Dark Moon Defender (Twelve Houses)

by Sharon Shinn

  “I would not want to be the only one giving my loyalty,” he said.

  She nodded, as if that was a reasonable thing to say. “I would be faithful to you,” she said. “I am always faithful, unless I’m betrayed. And then I never deal with that person again.”

  Now he was the one to nod. “That’s a bargain I can make.”

  “Then shall we tell my father we’ve agreed?”

  Senneth caught her breath. Kirra actually laughed. Will smiled. “Yes, serra Casserah. I think we may tell your father that we are willing to join our Houses—and ourselves—in marriage.”

  He offered her his arm. Looking both surprised and pleased at the courtesy, Casserah accepted it, and they headed across the room to where Malcolm stood talking to Carlo. Senneth and Kirra stared after them.

  “Well,” Kirra said, sounding stunned. “No wonder you and I have had such tumultuous love lives. We have expected much more—passion—and mystery—and agony. If only we’d spoken more plainly about what mattered to us and what we thought we could bring to the table! Think how much simpler our lives would have been!”

  “I think even among the noble Houses, such a proposal must be unique,” Senneth said. Now her laughter was starting to bubble up. “But I must confess, I have high hopes for this particular match! At least neither one will ever be able to complain that they didn’t understand exactly what pact they were making.”

  “Do you know what she said to me this morning?” Kirra demanded.

  “I wouldn’t even try to guess.”

  “She said, ‘If I accept Will Brassenthwaite, does that mean you will feel free to wed Donnal? Because that will be another incentive for me, you know.’ ”

  Senneth choked. “Really? I always thought your father and Casserah just accepted Donnal’s presence the way they accept Carlo’s. He’s here, he’s part of Danalustrous, he serves the Hall. But if she actually thinks he is good enough to marry you—well, can I just say, it makes my own betrothal seem slightly less outrageous.”

  Kirra shook her head. “I don’t think I’ll ever get married,” she said. “I don’t think I want to put Donnal through what Tayse is clearly willing to endure for you. Most of our days it is just the two of us, and we’re mystics, we’re equals and we’re content. When circumstances compel me to play the serramarra, he likes to step back. He likes to play the servant or the guard. Some people know of our relationship, but only those we trust, and Donnal would not be happy to think the great lords and ladies were whispering about me and how far I’d fallen. I can’t see a day in the near future when that will change. I can’t see the day he’d ever ask my father for my hand.”

  Senneth looked at her. “But that doesn’t mean he loves you any less.”

  Kirra shook her head. “Or that I love him any less.” She gave Senneth a small smile. “I think I own him, Senneth. I think there is nothing I could do to drive him away. That moves me and frightens me and makes me want to be very, very careful with his heart. So I will not put it on display in the drawing rooms of the Twelve Houses.”

  Senneth nodded. She was watching Tayse excuse himself from his conversation with Cammon and the steward’s daughter and make his way toward her. He looked too big for the room, too powerful for these pretty, delicate tables and graceful, thin-legged chairs. If he put a foot wrong or turned too quickly, he could accidentally break something.

  Oh, but Tayse was too graceful for that. He moved through the room as lightly as a shadow, touching nothing. He saw her noticing him, and he rewarded her with a smile.

  “Whereas I will drag Tayse to any House and any battlefield I happen to find,” Senneth said quietly. “If I have to endure it, then by the Bright Mother’s red eye, so should he! But he never complains.”

  “Why would he complain?” Kirra scoffed. “That man would do anything you asked. He’d die for you.”

  Senneth watched him come closer, and her own smile grew. She said, “He’d better not.”

  TWO days later, a party of five set out for Ghosenhall. They left Will behind to spend some time getting to know his affianced bride and touring the extensive grounds of Danalustrous. The Brassenthwaite guards were also left behind, though Will offered to send at least some of them along to protect the travelers.

  “Will. Four mystics and a Rider hardly need anyone’s protection,” Senneth told him with some amusement.

  He smiled and patted her hair, which was in its usual flyaway state. “Just a gesture of affection,” he said. “I would sacrifice my own security on the return trip to Brassenthwaite to keep you safe.”

  She hugged him. “I’m safe,” she said. “Congratulations on your betrothal.”

  “Congratulations on your own as well.”

  She was glad enough to be leaving Danalustrous, heading back toward the royal city. Between one unexpected trip or another, she had been gone far longer than she had planned. She didn’t mind it for her own sake—she could never bear to sit still in any one place for long—but she knew Baryn had hoped she would be back sooner. She also felt a little guilty about keeping Cammon away from his studies for such an extended time.

