Gajdosik’s mouth was still tight, but he was smiling thinly. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Forgotten gods, what a queen you would . . .” He stopped, flinching and then catching his breath against the pain. He hadn’t meant to say that last part out loud, Oressa saw.
She said, more gently than she’d intended, “That would have been different.”
“I know.” Gajdosik took a shallow breath. “I know. Couldn’t have you . . . over the body of your brother. Doesn’t matter. Oressa. Your Highness. You have to take my men. Promise me—”
Oressa knew exactly what he meant. She was sure, too, that he knew just how big a thing he was asking. Because it was big. Taking several thousand Tamaristan soldiers into her hand . . . That wasn’t subtle or secretive or something you could do obliquely, without anybody exactly noticing. That was the kind of thing that would force you to stand right up in front of everybody and declare I have the right to make huge decisions that change everything. When she thought about it that way, Oressa honestly didn’t know whether she could do it.
She imagined her father’s expression if she came back to Caras leading a force of three thousand foreign soldiers. He would be . . . what? Furious, offended, outraged. Impressed?
Not that his opinion mattered. She was sure it wouldn’t matter. Gulien wouldn’t have let their father reclaim his power, not when there was so much at stake. Her brother knew how important it was to keep power away from their father, after all. He’d met the Kieba too.
He hadn’t told her how terrifying the Kieba was. She had had no idea. Maybe the Kieba wouldn’t let any of them go. Oressa could imagine that more easily than she could imagine facing down her father. But Gajdosik was still looking at her, with something too much like trust for her to refuse. At last she said, “I’ll try.”
Gajdosik managed a tiny nod. He whispered, “Good,” and then, more strongly, in command: “Laasat.”
Without a word, his officer knelt, took the prince’s injured right hand in his, and gently worked off the ring he wore on his third finger. It was made of twisted copper and steel wire, set with the Garamanaj sigil. The sigil was worked in steel to show that Gajdosik was a legitimate Garamanaji prince, set with amethysts to show the house was royal. The braided copper border showed that he had never been acknowledged as heir.
Laasat, his face set, offered this ring to Oressa, flat on his palm. He said, “Your Highness, wear this. Show it to any of the prince’s men and they will know you. I mean, they will know he made you his heir. I will help you as much as I can. If he dies, I am your man.”
“He won’t die,” said Oressa. She looked at the ring for a long moment. It was such a small thing, and yet she was afraid of it, afraid of what it meant. Which was stupid. And anyway, Gajdosik was still looking at her. Quickly, before she could think too much about it, she held out her left hand. It was too big to fit any of her fingers, but Laasat slid it onto her left thumb, careful of her welted palm. The ring felt cold and hard and unbreakable against her skin. Somehow its weight was more vivid even than the pain from the Kieba’s whip.
Gajdosik’s mouth twisted. He whispered, his voice husky, “Laasat will tell you the names of my captains and officers. They will be loyal if you give them the chance. Trust them. They are good men. I swear you can trust them.”
“I will,” said Oressa. Her throat ached with the effort he was making. “I promise you, if you can’t care for your people, then I will.”
“Yes,” said Gajdosik. He closed his eyes, letting go of his resolve at last.
Oressa stood up slowly. She said to Laasat, “I’ll try. I’ll try to get you all out.”
Laasat also got to his feet. He nodded. “Yes, I know you will,” he said. And then as they both moved aside, he added, “Forgotten gods, I might have shot you.”
That first day, he meant, when she had been clinging to the wall of the palace and he had not known who she was. Oressa said tartly, “Worrying over what didn’t happen? I’d think you’d have enough worries right here and now.” She looked down at Gajdosik, then quickly away, not wanting to see too much. “The kephalos stopped her. I wonder if it would give us medicine, physician’s tools—Laasat, you can stitch wounds?”
“Not like those,” Laasat said quietly. “Not so many, and some down to the bone.”
