Stormlord’s Exile

by Glenda Larke

  She didn’t argue but rolled out of bed and reached for her clothes. “I can’t feel anyone moving this way.”

  “He’ll come.”

  “Neztor?” He was the leader of the Alabaster party, a middle-aged man who’d been a mine manager until ordered to abandon his mine because of Reduner raids.

  Kaneth began to dress. “Yes. I suspect he has a personal message for me and wants to seek out a private word.”

  She hadn’t left his side and she was sure no one had said anything to him that she hadn’t heard, but she knew better than to dispute his assertion. He’d be right. He always was. Frustrated, she asked, “How do you know these things?”

  He shrugged and gave her the same sort of unsatisfactory answer he always did. “He was as tense as a tent rope in a wind. It was the way his muscles reacted to different things said, and to different people. The tiny shifts in the way he sat, or the way his eyelids moved, the way his gut moved along.”

  She looked revolted. “Are you about to tell me you know what my gut does? Kaneth, that is horrid!”

  He grinned. “No, because I don’t want to know. I don’t pay attention, any more than you pay attention to everyone’s water as they walk around the camp.”

  “But you know the miniscule rearrangement of Neztor’s water.”

  “I don’t think of it like that. I just feel he’s tense, impatient, anxious. So I guess he wants to tell me something, but not in front of everyone else.”

  “I don’t understand how you decide what those tiny adjustments mean.”

  “Neither do I,” he said, “and I find the more I think about them, the less I know. And although I can tell someone is tense, there is no way I can be certain why, so I can be quite wrong in my interpretations.”

  “He’s on his way now.”

  “Told you.”

  She wanted to throw something at him; instead she hurriedly tied her hair back and finished doing up her breeches.

  It was Neztor and he was alone.

  The letters he brought—there were two—were sewn into the back of his vest, between double layers of leather. One was from the Bastion; the other was from Jasper.

  “Do you know what’s in these letters?” Kaneth asked as he took them.

  “I’m afraid I do,” he said. “Everyone in Samphire knows the gist of what’s happened.”

  Kaneth shot a glance at Ryka, and she leaned over his shoulder to read them with him. When they’d finished Jasper’s, she said, aghast, “So, in summary, Feroze has been murdered in Khromatis, Laisa is Highlord of Breccia, Jasper has married Senya, Terelle is missing in Khro-matis, apparently kidnapped and in danger, and I was right: Jasper does need her waterpainting in order to make storms. Elmar and Dibble have gone after her but haven’t much idea of where she might be. And that withering idiot Jasper then decided he would go after them.”

  She didn’t mention the main reason for Jasper’s letter: to ask Kaneth to look after the water supplies of the entire Red Quarter. She didn’t even want to think about what would happen if Jasper and Terelle didn’t return at all. The Source would be the only reliable water in the whole Quartern. At the moment, or so Jasper wrote, the Scarpen and the White Quarter had sufficient water for more than half a cycle with the rationing they had in place. He did not mention the plight of the Gibber. He didn’t have to; they both knew that even at the best of times, the settles only stored enough for half a cycle. Ryka felt sick. The news was dire, and there was very little they could do.

  Kaneth crumpled the letter in his hand, half in anger, half in grief. “Sunblast, Ry,” he whispered, “I think this is the worst news I’ve had since I was told you’d died.”

  I’ll be waterless, she thought. Maybe Ravard will get what he and Davim wanted after all: a return to a Time of Random Rain. She swallowed back her fear. “What does the Bastion’s letter say?”

  Kaneth scanned it quickly. “He’s giving his assurance he’ll help Jasper and Terelle as much as he can. Oh, Sunlord above! He’s preparing for a possible war against the Khromatians. The Alabasters are contemplating a refusal to work there if Terelle and Jasper aren’t returned safely and unless Khromatian Watergivers undertake to supply water to Alabaster.”

  He looked up from the sheet of paper. “Has everyone gone mad?”

