CHAPTER XVIII

“Down!” the blood-slick haft of his axe. She hit the Westron, sabre slashing across the back of his neck and if it didn’t cut more than the leather collar of his armour below his helmet’s brim, he was still driven down, beginning to fall. Lark seized and dragged, battle-roused. The man went under the stallion’s hooves and his horse swung away from Lark’s lunge after it. Tibor wheeled back to her.

“Go!” she shouted. That was a knight, she’d killed a knight of the fifth circle. Lark had. “Good boy!” she sang, as if she praised a dog. “Ride, ride!”

Lazlan’s horn had sounded the signal to break away and already the grey light that ran before the dawn was making them all too visible. No fog gathered to hide them. It would not. The god of this land was gone, they knew it. The young soothsayer Arpath, the closest thing they had to a wizard, had cried out, feeling that loss like physical wound, it seemed, and fallen in a dead faint the previous morning. He had not woken by the time Lazlan led his skirmishers away to make this last strike.

To show the All-Holy that even the death of their god would not break them.

Sayan had not been her god, nor Tibor’s, but it didn’t matter; they were all of the Western Grass.

She kneed Lark half around to meet the last pursuing rider. Tibor drew his bow to his ear and let fly. She’d thought him out of arrows, but he had one. It was enough and the pursuer fell before he closed with her. Sixteen years on the caravan road, her mother’s cousin. Tibor didn’t miss.

Cries from her left. Foreign. Hate-filled. It meant something like “godless,” that word, and it should not be cried there; they had driven in like the thrust of a spear to throw terror into this encampment, well within the pickets before they were noticed, and she’d seized the torch that burned before an officer’s tent to set it and five more alight before they’d swung away, with fires blooming all through the camp. Cries and screams as they rode down soldiers stumbling hazy from their sleep.

They’d lost contact with one another in their scattering flight. It was often so. Sometimes you never knew till days later who had gotten clear, who had fallen at the last. Deadly folly at the best of times, to ride reckless in the dark. She and Tibor hadn’t shaken that last pair of knights, elite warrior-priests riding good Westgrass horses, pursuing even as night faded.

Out of the north—these must have passed close in the night, a mounted patrol, and devils damn them, that they had eluded Lazlan’s company—six riding towards them on the light Westron ponies. She and Tibor could outrun the ponies, except the Westrons were close, close enough for a thrown spear—

—to miss.

Tibor had his sabre in hand now, and she saw the whites of his eyes, his bared teeth. Light spreading. Too long in disengaging, too slow, too late.

She went one way, Tibor another.

So she and Tibor would be among the lost when next they counted heads.

Jolanan had expected it every time she rode.

Something came up from the gulley, the dry watercourse they’d followed down towards the camp, a man who knew this land—it had been the grazing of his own herds—guiding them. Dog, she thought, one that must have followed Lazlan’s raiders from the main band of Reyka’s company that had kept pressing north.

Then she thought, wolf?

Bear?

Dog, but the size of it—not one of theirs. Did dogs grow so big? Did wolves?

It flung itself into the midst of the Westron riders with no warning. Ponies panicked, squealed, reared—riders fell. It pulled down a man and shook him, snapped his neck and flung him, bit through the arm of another as he slashed with a knife, slid aside from a spear and tore that soldier’s throat—the ponies were bolting, with or without riders, and Lark was trying to turn away. She could feel the fear growing herself, something wild and howling pulsing in her belly, a cold sweat. Tibor was fighting his bay, but when the second patrol crashed upon him man and horse found their nerve again and she rode to help him. The wolf-dog came snarling among them, blood-soaked jaws closing on a Westron man’s throat so close the spray arced across her face.

And then it was gone and they were free and riding hard, alone. No pursuit.

“Old Great Gods, Old Great Gods and damned devils, what in the cold hells was that?” Tibor’s voice was breaking, almost a howl himself, and he clutched the amulet-bag that hung about his neck. A stone from the Jayala’s bed, he had shown her once. Token of goddess and home, carried all the way to Marakand so many times. But Jayala their goddess was dead and their homeland laid waste by the All-Holy and everyone they knew…dead, enslaved, sworn to a foreign lie of a god to buy life. She didn’t know what to hope.

