The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  Starhawk, leaning her forehead against the glass, felt it like damp ice against her skin. Somewhere in the tall, narrow house she could hear Fawn’s voice, light and bantering, the tone she used to speak to the children. Then her footfalls came dancing down the stairs.

  She is on her feet again, the Hawk thought, It is time to travel on.

  The thought pulled at her, like a load resumed before the back was fully rested. She wondered how many days they had lost. Twenty? Thirty? What might have befallen the Wolf in those days?

  Nothing that she could have remedied, she thought. And she could not have left Fawn.

  By the time they had reached the crossroads, where the southward way to the Bight Coast parted from the highland road that led to Racken Scrag and eventually to Grimscarp, the mauled flesh of Fawn’s arm and throat had begun to fester. Starhawk had done what she could for it. Anyog, whose hurts by chance or magic remained clean, was far too ill to help her. There had been no question of a parting of the ways.

  By the time they had reached Pergemis, Fawn had been raving, moaning in an agony of pain and calling weakly for Sun Wolf. In the blurred nightmare of days and nights that had followed, in spite of all that the lady Pel Farstep could do, the girl had wandered in desperate delirium, sobbing for him to save her.

  During those first four or five days in the house of the widowed mother of Ram and Orris, Starhawk had known very little beyond unremitting tiredness and fear and remembered clearly meeting no one but Pel herself. The mother of the ox team was ridiculously like her brother Anyog—small, wiry, with hair as crisp and white-streaked as his beard. She had taken immediate charge of Fawn and Starhawk both, nursing the sick girl tirelessly in the intervals of running one of the most thriving mercantile establishments in the town. Starhawk’s memories of that time were a blur of stinking poultices that burned her hands, herbed steam and the coolness of lavender water, exhaustion such as she had never known in war, and a bitter, guilty wretchedness that returned like the hurt of an old wound every time she saw Fawn’s white, drawn face. The other members of the household had been only voices and occasional faces peering in at the door.

  Her only clear recollection of the events of that time had been of the night they had cut half a handful of suppurating flesh from Fawn’s wound. She had sat up with Fawn afterward, the girl’s faint, sleeping breath the only sound in the dark house. She had meditated, found no peace in it, and was sitting in the cushioned chair beside the bed, staring into the darkness beyond the single candle, when Anyog had come in, panting with the exertion of having dragged himself there from his own room on the other side of the house. He had shaken off her anxious efforts to make him sit; up until recently he had been worse off than Fawn and still looked like a corpse in its winding sheet, wrapped in his draggled bed robe.

  He had only clung to her for support, gasping, “Swear to me you will tell no one. Swear it on your life.” And when she had sworn, he had sat on the edge of the bed and clumsily, with the air of one long out of practice, worked spells of healing with hands that shook from weakness.

  Pel Farstep had remarked to Starhawk after this that her brother’s sleep seemed troubled. In his nightmares, he could be heard to whisper the name of the Wizard King.

  In addition to Pel, the family consisted of her three sons—Imber was the oldest, splitting the headship of the Farstep merchant interests with her—Imber’s wife Gillie, and their horrifyingly enterprising offspring, Idjit and Keltie. Idjit was three, alarmingly suave and nimble-tongued for a boy of his years and masterfully adept at getting his younger sister to do his mischief for him. In the spring, Gillie expected a third child. “We’re praying for another lassie,” Imber confided to Starhawk one evening as she played at finger swords with Idjit before the kitchen hearth, “given the peck of trouble this lad’s been.”

  The household further boasted a maid, a manservant, and three clerks who slept in the attics under the streaming slates of the roof, plus two cats and three of the little black ships’ dogs seen in such numbers about the city. Pel ruled the whole concern with brisk love and a rod of iron.

  It was a house, Starhawk thought, in which she could have been happy, had things been otherwise.

  There would be no glory here, she mused, gazing out into the dove-colored afternoon rain; none of the cold, bright truth of battle, where all things had the shine of triumph, edged in the inky shadow of death. There was none of the strenuous beauty of the warrior’s way here and no one here who would understand it. But life in more muted colors could be comfortable, too. And she would not be lonely.