“Well, you’ll have to try!” Oressa snapped, then flinched violently back as a black rod fell suddenly out of the air in front of her. It was Laasat who caught it, purely reflexively, and then almost dropped it, but snatched it up quickly in his other hand. He held it carefully, not exactly as though it was fragile, but as though it was precious. It was about two hand lengths long, made of twisted black iron, with a thread of black crystal spiraling around it from one end to the other. From the way Laasat held it, Oressa knew it must be important and valuable, but she had no idea what it was until she remembered Gulien telling her about the pain touching Ysiddro’s door had caused him and about the Kieba’s caduceus. Then she held out her hands eagerly, palms up.
And Laasat knew what the caduceus was too, because without a word he traced a fingertip down the line of the crystal, from one end of the rod to the other and back again. Then he grasped her left wrist firmly and drew the tip of the rod quickly across the whip cut that split her palm. She flinched and gasped but didn’t let herself pull away, and then she watched, fascinated, as the vicious welt closed to a thin red line. The cut still ached, but it was a better ache, as from an injury days old and nearly healed.
Still without a word, Laasat used the rod on her right hand as well. Then he straightened and walked back toward Gajdosik. He didn’t run, but he walked fast.
Laasat thought the Kieba sending Oressa the caduceus was a sign that she couldn’t be too angry with them. Oressa didn’t argue, but she suspected that the kephalos rather than the Kieba had sent the caduceus. Even if it had, she didn’t know what to expect from either of them now. Gulien hadn’t been sure what the kephalos was or what its relationship with the Kieba was, but Oressa remembered that flat, emotionless voice commanding Cease, cease, and the Kieba’s inarticulate gesture of frustration and fury. She didn’t know which frightened her more: the immortal woman who had once been a god—or at least a servant of the gods, if the Tamaristans were right—or the mysterious kephalos that spoke elliptically of keys and memory and identity and seemed to command everything within this mountain. Even, possibly, sometimes the Kieba herself. She wished she knew what it was.
Time passed, more than one day, judging from the dimming of the lights. The hours dragged, heavy with both boredom and tension. At least it was reassuringly clear now that Gajdosik would not die, though he couldn’t yet stand without help. He suffered a good deal of pain still, Oressa thought, even though Laasat used the caduceus on him twice more. Her own hands still ached a little. She tried not to imagine how Gajdosik must feel.
She waited for the prince to ask for his ring back, but he did not. That was a measure, she supposed, of his continuing pessimism. Or his clear judgment. One was difficult to tell from the other, under the circumstances. She made no comment about the ring. She had been Prince Gajdosik’s enemy, but things were more complicated now. She wondered what would happen when—if—the Kieba let them all go. Preferably soon, before everything happened without them. She hoped Kelian and the other guardsmen were all right, trapped among Tamaristan soldiers, who must be terribly worried by this time.
She was also worried about Gulien. By now he must have realized not only where she had gone—naturally he would have figured that out very quickly—but also that something had gone wrong. She hated to think of her brother riding unwarned into Gajdosik’s Tamaristan soldiers, as she had, or possibly worse, coming up the mountain after her. She wished she knew what was happening at home.
She also wished she knew how long the Kieba meant to keep them imprisoned within her mountain. She supposed they all wondered that, though nobody said anything about it out loud. Food appeared at intervals: loaves of bread, alo
ng with sharp white cheese and ripe pears. It was all a great deal better than nothing. And soap, appeared, too, and even fresh clothing: a startlingly beautiful Carastindin court dress of dusty gold and russet for Oressa and what she supposed was proper Tamaristan dress for the others. Oressa wished she knew if this portended a formal audience with the Kieba and wondered whether she should hope for that.
Laasat said he wasn’t in a hurry. He said he hoped time would take the edge off the Kieba’s temper. Oressa doubted he quite meant this, but she appreciated his reassuring air of calm patience. Tamresk, hardly older than she was, turned out to know a great many Tamaristan children’s stories and a really startling number of rude barracks songs, which seemed a peculiar combination until he shyly explained that he was the eldest of seven children and that all four of his uncles had been soldiers.
