Fire Hawk

by Justine Davis, Justine Dare

  “I cannot,” he said.

  Jenna’s heart sank. She hadn’t realized how greatly she had counted on his help until now, when he denied he could provide it. But something else he’d said prodded at her, and she lifted her head, marveling anew at how much effort it took to simply meet his gaze.

  “You said I must find someone who does.”

  He nodded, and she saw that light of approval still lingering in his changeable eyes, eyes so different from her own, which were always, ever blue.

  “Who?” she asked.

  He shrugged, as if it were common knowledge. “There is only one who can help you.”

  “Who?” she repeated.

  “Kane.”

  Jenna’s arched brows shot upward. “Kane? He’s a myth! A legend, a story told to children—”

  “So they say.”

  “But everyone knows he’s not real, any more than the beast of the lake.”

  The storyteller shrugged again.

  “You’re saying he is real? That he lives?”

  “He exists.”

  Jenna wondered at the choice of words in the storyteller’s quiet confirmation, but the entire idea was so absurd she could only shake her head.

  “But everyone—”

  “Before I came here,” he interrupted, in such a mild tone it took her a moment to realize he might truly be imparting some hint of his hidden past, “I passed through a land where there was a legend of a distant place, a glade in a magical forest that provided safety for all the souls that resided there, where all wants were met, peace had reigned unbroken year after year, and where the leader was marked by the possession of a golden hawk. All knew it was merely legend; all laughed at the idea of ever setting out to find such a place, for it was only a myth. Everyone knew that.”

  Jenna opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her mouth quirked; she’d been through this before with this puzzling, very curious man. “Another lesson hidden in allegory, sir?”

  He smiled, that gentle, approving smile that seemed to lighten even her heavy burden. “ ’Tis often easier that way, is it not?”

  “Especially for those too stubborn to see?”

  “You are never too stubborn,” he said. “But sometimes you are too close.”

  For a long time, Jenna sat there looking at the storyteller. She wondered if she had sensed from the beginning that he would somehow hold the key to their survival, wondered if that was perhaps why she had never questioned his sudden appearance, or his right to the position of storyteller to the clan.

  He merely endured her scrutiny, as if he’d said what he had to say, and it was now up to her.

  As, she supposed, it was.

  At last, her fears still present but quieted somewhat at the prospect of doing something—anything, no matter how preposterous—she let out a long, compressed breath.

  “What must I do?” she asked simply.

  The storyteller smiled.

  THE MAN WHO was only a myth sat by the fire, staring into the darkness. It would be more natural to stare into the dancing flames, but old habits died hard, and the warrior buried deep within him could not relax enough, even after all this time, to let his night vision be destroyed by staring into the light.

  He wondered if he would ever relax that much. If, perhaps, after a decade or so of peace in these high mountains, the warrior might truly give way to the man of peace he’d fought so hard to become. A man who did not see the potential for ambush in every narrow pass, a man who did not hear the approach of an enemy in every footfall, a man who did not wake every morning and search anew for any sign of treachery in his small domain.

  He wondered if he would ever be as other men, then laughed at his own foolish fancy; Kane was Kane, and such would he always be. He had done it to himself, with his own blindness, and it was only right that he pay for it with the rest of his life.

  Almost absently his hand stole upward, to trace the scar that ran from his right temple down to his jaw. He’d heard many versions of how he’d received the mark, from a heroic battle against a dozen men to the clash with the fierce lion whose skin now warmed his shoulders against the mountain cold. Only he knew the truth behind the slash that had left him carrying the narrow, oddly straight line of whitened flesh. He didn’t dwell on it, was merely thankful it hadn’t taken his eye as well as disfigured his face.

  He pushed raven dark hair back from his forehead. The unaccustomed length of it, falling past his shoulders now, was a constant reminder of the vow he’d made never to don a battle helm again. He would never again shear it short for that purpose. He would never—

  His thoughts ended abruptly as the faintest of sounds, a mere whisper, like that of a feather pushing against the still air, gave him warning. A moment later a glistening shape came out of the darkness, the sheen of its body the only difference between it and the black of the night.

  The raven landed on the log across from him, cocking its head as it looked at him. A wry smile curved his mouth.

  “ ’Tis as well you sent your emissary ahead, Tal,” he said into the darkness. “I’m a bit edgy tonight.”

  The laugh that came back at him seemed too sweeping to have come from any human, but Kane had always had his doubts about Tal on that score anyway.

  A second shape emerged from the blackness, with even less noise than the bird had made. Kane looked up at the one man he called, if not friend, at least not enemy. Although Tal was slightly shorter, Kane knew he had a wiry strength and quickness—and some unique talents Kane hadn’t quite figured out yet—that rendered the difference unimportant. Tal’s hair was almost as dark as his own, but the flash of silver at the temples—at odds with the young face—and its slightly shorter length, just above his shoulders, ended the similarities. He wore a simple tunic and leggings of soft leather much like Kane’s own, and moved like a man utterly at home in his body.

  “And when are you not on edge, my friend?” he asked.

