“Shyll, I’m not running away from you. I love you.” She swallowed, dryly, struggling to say the difficult things, to be honest. “Sometimes I love you too much. I try too much, too fast.” He held her as if she were made of spun glass, then turned away and went on pacing. His greathound Inu tried to heel without stepping on too many things until Rilla sent him back to his corner with the bitch Grey and her puppies.
“Promise me one thing,” Shyll said softly. “That you’ll both come back.”
“I’ll do what’s necessary.”
He stopped pacing and drew his hand through his blond hair. Rilla came over and hugged Megan in one arm, the other cradling the baby. Shyll forced a smile.
“... pretty damn good when she’s got her growth, Megan. She’d learn war-craft much faster practicing.” Shkai’ra’s voice wasn’t raised, but carried clearly through the door to the corridor, where Sova was passing on the way to her room. The Thane-girl slowed, put up a hand to steady Fishhook, who lay across her shoulders purring, and pushed the wing-cat’s buzzing nose out of her ear.
“I don’t want to put her in the way of sharp steel again until she’s of an age to choose.” Megan’s higher voice. “Two years is not too long to wait, and I’m sure there will be fights around here then if she wants them. She needs to learn other things that you don’t on raids; you want her to end up knowing how to do nothing but creep around in the dark and bash heads?”
“Of course not, what do you think? You usually handle the bookish stuff, though, and you’re going to be gone anyway ...” A pause came, that made Sova worry about getting caught listening. The carpet was soft under her feet, like home used to be, but decorated in the severe Zak style rather than Thanish bright. I miss the blue or red walls sometimes, she thought, stepping forward; then she stopped again as Shkai’ra’s voice continued. “Kh’eeredo, you’re treading somewhat on her honor as a warrior.”
A whisper of pacing feet: Megan, she could tell by the short steps. “No, I’m not. She has the zight of the house and her own behind her and all the pride and honor someone with her potential has. She’ll be a warrior when she’s of age, two years from now. Were you one at fourteen?”
“When I came back from my test I was considered one.”
“Well,” Megan said tartly, “I am hardly going to let you give her a knife and a rope and kick her out in the middle of winter—”
“Well, Zoweitzum on that!” Shkai’ra broke in.
“She’s my daughter-of-choice and I don’t want to see her get her brains spattered on an Arkan warhammer by mischance or mistake.”
A sigh. Sova could almost see the shrug. “Right. Right. It’s your part of parenting. So she stays here, safe in school.”
“It’s because I love her, akribhan. Books and stability are what I think she needs—especially after what happened.”
“Now, don’t start that again—”
“All right, love. But dragging her all over the Midworld is a hurt I don’t want to add to the others. The tea water must be boiling now.”
Their footsteps faded into the kitchen. Fishhook mewed and launched off Sova’s shoulder, gliding down the hall in front of her, to thump, a bit of orange fluff, in front of her chamber door. The girl followed slowly.
There was a stuffed bear, Sova thought. His brown fur was worn mostly off on his rump, one of his bead eyes was missing. Franc said I chewed it off when I was a baby, but I think he was lying just to annoy me ... well, I guess I might have. Babies do that sort of thing. Yesterday little Ness had eaten a sow-bug, before anyone could stop her. Yesterday, just after Zhymata Megan and Khyd-hird Shkai’ra had left to seek Lixand.
Sova felt her blade whip through the air with easy ripping speed, saw her wrists, thickened with long daily practice, and a little veined, like khyd-hird’s or a man’s. To do as smooth a cut in sparring as I can going through the First Nine Cuts; that’s the hard part. When she looked in the mirror now, she saw cheekbones and a sharp chin where before there had once been round baby-fat. I’m becoming a woman. Those lumps on her chest, they were no longer pretenses, but breasts, proper breasts, shaped like a woman’s. One day she had noticed her hips and legs were no longer the slightly-fleshed stick-bones of childhood, but flared and curved, as she’d imagined when trying to see herself grown-up in her old mother’s big mirror.
But her arms and shoulders had bulges that had never been part of the mirror-picture; the arms and shoulders of a teenage boy, it seemed to her, somehow glued onto the trunk of a maiden.
