He looks, Starhawk thought, his usual gorgeous self in the full panoply of the shirdar lords. He had all Nanciormis’ grace and beauty, unblurred by the lines of sensuality and indulgence which had long ago eroded the commander’s handsomeness. In his white cloak, his baggy trousers and soft boots with their stamp-work of gold, his flowing surcoat, and strings of scarlet and blue amulets, he looked like a young and graceful hunting cat; whereas the commander, though he had the same hawklike shirdar features and the same thick braids of black hair, more resembled a somewhat spoiled tabby who has long ago decided that mousing was beneath him.
Osgard rose, leading Tazey by the hand. The girl’s face had the set, desperate look it had worn, Starhawk realized, when she had first stepped forward to face the darkness of the storm.
With slightly rehearsed grace, Incarsyn bowed and smiled. “It is better than you know, my Princess, to see you well again.”
Tazey took a deep breath, released her father’s hand, and stepped forward. Reaching up, she removed the small, gleaming droplets of the sand-pearls from her ears. Her voice was small and steady and like the clink of a dropped dagger in the enormous silence of the Hall.
“Thank you.” She faltered for one instant, glanced desperately back at the King, then went on. “You’ve been too good to me for me to want to pay you in false coin. What you’ve heard is true. I’m mageborn.” And she put the sand-pearls into his hand.
In that hideous instant of silence, Starhawk’s interested glance took in all the faces at the High Table—Osgard’s engorging with blood as his hand came up involuntarily as if he would strike her, and Jeryn’s dark eyes blazing to life with the first expression of soaring joy Starhawk had seen in them at his sister’s courage; Nanciormis was smiling. Why smiling? Beside her, she was aware of Kaletha smiling, too, with triumph at having thwarted the King and with anticipation at being, after all, Tazey’s teacher.
For one shocked instant, Incarsyn looked as taken aback as if Tazey had confessed to selling her favors in the Pardle bazaar.
The silence seemed to last for minutes, though Starhawk calculated it was in fact twelve or thirteen seconds. Then Osgard found the breath to gasp, “You—”
Incarsyn lifted a stilling finger. Reaching forward, he took Tazey’s hand, turned it over gently, and replaced the sand-pearls in her palm.
“It is a poor lover,” he said softly, his liquid voice carrying to all corners of the Hall, “who abandons his betrothed because she cuts off her hair, or changes its color, or decides that she will learn to play the war pipes. What you have told me is no more than this. If you will have me, Lady Taswind...” Graceful as a panther, he sank to one knee and, closing her fingers around the pearls, pressed a kiss upon her knuckles. “...I will still be your true lord.”
The applause rang like a thunderclap in the rafters, shouts of approval and toasts in weak breakfast wine. Osgard, stayed in his stride forward to shake Tazey until her teeth rattled, stepped back, his broad face wreathed in a smile of startled surprise at this magnanimity. But Tazey, Starhawk saw, looked stunned, shaking her head in confusion as a tear tracked down her hollowed face.
“I think it was beautiful,” Anshebbeth sighed dewily, coming to join Kaletha’s table a few minutes later.
“Do you?” Nanciormis walked quietly up behind her, a half-drunk vessel of wine in hand, pressed there by the King to toast the betrothed couple. His pouchy eyes glinted with cynicism which could not quite conceal furious anger.
Anshebbeth flustered, confused about what she might have said wrong and even more confused by Nanciormis’ presence, as if, thought Starhawk, she can not make up her mind whether to stand next to him or Kaletha. “Well—that is—after what people have been saying...though of course there’s nothing wrong with it...But Incarsyn—”
“Incarsyn,” said Nanciormis bitterly, “would have said the same thing were she a humpbacked leper and still the daughter of the King of Wenshar. I know.” He looked somberly at Kaletha, and even her cool reserve relaxed a little, under his warm brown gaze. “I met him late last night, coming back from the brothels in town. ‘Does it matter to me if the girl’s a witch-bitch?’ he said. ‘I rode north to marry her whatever she looked like; if she boils toads and couples with snakes for her pleasure, what is that to me? It could be worse—she could play the war pipes.’”
