by Tom Deitz
Her hand had just brushed the hilt when the birkit moved. A breath, and it was before her; another, and those claws had raked her outstretched hand so quickly she barely felt the pain.
And so carefully there was no damage but the pain—and enough blood to serve their purpose.
She flinched back from reflex, and by then the beast was atop her, and Kylin, who must have heard the scuffle, was crying out and fumbling forward. “No!” she yelled—to him, the birkit, and the situation in general. Instinct made her bat at the huge head above her, while she felt her lower body pinned by massive legs. And it was opening its mouth, and all she could see was fangs sparkling in the sunset light, and a cavernous maw like the night to come.
“No,” she repeated, barely more than a whisper. And with that, the clogging in her brain intensified to the level of a headache, and the birkit's tongue lolled out and casually wrapped itself around the bleeding hand she discovered she'd extended toward its muzzle in a vain effort to fend off those fangs. It licked her flesh and with it her blood, and then, with a spring that took the wind from her, it leapt away.
For a moment nothing happened, and then, like a landscape slowly revealing itself through melting ice on a windowpane, came words.
You are We. You are the We who leaves and returns and has silences in Your head where We used to be, where We still are, and yet You are not. This confuses.
It is something My kind of We cannot help, Div gave back. We speak loud when We speak this way: when the blood is fresh. But when the blood grows old, We speak softly, and then We do not speak at all.
This confuses.
So does it confuse My kind of We. We are still learning to speak this way. We ask patience.
You remember We?
I think I do. I remember a We much like the one I see before me. I remember a den in the land near here.
That is Our den. That is the den where You and He-Who-Speaks-Loud and He-Who-Was-Weak denned with Us last Cold Time.
I—
This One with You … We do not know Him, but He is broken. Should He therefore live?
Only His eyes are broken. I would have no harm come to Him.
If You say so. We would put Him from His misery.
It is His choice. For now … We would crave shelter for the night. And We would crave the right to build a fire.
The one is Your right. The other We will endure.
And Our mounts—
Big Tasty Ones. Have You brought them—?
We cannot give them to You, for We must have their aid. We regret this. We ask that no harm come to them.
You ask much. They would feed the cubs for—
There was no word for the image that ensued, but Div got a sense that it meant something like “as long as it lasts.”
We would ask You not to. We are … hunting to aid He-Who-Speaks-Loud. We must hurry, or He will no longer be able to speak loud at all, and the friendship He has wrought between Our two kinds may end, for Those Who Would Harm Him would rule Our Tribe, and they would not be friendly to Your kind.
Silence followed—or the absence of the heaviness in her head, which was much the same. Div was startled to note that real sounds still existed in the world: water dripping from leaves, the harsh breathing of the birkits—three more of which had made their presence known and were even now crowding closer—and the sharper breaths Kylin was taking. She imagined he was scared to death.
“I've established communication,” she told him. “I think they'll give us shelter, and not hinder us. But the horses are a problem.”
Kylin didn't reply at first. Then: “How far is it to Grinding Hold?”
“Around three days this time of year, but it's out of our way.”
“Could one horse carry us that far?”
“If it was rested. But I don't like killing horses.”
“But you're under royal warrant, you could requisition more. Think of the men—and horses—who'll die if you don't.”
“So you're saying—”
“That you should offer them one of the horses when we leave. And—Wait, I'd forgotten that there's a ghost-priest messenger in transit somewhere out here. You should alert them that there's someone afoot who might do harm to us and them. We don't know when or if he'll be near here, nor what route he's taking, but if we could arrange for them to attack him …”
“You expect a lot from luck, but I'll tell them—later. For now—”
“Offer them the horse,” Kylin repeated stiffly. “I think it's the only choice.”
We accept Your offer, the birkit agreed unexpectedly. And that was that.
The other horse—
We will find it for You. We will fear it back this way. It will be there for You when You leave.
That must be soon.
It will be when it will be. For now, be warm. Sleep well. Den with Us and be happy.
