Daughter of Blood

by Helen Lowe

  Dain and the others followed as he led Madder forward, although they remained puzzled until the distance closed sufficiently for proximity to negate the shield spell, so everyone saw the narrow gash eroded out of the plain. Kalan sent Dain and Aarion to cover their progress from the gully rim, while Koris remained with the horses, and Tehan and Tymar accompanied him into the fissure on foot, quarrels already wound onto their crossbows. Cautiously, Kalan extended his own shield beneath the original working: sufficient, he hoped, to cover their advance, without alerting other hunters. The wyr hounds, too, were wary and stopped at the first bend, waiting for Kalan before scouting around the curve. The gully ahead was far deeper, and clogged by large boulders, but Kalan only felt the first insidious creep of tracking magic as they approached the second bend.

  The wyr hounds remained silent, but all their hackles were up as Kalan eased forward to sight around the curve. Beyond it, the gully widened into an expanse of sand, rock, and thorn between eroded walls, before narrowing into a third bend. The densest cover was provided by a patch of thornbrush hugging the base of the gully wall. Gradually, Kalan pieced together a shape among the crisscross of spines and branches. It was some kind of were-hunter, he decided, but smaller than those he had encountered previously. He could chart the shape of its tracking magic now, bent on ferreting a way through the shield working that lingered in the wash. Frowning, Kalan tried to pinpoint the source of the shield, but the fissures caused by erosion appeared shallow, and the remaining brush was too sparse to hide anyone effectively. The boulders, too, were smaller and more scattered than in the preceding section.

  Kalan was concentrating so intently that he almost missed the moment when the were-hunter moved. Initially, it was just one more shadow among many along the gully wall, but he got his first clear sighting when it slipped out of the thornbrush and behind a rock. The narrow, pointed face was manlike, but thick fur grew down onto it like a pelt and he could see the curve of incisors; the creature’s arms and legs, too, ended in claws. Kalan felt the tracking magic strengthen as the hunter sapped its quarry’s shield spell, and the sheltered gully felt stifling as the were-hunter crept forward. The narrow face alternated between snuffing first ground, then air, but its focus always returned to a stretch of wall more fissured than the rest, close by the third bend. Kalan studied the area of rock and shadow more closely and decided several of the fissures were deeper than they had first appeared. Eventually, a small ledge wavered into focus, halfway up the tallest crevice. The were-hunter must have seen it, too, because its bared incisors gleamed.

  Kalan edged backward to fit an arrow to the longbow’s string, before sliding back into position and waiting for a clear shot. The were-hunter was at the base of the cleft now, and Kalan could trace the course of its magic, questing upward. He also detected the first hint of a silhouette, crouched to the rear of the ledge, as the hunter studied the fissure—then leapt high, its extended talons raking the shelf. Steel flashed wildly as the shield spell shattered and a small form scrabbled backward. Simultaneously, Kalan loosed his arrow. The shaft pierced the were-hunter’s neck at the base of the skull and its body convulsed, falling backward at the same time as a second arrow sprouted between its ribs.

  Killed instantly, Kalan guessed—but the arrow through the ribs had not come from Dain or Aarion on the gully rim. Coolly, he readied another arrow, seconds before Orth and Kelyr appeared around the far bend. Both warriors were bloodstained, and Kelyr’s left bicep was roughly bandaged, although his bow remained steady as the Sword warriors approached the fissure. Kelyr bent to examine the were-hunter’s sprawled body, while Orth surveyed the crevice. He grunted, half turning away, then whipped back, reaching up one long arm and hooking Faro off the ledge with his longbow. The giant’s other arm grabbed the boy out of his tumble and forced him to his knees. “I didn’t think the Storm Spear would let you out of his sight, thief.” Orth kicked Faro’s dropped dagger aside. “But here you are, proof that Ornorith smiles after all.”

  Kelyr’s gaze was quartering the gully. “Whoever’s there,” he called, his voice tight, “show yourself.”