It was only a stone he held now. Empty of hope.

“Wolf?” she hazarded. Her throat was croaking dry and her mouth tasted of blood. Not her own.

“You, the cow-herd, say so?”

“I don’t know, then. I saw a bear come down off the mountains once. It wasn’t a bear, either.”

“Cross between them. Wolf and bear.”

“They can’t.”

“Bear-mule.”

“Tibor—”

He made a face. “Great Gods, look at you. What would your mother say?”

“Well done?” She hardly remembered her mother, dead when she was small.

“Probably.” They didn’t mention her father, wit-wandered after a bull flung him into a tree. Better he had died. When she could no longer cope with caring for him and managing their small holding, Tibor’s mother had taken them on. Papa she took for charity—at least he was content to scare birds from the wheatfields, if someone kept half an eye out to be sure he didn’t wander away looking for mama—Jolanan herself to ride herd. The drought years had been at their worst then, wells and water-holes drying, cattle, sheep having to range far in search of water or dying outright, and the river of the goddess herself shrivelled to pools between the stones. They’d thought better years must be coming, when the winter snows finally came heavy again, to nourish the land. But winter had opened into a black spring.

She’d been far out with the cattle when the smoke had called her home, too late, to find desolation. Luck that the Westrons had been and gone by then.

She had ridden mindless a time, heading northeasterly above the All-Holy’s course until she was ahead of it, dodging Westron scouts. More by luck than any cunning. Luck and the grace of her dogs. Their sacrifice. Wrung her heart. Showed her she could still feel. Pain upon pain. The dogs had found that one patrol first, and paid the price for her flight. Bought her the time to flee.

Found Reyka’s company. Found Tibor of all people among them, only family she had left.

Found a reason to keep getting up in the morning.

“Rider.”

She looked behind first. No, ahead, she saw it then. Black horse. Coming up from the line of the dry stream. Tibor reached for his bow, glanced to her quiver, empty as his own, shrugged and drew his sabre.

She was tired and her shoulder hurt. Face, damn it, itched, and scrubbing at it with her arm only made her foul jacket with its few reinforcing horn plates over the breast fouler. The blood was drying, sticky and stinking. Drew her sabre—taken from a dead comrade and some approximation of skill sweated into her by Tibor when she wasn’t having to figure it out with a Westron to teach her and life at stake. Arrows for hares and pheasants and the rare predators that didn’t have the sense to flee a bull or a rider, her stick for the cattle—those had always been enough. Sabre was only a stick with an edge, she had told Reyka, when Tibor first brought her before the chief, and Reyka had laughed. But she had not contradicted.

Farmers, mercenaries come home from the caravan road, Jayala’s folk and Sayan’s, Retlavon’s and the northern Yalla’s. Reyka had Sayan’s blessing, and the respect of those she led. She had in the beginning gathered about the core of her own cousins and herders, and she ruled them like the household of a farm. Brothers, sisters, cousins. Kin.

The rider only waited. He looked like a Westgrasslander, but a mercenary of the road, his hair worn long in many braids. Little gear. No buckler, no bow or spear. Didn’t bother hailing them, didn’t call to name himself. Didn’t draw his sabre. Trusting they weren’t converts. As they were him, she supposed, and did not sheathe her blade. He nodded as they came close enough to speak without shouting.

“Reyka’s folk?” His voice was hoarse.

“Whose are you?” Tibor demanded.

The man shrugged. “Sayan’s.” Which his tattoos already told them, as their killdeer and frogs identified them as Jayala’s, rooted them to a place. Owls curved from his temples, down around his eyes and over cheekbones, the black lines faded like the marking of a much older man. Hint, on the backs of his hands, of the entwined snakes and cheetahs in black and blue that would mark his arms. His brown face was burnt dark from the desert, paler scars seaming above and below his left eye.

Beardless, as most Westgrasslander men were. She’d been startled at the hairiness of a Red Desert man’s face, partner of a caravaneer of the Retlavonbarkash who’d come from the road to join Reyka’s company. Dark eyes peering out over a thicket of curling black. He had made her laugh. Gerbil peering from its burrow.

Dead, both of them, a week back.