The bear’s name was Dof. Mooti wanted to throw him away. “My daughter shouldn’t have such ragged old things! We’ll get you a new bear.” And they did, but he wasn’t Dof. I hid him, and brought him out to cuddle when she wasn’t looking.
“Keep your mind on what you’re doing, girl!” Shyll called, watching her with the eyes he had in the back of his head, while he went through his own drill. While khyd-hird was gone, he’d taken over her war-training. “Are you going to daydream while you’re in a fight? Then you mustn’t now.”
She allowed herself one last stray thought, before narrowing her concentration to the one steely path. I wonder what happened to him, when the mob went through the house? Just an old stuffed bear, not worth anything, no one would want him—burned.
Once I was naked, in front of a crowd of Zak ... No, don’t think about that, she told herself. Nothing undoes the past. But somehow, if she woke in the dead of night before dawn—why do I wake then? I never used to—she couldn’t make her thoughts go where she wanted them to, or not go where she didn’t. Sometimes it came because she was half-dreaming, making things happen that weren’t only horrible but strange; sometimes when she was fully awake, she couldn’t control her thoughts, as if the dark of night leeched away her power over her own mind.
I won’t remember. The day, blindingly sunny, the cold wind full of the smells of harbor, and sea beyond. The crowd that had gathered, having heard the news on the street or in inns; they all hate us. That was usual, but today it was unusually naked on the small Zak faces. Fater, Mooti, Francosz, her, the servants, all wore their festival best on the draped dais. Fatted cattle; in hindsight it looked that way.
She’d been twelve. All she had heard was that the Zak woman with the steel claws was a witch and an enemy, with no great regard for the life of anyone in her way; the other woman a plain savage. They’d race her father’s proxies, three Schvait, the stakes—a bond, did that mean the witch and the barbarian would be her father’s slaves, if they lost? In the house; she didn’t think that was a good idea. She didn’t like them, never wanted to see them again. Their stake was “a favor”. She thought that meant some kind of errand.
Then came the barbarian’s bow-shot, the gull with the arrow through it falling at their feet, her mother fainting ... All anyone ever said was that her head sounded hollow when it hit the dais. Always laughing. No one ever asked whether she was hurt.
She couldn’t see most of the race, only knew by the hungry whooping of the crowd that her father’s proxies had lost. Then Francosz was chasing the clown—Piatr, she’d find out his name was, later—around the dais with a knife, feeling somehow that he was somehow the source of all their troubles. The witch had hexed Franc, then turned him to stone until the judge called her off. But Franc had been right, it seemed; for as her “favor” the witch asked only the clown. A friend of hers. He was bewitching us, too.
I guess we go home now, she had thought then.
But instead the barbarian woman seized Francosz and her by the wrist. “That doubles my price,” she’d said, when Fater had called her what she was: barbarian. Else she wouldn’t have taken me. Maybe. She’s never really insulted when people call her that; it was just an excuse. That face, so haughty, carved like stone in smug cruelty as if it could know no other expression, the harsh voice, deep for a woman’s, the guttural accent; and the smell, that no woman should have, no human should have, like an unwashed arm-pit, or worse.
I threw
myself at Fater’s feet. But there was nothing he could do; if he’d clung she’d have torn me out of his arms, and taken pleasure in doing it; worse for his zight, what was left of it. He was proud to the end. She began to understand, when she saw the barbarian woman grab Franc’s hair, and draw her knife. The witch stopped it, leaving him only slightly shorn, and said something about an apprenticeship; but then the Zak turned her back, and in the barbarian’s face, and her word, “Strip!”, she saw the truth.
She’s claiming us. We’re her slaves. She owns us. Yet even as the truth sank in, a good part of her could not believe this was happening at all. It’s all a dream, a make-believe; Fater will rescue us and we’ll go home. A leer on the big woman’s face, the look, her mother had taught her, that only a doxy, a whore, gets. Naked, the wind touching her all over, the eyes of the crowd, laughing, hating, while she put one tiny hand over the place between her legs and the other forearm over her nipples, not yet grown into breasts, as if that really hid anything, Zak eyes seeing her as she truly was and pointing, laughing, seeing the tears she felt spill hot over her cheeks, and laughing harder.
