Winter of Ice and Iron

by Rachel Neumeier

  No one contradicted him, but Tageiny frowned and exchanged a glance with Caèr.

  “I’m not hungry,” Kehera said. “Tag, what?” She felt an unexpected and deep stab of terror. “What has happened?” she said, her voice rising involuntarily. “Caèr, is His Grace all right?” She couldn’t imagine what might have happened to him. Had there been another battle, that she had slept through? Had he been wounded again, and this time she had not been there to call on the Raëh Power?

  “He’s fine,” Riheir said, his tone savage, but then added, in a much gentler tone, “It’s you we’re all worried about, Kehy. You should rest. And eat something. Soup or something.” He threw a look at a man she didn’t know, who left, presumably to find her some soup that she emphatically did not want.

  Kehera asked sharply, “What is it that none of you want to tell me? Tag, do I have to ask you twice? Tell me!”

  “It’s nothing you should be asked to deal with,” Riheir began, with a deadly look at the bigger man.

  Tageiny cut him off. “That’s her choice, Your Grace, not yours!”

  “She’s in no shape to deal with such things right now! And she shouldn’t have to at all!”

  Kehera stepped back from them both and said through her teeth, “Riheir Coärin, I am not yours to rule! Heris Tageiny, whose orders do you take above mine?”

  The big man drew a breath and straightened. “No one’s.”

  “Then tell me,” she commanded.

  “No!” snapped Riheir.

  “His Grace,” Tageiny said, in a voice from which all expression had been carefully stripped, “has one of the captured Pohorin officers . . . up in the mountains. With him. My lady.”

  For a long moment, none of them moved or spoke. High and remote, the mountain cat screamed again. It did not, if one listened closely, sound exactly like a cat after all.

  Kehera looked at Caèr Reiöft.

  “I can’t go to him,” the man told her quietly. “I would. But he hasn’t allowed me near him since . . . you brought him back. His orders concerning me were unfortunately quite explicit.” He paused, touching his fingertips wearily to his eyelids. “He does get these protective impulses. At the worst possible times, generally.”

  “But he didn’t leave any orders for me,” Kehera said, knowing this was true.

  Caèr dropped his hand and met her gaze. “No, he didn’t. He didn’t leave any orders commanding you to do, or forbidding you to do . . . anything.”

  Kehera straightened her shoulders. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No,” Riheir said, face white and strained.

  “Yes,” said Tageiny, stepping forward. “But I will warn you, he’s in a savage mood.”

  “I don’t care. Take me to him,” Kehera ordered. “Get me a horse and take me to him.”

  Tageiny turned on his heel and strode into the darkness.

  Riheir came close and took her hands again, his grip urgent. “Kehy, listen to me. This isn’t something for you to interfere with. He’s not a safe man. I wish above all things you weren’t in his power. There’s no telling what he may do if you go up there—”

  Kehera let her hands lie still in his, not returning his grip, and answered quietly, “This is not yours to decide. It never was.”

  “He won’t harm Her Highness,” Caèr Reiöft said quietly. And to her, “When you brace the wolf, it’s never wise to back up.”

  Tageiny led two horses out of the darkness, a tall roan and a smaller gray, by the reins. The two pale horses loomed out of the night as though caught in their own personal pools of moonlight.

  “You must not—” began Riheir.

  “We had better not quarrel,” Tageiny said flatly. “Think of the example it would set for the men.” He met Riheir’s eyes without flinching, and the Duke of Coär paused.

  Kehera threw the reins over the gray’s neck. Riheir made as though to approach her, but Caèr stepped between them, deferential but unyielding.

  “You’ve got to stay here,” Kehera said to Riheir over her shoulder, and swung up into the gray’s saddle. “You know that, Riheir. There has to be a commander here that both armies are willing to look to, and I don’t see Toren Viärin anywhere about. Gone back to Viär, hasn’t he? Then you’ve got to stay here and you’ve got to work with the Eänetén officers. I shouldn’t have to tell you that!”