The company had been almost six hundred, when she joined. Two-thirds that, now, and fewer fit to fight. Those so injured they couldn’t ride even clasped in a comrade’s arms or tied to their horse—

Better a friend’s knife than to be taken by the Westrons.

“Ride with you.” Not a question. The stranger looked exhausted. So did his horse.

If that savage dog-thing belonged to him, there was no sign of it. She saw Tibor scanning the horizons, too.

They could contest him joining them. Jolanan wasn’t sure how it would go. He looked menacing in a way that Tibor and the other caravan mercenaries, hard though they had seemed when she first found herself among them, did not. Caravaneer’s coat the colour of a brindled cat, undyed grey sheep’s wool and sandy camel spun together, flung open over his russet brigandine. Indigo headscarf pulled down about his neck. His hair was very long, even for a caravaneer, and so dark as to be called black, under the dust, which was caked to him as if he’d ducked his head into some pool and ridden while still wet. It wasn’t the look of the road so much as the air of him. The bull that knew the herd was his. The bitch that all the other dogs gave place to in the dooryard.

“Yeah,” Tibor said wearily. “They can kill you when we get back if you need killing. I’m too tired. Want your name and gang, though. I’m Tibor. Used to ride with Hammad’s gang out of Marakand. This is my cousin Jolanan. We’re of the Jayala’arad.”

“Holla,” the man said. Shrugged. “Ridden with a few gangs, over the years.”

Jolanan had been around caravaneers long enough now to know that “a few gangs” wasn’t a recommendation, was a flag signalling trouble, in fact. They valued loyalty on the road. Someone who couldn’t settle or who got themselves turfed from master to master was not someone you wanted standing shoulder to shoulder with you in a fight.

“Who?” Tibor demanded.

“Gaguush’s gang,” Holla said, and there was a smile, even. Bleak. “Long time ago. She’s dead.”

It didn’t satisfy Tibor. “Never heard of her.”

“You wouldn’t have. Came up from Marakand this time with Mistress Varnouri.”

Tibor grunted, seeming to recognize the name. “Kin?” he demanded. “Cousins?”

“I look Westron to you?” The man turned his horse. “No kin. No cousins. They’re all dead. Whatever. Ride on my own, then.”

There were even Westrons among the company, caravaneers come with their partners and spouses, folk who swore by memory of their dead gods and reviled the faith of the red priests. Not lightly trusted, but Sayan had known the truth in their hearts.

“Still want to know who your kin were,” Tibor repeated, and kicked his bay up even, waving Jolanan to keep back. She ignored that, went up the other side. Holla didn’t seem much disturbed, although his black didn’t like it. Three stallions unfamiliar together. Lark didn’t like it either. Jolanan and the skewbald were still settling into one another’s ways. A spear had taken her old mare from her a fortnight back. Lazlan gave her Lark then, with the blood of a Westron commander still on his white-splashed flanks and Lark, it turned out, was no cattle-horse. He had a taste for fighting.

Holla stared Lark in his blue nearside eye and the horse settled down. The man nodded to Jolanan, as if to say, There. His own eyes were hazel, flecked golden-green, she decided. Warm.

Nice face. Much as she distrusted him, she liked it. Old, almost as old as Tibor, who was past thirty, but—when you were alive and hadn’t thought to be, it was surely an insult to life itself not to take a moment to appreciate a pleasing face, as much as it would be to shut one’s ears to the rising songs of the black larks or the bright swathe of pink a patch of campion made across the hillside.

He smiled.

Warm smile, too. Like he really saw her.

Jayala prevent he’d seen anything but proper suspicion in her scrutiny.

“I’ll talk to the warlord,” he said, turning from her.

“The chief, yeah,” Tibor said. “You’ll be talking to her, never fear.”

“How about we just take all the sniffing and growling as given, Tibor, and just ride? We want to be bearing more easterly.”

“No.”

“We do.”

Jolanan didn’t quite smile herself. Too tired. But the man was right. Tibor had an appalling sense of direction.

