by Kate Elliott
“What is it?” he asked softly, slipping an arm more firmly around her, gathering her closer against him.
The idea of asking him not to go was so ludicrous that she smiled wryly and kissed him again, murmuring, “I love you” several times in order to make him understand how much she did love him. And at least, moving there among the pillows, she knew without a doubt that he understood what was in her heart.
So at dawn the next day the army rode out, twenty units of a thousand soldiers each, half of them archers, and of those archers, a full third were young men a year older than Vasha who had trained with saber and bow. That first day, Tess could not bear to let Natalia and Yuri out of her sight. But there were the two cylinders from Charles to distract her, there were administrative and judicial disputes in Sarai to oversee, and, five days after the army had left, a cryptic message from Cara Hierakis: “Coming north. Expect me any time within the next sixty days.”
Galina Orzhekov gave birth to a healthy infant son. After the requisite feast, Andrei Sakhalin announced that he was taking a hundred riders and riding south after the main army.
Later that night, after Natalia and Yuri were asleep, Tess was interrupted while reading one of Charles’s reports. She blinked off her implant and said, “Come in.”
To her surprise, Katerina pushed aside the entrance flap and entered, alone.
“Hello, Katya. I thought you’d still be with Galina.”
Katerina did not reply immediately. She prowled the room, examining each object in the outer chamber with a niece’s disregard for any lingering possessiveness Tess might have managed to retain after twelve years with the jaran.
“Do you think Galina really loves him, or just thinks she has to because she had no choice but to marry him?” Katerina asked suddenly.
“If she loves him, does it matter why?”
“You don’t like him, do you?”
Tess quirked a smile but refused to reply.
Katya sat down abruptly in the other chair. Stood up. Sat down. Clasped her hands together on the table and fixed Tess with a stare. “I took him as a lover, on the ride back here.”
“Katya!” Tess was surprised to discover that this shocked her. “You could have hurt Galina deeply by that.” But even as she said those words, she realized that she was shocked more by the prospect of actually lying with Andrei Sakhalin, whom she found acutely unattractive, than of the unlikely prospect of Galina feeling betrayed by an affair that had occurred hundreds of miles away.
“All he ever does is talk about himself. Just like Vasha. Vasha is becoming just as boring as Andrei Sakhalin.”
Tess winced. “That comparison is unfair to Vasha!”
“Ha! You don’t like him.”
“If you dare repeat that, young woman—!”
“Of course I won’t!” Katya lapsed into a morose silence. She stood up again and prowled the chamber. Tess did not bother to watch her; it only made her dizzy. “Vasha was so stupid,” Katya said finally. “He always felt sorry for himself. He arrived at Yaroslav Sakhalin’s army thinking everyone should treat him like a prince, and he’d never even fought in a battle.”
Tess heard a quaver in Katya’s voice, like a hint. She seized on it. “You fought.”
There was a long silence.
A long silence.
Tess rose to face her. There is a moment before dawn of a drawn-in breath, as there is before speaking; so Tess waited for light to breach the horizon. Katerina lifted a hand to trace the gold designs inlaid in the quiver hanging against the wall. The gesture, oddly tender, was the only sound in the chamber.
“My lover died in my arms,” she said. “Cut down by khaja arrows.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Katya flashed her an angry look. “No one understands!”
“Oh, Katya! I’m truly sorry, you must know that. But do you suppose that you’re the only person—”
“Don’t mock me! Have you ever watched a loved one die of wounds right in front of you?” Her indignation was palpable.
Tess sighed, unable to be angry with her. “Your uncle Yurinya died just so, my child, defending me.” Just like that, the image of Yuri lying in the grass as life and blood leaked out of him slammed into her, as clear as if her implant had flashed on with a reconstruction of the scene. Tess had to steady herself on the back of her chair.
Yuri. He lay utterly still. There was a transparent cast to his skin, to his pale lips. His eyes fluttered and his lips moved. The scent of blood and grass drowned her. He lifted one hand and held it, wavering, searching for her… searching….
