Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (7 page)

Human.
A wolf would be quieter; a nuuwa—if there were such things this close to settled territory—wouldn’t have the brains to stalk at all. The thought of Altiokis’ spies drifted unpleasantly through her mind.

To hell with it,
she told herself and faked a stumble, cursing. The scrunching in the brush stopped.

Limping ostentatiously, Starhawk hobbled to the side of the track and sat down in the dense shadows of the brushwood. Under cover of fiddling with her bootlaces, she tied the burro’s lead to a branch. Then she slithered backward into the brush, snaked her way down the shallow, overgrown ditch, and climbed up onto the scrubby hillside beyond.

The night was clouding over again, but enough starlight remained to give her some idea of the shape of the land. Her pursuer moved cautiously in the scrub; she focused on the direction of the popping of cracked twigs. Keeping low to better her own vision against the lighter sky, she scanned the dark jumble of twisted black trunks and the mottling of grayed leaves.

Nothing.
Her shadow was keeping still.

Softly her fingers stole over the loose sandy soil until they found what they sought, a sizable rock washed from the stream bed by last winter’s rains. Moving slowly to remain as quiet as she could, she worked it free of the dirt. With a flick of the wrist she sent it spinning into the brush a few yards away.

There was a satisfactory rustling, and part of the pattern of dark and light that lay so dimly before her jerked, again counter to the general restless movement of the wind. The vague glow of the sky caught the pallid reflection of a face.

Very good,
the Hawk thought and eased her dagger soundlessly from its sheath.

Then the wind changed and brought to her, incongruous in the sharpness of the juniper, the sweet scent of patchouli.

Starhawk braced herself to dodge in case she was wrong and called out softly, “Fawn!”

There was a startled shift in the pattern. The shape of the girl’s body was revealed under the voluminous folds of a mottled plaid cloak—the dull, almost random-looking northern plaid that blended so deceptively into any pattern of earth and trees. Fawn’s voice was shaky and scared. “Starhawk?”

Starhawk stood up, clearly startling the daylights out of the girl by her nearness. They stood facing each other for a time on the windswept darkness of the hillside. Because they were both women, there was a great deal that did not need to be said. Starhawk remembered that most of what she had said to Ari had been in Sun Wolf’s tent; of course the girl would overhear.

It was Fawn who spoke first. “Don’t send me away,” she said.

“Don’t be foolish,” Starhawk said brusquely.

“I promise I won’t slow you down.”

“You can’t promise anything of the kind and you know it,” the Hawk retorted. “I’m making the best time to Grimscarp that I can, over some damned dirty country. It’s not the same as traveling with the troop from Wrynde to the Peninsula or down to the Middle
Kingdoms and back.”

Fawn’s voice was desperate, low against the whining of the wind. “Don’t leave me.”

Starhawk was silent a moment. Though a warrior herself, she was woman enough to understand the fear in that taut voice. Her own was kinder when she said, “Ari will see that you come to no harm.”

“And what then?”
Fawn pleaded. “Spend the winter in Wrynde, wondering who’s going to have me if Sun Wolf doesn’t come back?”

“It’s better than being passed around a bandit troop and ending up with your throat slit in a ditch.”

“You run that risk yourself!” And when Starhawk did not answer, but only hooked her hands through the buckle of her sword belt, Fawn went on. “I swear to you, if you won’t take me with you to Grimscarp, I’ll follow you on my own.”

The girl bent down, the winds billowing the great plaid cloak about her slender body, and picked up something Starhawk saw was a pack from among the heather at her feet. She slung it over her shoulder and descended to where the Hawk stood, catching at the branches now and then for balance, holding her dark, heavy skirts out of the brambles. Starhawk held out a hand to her to help her down to the road. The Hawk’s grip was like a man’s, firm under the delicate elbow. When they reached the road together. Fawn looked up at her, as if trying to read the expression in that craggy, inscrutable face, those transparent eyes.

“Starhawk, I love him,” she said. “Don’t you understand what it is to love?”

“I understand,” Starhawk said in a carefully colorless voice, “that your love for him won’t get you to Grimscarp alive. I elected to search for him because I have a little—a very little—experience with wizards and because I believe that he can be found and rescued. It could easily have been any of the men who came. I can hold my own against any of them in battle.”