Anshebbeth went white with shock and disillusionment. Kaletha’s nostrils flared in anger, but there was no surprise in her face as she threw a bitter glance at the High Table, where Tazey, rigid with desperate composure, listened to the Prince’s light glow of blandishments that spared her the effort of stammering a reply. “So he’ll take her away with him after all,” she said bitterly. “And her father will be spared having to think about her ‘disgrace.’”
“It’s what he came here for.”
With soft and bitter violence, she whispered, “Men,” and turned her head suddenly, going back to her breakfast in arctic rage.
After a moment’s hesitation Anshebbeth gathered up her long skirts and sat beside Kaletha, offering the comfort of her presence, but she threw one look quickly back over her shoulder at Nanciormis, as if asking his permission. Nanciormis said nothing, but his dark eyes warmed for a moment with complicity; with that Anshebbeth smiled, uneasily content.
“Then it’s been a sham all along?” Starhawk asked quietly, looking up at the commander.
“By no means.” Nanciormis shrugged, started to drink from the cup in his hand, then grimaced, and put it down. “She’s a beautiful girl, after all. But she’s my niece—I care about her happiness.” He looked back toward the High Table, a very real anger in every line of his thick shoulders beneath their snowy cape. He was a politician, as Sun Wolf had said, for all his relatively minor post as commander of the guards; Starhawk knew him to be skilled in dissimulation, seldom showing his true thoughts. But his anger in this situation was genuine—and so it might be, thought Starhawk. She herself had never seen that side of Incarsyn—in fact, had never seen him being other than a shirdar gentleman: not very imaginative, but doing his best within his limits to be kind.
Nanciormis went on bitterly, “He cares less for her than he does for his horses—I’ve heard him say two or three times that he wouldn’t trust any woman on them...” Kaletha’s back stiffened at that, and she turned from her barely touched plate to look up at him again. “He despises the mageborn—I won’t repeat to you some of the things he’s said about you, Kaletha, and your followers. But he has better sense than to say them to a girl who can get him related to the mines of Wenshar and maybe out from under the control of that sister of his. But of course, I can’t say so to her.”
“Since she had no choice in the matter,” Starhawk remarked softly, “what would be the point?”
Down at the end of the High Table, a sudden movement of red and black caught her eye, and she saw Jeryn sit up, looking toward the doors with sudden brightness lighting up his thin face for the second time. At the same instant, she knew that Sun Wolf was looking for her; turning, she saw him standing in the archways that led to the shadowy vestibule, scanning the crowd.
As if she had called out to him across the great, sun-shafted hall, he turned his head and met her gaze.
Perhaps because they had been together last night, she felt for one split instant the strange tangle of her love for him pull her daytime mind—a passionate caring that was both physical and maternal, a need for his happiness that was so deep it shamed her...
And then, between one eyeblink and the next, the soldier in her realized he wasn’t supposed to be there.
But he was walking forward toward the dais, and so happy was Osgard with his alliance with the shirdar secured that he lofted his cup in greeting and called out, “Hey, Captain!” before he remembered why he’d ejected the Wolf from his court.
A look of truculent suspicion clouded his face, and he stood up. Starhawk had already begun to move toward the Wolf, reading in his silence, the way he held his body, that there was so
mething very wrong. Under a layer of dusty beard-stubble his face looked drawn, as she remembered it looking sometimes when he would look on things that had been done in the sacking of a city, in the cold light of the following day. His leather eye patch was blotched with moisture, his faded hair sleek and wet, as if he had dunked his head in a horse trough to clear his mind. Starhawk thought, If he tries to stop the match now, we’re going to have to fight our way out, touched her sword hilt, and gauged the best route to the closet window.
Osgard must have been thinking the same thing, for he demanded roughly, “I thought I told you to stay the hell away.”
“You did,” the Wolf said. “I just came to tell you the Bishop Galdron and Norbas Milkom are dead.”
Chapter 9
“WHEN DID YOU SEE Galdron?”
Starhawk held tight to the reins as her horse tried to throw up its head, made nervous by the stench of blood. “About three hours after midnight.” The sun, already well above Dragon’s Backbone at breakfast time, was now hot; the air in the little clearing among the boulders where she and the Wolf had first rescued Osgard from the disgruntled shirdar seemed alive with the low buzz of insects. Used as she was to day-old battlefields, the place made Starhawk’s stomach turn. “Milkom was with him. I got the impression they were heading straight back to town.”
