The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  As if her throat had been cut, the White Witch’s high color ebbed to wax. Not quite aware of what she did, she reached out to take his hand.

  The young man went on, “He’s learned about...” He glanced at Starhawk, Anshebbeth watching them with devouring black eyes, and the other students—Pradborn Dyer, Luatha Welldig, and Shelaina Clerk—meditating or chanting quietly to themselves on other benches along the uneven, latticed walk. “About my being your student,” he finished. “He speaks of sending me to Dalwirin or even to Kwest Mralwe.”

  A little numbly, Kaletha said, “He is your mentor. You told me yourself he looked upon you as his chosen novice, his eventual successor.”

  Egaldus nodded. “That’s what he can’t forgive. That after he’s favored me, I’d dare find the spark within myself and come to you to kindle it to flame. It’s why I have to learn from you all I can before I go, if I’m to be on my own.”

  Her face changed at that. Starhawk felt it, almost like a physical cooling of the air as Kaletha’s hand slipped away from his, and her body settled back just a fraction on the bench. Egaldus felt it as well. His blue eyes had an odd, calculating glint as he regarded her, his head tilted a little to one side. Very softly, he asked, “Or are you still going to keep it all to yourself?”

  Turning, he walked away.

  He had gone five or six paces when Kaletha started up. “Egaldus...”

  “Kaletha...” Anshebbeth’s timing as she turned and laid her hand on the younger woman’s arm was far too precise to be accidental. Egaldus rounded the corner at the end of the walkway. The brazen sun seemed to ignite his embroidered tabard in gold and azure fire against the parched sand as he strode down the garden. As if oblivious to all that had passed before, Anshebbeth said, “Since I will be able to speak to Tazey, perhaps if you told me what to say to her, or gave me some instruction to pass along to her...”

  In a voice like watered poison, Kaletha said, “I’m afraid you’d scarcely be qualified.”

  The older woman’s mouth pinched tight. A blotch of sunlight, falling on her face, caught the sudden twist of wrinkles around her hungry eyes. “Perhaps if you spent as much time teaching me as you do teaching Egaldus...”

  “Egaldus is mageborn.”

  “You said before, you could make me mageborn, too.” Anshebbeth’s shrill voice cracked. “You said I—”

  Crushingly, Kaletha said, “That was when my teachings—my efforts to release the powers hidden within the human mind—were your first priority, Anshebbeth. That was when you were willing to devote yourself to purity of the body and exercises of the mind. I’m not sure that’s true anymore.”

  Anshebbeth was still holding onto her arm. Kaletha turned her wrist to shake off the possessive clutch of those long white fingers and walked after Egaldus, her voluminous black robes billowing behind her in the glare of the autumn sun.

  “That wasn’t exactly fair.”

  Kaletha averted her face, pretending to be looking out across one of the smaller courtyards near the bottom of the gardens. This one was well watered, with a couple of orange trees pregnant with fruit in its center. The smell of them mingled thickly with that of the roses growing in little craters of packed gray-brown earth at the four corners, the ever-present harshness of dust, and the sticky warmth from the vendor of cinnamon buns on the opposite walkway.

  “If she’d quit hanging onto me, maybe she’d be pushed away less.”

  Starhawk had spotted Kaletha alone here on her way out of the gardens to return to her duties. Anshebbeth was still looking for her higher up. Whether Kaletha had overtaken and spoken to Egaldus or not, Starhawk guessed the result was pretty much the same. She leaned her shoulder against the coarse, shaggy wood of the arbor and looked down at that white profile beneath its auburn swags of hair. “If you pushed her all the way away,” she remarked, “she would have gone.”

  “You don’t know ’Shebbeth.” Kaletha remained resolutely staring into the garden, the harsh light showing up the small wrinkles in the delicate skin around her eyes. Above the tangle of bare wisteria vines and old walls, the shadows had begun to slant across the face of Mount Morian and to dye black the eastern cliffs of the distant Binning Rock. “She elected me as her mentor and teacher and someone to tell her what to do and be when I was seventeen. And the Mother knows she needed it—an awkward half-caste provincial from Smelting with enough shirdar nobility in her background to get her parents to send her to finishing school in the Middle Kingdoms and make her discontented with everything around her. Neurotic, whining, clinging...”