Prince Gajdosik seldom spoke. He was very grim and silent now. Pain or fear or helplessness had turned his attention inward. Oressa found, unexpectedly, that she missed his confident arrogance. She found herself watching him without meaning to, her gaze resting on him while he slept or watched the water flow down the wall. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. But she was fairly certain he was thinking—that he hadn’t simply given up. His was the quiet of waiting, not the silence of despair.
CHAPTER 12
Gulien hadn’t know what he should expect to find when he arrived once more at the base of the Kieba’s mountain.
He had brought half a company of mounted militia, brought them as fast as he could, and so they arrived as dusk approached, barely forty hours after leaving Caras. He had thought—hoped—that the Kieba herself might meet them. He had feared she might be impatient and annoyed at his return before his year had run out; he had hoped she might prove utterly dismissive of any possible danger to herself from a Tamaristan threat. Nothing of that would have surprised him. But he could see no sign of her, not so much as a larger-than-ordinary hare or mountain fox.
If not the Kieba, then he had hoped to hear the disembodied voice of the kephalos, offering uninterpretable comments about affiliation and identity. That would not have surprised him, either, and he had hoped the kephalos might prove easier to deal with. Several times during the bone-achingly fast ride from Caras, he’d glimpsed a falcon overhead and thought—hoped—that the kephalos was watching, alert and aware of everything that moved in the drylands. The idea was reassuring, though also, in another way, discomforting.
Or he wouldn’t have been surprised to find one or more of the great spiderlike war golems patrolling the Kieba’s boundaries, stalking along her wall, warning away trespassers who might threaten to intrude on her privacy. That, too, would have been both reassuring and discomforting.
Most of all, he had hoped to find his sister, having delivered Parianasaku’s Capture and charmed the Kieba, cheerfully coaxing the kephalos to demonstrate how its golems could explode boulders and trying to persuade it to let her have half a dozen as a permanent guard for Caras. He could quite clearly picture Oressa engaged in just that sort of activity, ridiculous as he suspected the hope would prove to be.
And, of course, he had far more than half expected to find a considerable number of Tamaristan soldiers bivouacked at the foot of the Kieba’s mountain. He had even been prepared to find disturbing evidence that the Kieba had already dealt with such an intrusion, prepared as well to beg her pardon for his own trespass with so many men.
Unfortunately, though the Tamaristan soldiers were indeed present, that was the only part of his expectations that was met, for he did not see the Kieba, nor any sign that she had even noticed either the Tamaristan intrusion or his own. Though he looked, he could glimpse none of the great war golems, nor his sister, but Tamaristan soldiers there were in plenty.
Gulien had thought carefully about how many men Prince Gajdosik might have brought with him. In and out as quickly as possible, Gulien was almost certain that was the Tamaristan prince’s intention. The prince and his men must be mounted on stolen horses; surely it could not be easy to steal mounts and remounts for a great many men at such short notice—though that was good country for horses, up by Addas.
He had thought also about the Kieba’s own defenses, which must make any numbers of soldiers irrelevant; and about artifacts, so wholly unpredictable; and so he had decided on half a company of his own because he had hoped it would be enough and was all he thought Caras could spare—and very nearly all the horses in Caras fit for a fast drylands journey too.
Now that they had arrived, however, he saw that he had been too optimistic on several counts, because it was immediately obvious that his own company was facing at least even numbers, possibly worse. Wherever Prince Gajdosik had found the horses, however hard he had driven his men, this was at least a full company, and moreover, the Tamaristan soldiers already held defensible positions in the main farmhouses and outbuildings clustered at the foot of the mountain. Standing up in his stirrups, Gulien stared across the river and through the shade of the overarching cottonwoods toward the nearest farmhouse, trying to figure out what to do.
