Oathblood

by Mercedes Lackey

  Tarma nodded glumly. “Dow I doe why de priests were habing such trouble,” she said. “Hodestly, I don’d think they eben dew they had this. Or whad id was, anyway.”

  “Maybe not,” Kethry replied with a sigh. “Probably not. They’d have tried to conceal it, or they’d have gotten it back to the Lurchan-priests. They probably didn’t recognize it any more than you did. I guess it was probably just a case of ‘friendly fire’ getting us.”

  “Fredly fire idn’t. Wad can we do?” Tarma asked plaintively, her eyes watering, blowing her nose on her rag.

  “We’ll have to get rid of it somehow.” Kethry sat back against her packs—but not without first checking, carefully, to make certain that the packs were steady. “It’s not going to be easy. Whoever takes it has to want it—and I won’t pass this thing off on someone innocent, I just won’t.”

  :Admirable,: Warrl said dryly. :Stupid, but admirable.:

  Kethry turned on him. “Don’t you start!” she snarled. “If you want to do something useful, we should reach Ponjee tomorrow morning. Help me find someone who deserves this damned thing, then help me think of a way to make him take it!”

  Warrl recoiled, his ears flattened, and blinked at her vehemence. Tarma made a choking sound.

  It sounded like a suppressed laugh and Kethry raised an eyebrow. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “You won’d like id,” Tarma said, still chuckling between blowing her nose and coughing.

  “If it’s enough to make you laugh—”

  “He said, ‘Mages be glad I’b a neuder.‘ ”

  Kethry blinked slowly, then smiled slowly. No point in getting angry—and besides, she had just thought of something useful.

  “Well, Warrl,” she said sweetly, “It just occurred to me that these things have a range of about ten furlongs. And we need meat. Now obviously, anything we do is doomed to failure—but you can go out there and catch us all something outside that range. Can’t you.”

  Warrl’s ears drooped, and he sighed, but he obediently got up and padded out into the wet and dark.

  Tarma held her laughter until he was out of range, then chuckled. “Revenge id sweed,” she observed.

  “And even a neuter should know better than to annoy a female with an aching gut,” Kethry agreed. “Now—let’s figure out how to subvert this stupid talisman as much as we can....”

  The rain stopped before dawn; Warrl brought back two rabbits and only dropped them in the mud once. They had decided that the way to deal with the talisman was to make very certain that there were as few opportunities for something to go wrong as possible. Which meant, nothing could be taken for granted. Everything must be checked and double-checked. They were to check each other and remind each other of things that needed to be done, no matter how annoying it got.

  And it got annoying very shortly, yet somehow they both managed to keep their tempers, mostly by reining them in.

  The village of Ponjee was not terribly prepossessing. A huddle of mud-and-daub huts around a center square, straddling the road. No inn, but careful inquiries brought the name of someone who sold herbs. Tarma kept the talisman in her pouch and waited outside the village until Kethry was outside of the damn thing’s range; the mage bought the herbs they needed without incident, and stowed them in the still-waterproof saddlebag before Tarma brought the thing close again.

  As if their attempt to get around its powers angered it, before they had a chance to leave the place, Kethry’s blade Need “woke” with a vengeance.

  Immediately she had a splitting headache—and as if to make certain that there was no mistake about a female in trouble, the sounds of shrieking and a woman being beaten sounded from the last house in the village.

  Kethry had no choice; given the way the sword was reacting—and the pain it was putting her through—she wouldn’t even be able to get past that hut without blacking out. If then. Need could be very persistent in seeing that her bearer dealt with the troubles of those women unable to help themselves.

  The door was open; right up until the moment they reached it. Then it slammed shut in Tarma’s face, and Tarma hit it at a dead run, like a comic in a farce. She bounced off it and landed on her rump in the mud of the street; Kethry, several steps behind, prepared to hit it with her shoulder and ram it open—

  But it opened again, just as she reached it, and she staggered across the threshold and into a table laden with dirty pots and pans. The table collapsed, of course, and the pots and pans fell all around her.