  Several men rode in from the north, sent by the Sandmaster of Dune Singing Shifter, to tell Kher Ravard they’d fought Lord Kaneth but failed to kill him. Worse, they had failed to retrieve the object of their ambush. They had been after either Islar or Clevedim to bring them home with all their knowledge of where Kaneth’s camp was hidden, how many men and pedes he had, and how best to defeat him. A youth beaded with ice crystals, whom they’d assumed was Islar, had allowed himself to be captured, but in the end they’d had to give him up. If Clevedim had been with Uthardim, they didn’t know it. They had no idea what he looked like.

  Ravard swore. Patience, patience, he told himself. You are young. You can wait. Eventually one of them would find a way to escape. Or someone would find out where Vara, Kaneth and their men were hidden.

  Where Garnet is.

  What no one understood was where they were getting their water. Water sensitives had roamed the northern dunes for any whiff of static water and found nothing that did not belong to a long-established tribe. No hint of extra or unexpected water, either from people, or pedes, or a waterhole. True, Ravard’s men didn’t have rainlords skilful at sensing over long distances, but if there’d been anything out there he would have thought that a normal water sensitive would have found it.

  Never mind, he told himself. Islar is a brave and resourceful young man. Clevedim is ambitious. One of them will escape soon and tell us all we need to know.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Khromatis

  Wilder Pale

  Low Plateau Pale

  “Are you warm enough, Elmar?” Jasper asked him.

  “Warmer than I’ve been in days. Better fed, too.”

  Jet and his armsmen had brought packs and supplies fresh from Verdigris Manor. They hadn’t gone to waste. Elmar turned his head to look appreciatively at the crackling fire. With the damp weather and the snow, he and Dibble had always had problems lighting a fire in the bivac. With Umber’s stormlord skills, that wasn’t a problem. He could even dry out a fresh branch snapped from a living tree.

  The advantages of being a waterlord, Elmar thought sleepily. He tried to sift through the stray facts drifting through his head. All the men Jet had brought with him were dead. Umber was Terelle’s cousin. A stormlord. Jasper was here because the Bastion had written to him in Breccia. While the Cloudmaster was gadding about Khromatis, the Quartern was getting no water at all.

  Above all, we have to get him and Terelle home safe.

  “How are the wounds?” Umber asked, breaking into his train of thought.

  “Throbbing a bit. But whatever you put on ’em last night worked wonders. Hardly felt a thing. Managed to sleep well. Thank you for stitching them up, by the way.”

  “Ye can use more of the liniment. Good stuff. Kills pain and aids healing. Great for sprains, too. No rider should be without it.”

  He absorbed that. “You mean it’s for the animals?”

  “Sure. Ye didn’t think I carried all that medicine stuff for us, did ye? Liniment, needle and thread, it’s all for them. Blithering beasts are always doing dumb things and cutting themselves…”

  Dibble muffled a laugh. Elmar glared at him.

  “Lord Umber and I will be off now,” Jasper said. “If he’s forgiven me for deceiving him about who I am.”

  Umber grinned amiably. “Never was one to care overmuch about titles.”

  “We should be back in three or four days, at the most, with Terelle. If we aren’t, then you’d better turn around and go home because there won’t be anything you can do.”

  “We should be going with you,” Elmar protested. “Nothing must happen to you!”

  “With your injuries, you’d be
more of a hindrance than a help. Even Dibble is still groggy.”

  “Just remember,” Umber added, “ye tell anyone who comes that ye’re Lord Umber Grey’s men, and ye’re under my instructions to be waiting here for my return. Anybody gets nosey, tell him to be sticking his questions up his arse. All right? Oh, and I’ve disguised the alpiners we purloined and temporarily altered the brands with a bit of clever shaving. I hope it’s enough that they won’t be recognised.”

  “People can tell them apart from one another?” Elmar was astonished. The animals were all the same colour and shape and, until then, he’d thought of them as more like birds—virtually indistinguishable from each other once fully grown.

  “Of course! But I’ve cut their manes and tails into a bit of a mess, stained some of their hair and shaved other bits. They don’t look like neat military mounts any more. Make sure they are fed and watered. I’ve shown Dibble how much to be feeding them, and he knows to be warming the water slightly first.” With those words he smiled and left the bivac. Dibble followed him out, limping slightly from his bruises, but Jasper lingered.