  “Or I deal to the Haarth rat,” Orth added. He shook Faro slowly, back and forward, and set a knife against his throat. The wyr hounds growled and bristled, starting forward as one, and Kelyr’s arrow swung onto them. Moving slowly and deliberately, Kalan released his shield working and followed, keeping his arrow trained on Orth. Tehan and Tymar flanked him on either side while the wyr hounds continued to advance, their eyes silver flame.

  “Call them off, Khar,” Kelyr said. “Orth’ll make the brat suffer if you don’t.”

  The wyr hounds stopped, although their hackles still bristled. Faro was white, his face smudged with terror, desperation, and weariness. “We don’t want to hurt him,” Kelyr said, ignoring Orth’s glower. “The country’s crawling with ’spawn, more than we’ve ever seen, and we lost Tawrin and Malar during our last encounter with ’em.” He paused, his eyes meeting Kalan’s. “We want to come into the caravan.”

  “In that case,” Kalan answered coolly, “I suggest you let Faro go.”

  “Do it, Orth,” Kelyr said.

  The giant’s glower deepened, his head hunching into his shoulders. “We don’t need them. Or this scum lover, thinking he can foist his Grayharbor gutter rat on the Derai.”

  The wyr hounds growled again, while Kelyr’s face told Kalan what he thought of the Sword warriors’ chances on their own. But it was Tehan who spoke. “What do you mean? A blind weatherworker could see the boy’s Derai.”

  Kelyr’s answering frown was uncertain, but Orth snorted. “So he’s some fugitive priest’s half-born brat—that’s worse than a Haarth imposter.”

  “Pure Derai,” Tehan clarified, shaking her head. “You don’t think we’d let an imposter, or even a half-born, creep onto one of our ships, let alone carry him back to the Wall? That’s not the sort of mistake we can afford to make.”

  For the first time, doubt flickered in Orth’s expression. He did not appear to notice that Tehan had sidestepped the priest-kind angle—fortunately, Kalan thought. “Release the boy,” he said, “and you can come into the caravan. You have my word.” The Sword warriors might be brutes, but they were brutes who could fight, and the caravan needed every sword it could muster.

  “Let him go, Orth,” Kelyr said. He lowered his bow and the marines did the same, but Orth’s head hunched lower.

  “I say we keep hold of the boy as surety for the Storm Spear’s good faith.”

  Even in Blood’s camp? Kalan wanted to ask, but knew baiting Orth would not resolve matters. And although he still had an arrow trained on the Sword warrior, it would not beat the knife. Standoff, he thought, frustrated—at the same time as a rock flew out of the fissure and smacked into the giant’s knife, knocking it from his hand.

  “No shooting!” Kalan yelled, as Orth roared and Faro twisted free, pelting toward him. The wyr hounds surged forward, surrounding the boy in a protective circle. “Everyone hold!” Kalan commanded as the foremost hounds, their eyes still on fire, growled at the Sword warriors. Orth snarled in answer, his sword already out, but Kelyr had not fired—possibly because he had seen Dain and Aarion, arrows trained on them both from the gully rim.

  “Orth,” he warned, and Kalan saw the giant absorb the situation—before his glare focused on the fissure.

  Oh no, Kalan thought, you don’t. “Enough!” He spoke crisply, but lowered his own arrow at the same time. “You know as well as I do what we’re facing and that we’ll need every fighter, including both of you. So my offer to let you into the caravan stands, but this nonsense ends now. When we win clear,” he said to Orth—if we do, he thought—“you and I can worry about settling scores.”

  Orth hesitated a moment longer before slamming his sword back into its scabbard. Scooping up his knife, he resheathed it more slowly. “Until this business is done,” he said, and spat to one side.

  “Until then,” Kalan agreed. “Now, move
away from the fissure.” He watched Orth closely, but although the giant’s glower was simultaneously calculating and reluctant, he retreated with Kelyr. “Don’t take your eyes off them,” Kalan told the marines, before moving forward. Seeing a gleam among the stones, he picked up Faro’s knife—the same one he had charged Liy to pass on—and handed it back. “Well done,” he said softly.

