Fire Hawk

by Justine Davis, Justine Dare

  The old man’s dark brows rose. “Precious?”

  “I heard much of you in the time she was with me.”

  The old man smiled, winked at Jenna, and said to Kane, “Too much, I gather?”

  “I grew weary of it, old man. But more, I grew suspicious. You know of things no man should know.”

  “I know what makes a good story,” the old man replied. “And Kane the Warrior is one of the best. I made the effort to learn all I could of him.”

  “You told her how to find me.”

  “I am . . . familiar with the mountains. I knew where the place the tales describe must be.”

  “Does this matter now?” Jenna interrupted. “Do we not have more important things to speak of than what is past?”

  “That’s my girl, always to the heart of the matter,” the storyteller said with a grin that took years from his countenance and made him look eerily like Tal. Jenna felt Kane’s sudden stillness and knew he had seen it, too.

  “Who are you?” Kane asked.

  The storyteller winced, like a man realizing he’d betrayed something he hadn’t meant to. “I am merely a storyteller. Ask any of the clan, they will tell you.”

  “These people may be content to take you at your word, but I am not,” Kane said.

  “No, you take no one at their word, do you? Who was it that taught you so completely to trust no one but yourself?”

  Kane’s brows lowered, and his jaw tightened. “Suffice that I learned it well and early. And I have rarely been wrong.”

  “Ah, but if you do not trust, you have no way of knowing if you could have.”

  Kane snorted. “You talk in riddles, old man.” As if dismissing the subject, he turned back to Jenna. “What was said, is it true? You have held them where they are, on the edge of your forest?”

  She nodded. “For several days. We have harried them at every turn, as you said. Loosed their horses, tainted their food and drink, stolen everything small enough to be easily carried.”

  “And left behind inexplicable signs, mysterious carved stones, footprints that could come from no less a creature than a bear that would tower over even you,” Evelin added proudly. “Druas’s men are half convinced the glade is full of evil spirits. And every night we make sure they hear noises that convince them even further. They’ve slept little since they set up their camp.”

  “They always were a credulous lot,” Kane said, nodding slowly in approval. “Clever of you to play upon it.”

  “ ’Twas the Hawk’s idea,” Arlen said, gesturing toward Jenna. “Because of her, Druas has even called much of his force back to his stronghold in the west.”

  Kane looked at her then. “The Hawk,” he murmured. Jenna felt herself color. “You thought of this?”

  She shrugged. “They were already wary of the forest, since they knew we had to be here somewhere yet were unable to find us. And then I remembered something . . . someone told me, about people fearing the unknown more than anything else. So I thought to take advantage of that.”

  “Someone?” Kane’s voice was low.

  “Tal,” she admitted. “He spoke of it on the way down the mountain.”

  “So he is here,” Kane breathed.

  “Here?” Jenna gave him a puzzled look. “No. He told me he was going to see to . . .” She broke off, doubted Kane would like it if she phrased it as his friend had. “He said he was going back to the mountain. I’ve not seen him since. Only Maud.”

  Kane blinked. “Maud?”

  “He sent her after me, I think. And I was more than glad of it. She’s a very clever bird.” She glanced at the others, who were looking at her rather curiously. She knew she could say no more of Tal’s uncannily intelligent companion in front of them, so she hastened to go on. “She stayed with me to the edge of the forest, but she would come no further. She must have gone back to find Tal.”

  “But he is—”

  Kane broke off, and she had the oddest feeling that he was thinking just as she had been a moment ago, that whatever he’d been about to say should not be said in company.

  “I will need to see the lay of the land,” he said, changing the subject abruptly. “And to see what you have done so far.”

  Jenna took a breath. “Why?” His brow furrowed. It took a great deal of effort to go on, but she got out the words. “Perhaps more correctly I must ask why are you here?”

  “And,” Evelin added, apparently getting over her awe, “how you found Hawk Glade.”

  “You told me how,” Kane said, looking at Jenna.

  “I?” she asked, startled.

  “Do you not recall? The night you told me how he”—he jerked a thumb at the storyteller—“found you?”

  Jenna’s breath caught, and she prayed that the room was dark enough that the others could not see the color that rushed to her cheeks. She indeed remembered that night, when Kane had used his mouth on her for the first time, when he had taught her there were kisses more intimate than anything she had ever imagined.

  “You told me he is a man capable of seeing what others cannot, patterns where others see only chaos. That he knew Hawk Glade was supposed to be here. When he arrived and it was not, he merely discounted the evidence of his eyes and kept coming.”

  “I never meant . . . ’twas only to try and explain how this place keeps us safe,” Jenna said in embarrassed consternation.

  “Never explain what advantage you may have to anyone not on your side,” Kane said flatly. “If they do not turn it against you themselves, they will most likely sell it to someone who will.”

  She drew herself up then; she was the Hawk, and it was past time she started acting like it.

  “And which will you do, Kane?”

  For an instant he looked startled. “What?”

  “I ask again. Why are you here?”