  “Get a good rest, El,” he said. “We need you fit for the return journey.”

  “I’m sorry to have let you down, m’lord.”

  “Let me down? Salted wells, have you no idea how much you achieved? You got back to Samphire and told the Bastion what happened in Marchford. Which is why I’m here. Your news turned everything around. The Alabasters went from being secretive lackeys for Khromatis to being our allies. Anyway, I reckon this was always a job for a stormlord, but we just didn’t know it.” He patted Elmar’s shoulder. “Rest and heal, so you’ll be able to go back with us.”

  He let himself out, and a while later Dibble returned. “They’ve gone,” he said. “It’s beginning to snow again.”

  “He’s changed,” Elmar murmured.

  “The Cloudmaster?”

  He nodded. “To think I wondered once if he was strong enough to rule the Quartern. He ordered Lord Jet’s death like it was nothing. No second thoughts, no agonising over the rights or wrongs.”

  Dibble shrugged. “I suppose it’s no different from running a sword through an enemy in a fight. You didn’t see him at the battle for the Qanatend mother cistern.”

  “Yet Jet’s death bothered you. I could see it on your face.”

  “It was just… the fight was over. We’d won. And then, well, throwing the bodies into the ravine. It was disrespectful. They were armsmen, like us, El. Just fellows trying to earn a living. Fighting them is one thing, not burying them with proper respect is another. You’re right; he has changed.”

  “You want him back the way he was?”

  Dibble sighed. “No, I reckon not. Times are bad. We need a strong man. Reckon I’d always follow him to a waterless hell and back, and it helps to know he has the kind of flint to get us home again too.”

  “The ground’s frozen. Would have been withering tough to dig a grave anyway, if that makes you feel better.”

  “’Specially when I’d have been the plodder digging the bleeding things, eh?”

  They grinned at each other companionably.

  Sunlord save me, if the whole ride is going to be like this, I’ll end up sandcrazy by the end of it.

  An armsman and a groom led the way; another armsman and another groom brought up the rear with the pack alpiners. Behind her, Rubric was silent, out of loyalty to his mother perhaps. Terelle shot a sidelong look at Lord Jade riding beside her. Her stony look of grim anger and determination appeared permanently fixed to her face. Since they had all left the waterpainting room two nights previously, Lord Jade had not spoken to her once, and Rubric had been reticent and distant.

  Well, too bad, she thought. Bice had ordered her death and then imprisonment, Jet had tried to kill her and broken her nose, Jade had collaborated in her incarceration. Rubric would be better off without the rest of his poisonous relatives—so was there some reason she should feel guilty about coercing the two of them to Breccia?

  Inwardly, she didn’t feel good about it. What Russet had done to her was not reason enough to do it to someone else. Yet she had. And she’d have to live with it, because there was no way she could reliably undo the future except by helping them to reach it. Or by dying.

  “Have you forgiven me yet for painting your mother in Breccia?” she asked when Jade swapped places with Rubric. “She’s a waterpainter. I was afraid of what she might do if she didn’t come with me when I escaped.”

  “She would never have hurt you. I thought you had a good grasp of what people are like under their skins.”

  “Usually I do. I was brought up in a snuggery. It was the world in miniature.”

  “You’ve mentioned that before. What is a snuggery?” Then, when she told him, he exclaimed, “Oh, you mean a bawdy house! Really?”

  So she told him about her early life. From the way that Lord Jade turned her head slightly Terelle guessed she was trying to hear, so she continued the story past her childhood and pitched her voice to carry. She wanted both of them to know about life in the Scarpen. By the time they stopped for lunch at a shelter along the track, she had covered much of her history, including her part in the war against Davim.

  It was a clear day, crisp and cold, but the view was spectacular. After she’d eaten, she approached Lord Jade, who stood at the edge of the road looking down on the valley of Low Plateau Pale.

  “It’s beautiful,” Terelle said. “And you’ve so much more than we have. Rivers, water falling down from the top of mountains, lakes, ponds, rain, snow, so many different trees. Your waterlords use their power to stop it raining. Would it be too much to ask that some of you could find it in your hearts to help us? Send us unwanted water, perhaps?”