  “But you’ve known her for a long time.”

  Kaletha paused. The beautiful shoulders under their black gown tensed as she presented the back of her head to Starhawk’s unemotional gaze. Then she sighed, seeming to read in the Hawk’s uninflected voice the unspoken observation that, had she truly wanted Anshebbeth never to bother her again, she’d had ample time to say so. Some of the stiffness went out of her. “I know,” she said.

  She looked up at Starhawk, the defenses of the one whom she made herself to be in front of her disciples lowered, hesitantly, like the shield of a warrior who doesn’t quite trust the cry of “friend.” “And I was...unfair. But—I don’t know.”

  “Well,” the Hawk said judiciously, “I admit that when someone walks around all day with ‘Please don’t kick me’ written on their back, the temptation to kick them can be almost overwhelming.”

  The White Witch started to stiffen with indignant denial of any sentiment so unworthy of her, then caught the glint of understanding in those calm eyes, pale in the sunburned face.

  Starhawk went on, “And her timing wasn’t the best.” She came around and sat on the other end of the bench, facing Kaletha in the hot, spotted shade. “But it’s still no reason to be cruel.”

  Kaletha sighed again and nodded. With a gesture oddly human after her rigid, self-controlled serenity, she pressed her fingers to her eyelids, smudged brown with sleeplessness. Her face looked suddenly older, with the struggle not to admit, even to herself, that she was jealous, that she was frustrated by the King, and that she could not quite control all those around her. “Maybe it’s for the best,” she said wearily. “Egaldus being sent away, I mean—if he is going to be sent away. He might have just said that to...” She paused, then changed her mind about what she was going to say and went on with something else, her tone calm as a frozen lake. “He is very—eager. Too eager, like your friend, though of course his teaching is far more advanced than Captain Sun Wolf’s is, and I believe he has more potential because his mind is better disciplined. He’s like a man trying to pour water into a basin which isn’t dug deep enough. He doesn’t understand when I try to tell him that some of it’s going to spill on the ground.”

  Are you going to keep it all to yourself? he had asked. Starhawk leaned her back to the arbor post behind her and remembered Sun Wolf’s words about Kaletha and her power. Looking across at that pale, controlled face, Starhawk wondered suddenly how much of Kaletha’s desire to teach Tazey stemmed from the fear that she might be surpassed in power by a girl younger than herself. A couple of young girls strolled past them, each with a miner on either arm, the girls all done up in bright cotton and glass-bead finery, flowers and sweet grass braided into their long hair.

  For a moment Kaletha’s lips hardened in a disapproving sneer. Then she went on, still behind her wall of pedagogical calm, as if Egaldus was truly the issue. “It takes years of preparing the mind, of disciplining the body. I know, I studied in silence, in darkness, for years...” She stopped again and looked quickly at Starhawk, as if remembering her closeness to Sun Wolf. Then, bitterly, she twisted on the bench and looked out into the dry garden again, keeping her secrets clenched close within. “All magic springs from the mind,” she said after a moment. “How can power spring from a dirty and undisciplined place? It requires study and purity...” She hesitated over the word.

  “Not to mention,” Starhawk said softly, “the Great
Trial.”

  Startlement broke Kaletha out of that rigid mold. There was genuine puzzlement in her voice. “The what?”

  “She’d never heard of it?”

  Starhawk shook her head. She had come down to the empty quarter as soon as it grew fully dark. It was a restless night, full of the movement and dry, electric whispers of the wind. Far out on the desert Sun Wolf could sense a storm, but it was traveling elsewhere, and the foothills would only feel its farthest hem fringes. The moon hung over the black hump of Mount Morian like a trimmed coin.

  Last night Starhawk had not come to him, knowing it was possible that she would be watched. Before they had become lovers, Sun Wolf had occasionally wondered about his second-in-command’s habitual self-contained calm—offhand, soft-voiced, capable of an animal’s logical cruelty. He had trained with her and fought sword-to-sword with her too often not to suspect fire lay under that gray ice. It was her vulnerability which had surprised him. It was good, beyond anything he had known, not to have to hide the needs and fears of his soul from her behind an unbreakable wall of strength.

