Anger and a sickening fear rose up in him, so strong it overwhelmed the other, more basic demand of his flesh. He felt an unreasoning urge to wrest the Saireflute from Elzin's hands and snap it like kindling over his knee. He had strength enough to serve its player's spine the same--Saire and Saireflute, both destroyers, both destroyed . . .
She smiled up at him then, child-like, all innocence, and stretched out her hand. It was like a balm on the open wound of his outrage. Here was no beast. This was not the creature who had raged and called him murderer, whose talons had impaled and held him pinioned in the mist while all that he was fell to nothingness. Here was only Elzin, simple Elzin, who wanted little more than peace and her pleasures, and who wept at night in her tent over a deer slain so that she might eat.
She touched his arm, and did not even notice that he flinched.
"Do you think they'd mind," she asked him shyly as she plucked at a button on his jacket, "if we ate now? My stomach's crawled half up my throat."
"If you and I begin," he told her softly, "I believe the rest will follow."
o0o
Strange, thought Heratinn, how she never seemed aware of what her playing wrought.
She and Caldan exchanged words, and then walked together to the first of the tables, where the councilor carved a ribbon of meat from a steaming haunch of beef. He tore the strip in half, and offered a piece to the Saire. She bit deeply, and beamed, chewing.
He could not help but notice how careful the highlander had been to swallow his own morsel at the exact moment Elzin swallowed hers. The count's dogs, too, each had their sample from their master's hand.
Elzin turned to the gathering, her look anxious and expectant.
"Well," said Val Torska, "will you come, then?"
And they did. They all did.
o0o
With clenched jaw and gritted teeth, Tavari glared into space. From the corner of her eye she caught movement in the late twilight tones of her vision. Rahi, moving closer to catch the last faint strains of the music of the Flute. She turned her baleful stare on him, and he froze.
The bitch's voice rolled through the trees like an avalanche. "Know you then that the goddess can be generous. Let us mark our union with a feast."
Tavari snapped the green branch in her hands like a twig and hurled its pieces to the ground.
Curse the lowlanders. Curse the Saire and her instrument of slavery and destruction. The Flute had nearly executed genocide upon them once, depleting the population of males almost to the point of no return. How could Caldan allow them to bring that abominable thing here, and how could the elders allow the bitch to play it?
There was only one answer. They had no choice. For eight-hundred years that had been their answer to every demand the lowlanders made of them. Only twice had they dared refuse: they built no temple to Shador, and King Nazril and his army entered Tarska uninvited and had not been permitted to leave it alive.
She smiled, relishing old victories. Caldan, the crafty old wolf, had known precisely what the result of the carnage would be. It gave them a chance for pride and revenge, with no fear of reprisals. She herself had been too young to understand, then, but her mother gleefully recounted the story for her each time that she would ask for it.
Until her mother died, topping out a mastwood for the lowlanders.
Oh, yes. The lowlanders must have their taxes. They must have their tribute. They must have the trees. Besides what few furs they did not need themselves, mastwood was all the Kyr had to offer. Tarska was forbidden trade with any other but the crown, and what price the crown set they must accept. Not surprising that the crown was far from generous. The mastwood's true value set Tarska's taxes at more than all the other provinces combined.
Nearly every adult served time in the lumber camps. They all hated it; hated killing the trees, hated serving the lowlanders. Hated to bear witness to the mastwood's echo of their own existence. For no matter how meticulously harvested and lovingly tended, the trees, too, declined. The lowlanders demanded, and nothing would satisfy them but to consume all.
Only one group besides the young did not attend the trees: the nightwender. They took a harvest of another sort.
It seemed to her now that from the moment she had watched her mother fall, all those many years ago, she knew that she would wear the cropped hair and black doeskin and would see in the night. Yet, she had told no one, not even Casti, who was her closest friend.
The day she became an adult she asked to be tested. Speed and coordination, focus and temperament, strength and cunning. A wait, and then the final test: to watch a group of prospects take the drug that would induce the change.
