Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (29 page)

But then he heard her turn away, and the splash of her boots retreated through the puddles that scattered the pit’s floor in the rain. For an elastic time he lay fighting the unconsciousness that he knew would only bring him the hideous terror of visions. Then he heard the rattle of her horse’s retreating hooves, dying away into the thundering clatter of the rain. He slipped again into the red vortex of delirium.

There was utter loneliness there and terrors that reduced the pain ripping through his distant body to an insignificant ache that would merely result in his eventual death. Worse things pursued and caught him—loss, regret, self-hate, and all the spilling ugliness that festered in the bottommost pits of the mind.

And then, after black wanderings, he was aware of moonlight in a place he had never been before and the far-off surge of the sea. Blinking, he made out the narrowing stone walls of one of those beehive chapels that dotted the rocky coasts of the ocean in the northwest, the darkness around the Mother’s altar, and the shape of a warrior kneeling just beyond the uneven circle of moonlight that lay like a tiny carpet in the center of the trampled clay floor.

The warrior’s clothing was unfamiliar, the quilted, shiny stuff of the Bight
Coast. The scarred boots he knew, and the sword that lay with the edge of its blade across the moonlight, a white and blinding sliver. The bent head, pale and bright as the moonlight, he could have mistaken for no other.

She looked up, and he saw tears glittering on the high cheekbones, like rain fallen on stone. She whispered, “Chief?” and got haltingly to her feet, her eyes struggling to pierce the gloom that separated them. “Chief, where are you? I’ve been looking for you . . . ”

He held out his hand to her and saw it, torn and filthy, as he had seen it lying in the slime of the pit. She hesitated, then took it, her lips like ice against it, her tears scalding the raw flesh.

“Where are you?” she whispered again,

“I’m in Mandrigyn,” he said quietly, forcing the scorched remains of his voice to be steady. “I’m dying—don’t look for me further.”

“Rot that,” Starhawk said, her voice shaking. “I haven’t come all this way just to—”

“Hawk, listen,” he whispered, and she raised her eyes, the blood from his hand streaking her cheek, blotched and smeared with her tears. “Just tell me this—did you love me?”

“Of course,” she said impatiently. “Wolf, I’ll always love you. I always have loved you.”

He sighed, and the weight settled heavier over him, the grief for what could have been. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasted the time we had—and I’m sorry for what that did to you.”

She shook her head, even the slight brushing movement of it tearing at the rawness of his overtaxed body. He shut his teeth hard against the pain, for he could feel himself already fraying, his flesh tugged at by the winds of nothingness.

“The time wasn’t wasted,” Starhawk said softly. “If you’d thought you loved me as you loved Fawnie and the others, you would have kept me at a distance, as you did them, and that would have been worse. I would rather be one of your men than one of your women.”

“I see that,” he murmured, for he had seen it, in the twisting visions of the endless night. “But that speaks better of you than it does of me.”

“You are what you are.” Her voice was so quiet that, over it, he could hear the distant beat of the sea on the rocks and the faint thread of the night wind. Her hands tightened like icy bones around the broken mess of his fingers, and he knew she could feel him going. “I wouldn’t have traded it.”

“I was what I was,” he corrected her. “And I wanted you to know.”

“I knew.”

He had never before seen her cry, not even when they’d cut arrowheads from her flesh on the battlefields; her tears fell without bitterness or weakness, only coursing with the loneliness that he had himself come to understand. He raised his hand to touch the white silk of her hair. “I love you, Hawk,” he whispered. “Not just as one of my men—and not just as one of my women. I’m sorry I did not know it in time.”

He felt himself slip from her, drawn back toward that bleak and storming darkness. He knew his body and his soul were breaking, like a ship on a reef; all his garnered strength sieved bleeding through the wreckage of spars. All the buried things, the loves and hopes and desires that he had derided and forgotten because he could not bear to see them denied him by fate, poured burning from their cracked hiding places and challenged him to deny them now.

They were like ancient dreams of fire, as searing as molten gold. He heard his father’s derisive jeers through the darkness, though the voice was his own; the old dreams burned like flame, the heat of them greater than the pain of the anzid burning through his flesh. But he gathered the dreams into his hands, though they were made of fire, of molten rage, and of wonder. The scorching of their power seared and peeled the last of his flesh away, and his final vision was of the stark lacework of his bones, clutching those forgotten fires.