  They coupled in fierce silence in the cell that had been theirs, close enough to hear the music that drifted from the Hall. Afterward, spent, they lay in the darkness, warming one another under the meager blankets Starhawk had left for him with last night’s food, taking pleasure only in the touch of one another’s skin. It seemed like half the night before they spoke.

  “She asked me what it was,” Starhawk said from the hollow of his shoulder where she lay. “I told her. I have a feeling she meant to go through it in secret, so no one would know she hadn’t done it already, until I told her how it was done.”

  Sun Wolf shivered. The hallucinatory poison which could bring a wizard’s powers to fruition invariably killed the nonmageborn—and perhaps, he thought, some of the less strong among the mageborn as well. The old man who had whispered of it to Starhawk once had spoken of preparation for the Trial, but no one knew anymore what that preparation had been. He himself had only survived it because he had a trained mercenary’s physical strength. The agonized screaming was what had destroyed his voice. The memory of the pain would follow him to his grave. He knew down to the depths of his heart that if he had not been given the poison for other reasons—if he had known he would have to take it to achieve a mage’s full powers—he would never have had the courage to do it.

  But then, like Tazey, he had never wanted to be a mage.

  “Tazey will have to go through it.”

  Starhawk’s short, baby-soft hair moved against his chest. “I know.”

  “She’ll need a hell of a lot of teaching first.”

  She nodded again. “You know the Bishop and Norbas Milkom have come up here to try and talk Osgard into sending her to a convent,” she said. “The Bishop because he’s afraid for her soul—I think Norbas Milkom because he sees it as a good way to break up her marriage with a shirdar lord and maybe later, just coincidentally, talk her around into marrying one of his own sons.”

  “They’ll never do it.” Sun Wolf’s hand smoothed the skin of her shoulder absently, yet delighting in the feel of it, like silk under his palm, broken by the delicate trapunto of an old knife scar. “It hinges on Osgard admitting that Tazey’s mageborn—that she isn’t the perfect little princess he’s always wanted. Galdron’s going to be lucky if he gets away from the palace without a flogging for even bringing it up.”

  But evidently the Bishop went unflogged, for three hours later he came, in silence, to the base of the outside stair that led up to Tazey’s lighted room. The night had grown cold, the terrible electric quality of it ebbing as the distant storm died away over the desert. The music had long since ceased from the Hall, but the light in the King’s solar continued to burn, and an occasional soft-footed servant had come and gone from the curtained archway of Tazey’s room. The curtains were orange and scarlet desert work; with the lights in the room behind them, they rippled like a rainbow of fire. A reflection of that dim and far-off luminescence sparkled on the Bishop’s embroidered cloak as he gathered up his robes like a lady’s skirts, glanced surreptitiously around him, and started to ascend the stair.

  “It’s a bit late to be going calling, Galdron,” said a soft, even voice from the shadows of the stair.

  The old man stopped with an apoplectic snort. Midway up the stair, a rawboned figure unfolded itself from the shadows; the sinking moonlight brushed a few ivory strands of short-cropped hair and the glint of steel studding on a green leather jerkin such as the guards wore. The Bishop blustered, “They said that the Princess sleeps ill of nights and that, if she was still awake, I might speak with her.” But like her, he kept his voice low. A sharp word spoken anywhere between the stair and the little gate that led from the court to the empty quarter would wake every sleeper on that side of the Palace.

  “They probably didn’t mean at three hours before dawn.”

  “I have been speaking with the King,” the Bishop replied with dignity. “I thought...”

  “You thought you might be able to talk Tazey into wanting what you want for her? Give her a few choice nightmares to think about before she sees her father at breakfast?”

  “Whatever nightmares the witch’s guilty conscience might visit upon her,” Galdron said sententiously, “they are well spent if they will save her from the eternal nightmare of Hell by causing her to repent.”