They caught up with the spread-out straggle of the warband eventually, just as it was drawing together again around the start of a camp: a few cookfires, pickets riding out. Jolanan didn’t like the way Holla frowned, seemingly noting everything. Disapproving. Assessing. Spy, she thought again, and when they found Reyka and Lazlan standing apart in some quiet consultation with the Marakander caravaneer Caro, she made sure to keep herself between the stranger and the chief, which she saw Lazlan noting, then moving to do the same.

“This is Holla,” Tibor announced without dismounting. “We found him riding north after the raid. He doesn’t give any good account of what he was doing there. Says he was looking for us, chief. No family, no kin, and shiftless between gangs, by his own admission.”

“Looking for us, why?” Reyka demanded. A woman nearing fifty, her hair cut short, narrow face tattooed with the black larks that folk of the Sayanbarkash used for women, making a difference in pattern as Jolanan’s own folk did not. Grey eyes. A necklace of mountain-turquoise about her throat, last trace, maybe of the wealthy farmer she had once been. Her younger brother was very like her. Staring up now, with eyes narrowed against the sun, at the weary stranger on his horse.

“You’d rather I rode with the All-Holy?” Holla asked. “I’m heading over the rivers. Thought I’d travel with you, lend my sabre to yours, if you’re heading north or east. If you don’t want me, I’ll ride alone.”

Wanted the relative safety of a company about him, and precious grain for his horse, probably. Or wanted them to think that his only desire.

She knew that horse. Dark stallion, white blaze. Small wonder Lark had reacted as he had. She’d killed its rider, that very dawn. The knight. She’d have known it at once if she hadn’t been so tired.

“Arpath?” Lazlan called, turning away.

The young Sayanbarkashi seer was conscious again, at least. He came from the round tent the chief’s household shared, a blanket wrapped over his shoulders, though the day was warm. Face wan, golden-brown eyes bruised-looking as if he’d sat unsleeping too many nights. His gaze fixed on the stranger, stayed there.

“This is Holla. Tibor and Jolanan found him after the raid. He says he wants to join us. We trust him? Won’t say who his kin are.”

Arpath, like Lazlan, had the men’s owls of the Sayanbarkash tattooed on his face. A different style than the work on Holla’s. Well, the bards who did the work when a youth came of age sometimes revived old styles, or found new of their own. Didn’t mean Holla’s tattooing was false. It would have been fresh and new and out of place on his weathered face in that case, anyway.

“Lose your own horse?” she asked him.

The corner of his mouth tucked up, as if she amused. “Yes. Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Providing another.”

“Did I?”

He shrugged, looking away now, at Arpath. “Found him straying when I needed him. Rather like I did you two.”

“We found you,” Tibor said.

Arpath still stared.

“Go on,” Lazlan said. “Ask him.”

Lies, Arpath had said, gave him a bitter taste, like bile rising.

“I’m not a Westron spy,” Holla said to the seer. “I’m not any enemy of yours.”

Arpath swallowed, nodded.

“You didn’t grow up under a mushroom,” Reyka said. “Who’re your kin? What farm, what valley?”

“They’re all dead,” Holla said. Seemed to hesitate. “Where you from? North hills?”

“I held the valley below Dyer’s Hill.”

“Huh. Thought so. You’ve got his face.”

“Whose?”

“Someone I knew once.” He shook his head. “No family. I was a foundling. Doesn’t matter.” He looked tired, suddenly. More tired than he already had. “It really doesn’t matter where I’m from. You want me to ride with you a while, or not?”

“Arpath?” Reyka asked, gentle, as she always was with the young seer. They’d come on him at his own family’s execution. Father, mother, sister, cousins, grandparents already burning, beyond saving. He’d been on his knees, screaming, cursing, a sixth-circle priest, a diviner of the All-Holy, in her soot-smudged white cope pulling his head back by the hair, shouting at him in bad Westgrasslander to look, see what awaited if he did not give himself and the blessing of his talent to the service of the All-Holy as the Old Great Gods had intended.

“He’s true,” the young man said. “He’s—” Fell silent. Took a deep breath. Eyes wide, pupils dilated, as if he were falling into vision without drum or prayer.

Did Holla shake his head, ever so slightly? Arpath blinked and looked away. “He’s not a Westron spy. Trust him.”

