by Linda Nagata
“They are wolves!”
“Of course they’re wolves. I like to follow them sometimes when I’m hunting.” He laughed. “It annoys them when I take the fawn they wanted for their own dinner.”
“They do not hunt you?”
“Why would I let them?”
She looked up at him with her dark eyes. Such pretty eyes. “And the bears?” she asked. “Are you afraid of them?”
“No, nor the lions. And you don’t need to be afraid either while you’re with me. Now come.” His hand tightened on hers. “The brook isn’t far, and you’ll feel better in the sunlight.”
But to his exasperation she shook off his hand, and insisted she would follow two paces behind.
In unnumbered spring floods the brook had polished clean a field of smooth gray stone that now, at summer’s end, flanked its glistening water. Ketty lay back, her head pillowed against her sack and her eyes closed as she basked in the golden light of afternoon.
Smoke stood gazing at the pretty turn of her face. He did fancy her. He truly did. Never before had he felt this way about any woman. But he was discouraged. Why would she not admit that she cared for him too?
The song of wolves reached them again. Ketty stiffened. After a moment she spoke without opening her eyes. “Is there anything in the Wild Wood that can cause you harm?”
“Don’t worry on it. We’re nowhere near the dark heart.”
Ketty opened her eyes, raising her hand to shade them from the brilliance of the sky. “Then there is something you fear?”
“The Hauntén live in the dark heart of the forest, but I don’t go there.” For as long as he could remember he’d felt a dread of the Hauntén and their fastness deep in the Wild Wood. But he did not tell this to Ketty. “My holding is hidden, and safe. No one even knows it exists, and I’ll kill anyone who learns it.”
Ketty sat up. “So you really would have killed my father, if I’d let you?”
“It would have been better. Less risk.”
“You speak as if you’ve killed men before.”
Smoke laughed. “Did you truly wonder? Of course I’ve killed men before. It’s nothing and I don’t care about it.” He walked down to the water’s edge where he knelt, gazing at the shapes of fishes swimming at the bottom of a deep, calm pool.
I don’t care about it.
Without warning, a sick heat stirred in his belly. He grimaced, and then he heard himself speaking in a soft voice that hardly seemed his own, “I don’t like to kill women or their children.”
The words were hardly out when the feeling passed. Why had he spoken at all? “Don’t think on it,” he told himself in a whisper. He stood up again and in a firmer voice he said, “Come, Ketty. The days have grown shorter, and we still have some long way to go.”
He turned, and was surprised to find Ketty already on her feet, her sack slung over her shoulder, and her staff raised against him as fear and fury waged in her eyes. “You’ve murdered children?”
He was taken by surprise and his own temper flashed. “They weren’t your people! And anyway, it was a war. The Trenchant commanded it.”
She was aghast. “The Trenchant? You’re a Koráyos warrior? From the Puzzle Lands?”
“Ketty, will there never be an end to your questions? You try my patience!”
“Answer me, Smoke! Are you a Koráyos warrior?”
“I was, but no longer. Now can we go?”
“No.” Ketty took a step back. “I don’t want to go any farther with a bloody-handed servant of the Bidden.”
Smoke’s hands squeezed into fists. A flush heated his neck and cheeks. Ketty must have sensed his perilous mood. She gasped, stumbling away as if expecting him to come after her with his sword. He wondered if he should.
Then again, the wolves were hunting.
“Go on!” he told her. “Go on your way. I’m young yet. I’ll find another woman.” He turned his back on her and walked on, so used to walking now that in the tumult of his thoughts he forgot there was another way.
Leaving the sun-warmed rock, he slipped into the shadows of the forest. That was when Ketty called after him in a tentative voice, “Smoke?”
He ignored her.
She called him again. “Smoke!”
He berated himself. You’re being a fool! He knew he should go back and kill her. It wasn’t likely that she could evade the wolves and find her way out of the forest, but it wasn’t impossible either. And if she escaped? If she spoke of him? If word of his presence got back to the Puzzle Lands? He couldn’t risk it!