“Is that all it is to you?” Fawn demanded passionately. “Another job? Starhawk, Sun Wolf saved me from—from things so unspeakable it makes me sick to remember them. I had seen my father murdered—” Her voice caught in a way that told Starhawk that the death had been neither quick nor clean. “I’d been dragged hundreds of miles by a band of leering, dirty, cruel men, I’d seen my maid raped and murdered, and I knew that the only reason they didn’t do the same to me was because I’d fetch a better price as a virgin. But they talked about it.”

Her face seemed to burn white in the filmy starlight, her body trembling with the hideous memories. “I was so terrified at—at being sold to a captain of a mercenary troop that I think I would have killed myself if I hadn’t been watched constantly. And then Sun Wolf bought me and he was so good to me, so kind . . . ”

The hood of her cloak had blown back, and the stars glinted on the tears that streaked her cheeks. Grief and compassion filled Starhawk’s heart—for that distant, frightened child and for the girl before her now. But she said, with deliberate coldness, “None of that means that you’ll be able to find him safely.”

“I don’t want to be safe!” Fawn cried. “I want to find him—or know in my heart that he’s dead.”

Starhawk glanced away, annoyed. She had never questioned that she should look for the Chief—her loyalty to him was such that she would have undertaken the quest no matter what Ari had said. Her own unquestioned prowess as a warrior had merely been one of the arguments. Her native honesty forced her to recognize Fawn’s iron resolution as akin to her own, regardless of what kind of nuisance she’d be on the road.

The older woman sighed bitterly and relaxed. “I don’t suppose,” she said after a moment, “that there is any way I could prevent you from coming with me, short of tying you up and dragging you back to camp. Besides losing me time, that would only make the two of us look ridiculous.” She stared coldly down her nose when Fawn giggled at the thought. “You know, don’t you, that you might cause the troop’s departure to be delayed if Ari takes it into his head to search the town for you?”

Fawn colored strangely under the starlight. She bent to pick up her pack again and start toward where the burro was still tethered, head-down against the wind. “Ari won’t look for me,” she said. “For one thing, you know he wouldn’t delay the march north. And besides . . . ” Her voice faltered with shame. “I took everything valuable of mine. Clothes, jewels—everything that I would take if I were running off with another man. And that’s what he’ll think I did.”

Unexpectedly, Starhawk grinned. Fawn might not be able to reason her way past their arguments, but she certainly had found a matter-of-fact means of discouraging pursuit. “Don’t tell me you have all that in that little pack?”

Startled at the sudden lightening of the Hawk’s voice, Fawn looked quickly up to meet her eyes, then resumed her smile ruefully. “Only the jewels. I thought we could sell them for food on the way. The rest of it I bundled up and dropped over the sea cliffs.”

“Very nice.”
Starhawk smiled approvingly, reflecting that she was evidently not the only person in the troop to hold possessions lightly. “You have a good grasp of essentials. We’ll make a trooper of you yet.”

When Sun Wolf was a boy, he had been stricken by a fever. He had concealed it from his father as long as he could, going hunting with the other men of the tribe in the dark, half-frozen marshes where demons flitted from tree to tree like pale slips of phosphorescent light. He had come home and hidden in the cattle loft. There his mother had found him, sobbing in silent delirium, and had insisted that they call the shaman of the tribe. It all came back to him now, with the memory of parching thirst and restless pain: the low rafters with their red and blue dragons almost hidden under the blackening of smoke; the querulous voice of that dapper, busy little charlatan with the holy bones and dangling locks of ancestral hair; and his father looming like an angry, disapproving shadow beside the reddish, pulsing glow of the hearth. The Wolf remembered his father’s growling voice. “If he can’t throw it off himself, he’d better die, then. Get your stinking smokes and your dirty bones out of here; I have goats who could work better magic than you.” He remembered the shaman’s offended sniff—because, of course, his father was right.

And he remembered the awful agony of thirst.

The dream changed. Cool hands touched his face and raised the rim of a cup to his lips. The metal was ice-cold, like the water in the cup. As he drank, he opened swollen eyelids to look into the face of the amber-eyed girl. The fear that widened her eyes told him he was awake.