Then the vision disappeared from him, as his own apparition had faded from Starhawk’s grasp. He opened his eyes to the slanted wood of the loft ceiling, fretted with the wan sunlight that filtered through the bare trees of Sheera’s courtyard. He heard the murmur of Sheera’s voice from below in the orangery and Yirth’s terse and scornful reply.

Yirth,
he thought and closed his eyes again, overborne by horror and despair. All his efforts of that long day to hide his trail from Sheera—and she had only to ask Yirth to speak his name and look into standing water. The night he had spent in the pit, the pain, and the unnamable grief had been for nothing.

Weak and spent, there was nothing of his scoured flesh or mind that would answer his bidding; had he had the strength to do so, he would have wept. The women had won. He was still alive and still their slave. Even had he been able to find a way to elude Yirth’s magic, he knew he would make no further attempt at escape. He would never have the strength to go through that again.

Had Sun Wolf been able to, he would have avoided Yirth’s care, but he could not. For two days he lay utterly helpless, drinking what little she gave him to drink, feeling the shadows shrink and rise with the passage of the cloudy days, and listening to the rain drum on the tiles or trickle, gossiping, from the eaves. In the nights, he heard the women assemble below, the thud of feet and the sharp bark of Denga Rey’s voice, Sheera’s curt commands, and mingling of voices in the gardens, as they came and went from the bathhouse. Once he heard a hesitant tread climb the stairs toward his loft, pause just below the turn that led to his door, and wait there for a long time, before retreating once again.

He slept a great deal. His body and mind both felt gutted. Sometimes the women who came—Amber Eyes, Yirth, occasionally Sheera—would speak to him, but he did not remember replying. There seemed to be no point in it.

On the third day, he was able to eat again, a little, though meat still nauseated him. In the afternoon, he went down to the potting room and repaired the damage that neglect had done to his bulbs and to the young trees in the succession houses. Like a spark slowly flickering to life against damp tinder, he could feel himself coming back to himself, but the weariness that clung to his bones made him wary of even the slightest tax on either his body or the more deeply lacerated ribbons of his soul. When he heard Sheera come into the orangery in the changeable twilight at sundown, he avoided her, fading back into the shadows of the potting room when she entered it and slipping unseen out the door behind her.

After the women had come and gone that night, he went to lie in the hot water and steam of the bathhouse, listening to the wind that thrashed the bare branches overhead, feeling, as he had felt as a child, that curious sense of being alive with the life of the night around him.

He returned to a sleep unmarred by dreams.

Voices in the orangery woke him, a soft, furtive murmuring, and the swift patter of bare feet. During his illness, though she had nursed him by day, Amber Eyes had not spent the night there. He wondered whether she had had another lover all along while Sheera had assigned her to keep him occupied. The room was empty as he rolled soundlessly to his feet and stole toward the stairway door.

He could hear their voices clearly.

“ .
 . . silly cuckoos, you should never have tried it alone! If you’d been taken . . . ”

It was Sheera’s voice, the stammering tension giving the lie to the anger in her words.

“More of us wouldn’t have done any good,” Gilden’s huskier tones argued. “It would have just made more to be caught . . . Holy God, Sheera, you weren’t there! I don’t know what it was! But . . . ”

“Is she still there, then?” Denga Rey demanded sharply.

Gilden must have nodded. After a moment, the gladiator went on roughly. “Then we’ll have to go back.”

“But they’ll know someone’s trying to rescue her now.” That was Wilarne’s voice.

By the spirits of my ancestors, how the hell many of them are in on it, whatever it is!
Sun Wolf asked himself.

Exercising every ounce of animal caution he possessed, trusting that whatever noise they were making down in the orangery would divert their minds, if the stairs creaked—though it shouldn’t, if their training had done them any good!—he slipped down the stairs, stopping just behind where he knew his body would catch the light.

There were five of them, grouped around the seed of light that glowed above the clay lamp on the table. A thread of gold reflection outlined the sharp curve of Denga Rey’s aquiline profile and glistened in her dark eyes. Beside her, Sheera was wrapped in the cherry-red wool of her bed robe, her black hair strewed over her shoulders like sea wrack. The three women before them were dressed—or undressed—for battle.