“We can withdraw and send for reinforcements,” said the senior officer of his own militia company, a captain named Aran whom Gulien hardly knew. “But if you wish to bring that force to battle, what I suggest is, we can fall back before they realize we’re here, send the crossbowmen wide around the mountain, then at dawn have our arquebusiers make a noisy advance across the river and the crossbowmen move in from their rear. If we’re quick enough—or not, curse ill luck and the enemy’s good sense!”
“Too late,” Gulien agreed, for he, too, could hear the shouts of the enemy, faint with distance, and see the rapid response to those shouts. Plainly it had just become impossible to try any such maneuver as his captain had suggested. On the other hand . . . “It may be just as well, as they may have my sister prisoner. And our people who came with her, and of course these farmers whose homes they’ve occupied. Bringing the Tamaristans to immediate battle under these circumstances would not be my first choice.”
“Your Highness is quite correct that hostages complicate matters,” agreed Captain Aran. “Though we don’t know that’s the situation, either. Kelian might have realized what they were riding into and gotten Her Highness and our people away; we don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see if they send a man to parley.”
“We’ll hope they do. Or if they attack, can we do better than hold this position?” Gulien asked. “If they would come against us here, they must ford the river and come up the bank.” The river wasn’t much of an obstacle, but enough, surely, to hamper an enemy. “Or if they refuse to advance . . .” He paused, having little idea what might be done if the Tamaristans refused to leave their current position. He quite clearly recalled the writings of his great-great-great-great-grandfather Ges Madalin, who had rebelled against the authority of the then king of Greater Estenda and forced Estenda to recognize Carastind as a free and independent country. Ges had had a good deal to say about the stupidity of attacking a fortified position and had been of the opinion that a commander who had no choice but to do so had better have either surprise or greatly superior numbers. True, Ges had been writing before the invention of cannon. But since Gulien had no cannons either, that hardly signified.
“They’d be fools to leave their positions, twice fools to attack across the river,” Captain Aran agreed, not very happily. “If I were their commander, I’d stand fast and make us come to them right across those wheat fields. If they’ve got arquebuses and the sense to fire in volley, they’d cut us to pieces—and if they’ve got nothing but crossbows, they’d still cut us to pieces, only at slightly closer range. Though in either case our own arquebuses could at least reduce visibility. We might do something with that—put up a lot of smoke and use that as a distraction while we send in a small team to try to get Her Highness clear. If she’s there.” But he didn’t sound very enthusiastic about this idea.
“Yes,” Gulien acknowledged distractedly, both the thought
and the reluctance. He could see perfectly well all the problems with either carrying the battle to the Tamaristans or sitting still for parley. But he wasn’t certain he could dare stand still and just wait for the Tamaristan prince to finish whatever he had come to do—to use some artifact to attack the Kieba while she was distracted, in the worst case. Or to persuade the Kieba to throw down the Madalin falcon and raise up the sea-eagle in its place. That would be almost as bad and, Gulien feared, all too possible.
Was it possible he had been in time at least to pin Prince Gajdosik down on this side of the wall? That might not be quite so bad. But then Gulien could just imagine Gajdosik bringing his sister out as a hostage, just as he had before, and demanding whatever concessions he thought he could force Gulien to accede to.
It was insupportable. Yet obviously he dared not allow the Tamaristan prince a free hand, on this side of the wall or most especially on the other.
He said, rather through his teeth, “Very well, then. We’ll send a man for parley; that will at least guarantee a pause, I hope. Meanwhile, I’ll cross the Kieba’s wall myself and go up the mountain. With luck, that Tamaristan bastard hasn’t found a way into her mountain at all—I can hardly see how he could have come here so very much before us, and without leave from the kephalos he may well not have managed to find the way, no matter what artifact he might hold. So we will hope he has not gained leave from the kephalos.” He only hoped the kephalos would still speak to him. But he said firmly, trying to sound as though he had no doubts at all, “I’ll find the Kieba and speak with her and then . . . then we’ll see. You, hold here and just wait. Just wait, and stop the Tamaristans from any precipitous action, and we’ll see how matters look after I’ve had a chance to speak with the Kieba.”
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