  By then Tarma was up and through the door. The man who had been—quite clearly—beating his woman, stared at her in amazement as she blundered inside.

  And slipped on the mess spilled from the dirty pots. And fell again.

  Need had, by now, taken over Kethry; she couldn’t stop herself. She was on her feet, sword out—

  Overreaction, of course, but that was the talisman’s doing; it couldn’t stop the sword, so it was making whatever it did be the worst possible response to the situation. And as Kethry realized that, she also realized that it had made certain Need was entirely inflamed, so that it took her over completely.

  The man was unarmed and unarmored; it didn’t matter. Need struck to kill.

  At the last moment, Kethry managed to get enough control back to turn the flat of the blade on the man rather than the edge, and to hold back the blow a little.

  It hit him in the head like a club, and he went down without a sound. But, thank the gods, not dead.

  The moment her man went down the woman screamed with outrage.

  Kethry couldn’t quite make out what she was shrieking; the woman’s dialect was so accented and so thick that she didn’t get more than one word in five. But the meaning was clear enough—“How dare you bitches hit my man!” She grabbed crockery and anything else she could reach, hurling it and invective at the two of them. Tarma seized a pot lid to use as a shield; Kethry wasn’t so lucky.

  That was when the rest of the village decided to get involved.

  “Now I know how Leslac feels,” Tarma said wearily.

  “Leslac doesn’t have two battlemares and a kyree to hold off the enraged populace while he makes his escape,” Kethry replied, blotting at a bruise on her forehead. She‘enedra, we have got to get rid of that damned thing. Either that, or we’d better take up living in a cave for a while.“

  :Your troubles are not yet over,: Warrl cautioned them. :There is a band of robbers on the road ahead. If you wish to avoid them, we will have to go back to the last crossroads and detour three or four days out of our way.:

  Tarma cursed in three languages—then stopped, as something occurred to her. “Keth—how helpless can you look?”

  “Pretty damned—” Understanding dawned on the sorceress’ face, and she nodded. “Right. Don’t say anything. I don’t know how the curse works except that it doesn’t seem to read thoughts. Here—” she unburdened herself of everything except Need and the money pouch, and handed it all to Tarma. “Furball, you follow me on the other side of the hedgerow and call Tarma when the time is right.”

  Warrl nodded, and wormed his way through a gap in the hedge to the field on the other side. Kethry left her mare with Tarma and trudged on ahead, trying to look as much like a victim as possible.

  The road twisted and turned here, and rose and fell as it went over gently rolling hills. Shortly Tarma was out of sight. Kethry might have been worried—except that she was feeling too cold, sore, and generally miserable to bother with something as simple as “worry.” Of course, given the way the talisman worked, the robbers would appear at the worst—

  Her foot hit a rock, and her ankle turned under her. She yelped with pain—she couldn’t help it—and she hit the ground hard enough to add yet more bruises to her already considerable collection.

  Her ankle screamed at her. Without a doubt, she’d sprained it, but she felt it gingerly to be sure.

  It was already swelling. And she looked up to find herself the focus of five p
airs of amused and variously hostile eyes.

  “Tain’t everyday a cony drops right inta the snare!” one of them said with a nasty chuckle. “Wot a nice little bunny it is, too!”

  The half-formed plan she had made was now in pieces; obviously she wasn’t going to be able to run—or even draw the sword. There was only one thing she could do.

  She snatched the purse off her belt and flung it at them.

  Two or three coins spun out of the open mouth; three of the men scrabbled after them and retrieved them, shoving them into the front of their shirts, while the man who had spoken snatched the purse out of the mud. Kethry heard a warning howl and ducked, hiding her head in her arms.

  Warrl vaulted over the hedge and over her; a breath later Tarma and the mares charged up the road and leaped over her as well.

  The bandits scattered, too taken by surprise to make any kind of a stand. Tarma and Warrl pursued them just long enough to make certain that they weren’t going to come back any too quickly.