I tried to kill her,
he thought cloudily. But she tried to kill me—or did she? His memory was unclear. Mixed with the perfume of her body, he could smell the salt flavor of the sea; the creak of wood and cordage and the shift of the bed where he lay told him he was aboard a ship. The girl’s eyes were full of fear, but her arm beneath his head was soft. She raised the cup to his cracked lips again, and he drained it. He tried to stammer thanks but could not speak—tried to ask her why she had wanted to kill him.

Abruptly, Sun Wolf slid into sleep again.

The dreams were worse, a terrifying nightmare of racking, helpless pain. He had a tangled vision of darkness and wind and rock, of being trapped and left prey to things he could not see, of dangling over a tossing abyss of change and loss and terrible loneliness. In the darkness, demons seemed to ring him—demons that he alone could see, as he had always been able to see them, though to others—his father, the other men of the tribe, even the shaman—they had been only vague voices and a sense of terror. Once he seemed to see, small and clear and distant, the school of Wrynde, shabby and deserted beneath the sluicing rain, with only the old warrior who looked after the place in the troop’s absence sweeping the blown leaves from the training floor with a broom of sticks. The smell and feel of the place cried to him, so real that he could almost touch the worn cedar of the pillars and hear the wailing of the wind around the rocks. Then the vision vanished in a shrieking storm of fire, and he was lost in spinning darkness that cut at him like swords, pulling him closer and closer to a vortex of silent pain.

Then that, too, faded, and there was only white emptiness that blended slowly to exhausted waking. He lay like a hollowed shell cast up on a beach, scoured by sun and salt until there was nothing left, cold to the bone and so weary that he ached. He could not find the strength to move, but only stared at the timbers above his head, listening to the creak and roll of the ship and the slap of water against the hull, feeling the sunlight that lay in a small, heatless bar over his face.

They were in full ocean, he judged, and heading fast before the wind.

He remembered the mountains of clouds, standing waiting on the horizon. If the storms hit and the ship went to pieces now, he would never have the strength to swim.

So if would be the crabs, after all.

But that cold, calm portion of his mind, the part that seemed always to be almost detached from his physical body, found neither strength nor anger in that thought. It didn’t matter—nothing mattered. The sway of the ship moved the chip of sunlight back and forth across his face, and he found that he lacked the strength even to wonder where he was—or care.

An hour passed. The sunlight traveled slowly down the blanket that covered his body and lay like a pale, glittering shawl over the foot of the bunk. Like the blink of light from a sword blade, the chased gold rim of the empty cup on the table beside him gleamed faintly in the moving shadows. Footsteps descended a hatch somewhere nearby, then came down the hall.

The door opposite his feet opened, and Sheera Galernas stepped in.

Not the President of Kedwyr, after all, he thought, still with that eerie sense of unconcern.

She regarded him impassively from the doorway for a moment, then stepped aside. Without a word, four women filed in behind her, dressed as she was, for traveling in dark, serviceable skirts, quilted bodices, and light boots. For a time none of them spoke, but they watched him, lined behind Sheera like acolytes behind a priestess at a rite.

One of them was the amber-eyed girl, he saw, her delicate, curiously secretive face downcast and afraid and—what! Ashamed! Why ashamed!? The rose-tinted memory of her room in Kedwyr slid through his mind, with the warmth of her scented flesh twined with his. She was clearly a professional, for all her youth . . . Why ashamed! But he was too tired to wonder, and the thought slipped away.

The woman beside her was as pretty, but in a different way—certainly not professional, at least not about that. She was as tiny and fragile as a porcelain doll, her moonlight-blond hair caught in a loose knot at the back of her head, her sea-blue eyes marked at the corners with the faint lines of living and grief. He wondered what she was doing in the company of a hellcat like Sheera . . . in the company of any of those others, for that matter.

Neither of the other two women had or would even make the pretense of beauty. They were both tall, the younger of them nearly Sun Wolf’s own height—a broad-shouldered, hard-muscled girl who reminded him of the women in his own troops. She was dressed like a man in leather breeches and an embroidered shirt, and her shaven skull was brown from exposure to the sun. So was her face, brown as wood and scarred from weapons, like that of a gladiator. After a moment’s thought, Sun Wolf supposed she must be one.