As they approached the lake with its margin of evergreen forest and island settlement, it seemed to Terris that the ice-pure morning air had sharpened his senses, honed them like a knife. As he inhaled, the smell of the sweating horses surged through him, along with the tang of wire-grass and the salty odor of human bodies after days on the trail. His ears echoed with the pounding of hooves on the frost-hard earth and the whistling of his own breath through his chest.
When had he ever seen such a sky? Shimmering above the tundra, azure and brilliant, it penetrated the very marrow of his bones. He shivered in the wind from the lake and thought of Etch, how he’d looked this last day, swaying in his saddle, clutching his injured arm, his face distorting whenever his horse stumbled.
Terris drew the folds of tight-woven wool closer around him, awkwardly because his hands were bound, and tried again to prepare himself for whatever might come. He didn’t know what the northers might do to him, and yet he mistrusted his preconceptions about them. He’d discovered during the long silent hours of the journey north that nothing was as he’d thought. Nothing...
Not Montborne, heroic general and assassin. Not the University, that bastion of privileged scholarship. Not Esmelda, with her feet of uncertain clay.
Not Etch and Kardith — teachers, followers, he didn’t know what they were to him, beyond the best and truest friends he’d ever had.
And not himself. Surely not himself, he thought as they came to a halt by the lake’s edge. Different, a misfit — yes, he admitted that to himself. He could never go back to Laureal City as Esmelda’s adjutant and heir, never pretend he could not feel the things he’d felt or see the things he’d seen. He sensed something more, as if, for a single fragile moment, he’d touched the still center of a tempest. Currents surged and shifted around him — Laurea poised for war against the hungry north, Montborne and Esmelda sparring and scheming, Avi lost somewhere on the Ridge where things that ought not to exist at all twisted the edges of sunlight. All of them circled the point on which he stood, linked to him in ways he could not understand — not yet.
Noises jolted Terris from his musings — voices shouting, the bleating of penned brush-sheep, the shuddering whinny of a horse calling out in greeting. As he dismounted, he tried to make sense of what he saw. The northers were supposed to be savages — nomads and subsistence hunter-gatherers, a paranoid society whose only outside contact was a naked spear. What was known about them came from war stories and tradition, for no social scientist had been able to study them firsthand within present memory and the older records were mostly a blend of folklore and myth, not true scholarship.
Yet the lake encampment reminded Terris of nothing so much as the Laureal City plaza on Solstice Day, the tents with their curious jumble of the familiar and the exotic, the smells of food, the swirls of motion, the sudden flashes of color, the bits of music and laughter. Where were the piles of skulls, the cauldrons of blood, the instruments of torture? He stared at the encampment, fascinated, and began making mental notes.
A hard shove between the shoulder blades sent Terris stumbling in the direction of the simple pier. He lowered himself into one of the boats, narrow and tapering at either end. It bobbed under his weight, satisfyingly familiar to one who’d lived his whole life between two rivers. Etch, in the boat in front of him, looked gray-faced and uneasy, huddled into himself. All Terris could see of Kardith was her back.
The northers paddled their narrow craft swiftly to the island. As soon as they landed, Kardith was manhandled away in one direction and Etch in another, each between two tough-looking guards. Terris was led away, a spearpoint digging into his back.
o0o
The long-house smelled faintly of wool and leather, smoke and some resinous incense. The man on the drum stool sat very still, like mirror-smooth water, lean and taut-muscled under the buttery elkskin shirt and breeches. He wore a vest of quilted felt embroidered with complex patterns. His dark blond hair had been woven into half a dozen braids and tied with strips of red-dyed leather. Sun streaming through the slats in the roof burnished the top of his head into a golden cap while it cast his eyes into shadow.
Terris’s guard yanked his cloak from his shoulders and shoved him forward. He stumbled and caught his balance, holding his bound hands in front of him. He could not see the seated man’s eyes. The effect was deliberate. He’d experienced it before. It was exactly the kind of intimidation a master’s committee might use to test a candidate’s self-confidence or a Senator to impress a new assistant. Esmelda wielded it as freely as if it were a normal and necessary part of social intercourse.
Any sane person in his situation would be paralyzed with terror, and yet Terris wanted to laugh aloud. What you’re doing to me, it’s been done before, and by experts! Hilarity, he’d been told, was a common and natural reaction to stress. It only showed how frightened he really was. Any moment now the mood would shatter, leaving him truly defenseless.
The seated norther spoke at last, his voice resonant and slightly lilting. As he talked, he raised his hands. His fingers were strong and tapering, covered with whitened scars and callouses. Several knuckles were prominent and odd-shaped, as if they’d been broken and badly healed.
“And what are we to do with you?” the norther said.
“If you’re asking my opinion,” Terris answered, “I’d be just as happy to go back to minding my own business.”
“‘Minding my own business’?” the norther repeated. “I only wish you’d had the sense to. But like all southers, you think nothing of barging in where you have no right to be. Tell me, what would happen to one of my people caught trespassing on your territory?”
Heat rose to Terris’s face. He’d expected to be threatened, harassed, bullied. But he hadn’t expected such blatant unfairness. “We weren’t trespassing,” he answered stiffly. “It was your own men who dragged us over the border.”
“I’m the judge of what crimes you’ve committed. I’m Jakon of Clan’Cass and it was Clan’Cass land you were taken on.” There was no bluster in his words, only a quiet statement of fact. Then, with a mercurial shift of mood, he added, “Since I already know where you’re from, you might as well tell me your name.”
“Cassian territory...” Terris searched his memory for the bloodthirstiness of their reputation, but his brain seemed to have turned to mush. He certainly wasn’t making a very good start at resisting norther interrogation. Right now, he couldn’t think of a single coherent reason not to give the man his name.