  “When I’m asleep?” Kane suggested wryly.

  The laugh came again. “Not even then, Kane. Not even then.” He sat on the log beside the bird, who looked at him expectantly. “Be off with you. Make your hunt. You’ve been patient enough.”

  The raven squawked something that sounded remarkably like “At last,” and took flight, making no more noise in departure than it had arriving.

  “You keep strange friends,” Kane observed.

  Tal lifted a dark brow. “This from you?”

  “Precisely,” Kane agreed dryly, not missing the implication that he was among those strange friends.

  Tal chuckled, and Kane found himself smiling. Somehow the man always did that to him, lightened a burden carried so long he’d become almost numb to it. He’d been more than wary when he’d first encountered Tal; he was wary of any stranger, and more so one who seemed to materialize out of the mist with no more warning than the bird that seemed to be his constant companion. And in recollection, it was nothing short of astounding that he’d come to trust the man as quickly as he had, but he had to admit the man had a way about him. Even the animals trusted him, merely glancing at him when they would have slipped away from Kane’s approach.

  It was something in his eyes, Kane had once decided. Something in those changeable, intense eyes.

  “You are feeling a bit edgy tonight, aren’t you? Why?”

  Kane shrugged. He had no answer for that. It was just an odd feeling that had overtaken him today, a feeling of . . . anticipation. As if something were about to happen. It was not quite like the feeling he used to get on the eve of a battle, knowing what the morrow would bring, but that was the only thing in his experience he could liken it to.

  Tal glanced around as if he’d heard something. Or as if the woods held the answer. And for him, Kane had often observed, they did.

&
nbsp; “Is it the feeling of waiting?”

  Kane stiffened. Really, sometimes the man’s uncanny guesses were too much to be borne. If Tal hadn’t denied it while steadily meeting his gaze, Kane would have believed him a mind reader, a diviner of the sort careful men looked askance at. As it was, his observations were enough like prophecy—and came true often enough—to be thoroughly unsettling.

  “The forest is rife with it tonight, is it not?” Tal said, as if he hadn’t noticed Kane’s reaction, when Kane knew the man never missed such things. Tal looked back at him once more, holding his gaze levelly. “After all this time, you still don’t trust me? Do you think I cannot feel what you feel? I lived in this forest long before you came here, and I’ll be here long after you’re gone.”

  “I will die here,” Kane said. “Will it be that soon? Or are you that much younger than I, then, that you will be here so long after?”

  “No,” Tal said, with no clarification of which question he was answering. Kane knew better than to ask; Tal wasn’t in the habit of explaining himself, and Kane had too many secrets of his own to pry into another man’s.

  “Where have you been hiding these last weeks?” he asked instead.

  Tal gestured vaguely, a motion that took in far too much area with only one common characteristic, which he then spoke in a tone as vague as the gesture.

  “Down there.”

  Kane’s mouth quirked. “Oh.”

  That got Tal’s attention. “It’s getting . . . quite ugly down off the mountain.”

  Kane went still. “It has always been ugly down there.”

  “But it is worse now. The warlords are slaughtering innocents as well as each other. People who have lived in peace for countless years. Who know nothing of fighting.”

  “What the warlords—all of them—do,” Kane said, enunciating carefully, “means nothing to me.”

  “And why should it?” Tal said easily.

  “Precisely.” It was flat, unequivocal.

  “Nothing happening down there means anything to you.”

  “No.”

  “What happens here on your mountain is the only thing you care about.”

  “Yes,” Kane agreed, but he was looking at Tal suspiciously; he had learned to recognize when he was being led by the too-clever man. “Why?”

  Tal shrugged. “No reason,” was what he said. But Kane distinctly heard You’ll find out. He stared at the unlikely man who had become, even more unlikely, his friend. He supposed he had to admit that. Tal was not merely not an enemy, somewhere along the way he had indeed become a friend.

  But Tal’s barely disguised smile did little to reassure him. In fact, it made him more edgy than he already was.

  So edgy that when he heard the rustling sound behind him, he whirled and reached for a sword he’d quit carrying years ago. And straightened up as the maker of the sound staggered out of the dark and collapsed at his feet. He stared down at the woman crumpled in the dirt, strands of fiery hair escaping from the cloth that tied it back.

  “Damnation,” he muttered. “Who are you?”

  He looked over his shoulder at Tal.

  He was gone.

  But Kane could swear he heard laughter from out of the darkness.

  Chapter 2

  JENNA SNUGGLED deeper into the warmth, seeking to pull the sweet tendrils of sleep back around her. The movement sent pain shooting up from her right ankle to her knee, and she came sharply awake. Her involuntary recoil from the pain in her leg caused another sharp jab of pain in her left shoulder. Her breath caught, and she stifled a moan.

  “You’ll regret it less if you stay still.”

  Her head whipped around and she sat up, her eyes searching the shadows for the source of the deep, rough voice. She did cry out then at the sharp pain that seemed to stab from both her leg and her shoulder.

  “As you will, then,” the voice said.