  By then, Kethry had levered herself up out of the muddy road using Need as a crutch, and stood there waiting for them.

  Tarma pulled her mare up as Kethry’s mount came close enough for the sorceress to pull herself into the saddle. Which she did, with no mishap. Proof enough that the curse was following someone else now.

  “That was the last of our money,” Tarma said, as Kethry ignored her throbbing ankle in favor of putting as much distance between them and the robbers as she could. “We’re going to be spending the rest of the trip sleeping in haystacks and eating half-raw rabbit.”

  Kethry noticed that her ankle hurt less with every moment—as did her bruises. Need was making up for her misbehavior earlier, it seemed.

  And Tarma’s nose wasn’t red any more either.

  “Getting the curse to stick on someone else depends on how much you’re willing to sacrifice to get rid of it,” Kethry pointed out. “I just threw away all our money. The curse is not going to come back. And—” she continued, “—have you noticed that your cold is gone?”

  Tarma blinked in surprise, and sniffed experimentally.

  “I think,” the Shin‘a’in said carefully, “that this is a wonderful time of the year for camping out. And rabbit is excellent when rare.”

  Kethry laughed. And after a moment, Tarma joined her. The mares ignored them, continuing down the road at a brisk walk—

  With no signs of lameness.

  But behind them, Kethry thought perhaps she heard, faintly, the sound of someone cursing.

  WINGS OF FIRE

  Speaking of children, here’s Kethry with some of her own, at last. If you’ve read Oathbreakers you know where she got Her Man.

  Fecund little devil, isn’t she?

  Personally, I prefer having children with feathers. We have a number of them, cockatoos, macaws, and parrots, most of them about as loud as your average four-year-old, but the advantage is that you can keep them in a cage full of toys without having Child Welfare come after you!

  The disadvantage is that they can hang off your collar and try to see why your beak (teeth) is on the inside of your mouth, destroy your jewelry, try to take your keyboard apart, and surf in your hair.

  Heat haze shimmered above the grass stems, and insects droned monotonously, hidden down near the roots or swaying up near the new seed-heads. There was a wind, a hot one, full of the scent of baking earth, drying grass, and the river nearby. Kethry held a half-finished basket in her hands, leaned back against a smooth, cool boulder in the shade of her tent, and drowsed. Jadrie was playing with the other youngsters beside the river—Lyan and Laryn were learning to ride, six-month-old Jadrek was with Tarma and Warrl, who were watching him and the other babies of Liha‘irden, sensibly sleeping the afternoon heat away. All four of the children were safe, safer than at home, with all of Liha’irden watching out for them.

  Kethry felt perfectly justified in stealing a little nap herself. The basket could wait a bit longer.

  Then a child’s scream shattered the peace of the afternoon.

  “Mama!”

  Kethry reacted to that cry of fear as quickly as any mother would—though most mothers wouldn’t have snatched up a sword and unsheathed it as they jumped to their feet—

  Even so, she was a heartbeat behind Tarma, who was already running in the direction of Jadrie’s cry, toward the trees lining the river.

  “Mama, hurry!” Jadrie cried again, and Kethry blessed the Shin‘a’in custom of putting women in breeches instead of skirts. She sprinted like a champion across the space that the herds had trampled bare as they went to and from the waterside twice a day.

  As she fought through the screening of brush and came out on the bank under the willows, the first thing she saw was Jadrie, standing less than a horse-length away. The girl was as white as the pale river sand, with both hands stuffed in her mouth—she seemed rooted to the riverbank as she stared down at something.

  Kethry sheathed her sword and snatched her daughter up with such relief washing over her that her knees were weak. Jadrie buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and only then burst into tears.

  And only then did Kethry look down to the river itself, to see what had frightened her otherwise fearless child half out of her wits.