  “You’ll have forgotten everything Jerril ever taught you,” she said. It was late afternoon on their second day out of Danan Hall and they were heading southeast through the upper tip of Storian lands. Tayse was about a hundred yards in the lead; Kirra and Donnal were behind them on the path, talking quietly. “By the time we get back to Ghosenhall, you won’t be able to read minds at all!”

  “I can’t read minds,” he said automatically.

  “Ha. Tell me how I’m feeling about my brother agreeing to marry Casserah Danalustrous.”

  He smiled. “You’re pleased. But anyone could tell that.”

  “I saw you talking to marlord Malcolm the night before we left,” she said. “Was he trying to hire you? He seemed very interested in discovering just what you’re capable of.”

  “He was testing me,” Cammon said. “Kirra had told him I can tell when someone is lying. So he would say something to me and I was supposed to guess whether or not he was telling the truth. He’s a very hard man to read.”

  “Malcolm?” Senneth said derisively. “Indeed, he is! Impenetrable, in fact. Even his own daughters would tell you they never know what he’s thinking. How often were you able to separate the truth from the lie?”

  Cammon looked surprised. “Every time.”

  She started laughing. “Oh, very impressive. How much did he offer you to stay?”

  Cammon grinned. “He told me I could name my price.”

  “You should have said, ‘Let me marry Casserah.’ That would have been interesting.”

  “But I don’t want to marry her.”

  “No, the point would be—never mind. I can’t believe he let you ride out.”

  Cammon looked a little self-conscious. “I may have told him I’d come back.”

  “Oh, we’ll see you wearing Danalustrous red before another year is gone.”

  Kirra and Donnal trotted up. “Is my father trying to recruit Cammon?” Kirra asked. “I knew he would. Casserah liked him, too. Too bad my father has run out of daughters to marry off, or he’d try to bind you into the family.”

  Senneth glanced at her. “Don’t you have cousins somewhere? Or some nice young girl born to a high-ranking vassal?”

  “Not everyone wants to marry a fortune, but every man appreciates a good plot of land,” Donnal put in. “Malcolm’s ruthless enough to dispossess a lordling if he thought Cammon might value the estate.”

  Senneth and Kirra laughed, but Cammon didn’t seem to think it was funny. “I don’t want to be a landowner!” he exclaimed. “What would I do with property?”

  “Settle down? Become rich? Acquire a little sophistication?” Kirra suggested. “I don’t know how we’d ever get your hair to behave, but maybe a nice velvet suit—some expensive boots—we could polish you up a lot.”

  “I don’t think so,” Cammon said.

  “Face it,
Kirra, of the six of us, you’re the only one who’s ever going to look remotely respectable,” Senneth said. “You can dress us up, you can sit us at the marlord’s table, but we’re all going to look like peasants, soldiers, and vagabonds.”

  “Well, if you’d put a little effort into it,” Kirra said.

  Donnal’s voice held a grin. “Not all the effort in the world would serve to transform some of us.”

  Cammon opened his mouth to speak, but instead a guttural sound came out, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Senneth glanced over and saw him suddenly jerk upright, and then put a hand over his heart with a cry of pain. She pulled hard on her reins, reaching across to him, but he was already slumping in the saddle. His horse whinnied and came to an uncertain stop; Kirra and Donnal almost rode over him.

  “Cammon, what—” Senneth began, but then he cried out again and tumbled off his horse onto the hard ground. “Tayse!” Senneth screamed, pulling her sword and looking wildly around for any sign of attackers. Behind her, she felt rather than saw Donnal shift shape and take wing, soaring upward to reconnoiter. Kirra had scrambled out of her own saddle and was already on the ground beside Cammon as Tayse came thundering up.

  “What happened? Did he faint? Was he hurt?” the Rider demanded. His own sword was out and he was raking the vistas ahead and behind for any evidence of trouble. They were passing through fairly open land; it was hard to believe they could have been ambushed by an enemy still out of sight.

  “Sen,” Kirra called, looking up from Cammon’s prone body. “There’s not a wound on him. His pulse is fast and his skin’s cold, but he’s untouched. Physically.”

  Senneth glanced at Tayse and he nodded, so she slid down from her horse and crouched beside Kirra in the dirt. “Then what happened to him? What’s wrong?”

  Kirra’s hands were pressed to Cammon’s chest, willing some of her own strength into him. Kirra possessed both healing power and some training as a nurse. Senneth’s own fiery magic could be bent toward rough-and-ready physicking, though she didn’t pretend to have Kirra’s finesse. Still, both of them needed a wound they could see or a disease they could understand. It looked like Cammon had been felled by something more mysterious.

