She remembered a time when she had been proud of her scars.
Who but Ram, she wondered, would offer to take a warlady to wife? Certainly not a man who had his choice of fragile young beauties like Fawn.
The door opened behind her. The liquid deeps of the mirror showed her another candle, and its sheen rippled over a gown of brown velvet, tagged with the pale ecru lace such as the ladies of the Bight Islands made, with a delicate face lost in shadow above.
She turned from the mirror. “How do you feel?” she asked.
Fawn shrugged and set the candle down. “Renewed,” she replied quietly. “As if—oh, as if spring had come, after a nightmare winter.” She crossed to the small table that stood beside the window and picked up her hairbrush, as was her nightly wont. But she set it down again, as she had set down untasted forkfuls of flour paste and ash at tonight’s supper. In the silky, amber gleam of candle and lamp, her fingers were trembling.
“Ready to take the road again?” the Hawk asked, her voice ringing tinnily in her own ears. This man of Fawnie’s, Ram had said. But that, she told herself, was nothing that she had to burden Fawn with. It was no doing of hers that she had been stolen away from her family and had taken Sun Wolf’s fancy. The Wolf was lost and in grave danger, and Fawn had put her life at risk to find him.
Fawn was silent for a long moment, staring down at the brush, her face turned away. In a muffled voice, she finally said, “No.” She looked up with wretched defiance in her green eyes. “I’m not going on.”
Even Ram’s unexpected proposal of marriage had not struck Starhawk with such shock. For a moment, she could only stare, and her first feeling was one of indignation that this girl would abandon her quest for her lover. “What?” was all she could say.
Fawn’s voice was shaking. “I’m going to stay here,” she said haltingly, “and—and marry Orris.”
“What?” And then, seeing the girl’s eyes flood with tears of shame and wretchedness, Starhawk crossed the room in two quick strides and caught her in a swift hug, reassuring her while her own mind reeled in divided confusion. “Fawnie, I—”
Fawn began sobbing in earnest. “Starhawk, don’t be angry with me. Please don’t be angry with me. Sun Wolf was so good to me, so kind—he saved me from I don’t know what kind of slavery and misery. But—but Anyog was right. I was there at the inn when he said we would never enter the Citadel without the help of a wizard—I was listening in the hall. And he’s right, Hawk. We can’t go against Altiokis by ourselves. And there are no wizards anymore. He’s the last one left, the only one...”
Not if I can put the screws to Anyog in some way, he’s not, Starhawk thought grimly. But she only said, “We’ll find one.” Her honesty drove her to recognize Fawn’s love for the Wolf to be as valid as her own, even as it had driven her to allow the girl to accompany her in the first place.
“No,” Fawn whispered. “Hawk, even if we could—it isn’t only that.” She drew back, looking earnestly up at the older woman with those wide, absinthe-green eyes. “Starhawk, it isn’t enough. I want a home; I want children of my own. Even if we find him, even if he’s not dead, I don’t want to live as a mercenary’s woman. I love Sun Wolf—I think I’ll always love him. But I won’t go on being a glorified camp follower. I can’t.”
Her trembling fingers gestured at the dim room, with its curtained bed and softly shining lamps, its stiff-robed, ridiculous saint preaching to the mermaids in the sea, with their weedy hair flowing down over their breasts. “This is the sort of house that I grew up in, Hawk. This is the life I know. I belong here. And believe me,” she added with a wry smile, “marrying into a firm of spice merchants is a better thing, in the long run, than being mistress to the richest mercenary in creation.”
Flabbergasted, Starhawk could not speak, but only look in puzzlement at that beautiful, secretive face and wonder that anyone who actually had Sun Wolf’s love could give it up for a bustling, pompous busybody like Orris Farstep.
