Soraya spun, astonished. Her mother returned her gaze calmly, every braid in place, as if she always rose at dawn. She was dressed for riding, a modest split skirt beneath her overrobe—unlike Soraya.
“I didn’t realize you were coming with me, madam.” Soraya transferred Merdas into her outstretched arms, and he settled on her hip, reaching for the feathers in her hair. But for once he didn’t have Sudaba’s full attention. Her lips tightened as she took in the baggy men’s trousers Soraya wore for riding. Not ladylike. Not proper for a deghass.
But making a scene in front of the servants wasn’t proper either. “I thought it best to accompany you, daughter, in this difficult time.”
To support Soraya in her troubles? No, to make certain her orders were obeyed. As if Soraya were an infant. Soraya scowled, but there was nothing she could do. The jumped-up page boy, Jiaan, looked startled, but Sudaba would care even less for his wishes than her daughter’s.
Sudaba’s maids brought out her baggage—far more than Soraya had brought—and several more mules were added to the caravan. Merdas’ nurses scurried out and took him from his mother’s arms.
“We’re ready to depart, madam,” Jiaan told Sudaba respectfully. He didn’t even look at Soraya.
Sudaba mounted and set off, the armsmen trotting after her. But Soraya went to Merdas and covered his face with big, smacking kisses that made him giggle.
“A present when I come back,” she promised, and then turned swiftly to her mare. The groom’s cupped hands caught her bent knee and tossed her expertly up into the saddle. Soraya wrapped her legs around the mare’s broad barrel and took her out without a backward glance. More regal that way. For if she looked back and Merdas reached for her, she might weep. And if he was indifferent to her departure—a perfectly normal reaction for a toddler, who had no idea how long she might be gone—she’d feel cheated. Besides…
She snickered, and Jiaan, who was trotting up beside her, stared, his annoyed scowl fading into curiosity.
If he’d been impertinent enough to ask why she laughed, she wouldn’t have said anything, but he just watched her and let the silence stretch. And he looked almost embarrassingly like her father.
“I was just thinking that any grief Merdas showed would have been for his vanishing horseback ride, not for me.”
Jiaan grinned, but his pale, greenish eyes—lighter than her father’s, his peasant blood showed in that—were full of speculation.
Soraya knew what he was thinking. She’d heard it for almost two years—whispers in shadowy stalls, in the bushes in the courtyard, behind her back: “She really loves the boy. Or seems to. How can she when her mother…”
But Merdas couldn’t take away affection that Sudaba had never given her in the first place. If anything, she’d come to understand her mother better since Merdas had been born, for the need to be mistress of her own house, to be the first woman in it, had been setting its heels to Soraya’s sides lately as well. And her father’s recent letters had hinted that marriage, a fine marriage, was under consideration. So what was this ridiculous sacrifice business? Certainly the priests demanded sacrifices of gold, but the sacrifice of life, of blood, hadn’t been demanded since the days folk truly believed in the power of the djinn. Soraya sighed. She had to discuss this with her father. Sudaba needn’t have worried that she’d rebel; in fact, Soraya would have gone even if her mother had forbidden it. This was the first important thing her father had asked of her.
THEY TOOK THE ROAD that followed Little Jamshid Creek, which flowed eventually into the Jamshid River. Sudaba rode at the head of the party, as a high-ranking deghass should. Soraya kept her horse back, but she maintained her dignified silence, answering Jiaan’s occasional conversational attempts politely but not expanding on them. He soon gave up and stopped talking.
That suited Soraya. It was almost a full day’s ride before the farms of the first village disrupted the sweeping plains of her father’s estate, and silence was the proper greeting for windswept grass and the huge, open sky.
At dusk they began to encounter the kind of fields you weren’t supposed to ride over—though sometimes, in the heat of the hunt, you did. When that happened, her father would send a groom to find the farmholder, with a small purse of copper stallions or a few silver falcons to set it right, but Soraya knew most deghans wouldn’t bother to do the same. You had to eat, of course, but most deghans regarded plowed land as a waste of good pasture.