  Riheir stopped.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Kehera promised Caèr, and was absurdly flattered when the man nodded as though he trusted this promise. She booted the gray in the ribs, and it jolted off after Tageiny’s roan. Its gaits were brutally rough, and for a moment Kehera thought of how much she would rather be lying on her cot, in her tent, wrapped in blankets rather than a cloak.

  No one challenged them as they left the camp, although Kehera saw one sentry, and then another. They recognized her, perhaps, for they lifted their hands in salutes and stood aside. Tageiny reined his tall roan back beside her and told her, speaking clearly to be heard over the sounds of hooves and creaking harness and cold wind, “The trail’s narrow—if you can call it a trail at all; it’s more a goat path. The horses should stay on the path, but we’ll have to go single file, and there’s damn all for light, with the moon so thin. That’s why I picked light-colored horses. If I get too far ahead of you, give a yell.”

  Kehera nodded, realized that of course he couldn’t see her, and said, “Yes.”

  Tageiny brought his roan in front of her gray. Its dark tail flicked back and forth between nearly white thighs, easy enough to follow. Kehera let her horse pick its own way, taking care only to keep it headed in the right general direction.

  The ground rapidly grew steep and rugged. The hooves of the horses rang against stone, and her gray put its head down almost to touch the ground, picking its way more by feel than by sight.

  Above them, another scream cut through the air, much closer than before. It did not, now that they were so close, sound at all like a cat. Neither did it sound human. Kehera closed her hands on her horse’s mane until they ached.

  The path, if one could dignify it by that name, leveled off and then steepened again, and then gradually leveled once more. The scrubby trees opened out to tough wiry grasses yellow with winter, and bare rock, and patches of snow. A great fire burned before them. No, Kehera saw, there were two fires, some little distance apart, and between them, the dark silhouette of a tall man.

  “Tag!” she said urgently, and when he turned his horse back toward hers, added, “I want you to go back to camp—don’t argue, and don’t disobey me. I’m far safer here than you are.”

  Without a word, the big bodyguard turned his horse in a circle and put it into a slow, careful walk down the slope they had just climbed.

  Kehera sent her gray forward, toward the fires.

  The Wolf Duke heard her coming, of course. He waited for her between the fires, their light sending his shadow leaping on the cliffs that lay to either side. Although the air had been quite cold, it was not cold near those fires; the steep cliffs flung their violent heat back at them, and it became uncomfortably hot as Kehera approached.

  The duke was clearly prepared to be furious with whoever had the temerity to approach him, to interrupt him here, about this . . . activity. He was shirtless, and for the only time she had ever seen him, with the sole exception of when he had been lying on the ground with an arrow in his chest, he was not immaculate. Blood streaked his chest and arms. Ribbons of it curled around his fingers. His face shone with sweat from the heat, but the expression in his eyes was wintry.

  Behind him, on the ground, a man lay spread-eagled and naked, wrists and ankles bound to stakes pounded into the rocky ground. Kehera was glad she could not see the details clearly. She could hear the man breathing, deep raw breaths that were half groans.

  She drew her horse to a halt and put her hood back. Her hands were shaking. She kept her eyes firmly on the duke’s face.

  And so she was watching when the leashed rage in hi
s yellow eyes changed gradually to appalled shock. There was little enough sign of it; another person, watching less closely, or less familiar with his minimal expressions, might have missed it entirely. He did not speak.

  Kehera said, hardly recognizing her own shaking voice, “Innisth, how can you do this?” It was the first time she had ever addressed him by his name, and she saw it have an impact. The duke drew a slow, shuddering breath, dropping his gaze to the ground. But he did not answer.

  Kehera slid down from her horse and started to walk forward, past the duke and between the fires. He put out a bloody hand to bar her way. “You do not want to see that.” His voice was flat, empty of expression.

  “What I want,” Kehera answered tautly, “is for that not to exist.”

  The duke turned on his heel, walked back to stand beside his victim, plucked a knife off the ground, and hurled it downward with a neat economical movement. The man lying there shuddered in one great spasm, and went limp.