  Loneliness was nothing new to Starhawk. There were times when she felt that she had always been lonely, except when she was with Sun Wolf.

  These days of rest had given her time to be alone and time to meditate, and the deep calm of it had cleared her thoughts. Having admitted her love to herself, she did not know whether she could return to being what she had been; but without the Wolf’s presence, she knew that it would not much matter to her where she was or what she did. There was the possibility—the probability after so much time—that he was dead and that her long quest would find only darkness and grief at its end.

  Yet she could not conceive of abandoning that quest.

  It was nearing lamplighting time. The room was on the south side of the house, facing the sea, and brightness lingered on there when, in the rest of the house, Gillie and the maid Pearl began to set out the fat, white, beeswax candles and the lamps of multicolored glass. The hangings of the bed—the best guest bed that she had shared with Fawn for the last week, since Fawn’s recovery—were a rich shade of red in daylight, but in this half-light they looked almost black, and the colors of the frieze of stenciled flowers on the pale plaster of walls had grown vague and indistinguishable in the shadows. Opposite her, above the heavy carved dresser, a big mural showed some local saint walking on the waters of the sea to preach to the mermaids, with fish and octopi meticulously depicted playing about his toes.

  Sitting in the window seat, Starhawk pulled the thick folds of her green wool robe closer about her. Her hair was damp from washing and still smelled of herbed soap. She and Ram had taken Idjit and baby Keltie down walking on the stone quays after lunch, as the gulls wheeled overhead piping warnings of the coming storm. The expedition had been a success. Idjit had induced Keltie to fetch him crabs from one of the tide pools at the far end of the horn of land that lay beyond the edge of the docks, and Starhawk had had to slop to the rescue, with Ram hovering anxiously about, warning her not to be hurt. A most satisfying day for all concerned, she thought and grinned.

  For a woman who had spent her entire life in the company of adults—either nuns or warriors—she was appalled at how idiotically fond she was of children.

  It would not be easy, she knew, to leave this pleasant house, particularly in light of what she and Fawn must face.

  Yet the days here had been fraught with guilty restlessness; nights she had lain awake, listening to the girl’s soft breath beside her, wondering if the days she spent taking care of Fawn were bought out of Sun Wolf’s life.

  But she could not abandon her among strangers. And this knowledge had made Starhawk philosophical. There had been entire days in which she had been truly able to rest and peaceful evenings in the great kitchen or in the family room, listening to Gillie play her bone flute and talking of travel and far places with Ram. When Fawn was able to come haltingly down the stairs, she joined them. Starhawk was amused to see that she had won Orris’ busy heart with her quick understanding of money and trade.

  For Starhawk, at such times, it was as if she had refound her older brothers. After Pel and Fawn and Gillie had taken themselves off to bed, she had spent evening after evening drinking and dicing with the three big oxen, telling stories, or listening to them speak of the northeastward roads.

  “You aren’t the only ones who’ve spoken of the nuuwa running in bands these days,” Imber said, tucking his long-stemmed pipe into the corne
r of his mouth and gazing across the table at Starhawk with eyes that were as blue, but much quicker and shrewder, than those of either of his brothers. “After these gomerils left for the North, we had word of it, before the weather closed the sea lanes. I had fears they’d come to grief in the mountains.”

  Orris frowned. “You mean, others have seen bands as big?”

  “Eh—twice and three times that size.” Imber leaned forward to his carved chair and pushed his glass toward Ram, who had charge of the pitcher of mulled wine. “Fleg Barnhithe told me some sheepman from the Thanelands said there’d been a band there numbered near forty...”

  “Forty!” the others cried, aghast.

  “They’re breeding up in the mountains somewhere.” Imber sighed, shaking his head. “It’s made fair hash of the overland roads. Them and other things, other kinds of monsters...”

  Starhawk frowned, remembering her words with Anyog in the half darkness of the corridor of the deserted Peacock Inn. “Breeding?” she said softly. “Now, I’ve heard tell they’re men—or were once men.”