“Kylin,” Div sighed aloud, “prepare for what may be the strangest night of your life.”
(NORTHWESTERN ERON—HIGH SUMMER: DAY XLVIII—NEAR MIDNIGHT)
Bekkin could wait no longer. He'd hoped he was over the sickness—the gripping in his gut and fluidity in his bowels that had come upon him and his Fellows-of-the-Face three days into this journey, and which had cost them two days already. Most things one could endure on horseback—flux, one could not. So it was that they'd spent as much time out of their saddles as in them, and the only thing that made it tolerable was that Nyss was as badly afflicted as her squires. It was balance, Bekkin supposed: The Ninth Face had attacked Gem-Hold unawares, and sickness had caught its emissaries unawares in turn.
Still, there was nothing to do but accept it. If nothing else, the ailment seemed to be shifting focus from his bowels to his stomach—which was suddenly threatening to rebel. He could feel the sweat starting now, the tightening in his throat, as possible approached inevitable—
Setting his jaw against the sour taste already flooding across his tongue, Bekkin scrambled out of his bedroll, sparing but the briefest attention to his three companions, who bracketed the other sides of the fading fire like logs. Birch logs, he supposed, what with the white cloaks they'd rolled around themselves.
Not that it mattered—as he clamped a hand across his mouth and staggered toward the deeper woods that surrounded the camp. A laurel hell walled it on three sides; he thrust through the fourth, angling toward the road, a shot away from which they'd camped—
He managed a dozen paces before his body overruled his mind and set him vomiting: long, aching spasms that brought up nothing but thin yellow bile that tasted like bitterness distilled. On and on and on—endlessly. Eventually, he finished— but had barely taken two steps toward camp before nausea ambushed him again. He slumped against a tree, seeking strength that had all but left him.
And in the ensuing pause, he became aware that new sounds now stalked the night. Troubling sounds, though no more, at first, than the patter of raindrops shaken from leaves that still held water from the earlier storm. But then came a pad of heavy feet, a snort from the horses; then a mad, loud scramble of leaves and twigs, followed by three thumps that merged at once with growls and tearing sounds, and one choked word that might've been “birkits.”
Then—worse—a set of screams from the horses, and— worst of all—a pad, pad, pad coming toward him. Quickly.
Blind with fear, he fled, hearing the deaths of horses, followed by a wild thrashing, predator yowls, and a louder crashing.
On he ran, blindly in the woods; forgetting his sickness, his fear—everything but the fact that he had to survive, because he was the only one who had survived, and Zeff's ultimatum had to reach Tir-Eron no matter what.
Twigs tore at him, laying his cheek open. Breath hissed harsh and loud in his ears, but atop it came the woody thunder of something smashing through the undergrowth behind. Something too big to be a birkit.
Horse, instinct told him. He turned to confirm, not believing his luck. And doubted it again when the darkness spat ou
t his very own steed: faithful Wyle. He whistled Wyle's special note—and saw her slow but not stop. Even so, she swerved close enough, for long enough, at a sufficiently viable pace for him to grab her mane as she passed and hurl himself atop her.
Already fearing attack from above, she bucked. Bekkin hung on grimly—and then there was nothing to do but let Wyle run herself out.
At least they were alive—for now.
Even so, he didn't return to camp until a hand past sunrise, and only then armed with a spear he'd made from a sapling. Wyle hadn't wanted to approach closer than a quarter shot, but he forced her, unwilling to go afoot longer than necessary. He found what he expected, too: his companions dead, with their throats torn out by carefully calculated bites from massive jaws. Even Nyss was dead—which would not please Zeff. The horses were dead as well—and they, Bekkin noted, were missing flesh.
