SILAS SHIFTED ONTO his back and pulled Lainie over to lie with her head on his chest. She snuggled up against him like she belonged there. Slowly, gently, he trailed his fingers along her hip and side. Back in Granadaia he had liked women with lush, full curves that overflowed his hands, but in the Wildings, life was hard and it was mostly only house ladies who attained that kind of voluptuousness. Lainie felt so fragile beneath his touch, her bones as delicate as a bird’s, but her skin was warm and velvety soft, and the sweet curve of her hip and bottom fit perfectly in his hand. Her wavy hair, freed from its braid, flowed across his chest and arm like silk.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling so deeply content. He was no stranger to magical hunger, but it was rare that he found himself in the company of an incredible, amazing, extraordinary – and equally hungry – woman when it came on, and even rarer that they were in a starlit, fragrant mountain meadow when it happened. More than rare; this had been a once in a lifetime experience.
They lay in silence for a long time before she spoke, her voice uncertain though she had shown no signs of shyness earlier. “I don’t know what happened. I’m really not that kind of girl.”
“It’s usually just called the hunger,” Silas answered drowsily. “When you’ve depleted your power, you need to regenerate it. Lots of food and sleep will do the trick, but sex is faster and more effective. And more fun, if there’s an agreeable partner close to hand. There’s also drugs that will replenish power, but any mage who uses them is a fool.”
“Oh,” she said. She fell silent again, while he went on stroking her slender curves and feeling her breath, warm and soft, ruffling the hair on his chest. Then she said, “What happens now?”
In his state of exhaustion and contentment, the question didn’t trouble him as it had before. “I can’t let you stay here untrained, so I’m going to send you to one of the schools of magic in Granadaia.”
She fell absolutely still. Even her breathing seemed suspended. Then she sat up abruptly, her back to him, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. Her hair rippled down her slender, shapely back, shining in the light from the moon and stars. She was very quiet, until she took in a long, ragged breath and he realized she was crying silently. “Darlin’…?”
“My Pa was right,” she wept. “No soul, no heart… He said you would take what you wanted and one way or another you’d ruin me.”
It took him a moment, thinking back over what he’d said and done, before it hit him. His heart sank cold and heavy like a stone. Taking her the way he had, without a thought for her needs – by the time it occurred to him that of course she was a virgin, she wasn’t any more – and then talking about what had happened as if it was merely the satisfying of a physical urge, followed by telling her he was going to send her away to become something she didn’t want to be – send her, not take her with him –
Beef-brained son of a bitch. He couldn’t have made a worse mess of this if he’d tried. “Lainie…”
“Just like my grandmother.” The vehemence in her voice shocked him. “When she found out she had power, she abandoned her family and took a mage lover and threw her family off their land so she could give it to her lover’s son. She destroyed her own family, and she didn’t even care. All she cared about was power. And now you’re telling me I have to go away and learn to be like her, and you don’t even care.”
The last words stabbed cold in his heart. He couldn’t even be curious about her grandmother; that wasn’t important right now. He sat up and touched her shoulder; she jerked away from him. “I’m sorry, Lainie,” he said, feeling helpless. “It’s the law. People with power have to either be trained or Stripped of their power. It’s too dangerous to leave someone with power untrained and free to use it. You could do a lot of damage, or even kill yourself or someone else.”
“Then I’ll be Stripped – whatever that is.”
“Don’t ask me to do that to you, darlin’. Stripping leaves a person mindless and helpless. An empty shell. Would you want your Pa to have to take care of you the rest of your life like that?”
“Why do I have to choose?” she cried out. “What if I promise to never use my power again? I hardly ever use it anyway.”
“It’s the law,” he said again, trying to convince himself as much as her. “If I don’t make you choose, some other mage will find you sooner or later, and they might not give you a choice. And if the Mage Council finds out that I found you first and left you alone, it’ll be even worse for you, and for me. Prison at the very least, or even execution or Stripping.”
Her only answer to that was an angry, unconvinced sound.
“Besides,” he went on, “even if you did promise never to use your power again, do you really think you could keep that promise?”
She was silent. Even without being able to see her face, Silas knew the answer was no. Having magical power and being unable to use it would be like cutting off a piece of yourself. “And anyway, even if you never do magic again, the people in the valley know about you now. It isn’t safe for you there any more.”