Katya stared as if she had just that moment realized that someone else could suffer as she suffered.
“I’m sorry, Katya.” Tess wiped away her own tears with the back of one hand. Nineteen was too young to see death so violently and so close, no matter how good the cause. Any age was too young, to have your best loved comrade die despite the full force of your own will that they, by God, just live, just hang on. “I know it doesn’t make it any easier to know that other women have lost lovers and husbands and brothers, but still it’s true that you aren’t alone. If that helps.”
“I am alone.” Caught in profile, Katerina looked tired, beaten down. The Orzhekov women were known as a handsome line, but it was intelligence and vitality that made them attractive more than the simple physical prettiness that had—for better or worse—graced the line of Sakhalin princes. Katya’s grief was raw and terribly affecting. It drained all animation from her. Tess went to her and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Oh, Katya—”
Katya jerked away from the touch. “I can’t tell anyone,” she gasped, gulping down dry sobs.
“Katya! Oh, gods.” Tess took hold of her, as she would of a small child caught up in uncontrollable fears, and held her with an iron grip. “You must have loved him very much.”
“I yelled at her, ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ But she just looked at me and said, ‘It hurts so much. I just want peace.’ When she died I died with her, because I could never share my grief with anyone else, I could never share our love and give it life by remembering it to others.” She broke into racking sobs, burying her face in Tess’s shoulder. “Oh, gods. Promise me you won’t tell my mother.”
“I promise.” She let Katya cry. When the sobs quieted, Tess stroked her hair. “What was her name?”
There was a pause.
“Mariya. Mariya Sakhalin. Grandmother Sakhalin’s youngest sister’s youngest daughter. She was sent out to her uncle Yaroslav’s army when she was sixteen, a year before I got there. We were put in the same jahar—”
She began to talk. And talk. Tess sat her down and held her hands, and Katerina talked fast, and low, and fiercely, as if she feared that this was her only chance to share her love, to truly mourn. For as the jaran say: “If you hold your grief to yourself, you double it.” As Kirill Zvertkov had said to Tess after her brother Yurinya’s death: “You might as well be dead, too, if all you care for is your own grief.” But how could Katerina share her grief when she would be condemned for it? Tess felt a grotesque compassion for little Katerina—no longer so little—who had borne her sorrow like a burden for so many months, alone, who could only unburden herself to her khaja aunt, who alone of all her relatives would not, just possibly not, judge her harshly for loving another woman when she ought to have been loving men.
She also felt a little bored. Katya was no different in this respect from any other callow youth, transported by her first serious love affair. She could go on at length about her lover’s fine qualities and the stupid little endearments they had made up for each other and the three arguments (the only ones they had ever had). And she did go on. Tess let her, wondering sardonically if she had ever bored anyone with the same recitation of Ilya’s virtues and the minutiae of their meeting and falling in love; feeling the full force of the irony of the situation, that she should sit here and be bored by poor Katya’s confession of her ecstatic and
passionate love for this matchless paragon who was now dead.
After a while Katya trailed off. The lanterns burned low, streaking the corners of the chamber in dense shadows. “I’m going to ride south with Andrei Sakhalin tomorrow.”
“Why? Your mother is so happy to have you home again. She’s certain you’re staying. You’ve spent two years with the archers. That’s enough.”
“She’ll marry me off,” muttered Katya. Tess did not reply, since it was true. Katerina was nineteen, quite old enough to be married. “She even said to me yesterday, after Galina’s baby was safely born, that when she was my age she’d already given birth to me. I hate that.”
Tess sighed.
“I don’t want to get married.”
“Do you want to ride with the army, like Nadine?”
“No. But I don’t see what else I can do.”
Tess did not know what to say, except platitudes, and she hated platitudes.