It was violent, ugly, and when it was over, half of the prospects had not survived the convulsions and hemorrhaging. Another wait. Time for the watchers to think on what they had seen. Time for them to change their minds. To reconsider was no disgrace.
Some did demur, but she herself had never wavered. Better to die writhing like a speared fish than to serve the lowlanders.
Better to die, but best yet to kill instead.
o0o
Reclining in his vantage point, the wide branch of a tree above and behind, Ymarr watched his youngest. The branch Tavari fractured had been green wood three fingers thick. To snap it she had slipped in and out of focus with the ease of a snake slipping from land to water, and that spoke of talent worth any nurturing. How dangerously ferocious she was, strung tight as an elk hunter's bowstring. Loosed, she would fling death, all right, and more certainly than any bow.
Tavari. When the nexus came, she must make the right decision.
The Dreamer saw already that she would be there.
Chapter Sixteen
The treacherous lie sleepless,
crouching like foul beasts,
Preparing to rend flesh from bone
and then in hatred feast.
--"Shador Shields Us"
The beast came on: insatiable in appetite; unfathomable in form; inexorable in its advance. Elzin quailed to hear the crunch of brittle bones, the roar of its dreadful breath. She crouched and quivered, knowing soon its eye would fall upon her, that there would be no escape.
Tutor stumbled. Elzin's jaw banged against her chest, jarring her from that nightmare to this. Here, however, the crunch was not of bones, but of the horses' hooves through the hard, crusty snow at the bottom of the pass. She blinked her eyes at the sheer black walls that reared overhead as if poised to crush her. Her eyes teared in earnest at the blinding, bright blue of the thin strip of sky; it fostered her hope that somewhere, far above, a sun still circled. Since the pass, she had known only the absolute black of night or the twilight that passed in the crevice for day.
She swiped at her frozen cheeks with the backs of her thick, furred mittens, a Tarskan gift. Their other present, a cloak of dense, white fur, covered her shoulders, back and as much of her legs as she could draw underneath it. Only there did she not feel frozen. Sometimes she thought only those parts of her could still feel.
Telriss preserve her, where was spring? Had she somehow passed beyond even the healing breath of the goddess? How had she come to be transported to this alien landscape of stark blacks and whites?
Their very mounts seemed otherworldly. Vapors rose from the sweat of their shaggy coats; whole clouds gouted forth from their nostrils. They were not the same creatures who had first entered Griffin Pass. Those horses had been lively; they snorted and tossed their heads, lifting high their hooves as the strange surface groaned and fractured beneath their weight. Now, they steamed and trudged and rarely flicked an ear, weary heads hung between their knees.
Their riders, too, had been transformed. Even Heratinn no longer stared about himself in wonder, but hunched forlornly in his saddle as ice rimed his hood and cold crystals burrowed into the folds of his cloak. Only the highlanders sat erect and impervious, Caldan sometimes breaking trail for the horses himself.
No one's voice was raised in talk or ban
ter, or even to give orders. She could hear no cry of animal or bird. Only the wind had a voice in this place. It wailed and howled, never silent, never still in its tireless quest to reach for her within the sheltered crevice. It ambushed her from a thousand places, leaping down to snatch with icy claws at her garments, ripping through to tear like a starved beast at the life-giving warmth beneath.
The wind isolated her. She was shut up in a cell of sound. It turned all her hopes to dreads, and all her dreams to nightmares. She thought she would go deaf. She thought she would go mad.
Tutor bent his body like a hairpin around the latest switchback, and as if by magic their destination appeared, stark and forbidding, like a single, black tooth thrust out of the lower jaw of the mountain. Hawkshold. The wind roared in frustration and hurled thin spears of snow across the chasm, high above her head.