Which was still strange, he reckoned. Birkits killed no more than they needed. Usually they killed men solely to get at horses, and then only one horse at a time. In any case, what mattered was completing the assignment. Steeling himself, and grateful that his stomach no longer rebelled, he searched the bodies, finding the document where he'd last seen it, in Nyss's saddlebags. He also found other things that he might need to survive, and—efficient lad that he was—was on his way again a hand later, with three dead companions and three dead horses lying unburied behind him. He was hungry, he realized, and thirsty. But this time food and drink stayed with him, as he turned Wyle's nose toward Tir-Eron.
(NORTHWESTERN ERON—HIGH SUMMER: DAY XLIX—MORNING)
The sun was shining in his face when Kylin awoke, warm, well fed, and dry, with stone invisible above him, beneath him, and curving up to either side, save that which faced the light. Div was there as well; he could hear her breathing and stirring a pot of what smelled like stew. There was a scrambling at the cave's mouth, too, followed by a series of padded footsteps, that had to be a birkit returning from some all-night endeavor.
“What have you been doing, beast?” Div murmured amiably. Then, with alarm: “How'd you get all that blood on your fur. Are you hurt, or—?”
Perhaps it was the fact that Kylin was still half-asleep, and thus receptive; or perhaps it was simply the intensity of the birkit's reply, but he “heard” the reply even as Div did. Three dead, alien thought whispered through his mind. One survived.
Then gone. From him—but not, apparently, from Div.
“Something seems to have delayed the messengers,” she informed him a moment later. “If we hurry, we may still reach Tir-Eron in time. The birkits say they—some of them—will follow us all the way to the Gorge.”
Two hands later, they were traveling.
CHAPTER XII:
SMOOTH THINGS, AND ROUGH
(ERON: TIR-ERON: ARGEN-HALL—HIGH SUMMER: DAY LIV—EVENING)
“It's the smoothest thing in the world,” Avall murmured, letting his fingertip glide along the soft curve of Averryn's chubby cheek, where he lay, velvet swaddled, in Argen-a's family creche. The surrounding room was soft, too: soft with shadows wrought by a tiny glow-globe's dim but steady light.
Strynn, beside him, was a face melting into the warmer shadows of her maroon robe, shadows that merged with the dark folds of his own house-robe. She gazed a moment longer at the child—her child, by Eddyn's rape—then shifted her gaze back to him, a sly smile on her face. Lifting a slender hand that could nevertheless forge blades, she traced the line of his jaw. “Not much rougher here—for an old man, but a very young king.”
Avall blushed in spite of himself. For all the intimacy they'd shared, of body—and mind, through the aegis of the gems— Strynn could still make him feel like the beardless boy who had been so enraptured with her when he was fourteen. And, in spite of three seasons of marriage, he was not yet reconciled to the fact that she was his, to touch when he would, where he would, and that she had the same—and oft-claimed—right to him. At times like this he could almost forget that he was a reluctant King, a political father, and a smith denied his craft. He could almost forget he had a bond-brother he loved as much as anyone alive, and live only to be with Strynn. He wondered if all married men felt the same. Bond-mates were usually taken young, the bond born of adolescent pain, insecurity, and passion. Marriage was an adjunct of adulthood, and—typically— the result of much more careful consideration, for marriage forged links between clans as well as people. Who would Strynn have wed, he wondered, if left to her own volition?
“What are you thinking, Vall?” she murmured, taking his hand. With the query came a nuzzling around his mind— which didn't surprise him. She would never invade his thoughts without permission, but the mind sometimes did its own wanting, and one had now and then to rein it in, lest curiosity satisfy itself unasked.
“I'm just tangled in the complexity of it all,” he replied, not moving. “Love, sex, and friendship, and how they can all merge and mingle; and how trying to set priorities among them is much more involved than trying to run a kingdom— and just as scary.”
“Dangerous, too.”
Avall nodded vigorously, then took a deep breath, not looking at her. “Which brings up a dangerous question. One I keep finding myself having to ask again and again, though I don't know why, but … are you ever jealous of Rann?”
Her grip tightened ever so slightly. “Are you ever jealous of Merryn?”
“Merry's my sister!”
“And my bond-mate. Which means that we're allowed to be closer than you and she could be.”