The inn at the small village was crude, but Soraya had stayed there before, and she knew it was clean and had a decent bathhouse. She frequently accompanied her parents on the six-day journey to Setesafon. It was Farsala’s capital city, because the gahn’s palace was there.
Soraya tossed her reins to the groom and slid off her horse. It had been a long ride, even for someone accustomed to the saddle. The innkeeper was already bowing Sudaba through the door. Soraya followed, waving over the first maid she saw to command a bath. Her escort would pay the tab.
AROUND MIDDAY THE HORSES picked their way down the shallow cliffs that separated the upland plains from the near-solid farmlands—the flatter, wetter country where the lesser noble houses held land.
Then a short canter across country brought them to the Great Trade Road. No matter how many times she’d seen it, the wide, dusty tracks always intrigued Soraya. The carters who drove it tried to move their carts around, to keep any one set of ruts from becoming too deep, but after a while they deepened anyway, and the road shifted a bit to the north or south to make new tracks. Over the centuries it had become not one road, but dozens of twining trails, weaving their way from the Sendar Wall at the western border of Farsala to the invisible line in the east where the border deghans held back the Kadeshi.
Some of the laden carts on this road had come from even farther away, carrying second-rate steel and mechanical creations from the Iron Empire of the Hrum, to trade for glass, spices, and dyes from the savage lands of Kadesh, for even the Hrum’s second-rate steel was better than anything the Kadeshi could produce. Some traders from both directions stopped in Farsala to trade for Farsalan silk, which was so strong that armor could be made from its gathered layers, like the padded tunic Jiaan was wearing—armor both stronger and lighter than the leather armor most folk used. Sometimes they traded for horses, too. Farsala’s horses were the finest in the world, and even the culls from their herds were worth much in other lands.
Traders liked Farsala, Soraya’s father said, and paid their travel tax willingly because the deghans kept the road free of bandits. Soraya had never met anyone willing to pay taxes, but the traders were a cheerful lot, calling out greetings and talking of the lands they’d visited as you rode beside their carts—though they wouldn’t unwrap the mysterious bundles and crates of their loads unless you had coin in hand and were interested in buying more than a trinket or two.
On past trips Soraya had talked to the traders for candle-marks, to her father’s amusement and her mother’s disapproval. Sudaba would never permit casual conversation with such lowborn men on this journey, just as Soraya’s trousers had been taken away by her mother’s maid and replaced with the voluminous, awkward split skirt.
Soraya sighed again. When she married, she would choose a man who let her wear what she pleased and talk to whomever she wished, like her father did. When she was married…
THE WEATHER HELD GOOD for two more days. The harvest was beginning, the fields full of peasants in their vulgar, brightly dyed clothes. Even little ones, barely older than Merdas, were fetching empty baskets for their elders or chasing off the birds. But midafternoon, on the fourth day of their journey, the clouds to the south began to build and darken.
Jiaan scowled at them—her father’s scowl—the rising wind ruffling his curly, peasant hair, and he asked Sudaba if they could stop at the next village.
Soraya bit back the urge to argue. She might love a thunderstorm, but she knew the horses wouldn’t.
So it came about that Soraya found
herself, in the late afternoon, with time and energy to spare, cooped up in a bedchamber that was too small even to pace in. There were peasant designs painted on the furniture, and the painted shutters of the single, small window opened onto the inn’s kitchen yard. The trees on the other side of the yard’s wall rustled in the wind, their upper branches beginning to toss; but the window faced north, so that was all of the storm she could see.
At home Soraya had a south-facing room. She could sit at her open window, blanket wrapped around her, and watch the winter rains rush in, spitting lightning and growling like a lion, as the wind clawed at her hair. Sometimes she didn’t close the shutters when the first drops struck her face. Sometimes she even went out in the storms….
There was a shed roof not four feet below the windowsill. Why not? Her mother’s maids had only taken away one pair of trousers.