So turn around and kill her!
He only walked faster until she cried out after him, “Smoke, wait!”
Her command stopped him short. It wasn’t something he willed. His lip curled in frustration. He told himself to walk on, walk on, but he stood rooted in place. Curse the prayers of women! He was bidden by them, especially when it was one woman alone and in need.
Ketty’s boots rustled thoughtlessly in the leaf litter as she bounded after him. “Smoke.”
To his surprise she caught his hand again. She looked up at him with a glint of tears in her dark eyes. But he shook his head. “You’re too difficult, Ketty.”
“I know I am, but it’s because I was born wrong. My mother said I was born under the red moon. Its spirit crept inside me, and that’s why I am like I am. My brothers and sisters are all good and obedient, but I’m not. I’m stubborn, and lazy, and pig-headed too—and I always argue.”
“Ketty of the Red Moon,” he said with disdain. Then he reclaimed his hand and set off again. But he wasn’t thinking anymore of killing her. He knew he couldn’t do it. He’d have to rely on the wolves no matter the risk.
But she wasn’t cooperating at all. Instead of going on her way, she was trotting alongside him. “Smoke, would you . . . really find another woman?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve given up then?”
“Yes.”
“But I think we’re bound together.”
He stopped again and glared down at her.
She blinked hard as tears threatened to spill over. She spoke in a choked voice. “I . . . I was thinking that maybe—if you’re done with murdering—that maybe you’re better company than wolves.”
His smile blossomed. He couldn’t help himself. “That’s not what you were thinking.” He touched her soft cheek and to his delight she actually leaned into his hand. “You were thinking how much you’d like to spend tonight in my bed.”
That spoiled it. She drew back, wide eyed. “No! Well, sort of . . . but I don’t like it that I have no choice!”
“You had a choice between me and the widower, between me and the wolves. I don’t have any choice at all.”
“I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?”
He shrugged.
“You’re impossible!”
“Kiss me anyway.”
“Or go to the wolves?”
“You already have the soul of a sharp-toothed wolf. Don’t deny it! You’re a wild thing.”
“All right then.” She set her hand on his left shoulder—but her attention was immediately caught by the deep scar on his neck. “Did you get that in battle?”
“That was from a Lutawan officer named Nedgalvin. I’ll find him and kill him someday.”
“It looks like your head was almost cut off!”
“It almost was. Now kiss me.”
He was awash in her presence. Ketty must have felt the same way, because she needed no more encouragement. Standing on her toes she stretched up to press her lips against his—
And Smoke chuckled deep in his throat. “You don’t know how to kiss, do you?”
She drew back. “And what do you expect? I’ve never kissed anyone before.”
“I have, and it’s done softly. Like this.” He bent, and brushed his lips against hers, and then he went deeper, and as he tasted her mouth he felt a mesh of binding threads weaving tight between them.
“It is such a very
little cottage, isn’t it?” Ketty said, in a very small voice.
It was day’s end, and they stood on the edge of a dainty round meadow of tasseled grass. Five deer had been peacefully browsing but at Ketty’s voice they startled, bounding away along the bank of a brook that ran along the meadow’s southern edge, until they disappeared within the towering forest. Mist gleamed all along the brook’s course, made golden by the setting sun, but on the meadow’s north side twilight had already come. A hill stood there, studded with tumbled gray boulders that wore cloaks of moss. A scatter of stunted trees grew between them. At the foot of the hill, flanked by groves of young aspen already gold in leaf, was a tiny round cottage of wattle and daub. It had a single door, woven of sticks. No windows looked out from its brown walls. It huddled shyly beneath the wide overhang of a thatch roof that it wore like a tall, conical hat. Faint skeins of smoke seeped up through the thatch, to escape into the sky.
Smoke looked on it with great pride. He had built it himself, alone. It was the first time he had ever built anything. “It’s a perfect round,” he bragged. “As round as the sun, so fine that a hearth spirit has come to live there, and keep the fire lit.”
