Mindbond (23 page)

Was the change in her? I had thought it was the joy of our homecoming gathering her in. But she knew what Kor meant, and there was not much guile in her that night. She sobered and looked down at the sand, denying nothing, saying nothing.

“Will not the morrow be time enough for tales?” she asked at last. “You are both mending, you should rest.”

“Sakeema knows what will happen on the morrow,” said Kor starkly.

So she told us.

It had seemed a long winter to her while Kor and I were in the sea. She had not gone off on her lifelong wandering quest, as we had assumed she would. As she had always made us think she did when she was not with us. In fact, she had never been far from us since the first day she had met us, never more than three days hard riding away, most often much closer. Near us, yet afraid to be with us, she admitted with her eyes downcast and her hands stroking the sand. Like a moth following a flame. But she had not been able to follow us into the sea.

That being so, she had set herself to watching the sea and our swords and our steeds. Sora and Talu were wandering with Calimir somewhere in the spruce forests, not too far away. Tass had built herself a shelter of poles and skins, setting it up against a cliff and a shallow cave, a short walk from where we were, though it had been too distant for her to drag us there when we were limp weight just washed ashore. (We could go there now if we liked. Not now, we told her, Thank you, but no.) She had spent the winter living there, hunting and fishing for her food. Folk from Seal Hold had discovered she was there, and someone came from time to time, bringing her oats and talk. Nor had it taken them long to comprehend that she was a maiden—perhaps she had not hidden it as fervidly as before. And they had accepted it in her. But most of the time she had been alone. She had never spent so much time in one place and alone. It had seemed a long, gray winter.

Then she had been afraid.

“The jewel lights went out.” She raised her dark eyes and looked levelly between us, toward the sea, and her eyes were as dark as the Mountains of Doom, as deep as the sea. “In the hilts of your swords, the stones. One day their light was gone, they lay as dull as pebbles, and I knew you were—dead.”

Kor looked down with a small grimace, as of discomfort. I shivered, suddenly feeling the nighttime chill on my bare spine.

“I—I panicked, I grew frantic. I snatched at the swords as if I could warm the life back into the jewels with my hands, or shake them, something—I am not sure what. But they did not let me touch them. They warned me away.” Smiling, Tassida raised both her palms toward us in a gesture that made her seem magical, a wise woman, a seeress. And across the four fingers of each hand ran a thin, white scar, very much like the ones Kor and I each bore.

We were stupid with weariness and our own unspoken quarrel, worn down by Mahela's torments, or we would have known, then. Everything.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the pattern was too vast for us to comprehend so quickly, a vastness like that of sky or sea. Perhaps poison of Mahela was darkening our sight. Perhaps neither of us had courage to see. Not Kor, who I had thought was a god. Not I, who now felt pain as if I had been betrayed, thinking he was not.

For whatever reason, we said nothing, and Tass went on.

“There was nothing I could do but wait. And then the devourers came, all of them at once, in the daytime. When did they grow bold enough to fly in the daytime? Bowels of my mother, but I was afraid.” She hesitated, her head once again bowed, her hands down, fingers tracing in the sand. “You have heard—there is a mode of attack folk do not care to speak of. Shameful in men. All the worse in devourers.”

I had heard whispers, nothing more, of something vicious the Fanged Horse Folk did to captured women. Whispers … I had not known until I met Mahela that the act of love could be turned into a weapon and an abomination. And suddenly understanding, I sat without speaking, chilled. But Kor, who must have felt it worse than I, nodded briefly and spoke.

“A king must know of such evils. They had done it to you before?”