  Senneth laid her hands on his forehead and it felt cool and clammy against her palms. “Cam,” she said, her voice hard, pitched to break through a cloudy mind. “Cammon. Where are you? What happened to you?”

  He opened his eyes and they seemed pale with pain. For a moment he labored to catch his breath. His lips moved, and Senneth bent down to hear whatever word he was struggling to form.

  He whispered, “Justin.”

  CHAPTER 28

  ELLYNOR sat at the infirmary window and watched the rain sluice down. It was a cold, nasty precipitation, laced with ice and driven by a hard wind, and literally no one had stepped into the courtyard all morning to brave it. She wondered for the hundredth time if Justin and his companion had left at some point when she had turned away from the window, or if they were still sitting in the barracks, waiting out the worst of the weather. It was past noon now; if they didn’t leave soon, they wouldn’t have enough daylight left to make it back to Neft.

  And if he spent another night at the convent . . .

  “Ellynor.” The voice from the bed was Rosurie’s, and Ellynor left her post at the window to answer her. “Do you think I could try to stand up now? I feel so much stronger, and I drank all my milk this morning.”

  “Let’s see,” Ellynor said, pulling back the covers and taking Rosurie’s arm. The Black Mother knew Ellynor would rejoice for a whole host of reasons if Rosurie made a fast recovery. “I think you’re still a little weak, but let’s see you walk across the room a few times.”

  Rosurie managed the feat slowly, dipping now and then from dizziness, but negotiating the room three times before dropping back into her bed. “I feel so stiff! Like all my muscles have been shredded,” she said.

  “Well, you should have seen yourself. Your whole body clenched tight for days. I’d think you’d be terribly sore after that.”

  Rosurie passed a hand over her bare scalp, where the little nicks were healed over but still visible. “It feels so strange not to have hair,” she remarked. “Like my head weighs almost nothing.”

  Ellynor poured another glass of milk and handed it over. “Are you sorry you cut it?”

  “Oh no. The Silver Lady smiled at me when I took the razor in my hand. She knew what a great sacrifice I was making, and it pleased her. Besides, now I carry no Lirren markings at all—nothing to show I belong anywhere but here.”

  Ellynor watched her swallow the milk. Drink up. Grow strong. When you are well enough, I am leaving. “It is good to find the place you feel you are supposed to be,” she said quietly.

  Though Ellynor had no idea where that place would be for her.

  “Do you think I might go down to dinner tonight?”

  “Probably not,” Ellynor said. “But I’ll have someone bring you a plate of food, and if you eat it all, you can go down for breakfast tomorrow.”

  “I’m still a little tired,” Rosurie admitted. “But I’m so bored just lying here!”

  Ellynor smiled. “That usually means you’re well on the way to getting better.”

  They talked sporadically after that, and Ellynor checked on the other three patients. All of them with that hacking cough Deana had developed, though none of them as ill as the proselyte had been. When everyone was fed, medicated, cleaned up, and resting again, Ellynor went back to the window.

  The rain had abated; the sullen clouds looked as if they might grudgingly give way to a little weak sunlight. Ellynor could feel the cold seeping in past the window glass, but that didn’t bother her. And it shouldn’t stop a determined traveler. The roads would be wet but not impassable, not if you were willing to take your time and didn’t mind kicking up a little mud on the road.

  Evidently, she was not the only one to reach that conclusion. While she watched, a small caravan plodded into her line of sight, moving from the back of the convent and slowly across the courtyard. Two men and six horses. Justin and the freighter. They paused briefly at the gate, waiting until it was unlatched and swung back, and then urged their animals forward into the wet, cold depths of the forest.

  Just as he passed through the gate, Justin turned his head and glanced back. His eyes searching the convent windows. Looking, Ellynor knew, for any glimpse of her. She stayed where she was, far enough back from the glass that he probably could not see her. In a moment, he faced forward again and urged his horse onward.

  She was standing by the window again about thirty minutes later, feeling bereft and depressed, when she saw a second party of men go riding through the gates. There were five of them, all convent guards, and by the glitter of metal in the frail sunlight, she could see they were heavily armed. There were too many to be running simple errands, not enough to be planning a midnight raid on some hapless mystic’s house. A hunting party? Maybe.

  But—hunting game? Or hunting men?

  For the hundredth time, Ellynor asked herself, Did Daken see Justin last night? Had he guessed the visitor had spent the evening wooing a convent novice? Daken was not among the men riding out through the gates, but that didn’t mean much. Astira had reported he wasn’t very good with a weapon. He spends so much time practicing, he says he’s getting better, but I can tell he’s disappointed. If the convent guards had decided to ride out to punish a man who had dared to romance a novice, they would send seasoned men to do the task, warriors, true swordsmen.