“Something is troubling my daughter,” said Sonia to Tess the next morning, after they had said their good-byes and the little jahar had ridden away. “But she spoke of it to no one that I know of, not to me, not to her aunts or to her grandmother. Not even to Galina.”
Tess had hold of Yuri’s hand. Natalia had ridden out a ways with the older children, escorting the jahar to the outskirts of Sarai. “She will probably tell you when she is ready,” she said, and hated herself for mouthing platitudes.
“May I help you with that?” asked the barbarian girl with a smile.
Jaelle did not in truth understand the exact words, but the tone and the gesture conveyed the young woman’s meaning well enough. Jaelle smiled tentatively. Over the years she had grown unused to smiling. Since Princess Rusudani had come to the jaran, Jaelle had been forced to smile frequently.
The girl helped her carry water back to the princess’s tent, and laid a fire for her while Jaelle rolled out a carpet and set up the awning and the quilted chair on which the princess would sit. These jaran girls went armed everywhere, quivers strapped across their backs and knives stuck in their belts. They wore striped trousers and over them a skirt split for riding, and full blouses quilted and padded like armor. In the great jaran camp in the north, the same two girls had assisted her every day, as an honor to the princess, probably, and yet always the girls went about their duties with evident good nature, including Jaelle as well as they could and even taking her down to the pond to bathe several times. Jaelle judged them to be around the same age as she was. She had learned quickly how to identify these unmarried girls from the more respectable married women. Now that they were traveling again with the army, several young women of the same type took shifts helping her. Perhaps this served as a break from more onerous duties elsewhere.
Like most women who traveled in an army’s train, Jaelle knew they must also sleep with the men, and all these girls, however barbaric they seemed otherwise with their weapons, had a free manner around men that revealed that, like Jaelle, they were prostitutes. But in fact it was the behavior of the jaran men that struck Jaelle as odd. She had thought the young slave Stefan’s quiet manners to be the consequence of his lowly position, but surely all these soldiers were not slaves? Granted, she had immunity because of her new status as a servant to Princess Rusudani, but not one man importuned her. Yet she knew—had stumbled across—a few trysts taking place out in the brush away from the camp.
She set the quilted chair in place under the awning and made the sign of the Pilgrim, praying to Our Lady to make clear these strange events, to grant her faithful servant good fortune at the end of this journey. After one unfortunate experience, Jaelle had learned to stay with the caravan trade. Traveling with an army’s train was not so much dangerous as… changeable, and any woman caught on the losing side was fair game. It had only happened to her once, four years ago. But Our Lady had given her a blessing to hold against the horror of the three days that had followed the lost battle: The treatment she had received had caused her to lose the child she had been carrying. Indeed, because she knew enough to cooperate with the men who had come to her, that abortion had not been as painful as the one last year, which she had procured with the aid of an herbwoman.
“I beg your pardon,” said a man’s voice.
Jaelle stiffened. She knew who it was, knew it instantly. She collected herself and turned around slowly. The jaran girl, lighting the fire, examined the new arrival with crass interest. Even after she got the fire lit, she showed no inclination to leave.
Jaelle clasped her hands meekly in front of herself and cast her eyes toward the ground. “Bakhtiian.” She was not sure whether this was his name or a title, or both. “Princess Rusudani has gone with an escort to the church in the village.” They had taken a different route south, along the coast instead of into the heathen kingdom in the highlands inland.
Bakhtiian held the copy of The Recitation, translated into Taor, which Princess Rusudani had purchased from Sister Yvanne and then given him as a gift in Sarai. “But you are also of the faith,” he said. “I am curious about these words I read, in the third gospel, that when Hristain was brought back to life by his sister—”
Jaelle tried to hide an involuntary shiver. It was as if God had given her a sign, through this barbarian prince who, given the gift of God’s word from a daughter of the apostate church, yet spoke truly. To Princess Rusudani his words would be blasphemous, of course: When the Pilgrim had bathed her brother in the waters of the spring, God had turned the water to life-giving milk and thus granted the Holy Son life once again, but according to the northern church, the false faith that the princess professed, it was God’s doing alone, when in fact the faithful who professed the teachings of the Anointed Church, the southern church, knew that it was God acting through His Daughter, who partook equally with her brother Hristain of God’s divine nature.
