“Why am I not surprised?” Starhawk took a sip of the liquescent nastiness in the cup. At least it was warming, which the coals in the brazier nearby definitely were not. “I’m really not surprised,” she added, without irony this time. “That settlement and its farms have been hanging on by their teeth and toenails for the last forty years. Ari tells me the land was exhausted, and I know for a fact they got raided about twice a year, once by us and once by bandits... But it would be now that the ax falls.”
“The scouts said it appeared to have happened six weeks ago.”
“That counts as ‘now.’ ”
A few tables away, amid whoops of audience laughter, Gully was on his knees attempting to lick out the gin Curly Bear had poured into the hole of his mandolin. Though Starhawk had a good deal of sympathy for Curly Bear’s feelings—she was ready to kill the little bard if he whined at her for a drink again—she sighed disgustedly, and called put, “Oh, come on, you want that thing to sound even worse than it does already?” She pitched a copper at Gully’s feet. “Get yourself some gin and drink it real slow in that corner over there and don’t make a sound.” She’d planned to have a second round herself, but, she thought, what the hell? In any case the stuff was vile enough to engender a certain amount of pity for anyone who had to have it, as Gully did.
The bard bowed to her with a flourish, gin dripping from his mandolin. “Warlady, I shall commemorate your generosity with a ballad in your honor...”
With a shudder, she turned back to Moggin, while the Bear and his boyfriends fell on each other laughing and improvised on the theme of Gully’s commemorative ballads. “I don’t know whether that poor little sap being here is his bad luck or ours. For that matter...” She paused while Moggin coughed again and sipped gingerly at his drink. “...could the hoodoo be someone in the camp? Not one of the slaves from Vorsal, but someone who’s been here all along? Someone who came in with last summer’s campaign, maybe...”
“Nix.” Dogbreath looked up from his solitaire with bright, demented eyes. “First week under the walls, I won fifty bits strat off Zane at poker. Now, you know what? I’ve been dealing poker hands and shooting dice against myself for two weeks, and have gotten zippe-roonie, zero—hell, the only way I’ve been able to win at solitaire is to cheat.”
“Which seems to indicate,” Moggin said thoughtfully, “that what’s operating is completely automatic. If the curse were placed on the troop for vengeance, as I suspect it was, there would be no need for the wizard to follow and see it done.”
“Vengeance for what?” demanded Dogbreath, genuinely indignant, and Starhawk kicked him under the table. “Wait a minute, it isn’t us who start the wars. That’s like putting a knife on trial for murder.” And, when Starhawk raised one dark brow ironically: “Or a knife on trial for being a knife.”
“You have a point,” Moggin agreed, evidently willing to argue the matter on philosophical grounds. “But just because a man—or woman—is a wizard, doesn’t mean he or she is a determinist philosopher, or even particularly rational. Men kill not only the messenger who brings them bad news, but also the horse he rode in on. It may not be fair, but it does relieve one’s feelings.”
“But by the same token,” Starhawk said, “slapping a curse on the camp might do the job; but, if I was out for vengeance, I’d sure as hell want to relieve my feelings by coming along to spit on the last man as he died. The Chief’s been all over this camp with that auligar of Drosis’. He says he’s found the slime, the touch, of the hex everywhere, but not so much as a single Eye on any wagon, tent, box, or bale. And don’t forget that someone tried to enslave him back in Vorsal and, when that didn’t work, sent the djerkas to skrag him. Does that sound like straight vengeance?”
“It might,” Moggin said quietly, “if it is vengeance against him that this other mage seeks. Where is he, by the way?”
“At Butcher’s,” the Hawk said, her voice suddenly very small, turning her face away to look into the dull glow of the brazier’s coals.
Sun Wolf came out of the hospital tent moving slowly, stiffly, like an old man. And like an old man or like a University doctor or scholar, he wore a long robe thrown on over the red pig-leather of his doublet—a robe mostly in rags, but fur-lined and the warmest thing he could find—and it billowed heavily around him with the cold gusts that snatched at his hair as he stood, arms folded, staring out into the wet hell of darkness and pattering rain. Was he old? he wondered, with the detached disinterest he had frequently experienced in his times of greatest peril. He certainly felt old. Old, and very helpless.