Reyka was frowning. Summoned her brother with a raised chin. They murmured, heads together. Beckoned Arpath in close. More murmuring. The seer seemed vehement. “I swear it, chief, marshal, Sayan—Old Great Gods be my witness, he’s true.”

Jolanan leaned over to murmur herself, “They’ll kill you if they decide you’re a spy anyway.”

“Sensible. If I were.”

“Does Arpath actually know you?”

“Haven’t been back to the grass since before he was born. No.”

“Are you a spy?”

“No.”

He didn’t seem worried. Just tired. Bored, even. The black horse stood head low, ears drooping. Holla scratched its neck absently.

“We’re not bandits,” Reyka said. “We’re a warband. We ride in justice, with honour. We protect the folk. We don’t raid them, any we find surviving. We’re the rearguard of their flight beyond the rivers. We serve the folk and the gods and the goddesses—the memory of the gods and the goddesses of the Western Grass. We do as they would have us do, under the Old Great Gods. If you can’t hold to this, if you think this is about brigandage, if you’d murder or steal from the folk the little they have left, if you’d abuse those weaker than you or think to make yourself a master over bondfolk like a Great Grass chieftain, you can ride away now. If you can ride on our terms, you take an oath to us.”

“I take no oaths to serve any woman nor man,” Holla said. Matter-of-fact, no great emphasis. “But I swear, I ride in the service of the gods of the Western Grass. Always. Take that, or don’t.”

“It’s enough,” Arpath said, as if he had authority here, and Reyka gave him a long look. He didn’t seem to notice.

Lazlan began to say something, but Reyka held up a silencing hand, transferring her stare to Holla. “You an archer?”

“If I need to be.”

She shook her head. “Take him to Caro for the lancers, Tibor. She’s a caravaneer; she can deal with him. Jolanan, stay a moment.”

Jolanan dismounted, joined Reyka, Lazlan, and Arpath as Tibor reluctantly turned his horse and led away, Holla following.

“Get Tibor alone, when you can. Let him know—you and he both, ask around among the caravaneers. See if anyone from the road knows anything of Holla.”

“Yes, chief.”

“He’s true,” Arpath said. “He’s—I felt it, for a moment, Reyka. He’s touched by the gods. Blessed. Somehow.”

“A bard? He isn’t. Nor a wizard of any sort.”

“No. But—”

“I’ll accept what you’ve seen in him, Arpath, but nonetheless, I want someone keeping an eye on him. Everyone’s got cousins of some degree, by blood or adoption. Talk to Lazlan when you find out anything, Jo.”

“Yes, chief.”

Reyka gave Jolanan a weary smile, Lazlan a friendly thump on the shoulder as she led Lark off in search of the food and rest they both needed.

No chance to talk to Tibor alone there; he was with Caro, a Marakander caravaneer who’d followed a Westgrasslander husband to this fight and lost him to a Westron arrow in their first battle. But maybe no need.

“Gurhan grant we do get over the river,” Caro was saying in the desert-road tongue, though she spoke good Westgrass. “Wish you’d brought Varnouri and the rest of her gang with you, Hol.”

“They were heading up to At-Landi,” Holla said, frowning over a swollen bruise on the black’s neck. Lark’s doing, maybe. The horse shifted its weight unhappily, turned its head, but only to rest a nose on the man’s shoulder. He resumed his grooming with a twist of wiry grass. “I don’t think most gang-bosses are understanding, yet, how bad things are. The Westrons aren’t going to stop at the Kinsai’av.”

Jolanan had to listen carefully to catch the words. Till this summer she’d never learnt any language but her own, living in the shadow of the Karas, that and a few words of Westron.

They should have killed the red priests, the missionaries, who’d been creeping down the old lost road from the mountains in dribs and drabs all her life, not listened to them, however politely, however deafly. Not given them advice on the road east, and shelter, and food, and kindness.

First folk to be overrun by the Westrons, the Jayala’arad.

“We’re running north.”

“ I know.”

Caro gave Jolanan a smile, switched languages. “You’ve found us a good one this time. He says the horse is yours. Can he keep it?”

Her prize? They didn’t work like that. Lazlan and Reyka would assign captured livestock and supplies where they were lacking. But the man needed a mount and nobody had shown any urge to take it from him.