“But we stopped Carden! We saved them from the Sh’kimech! If we tell them –”
“Do you really think that’ll make any difference?” he asked in exasperation. “To most Plains, a wizard is a wizard, no matter what we do. I don’t blame them for hating us, not with how things are in Granadaia, and I hope things will be different one day, that Plains and mages can come to terms with each other and learn to live together peacefully. But right now the fact is that your life will be in danger if you stay in Bitterbush Springs.”
She didn’t answer. Her stubborn, angry, hurt silence dragged on, and her words, You don’t even care, echoed in his mind. Silas tried to think of something he could say that would undo the damage he had done, and came up empty. He sighed, then started pulling on his pants. “Lay down and get some sleep, darlin’. I’ll keep watch.”
* * *
THE NIGHT WAS quiet. The only danger was likely to be from groviks; too exhausted to stay awake any longer, Silas built a small campfire to keep the animals at a distance, then finally let himself go to sleep.
He awoke to a chilly sunrise. Lainie was still asleep, rolled up in his coat. As morning light filled the small, grassy vale, lined with pines and golden-barked trembleleaf trees, he caught a couple of fish in a nearby stream and skewered them on twigs, then set them to cook on rocks beside the fire. While they cooked, he climbed up onto a ridge above the meadow and looked around. By the position of the sun and the lay of the mountains before him, he guessed that they were some distance west-northwest of the A’ayimat camp. There was no telling how far; it was impossible to translate the tunnels they had run through in pursuit of Carden into distance in the mountains. But, assuming they didn’t run into any impassable canyons or cliffs, they couldn’t be more than a day’s journey or so away from the camp.
Lainie stirred. Silas busied himself with the fish, his back turned to her, giving her privacy while she dressed. When she came to the fire, he picked up one of the fish on its skewer and handed it to her. “Hope you like fish,” he said.
She shrugged, then set about eating the fish in a fastidious manner that suggested she didn’t really like it. When she was done, she knelt by the stream, drank from her cupped hands, and splashed water on her bruised, filthy face. Her tears the night before had smudged the dirt and left tracks in it, but she seemed dry-eyed enough this morning. Whether that was a good or a bad thing, Silas couldn’t tell, but going by her silence, it was probably bad. He finished his own breakfast, then joined Lainie at the stream to drink and fill the water bottle she had carried out from the caverns as well as his own.
“If you’re ready, we should head on out,” he said.
“Where’re we going?”
Silas gestured towards the east-southeast. “We’re heading for an A’ayimat camp that way. It’s a long story; I’ll explain while we walk.”
She nodded. He kicked dirt over the campfire to smother it, and put his duster and hat on. They climbed out of the vale and paused up on the ridge so he could sight out their way. In the morning light, it looked like an easy hike over a series of fairly gentle ridges and valleys descending the eastern face of the mountain range. With Lainie following him in silence, he started down the other side of the ridge.
While they walked, he told her how he, her father, and Dobay had taken out the ten miners who were carrying ore out of the mountain, and that Banfrey and Dobay had been injured in the shootout.
“Is my Pa okay?” she demanded anxiously, the first thing she had said since they left the meadow.
“I think he will be.” He went on, telling her about the A’ayimat who had joined the fight and then had taken Banfrey, Dobay, and the injured miners back to their camp. “Our deal was that if I stopped the man who had invaded their territory and settled the beings – the Sh’kimech – down again, they would care for your Pa and Dobay and let them go when I came back for them. I took a couple more miners up to the camp later on, and your Pa looked a lot better then.”
“Good,” was all she said.
The silence dragged on as they walked, crossing forested mountainsides and making their way through the valleys between them. Silas tried to think of something else to talk about, but the longer the silence went on, the more it seemed to him that any subject he brought up would only look like an obvious attempt to avoid what was lying so heavily between them. Lainie plodded along, hands jammed in her pants pockets, looking everywhere but at him. She stumbled over a rock, and picked it up and threw it into the forest with more vehemence than the rock deserved.
Nothing to do for it but face it and try to clear the air, Silas decided. He took a deep breath, gathering his resolve. “I’m sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have let it happen, not when you didn’t understand what was happening.”
“I’m not stupid, Mr. Vendine.” She still didn’t look at him. “I know what’s what.”
“No, I mean the hunger. I should have told you that was what you were feeling, and that there were other ways –”
“Look, we both know that I wanted it as much as you did. So stop acting like – like you raped me, or something.”
