“Not so fast, Cousin.” Steel rang in Jarid’s arrogant voice.
Without meaning to, Haemas found she had dropped back into her seat.
“I have a little something for you.” His sense of interest in her became stronger, sharpening into something closer to . . . ownership. “Something which I trust you will not find unappealing.”
Haemas tore her gaze away from Jarid’s compelling ice-pale eyes. “I want to go.”
“Very well, then, skivit, by all means, go.” His tone mocked her. “But first you must drink a toast with us.”
Frozen, she watched as his steady hand poured deep-red tchallit wine into the green crystal goblets set before each place. His sense of triumph was so strong, she knew he was not even bothering to shield. He handed one goblet to Alyssa, the next to Haemas, reserving the last for himself.
All three portions came from the same bottle, yet the moment her hand closed around the slender green stem, she knew something was wrong with it. Her hand jerked away as though the glass had burned her.
Candlelight reflected on the green crystal as he raised his goblet high. “A toast to the Heir of Tal’ayn.”
Alyssa rose beside him, her hand draped casually over his shoulder. “To the Heir!” she agreed merrily. Watching each other, they sipped the blood-red liquid.
“What’s this, Cousin?” Jarid turned the full force of his magnetic gaze on her. “You won’t drink with us? We can’t have that.”
The compulsion to drink flowed over her, more powerful with every passing second. She closed her eyes, fighting his will, gripping the hard arms of her chair until her fingers were numb. Abruptly her cousin showed her a gruesome image in his mind, her father lying dead on the floor.
“Father!” she gasped. “I won’t let you!”
Casually, Jarid doubled the force of his compulsion. Her hand crept toward the cup. “But,” he said softly, “you’ve misunderstood. You know a touch of Foreseeing runs through the Tal line. No . . . I’m afraid my unstable cousin is the one who will do that.”
The struggle generated a white-hot haze inside her head, through which she could just barely see her hand as it closed around the goblet’s green stem again.
Jarid nodded his approval. “Just one sip.”
She picked up the cup and put it to her lips . . .
“. . . no, no, I wouldn’t hurt him!” Her heart thumping wildly, Haemas bolted upright in the darkness. Her head throbbed and hot tears streamed down her face. “I wouldn’t!” Her panic increased as something snared her wrists and would not let go.
“Demonfire and damnation!” a male voice exclaimed in her ear.
Haemas cried out and struggled, frantic to get away. A red glow arose in the darkness a few feet away as someone prodded the fire back to life.
A hand clamped over her mouth and an arm caught her shoulders. Gradually, her struggles subsided as she remembered where she was. After a moment, Cale released her, but she just sat there, staring at her bound wrists, trying to control her ragged breathing.
Cale brushed a twig out of his hair. “I suppose we’ll never know what that was all about.”
Haemas tried to massage her aching shoulder with her bound hands. “I’m . . . sorry,” she said. “I was . . . dreaming.”
Cale’s mouth dropped. “Holy Mother above!”
She blotted her damp cheeks with the back of her hands, realizing every eye in the camp was on her.
“Did it just talk?” Mashal demanded, throwing a large branch on the fire.
The flames hissed and popped as they all stared at her. “Well, prize?” Cale tugged on the thong that led from his hand to her wrists.
She raised her chin. “My name is Haemas.”
Mashal scowled and turned away, poking the fire viciously.
Cale shot him a triumphant look. “And what House would you be from, young Haemas?”
She looked away into the blackness outside the fire’s yellow light. “That’s none of your concern.” Then she found her blanket and rolled back into it as well as she could.
Mashal snickered. “Within the month!”
Somewhere out of the darkness came the snarl of a silsha.
* * *
Windsign shared the shadowfoot’s frustration as it prowled the outer reaches of the quiet ones’ camp, wary of approaching the girl again. She saw the scene through its eyes, the tangled vines, the moldering leaves, the bright circle of frightening, unnatural light. The shadowfoot is nervous, she said. They have fire and weapons.
He must try again, said Summerstone, even if it costs his life. We will all die unless we gain her help.
* * *
Midmorning the following day, Jarid jerked irritably at the knobby head of the nag he had liberated from one of Lenhe’ayn’s outer fields. Flattening its ears, the black gelding eyed the stream suspiciously and refused to cross.
Cursing his luck, Jarid seized control of the animal’s distastefully dull mind and forced its unwilling legs into the shallow water. It was no big secret to him why the Lenhe field hands had not worried if this beast strayed. The only thing more important in its stupid mind than sloth was food.
Where in the seven hells was his fool of a cousin going, he wondered as he released the horse’s mind. He’d tracked her to a chierra shrine the night before, but none of the women there had known anything, so he’d stolen an ebari saddle and bridle and moved on.
The idea of women having a religious vocation made him laugh anyway. Trust the chierras to get everything backwards.
Glancing upwards at the canopy of leaves and branches, he tried to calculate the time, but too little sunlight filtered through. His stomach insisted it was lunchtime, though. Frowning at the thought of making another meal on trail rations, he cast his mind through the forest until he found the clear, unshielded thoughts of a Lowlander not too far away.