Standing beside her near the little cluster of horses at the road’s edge, Sun Wolf nodded. “They must have been. I was wakened by something about two hours before dawn, but all I heard was every coyote in the hills howling. It wasn’t till daylight that I smelled the blood.”
From the mouth of a little wadi that wound away back into the rocks stumbled one of the band of Trinitarian priests who had met the posse from the Fortress at the place; he was an oldish man, bareheaded even in the rising heat, his robes like an incongruous bouquet of orchids against the lead-colored rocks. He leaned against a boulder and vomited as if he had been poisoned. Even at this distance, Starhawk could see the rim of scarlet along the hem of his robe.
Sun Wolf scratched his moustache and continued, “I went on into town to the Cathedral and got Egaldus and a bunch of the priests to come out here to keep an eye on the place, but I had a look around, first. You see anything odd about this?”
She looked around them at the small space of open ground. In places dark mud had dried to crusted puddles, soaking into the dust; she noted automatically that the ground underfoot was dust and pebbles, not sand, and covered like a lunatic quilt with back-and-forth stitching of tracks—the priests’, the posse’s, those of the onlookers that had already begun to gather and were being held back, rather unsuccessfully, by Nanciormis and a couple of his guards back on the road.
“You mean, besides two men and two horses dismembered?” she remarked, glancing back at Sun Wolf.
“Besides that,” he agreed, folding his arms.
She scanned the road: the gravelly dip and the surrounding rocks; Egaldus with his blond hair like a thick halo in the hot sun, speaking with gentle authority to the older priest; and Osgard, some distance away, sitting on a boulder, his face buried in his hands. Softly, she said, “I’m trying to picture how it was done, Chief, and I can’t. The area of the kill’s huge—it starts over there where one of the horses came down...” She pointed to a churned-up patch of black mud on the slope down from the road. Tracks zigzagged frantically away, passing within feet of them—pointed-toed slippers. She’d noted them on Galdron, pearled tips poking coyly from beneath the crimson hem of his robe. One of them, with the foot still in it, lay halfway under a boulder near the mouth of the wadi, swarming with flies. So far the priests had missed it. “Milkom’s body was over in those rocks there, but the first blood starts only a few feet from here.” That, by the look of it, had been an artery. She was astonished the little man had been able to run so far. “Two trained assassins on good horses could have done it, maybe. But...”
Her glance slipped back to the Wolf. His sunburned face looked dark against the white frame of his head veils; his single eye, yellow as a lion’s, was narrowed in thought. Knowing his answer already, she said, “There weren’t any tracks, were there?”
“No,” he said.
For a time they were both silent. Across the open ground, Osgard’s voice rose in a despairing shriek to no one in particular, “I’ll have the bastard crucified! I’ll have the skin flayed off him and leave him for the ants! I’ll get whoever did this—I’ll get him!” Nanciormis came hurrying down from the road toward him, leaving the guards to deal with the gaggle of neck-craning miners and cattle herders. Incarsyn, standing closer to the King, holding the bridle of his own horse—one of the famous white mares of the desert—didn’t move. He looked dazed and shaken, like the man in the legend who had bargained with the djinns for his worst enemy’s head in a box and, opening it, had found his own.
After a little while Starhawk said, “While I was getting ready to ride with you, ’Shebbeth came to me, in tears because Galdron had never liked Nanciormis, and she was afraid people would think he had something to do with it. She said Nanciormis was with her last night...”
“Was he?” Sun Wolf asked, more out of curiosity than anything else.
“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I was on the balcony for at least two hours after I saw Galdron. Nanciormis came sliding out of ’Shebbeth’s room close to dawn.”