That wasn’t the right thing to say, then. He waited for her to speak again, hoping she would give him something to go on.
“So, it was just the hunger, was all,” she said after a while. “And I know you can’t stick around…”
That was what she wanted, to know that it hadn’t only been physical need, that it had meant something more to him, and that he wouldn’t leave her without a second thought.
Had it been the hunger and nothing else? He didn’t think so. True, if it hadn’t been for the driving, ravenous, all-consuming need, he would have thought twice about taking the virtue from a lovesick young woman when he could offer her nothing in return. But he also couldn’t deny that her courage, her spirit, and her honesty attracted him more than any other woman he had ever known. And her beauty – by the standards of Granadaian mage society she might be considered almost plain, but, even bruised and dirty as she was now, she reminded him of the small flowers that grew in so many of the harsh areas of the Wildings: small, almost invisible, not bright or showy, but, on close examination, simple, delicate, pure and perfect in their beauty, and stronger than any of the hardships they faced – more than that, made stronger by those hardships.
It had meant something. By all the gods, it had meant something. But saying so would imply promises he wasn’t in a position to make. So he didn’t say anything.
“It’s just…” she finally went on, still without looking at him. Her face reddened. “What if I’m pregnant? My Pa will go right through the roof.”
At least he had an easy answer for that. “You aren’t.”
“How do you know?”
“When mage children begin to mature, a block is placed on their fertility. It can only be removed by a member of the Mage Council when they enter into an approved marriage. I’m not married, so my block is still in place.”
“Oh.” Her shoulders drooped, almost as if she were disappointed instead of relieved. “Why do they do that?”
“It’s to manage the bloodlines, since magic is passed down in families. The Council tries to strengthen weak bloodlines through carefully-arranged marriages, and maintain the strong ones without letting them become inbred. Adultery between married mages is illegal, and if a mage becomes widowed or divorced the block is put back on them.”
“What about my Pa’s mother? He told me she was the bastard child of a mage and a Plain servant girl.”
“Adultery with Plains – or with unmarried mages – isn’t illegal. It’s frowned on, but it does happen. If a half-mage Plain child with power is found, they’re taken and trained, and the block is put on them until an appropriate match is made for them. The Mage Council considers them the lowest of the low as far as bloodlines go, depending on who the mage parent was, but it does bring some fresh blood into the mix.”
They walked on. “So,” she said after another long silence, “that’s that, I guess.”
“I’ll take you to Granadaia myself.” It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing, and all he could offer her right now.
“I ain’t going.”
The stubborn words made it clear that she wasn’t going to listen to anything more on the subject. He let it drop, wondering if there were any good answers to the problem of what to do about her.
* * *
THEY CAMPED THAT night by another stream, and ate a silent supper of fish, and bedded down on opposite sides of the campfire. Silas gave up on the idea of keeping watch; last night had been quiet, and he was in desperate need of more sleep.
Around midmorning the next day, they came upon an A’ayimat sentry, who greeted them as though he had been expecting them and led them down into the camp. Banfrey was sitting up, propped against a tree, and Dobay sat nearby. They both looked much better. The miners lounged around the camp in various states of exhaustion, injury, and laziness.
“Pa!” Lainie cried, running over to Banfrey. She dropped to her knees beside him and they embraced each other fiercely.
“Lainie-girl,” Banfrey said. “Are you all right? None of ’em hurt you?”
“I’m fine, Pa,” she tearfully assured him. “I was worried about you. Mr. Vendine said you got shot.”
“Oh, I’m all right. It wasn’t nothin’ but a scratch. These blueskins took good care of me with their healing magics.” He looked up at Silas, not bothering to hide his own watering eyes. “Thank you for bringing my little girl back to me, Vendine.”
Silas felt a twist of guilt in his gut at the thought of separating Banfrey from his daughter again, by sending her to Granadaia to be turned into something he hated and had good reason to hate. Not to mention taking her virtue and giving her nothing in return but a broken heart. “I’m glad I could help,” he said. “We’ll head on out now, if you feel up to it.”
Several A’ayimat had gathered around during Banfrey and Lainie’s reunion. “This woman is the one who was taken by Carden?” one man asked. He wore several leather thongs around his neck, strung with feathers and beads carved of bone, wood, and stone.
“Yes, that’s her,” Silas answered.