Fawn disengaged herself quietly from Starhawk’s grasp and walked to the window. The lace at her throat almost covered the bandages that remained over the wounds that the nuuwa had left; like Starhawk, she would carry scars to the end of her days. Her voice was soft as she went on. “I spoke to Pel about it this afternoon. I know Orris is fond of me. And I—I want this, Hawk. I want a home and a family and a place; I want to know that my man isn’t going to get himself killed in a war next week or discard me for someone else next year. I love this place and I love these people. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” the Hawk said, her voice so low that she was almost not sure that it could be heard over the clamoring sounds in her own heart and mind. “Yes, I understand.”
Fawn’s back was a shape of darkness against the deep well of the window’s shadow; the candle threw a little wisp of light along the edge of the lace and on the halo of her hair. “What will you do?” she asked.
Starhawk shrugged. “Go on alone.”
She took her leave of them next day. Pel, Orris, Gillie, and the children went with her to see her off at the city’s land gate, wrapped in oilskins to keep off the rain. Anyog, though he was able now to get about, had remained at home, as had Ram and Fawn, each for a different, personal reason.
All the way through the steep-slanted cobbled streets of the town, Orris had kept up a worried stream of caution and advice regarding the roads through the Stren Water Valley that would take her northeast to Racken Scrag, about the bandits who were said to haunt them, and concerning the dangers of Altiokis’ lands. “It isn’t only the bandits stealing your horses you’ll have to worry about, lass,” he fretted—Pel had given Starhawk a riding mare and a pack mule. “That Altiokis, he’s hiring mercenaries, and the countryside’s stiff with them. They’re dangerous fellows...”
The Hawk sighed patiently, glancing sideways at Orris from beneath her streaming hood. “I know all about mercenaries that I need to.”
“Yes, but—”
“Leave the poor woman alone,” Pel ordered briskly. “By God, how she put up with you all the way from Foonspay I’ll never know.” Her smile flashed white in the gypsy brown of her face. Her hood was of the fashionable calash type—under its boned arch, the piled braids of her widow’s coif gleamed faintly in the rainy daylight. She quickened her step to where Starhawk walked in front of the little cavalcade of led horses and took the Hawk’s hand in her own little square one.
In a softer voice, she said, “But we’re all glad that you have been here, child. Your staying made all the difference to Fawn. In the pinch, it may even be that it saved her life to know that she had not been abandoned in a strange place.”
Starhawk said nothing. She felt uncomfortable about Fawn, almost guilty. But her impassive face showed nothing of the turmoil within her as she looked around at the bright-painted walls of this rain-drenched, fish-smelling town. Pel seemed to accept her silence for what it was and moved along briskly beside her, keeping her heavy black skirts lifted above the runnels that trickled among the cobblestones.
Orris persisted. “But mercenaries—they’re a bad breed, Starhawk, begging your pardon for saying so. And they say the Dark Eagle whom Altiokis has put in charge of all his mercenaries is the worst...”
“The Dark Eagle?” Starhawk raised her dark, level brows.
“Aye. He’s a wicked man, they say...”
“Oh, bosh,” Pel retorted. “Our girl’s probably served with him; haven’t you, child?”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” she admitted, and Orris looked shocked.
From the saddle of the riding mare, Idjit announced, “I be goin’ with the Hawk.”
“Say, ‘I am going with the Hawk,’” corrected Gillie, who was leading the mare. “And in any case, you aren’t, laddie.”
“Then I maun’t say’t,” the boy retorted in the broad Bight Coast dialect that his mother was laboring diligently to erase from his speech. Keltie, perched amid the packs on the mule, watched her brother with worsh
ip in her round, blue eyes.
Their mother looked annoyed with this challenge, but Starhawk only said, “That’s all right, Gillie. Even if I could take a child along—which I can’t—I wouldn’t have one with me who talked like a fisherman.”
At this rebuke from his hero, Idjit subsided, and Pel hid a grin. They had reached the squat towers of the city gate. Amid the crowds of incoming countryfolk and local farmers, they said good-by, Starhawk lifting the children down and mounting in Idjit’s place, leaning from the saddle to clasp their hands. She missed them already—and more than these who had come to see her off, she missed Ram and Anyog and Fawn. But there was nothing that she could have said to them in parting. What could she say to a man she was leaving to seek another, or to the woman who had abandoned that quest? And though in the end she had not had the heart to speak to Anyog of her desperate need for even a cowardly and unfledged wizard’s aid, she knew that Anyog knew it. She did not blame him for his fear, but she knew that he blamed himself.