Ketty pressed a knuckle against her lip and spoke with some despair. “The smoke is coming up through the thatch. Why is there no chimney?”
“Because this old way is better. The smoke keeps the small creatures of the forest from making a home in the thatch, so it never leaks.”
“But there is no proper door.”
Smoke shrugged. “I wove a door from the wattle, but don’t worry. There’s hide on the inside to keep in the heat.”
“And the palisade?”
“There’s no need for a palisade. No army will come here to assail us.”
“But what of the wolves? The bears? The forest lions?”
Smoke laughed. “Ketty, you worry too much!” He took her hand and kissed her cheek. “Come! Come see our home—and our bed!”
He set off trotting across the meadow and Ketty had no choice but to follow at his hurried pace despite her aching legs. They came to the door. It was fastened only with a loop of leather. Smoke unhooked this and pulled the door open. Ketty peered in, but it was so dark she could see only a faint glow of coals.
Smoke swept her up in his arms. She yelped in surprise. “Put me down!” she cried, even as she clutched at the front of his coat.
He grinned. “You’re always playing.”
He bore her over the threshold, into a murky, smoke-shot darkness relieved only by the red glow of a central hearth, and by the golden shimmer of the hearth spirit, visible for a moment before it sank into the warm, dry ground.
Ketty yelped again as Smoke dropped to his knees. He spilled her onto a pallet stuffed with straw. Her hand still clutched his coat. She stared in fascination at his green eyes, glittering in the darkness. Then she pulled him closer. He kissed her lips as she lay there. He kissed her face and her neck, even with his weapons still on his back.
She returned his kisses. She even found her lips brushing the deep scar given to him by a Lutawan soldier called Nedgalvin. It should have repulsed her, but everything about him seemed suddenly precious.
The cottage was quiet for a time. The hearth spirit returned. But soon after Ketty shed her poncho and Smoke gave up his weapons. Then a noise of sighs and moans and murmurs frightened the spirit once again, and by the time quiet returned, the sky outside was filled with stars.
~
Though we’ve waged war against the Lutawan king since the long-ago days of Koráy, none of us has ever seen him. Whether he’s one man sustained over the centuries by magic, or a succession of men, I cannot say. I only know that his people hate him. Given half a chance, the young women from the border villages will abandon their families and flee north to throw in with the Koráyos army, against their own people. Not one of them has ever betrayed us. But their presence in our army infuriates the southern king and makes it difficult to negotiate a truce.
Trust
Two nights after her tryst with General Nedgalvin, Takis set out from Fort Veshitan in the company of Chieftain Rennish who commanded the irregulars, and Chieftain Helvero who was charged with holding the captured lands south of the Séferi Mountains. They went on horseback, following a winding trail up through thick forest. The Séferi were steep, rising in knife-edged ridges, but they weren’t high. Tall pines and massive hemlocks grew all the way to the summit.
The riders crested and started down again. The trail reached its end a few minutes later at a lookout above Scout’s Pass. They left their horses among the trees and walked out onto a pier of rock. A gazebo stood at the farthest point, its roof and half-wall providing a token shelter. Starlight and a sliver of setting moon illuminated a sheer drop to the pass on one side, and on the other, a deep and very narrow canyon. The borderlands began at the foot of the mountains—a mixture of tall grass and groves of trees, and beyond, farms, now mostly abandoned.
“We should burn off more of those groves,” Takis said. “They provide too much cover.”
Rennish was nearly fifty, tall and slim, with short hair and a narrow face. She’d trained Takis in combat, and Tayval and Smoke too, and as commander of the irregulars she spent much of her time deep in the field, so she didn’t hesitate to disagree with Takis. “The cover benefits us more than the Lutawan forces—and if you burn it off for no good reason you might find some Hauntén who object.”
“Are there Hauntén in the borderlands?”
