Blood's Pride

by Evie Manieri

  Eofar and Harotha walked up and they all gathered next to the fallen spy; Eofar had a coil of spare reins from Aeda’s saddle.

  “Everything go as planned?” Daryan asked Rho.

  “Yes.”

  “What about the White Wolf?” asked Harotha. Isa noticed how her voice sounded harder when she spoke to Rho. “Is she trapped in the temple?”

  “For now.”

  Isa asked, “And Lahlil? Did anyone see her?”

  “Who’s Lahlil?”

  “The Mongrel,” said Daryan.

  “Oh. She and King Jachad went to ask the Nomas for help. They said they would meet us at the palace.” Rho kicked the spy’s leg. “What are we going to do with him?”

  “His name is Elthion,” said Harotha. “He’s one of my brother’s men. He must have followed Daryan and me from the beach.”

  Isa looked at Harotha closely for the first time. She hadn’t changed much despite the pregnancy: full cheeks; smooth skin; brown eyes flecked with gold and just a bit lighter than Daryan’s; lips a deep coral pink. She was very beautiful, but Isa had known that already.

  “We’ll have to leave him in the cave,” said Daryan.

  They couldn’t be sure they’d ever be able to return and release him. They might be sentencing him to death.

  “We don’t have a choice,” agreed Eofar.

  “All right, let’s get him inside. At least he’ll have shelter, and we’ll leave him whatever water we can spare.”

  Eofar moved forward with the reins, but Harotha put her hand on his arm. “I think Daryan and I should leave for the palace now, alone,” she said. “If my brother is sending people to spy on us, it means he’s already suspicious. It’s too dangerous for us all to be seen together.”

  “If you think that’s best,” said Eofar. Harotha couldn’t feel how deeply it pained him to be parted from her again, but Isa could.

  Daryan’s eyes swept over all of them. “No, no, no,” he said suddenly, his mobile mouth moving in distress. “No, this is all wrong—I shouldn’t have— You, Harotha and Isa should leave, right now. None of you should be here.” He looked at Harotha. “Go somewhere and have your baby—be happy, please. Forget about the Shadar, forget about this alliance. It was all a mistake.” He blinked away the tears welling up in his eyes and growled at Eofar, “Take them away! Don’t you understand what’s going to happen?”

  “Daryan, listen to me,” said Harotha, even as Isa was still struggling to make sense of what he was saying, “we’ve all made our own choices; you’re not forcing us to do anything. Tonight there will be a battle, and some of us will get hurt. Some of us will die. You’re going to have to accept responsibility for that and still be able to live with yourself. That’s what it means to be a leader.”

  “I’m not a leader. You’re—”

  “That’s what it means to be a leader,” she repeated. “That’s what you are. You were right about Rho, and you were right about this alliance. This is the only way to stop the White Wolf.”

  He looked back at her for a long time without saying a word. At last he said to Eofar, “You told me you wanted to take Isa and Harotha away.”

  “I know. I was wrong,” Eofar replied. “I have to make sure Frea doesn’t get the chance to do the things Harotha saw in her vision. Isa and I are the only family she has; that makes her our responsibility.”

  Daryan turned around to face Isa. “You won’t go either,” he asked her, “not even if I beg you?”

  “Not without you.”

  They both understood that their brief moment together, that tiny glimpse at happiness, was all they were going to get for now. It wasn’t enough that they belonged to each other: he was a king, whether she liked it or not—and she was afraid she was already losing him.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Rho leaned his shoulder against the empty doorframe in the ruined, roofless hall of the abandoned palace—a doorway leading from nothing, to nowhere—and wondered when all of this would be over. Here they all were, the partners in this weird alliance: the Shadari, more than a hundred of them, ranged along one side, baking in the sun; the Norlanders huddling dispiritedly on the other side, hiding in the shadows of the broken walls, and the Mongrel in the middle, her every move scrutinized by the Nomas king. Rho’s only certainty was that they all hated and feared Frea just a little more than they hated and feared each other.

  He straightened up uncomfortably; every time he moved the fabric of his shirt tugged at his wound. He pressed his forearm hard against his side and tried to dull the throbbing, while his eyes kept returning to the curved sword stuck through Faroth’s white sash. Reunite Dramash with his people: that had been his goal. Get the boy away from Frea and back where he belonged; that would make everything all right again.

  When did I become such an utter fool? he wondered.

  One look at Dramash asleep on the ground with his head in Harotha’s lap, flanked by Faroth on one side and Daryan on the other, was enough to tell anyone with half a brain that reuniting Dramash with the Shadari had solved nothing. In fact, everything was certainly not all right, and he was beginning to doubt that it ever would be.