  Kehera put one hand over her mouth and turned away. The heat of the fires leaned like a physical weight against her back.

  The duke said distantly, from quite near behind her, “I shall take you back to your tent.”

  “No,” Kehera said. Behind her, he took a breath, more felt than heard, and she added, shocked by the steadiness of her own voice, “I want to know why you did this.”

  “There are times I must do it.”

  “No. I don’t believe that. What I believe”—her voice shook now, uncontrollably—“is that you want to do it.” She turned once more to face him, having to tip her head back to meet his eyes. The fires behind him cast moving shadows across his expression. She could not make out any details of his face. But she felt his fury, blazing out of him like the heat of those great fires, ready, if it slipped the leash of his control, to burn out over this whole mountain.

  He said coldly, “If I cannot draw on Raëhemaiëth’s calm, I must assuage Eänetaìsarè another way. Should I use one of my own men? Or yours?”

  Kehera shook her head. “Innisth, I am willing to give you Raëhemaiëth’s calm.” She was willing, she found, and in the moment, this understanding somehow did not surprise her. She said, “I am willing to have you draw on Raëhemaiëth through me. You said you would marry me, and told me your reasons. You didn’t say that one of those reasons was so that Raëhemaiëth would moderate Eänetaìsarè’s demands. But you hardly have to say so. All your reasons stand, including that one. So I will marry you. You will not put this off again. I will be your wife, and you will never do this again.”

  The quality of the silence after that told him she had struck home. She said, following up her advantage with a precision she had not known she could command, “Don’t tell me you would hurt me. I know that’s not true.”

  “I cannot marry you,” he answered, and for the first time in his voice there was a raw sound of naked emotion. “I intended to. But how can I bring . . . this . . . to you? You say your Immanent will moderate Eänetaìsarè. But the reverse is also true.”

  Kehera looked into his face. The shadows moved over it, and she could see nothing there she recognized. But she could hear his voice clearly, even over the sound the fires made. She said, and this time her voice did not shake, “You will give me something of Eänetaìsarè. And I will accept it. Do you think I am so craven that I fear that? If you think so, you are much mistaken.” When he started to interrupt, she added firmly, “And you must go forward with the marriage. What will you do if you have no heir, and another arrow that you cannot send aside comes down out of the sky? What will Eänetaìsarè do then?”

  He drew a sharp breath, and she knew she had struck home a second time.

  She said before he could find an answer, “And you must, because I will have it so. I will be your wife, Innisth, and I swear, Fortunate Gods witness, that you will never again lay your hand on any man, or woman, as you have done here tonight. If you do, I lay on you a cold bed that will never grow warm. I call on all Fortunate Gods to hear me: If you do, I lay on you that you will never get a child by me nor by any other woman. A cold bed and a cold wife you will have, all the days of your life, and no child to come after you—”

  He took the one step necessary, caught her shoulders, and shook her once, hard. “Kehera! Woman, what are you trying to do to me?”

  And that was the first time he had ever called her by name. She knew by that she had won. But she had known it anyway. She did not try to break free of his grip. But she found now that she could see his face clearly, even in the uncertain light. His yellow wolf’s eyes were wide, shocked. Vulnerable. “Kehera,” he whispered, this time quietly, with a deep weariness behind every word that frightened her more than anger would have done. “Kehera, I will not be able to protect you from Eänetaìsarè.”

  She brought her hands up to close around his wrists, where he held her shoulders. His skin was sticky with sweat, or blood. She held him tightly. “I don’t require protection. I’m not fragile. Besides, your Immanent will moderate its desires for Raëhemaiëth’s sake.” She paused and then said more gently, “But you’re wrong anyway. You will protect me if you need to. Do you think I don’t know you can hold your Immanent in the palm of your hand? You can deny its worse desires, if you will have it so.”

  “Do you think I have never tried?”

  She shifted her grip to his hands and held them firmly in hers, not letting him pull away. “I think you’ve never tried with a Harivin Raëhema standing next to you.”