He understood that working the weather in winter was a futile task at best. In putting forth all his strength to turn aside wind and rain, he never knew whether the storms that drenched them, the winds that scoured them, the cold that deepened nightly, were less cruel than they would otherwise have been. He could only repeat the spells, evening after evening when the train stopped after sometimes as little as five miles, and hope.
No rest, no time, not even time to quiz Moggin on the contents of Drosis’ spell books beyond what was absolutely necessary for this endless, hated round of healing and weather-weaving. After two weeks, the drain on his overstretched powers was beginning to nauseate him, as if the power that he put out to save them was cut from his own flesh, drained from his veins.
He closed his right eye, feeling the leather patch twitch with the drawing-down of the long, curled shelf of his brow. Clouds moved swiftly in a low roof overhead, surging around the swell of the moor on all sides in the leaden dark. The heart-piercing wildness of the rain smell filled him, the rising cold must of earth, and the scents of wind and freedom and stone. They were all but buried in the stink of the camp, the stench of privies and sweat and, from the tent behind him, clinging to the folds of his patched mantle and the leather of his sleeves, the other stinks he hated—mortifying flesh in wounds that refused to heal, scorched herbs, draughts that had no effect on the nameless fevers that had begun to wander the camp like the Gray Women of fireside legend, carrying off whom they would.
Dimly he could hear Ari talking to Butcher in the deeps of the tent while she bandaged, once again, the still-open wound Zane had left on his arm. Dammit, that arm should be smooth as a baby’s bottom by this time! He had worked healing spells over it daily, putting his powers into it as he had put them into the mule-wrangler’s boy who had died last night of fever, the sutler’s slave whose arm, severed in a freak accident with one of the wagons, had mortified in spite of all he could do, and the camp follower who had died tonight bearing a son who would have to be drowned, for it could not survive the journey yet ahead of them to Wrynde. He could feel the power draining out of him, knowing that tonight’s brief rest would be no more sufficient to restore it than last night’s had been, or the night before.
But having saved Starhawk, he could not turn his back on these others. Every time he touched Ari’s arm to work the healing-magic that seemed to have no effect, he could feel the rot there, gangrene waiting like a black syrup just beneath the skin. The day he quit pouring his strength into those spells, the wound would turn like fruit in the tropic summer.
And everywhere he felt the hex. With his eyes closed, it was as if he could see the camp still in the darkness, glowing under the rain like putrid fish.
Feet plashed softly in the puddles. Too late, he smelled a familiar perfume. Not now, he thought, blindly, wearily. God’s grandmother, I’m too tired to deal with this now. Go away, damn you, woman...
But in spite of his weariness his palms warmed with the memory of her flesh.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
In a train of two thousand people it hadn’t been easy. Opening his eye, he saw her where the shadows lay blackest, her cloak belling like smoke in the fitful wind, and the edge of the tent’s grimy light catching a flame echo of orange from her striped dress beneath. Rain whispered unnoticed around them like the murmur of wind in the coarse heather.
“Yeah,” he
said quietly. “I have.”
She took a step nearer to him and he backed a step away, ducking behind a guy rope, not wanting to come near enough to her to touch her, for fear that he might. “Aren’t you going to let me thank you for rescuing me from Zane?” From beneath her cloak her hands, small and brown like a little orange seller’s, emerged to rest on the rope that stretched between them. Poor food and physical strain brought out the fragile wildness of her face, deepening his own need to protect and shield. It would be so easy to cup that delicate chin, touch the childish hollow beneath the cheekbone... The rain sprinkled her magnificent hair with diamonds in the frame of her hood; for a moment, his hands shaped the thought of warmed gold and the prickle of the jewels that decorated her bodice clasps.
He took a deep breath, and carefully steadied his hoarse voice. “I’d have rescued you if you were forty and ugly, Opium,” he said. “I did that for you, not for me.”