She a learned enough trade-Zak to understand the barbarian’s mocking words. He’s not my type and you’re too young. But the eyes said different, running up and down her, contemptuously measuring, like the hands of buyers in the slave-market. I’m too young, she would think later. She wants to save me for sometime in the future. No. No, this isn’t happening. Fater ... Then the blows began, on both of them, hand and belt and foot.
“The best you’re likely to get is scutwork somewhere.” Choices; they were saying something about choices. That was the Zak’s doing, it turned out; she’d had words with the barbarian.”Stay with us, and you’ll have a berth and enough to eat ...” The Zak had said they weren’t slaves, that their answers weren’t final, but hadn’t asked again. In the meantime, they had to do whatever either woman said, and got beaten more than the household slaves.
The next weeks she remembered as a blur, of pain and exhaustion and shame, shame over and over again, more shame than she’d ever thought she could bear. She had to say sorry and ask forgiveness of Piatr, but no one ever said sorry to her, no matter what they did. Ugly, ill-mannered, weak, ignorant ... They’d made Franc and her do their slave chores for them, hit them if they didn’t want to, or when they didn’t know how because they were highborn, hit them for that ... She remembered Shkai’ra asking, exasperated, “Don’t you have any will to survive?” just as she’d been thinking she’d be happier dead. Even when I started to get stronger, even when she praised me, she always took it back by saying someone of her race two years younger could slice me to skunkbait or something like that.
Trying to make me useful, she said. As if I was worth nothing before. The image had stayed, since someone on the ship had spoken off-hand of her being forged into steel: her on an anvil, Shkai’ra over her with the hammer. No one ever asked the steel what shape it wants to be. It’s made to be used.
“I’m remembering again,” she said aloud in the dark, to no one. She felt her own tears, and began the deep breathing to soothe them, a trick that Shkai’ra had taught her, which had, like everything Shkai’ra had taught her, been ground into her instincts by endless repetition, and showed up whether she wanted them to or not, like traitors. “I shouldn’t remember. It doesn’t do anything but hurt.”
Then, being a child, she’d taken it all as part of life, however much the pain, knowing no other choice. Like everyone else on the ship, seeing what fates Megan’s friends had suffered at the hands of Habiku Smoothtongue, she’d got drawn into the feud up the river, even fought, risked her life for it, when Francosz had been in danger. He had given his, and been buried as a warrior—though not with more honor, Sova had not failed to notice, than Shkai’ra’s cat. Grief had been black as Fehuund; like any brother and sister they’d had their spats, but he’d been all the family she had left. Without him she was alone.
At the end of it, Sova had accepted her and Megan, along with Rilla and Shyll, as her parents by adoption. Her blood-parents were dead or gone, run out of Brahvniki; she’d heard the mob cry, after the race, “To Schotter’s house! Bring torches!” She’d also been dimly aware adoption gave her certain protections, at least on paper. I didn’t even know it in words then, she thought, in the dark. I was a child. It had been instinct to cling to her only shelter, to not want to know what they’d do if she refused what they asked. What would they have done?, she wondered. No one respectable in F’talezon or Brahvniki would have adopted me or taken me for an apprentice. An orphanage, maybe, getting trained how to do scutwork. Or they’d, have kept me on as a servant. Or just thrown me on the street.
She’d learned quickly not to complain; never to complain. Never to be anything but happy here, whatever they did. Never to be difficult in any but an innocent child’s way, that they’d expect, in a spoiled child’s way, that they could laugh at. When Shkai’ra hadn’t been busy training her to cut off her tongue at the roots, as the Thanish saying went—“Oh, you evil adoptive parents, if you loved me you’d let me do what I want,” she’d laugh, mocking, reducing it to that—Sova had trained herself, whenever her feelings weren’t the grateful foundling’s.