  Jenna got the distinct feeling he was uncomfortable, although she thought it so unlikely she was reluctant to trust her senses.

  Kane glanced around at the others in the room. “I would speak with your Hawk alone.”

  “No,” Arlen said protectively.

  “You shall not,” Evelin said simultaneously, in much the same tone.

  “I mean her no harm,” Kane said, clearly restraining his anger with an effort; Jenna doubted he was often gainsaid in such a manner.

  “It is all right,” she told them.

  “No!” they chimed together.

  “Be easy,” the storyteller, slipping off the table to walk over to the two. “He will not hurt her.”

  “You cannot be sure of that,” Evelin protested.

  “Had he wanted to harm her,” the storyteller said mildly, “he had ample chance. Do you forget she spent the moon’s cycle in his company? Come.”

  Reluctantly casting concerned glances back at Jenna, they let the old man usher them out. At the door, the storyteller glanced back over his shoulder at them, giving them both one of those intense, disconcerting looks of his, and then he walked out without another word.

  Jenna watched as Kane stared after the old man.

  “He looks like Tal, does he not? Or as Tal will look, many years from now.”

  Kane’s gaze snapped back to her face. “So you see it as well?”

  “I saw it in Tal from the beginning. So much that I asked him if his father still lived.”

  Kane blinked. “Does he?”

  Jenna blinked in turn. “He is your friend. Do you not know?”

  “I . . . no.” He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I don’t . . . I never asked. I’ve never . . . had such a friend.”

  As easily as that she was back to where she’d been on the mountain, aching for the man so many saw only as myth, the man who had never had a chance to become anything but what he h
ad become, a man who walked alone, whose very name made others walk the other way.

  “He said his father was long dead,” she said quickly, fighting the unwanted emotion he seemed always to spark in her. “And the storyteller has no kin in the mountains. ’Tis only a fluke, it would seem.”

  “An uncanny one,” Kane muttered.

  “Yes. But no more uncanny to me than you walking out of the night. Why?” she asked for a third time.

  “I thought that obvious.”

  “Is it? You told me you would never again take up arms. That you had buried your sword deep, never again to see light.”

  “I never meant to.”

  “And now I know you were once at the right hand of the warlord who wishes us all dead and out of his way.”

  “I do not deny that.”

  “But I am to believe you came here to . . . help us?”

  He made as if to speak, then stopped. When he went on, she was somehow certain it was not what he’d been about to say. “You will believe what you wish.”

  “You told me you would die if you left your mountain.”

  His mouth twisted wryly. “That may yet be true.”

  She stared at him. “You still believe you might die, yet you came? Why?”

  He looked at her for a long, silent moment, so long that she felt her heart take a quivering little leap. Not for her? Surely not for her? She didn’t dare to hope for such a thing.

  “I grew bored,” he said at last, the cool dismissal in his voice at odds with the intensity of his eyes. “Perhaps teaching you reawakened my interest in contests of this kind.”

  “No!”

  Her cry startled her even as it broke from her. Kane looked at her, brows lifted as if in faint surprise at her reaction. She mistrusted the reality of the emotion; somehow it seemed Kane had utterly withdrawn, except for that moment when he had learned the name of the warlord they fought.

  “I . . . did not wish that,” she stammered.

  “You came to me asking for just that, did you not?”

  “Yes, but . . . I do not wish it now.”

  “Why?”

  “I . . . understand now, why you abandoned that life. What it took from you. What it cost you. I do not wish to see you return to it. Bury your sword again, Kane. Go back to your mountain, where you are safe.”

  For an instant, no longer, she thought she saw a surprise in his face that was genuine, not a mockery of the emotion. Then the mask was back in place, that cool, uncaring expression that belied what she thought she had seen.

  “Safe from what?” he asked, as if it were only an idle inquiry, not a matter of his own death. “Tal’s prophecy, or Druas?”

  “Both,” she said. “Have you not thought that if Tal’s prophecy is right, Druas may be the means?”

  “I had not,” he admitted. “But I was unaware it was Druas you faced until now.”

  “Then you must see,” she said urgently. “If your intent was truly to help us, you must see that if Druas finds out that you have turned against him—”

  “I turned against him long ago.”

  “You merely left him,” Jenna pointed out.

  “ ’Tis the same to Druas. You are either his man, or you are against him.”

  Jenna did not question his words; she’d seen enough of Druas’s brutality to believe them. “Then he will be truly angry should he discover you are helping us.”

  “He will be,” Kane said with a negligent shrug of one shoulder, “incensed.”

  “Then you cannot risk it. You must go. We are holding them. We will continue, until they give up and choose another path to the north.”

  “They will not.”

  “But you said—”

  “That was before I knew you dealt with Druas.” Kane closed the slight distance between them with one long stride. “He will never give up. Nor will he turn away. He has set his course, and he will follow it. He will have his path to the north, if he has to cut down every tree of your forest. And he will not care if he cuts all of you down as well. In fact, he would take great satisfaction in it.”