From his hiding place, Sun Wolf noted the changes in those delicate-boned bodies. The slack flesh had given place to hard muscle. Even Eo, towering above the two little hairdressers, had a taut sleekness to her, for all her remaining bulk. Under dark cloaks, they wore only the leather breast guards of their training outfits, short drawers, and knife belts. Their hair had been braided tightly back; Wilarne’s had come half undone in some kind of struggle and lay in an asymmetrical rope over her left shoulder, the ends tipped and sticky with blood.

Sheera’s women, he thought, had gone to battle before their commander was ready for it. He wondered why.

Sheera was saying, “When was she arrested? And why?”

Eo
fixed her with cold, bitter blue eyes. “Do you really need to ask why?”

Sheera’s back stiffened. Gilden said, with her usual diplomacy, “The reason was supposedly insolence in the street. But he spoke to her yesterday outside Eo’s forge . . . ”

Eo
went on bitterly. “Well, he can hardly seriously suspect a fifteen-year-old girl of treason.”

“We had to act fast,” Wilarne said, dark almond eyes wide with concern. “That’s why we weren’t in class tonight.”

“You’d have done better to come and get help,” Denga Rey snapped.

In the darkness of the stairs, Sun Wolf felt sudden anger kindle through him, startling and cold. Tisa, he thought. Gilden’s daughter, Eo’s niece and apprentice. A girl whose adolescent gawkishness was fading into a coltish beauty. He wondered if she, too, had been given an opportunity to prove her “loyalty” to Derroug and had been arrested for rebuffing him.

Gilden was saying, “We went in over the wall near the Lupris
Canal. We took out two guards, weighted the bodies, and dumped them. But—Sheera, the guards in the palace compound itself! I swear they see in the dark. There was no light, none, but they saw us and came after us. We could hear them. One of them caught Wilarne . . . ”

“I don’t understand it,” Wilarne whispered. Her hands, fine-boned and as little as a child’s, clenched together in the memory of the fight and the fear. “He—he didn’t seem to feel pain. Others were coming—I hurt him, I know I hurt him, but it didn’t stop him, it didn’t do anything. I barely got away . . . ”

“All right,” Sheera said. “I’ll send a message to Drypettis, tell her what’s happened, and see if she can get us into the palace.”

“She’ll be watched,” Sun Wolf said. “And you couldn’t get a message to her tonight.”

It was the first time that he had spoken in three days, and they swung around, startled, not even knowing that he had been there watching them. Having spoken to Starhawk from the pit, he was no longer surprised at what remained of his voice, but he saw the frown that folded Sheera’s brow at the rasping wheeze of it, the worry in Eo’s broad, motherly face, and the flood of joy and relief in the eyes of Gilden and Wilarne. They had, he realized, been truly frightened for him.

Sheera was the first to speak. “Derroug doesn’t suspect Dru . . . ”

“Maybe not of treason, but he knows she’d do just about anything you bade her. Whether he understands that there’s some kind of connection between you and Gilden, I don’t know . . . But in any case, we’ve got to get Tisa out of there before he tries to lay hands on her.”

He intercepted a look from Gilden and realized that, for all her briskly matter-of-fact attitude about her daughter, she was not quite the offhand mother she seemed. He also realized that she had not expected him to agree with her. Gruffly, he amplified. “If Derroug tries to force her, she’ll fight—and she’ll fight like a trained warrior, not a scared girl. Then the cat’s really going to be out of the bag. So when did you take out the guards, Gilden?”

Gilden stammered, recovering herself, “About two hours ago,” she said. “They were starting their watch—the watches are four hours.”

“We’ll need a diversion, then.” He glanced across at Sheera. “Think you can find Derroug’s sleeping quarters again?”

Her face scarlet, she said, “Yes,” in a stifled voice.

“Change your clothes, then, and bring your weapons. Denga, you stay here. I’m not surprised the little bastard’s guards saw you skirts in the dark if you didn’t blacken your flesh.”

Gilden, Wilarne, and Eo looked at one another in confusion.

“But never mind, you’re lucky you weren’t killed, and we’ll leave it at that. I don’t know if you’ve made any provision for the plot being blown, Sheera, but it’s too late to make one now. You know that if anyone’s captured, she’ll talk. You were in that cellar, too.”