  Tarma was already down there, kneeling-beside someone. A body—but a wreck of one. Shin‘a’in, by the coloring; a shaman, by what was left of the clothing. Tarma had gotten him turned onto his back, and his chest was a livid network of burn lines, as if someone had beaten him with a whip made of fine, red-hot wires. Kethry had seen her share of tortured bodies, but this made even her nauseous. She could only hope that what Jadrie had seen had been hidden by river water or mud.

  Probably not, by the way she’s crying and shaking. My poor baby—

  The man stirred, moaned. Kethry bit back a gasp; the man was still alive! She couldn’t imagine how anyone could have lived through that kind of punishment. Tarma looked up at the bank, and Kethry knew that cold anger, that look of someone’s going to pay.

  And get the child out of here.

  Kethry didn’t need urging; she picked up Jadrie, and stumbled back to the camp as fast as she could with the burden of a six-year-old in her arms.

  By now the rest of the Shin‘a’in were boiling up out of the camp, like wasps churning from a broken nest; wasps with stings, for every hand held some kind of weapon. Kethry waved back at the river, and gasped out something about the Healer—she wasn’t sure what, but it must have made some kind of sense, for Liha‘irden’s Healer, the man who had nursed Tarma back to reluctant life so many years ago, put on a burst of speed that left the rest trailing in his wake.

  Kethry slowed her own pace, as the Clansfolk streamed past her. Jadrie had stopped crying, and now only shivered in her arms, despite the heat. Kethry held her closer; Jadrie was both the sunniest and the most sensitive of the children so far. So far she had never seen anything to indicate that the world was not one enormous adventure.

  Today—she had just learned that adventures can be dangerous.

  Today, she had learned one of life’s hardest lessons; that the universe is not a friendly place. And Kethry sat down in the shade of the nearest tent, and held her as she cried for the pain of that lesson. She was still crying when angry and frightened voices neared, passed the tent walls, and continued in the direction of the Healer’s tent.

  When Jadrie had cried herself to exhaustion, Kethry put her to bed in the tent she and Tarma shared with the four children, gathered her courage, and started for the Healer’s tent herself.

  There was no crowd outside the tent, and the gathered Clansfolk appeared to have dispersed, but the entire encampment was on the alert now. Though there was no outward difference, Kethry could feel the tension, as if a storm sat just below the horizon, out of sight, but not out of sensing range.

  She met Tarma coming out of the tent, and the tight lines of anger around her partner’s mouth told her everything she needed to know.

/>   “Warrl can guard the children. Do we stay here,” she asked, “or do we ride?”

  Tarma paused for a moment, and in that silence, the keening wail with which the Shin‘a’in mourned their dead began. Her eyes narrowed, and Kethry saw her jaw harden.

  “We ride,” the Shin‘a’in said around clenched teeth.

  They followed the river northward all day, then, when it dived beneath the cliff, up the switchback trail at the edge of the Dhorisha Plains. They reached the top at about sunset, but pushed on well past dusk, camping after dark in the midst of the pine-redolent Pelagiris Forest. Tarma had been silent the entire trip; Kethry burned to know what had happened, but knew she was going to have to wait for her partner to speak in her own good time.

  Being an Adept-class mage meant that Kethry no longer had to be quite so sparing of her magical energies; she could afford to make a pair of witch-lights to give them enough light to gather wood, and to light the fire Tarma laid with a little spark of magic. It wasn’t a very big fire—in this heat, they only needed it to sear the rabbit they shared—but Tarma sat staring into the last flames after she’d finished eating. Light from the flames revealed the huge trees nearest their campsite, trees so old and so large that Tarma could not encircle them with her arms, and so tall that the first branchings occurred several man-heights above the ground. Most of the time, the place felt a little like a temple; tonight, it felt more like a tomb.

  “He didn’t tell us much before he died,” Tarma said finally. “By his clothing, what was left of it, he was For‘a’hier—that’s Firefalcon Clan.”

  “Are they—all gone, do you think?” Kethry could not help thinking of what had happened to Tale‘se- drin, but Tarma shook her head.