Aviyya scrambled to her feet. She thrust her shoulders back and her chin forward, as if she meant to grab Jakon and shake him. She shoved one pointed index finger under his nose.
“My partner — my brother — they’ve been here all week, haven’t they? And I never knew! When I moved to the women’s tent, that’s when they arrived, wasn’t it?”
Before he could reply, she rushed on. “I thought you were beginning to trust me — what an idiot I was! I should have known something else was going on!”
She raised both hands, as if appealing to a celestial jury. “You’ve never believed a thing I’ve said, have you? Why did I even bother telling you the truth? What was the use of it? I could eat your gods-damned salt from now until the moons fall into the sea and you still wouldn’t listen to me!”
Despite his tiredness, Terris felt an incredulity bordering on awe at Aviyya’s outburst. It was so perfectly logical for the northers to keep their captives separate until they decided what to do with them. Esmelda would have done exactly the same, had the situation been reversed. What was most amazing, though, was the puzzled look on Jakon’s face when he answered, in perfect seriousness, “I believed you. I just didn’t trust you.”
“Then what in Harth’s name do you trust?” Aviyya demanded.
“My dreams.”
“Your — ”
“Which have shown me that I alone cannot judge your story, or your brother’s. Only in the Northlight will the truth be shown.” Jakon gave her no time for further protest. “You’d better listen to what your brother has to say. There’s far more at stake for your Laurea than the fate of one headstrong woman Ranger. We leave at dawn tomorrow.”
“But — ”
“Rest well, Aviyya of the south. You wouldn’t want any of us barbarians to — as you southers put it — ride circles around you, come tomorrow morning.”
With a hastily concealed quirk of his mouth, Jakon turned and stalked out of the long-house. Grissem also withdrew, but stopped just outside the door.
Aviyya watched them go, mouth slightly open, hands hanging open at her sides. She took a heaving breath. “Drat.” Then she spun around, strode over to Kardith and held out her arms.
Even if he hadn’t known they were lovers, Terris would have looked away. There was something intensely private about the way the two women embraced — the silence between them, the way their arms curled around each other and their bodies pressed together with no hesitation, the way the two heads, black and copper, rested on each other’s shoulders.
Etch got to his feet, his mouth twisted in an unreadable expression and his eyes carefully averted from the two women. He glanced at the floor, at the drum stool, moved a few steps toward the door and paused, turned halfway back and held out a hand to help Terris up.
Aviyya looked Kardith in the eyes. “Don’t you ever risk your hand for me again.”
“Oh, that,” drawled Kardith. “That was the easy part. The hard bit was back in Laureal City, facing that old dragon you call a mother. You owe me for that.”
“My mother?” Aviyya’s voice rose half an octave. “You went to see my mother?”
“For some official clout to get those crotting orders changed, you’re damned right I did. But all I ended up with was this old horse doctor — ” for just an instant, her eyes flickered across Etch’s turned-away face, “ — and this greenie kid with a yen for fancy dancing.”
“Terricel!” Aviyya exclaimed as if she’d just remembered he was there. “Baby brother!” She hugged Terris hard. He was a little surprised at the strength of her arms coupled with the softness of the cheek pressed against his. She smelled faintly of elkskin and lye soap. Then she grabbed his shoulders and pushed him away.
“You’ve got to tell me — never mind, let’s get out of here and then we can sort out the whole story. This is the horse doctor? You have a name? Never mind that, too. Griss!” She headed for the door, Terris in tow. “Where the hell is Jakon putting us?”
The tent Grissem led them to was actually a hut that had begun life as a root storage shelter and then been converted to overflow sleeping space when the trading camp was set up. The dirt floor lay about two feet below ground level, smooth but damp and very cold. Ratty furs from some unrecognizable animal covered the walls. Half a dozen fir-bough pallets encircled the central fire pit, which had been lit earlier and was now burning down to embers. Smoke curled upward through an opening in the conical roof. A pile of travel packs, saddlebags, and bedding stood just inside the single door.
“I wonder who we’ve kicked out,” Etch murmured, as he pulled his pack from the heap. “Or what they did to get stuck here in the first place.”
“Hunh!” said Kardith. “After the hole they put me in, this is downright lavish.” She sat down on one of the pallets and poked the stuffing. “Look, no bedmice.”
“I thought the northers kept men and women separate,” Etch said as he sat beside her.
“They do. Unmarried ones, anyway,” said Aviyya. “But they’ve probably given up on us amoral southers.” She pushed Terris down on another pallet and sat facing him. “All right, baby brother, what sort of mess have you been getting yourself into? Exactly what did Jakon mean by more at stake? And what the hell are you doing out here?”
“I’m rescuing you,” he said, bristling inside at being treated like a child. “At least that’s how it started out.”