Bakhtiian paused. She did not correct him, even though she knew her mistress would be aghast at his words. She knew better than to go against a sign sent from God.
He went on. “—that after Hristain rose up again, and blessed the multitudes who had come to witness this wonder, that then—” He spoke the words without having to refer to them in the book, which remained closed. “—ʻa bright light appeared from heaven; and on this light He ascended to His Father’s house.’ How is this explained, that a person might ascend to heaven on light alone?”
Jaelle risked a more comprehensive glance at him. Even her mother’s master, a mere lordling, had traveled in greater state than the great prince of the jaran tribes. He wore the same clothes as his commonest soldier might: scarlet shirt, black trousers and boots, and a saber and knife. The only adornment on him was the embroidery on the sleeves and collar of his shirt, a simple gold chain necklace around his neck, and a plain green ribbon woven into the bronze buckle of his belt. His sole escort was Stefan, except for the ever-present escort of guards who hovered a spear’s throw away. Stefan met her glance, flushed, and looked at his boots. Jaelle swallowed, looking about in the hope that her mistress might be returning. It was never ever wise to attract the attention of powerful men. “It is Princess Rusudani who was educated in a convent, my lord. I cannot interpret the words of the holy book.”
“But surely you have an opinion?”
“God has great powers, my lord, which lie beyond the understanding of men. It is our duty to be faithful to His word.” And because the princess was not there to hear, she added, “And to Our Lady’s example of endurance and fidelity.”
He grunted. “Ask Princess Rusudani when it might be convenient for me to visit her, to ask her of these things.”
“Yes, my lord.”
God and Our Lady were merciful. He took himself off. The jaran girl at the fire swung into step with him and began flirting so outrageously with him that Jaelle was amazed by her audacity. But it was true he was a handsome man, and not nearly as old as she had expected him to be. And so strange, too, to speak to her so casually, to ask her opinion!
; “Would you like to go to the church? I could escort you there.”
She had been so intent on Bakhtiian that she had forgotten about Stefan. An odd impulse struck her, and she tried out a smile on him, and promptly regretted it. He practically stammered, he looked so taken aback.
“I… I… perhaps you… I thought that…” Words failed him.
“Are you a slave?” she asked suddenly, wondering why he had not left with Bakhtiian.
“Am I a what?” he yelped. Bakhtiian’s escort had moved on, after Bakhtiian, and the young woman who had helped her now chatted with a guardsman at the tail end of the procession, having evidently given up on her flirting with the prince. He tried the word out, as if he thought he had misunderstood her. “Slave. A slave? Certainly not! I am the grandson of Nikolai Sibirin and Juli Danov, who are both great healers, and elders of the Orzhekov tribe, as well.” For an instant he looked her full in the face, and whatever he saw there made him clench his hands. “I beg your pardon!” he said in a tight voice, turning to leave.
Jaelle’s mouth dropped open, she was so surprised. “Wait! I…I beg your pardon.”
He stopped but kept his back to her.
“I only thought…” She cursed herself. Suddenly she didn’t know what to think. How could he not be a slave? What other man would help a whore, unless he had hoped to sleep with her? Except he had never once asked…. She didn’t want him to leave, not thinking badly of her. “I thought you must be a slave. I beg your pardon for offending you.”
His stiff shoulders relaxed, and he turned. “Why did you think I was a slave? I suppose you can’t know—only prisoners or people who have in some way betrayed the tribe are made servants in the jaran. And a slave—doesn’t that mean another person owns you? Tess said that a master can do anything he wants with a slave, even kill him.” He grimaced. “Only the gods can hold a person’s life in their hands. It isn’t granted to men.”