“Nearly. Not completely, or I would be—I would be like Dannoc's brother. It was but the one, then, and I withstood it, and that was terror enough. But the twelve, less only the one in Ytan …”

Alone and exposed on the expanse of beach—too late to hide, for they had long since seen her. No time to take refuge in the cave or her hut, for they were swift, rippling in on a western wind. She had held her sword at the ready as she stood to meet them—not with any hope of defeating them, for she knew, as we did, that knives, even the shining black blades of sharpest obsidian, had no effect on devourers. But she gripped her sword because the feel of the rounded hilt in her clenched hand, the weapon's weight, gave her some small courage. Also, she had resolved, as we had, months past, to use it on herself rather than let them possess her. She raised the blade as the fell servants skimmed around her to gang her, close enough that she smelled their deathly stench—

And the sword of its own accord had darted and pierced a glaring eye. Pale greenish ooze had spurted out, and the devourer had fallen back, thrashing in pain. She had whirled, or the blade had whirled her, to hold off the attack from behind, slicing deeply into a fish-gray body, sending splatters of blood the color of cormorant feathers, green-black, onto the sand. She had severed a thick, eel-like tail.… More quickly than she could tell it, she said, three devourers lay dead and the rest were fleeing. And only after it was over had she taken time to think, this sword is no ordinary knife, it is made of different stuff. And she had caressed it, speaking to it softly by name.

“Do you wish to tell us the name?” Kor asked quietly. And I sensed, as he did, that this was no small matter of trust, for Tass.

“Marantha,” she replied promptly.

“The amaranth,” I murmured. The healing flower of Sakeema's time, gone from the land with his passing, a spire-flower of a color I had never quite seen in any other, the same clear red-purple color as the jewel in Tassida's sword. Of course it was the name of her weapon. But Tass was looking at me curiously.

“Dan, how did you know? I thought all folk had forgotten that flower but me.”

“I have seen it in vision.”

“Marantha,” Tass said again, a different, vibrant tone to her voice, and the sword floated lightly out of the scabbard she wore by her side. Marantha laid herself in the sand, pointing toward us, Kor and me, but between us. As if in a trance we drew our weapons and laid them over Tassida's, blades crossing, so that blades and hilts formed a sort of star of six darts. And the stones blazed out, darting forth their own six-bladed lights, deep yellow, amaranthine, and sunset-red, bright as blood, brighter than the fire.

Eerie, uncanny, unaccountable … uneasily my mind built barriers. Perhaps it was not just the three of us, I thought eagerly. Perhaps there were swords for others at the bottom of the pool of vision. Many swords. One for my brother Tyee, one for Leotie, his pledgemate, who had once been my sweetheart. Twelve for his twelve, and as many for Kor's as well. Would it not be overweening to think that such weapons were only for the three of us, Korridun and Tassida and I?

“The day I saw that the glow had come back to your swords,” Tass said softly, “I was so happy I wept.”

Startled, Kor looked up at her. But her gaze was fixed on the star the swords made.

“So you see,” she said softly, “I had time, those long days while you were gone, to think that I had lost you both and to know that I had been a fool to be afraid. We belong together, we three.”

Swordlight flared briefly at her words, then subsided to a warm glow.

“Is it fated so?” Kor asked, and if there was fear in him I could not hear it in his voice.

“I do not know the reason. But that we three are to be—comrades—that much I am sure of, now.”

“And defeating the devourers did not hurt your courage,” said Kor dryly. She caught his meaning at once and looked up at him with a merry smile. Something grew hard inside me, and hurt.

“Indeed it did not. Thought I will never be able to use my sword against either of you two, and I know that.”

She had told us once that the weapons with names could not be used against anyone the swordmaster loved.…

“I will not leave you again,” Tass said.

Both of us, she meant. I was to—share her with him?

Swordlight had faded. I reached for Alar, drew her out of the star, and sheathed her. After a moment the others put their weapons away as well.

“Tired, Dan?” Kor's voice was gentle. I hated him. Without replying I lay and swaddled myself in my furs. One of them was a seal pelt. My pelt. I could be a seal again whenever I wanted, and swim away.

“Sleep with your swords,” Tassida told us. “Mahela wants you badly.”

I slept restlessly, ill at ease, feeling the hard edge of my own blade by my side, sensing fell shapes moving in shadow at the edge of my own dreams, feeling fear, and not of Mahela's minions. No devourers came that night. There was no need for Mahela to send them. She had only to watch and wait, for yet darker forces were moving in me.

Chapter Sixteen

“We should go to Seal Hold,” Kor said in the morning.

Tassida shook her head. “Wait one more day. You are still very weak.”