  “That’s impossible,” Orris stated, a little too quickly. “Blinding’s a punishment that’s practiced everywhere, and those who are blinded don’t even lose their reason, much less turn into—into those. And anyway, a blinded man doesn’t follow the way they do. Nor has any man that kind of—of insane strength.”

  But his eyes flickered as he spoke, and there was a touch of fear in his voice; if the nuuwa had once been men, the hideous corollary was that any man stood in danger of becoming a nuuwa.

  “I’ve seen men close to that kind of strength in battle,” Starhawk objected. She folded her long, bony hands on the waxed oak of the table top. “I’ve met men you’d have to kill to stop—men driven by necessity for survival out of all bounds of human strength.”

  “But if it was a thing that—that happened, as if it were a sickness, wouldn’t it happen to women, too? I don’t think anyone’s ever seen a woman of ’em.”

  “But that goes double for them breeding,” Ram pointed out, filling the glasses with the wine like molten gold in the gleaming lamplight. “Anyroad, they’d never reproduce—they’d eat their own young, as they do everything else they come on.”

  “The Mother doesn’t mold them out of little clay bits,” Starhawk said.

  Orris laughed. “You’ll never convince our Ram of it.”

  “Nah, just because he didn’t have no schooling, bar what the wardens of the jail could give him...” Imber teased, his eyes sparkling with mischief.

  “Better nor what the kennelman gave you,” Ram retorted with a broad grin, and the discussion degenerated into the rough-and-tumble kidding that Starhawk had grown used to in that boisterous house.

  But the memory of that evening came back to her now as she thought of taking the road again. She shivered and drew up her knees under the soft folds of the robe, resting her chin on her crossed wrists. Neither she nor Fawn had spoken to any of them of their destination; not for the first time, she was thankful for the brothers’ collective denseness that prevented them from guessing what Anyog had known. She had no desire to deal with the overwhelming rush of protectiveness that even the suspicion would have brought out in them.

  From somewhere below, she caught Fawn’s voice, like a drift of passing perfume; “...if that’s the case, then keeping a fortified post in the North open year-round would pay, wouldn’t it?”

  Pel’s brisk tones replied, “Yes, but the returns on the trade in onyx alone...”

  It must have been years, the Hawk thought, since Fawn had been in company with the kind of people she had grown up with, years since she had heard that clever, practical language of finance and trade. Starhawk smiled a little to herself, remembering Fawn’s shamefaced admission that she was a merchant at heart. Her father—whose bones had been lying these two years, bleached where the robbers had scattered them—had tried to make a great lady of her; Sun Wolf had made a skilled and practiced mistress of her; it was only now, after trial and struggle and desperate adventure, that Fawn was free to fly her own colors. In spite of what she knew to be their rivalry for the same man, Starhawk was proud of her.

  Heavy footfalls creaked in the hallway. Ram’s, she identified them, and realized that the room had grown dark. She got to her feet and lighted a spill from the embers of the glowing hearth. She was touching the light to the wick of a brass lamp in the shape of a joyous dolphin when the footsteps paused, and Ram’s hesitant knock sounded at the door.

  “Starhawk?” He pushed it shyly open. He, too, was sleek and damp from his bath, the sleeves of his reddish-bronze tunic turned back from enormous forearms, the thin, gold neck chain he wore like a streak of flame in the lamplight.

  She smiled at him. “The infants all bathed?”

  He laughed. “Aye, for all that Keltie wailed and screamed until I’d let her bathe with Idjit and me. It was a fine, wet time we had in the kitchen, let me tell you. It’s like high tide on the floor, and the steam like the fogs in spring.”

  Starhawk chuckled at the thought, noticing, as she smiled up at him, how the rose-amber of the light put streaks of deep gold in his brown hair and tiny reflections in his eyes. She saw the graveness of his face and her laughter faded.

  “Starhawk,” he said quietly, “you spoke this afternoon of moving on. Going away to seek this man of Fawnie’s. Must you?”