  Jade’s head whipped around. “Do you think I care?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done to me,” Jade said. “You’ve wrecked my life. Bice will blame me for this. When I return, he’ll make my life hell. You’ve destroyed all I have; don’t ask me to care about your land.”

  “And you want to stay with a man like that? For what? What does he have that makes it worthwhile?”

  Jade turned and walked away.

  Rubric watched her go, then marched up to take his mother’s place. “Are you trying to upset her?”

  “Not deliberately. Look down there, at your home, Rubric. You won’t return, not even when you can. You’ll like the freedom the Quartern gives you, I promise you. And so would she, if she could untangle herself from her position as Bice’s wife. It doesn’t sound much better than being a snuggery handmaiden, and believe me, that wasn’t much of a life.”

  “You’re that sure I’ll like it?”

  She nodded. “Although maybe not Breccia. It still suffers the effects of the siege and occupation.”

  “Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

  As they walked back to the alpiners, a rider came around a corner of the track further up the slope. Terelle felt a tightness in her chest, and thought of Jasper. A resemblance. Same build, same hair, same colouring. But Jasper would never have ridden an alpiner as if he belonged on it, would never have been here in Khromatis, would never have abandoned his duty to the Quartern. Wishful thinking, that was all. She was a dreamer…

  Another rider followed, but all her attention was still on the first. He was so like Jasper. And then she was running, feet scudding, oblivious to the danger of falling on the loose stones, not caring, knowing only that it was he, and that he had come. That he had come for her.

  He vaulted off his mount, ran towards her, grabbed her up in his arms and whirled her around, saying her name over and over and over as if he wanted to hear it forever.

  A moment.

  The run of a sandglass.

  A sliver of time. How long? She could not have said. But when she emerged from the cocoon of safety where nothing mattered but that she was safe and loved within the circle of his arms, the others were there with
the alpiners, regarding them both solemnly. He released her, reluctantly, to return their regard.

  “Introduce me,” he said.

  She wasn’t sure she could speak. She was too breathless, her thoughts too confused, her heart too overwhelmed. When she found the words, they didn’t sound as if they were coming from her at all. She looked at Jade and Rubric. “This is Lord Jasper Bloodstone, Cloudmaster of the Quartern, and the man I’m going to marry.”

  She knew there was something terribly wrong when the blood drained from his face and he stood staring at her as if she had sentenced him to death.

  The conversation flowed on around her, over her. Introductions: her newly found cousin giving her a hug, his exuberant welcome a distinct contrast to that of the Verdigris family; Jasper trying to be polite to Rubric and Jade when he clearly would have liked to wring their necks; Jade reciprocating his initial antipathy as they sized one another up like frilled lizards in a threat display; Rubric ambivalent, caught in the middle.

  Jasper told them how he’d met Umber, how he knew what had happened to her and Feroze, how Elmar and Dibble were now in a bivac because Elmar had been injured in a rock fall. Terelle explained that Rubric and Jade were going to the Quartern because she’d painted them there. Jade asked Umber if he’d seen Jet and his company of armsmen, and he said yes, they’d passed one another without stopping.

  And in all the explanations, nothing told her why Jasper had looked at her with such sorrow and dread. All she was sure of was that it was going to hurt her, hurt her terribly. She’d seen it in his eyes. He was never going to marry her.

  Within the run of a sandglass they were on their way upwards again. Private conversation was impossible because they had to ride in single file. Once they reached the top of the pass, they were pelted by wind-blown snow, and by the time they reached the bivac they would have been wet and shivering if the two waterlords and Jasper had not done their best to divert the worst of the flurries and keep their clothing dry. The place was packed; not only were Elmar and Dibble there, but so were the drivers of a wagon bringing bolts of linen to the upper pales. Any chance of private conversation was stalled. Terelle acknowledged that the cowardly part of her was glad, because she could go on pretending that everything was going to be all right. She was safe; Jasper was there. And it seemed her cousin was a waterlord too, and no friend to the Verdigris family.