Though she did not move from where she stood, he sensed the lifted readiness of her muscles settle, as if she had drawn back from him a little, and something changed in the shadowy pools of her eyes. “Really?” She could have made the question a seduction, but she didn’t. She sounded, if anything, a little taken aback, not truly able to believe that he had not taken her from Zane because he wanted her himself.
Really? To tell the truth, he wasn’t sure he’d have given a damn if the woman Zane wanted to rape had weighed twice what he did, or had had a birthmark the size of a raspberry on her nose.
Now that WOULD have gotten a laugh out of the men.
He nodded. “Really,” he said, knowing that it was true—or mostly true—now, though it probably hadn’t been then. “I’m sorry if you thought different.”
She looked away. Against the dark, he saw only the outline of her nose, small and tip-tilted and perfect, beyond the edge of her cloak hood, but anger and hurt were lambent in the draw of her breath. He felt tongue-tied and vaguely angry himself, at himself, at Starhawk, and at the fate that made him understand what it would cost him to seize this woman and rattle her stupid against the nearest tent. Angry that he knew the cost and couldn’t plead ignorance later when faced with the consequences.
Then the hard line of her shoulders relaxed, the cloak’s soft vibration like an echo of an inner defeat. “I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath, and looked back at him, for a moment as clumsy, as uncertain as he. The soft redness of her mouth twisted, wry. “Mistress Wyse—our madam, back at the house in Kedwyr—used to say you got what you prayed for. All my life I’ve hoped there was some man in the world a woman could believe when he said, ‘Nobody else.’ Just my luck he said it to some other woman.” And she turned to go.
“Opium...”
She stopped, turning back, like a bird on the edge of flight as the wind lifted back her cloak from the orange striped silk of her dress, and he saw the question in her eyes. Resolutely ignoring the part of his mind that screamed, Take her fast, you lummox! What are you, gelded? he said, “There’s others around—if that’s what you really want.”
And she relaxed again and chuckled, warm and lazy and rueful. “If I’d ever been able to figure out what I really want,” she said, “I wouldn’t have so much trouble.” Her smile was soft, and for the first time he saw her not as a beautiful woman he desired, but as a person like himself, skilled in love’s arts but not in loving itself. “I’m sorry I was angry at you, that night back at the engineering park. It’s just that...” She hesitated, trying to frame the source of her hurt without sounding conceited, without saying, It was the first time someone had said no.
“My fault. That was the first time I’d ever pushed anyone away. I’m new at this. I didn’t do it very well.”
The teasing light came back into her eyes as she found her footing with him again and her pride. “You’ll improve with practice,” she said and added with a teasing grin, “If that’s what you really want.” And turning, she gave him one swing of her hips and faded into the darkness.
He found himself hoping fervently that the curse would not choose to fall upon her next.
“Chief?” Part of his mind had already registered Ari’s footsteps approaching the tent door at his back. He ducked back under the guy rope, turning his good eye as the young captain’s head emerged through the flap. For a moment, seeing the look in Ari’s eyes, Sun Wolf felt a throb of bitter resentment—at Ari, at the hex, at Opium, at his ancestors, and at the men and women dying in the tent and at whatever ill tidings Ari was obviously about to impart. In the greasy yellowish glare, his friend looked beaten, worn down by the redoubled weight of command and the ceaseless gnaw of the pain in his arm. He hadn’t rolled back the frayed shirtsleeve or jacket over the dressings, which were weathered, despite a dozen washings, to the color of his flesh. In his paranoid moments, the Wolf sometimes suspected him of deliberately doing something to undo his efforts at healing his arm.
He forced his voice calm. “What is it?”
“Butcher wants you to have a look at that grut they brought in last night with a fever. He’s broken out in boils. Butcher says it looks like plague.”
A few hours before dawn, Starhawk woke, when Sun Wolf crawled frozen and shivering and depleted into her blankets in the pitchy darkness of the crowded tent. The cot was small, but, in this cold, that was an advantage. Even through the clothes they both still wore, his flesh felt icy.