  “He’s the only real weapon we have,” Faroth was saying to Harotha, “and you want him to hide? You’d make him watch his city burn around him, knowing that he might have stopped it?”

  “Do you want him to kill people?” She spoke softly so as not to awaken Dramash, but Rho couldn’t miss the ferocious look she aimed at her brother. The likeness between them was startling. “How is that any different from what the White Wolf wants to do with him?”

  “Of course it’s different—he’s a Shadari. He should do whatever is necessary to defend his home, like all Shadari.”

  “He’s a little boy. You can’t ask him to—”

  Falkar interjected, speaking only to the Norlanders,

  Eofar answered, and Rho felt Falkar’s frustration. Just a few days ago I might have made that same suggestion myself, he thought. No—a few days ago I would still have been in the temple, hanging on to Frea’s sleeve.

  Falkar asked.

  Eofar said, He walked over to the Mongrel. As he moved out of the shade the sun caught the gaudy triffons adorning the hilt of Strife’s Bane and the Norlanders winced against the glare.

  Rho looked at his countrymen: no more than fifty of them, while Frea had nearly twice that number at her disposal. Many of those, like Ingeld and Ongen, were fanatically loyal to her, while most of the men sweating in this ruin were supporting Eofar as the lesser of two evils.

  Isa said, looking at Dramash. She was sitting on a step near Rho’s feet—a step that led up to nothing and down from nowhere—with her cape fastened tightly at her throat. She’d kept her distance from the other Norlanders as he had insisted, and since she had always been aloof, no one found anything unusual or suspicious in her behavior. Isa herself had shown no interest in anything except the Shadari; even now she was staring across at them from beneath her cowl with a fixedness that Rho found unsettling.

  Just as Eofar started to speak, Dramash stirred on the rug beside Harotha, and every other sound and movement in the ruined hall ceased. The boy murmured something unintelligible and kicked at the dirt. Harotha swiftly laid her hand on the boy’s back and began rubbing it in soft circles. He made a tiny grunting sound and for a moment it looked like he was settling back into sleep—but then he stretched his arms out over his head and opened his eyes.

  “Is she back yet?”

  “Who, Dramash?” Harotha asked, smiling down at him, but Rho noticed that she’d stopped patting his back so that he wouldn’t feel the obvious trembling of her hand.

  “Mama,” he said, yawning. “Is she back from the mountains? Did she find the lost goa
t?”

  Daryan leaned forward and gripped Harotha’s shoulder. She bit her lip.

  “Not yet,” Faroth answered smoothly before Harotha could say anything. “She’s still looking. She’ll be back soon.”

  Rho closed his eyes. The ground beneath him felt unsteady and he was glad for the support of the doorframe.

  He could feel Daem watching him.

 

  “I want her to come home,” said Dramash, and then yawned again before snuggling up against his aunt and closing his eyes.

  No one else moved.

  After a long moment, Harotha looked down at the boy, then nodded.

  Rho, like everyone else, exhaled the breath he’d not realized he’d been holding.

  Eofar said to the Mongrel, first in Norlander, then in Shadari,

  replied the Mongrel.

  Eofar countered, but clearly even he didn’t believe it.

  Unconcerned, she turned back to the Shadari. “Any of Frea’s men who get through Eofar’s line will fly in low; their goal will be to set the city on fire in as many places as possible, to create as much chaos as they can. Your task is to stop them. Those who aren’t armed should be ready to fight the fires. The Nomas have agreed to help—they’ll be here by sundown.”

  “Here to pick our bones, I’ll bet,” one of the Shadari muttered.

  “Why would she bother setting fire to the city?” Daryan asked. “You said she was going to attack Norland, so why would she waste her time here?”

  “She needs Dramash and she doesn’t have enough men to search the whole city,” the mercenary explained. “She’ll try to force him out into the open—make you use him against her.”

  The Shadari daimon looked down at Dramash. “So Harotha’s right: we do need to hide him. But he can’t stay by himself—someone will have to watch him. Someone he trusts. I think it should be her.”

  Harotha looked up at Daryan, and then they both looked at the Mongrel.

  “Agreed,” she said.

  “I’ll leave some of my men with them,” offered Faroth, “to protect them.”

  “No.” The Mongrel’s tone brooked no further discussion. “No one goes near them. No one—Shadari or Norlander—is to know where they are.”

  Faroth glared at her. “No one but you, you mean?”

  This was Rho’s opportunity. He straightened up again and stepped forward. he offered, trying to appear disinterested.

  He was again struck by the strange impression that somehow the Mongrel knew more about him than he did about her. she said.