It was an old peddler driving his wagon down a narrow track on the forest’s near edge. Jarid cursed. It would take him some time to catch up.
A half hour passed before he could reach the forest’s edge. The old peddler lay sprawled against a tree trunk while his equally elderly draft ummit watched him snore, chewing its cud.
Jarid dismounted and quickly touched the wrinkled forehead to establish a link. You are sound asleep, he told the peddler sternly, sound asleep. Then he searched the old man’s stores, finding an appreciable quantity of real ham and fresh bread, along with a barrel of last fall’s callyt fruits.
Making a sandwich of the ham and bread, he squatted down beside the old man’s unconscious body and sorted through his recent memories. His name was Cittar and he had traveled these back areas for the last thirty years, selling mostly to the chierra settlements located far away from the Highlands.
He found no memory of the girl, however. Standing up, he bit into one of the sweet yellow callyts and munched thoughtfully.
It was apparent from the old man’s memory that he traveled quite a range in this area. Even though he hadn’t come across Haemas Tal yet, there was still a possibility he would, especially if a bit of direction were added to Cittar’s mind, a marked compulsion to ask after strangers and to seek out young, unaccompanied, light-eyed, fair-haired girls. Jarid smiled to himself.
Crunching the core, he laid three of his six fingers along the old man’s lined brow.
HAEMAS flinched as a blue-and-red-fletched arrow thwanged into the bark of a tree just ahead of Cale’s nose. The chierra hauled back on his ebari’s reins as the beast squealed and danced nervously. He stood up in his stirrups and addressed the swaying treetops. “That’s not funny!”
Her heart thumping, Haemas clutched at his waist to keep from sliding off the back of the anxious, horn-tossing ebari.
Mashal yanked the smoothly worked shaft out of the tree. “Jassfra,” he pronounced, his heavy-jowled face breaking into
a scowl.
“Oh.” Cale grimaced, then twisted around to follow the arrow’s trajectory back into the treetops. “Are you sure?”
A lithe figure jumped down feet-first through the branches and hit the ground with a muffled thump. “Better listen to him.” No more than sixteen or seventeen, the girl had a merry grin as she straightened, fingering the bone-handled dagger sheathed on her belt.
Haemas stared in amazement at her short-cropped hair; it was as deeply red as the heart of a midwinter fire, a color she’d never seen before.
“Dammit, Jassfra, do you always have to show off?” Cale reined the ebari in until its chin touched its chest. It stopped prancing and only rolled its four black eyes back at him.
The self-assured redhead slung her longbow over her shoulder. “I missed you too, lover. Lor, what have you got there?” She reached for Haemas’s leg. “Is that what it looks like?”
“None of your damn business!” He swatted her arm away. “Keep your paws off. It’s mine.”
Bracing her hands on her hips, she stood back and looked him full in the eye. “You weren’t so selfish last winter. You remember, Tenth Night, when you said—”
“Never mind that!” He kicked his ebari and reined it in a wide path around her. “I want to get home now. We’ve been out a long time.”
“And don’t I just know it!” Wrinkling her turned-up nose, Jassfra hooked her long legs over the lowest branch above her. “Eevlina has been looking for you these last two weeks. You’d best go on in.” She pulled herself up and disappeared into the blue-green canopy of leaves again. “Give her my regards!”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” Cale muttered under his breath as they rode on.
Haemas stared back over her shoulder. No girl of the Highlands would ever have spoken so to a man, not to mention carried a knife.
As they continued through the forest, the trees grew much larger and farther apart than before. Overhead, the interlocked branches shut out most of the sun and the trunks stood like massive columns, big enough that five men couldn’t have ringed arms around them. They rode a well-marked trail through a cool, dim silence scented with the menthol resin of leaves crushed beneath the ebari’s hooves.
Occasionally, as they passed another unseen sentry, they would hear a whistle or a figure would lean out of its leafy hiding place to wave down at them. Cale’s moody silence grew darker as they progressed.
Finally, they broke into an open space, and their ebari swerved around a deep fire pit where a haunch roasted on a spit. A black-haired woman looked up from a bowl where she was sorting red berries. Her broad face split into a smile. “Cale!”
He nodded, sitting very straight in the saddle. “Amina.”
Haemas’s mouth watered as she caught a whiff of the roasting meat, then a squat gray-haired old woman emerged from a triangular split in one of the huge tree trunks. Cale reined the ebari to a stiff-legged stop.
“Cale Evvri.” The woman rested her fists on her ample hips and regarded him with an icy expression. “I expected you and your misbegotten bunch of males back at least two weeks ago!”
The rest of the ebari-mounted men caught up with them, crowding into the large clearing under the enormous tree.
“Fine lot of horses you brought, too.” Her bushy gray brows knotted together. “I suppose this means you’ve got nothing at all to show for more than a season’s work.”
“Now, Gran, you don’t really want horses. They’re so flighty, like, and—”
“Don’t you ‘now, Gran’ me, you halfhearted excuse for a man!” Her massive breast heaved as she stared up at the girl behind him. “And, I might ask, just what in the seven hells is that?”