Now she was fourteen and a warrior, if a warrior was one who’d been in a real fight; she had begun to see it all with an adult’s eyes. They were attached to her now; she knew that. Megan, the wicked witch, had never wanted to consider them slaves and was genuinely loving. Shkai’ra loved her in her own odd way, even if only because she’d been molded into one Shkai’ra could love by Shkai’ra herself. Whatever else the world might call her, no one could ever say she, Sova, blood daughter of zight-less Schotter Valders’sen, adopted daughter of the Slaf Hikarme, didn’t know where her bread was buttered. But only a child need worry about that.
* * *
II
Matthas Bennas, fessas, resident of Brahvniki, he signed.
Spy, he didn’t.
The paper was an invoice for sheet rubber from Karoseth, his home town, southwest of the City Itself, on the coast. Yeolis called the sea the Miyatara, Zak called it the Mitvald, both meaning Midworld. Arkans called it the Arkan Sea.
The rubber was only processed in Karoseth, actually, the raw material coming from further south. Matthas had not seen his birthplace for a decade, having lived here in Brahvniki; for a moment the memory came sharp. Marble and granite and pink brick, climbing in terraces from the city wall and the tarry mast-forest of the harbor. Orange groves outside the walls, fields of lavender, warm sun on the blue mountains rising northwards.
The servants had opened the windows again. Brahvnikians, he thought. Arctic seals. It was typical spring weather in the Brezhan delta; raw, damp and chill, to an Arkan. He went to the windows and latched them closed.
The panes were thick triangles of inferior local glass set in wood, appropriate for a merchant of his standing. They looked down from the third story of a tall narrow house of half-timbering, above a narrow cobbled street that smelled of fish and garbage and the river not far away. Rain started, beating at the glass, streaking his vision like tears.
He went to the door and quickly checked the corridor either way; there was no way someone could climb the stairs without making a loud creak, but it never hurt to be sure. He added a small shovelful of blackrock to the tile stove, settled himself at the homely clutter of his desk and unlocked the bottom drawer, with its secret compartment. From that he lifted a plain leather-bound account book, its pages studded with rag bookmarks.
This was his real work: for Irefas, the Secret Service of the Arkan Empire. As far as he was concerned, it was the best that one of his caste, fessas, artisan-professional, could get. The merchant’s life, that so many aspire to, he thought. The money’s well and good, but the work’s so boring. Besides, more than one heroic spy in history had been elevated to Aitzas, noble. Another nice thing: in foreign countries there were no hair laws. His, blond like all Arkans’ but silvering at th
e temples, was almost waist-long, as none but Aitzas were permitted, inside the Empire.
Item: prices. Mules and horses in the Aeniri towns upriver: up threefold since the spring herds had come in. Tool-grade F’talezonian and Rand steel: up fivefold over the past six months. Significant increases in the prices of woolen cloth, grain, leather, oil, medical supplies and drugs, bronze; the armorers working overtime; the price of casual labor gone through the roof. Thirty-two ships of fifty tuin or more have cleared the harbor already this season. The bills of lading as fictional as Marmori’s Book of Children’s Merry Tales.
He looked at a copy his spy in the harbormaster’s office had made. A seventy-five tuin two-master carrying braided horsehair—catapult skeins—dried fruit, neatsfoot oil—for the maintenance of harness—cured bullhide, glassfiber, resin—shields, body armor—miscellaneous metal goods. Shipping to Haiu Menshir. His spy had gotten a good look at the “metal goods”; spearheads, broadaxe-blades, brass-hilted swords from Rand. And Haians, as all the world knew, were absolute pacifists, under Arkan control. If they’re buying that, I’m the Queen of Hyerne.
Arko’s taking of Haiu Menshir made him uncomfortable, actually, as he was sure it made many Arkans. It was also a political blunder, to his mind; no better way to turn all the world against the Empire, he’d thought at the time. Now, plain as day, it was happening. What made it even worse was that the takeover had taken two tries. The first time, the greatest Empire in the world, attacking a small island populated entirely by pacifists, had been defeated. A ragtag band of sailors hiding behind bales and crates, led by a man who may now be proving himself one of the greatest generals of his time but then had been an accredited lunatic ... he didn’t like thinking about it.
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