Rennish nodded. “I don’t think they live there, but now and then, I see them.”
“Look there,” Helvero whispered. He was younger than Rennish by many years, a powerfully built man, and though he tended to be rash and ambitious he’d proved his worth many times in combat.
Takis followed his pointing hand to the plain far below, where a horse and rider had just emerged from a grove close to the Trader’s Stone. Takis watched him—she had no doubt it was Nedgalvin—as he rode through the grass toward the stone’s tall, wind-sculpted spire. The Trader’s Stone had marked the start of the pass in a long-ago time before it was hidden.
Nedgalvin paused beside the stone. Turning around, he held his right arm out to his side and raised and lowered it three times.
At this signal a long line of horse soldiers issued from the trees, riding in silence toward Nedgalvin.
Takis let out a long, disappointed sigh.
Helvero snorted. “I never took Nedgalvin for a fool. Does he truly believe this pass unguarded?”
“Perhaps he trusted me,” Takis said.
“His mistake.”
Long ago Koráy had fenced the Puzzle Lands with a maze of defensive spells that had been reinforced and augmented in the generations since. The passes were disguised, the trails hidden, but the way would open to those who were welcome: Koráyos warriors, nomadic merchants, the tribal peoples of the Wild Wood and the far north. But any who were unknown or unwelcome in the Puzzle Lands put their lives at risk if they tried to cross the mountains. If they were lucky, such intruders might find themselves on a well-marked trail that doubled back on itself in a long exhausting loop, returning trespassers to where they’d started. If they were not lucky, the trail might take them into a trackless forest, or to the edge of a crumbling cliff or to a mountain torrent that could not be crossed, and then when they turned to go back, the trail would be gone.
Sometimes, invaders would simply be steered into a trap.
Takis sensed the presence of her sister Tayval in the binding threads. Tayval was far away, secure in the Fortress of Samerhen, but she was also in the world-beneath, poised like a spider at the center of a web of ten thousand threads radiating outward, woven into the structure of the air, the land, the mountains. If Tayval should pull on one of those threads a wind might rise, a storm might brew, or a hidden pass might be revealed—as tonight, when Scout’s Pass lay open to General Nedgalvin and his men.
The general’s soldiers caught up with him. Moonligh
t glittered on their spear tips. “At least two hundred,” Rennish said. “He intends to take the fort, at the very least.”
Takis watched as the horses climbed in a winding line up the trail, to disappear beneath the pines.
She had deliberately tempted Nedgalvin by telling him of the refugees at Fort Veshitan. The god of Lutawa, Hepen the Watcher, despised women. He allowed them to be sold by their fathers and owned by their husbands and any women who objected to this natural order were beaten, and if they still couldn’t learn right and proper behavior, they were executed. But sometimes a woman would escape and flee north to the Puzzle Lands. Many of these refugees chose to become soldiers in the Koráyos army. Their conversion to strong and competent fighting troops directly contradicted the teachings of the Lutawan king, and infuriated the men who made up his army. No officer loyal to the king would forego the chance to slaughter the refugees who believed themselves safe in a Koráyos stronghold. Even if no man in Nedgalvin’s company survived to return, word would escape, and those young women who were thinking of fleeing might then think twice.
Takis had hoped Nedgalvin would be different. She’d hoped that he could think for himself, that he would prove to be a rational man. She’d set her heart on it and her disappointment was bitter. “Damn you,” she whispered, feeling suddenly as if her heart would tear in two. She had liked him! But more, he had been bright and irreverent and courageous, and despite Tayval’s dour council, she had let herself believe he was capable of setting aside five generations of animosity, that he had intellect enough to see a different way.
She had imagined too much. “So we go on without him,” she said, with only a slight tremor to her voice. Ever since Koráy had taught the craft of war to the people of the Puzzle Lands, no company of the Lutawan army had been allowed to come over the Séferi Mountains or through the East Tangle. Takis did not doubt it would continue so for another five generations, so long as the Bidden survived.