Soraya pulled her next pair from inside one of her shifts, where she’d concealed them on the first night of the journey. She pinned her overrobe tight, grateful that it was split up the back for riding. It was the work of moments to swing one leg over the sill and pick her way down the shed’s roof, rope-soled riding boots secure on the rough slats. Off to one side was a wood bin, conveniently placed for a girl who wasn’t tall to reach with one toe and then wobble down to the ground.
Soraya grinned at the startled cook, who’d stopped pulling loaves from the oven under the shed’s roof to stare at the source of the overhead footsteps. Then she turned and made for the gate that would lead to the inn’s garden and, hopefully, to some open place where she could watch the storm come in.
Yes. Once she passed the trees, she saw a small rise that began where the garden ended. She’d almost reached it when a hand fell on her shoulder.
Soraya squeaked and spun, one hand clenching into a fist, as her father had taught her, the other reaching for the small eating dagger she wore at her belt. But the dagger went undrawn, for her fist smacked into a warm, strong palm, and a warm, strong voice said, “That’s my leopard cub! But you should have the dagger out by the time your fist hits, girl.”
“Father!”
A second later she was in his arms, a big man’s hug that lifted her off her feet.
“How’s my girl?” he growled into her hair.
“Angry with you,” Soraya muttered into his shoulder. “And if you think I’m going off to rot in some hole while all the other girls my age make the good marriages, then—”
“Hush.” Her father let her go; his expression was so serious that she did fall silent. Thunder rumbled. He glanced around the deserted garden, looking for all the world as if he feared to be seen with her. What in the name of all the djinn…?
“This is too open.” Taking her arm, he led her toward a small shed—no more than a lean-to with a thatched roof, half-buried in the trees. “Besides, we’re about to get wet. Still, I’m glad the storm brought you out. With the inn this busy, I’d have had to wait till nightfall to sneak in without being seen.”
Soraya felt a chill that had nothing to do with the storm. “Why don’t you want to be seen talking to me? And who would see us?”
“I’m pretty sure one of the armsmen with Jiaan is in Garshab’s pay.”
A gust of wind sent leaves whirling, and her father reached into the shed and began pulling out hoes and pitchforks, making them a place to sit, since the roof was far too low for them to stand. Soraya pulled her overrobe around her. She knew that Garshab headed the House of the Raven, one of the twelve great houses, just as her father was head of the House of the Leopard. This made Garshab one of the most powerful men in Farsala, and a powerful commander in her father’s army too, but…“Why would Commander Garshab care if you talk to me? Why should anyone care? You outrank him—in the army, anyway.”
“Ah, but he’s trying to change that.” Her father crawled into the dusty shelter without any visible thought for dignity or spiders. “That’s the point of this whole ridiculous mess. How much did Jiaan explain to you?”
“That I’m supposed to be sacrificed to propitiate the djinn,” said Soraya, scowling down at him. Thunder cracked and fat drops began to fall.
“And…,” said her father patiently.
“And that I’m supposed to hide out somewhere to avoid it, until you win the war. Which could take years! It’s ridiculous. The temple never asks for blood sacrifice—not for centuries. I won’t…”
The rain thickened suddenly, and she gave up and scrambled in to sit beside him.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to,” said her father. “Garshab’s cozened the priests into demanding your sacrifice, and they’ve stirred up the soldiers. Even some of the deghans. I’ve been trying for years now to convince the gahn and the others that the Hrum are a real threat; now it looks like I may have succeeded too well. Anyway, if I don’t agree to sacrifice you or Merdas, Garshab will argue that I’m unfit for command. He’s got enough support in the deghanate that the gahn will be forced to agree to him replacing me.”
For the first time Soraya felt a chill of real fear. The heads of the twelve great houses formed the gahn’s council. Technically, they were all equal, but Soraya knew her father had the support of the majority there. The deghanate, on the other hand, was comprised of the heads of all noble houses, even if they owned no more than one village and a single charger. They quarreled constantly among themselves, but when they pulled together, they could overthrow gahns. If the majority of the deghanate supported Garshab, the gahn wouldn’t dare ignore them.