  He was about to press his point further when Daem jumped up from the broken column on which he’d been sitting and asked,

  he said,

  He addressed the Mongrel again. Rho’s dismay at his interruption curdled into anger: Daem was deliberately shifting the conversation away from Dramash.

  The Mongrel waited for Eofar to translate Daem’s suggestion to the Shadari—minus the sarcasm—then replied, “Frea won’t retreat and she won’t leave reinforcements. Tonight the imperial ship will drop anchor in the harbor. If they notice anything wrong, if no one comes from the temple to escort the emperor’s ministers ashore, they’ll sail on the next tide for the nearest port. Frea has to overtake that ship before it’s out of range of the triffons. She has only one chance to strike and she knows it.”

  “But Daem has a point,” said Eofar. “If the ship doesn’t arrive for some reason, or if she doesn’t find Dramash in time, she’ll have to return to the temple. There’s nowhere else for her to go. And we still have people trapped there—my father’s clerks and physics, for a start.”

  “And some of the slaves,” put in Daryan. “They must have been hiding when the rest of us escaped.”

  Rho felt something new in the Mongrel’s hesitation, an uncertainty that went deeper than just the weighing of the facts; it worried him. Finally she told Daem, “If you want to go to the temple, I won’t stop you.”

  He racked his mind for some subtle way of bringing up the subject of Dramash’s escort again, but to no avail. He could have strangled Daem.

  Then Isa called over, She gestured toward Faroth, who was threading his way through the crowd toward the doorway in the eastern wall. One of his white-sashed followers was waiting there with the dirtiest, most bedraggled person Rho had ever laid eyes on. The man’s garments hung in tatters to the point of indecency, and every inch of him was smeared with black dust. His cheeks were hollow, but the sinews in his arms were as taut as wire. There was no softness about him anywhere. Labor had whittled his body down to a skeleton of iron.

  he said, keeping his eyes on the two men. The miner was speaking and Faroth was listening intently.

  Isa stood up from the step and moved to stand beside him. He felt the light touch of her hand on his elbow.

  He didn’t answer her. He was watching the miner place something into Faroth’s hand, something small enough to disappear when Faroth squeezed his fingers shut around it.

  Isa asked.

  he answered, his eyes still glued to Faroth.

 

  The interview appeared to be over. Faroth made his way back through the roofless hall and walked up to the Mongrel. “All right, we’ve had enough talk,” he said. “We know what we have to do. The sun will be down in a few hours, and we need to get ready.”

  The Mongrel looked around at everyone. “If you do as you’ve been told, you will defeat Frea, that I promise you.”

  The crowd began to break up and Eofar walked up to them. he told Isa.

  Isa said nothing.

  Rho knew better than anyone how hard she had worked learning to fight, and better than Isa herself the extraordinary extent of her natural talents. It wasn’t fair.

  she broke in, cutting short his attempt at compassion. She walked over to where Daryan was waiting and Eofar hurried after her.

  Daem sauntered over as soon as the others had gone.

  Rho asked him.

  said Daem,

 

  Daem’s anger flickered out at him. He was about to say more, but then he abruptly turned to walk away.

  Rho, taken aback, grabbed his cloak.

  Turning around, he said,

  �t know—I haven’t looked,> he answered truthfully,

  He pointed at the Shadari, at Dramash, asleep in his aunt’s lap.

  Everything around Rho slowed suddenly and he drew in a long breath of the warm, sand-scented air. A glimmer of hope danced around Daem’s words: the faintest possibility of escape.

 

  Rho pressed his forearm against his side as another twinge of pain shot through him.

 

 

  He felt Daem relax.

 

 

  Rho clapped Daem’s shoulder gratefully and followed him into the shadows of the broken palace wall. But as they joined the others he couldn’t help looking back over his shoulder at the Shadari, and he couldn’t help noticing that Faroth still held the miner’s gift in his clenched fist: a coin, maybe. The color of rust.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Jachad followed Meiran out of the ruined hall into a labyrinth of crumbling foundations scarred by wind-worn Norlander graffiti. The ruins were silent except for the occasional scratching of a lizard scuttling over the stonework. Wherever a fragment of wall cast a large enough shadow, a triffon lay in morose repose and watched them pass with dull eyes.

  Once they had left the others well behind, Meiran stopped to take a drink from the wineskin she’d acquired during their brief visit with the Nomas, and he seized the moment. “When I was convincing my people to fight against Frea, I had the idea that you actually wanted to win this battle.” He tugged the scarf from around his head and wound the colorful silk—a gift from his mother—around his neck. “And then I heard your battle plan, if you can call it that. I expected you to come up with something brilliant, something infallible. You can’t possibly expect to defeat Frea like that—Eofar and a few dozen triffons have no chance against her.”