CHAPTER V

The sounds of the komuz were distant, a faint wandering song in the night. The king’s bard was playing her great harp in the king’s hall, but her apprentice the princess had promised a new song and was sitting in the doorway of her bower trying it out one more time.

An awkward turn of phrase, that. Yeh-Lin heard Deyandara falter, realizing it herself. Another run at that verse, a word changed. The song was not something that would be picked up by the bards, not yet, and yet there was something there. The girl had the bones, now, the burning heart. Mastery would follow. A small song, this. It sounded as though it ought to be a piece of a larger whole, a longer tale of which this was only a moment, like a scene caught in faint colour and hasty lines. Riders by night, passing ghostly under the moon and fading away towards distant horizons. A vision woven of words, a glimpse of something viewed from afar, something never to be known in its entirety. She had hold of something, that child.

Yeh-Lin thought she might put a name to the riders. The child would no doubt deny it.

Child. Her pupil, once, but now? Deyandara was a young woman, the new king’s betrothed and a bard in the making. She had spear-carriers of her own and the king’s besides to keep her safe, and the wizards of the king’s hall. She carried no ancestral curse; she had no particular enemies any longer; the child—woman—needed no guardian wizard, nor yet a tutor, now that she had chosen to belong to the bards.

Yeh-Lin angled the inscribed silver mirror to catch the moon. Something had been nagging on the edges of her dreams, prickling when she drifted on the edge of sleep, for some time now. She had found herself unusually reluctant to pursue it. That fact . . . began to interest her.

Clouds, swirling, captured in silver beneath a cloudless sky. The spiralling path of text was in no script of human lands or tongue of human voice. She followed it, fell into cloud and moon, hung still and seeing.

A man lay on a pallet-bed. He was young, Nabbani, she thought, from his straight black hair, but he was so bruised and bloodied and bandaged, blood seeping through his bandages, too, that it was hard to guess at the bones underlying his swollen features or even the shade of his skin. He laboured to breathe, but he breathed. A woman entered, knelt. Her many-layered robes spread in a great pool of colour about her. Her hair was loose, a river of black over the silk, long enough to fall to her heels when she stood. The room was panelled in dark, carved wood, lit by golden lamps in the shapes of flowers, no two the same. Far grander than the bed, which was a makeshift thing. Not this man’s own place, she deduced. Ornate shutters closed the window; impossible to see if were day or night. Yeh-Lin could see only the one corner of the room; she might have seized the vision, entered into it more fully, but . . . better to be soft, to be quiet, no will but the watching, until she knew what she saw.

Nabban, of course. A woman of the imperial family . . . that cherished hair.

She pulled off silk gloves, laid her hands on the man, on his chest and forehead, careful to set skin on skin, not wrappings, even though that meant touching swollen and crusted blackness, which every human instinct should say to leave be. The man twitched feebly, as if, had he strength and waking wits, he would be flinching, struggling, crying out against such handling of what must be agonizing pain. Perhaps he was drugged.

The woman bent low over him. Praying, maybe. She took her hand from his forehead, drew a pendant of some sort out of the breast of her robes, laid it on his forehead. Her hand went over it, with more prayers. Yeh-Lin had only the faintest glimpse. Something pale.

There was a third presence in the room, an attenuated thread.

The man grew still. His breathing eased, deepened.

Yeh-Lin touched the surface of the woman’s mind to taste what she found there—

Was slammed away as though by a lion’s paw.

The last glimpse she had was of the woman’s eyes as her head snapped around. Fury, and an energy she could feel through the spurt of—fear, damn it, that she felt—like a blast of wind from an opened door. Red and gold and silver pursued her, a shivering wash of cold fire, of light that cracked and ripped as if through the sky of the frozen north, before she flung herself away, palm clapped over her mirror. Her heart pounded.

Well. So.

The night was silent, except for Deyandara strumming the komuz, gathering her thoughts, perhaps, for then her voice was raised again, that verse, a new turn of phrase.

Once her heart slowed—it had only been a momentary alarm, not fear—Yeh-Lin tucked her mirror away and walked across the crunching frosted grass, breath a cloud, to the stone-built bower. A stocky man leaning against the wall a little distance away nodded to her; the woman sitting with her spear at her feet and her hands tucked into her sleeves looked up and tilted her head towards the hall. Faullen and Rozen, chief of the princess’s spears. Get her and us out of the cold, my lady, please . . . Yeh-Lin smiled. The black herding bitch, Vixen, bounced up to greet her. It never failed to warm Yeh-Lin’s heart, that affection. Animals knew what she was, an alien note in the song of the world, but the little dog had come to trust where her mistress did. Deyandara played a rippling arpeggio and three ringing final chords and smiled shyly, flipping a coppery braid back over her shoulder. “That’s it, I think.”

“Yes. I liked it. Shall we go to the hall before your fingers freeze on the strings?”

“Before we give the old man an attack of rheumatism,” said Rozen, climbing to her feet. “Devils take this frost. I was meant for warmer lands.”

“Old?” demanded Faullen. “Old enough to know that if I plant my bony behind on the frozen ground I’ll give myself piles, as you and my lady are so set on doing.” He gave Deyandara a hand and hauled her to her feet.

“In the kingdoms of the north, they’d call this a fine springlike day, Rozen,” Yeh-Lin said. She did like the folk of Praitan. Here was the rightful queen of the land who had stood aside for one better suited to lead it, and a scout and groom and a wandering foreign wizard—princess and her banner-lords, as her own folk would name them—and they all strolled companionably together and joked and grumbled, and gave respect and trust where it was earned. Sometimes she wished it could feel like home to her. Sometimes she wished she could stay.

She would not spoil the girl’s evening. Deyandara sang often as a bard’s apprentice, but it was no small thing, to offer a new song. Nor would Yeh-Lin betray friendship and oaths by vanishing in the night. She had sworn service; she would seek leave. It would be given. They had gone east, those wanderers Deyandara saw in her mind’s eye beneath the moon. One should be dead and gone to his road by now, though the girl, she thought, had not understood that was his doom and she would not tell her so. The empire drew the other, but there was something coiled waiting in its heart. Yeh-Lin did not think he ought to face it alone. Deyandara would not think so, either. She trusted the child for that.