  ...this man of Fawnie’s. She looked away, down at her own hands, spangled with the topaz reflections of the lamp’s facets. Trust Ram, she thought, to go protective on me...“I’ll have to go sooner or later,” she replied. “It’s better now.”

  “Must it be—sooner or later?”

  She said nothing. The oil hissed faintly against the cold metal of the lamp; the smell of the scented whale oil, rich and faintly flowery, came hot to her nostrils, along with the bland smells of soap and wool. She did not meet his eyes.

  “If the man’s been missing this long, he’s likely dead,” Ram persisted softly. “Starhawk, I know you have vows of loyalty to him as your chief and I respect that, I truly do. But—could you not stay with us?”

  The drumming of the rain on the slates crept into her silence, and the memory of the bleak cold of the roads. She felt the bitter, weary knowledge that she would have to find a wizard somewhere, if she wanted to have any chance at the tower of Grimscarp at all, and that the going would be harder now, with maybe only that final grief at the end.

  If it’s this hard for me, she thought, what will it be for Fawn, alone?

  Doggedly, she shook her head, but could not speak.

  “In the spring...” he began.

  “In the spring, it will be too late.” She raised her head and saw his face suddenly taut with emotion, the big square chin thrust out and the flat lips pressed hard together.

  “It’s too late now,” he said. “Starhawk—must you make me write it all down, and me no good hand with words? I love you. I want to marry you and for you to stay here with me.” And with awkward passion, he folded her in his great arms and kissed her.

  Between her shock that any man would ever say those words to her and the rough strength of his grasp, for a moment she made no move either to yield or to repulse. The two affairs she had had while in Sun Wolf’s troop had been short-lived, almost perfunctory, a clumsy seeking for something she knew from the start that she would never find. But this was different. He was offering her not the warmth of a night, but a life in this place at his side. That, as much as the shape and strength of a man’s body in her arms, drew her.

  He must have felt her waver, unresponsive and uncertain, for his arms slacked from around her, and he drew back. There was misery in his face. “Could you not?”

  Shakily and for the first time, she looked at him not as a traveler like herself nor as an amateur warrior to her professionalism, but as a man to her womanliness. It had been comforting to rest her head on that huge barrel of a chest and to feel the massive arms strong around her, a comfort like nothing els
e she had known. She found herself thinking, He is very much like the Chief...and turned away, flooded with a helpless sense of shame, bitterness, and regret.

  Silently she damned Anyog for doing this to her, for making her aware of herself as a woman and of his nephew, that good, deserving ox, only in terms of the man she truly wanted and could never hope to have.

  She heard the rustle of his clothing and stepped away from his hand before he could touch her again. “Don’t,” she murmured tiredly and looked up, to see the hurt in his eyes.

  “Could you not give up the way of the warrior, then?” he asked softly, and the guilt that burned her was all the sharper for the fact that she had never spoken to him of another love. The very genuine liking she had for him made it all the worse.

  But she loved him no more than she loved Ari; and she could not conceive of herself marrying a lumpish, earnest merchant and having to deal with his clumsy efforts to protect her and to rule her life.

  “It wouldn’t be fair to you,” she said.

  “To take me a warlady to wife?” A faint smile glimmered in his eyes. “But you’d no longer be a warrior then, would you? I’d be the mock of my brothers, maybe, but then you could protect me and lay about them for me, you see.”

  And when she said nothing, the flicker of mischief died from his face.

  “Eh, well,” he said after a time. “I’m sorry I spoke, Hawk. Don’t feel you need leave this house before you wish, just to get clear of my ardor. I’ll not speak again.”

  She lowered her eyes, but could find nothing to say. She knew she should speak, and tell him that, though she did not love him, she liked him hugely, better than either of his brothers; tell him that were she not struggling with a love as hopeless as it was desperate, she would like nothing better than to join his loud and brawling family...But she could not. There was no one, in fact, whom she could speak to of it—there was only one person whom she trusted with her feelings enough to tell, and he was the one person who must never know.