  Faro’s face was pinched small, his eyes huge with recent dread and unshed tears, but he drew himself straighter. “She’s in there,” he said gruffly, jerking his head toward the fissure. “Lady Myr. She’s got a crossbow,” he added.

  “Ah.” Of course, Kalan thought. A Daughter of Blood would have been taught to use weapons, but he had assumed, because of Lady Myr’s diffidence, that the rock had been a lucky shot. Now he decided to err on the side of caution, and kept his approach to the fissure oblique. He could see no sign of Lady Myr from below, but pitched his voice to carry beyond the opening. “Lady Myrathis, it’s Khar of the Storm Spears.” He wished, momentarily, that Taly had not already left. “I’ve wyr hounds with me, and several of Lord Nimor’s marines, so it’s safe for you to come out. Or I can climb up to you,” he added. “Just don’t shoot me, all right?”

  When no reply came, Kalan climbed level with the ledge and peered cautiously around the opening, to where Lady Myrathis was pressed into the rear of the shallow recess, her hands locked around the crossbow. “Lady Myr,” he said quietly, “are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she whispered finally, and Kalan realized it might be as much reaction to her own daring as fear of Orth, or doubt of himself, that had made her freeze. “I couldn’t believe it was really you. Or a rescue. I felt I wanted it to be true too much.”

  “It’s true,” he assured her. “Do you need help to leave?”

  “No, I’ll come out.” He watched her shadow lower the crossbow then stand up. When she appeared in the entrance, he grinned at her.

  “That was a fine shot with the rock, Lady Mouse.”

  She looked worn out, with her hair straggling down her back and dirt on her face and clothes, but now she flushed and looked away. “That’s Dab’s name for me, and Taly’s,” she said, then spoke again quickly, before Kalan could respond to the implied prohibition. “They both always said I had a good eye.” Her gaze returned to his. “I couldn’t let the Sword warrior hurt Faro. But there were so many people close together and if I missed . . . The rock seemed better than the crossbow.”

  “Much better,” Kalan agreed, as she took the hand he held out. The flush had drained away again, highlighting the shadows left by exhaustion and fear as Myr paused, her gaze searching his.

  “Faro said that you would come, that you would save us, but I didn’t believe it was possible.” She slid a fleeting smile his way. “I’m glad you have, though.”

  “I think the pair of you did very well on your own.” Kalan helped her descend and forbore to add that no one had been saved yet. Her eyes had already told him that she knew.

  43

  Bond of Honor

  “I hate him,” Faro said, his voice hoarse with the emotion, and Myr looked away from his contorted expression. Despite finding, during the course of their flight and the long hours spent in hiding, that the boy was not mute after all, she had noticed his continued reluctance to say Kolthis’s name. Sometimes, too, he had seemed to struggle, as he was doing now, to get words out. His head jerked toward Myr. “I hated the way he watched her tent as well.”

  Myr kept her eyes lowered, partly as a defense against the circle of watching faces, but also because she knew her reddened eyes would betray that she had cried a great deal since returning to the camp. Not in front of anyone else—not even when Khar had told her that Ise and all her household except Ilai were dead—but afterward, when she was alone in what had once been Kolthis’s tent. Under the circumstances, she had not wanted to return to the pavilion—and as for the smaller tent having been Kolthis’s, a space comprising canvas and poles was not the person. Besides, Taly had already stowed Myr and Ise’s few intact possessions there.

  Taly, Myr thought drearily, who is somewhere out there in no-man’s-land, trying to fetch help. She pushed down her fear that the ensign, too, might be dead by now and made herself concentrate on their council of war. They were gathered in the Sea envoy’s large tent and Lord Nimor was attended by his secretary, Murn, and his escort captain, Tyun. Khar was accompanied by the former Honor Guard called Jad, who had been one of his seconds in the duel with Parannis. The eleven wyr hounds had crowded into the tent as well, and Faro was sitting with an arm draped about one of them.