“The Stren Water Valley will be in flood this time of year,” Orris advised. “Best go up it by the foothills.”
The mare shied, more offended than afraid, as a market woman chivied a herd of geese through the gate; in the shelter of the gatehouse eaves, a boy was selling roast chestnuts out of a brazier full of coals, his thin, monotonous song rising above the general din. Light and steady, rain drummed on the shining slates and on Starhawk’s black oilskin cloak. The sound of rain and the smell of fish and the sea would always be twined in her mind with these people—with the two children hanging onto Gillie Farstep’s hands, with the monumental Orris, fussing at her to watch what inns she put up at, and with Pel Farstep, like a little brown sparrow, reaching up to take her hands in farewell.
“Keep yourself safe, child,” she said gently. “And remember, wherever you are, there is a home here for you if you need one.”
Starhawk bent from the saddle and kissed the brown cheek. Then she turned the horse’s head; the mule stretched out its neck to the full extent of the lead before it followed. She left the Farsteps in the crowded shadows of the noisy gate and did not look back.
You have parted from so many people, she told herself, to still that treacherous ache in her heart. In time, you got over all but one and you’ll get over these.
She made herself wonder if the Dark Eagle would take her on as a mercenary; that would get her into the Citadel, without the need to search for a wizard to aid her. From things Ram and his brothers had said, most people didn’t believe in the existence of wizards anymore—only in Altiokis, inhuman, deathless, undefeatable, coiled in the darkness of the Tchard Mountains like a poisonous snake beneath the kitchen floor.
The wet wind lifted her cloak. Shreds of white cloud blew, unveiling the distant foothills of those mountains and the rolling uplands, stony and deserted, that guarded all approaches to them on this side. How long would it be, she wondered, before Altiokis turned his energies toward the Bight Coast, as he had turned them toward Mandrigyn and the straits of the Megantic?
Once she would have watched the proceedings with interest, as Sun Wolf did, gauging the proper time to apply for work amid the chaos. She had burned and looted many cities—this was the first time, she realized, she had dwelt in one in peace. Pel, Ram, and Orris were the burghers she and her men had helped kill; Idjit and Keltie were the children who had been sold into slavery to pay them.
She shook her head, forcing those thoughts into the background of her mind. One thing at a time, she told herself, and the thing now is to figure out what I’m going to do when I reach the Citadel walls. The Dark Eagle would know of her unshakable loyalty to the Wolf—he’d seen them work together when they’d all been fighting in the East. Even if she came up with a story of disaffected loyalties, the timing, with the Wolf, being a prisoner in the Citadel, would give the game away.
She had to find a wizard—one who was not too terrified of Altiokis to admit his powers, preferably one who had passed this Trial that Anyog had spoken of. But there was all the Mother’s green earth to search in and all the days that she had lost in Pergemis pressing on her, reminding her how little time it took for a man to die.
Damn Fawnie, anyway, she thought, exasperated, and then felt a twinge of guilt. She did not rationally expect that the girl would have known at the outset that she would not be going on from Pergemis; and in any case, Pel Farstep might very well have been right. It would be easy to die, lying friendless among strangers. Yet knowing Fawn for her rival, Starhawk could never have abandoned her to her death.
Hooves clattered on the hard surface of the highroad. Starhawk swung around in the saddle, the freshening wind blowing the hood back from her hair. It was a single rider, wrapped like herself in a black oilskin poncho, the folds of it whipping like the horse’s black, tangled mane and tail in the moist chill of the air. They drew up beside her, horse and rider steaming with breath.
Starhawk said, “Are you out of your lint-picking mind?”