“Sure.”

But Lark was cranky, tugging at the bridle, not liking the black any better, and she moved him off. Ate with Tibor and a crowd of fellow skirmishers and scouts. Heard who was dead and who was missing. Small stones, piling on. A weight that pressed down, day after day. Passed on Reyka’s order to find out about Holla, but Tibor shrugged.

“Caro knows him. He’s been with Varnouri’s gang six years, she says. That’s enough for me, I guess. Maybe he has good reasons to deny his family, you never know.”

Even a foundling had family of some sort. Maybe he’d been heading home to look for them, and discovered them all dead, the longhouse roofless, walls pulled down. Maybe a pyre in the dooryard, and the charred bones. Maybe he hurt too much to talk of them.

As the shadows gathered into night, she left Tibor and his friends searching out their beds, such as they were. Not enough tents, and a clear night, so nobody much was bothering with cutting brush and rigging shelters of hide and blanket. Everyone slept in some order, near their own horselines. They’d had to cut and ride before. Pickets out, with dogs, and Arpath would have searched in a bowl of tea, which had made her laugh the first time she’d heard Lazlan say it, but rocking and singing, catching the sky in the dark liquor worked to bring visions for him, so what did she know?

The lancer company was over to the east, and she found Holla there. No fires, not once night fell. Reyka’s rule. Folk lay close, shared blankets, not necessarily with any thought of more than warmth and fellowship. They would be breaking camp in the first grey light of the new day, moving slowly northward, a shield to the families and herds in flight ahead, making for the Bakanav, the river that joined the Kinsai’av above the caravan town of At-Landi. The Northron ships, which came down by forest rivers and a portage between the Varr’aa and the Bakanav, gave up their cargoes there to the camel-caravans and took the goods of east and south back north. A barrier to the Westron advance, maybe. Or at least a means of getting out of his path.

Most were already sleeping and she stood staring in the dark, not able to make out hummock of body from roughness of the ground or stacked gear. She’d thought to find some cluster still gossiping with the newcomer. Many of the lancers were caravaneers, who’d come with horses and camels and years on the road behind them; they’d be wanting news of friends and gangs and even family left behind. But the days were heavy.

Hopelessness. On them all. A weight like grey cloud, unending, pressing low. This was a retreat, a withdrawal from their own land, and they left their gods and their goddesses dead behind them.

“Caro’s gone out on watch.” Soft voice at her shoulder. She wasn’t even surprised. Turned to face him.

“I was looking for you.” Jolanan shrugged, which was pointless; he wouldn’t see. “I don’t know—making sure you’d settled in.” That was pointless, too. She wasn’t responsible for the man and that wasn’t why she’d come anyway. Just…

“Can’t sleep?” Was that a question, or did Holla say it of himself? She wasn’t certain. “Here, I saved the last of the tea.”

Dim movement. Cup in his hand. Jolanan found it as much by the fading heat of it on the back of her hand as by sight. Took it and followed him when he walked away, off into the night, waiting for her to catch up, a hand under her elbow when she stumbled on a tussock. Found a place to sit together, bruised grass sweet about them and a nightjar calling, as if all the humans and horses and camels were nothing to worry it.

“You alone?” Holla asked her.

“Tibor’s my cousin,” she said. “He’d gone to the road. I found him, when—I came east. Found the warband. Everyone else is dead. You too?”

“Long dead,” he said.

She drank the tea, bitter, sweet. Caravan tea, smoky as hard Northron fish.

“You should be with Caro’s riders,” Holla said abruptly. “I like how you handle that cranky brute of yours in a fight.”

“I’m a cow-herd, not a caravan mercenary.” Had he been lying up in the grass watching? Jolanan supposed he might have been; unhorsed and lacking a bow he couldn’t very well have joined in when she and Tibor were fighting for their lives. Had he seen that wolf-thing?

Distracted from asking the question. He’d touched a knuckle to the back of her hand, still wrapped around his cup. Not accidental, though they both could let it seem so, if she only moved her hand away. She didn’t.

“I’ll teach you,” he said. “They’re going to have to scare up a spear or two for me somewhere, anyway, they can equip you too. You ride with us tomorrow.” She didn’t question how he was going to bring that about. He seemed to take it for granted Caro, Lazlan, they’d all do what he asked. Her too?