The crevice gradually widened; the walls of her shelter grew short, they disappeared, and then, it was as if she rode along the top of a narrow wall, for the trail began to ascend the face of the mountain itself. The wind, no longer thwarted, made good on every threat of violence it had shrieked against her in the pass. It swept down from the north like an army, as if to drive her back to Sheldwinn. Tiny missiles of ice stung her face; gusts battered her like cudgels. She swayed in her saddle, making herself small, shrinking from the edge of the precipice. Below, far below, she glimpsed the sea as it lashed the rocks, a mad drayman flogging an unmoving horse.
Night fell here like a hammer, still, before the sky had fully darkened, they at last passed under the final wood and iron gate and into the inner ward of the keep. It was empty, deserted, and she was not the only one to start in alarm as the gate clattered closed, seemingly of its own accord.
o0o
Deep in the shadows of the stairway, Andor, heir to the province of Tarska, studied the group below him with the same amused absorption that a cat might reserve for a covey of netted birds. His father dismounted calmly and strode off to inspect the stables. The elite milled about, unnerved to be so deep in Tarska, and further dismayed, no doubt, by the dearth of servants in this, the lord of the highlands' stronghold.
And back from the stables already was the "lord of the highlands" himself. He spoke briefly with the two captains, and soon their own people began to stiffly lead their mounts to their well-deserved rests. Much to Andor's disappointment, Olkor had already taken the reins of the prince's mare. It might have made for an entertaining scene had there been no one to serve His Highness, but of course his father had thought of that.
The sixteen year-old did not miss the contemptuous look that his sister gave to the Saire, just as he did not miss the way that Elzin pressed her body close to his father as he helped her down from her gelding. The Saire shivered violently; she tottered unsteadily on her cold limbs. But no, not nearly so unsteadily as she pretended. She embraced rather than leaned on his father, and his father did not object. No, he did not object at all, and that was very interesting indeed.
And here came Tyrmiskai, smiling graciously. He truly did have a useful smile. It had persuaded enough so that a warm mash and bedding awaited the lowland horses, and a hot meal and ready rooms for their riders. Yet it was also his suggestion that no one openly assist the lowlanders, lest some action considered acceptable toward a servant cause tempers to flare. A pity, for that might have proved interesting as well.
Yes, conflict was stimulating; he enjoyed the struggle, the contention between opposing sides. Not battles fought with sweat and steel--such were for brutes, the inept or the cornered. No, it was the combat of mind and nerve that gave him pleasure. Intrigue. Manipulation. The double-edged sword of emotion. These were the weapons of those truly skilled at war. Hadn't his father told him so?
Dear, dear father.
How tenderly he settled the Saire on a bench as Tyrmiskai whispered in his ear. Even this far, Andor could tell that his sire would excuse himself. Whatever Tyrmiskai said was important.
Did his father really care for the lowland bitch, with her squat body and her tits as big as the summer melons grown in fertile Talvni? Did he use her? For what? A Saire had some power, but it was undefined, its usefulness questionable. Besides, even the appearance of an affair with her could cost his father dearly. If the Queen did not kill him out of jealousy or fear of treason, the best that he could expect was that his own people would send nightwender to dispatch him quickly. No, it was not like him to rush, to risk everything already accomplished with such a dangerous, desperate gamble.
Could it be love, then? His father? How amusing! Andor looked at the Saire again and nearly laughed aloud. How very fitting it would be to have the great Caldan brought to ruin by a chubby, lowland slut. A Saire, no less, chosen of the accursed instrument that nearly wiped out the Kyr over eight centuries ago. He would be fortunate if the elders didn't send the nightwender to wring his neck just for looking at her, although wringing something else might be more appropriate.
Perhaps now might be his chance to find out more. Now, while his father had his mind on other weighty matters.
o0o
Elzin could not help but stare; to see him was to see time rolled back. It was Caldan: still tall, but not full into growth, already with Caldan's bold stride and Caldan's grace, though his face was not yet scarred. Two coursers trotted at his heels. He did not look right or left but only at her, directly at her, and though she thought she should feel flattered, she somehow only felt afraid.
"My son, Andor."
"Son?" She blinked her eyes as comprehension dawned. "Oh--of course--your son!"
"And very much at your service, Great Lady."