  For a long moment there was no sound in the night but the crackling roar of the fires.

  “Swear it. Swear you will never again look to another person’s pain for your release.” She thought for a moment that he would break her hold on his hands and walk away, and she knew that if he did, there would be no way to go after him.

  But after that moment, he stood still again, his inhuman golden eyes swimming with fire.

  “Swear it,” she insisted.

  And he sighed and said quietly, “I so swear.” He did break her hold then, and turned a little away. But he did not walk away and leave her standing behind him. He stood still, looking into the fires, or perhaps at what lay between them.

  She said, speaking as quietly as he had done, “Then I will marry you. You must send me a poem.”

  He turned his head, clearly taken aback.

  “Every woman expects a courting poem from any serious suitor,” Kehera told him. “I expect one.” She hoped composing one on such short notice would help him regain his own accustomed self-possession as well. Though he might have been turning lines over in his mind since his earliest declaration that he would marry her. She would not have been surprised.

  He did not object to her demand, but only bowed slightly, though he still stood before her shirtless and streaked with another man’s blood. “Your wish is, evidently, my command.”

  “Good. We will marry tomorrow.” She looked up at the star-dusted sky. “Today,” she said, because she could feel the approaching dawn. She said it again, “Today.” It sounded certain. It sounded right. She had never felt so sure of anything in her life.

  “As you wish.” He held out his hand. “May I escort you back to your tent?”

  “What, like that?”

  He glanced down at his naked chest, his bloody arms. “I have a towel. And a cloak. With my horse.” He collected both, taking his time about it, and came back to where Kehera waited for him, holding the reins of her own horse. He had cleaned the blood off his hands. Wrapped in his black cloak, he looked severe but no longer savage. He held a bowl of water, which he poured over Kehera’s hands to wash off the blood she had gotten on her fingers, touching him.

  After that, she allowed him to help her mount. As they turned their horses toward the little trail that would lead back to camp, she hesitated and asked, “What about the fires?”

  He spared a glance over his shoulders to them, the flames catching in his eyes. He said, in a tone Kehera could not interpret, “Le
t them burn. Let them burn to ash and nothing.” And turned forward again, and lifted his black mare into a dangerous canter down the sloping trail.

  The falcon flies swift on the wing—

  Bright her brave flight

  Against the pale sky.

  Out of the clean dawn,

  The wind-swift bird appears—

  These walls do not prison the bird

  Although I am prisoned here.

  To our shattered dreams we cling:

  Bright we dreamed them,

  Long we cherished them,

  High we builded them,

  But they break against the beating

  Of our deepest hearts and fears,

  And we cut our fingers to the bone

  On the shards of passing years.

  Is it for me the falcon cries?

  Brave her song falls

  From the open sky!

  From the tumbled walls the echoes ring.

  In all her dreams she perseveres—

  The foundation of all my hope,

  And the tomb of all my fears.

  23

  Tiro knew all the stories. He leaned against the heavy windowsill of this high tower room, gazed out over the windblown homes and towers of Talisè, and let all the scattered details of those old tales fall through his mind.

  For example, the one about the Great Power of ancient Sierè in the south. It had forced the apotheosis of many southern Immanences, or so scholars thought. Of course, nothing was left of Sierè now, or any lesser Immanent of the southlands. No one was entirely certain whether the Power of Sierè had meant to devastate the south, but if anything besides the chaos of black storms and obsidian-winged dragons now existed in the south, no one knew of it.

  Tiro had certainly not driven the Immanent of Eilin from the land that had birthed it. But he had taken not merely a light tie, but a full ruling tie to the lesser Immanent. He had anchored Raëhemaiëth into Eilin, through and past the rightful Power of that land. Through and past the tie rightfully held by the Lady of Eilin. Lady Viy still held Eilin. But now she held town and province and Immanent Power largely at his own sufferance. If he put his will on Eilin, Tiro was fairly certain he could take the tie away from Lady Viy entirely and keep it for his own or bestow it elsewhere as he pleased.