On the edge of his mage senses, Silas felt the wiseman probing at Lainie. She gasped and gave the wiseman a sharp, wary look. “She’s powerful,” the wiseman said. “Grana magic, but not entirely different from ours. Did she drive back the Sh’kimech or did you?”
“She did,” Silas said. He still had trouble believing it himself, that this untrained young woman had been able to command those dark, powerful beings when he had nearly been overcome by them.
The wiseman nodded. “Not surprising, since her power is kin to ours. I doubt someone with only Grana magic could have done it.”
“What if she hadn’t been able to?” Silas asked. “The raiding party we met at the bottom of the canyon refused to help, said it was our problem to solve.”
The wiseman shrugged. “And so it was. If you weren’t able to solve it, we would have dealt with the Sh’kimech ourselves and then found another way to make you Grana folk pay for letting that man trespass on our lands. Now, where is he? You agreed to hand him over to us.”
Silas took a deep breath. This was going to be tricky. “He’s dead. I killed him. He’s buried in a cavern beneath the mountain.”
One of the warriors in the camp looked at him, golden eyes narrowed in suspicion. “An easy lie to tell. You could have let him go.”
“Not a lie.” Silas unbuttoned his inner coat pocket and took out Carden’s gold ring. “This is his mage ring.”
The wiseman touched it with the tip of his forefinger. “It does have power, or did, once.”
“You could have taken it from him to fool us,” the warrior said.
“It’s impossible to take a mage’s ring from him without his consent as long as he’s alive. Here, try to take mine.” Silas held out his left hand, where he wore his own silver mage ring. The warrior reached out to take the ring. At his touch, sparks jumped from the ring, and he cursed and snatched his hand back.
“And no mage would ever weaken himself by giving up his ring once he’s earned it,” Silas went on. That wasn’t quite true; a mage might give up his ring if he was desperate enough. But the A’ayimat didn’t need to know that. Anyhow, Carden hadn’t been that desperate; he had believed until the end that he could win, and he had seemed the type who would rather die than surrender. “He’s dead. I killed him and took his mage ring, and now he lies buried beneath the mountain. Keep his men, if you want, but let my companions go.”
“Hey!” Teebers, the miner who had been in the tunnel with Mooden, protested. “You can’t leave us here!”
The wiseman spoke to the warrior in their own language. The warrior answered sullenly, then said to Silas, “I still don’t believe you, but our wiseman does.” He gestured at the miners. “Take them with you. They eat too much, anyway, and they stink.”
“Hey!” Teebers shouted again.
“I don’t want them,” Silas said. “But they’re free to go?”
“Yes.”
“And you won’t attack the settlers in the valley?”
The wiseman and the other men who were gathered around carried out a longer discussion in their own language. Not for the first time, Silas wished he knew the A’ayimat trick of understanding any language that was spoken to them.
The warrior who had spoken before turned back to him. “Not this time. But if it happens again, we won’t be so patient.”
“I think I can safely say it won’t happen again,” Silas replied.
* * *
ALTHOUGH IT WOULD be easier and safer to walk down the upper canyons than to ride, Banfrey and Dobay weren’t well enough to make the long trek on foot. Silas and one of the A’ayimat helped them onto their horses, which had been brought to the camp and cared for, and the A’ayimat offered Lainie one of their sturdy mountain ponies, telling her to let it go when they reached the valley and it would find its way back home.
“Mr. Vendine, sir?” Mooden came over to Silas as they were preparing to leave. “I just – I hope you know, Mr. Vendine, none of us meant no harm by working for Mr. Carden. We didn’t know he was a wizard or that he wanted the ore for wrongful things. An’ none of us set hands on the girl. So we ain’t going to be punished, right?”
There were severe penalties for Plain folk who knowingly assisted rogue mages, but Silas doubted that any of these miners were guilty of anything worse than greed and stupidity. The one who deserved punishment was Gobby, whom Silas had left unconscious or possibly dead – he hadn’t had time to check or to tie him up – in the tunnel outside the cavern where they’d been mining. “No, you won’t be punished,” he said. “But be more careful who you decide to take money from, next time.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Vendine, sir,” Mooden said, relieved nearly to the point of tears. “Thank you, sir.”
With Lainie leading her borrowed horse and her Pa’s horse by the reins, Silas leading Dobay’s horse and Abenar, and the freed miners trailing after them, the group left the A’ayimat camp and started on the long trip back down Yellowbird Canyon to the Bitterbush Valley.