Avall shook his head. “But you and I have been as close as Rann and I have been …”
She regarded him frankly. “But you two have been that close longer. I knew your bond existed when I agreed to marry you. I knew you … liked me and I knew you'd wanted me at one time, and I knew you'd try as hard as any man alive to love me, and I knew you were a man I could love. But I wasn't sure you were the only one I could love, because that choice was stolen from me.”
“It's so easy to forget that.”
Strynn gnawed her lip. “I forget it myself, sometimes. I no longer feel his touch, when I'm with you. I no longer look at Averryn and think at once that he's Eddyn's child.”
“Nor do I,” Avall admitted. “It's not hard for me to think he's mine—for now. But I … I guess I'm afraid that, though I love him now, I … might not as he grows older. He is made from Eddyn's seed, and that seed will manifest one day. Maybe he'll be taller, or more reckless, or more vain, or—”
“More talented than you?” Her voice had gone sharp and cold. “You're afraid of that, aren't you? That he'll surpass you the way you surpassed Eellon.”
A snort. “I didn't surpass Eellon.”
“Yes, you did. And Tyrill. There's no point in denying it. I'm accounted Tyrill's equal, and I wasn't even born a smith.”
“But if two mastersmiths have a child, that child is bound to surpass either of its parents …”
Strynn's harshness succumbed to a wicked grin. “And if another smith, better than the first, should sire a child on that same mother … ?”
“It would be the best smith ever.”
Strynn chuckled. “Would you risk it, Avall? Would you dare sire the child of legends?”
His smile gleamed even in the half-light. “You're saying we're legends?”
A shrug. “We don't seem to have much choice.”
“And now might be a good time to try?”
“I'm saying that, King or no, you're required to give Eron three children, and that I would be honored to bear them.”
Avall felt a stirring in his loins which he didn't try to suppress. Yet something still gnawed at him. Maybe it was the environment: the softness of the shadows shaping a kind of dreamlike otherworld in which it was safe to say what could not be said under harder light. And so he asked that which could shatter it all.
“What about Kylin?”
She didn't falter, though something like pain flickered in her eyes. “He … loves me, I t
hink. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't … care for him. But, believe me when I say that I would never, ever put him above you.”
“But do you love him?”
A long pause, then: “I love different things about him. And—” She paused again. “And you and he love different things about me, I think.”
Avall cocked his head, genuinely curious. “How so?”
“You love the hard things in me: my strength, my skill … my honor. Kylin—loves the soft things. But you know what's really funny?—which I only just realized. I love you two the other way around. I love the soft things in you—the part you let me see that you reveal to no one else except Merry and Rann—the boy that's still in you, I guess. But Kylin—I love that solid core in him he doesn't know he has: the fact that he just goes on. He's blind, and people want to feel sorry for him and make allowances for him, but he doesn't let them. He's iron sheathed in sylk, I guess. You're sylk sheathed in iron.”
Avall exhaled a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. “That's as much as I dared hope,” he conceded. “Though I'm just as glad he's far away tonight.”
“So am I,” Strynn smirked, “because I've got some very interesting ideas about how we should spend the rest of the evening, and I want no interruptions.”
Avall grinned back. “I think we can manage that. It's one of the advantages of being King.”
“Maybe I was wrong about Averryn,” Avall murmured into the nape of Strynn's neck, an indeterminate but very pleasant while later. He was curled around her on a fur rug they'd dragged onto the north balcony of their suite. She lay before him, naked, as was he, and utterly exposed to the cool night breeze that made her skin shiver and her nipples tense even when he didn't touch them. It was other skin he touched now, palms cupping the fullness of her breasts when fingers didn't venture lower.
She stopped one such foray with a hand, yet not so much as to forestall caresses. “What do you mean?”
“That parts of you are at least as smooth as parts of him.”
Her hand found his upper thigh—all she could easily reach, the way they lay—and stroked it in turn, first sensually, then critically. “You're in need of waxing.”