasha, especially since he had volunteered to come along just as enthusiastically as Ivan and Arkady had.
“Look!” said Arkady in a sharp whisper.
Out of the east came a rider, galloping. But Arkady was looking southwest. In the distance, four wagons jerked and pitched along a rutted road, whipped along at a brisk pace, aiming for the villa. Four armed men marched alongside the wagons. A flag went up on one of the villa’s towers, and the palisade gate swung open just as the rider pounded up and entered.
At once, activity erupted throughout the compound. Men yok
ed cattle to wagons. Two girls at the bird coops fought feathers and flapping wings to cage the birds inside tiny pens. A trio of boys linked the horses up on strings and led them out to the big gate. Women streamed in and out of the great door leading into the villa, bearing chests and bundles of clothing. It all looked quite disorganized and frantic. A child sat in the dirt beside the door and wailed.
“If that rider’s brought news that the jaran army is advancing,” said Stefan, “then we’d better go back.”
“Not before we get a prize to take with us,” said Vasha stubbornly.
Stefan shot him a look but mercifully said nothing more. It was all very well to advise caution, but Vasha knew that Stefan was as frustrated as he was, too young to ride with the army, too old to be satisfied to stay in camp. Vassily had seen khaja boys—men—led in as prisoners or fallen on the field of battle who were no older than he was. And Stefan’s twin sister Elena, and Vasha’s own cousin Katerina, had already ridden with the archers; of course, they were already women even if they were all nineteen; it was different for them.
“But if they’ve news of the army,” said Arkady suddenly, “then they won’t expect us to be here. Look at them run around. They must think they have time to escape.” Sharp-eyed, he squinted toward the villa. “Besides the four on foot, I only see two archers in the northeast tower and one other khaja with a spear. Only that messenger is armed and mounted, and he just has a short sword. It should be easy to steal some of those horses.”
“What do you think those other wagons are?” asked Stefan, jerking his head toward the four wagons that approached from the southwest. “Why are they guarded?”
“What does it matter?” asked Arkady. “Only women ride in wagons anyway. And khaja women don’t know archery.”
Vasha studied the situation a moment longer. From this height, he surveyed the fields that stretched out around the palisade. At the base of the ridge, a line of trees rimmed a stream that flowed down from the heights.
“Come on.” He scooted backward from the rim. Jumping to his feet, he leapt down the slope, his boots sliding on shale as he picked up speed. Arkady followed, falling flat out once in his haste and rising with a grin. Stefan picked his way down more carefully.