He had his father's bow as well.
"There has been a message from Sheldwinn, Great Lady," said Caldan. "His Highness and I had best tend to it immediately. Kezwann appears exhausted; permit Tyrmiskai here to see to whatever it is you might wish."
"If you and the Great Lady will allow, Father," said Andor, "I would consider it an honor to attend the Saire. Besides," he added with a grin, "Tyrmiskai and I were playing chasti, and it is still his move."
"Ungrateful whelp. You should see how your son rewards my patient and masterful tutoring. I lost my griffin to him an hour ago."
"I'd really like a room," said Elzin. "And a fire. And something—anything--warm. My feet feel like boards."
"At once, then," said Andor. "And in order."
He helped her to rise.
"Shame on my father for leaving a beautiful woman unattended to go look after business," said Andor. "I must remember to thank him. Where are your things, Great Lady?"
"There." She pointed. "See, Kezwann's watching over them like a hawk."
"Your maidservant. Yes, I see her. A moment, no more, Great Lady."
"Oh, but my elite can carry--"
"Not at all. Your elite are meant for your protection; they must not be otherwise burdened."
True to his word, it took no more than a moment. She marveled at the ease with which Andor shouldered the bulging bags filled with her personal possessions.
"Tyrmiskai will see to the comfort of your maid," he said, then paused with one eyebrow raised curiously. "Is everything all right?"
She realized she stared again. "Oh! Oh, yes. It's just," she shook her head at him wonderingly, "well, you look so much like your father."
"A compliment, I hope."
"Goddess, yes," she assured him. "Your father's always getting stared at, too. Like my brother would say, who looks at the ducks when a swan's on the lake?"
His intensity so unnerved her that she couldn't help but stammer on. "Of course, he was talking about girls, my brother, but, well, you know what I mean. We women look, too. At the swans, that is."
"But he only looks at you, I take it." he said. She blushed, and that made him smile.
o0o
Won't you tell me more, Great Lady? he thought, though she had told him already more than enough to guess her intentions. How very easy she was!
"And it
was his idea, to bring you here?"
"Well, yes, actually, it was." She glanced behind herself once, but their speech was low and the elite considerately some distance behind. "I'm really grateful. I just didn't know what to do, when the Flute chose me. I was so confused, and the Queen--it was awful! To tell you the truth, I think he saved my life."
"I believe I understand why."
When she blushed again he almost laughed.
"I guess it's pretty obvious, isn't it?" she said. "Your sister saw how we felt about each other, too. He's your father after all; you're more used to his moods. I'll tell you one thing, though--Castandra didn't like the idea much."
"Ah, Castandra. My sister does not always want what is best. Trust me, you need not worry about her."
She positively beamed. "Thank you, Andor. You've made me feel welcome."
"Oh, but it's so, Great Lady. Yes, I assure you, you cannot imagine just how terribly welcome you are."
o0o
"Your room," he said. "And just a few steps away, my father's." She peeked down the hall, then rewarded him with a grateful smile.
He raised his lamp high as he entered. How long since this room had been opened? All of his sixteen years, perhaps? But the shutters were tightly molded, the drapes heavy, and stone hardly dusty at all. Except a few cobwebs, the room probably looked much as it had long ago.
No oil in the lamp on the wall. Evaporated, of course. "A moment," he said, and retrieved a full one. "My apologies, Great Lady, but it appears there has been no fire laid, and I see no coal in the braziers. Bear with me for just a bit longer, I will take care of everything personally."
o0o
The lamp burned steadily in the still air of the room. Elzin rubbed her forearms and tried to make sense of her surroundings. Everything seemed strange and foreign, but after the difficult journey, luxurious. Several pelts, like her cloak, heavy and whiter than snow, had been joined together and were flung over the bed like a comforter. With her teeth she pulled off her mittens and kneaded her fingers in the lush, long fur. Wonderful, warm, soft friction! She bounced her rump on the mattress, somehow both pliable and firm at once.
The Night Holds the Moon Page 22