  “Repent what? How she was born? Saving four people from dying? You have a beautiful voice, Galdron; you can probably persuade people into believing anything.” The dark figure began to descend the stairs toward him, and there was a sudden flash of moon-silvered steel as a thin knife appeared in her hand. “I think it would be a whole lot less persuasive with your nose slit clear back to the sinuses.”

  Galdron backed down the stairs so hastily that he nearly tripped on the flowing satin of his crimson robe. He stammered, “I shall call—”

  “Call whom?” a rich, deep voice asked softly from the courtyard shadows. The Bishop looked back irritably over his shoulder. In the shadows, eyes gleamed white in a dark face above the pale blur of a collar ruffle. “The guards, and tell them you tried to talk your way around Tazey when her Daddy had already told you no? I told you it was a fool idea. Let’s go back to town.”

  Galdron hesitated for a moment. In the moonlight Starhawk saw his face purse with frustration. Then he looked up at her where she stood on the stairs, his white beard like streaks of ermine among the dark fur of his cloak collar. “Don’t believe that I have given up,” he said, still softly. “The girl’s soul is in danger. I have told her father so, though that...” He hesitated and glanced at Norbas Milkom, who had materialized beside him in the shadows. He amended, “...though her father will not believe me. There is too much witchery in this Palace already. She must be removed, or evil will come of it.”

  And turning, he vanished into the night. Laughing softly to herself, Starhawk slipped her knife back into her boot and went up the stairs.

  The following morning Tazey was pronounced well enough to make her appearance in the Hall at breakfast.

  Sitting in her usual place at Kaletha’s table, Starhawk eyed the girl worriedly, as Tazey was ushered in by her father and her uncle. Her dust-blond hair artificially curled, her broad, straight shoulders framed in a profusion of cantaloupe-colored silk ruffles, she looked washed out and miserable, hopelessly distant from the gay and beautiful girl who had so joyfully danced the war dance. Years of friendship with Sun Wolf’s various concubines had given Starhawk the ability to spot make-up carefully applied, in this case to cover the ravages of sleeplessness and doubt. The King, in puce damask that accentuated the broken veins in his nose and cheeks, held his daughter’s hand with possessive pride, his weary, bloodshot green eyes darting over the faces of the unnaturally large crowd at breakfast, daring any to speak.

  None did. However and whyever Nexué’s strident gossip had been silenced, Starhawk thought, the silencing had been effective. There was
a good chance that the whole affair would be scotched.

  And what then? she wondered. The gorgeous and somewhat wooden-headed Prince Incarsyn would marry Tazey and carry her off in splendor to his jewel-like little city deep in the dune seas of the south. She would eat candied dates, ride in palanquins, bear his babies, and try to forget what it felt like to part the winds with her hands.

  As the King conducted his daughter to her place at the High Table, Anshebbeth came hurrying down to where Starhawk and Kaletha sat. The governess, in her high-necked velvet gown, looked as if she, like Tazey, had spent a night either sleepless or ravaged by hideous dreams; her thin hands twitched as she kept glancing back toward the King. Though her place was with her charge on what was clearly an official occasion, she perched nervously on the chair at Kaletha’s other side.

  “They came last night,” she fretted. “The Bishop and Norbas Milkom...”

  “Starhawk was telling me,” Kaletha replied, a little spitefully, as if to lay emphasis on Anshebbeth’s exclusion from the prior conversation.

  The governess threw a hunted look up at the High Table where Osgard was irritably ordering Jeryn to sit up straight. The boy, just up from his own bout with sunstroke, looked like a lizard in molt, wan and exhausted and peeling, his white hands with their bitten nails toying listlessly with his food. Her voice sank to a whisper, “Do you think he will—will proclaim your banishment?”

  “Your banishment?” Starhawk asked, surprised.

  Kaletha’s lips compressed with barely stifled irritation. Anshebbeth explained hurriedly to Starhawk, “We were told, Kaletha and I, that the real reason Galdron and Norbas Milkom came last night was to demand that—that Kaletha be sent away! Only because of her power, only because her excellence would be a temptation to the Princess—only out of spite, and jealousy, because of Egaldus becoming a wizard! They hate her, Galdron and Milkom...”