“Your name?” Jakon repeated in a bantering tone. “Or should I call you ‘souther’ or ‘you there’? Or perhaps you’d prefer simply, ‘batbrain’?”
“Terricel sen’Laurea.”
“A scholar in our midst?”
“What do you know about us? You’re — ”
“A norther? A gross, uneducated, bloodthirsty norther?” Jakon lifted his face and the light fell full on his ice-blue eyes. “It is not we who are ignorant of our neighbors.”
He paused, then said with sudden passion, “What is the matter with you people? Haven’t you got enough troubles of your own without dragging them up here? Unless you’re not quite as innocent as you seem. Unless the Butcher of Brassaford now sends children to spy on us — ”
“We weren’t spying!”
“You weren’t? Then what exactly were you doing?”
Terris pressed his lips together, as if the truth might spring out, all on its own. No norther, especially one who referred to Montborne as the Butcher of Brassaford, was going to help him find a missing sister, a missing Ranger sister. And if somehow he let it slip that he was Esmelda’s son — who knew what use this Jakon might make of that? While he was wondering what to say, here was Jakon, watching him with the intensity of a hungry viper.
He can watch me all he likes, for all the good it’ll do him! He’s no better than a playground bully. I’ve met enough of those in my time, wanting to see how tough Esme’s son really was. But he’s got limitations like all of us. He can’t read my mind — and he can’t get anything from me unless I choose to tell him.
The center of the long-house seemed to stretch out in back of him, a vast, unnaturally quiet space like the belly of a giant beast that held him in its jaws, caught but not yet swallowed. Terris’s muscles tensed and his pulse quickened. His palms, held together by the leather thongs, felt cold and slippery.
Deliberately, he shut out all awareness of where he was and what might be about to happen to him. Turning his focus inward, he imagined he was back in the Starhall, at its very center, with the worst of the stomach-twisting wrongness flooding over him. Then, as if the years of discipline had hardened into an instinctive reflex, his breathing slowed and his pulse returned to normal. His muscles softened, although he stayed balanced on his feet. He stopped sweating. His face settled into an impassive mask.
“All right,” said Jakon. His voice, although still soft, took on new, chilling undertones. “You can tell me now, or you can tell me later. But, my friend, I promise...you will...”
Behind him Terris heard approaching footsteps, the soft-soled boots worn by the northers. Jakon was no longer looking at him, but beyond him. For a flickering second, the norther’s eyes narrowed and the muscles of his jaw stood out, hard and taut.
Terris turned to see Kardith between two tall northers, each with a firm hold on her arm. Her hands were tied in front of her and her boots were missing, but she didn’t seem to be hurt.
But Kardith was a Ranger. She’d patrolled these borders for years. Who knew how many northers she’d killed or what they’d do to her now? What special kind of revenge would they devise, just for her? And there was that spark of recognition on Jakon’s face, that surge of emotion, quickly masked. Terris didn’t know what it meant, but his mouth went dry.
Slowly Jakon got up from the drum stool and walked over to Kardith. They were of a height, as he wasn’t tall, but his shoulders were heavier and more powerful, his hips leaner. Her face, framed by her ragged curls, looked dusky next to his. She stared back at him steadily.
Without taking his eyes from hers, Jakon slid the dagger from his belt and brought it to the base of her throat, the cup of soft flesh where her collarbones and breastbone met.
Terris’s hands curled unconsciously into fists. His heartbeat quickened and yet he couldn’t look away. Kardith was moments away from dying, and he could do nothing, nothing but watch. An image rose up behind his eyes, so powerful and vivid that for a moment it wiped out his normal sight. He saw Kardith pivot, a sharp spiraling movement that jerked one of her guards off balance. She jabbed her opposite elbow into the other’s solar plexus and he buckled over, gasping. The next moment her arms were free, the dagger in her still-tied hands, the point speeding toward Jakon’s heart...
But no, Kardith did none of this. She continued to stand absolutely still, even her eyes. Yet there was something in the way she met the dagger that was not courage. Not courage or bravado but simply that she had no fear of anything Jakon, or any norther, could do to her. She didn’t even flinch as a trickle of blood ran down her chest and soaked into the cloth of her shirt.
One drop, two, three...four.
Jakon lifted the dagger tip in a salute and resheathed it. He glanced from Kardith to Terris. “Is this cub under your protection?”
For a moment Kardith hesitated, surprised by the question perhaps, or puzzled. Then she shook her head.
No? Terris wondered, startled.
“No?” Jakon repeated aloud. “I may be nothing but a ‘norther barbarian,’ but I’m not entirely lacking in wits. Do you expect me to believe you’re under his protection? Or that he made it here from Laureal City on his own? Or that it’s sheer whimsy — or misguided chance — that puts a herdsman, a scholar and the best knife-fighter in all of Harth, together on my borders?”
“Believe whatever you like,” she said coolly. “You will, anyway.”
Jakon went back to the drum stool but did not sit down. He stood looking out of the nearest slit window. Silence settled like a cloak around him.
He knows it’s useless to threaten her. He’s wondering if he can get her to talk by torturing me.
Terris had no particular illusions about his ability to withstand physical pain. What he’d thought of as agony along the trail would quickly pale beside what these northers would do to him. All the tricks of self-control he’d learned in the Starhall would collapse like a house of dried leaves. In a few hours he’d be screaming his guts out, willing to do or say anything to make them stop, begging Kardith to tell them whatever they wanted to know.
And she wouldn’t, no matter how he pleaded, no matter what they did to him. Of that he was absolutely certain.