“I suspect so.” Uncle Anyog was panting, clinging to the pommel of the saddle for balance, his face white against the darkness of his salt-and-pepper beard. “But I couldn’t let you go on, my warrior dove. Not alone.”
She regarded him from beneath lowered lids. “You going to start calling me ‘lass,’ as Ram does?”
He grinned. She reined her mare around and started up the road for the foothills and the way to the Tchard Mountains, Anyog jogging at her side.
“For that matter, did Ram put you up to this?” she asked suddenly.
“It would do my wits greater credit if I said he’d threatened me with a horrible death if I didn’t go to your aid.” The old man sighed. “But alas, in old age one learns to take credit for one’s own follies. None of them knows a thing, my child. I left Pel a note.”
“It must have covered three pages,” she remarked.
Anyog was recovering his breath a little. She could see, under the oilskin, that he was dressed as he always was—as a gentleman—in his drab and sober black, the starched white lace of his ruff like petals around his face. “In the finest iambic pentameter,” he amplified. “My dove, I know why you refused our Ram’s hamlike but gold-filled hand—and I suspect I know why you left the Convent.” Her head swiveled sharply around, her gray eyes narrowing. “Oh, yes—I have seen you meditate and I know you didn’t learn that as a mercenary...But why did you become a Sister to begin with?”
She drew rein, meeting that bright, black scrutiny with cold reserve. “I never turn down an offer of help,” she said. “And now that you have offered, I won’t send you back, because I need you. But that doesn’t mean I won’t gag you and pack you up to Grimscarp, the way we packed you into Pergemis, if you ask after things that are none of your affair.”
She clucked to the mare and moved off.
“But it is my affair, my dove,” the little man said, wholly unperturbed. “For I think we are more alike than you know. You became a Sister, I suspect, for the same reasons that you later became a warrior—because you would not tolerate the slow breaking of your spirit to the yoke of a house and a child and some man’s whims, and any life seemed preferable to that—because you need a life of the brighter colors, because you prefer lightning-edged darkness to an eternal twilight. My child,” he said softly, urging his bay mare up beside hers on the narrow road, “I could no more have remained a pensioner in my estimable sister’s house than I could become a warrior like yourself.
“I have lived with my fear a long time,” he continued, drawing the oilskin closer about his body as the wind turned chill once again. “Not until now had I realized how it had come to rule me.”
Chapter 12
SUN WOLF PAUSED in his pacing, hearing the sound of soft, approaching footfalls in the darkness. From the stairs, he thought. His sigh was deep and bored, and he shifted his weight as a man would do on a long stint of guard. The pattering steps halted. Around him, the vast, chilly darkness was lambent with breath.
Somewhere a board creaked. Then weight struck his shoulders and the back of his knee—light, muscled weight, like a cat’s, vicious and controlled. At the first breath of impact, he twisted, slithering free of the smooth arms that sought his neck. In the darkness, he reached back and expertly tweaked the short little nose that snorted with exertion so close to his ear.
He felt his assailant step away. With an oily hiss of hot metal, someone uncovered a dark-lantern. Behind him, Gilden stood panting, regarding him with injured chagrin.
All around the room, their hair tight-braided and their smooth arms traced in the shadows with the faint, clear lines of muscle definition, the ladies of Mandrigyn watched him, a sea of aggrieved eyes.
“You’re pulling with your shoulders,” he told Gilden, looking down into those long-lashed, sea-blue eyes. “Your center of balance is lower than a man’s—that’s why you women have hell’s own time throwing each other. It’s one of your advantages against a man. Throw from the hips—like this—lever me down. Somebody your size, trying to use brute force against someone my size, is more than stupid—she’s suicidal.”
Gilden colored, but said, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“And I heard you coming.”
She said something else then, sotto voce and obviously picked up from Crazyred’s vocabulary.
He glanced at the assembled ladies. “Next?”
Behind him, he heard Gilden’s swift hiss of intaken breath, a voiceless protest. When he turned and raised one shaggy brow at her, she asked, “Couldn’t I try again?”
The Ladies of Mandrigyn Page 19