  Now he coughed. “Like a cat,” he continued, his odd accent accentuated by weariness and remembered fear, “watching a mousehole. His face always changed, too, like someone else was looking out through a mask. And that other face—” Faro’s arm tightened around the hound and he appeared to struggle with himself before getting the next words out. “It was cruel and cold. Very cold . . .” He shivered. “The other guards, the ones he kept close, always turned their heads when he turned his and looked exactly where he did. As though he was the only one that was real and the rest were like his shadow—only there were lots of them. It made my skin creep.”

  Myr shivered, too, because her skin had crawled on more than one occasion since departing Blood territory, although she had not known why. Now she imagined it might have been when Kolthis had been watching in the way Faro described, behavior that smacked of every fireside tale of possession Myr had either heard or read. Although a doubter, she supposed, would probably point out that Faro could be using those tales to embroider his own. Automatically, she glanced toward Lord Nimor, but his face gave nothing away.

  Khar was studying his page. “I heard you’d been watching the pavilion closely.”

  Faro ducked his head. “I’m your page,” he said gruffly, “and you’re her champion. My mam always said nothing—no one—could change that, because it’s a bond of honor . . .” Briefly, he looked uncertain, before his voice strengthened. “So that means I have to keep your pledge of faith, too, see?” Myr glanced up in time to see Tyun and Jad nod. Having experienced Faro’s ability to find hiding places and keep out of sight during their flight, she doubted Kolthis had suspected how closely he was being observed. “I had to be a lot more careful, though, after he said he’d thrash me. Then yesterday, when I was tracking the insect, I saw them. Him and another beast-man like the one you shot, meeting out of sight of the caravan.”

  The boy shook himself like a dog. “So I laid low until it was dark before working my way into the inner camp and hiding out beneath one of the carts.” He shivered again. “Nothing happened until the watch changed, but then the old guards didn’t go off duty. Instead they joined with the newcomers and surrounded the pavilion. The way they watched it made me feel as though he was looking out of all their faces. That’s when I knew I had to do something to draw them away.” Faro’s breath shuddered. “Or maybe I just had to distract him. I thought that, too.”

  “So you set the fire,” Khar said.

  Faro nodded. “I tried to be brave and clever,” he whispered, “just like you would be.”

  Kharalthor and Hatha, Myr thought, would say something heartening but jocular in reply, while her other siblings would probably mock the expression of feeling. But Khar opened up his arms, and Faro relinquished his hold on the wyr hound and stumbled into them. “You were exceedingly brave,” Khar told the head pressed against surcote and breastplate, “and exceptionally clever. I’m very proud of you.”

  Myr smoothed her pointed cuffs down over her hands, aware of the stab of an emotion she could not name, or did not wish to, but which might have been longing, or envy, or loss, or all three blended into one. When it dissipated, her fatigue and grief both felt more pronounced, but she managed a smile for Faro all the same. “And I am grateful. You were everything a champion’s page should be, and more.”

  While I, she thought, recalling how they had crawled beneath wagons
and clung to every shadow, was not brave at all. Once they struck out across the plain, she had been terrified by its openness. At any moment, she had expected the pursuing shout and thunder of hooves, or worse, the arrow or lance driving into flesh. Ise had insisted it was her duty to escape and ordered her to go—and Myr had obeyed, abandoning the person who had been her life’s constant to save herself. Conduct unworthy, she told herself now, of a true Daughter of Blood.

  Faro twisted to face her, although he still kept one arm tight around Khar. “I thought you weren’t going to leave at all until the old lady made you.” He scuffed one foot back, then forward again, darting a glance around the others’ faces. “She said it was the Bride’s duty to escape,” he told them: “Because of the marriage treaty but also to thwart her enemies.”

  As though, Myr thought, he’s defending me against my own unspoken accusation. Yet, if asked, she would have said that all his courage and cleverness had been for Khar’s sake and because he hated Kolthis, not for her. Khar’s eyes met hers above his page’s head. “Mistress Ise was right,” he said. Everyone else was quiet, although beyond the tent the camp was loud with activity. “The principal purpose of the caravan is to make sure the Bride reaches Night safely. But it’s your duty, too, Lady Myrathis, as much if not more than anyone else’s.”