  Jenna stared at him, unable to doubt the certainty of his words. “He is . . . even more evil than we had thought.”

  “He is.”

  “Yet you fought for him.”

  “I did. For years. I trained for it since I was twelve, fought for him since I was sixteen.”

  Her breath caught; so young?

  “Do not foster any benevolent thoughts of me, Jenna,” he said, speaking her name for the first time; he said it so coldly she could have wished he had not. “I was the perfect right hand for Druas’s evil. I cared only for the goal, nothing for the method. Nor did I care for those who were left trampled in our wake. Druas gave me orders, I carried them out. I never questioned him. It was my place to see his wishes enacted. I did so.”

  His voice had taken on the quality of a lash, snapping, cracking as though impacting on flesh. And although his expression betrayed nothing but cold composure, Jenna knew instinctively that the lash was directed at himself. And she knew in that moment that no one could ever punish Kane the Warrior for what he’d done any more harshly than the man himself.

  “Kane,” she said, then stopped, afraid to go on when she had heard the tremor in her voice, echoing with the pain she was feeling for him.

  “Stop,” he hissed. “Do not squander your soft feelings on me. I do not deserve them.”

  She couldn’t hold it back; the words tumbled out. “But you need them. More than any man I’ve ever known.”

  Kane recoiled as if she’d slapped him. “I have no need of anything from you, or anyone.”

  That was as clear an answer as she would ever get, Jenna thought. Whatever they had had, it had ended, completely and permanently, when their bargain had ended.

  Jenna studied him for a moment, gathering her nerve; this meeting was truly testing her mettle. “If you need nothing from anyone, then why are you here?” she finally asked again. “Why did you not simply stay in your cave, apart from the world?”

  His aloofness was quickly back in place. “I told you. I grew bored.”

  “I do not wish you to . . . amuse yourself here. Go back to your mountain, Kane the Warrior.”

  He lifted a brow at her tone. His glance flicked to the carved mantel above the fireplace, where the golden Hawk gleamed dully in the firelight; she should have realized he would have noticed it.

  “Is this the Hawk, giving an order?” he asked.

  “If you wish. ’Tis bad enough I have the blood of my people on my hands and my heart. I do not care to add the blood of an outsider, with no need to be here.”

  He shook his head. “It is my choice, Jenna.”

  “To risk your life? For people you say yourself you neither need nor want anything from? For a lost cause? You called it a fool’s errand, did you not? ’Tis not like you to play the fool.”

  Kane looked at her, and again she made herself hold his gaze.

  “You wear it well,” he said after a moment, his voice quiet. “Command suits you.”

  “I have no wish to command. I wish only to save my people.”

  “Then you must retract your order, Hawk. With me, you might just have some small chance of surviving. Without me, Druas will crush you to the last, and not leave any trace that you were ever here in the process.”

  Jenna knew she could not tell him that the thought of him taking up arms, of him becoming again that which he had fought so hard to leave behind, hurt her nearly as much as the thought of her people being slaughtered by their vicious enemy. She could not tell him that she wanted him to stay simply because she was hungry for the sight of him, and hungrier still for the feel of him. She could not tell him that she wished more than anything that she c
ould abandon the task before her, could shirk the responsibilities of the Hawk and run with him back to his mountain.

  She could tell him none of that. He would not welcome it, nor could she humiliate herself so and still expect to function as she must. And the truth of his words were undeniable; with him, a man trained by, and well versed in the tactics of their enemy they might have a chance. And it might well be their only chance. What right had she to refuse, simply because Kane’s presence would wreak havoc with what tiny bit she had left of peace of mind?

  She glanced at the golden hawk, the generations-old symbol of her office. She did not have the right. She should have welcomed him without question, without thought of the cost to him. Yet she had thought of it, second only to her dread for the clan. And if she were honest, in the first moments, she had thought of it foremost.

  With an apology directed as much at the golden statue as anything, she made herself speak.

  “I will consider revoking it,” she said, “if you will honestly tell me why you are here.”

  He was silent for a moment. She wondered if he was debating what to say, or simply whether to answer at all. At last he spoke.

  “I have many reasons. They are my own. But now that I am here, now that I know who you face, there is yet another reason I will give you. I have . . . reason to wish greatly for the defeat of Druas. And reason to want to be the one to bring him down.”

  It was his other reasons Jenna wished to know, but she knew he would not tell her. And it mattered not, not in the end.

  She had no right to think about her own concerns. She had no right to place her own or anyone else’s welfare above that of her people. She had no right to turn down his offer. Kane was their best, perhaps their only hope of survival. She had to accept what help he could give.

  Even if it cost him his life. And what was left of her heart.

  Chapter 17

  IT FELT VERY ODD to be among people again, Kane thought. Especially people like these, generally quiet, peaceful, and more than a little bewildered by what was happening to them. He’d never dealt with this kind before; he’d grown up among fighters, not villagers, and he’d been taught that the latter were most often stupid fools who generally deserved whatever fate befell them.