Holla wasn’t asking anything. He was just…sitting there. Tired. Disheartened. Alone. She leaned a little. Not much. Didn’t need much, to bring her shoulder to his arm. After a moment it went around her. Tucked her closer.

Heart might be beating a little too fast. Reckless and not worth worrying about, that she didn’t have what the caravaneers called a maiden’s friend from the glovers of Marakand or Serakallash, or the amulets a wizard more skilled in spell-crafting than Arpath might sell. Not worth worrying, because she didn’t think they were any of them going to survive long enough for next year to matter. She didn’t want the mere warmth of some half-known fellow archer who might be dead tomorrow snoring and sighing and breaking wind beside her, she didn’t want to lie trying not to think, to remember, waiting for exhaustion to drag her down so she could sleep and forget till in the morning it all began again or the horns woke them into blind flight in the dark. She didn’t want to care, about anything, and Holla had smiled, younger than his eyes, and even his eyes had something in them that wasn’t there in Tibor, who worried over her for kinship’s sake, in Arpath, in Nessa who so quickly become a friend like a sister and then was dead anyway, last week which seemed months ago now—

“You tired?” she asked, and when he looked down to answer her she could feel his breath, clean, inviting, on her face.

“Very,” he said, but when she set the empty cup down and put her fingers to his cheek, thumb under his jaw, she could feel that his pulse ran hard like her own.

Jolanan found his mouth in the dark on her second try, and what was sweet, careful invitation—he could still say, no, we need to be sensible, a Westron patrol might find us, the alarm might sound, there’s someone back in my caravan-gang, I’m too old, you’re too young, or just I’m really too tired and we should sleep—all of that, any of that—became hungry, urgent fire burning away all the sensible arguments neither of them was making. Fingers finding buckles, ties—not quite so insensible of caution as to strip themselves utterly naked, no, but his hands were warm on her skin, fingers spreading over a breast, fingers spread on her belly, sliding down and she lay back, hooking a leg over him, tugging him down over her, her own hand going down between them where she’d never let a hand go with a man before, cuddling with Dharand who had ridden herd for some remoter cousins of the next valley, the two of them so careful, so sensible of what was right between young people who had not yet pledged their betrothal before the goddess—Dharand, like all the other people of her first life, dead or lost and only might have been, nothing to do with Jolanan who could kill a man and not even remember his face, only that his horse had a white blaze. Holla was hot down there, hard and silk-soft, and she was afraid she might hurt him, her fingers so bark-rough, ragged-nailed. He made a sound that was nothing but pleasure, though, and let her carry on with what she had begun, his mouth on her breast, till it was his own hand exploring, fingers…a tongue deep in her mouth and she was losing herself, somewhere, losing the world, which was all she asked of the night.

Something—on the edge of his awareness. A shadow. Something…slinking past, in the darkness. Like the swift-slow shadow under the canoe, half lost in wave and shimmer. Shark. Corner of the eye and gone.

“Wake up,” his sister said. “He’s coming to kill you.” And she laughed.

Something out there. Dangerous. Ancient. Hidden.

A shape he almost knew.

Jochiz sat up, opening his eyes, flinging the blanket back. The woman Clio woke as well. A primate of the seventh circle, diviner and warrior and devoted lieutenant…he pushed her aside, when she would have reached for him, her words meaningless, questioning, concerned at his alarm.

It wasn’t alarm. He had not cried out.

It was only dream.

Warning.

Jochiz lay down again. Let the woman reach for him, hold him, stroke the scars of his forearms, which fascinated her. Her mouth on them, soft, as if she would suckle there, feed on what he had already given her, given again and again, for all his folk in their generations. He could ignore that. Ignore her even as her mouthing grew more insistent, teeth nipping. He put her aside, but did not order her from the bed. He might want her later. The body, Sien-Shava, had his needs, and her nibbling teeth…not now. Later. He let himself lie, still, rocking in the waves, in the darkness, letting the water flow through him, carrying the shape of the shadow, the scent…memory.

Elusive as water, unknowable as the depths of a lake.