Cale swung hastily down from the saddle, then pulled Haemas off like a sack of grain and held her before him. “This is much better than some old horse, Gran. With this, we can buy horses, lots of them!” He titled Haemas’s face up so the woman could see her eyes.
Eevlina scowled. Snatching a stick from the ground, she thumped him about the head and shoulders. “Buy horses?” She snorted. “Why in the Mother’s good name would we ever buy something when we can always steal it?” She swung at his ear. “Have you lost your mind?”
Cale dodged out of her range. “Now listen here, Gran, after I ransom this whelp for lots of money, you can buy anything you want. You ought to give currency a chance. You might like it.”
“You’re a great big lunking lily-livered disappointment to me, boy!” She gave him one last withering glare, then turned away. “Your mother should’ve listened to me the day you was born. ‘Leave it for the beasts,’ I tells her. ‘Who needs another worthless male to feed, and a funny looking one at that?’” She shook her head as she stooped to re-enter the tree.
Mashal stared after her broad back as it disappeared into the dark interior. “I didn’t think she’d go for it.”
“Shut up.” Cale’s blue eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “On the whole, she took it better than I’d hoped.”
* * *
Small, but sure-footed, the black mare picked its way around the gnarled roots and rotting logs that littered the forest floor. Kevisson relaxed in the saddle, his golden-brown eyes half-closed as his mind ranged farther and farther away in a standard spiral Search pattern, trying to locate the young Tal. How could she have gotten so far? Idora’s memory plainly showed that just three days ago the girl had been weak with injuries.
Abruptly, the mare shied to the right, throwing up its sleek black head, its delicate nostrils flaring in alarm. Kevisson grabbed the coarse mane, then reached for its mind to see what had frightened it. Replaying its memory, he saw the small bluish-gray body with a tiny pointed face dash across the mare’s path: a common skivit. He grimaced and swung down from the saddle, anchoring the mare’s tossing head with one hand as he sought to calm the high-strung creature with his mind until at last it stood quietly.
Then, tethering the mare to a tree branch, he slipped its bit and fitted on a feedbag of oats. It was a beautiful creature, he thought, but a perfect example of the inbreeding that was going to make its species useless on this planet unless something were done.
Instead of breeding for color and conformation, the Lenhes ought to have developed a strain that could digest Desalayan grasses and grains without dying from a lack of trace elements, not to mention one that wasn’t terrified of its own shadow.
At any rate, it wasn’t the mare’s fault that it was an inbred ninny. He patted the arching, glossy neck and settled back against a neighboring tree, focusing again on his job.
Where was Haemas Sennay Tal?
He strongly suspected from Idora’s account the girl had sensed someone Searching her and fled into the woods. Unforgivably clumsy. He shook his head. That’s what came of teaching amateurs the basics of Search techniques. These days any idiot with a Plus-Three rating thought he could Search as well as a Shael’donn master!
Pulling the soft blue-and-gold clothes out of his saddlebags, he tried to pick up a sense of the girl’s mental signature, the qualities that would make her stand out even in a crowd of hundreds. His fingers traced the embroidery around the high collar, a fanciful pattern of moons and stars worked in silver, a large sunburst dominating the middle. Her image crept into his mind much as he had begun to see it before at the chierra shrine: tall . . . slender . . . sad . . .
And young, he thought, so young to have attacked her own father and killed a servant. He pushed further, looking for more. Quiet . . . grief-stricken . . . He waited, but that was all, no trace of anger or hate, nothing to indicate she was capable of murder.
He closed his eyes and began to count each breath, letting more of the tension in his muscles flow out of his body with each exhalation. Gradually he achieved readiness for the deeper trance that was obviously going to be necessary. He let himself sink deeper and deeper into the center of his mind.
When he was ready, he pictured again the solemn face, the unusual light-gold hair and eyes, the sense of grief and determination that clung to her clothes like a dim perfume, then loosed his mind into the gray otherness for what seemed like hours until he finally found her.
His mind emerged from the grayness with hers as an anchor. Go softly, he chided himself as he circled the bright silvery center of her thoughts, too close and he would just frighten her into running even farther.
It was a place of trees, he realized, giant trees, and other minds hovered nearby. Someone must be helping her, although these seemed to be only chierra minds. He sensed no one with any Talent.
Gingerly, he picked at the edges of the girl’s thoughts, trying to determine the strength of her Talent. As she wasn’t old enough to have been Tested yet, there had been no record in the Highlands he could depend upon. Nevertheless, he had no intention of being mindburned like the old Lord, her father.
A sense of power did radiate from her mind, but it had a strange, muted quality about it, quite unlike anything he’d ever come across. Although he would have liked to probe deeper, he withdrew, maintaining the barest thread of contact between his quarry and himself.
Opening his eyes, he glanced around the forest and stretched his stiff shoulders. As long as she didn’t become aware of his touch, he should be able to ride straight as an arrow to her now.
The black mare swished its silken tail and regarded him over the feedbag with heavy-lidded, half-dozing eyes.
Well, Kevisson thought, even a horse could be right occasionally. His Search had kept him up very late last night.
He settled on his side and closed his eyes.
* * *
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