  Instinctively she pulled the roughly woven, heavy cloth blanket closer around her. Vaguely she realized the ankle she had twisted had been bound, and that some sort of balm had been smoothed over her bruised shoulder, but her attention was fixed elsewhere. She stared at the man who sat beside her, illuminated only by the single tallow light that sat on a short, wide, upended log apparently serving as a table.

  Kane.

  There could be little doubt. He was as the legends described him, tall and broad and strong, a long mane of hair as dark as night, cold eyes of an odd, smoky gray. In only one way did the legends lie; they’d called his countenance menacing, frightful, said that his face was twisted into ugliness by a wicked scar. The scar was there, but it was as neat and tidy a mark as she’d ever seen, given what must have been the viciousness of the wound that had caused it. And she found his face not in the least ugly. His features were strong; he looked stern and forbidding and more than a little intimidating, but hardly ugly. Scar or not.

  “You do exist,” she whispered.

  “Obviously,” he said, his tone biting. “The question is, do you?”

  She blinked. “Me? Of course I do. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “So it would seem. Unless you’re something Tal conjured up out of that wicked imagination of his.”

  Jenna had no idea who or what he was talking about, but hastened to speak. “I assure you, I’m quite real.”

  “Then you won’t mind telling me who you are and why you have intruded upon me.” His tone lowered ominously. “And how you got here.”

  Jenna chose the simplest question to answer first. “I walked.”

  His eyes widened, then narrowed. “Walked? Up this mountain? From where?”

  “My home. At the foot of Snowcap.”

  He went very still, and she saw he knew just how far her mountain, known for its permanent cap of white, was from his own mountain abode.

  “You walked . . . from there?”

  She nodded. “And an unpleasant ten days it was. The storyteller was right. All manner of fierce creatures, fanged serpents . . . I did not encounter the lion he predicted, but enough other things bent on having me for supper to make up for it.”

  She knew she was chattering, and realized she was indeed intimidated. But then, who would not be, sitting two feet from a legend? And he looked nothing less than mythical in the flickering light of the tallow lamp, which cast mobile shadows on the walls of what appeared to be a small cave; when they said Kane never left his mountain, she hadn’t realized he actually lived in it.

  She was very conscious of his eyes on her. There was a grudging respect in the gray depths as he looked at her, his gaze sliding over her body as if noting all the bruises, cuts, and scrapes that adorned it as a result of her arduous journey.

  “Who are you?” he finally asked.

  “My name is Jenna. I’m of the clan Hawk, holders of Hawk Glade.”

  His brows lowered again. “Hawk Glade is a myth.”

  The irony of it caught her off guard, and she laughed. He drew back slightly, as if startled—or stung—by the sound.

  “No more than are you, sir,” she said. “If I can believe you are the mythical warrior Kane, then surely you can believe in something so much simpler.”

  “The Hawk Glade I was told of is a place of peace and magic, of fruitful life and happy people. Something I find very much harder to believe in.”

  Jenna’s expression changed as the sadness flowed back, erasing all traces of her earlier laughter.

  “It was all of those things, once.”

  Emotion tightened her throat and she fought it back; this was not the way to approach this man, she was sure. Kane was reputed to be as hard as granite and as cold as Snowcap’s glaciers; tears would not move him.

  But she had to move him.

  She swiped at her eyes angrily, and the qu
ick motion brought tears of another kind to her eyes, tears of pain as her bruised shoulder protested.

  “Rest.”

  It was an order, given by a man clearly used to the process. Still, Jenna shook her head.

  “I must speak to you. It’s why I came.”

  He let out a harsh breath. “I cannot stop you from speaking. But if you wish me to listen, you must rest first. I have no patience to deal with a rambling discourse on whatever fool’s errand has brought you here.”

  “It is not a fool’s errand. Desperate, I will allow, but—”

  “You have come a long way. You have survived a journey that would have defeated many. For that, I suppose I must let you say your piece. But I warn you now, it is useless. Whatever you wish from me, I cannot give.”

  Jenna fought her trembling; was she to be denied without even a chance? She forced her chin up.

  “Or will not?” she said, her fear putting an edge in her voice even as she realized it was no doubt unwise to provoke the man she’d come to seeking help for her people.

  Kane looked startled at her temerity, then shrugged as if it meant nothing. “As you will.”

  He stood up, and Jenna caught her breath as he towered over her; he was indeed as tall as legend had claimed him. And as broad. And as strong, she guessed, judging from the powerful lines of his body in the soft leather tunic and leggings he wore. The laces at his throat were loose, as if his chest were too broad to be covered easily, and the sleeves of the garment clung to powerful and supple muscles as if they were his own skin.

  He turned his back to her, and Jenna searched her mind for some word, any word, that would make him stay and listen to her. But her mind suddenly seemed to lose the capacity for coherent thought; her observation of his clothing had brought abruptly home to her that she herself was somewhat lacking in that area. She nearly gasped as she realized she was clad only in a shirt of some finely woven white cloth, fine enough to have belonged to the wealthy highborns the storyteller had told her of, those who lived so far away and had such strange ideas about people and ruling.