Though mending, both of us, far faster than we should have expected after starvation and Mahela's brutal tempest, so it seemed to me.

“Your people will manage without you another dayspan. The salmon run less, as always, and the Otter beg and the Fanged Horse Folk threaten, and not enough oats are left. Once you go back there, they will want to make a savior of you, there will be no peace.”

It was a rarely fine morning. Blue sky, blue doveflower already blooming upon the rocks. Eastward I could see the snowpeaks! Fresh breeze. Greed of Mahela be praised, the high tide had taken the carrion devourer, which had been starting to stink. All was fair now, and clean, as if just washed. I scanned sky, sea, sand. Near the rocks a white shape lay on the beach, left there by the retreating surf.…

I stood up, staring, and if Kor or Tass spoke to me I did not hear them.

The white seal. It was she, my gentle lover. I went over, knelt beside her sleek body—she looked as fair as she had in life. I reached out, meaning nothing but to stroke the glossy fur. But as my hand touched her she changed. There on a white pelt lay the sea maiden, with her long, shimmering hair flowing down like tears. Pale, bruised, dead. I could have stood it better had I not been so startled, I think. But as it was, I made a choking sound and reached out to gather her up, as if by holding her I could somehow help.

Tass and Kor had come to stand beside me, and I looked up, bursting out, “I—I killed her, great oaf that I am! When she hit against the rock, I came blundering on top of her.”

“Mahela's doing, not yours,” Kor said, sensibly—but I was in no fit mood to be sensible. “It might as easily have been you who were killed. The white maiden saved you.”

“You—you loved her!” Wonder in Tassida's tone, and she was staring. “In a—a certain way …”

“If I cannot love a woman, I do not lie with her,” I said.

“Dan, I did what I had to!” Kor protested, his voice sharp with—grief? I stared at him in surprise.

“I have said nothing against you!”

“Not yet.”

So he knew, damn him, he sensed—what could have been decently hidden from any proper friend.… Well, if the cap fit his sore head, let him wear it, then! I gave him a black look but no answer, and turned back to the sea maiden.

“We must guard her,” I said, thinking hazily of the legend of Sedna, “so that carrion birds do not pick out her eyes. We must cover her with a cairn.”

She who had floated in the salt eddies to be laid in a bed of bruising rock—it hardly seemed fitting, yet such a wrong-headed demon was in me that I could think of nothing else. I lifted her, carried her up beyond the tide line to where the dry sand lay in billows. Tassida came after me with the white pelt.

“Take it,” I told her. “We will all three be seals, then, and go swim in the greendeep when Mahela has laid bare the land.”

She hesitated, then took the seal pelt back to our campsite, brought other furs instead, a deerskin, a fine cape of otter. We laid the white maiden on the deerskin in soft sand and covered her with the otter cape, fur side next to her, head and all, so as to keep the rocks from her skin.

Then we built the cairn, and what should have been half a morning's labor took us all day, Kor and I, we were yet so feeble. Tass helped us when she could, but she had snares to tend, and foraging to do, and cooking, if we were to eat. Which was of importance, that we should eat and mend. So Kor and I carried stones, small ones, singly, and laid them over the otter cape. Between times we rested, not much speaking to each other. I found ways to busy myself—my body ached and stumbled in protest, but better that than sitting near him, not wanting to meet his eyes. I gathered driftwood and dragged it to the fire—the tide had been high, for the moon was at the full. I hunted in the rock pools for mussels and such, food I had never sought with such fervor. Silent and still, Kor watched me.

If Tassida had not been there, if it had been just the two of us, bond brothers, the silence would have been unbearable after all that we had shared, and perhaps we would have had our trouble out and mended it somehow. But Tass was with us, we talked with her, and she sensed nothing wrong between us—she thought we were tired, which we were. There had not been much need of speech between Kor and me since she had known us. Though time had been when we would have walked under the full moon, Kor and I, and talked for hours while he kept the vigil his kingship demanded of him.… I would not think of those times. I had hardened myself to the unspoken quarrel, for it cleared my way to Tassida. Though I would not admit as much, not even to myself.