“You should let them die, you know,” she whispered, scarcely louder than the hoarse, nasal breathing all around them in the smelly dark. “You’re putting out your strength, your magic, to save their lives, but when you’ve run out of strength, run out of magic, they’re going to die anyway. We’re making less than ten miles a day. It’s a hell of a long way to Wrynde.”
He whispered, “Shut up,” and turned from her, shaking as if with ague himself. She was right, and she sensed that he knew it as well. The magic in him was sunk to an ember, the magic that had called her back to him from the shadowlands of death, the magic that was now the only thing that stood between the troop and disaster. Whoever had placed it, whyever and however it had been placed, the curse was eating it and him alive.
This was wizardry. This was what he’d traded the troop for, his friends for, and his former life for.
She had nothing to give him but her touch, feeling the coarse hair on his back through the threadbare linen shirt. He turned, suddenly and convulsively, and caught her in his arms, holding her desperately, his head buried in her breast.
They reached Wrynde eight days later; in those eight days, they lost nearly a hundred men to the plague. Sun Wolf—bludgeoned, aching, physically and emotionally drained—had long since ceased to speculate on who might have placed the curse upon the troop or what it was in the camp that was marked; it was enough to work the healing-magic, to weave the weather, to drag and lever straining wagon teams out of mudholes and to fill in as Ari’s second-in-command on the day-to-day business of the train. When Butcher was taken with the plague five days out of Wrynde, he took over the running of the hospital as well, assisted by Big Nin, the madam who’d stayed with Ari’s half of the troop, and by Moggin, whose copious readings in Drosis’ medical books had given him at least a theoretical knowledge of what he was supposed to be doing.
As commander, he had understood that his life was forfeit for his followers when he led them into battle. This slow bleeding away of his strength, of his time, and of his spirit was something different. It was responsibility without glory, and he ceased even to hate it, knowing it only as something which had to be done and which only he, as a wizard, could do. He began to perceive that the curse would destroy them.
They reached Wrynde in the rain, a vast, crumbling corpse of a town whose scattered limbs of walls, churches, and villas had long since, like a leper’s, dropped off from lack of circulation and sunk rotting back into the broken landscape of flint-colored stream cuts, granite, and marsh. On the high ground between the cold silver becks that now webbed the remains of the city st
ood the village, sturdily walled against bandits and offering protection to the farmers, small merchants, and mule breeders who were able to eke a living from what had once been the fertile heartland of the north. A small delegation of them met the train, led by Xanchus, mayor of the town and breeder of most of the troop’s stock, to inform them that most of the population of the town had been laid low by a debilitating flux. By this time, Sun Wolf and Ari scarcely cared.
They camped in the ruins of an old convent outside Wrynde’s walls and, the following day, labored the last ten miles to the old garrison-citadel which had once defended the town and its mines, perched like a sullen and crusted dragon on its heather-bristling hillside—the Camp. Home!
Sun Wolf crawled to the three-room wooden house that had been his for years, feeling like a very old dog dragging itself into a swamp to die. He slept like a dead man for over twelve hours. When he was wakened by shouts and cries and informed that the camp had caught fire, all he could do was sit on the brick steps of the terrace and laugh until he cried.
The damage wasn’t severe, owing to the thoroughness with which everything had been soaked by the rain. But returning, sodden with exhaustion, to stir up the hearth fire in the iron-black hour between moonset and first light, he had a sense of déjà vu, of having come full circle from the bitter dawn in the house of the innkeeper’s sister, on the slopes of the Dragon’s Backbone, hundreds of miles to the south.
On the white sand of the hearth, raised within an open square of brick benches, the fire wickered softly. He could hear Starhawk’s light tread on the wooden steps that led down into the overgrown garden where the bathhouse was. Cold as the night had been, the first thing she’d done after the flames in the stables and hospital were quenched had been to heat water for a bath. A moment later he heard the heavy cedar door close, and the creak of the oak floor as she crossed at a respectful distance behind him, in case he was asleep.
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