“Don’t worry,” said her father, reading her expression. “I won’t allow any harm to come to my leopard cub. Unfortunately, Garshab knows that. His plan—his real plan—is to catch me in the process of saving you.”
“But wouldn’t Commander Garshab have to make some sort of sacrifice too?”
“He’s probably prepared some way to get around it.” Her father’s lips twisted in disgust. “But I swear, Garshab might sacrifice one of his children for real, if it was the only way to get command. He has a hunger for power that…Well, I wouldn’t want him in command at the best of times, and now—”
“Now, if the Hrum come, he’ll get the glory of defeating them,” said Soraya indignantly.
“I’m sure that’s what he thinks,” said her father. “And by Azura’s arm, if it were just the glory, I swear I’d give it to him. But the Hrum have conquered every land in their path for almost two centuries, leopardess. And despite what Garshab believes, he isn’t Sorahb reborn—not even close. I don’t think he can beat them. So I have to retain command, and that means you—”
“Have to be sacrificed.” She understood; she just didn’t like it. “But if Garshab has the temple and the deghanate behind him, how can you—”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll see that no harm comes to you, and as soon as the Hrum are defeated, none of this will matter.”
“But the Hrum might not come for years!”
“They’re in Sendan now.” Her father’s voice was very soft. “Some of the deghans think they’ll need time to conquer it, but Sendan is hardly putting up any resistance. The Hrum army mostly consists of infantry. The soldiers won’t want to campaign in the winter, but when spring comes, they’ll come for us.”
Soraya decided to blame her shudder on the leaking thatch. “All winter in exile? And then the time it will take to fight a war as well? Besides, there’s a wall between us and Sendan. We can stop them at the Sendar Wall.”
“The Sendar Wall is Sendan’s wall,” said her father dryly. “Now it’s the Hrum’s. We can’t exactly turn it around and use it against them.”
Soraya frowned. “Why not?”
Her father laughed softly. “Sometimes I forget that you’re a girl.”
“Woman.” Soraya scowled. “An unwed woman. Isn’t a wall the same on both sides?”
“Not this kind of wall.” Her father was still grinning. “The arrow slits, all the defensive structures, face the other way. Don’t worry. The defense of Farsala lies i
n the strong arms of its deghans, and against the Hrum those arms had better be strong and well wielded. Because, frankly, looking at the Hrum, I wish the previous gahns had built us a few walls.”
“But you can beat them?” The Hrum might have conquered half the world in the last few centuries, but no one had been able to conquer Farsala for thousands of years. And many had tried. And her father was the best commander—
“Of course I can.” His frown vanished in a grin. “Don’t fret about that, girl. You’ll have enough on your plate, trying to act like a proper sacrifice.”
“I have no clue how to act like a sacrifice,” Soraya told him gloomily. But she knew protest was useless. And Merdas was too young. She wouldn’t sully her dignity by even mentioning his name.
“You’ll bring it off, when the time comes,” her father told her. “You’re no fool, girl, any more than your mother is. You can lie better than any scheming deghan, if you put your mind to it.”
Soraya sighed. “I’ll try.” But she wasn’t happy about it.
Her father laughed. “Just keep sulking, like you have for the last few days, and that’ll do.”
“I haven’t been…How do you know what I’ve been doing?”
“I started following you late this morning,” her father confessed. “I had to catch up with you before you reached the capital. We’ll both be watched there. My aides are covering for me now, but I wore out three good horses getting here, and I’ll wear out as many more getting back to the city before dawn.”
“I haven’t been sulking,” said Soraya. “How are you going—”
“Soraya?” Her mother’s voice sounded, not quite an unladylike shout, but loud enough to carry. Soraya’s absence had been discovered. And the rain was letting up. The maids would begin searching for her soon.
“Time to go,” said her father. “I only came to be sure that you weren’t fri—that you knew what was really going on.”
“But I don’t know what’s going on! Not nearly enough.” Soraya grasped his sleeve. “Doesn’t Mother know you’re here?”
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