Her dark brows twitched together for a moment as she remembered the narrow, rather gloomy confines of the Women’s Hall, with its unmade beds, abandoned by the underservants when they went to see Tazey’s reinstatement at breakfast, and the grayish shafts of filtered light that came in through the windows that overlooked the wide quadrangle of the kitchen courts. Anshebbeth had clutched desperately at her hands, her face skull-like, sleepless, and her hagridden eyes huge, begging the Hawk not to tell anyone. She would be ruined, utterly ruined, if the King found out. Starhawk, knowing the standards of propriety necessary in a Princess’ chaperone, had to agree with her there. But she would testify to anyone, she said, if necessary, that Nanciormis had not been abroad that night...
She looked across at the commander now. He was kneeling on the ground before the King, graceful as a tiger in spite of his bulk, every gesture he made lambent with beauty and power. For this man, poor Anshebbeth was risking not only her reputation—no small thing in a community as tight knit as this one—but her position, Tazey’s reputation, her friendship with the person dearest to her, and her own hopeless dreams of sharing Kaletha’s magic; and for thanks, Nanciormis tumbled her as he casually tumbled the laundry women, making jokes about her behind her back.
It was all none of Starhawk’s business, but she was conscious of a wish to see the commander prey to some kind of comprehensively disfiguring skin disorder for a number of weeks.
Quietly, she went on, “The damn thing is, it would be nice to have to worry about it being Nanciormis, or Osgard...or anyone.”
Sun Wolf nodded. The wind turned, blowing a little skiff of dust over the dark splatterings of the blood trails; Egaldus and two of Incarsyn’s shirdar body-guards emerged from behind the rocks, carrying something between them wrapped in a blanket. One of the horses whinnied and shied. Overhead, the vultures rode the thermals, curious but staying unnaturally high.
Like the hoarse, stripped scrape of metal, Sun Wolf’s voice went on. “I had a feeling about Nexué’s death, and this time, I’m sure. Whatever killed those poor bastards, Hawk, it was nothing human. I think the time has come for me to have a little talk with Kaletha.”
“You have no right to ask me about my power!” Kaletha almost spat the words at him, like an angry cat. In the slatey shadows of the small chamber just off the Women’s Hall, her face was like a white mask, floating above the dark, heavy folds of her gown.
“The hell I haven’t, woman! Two men have been murdered, and a woman also, if I’m right. You’re a wizard...”
“Just because you can find no sign of a killer, you accuse me?”
Sun Wolf�
�s eye narrowed. “I’m not accusing anyone. But you have books of magic that could tell us—”
“So!” The word came out like a trumpet of bitter laughter. “I thought we’d come to them, sooner or later. You’ll take any excuse to get your hands on them, won’t you? You are greedy, like Egaldus, but without Egaldus’ discipline and respect.”
Sun Wolf held his temper with an effort, but his harsh voice was thin. “I don’t give a tin damn if your way of holding power over your students is to deny them knowledge—”
“Power has nothing to do with it! I share my knowledge!”
He didn’t take that bait, but went inexorably on. “—but right now we need to know what killed those men, what could have killed them. You’re the wizard around here. I know there are demons in Wenshar. There could be other creatures in the desert as well, creatures we know nothing of...”
Kaletha scoffed, “Who told you that old tale? That old tattler Nanciormis?”
“I’ve seen them, dammit!”
“More lies,” she said, her voice cold. “No one has ever seen these so-called demons—nor, for all the superstitions about them, has anyone ever been hurt by them. They’re tales to keep children good and to give men an excuse for punishing wives who meddle. But magic is entirely the product of the human mind, purified by self-sacrifice and reason...”
“If it’s entirely the product of the human mind,” said the Wolf, “then it has to be fouler than a cat-house latrine.”
“Don’t you use language like that to me.”
“Don’t you understand?” Sun Wolf took a step toward her, and the tall woman fell back before him, hate and resentment in every rigid line of her body. Through the wide window that overlooked the kitchen garden, doves could be heard, and the soft chatter of women walking the paths between the dusty herb beds. The smoke of the kitchen fires, already heating up for that evening’s dinner, drifted like an acrid whiff of far-off battle on the shift of the wind. “Magic is born in us, because we’re children of the earth. It isn’t we who produce it. Its presence doesn’t make us better or holier people. Magic can be as pure and true as a man giving up his life for people he doesn’t even know—may his ancestors help the poor clown—or as foul and petty as the things lovers say to each other when they tire of love.”
The Witches of Wenshar Page 15