He began the story once again, beginning with the assassination of Pateros. He’d repeated the episodes so many times now they had a curious distant quality, like something from an outdated textbook. It was hard to believe he’d actually been there and several times he’d almost been killed. Some new, inner caution kept him from mentioning his suspicions about Esmelda’s secret guardianship of Harth.
Aviyya proved a far different listener than Etch or Jakon. For one thing, she kept interrupting. Terris couldn’t go more than a sentence or two without her interrupting with another question. She wanted every step explained, none of the details left out. Also, she’d burst out with “Drat!” at such increasing frequency that Etch finally turned to her and said, “Harth’s sweet ass, woman, you come up with the most unimaginative swearing I’ve heard in my entire life!” While Kardith and Terris laughed aloud, Aviyya stared at him with a puzzled expression and went right on with her next question.
“This is bad, Terr,” she said when he was finished. “This is really bad. I wish you’d turned around right then and brought the dagger back to Esme. She would have known what to do with it.”
“I take responsibility for my decision,” Terris said tightly.
She glared at him, lips pressed together. “You have no idea what you’re playing with — ”
“Back off, Avi,” Kardith said. “He’s not the baby brother you left behind. Not anymore.”
“Meanwhile,” Avi went on after a heartbeat, “who knows how long it’ll take us to get out of this mess — not soon, anyway, what with Jakon dragging us all up to this Northlight thing of his. It’s not worth risking all of Har — of Laurea for one person. You should have let me rot, all of you.”
“That’s not only stupid, it’s just plain ungrateful,” Etch snapped. “After what your brother and Kardith went through to find you. Kardith especially. What she almost lost — what she was willing to give up to save your lousy skin! You don’t throw that kind of loyalty away, you — ”
“You don’t know anything about it!” Aviyya snapped.
Etch stared back at her, unflinching. “Horse-crotting toxic shit.”
Aviyya’s hand, resting on her thigh, twitched as if reaching for a knife that wasn’t there.
“Stop it, both of you!” said Terris. “Did we come all this way just to snipe at each other like a clutch of twitterbats? We’ve got this Northlight test to deal with, and Jakon to convince to let us go — with the dagger — not to mention getting it back to Laureal City and building a case against Montborne. If either of you thinks this bickering is going to help, I’d sure like to know how!”
“Drat.” Aviyya ran one hand through her thick black hair. “You’re right.”
“Meanwhile,” Kardith said, leaning forward in Aviyya’s direction, “I for one would like to hear how you got up here when I couldn’t find a trace of you anywhere between the camp and the badlands.”
“That’s a story and a half,” Aviyya said. “It all happened because I was stupid.”
“Stupid?” Kardith said, grinning wickedly. “You’re admitting you might have been stupid?”
“You’d think after all those years I’d be used to the Ridge weirdies, wouldn’t you? They were all clustered around me that last night. Drove me half bats. I went off a little way from the camp...and then — I wasn’t on the Ridge any more.”
“You fell down a canyon?” Terris asked, remembering his vision of her struggling up a mud-slick slope, her face white and bleeding.
“There’s no place to fall down to.” Aviyya’s eyes widened. “But I did have a fall like that, a couple of years ago. It was during a skirmish. I felt — for a moment, I felt as if you were right there with me.”
Terris thought of his other visions, especially his glimpses of Esme confronting Montborne, wearing the Guardian’s medallion. Were they past or future...or only possibility?
“I turned around, heading eastward, back toward camp,” Aviyya went on, “and there I was, in the middle of this green tunnel. Not scrub-grass green, more like the color of malachite. All green, as far as I could see. It was so quiet the only thing I could hear was my own breathing. No flies, lizards, twitterbats, nothing.”
“I know,” Terris said. “I’ve seen it, too.”
Aviyya hung her head, and her soft dark curls hung forward around her face like a veil. She took a deep breath. “I have no idea how long I was there. Long enough to get thirsty — I was scared to go too far looking for water. I tried using my knife to mark the walls, but it wouldn’t leave a scratch. Finally — I don’t know how I did it. I was pacing out a path...and I turned around...and there was a shimmer like a Ridge weirdie and I was out. But not back at the camp.”
“The badlands, where you hid your button?” asked Kardith.
“I knew you’d find it if Derron let you search that far,” Aviyya said. “Anyway, by the time I’d figured out where I was, I was nabbed by Jakon’s scouts. They’re even jumpier about trespass than we are. Caught me way off guard. I should’ve been able to handle them — there were only three.”
“You were always no good with a knife,” Kardith said cheerfully. She looked happier, but there was a strain in her voice, a poignancy that he couldn’t quite place.
“Right,” said Aviyya. “You can guess what a time I had trying to explain to Jakon what I was doing here — ”
“And Jakon didn’t believe a word of it,” Terris said.
“I can hardly blame him. If I were him, I wouldn’t believe me either. But I was enough of a mystery that he didn’t kill me right off, even when I spit in his eye rather than eat his bread and salt.”
“So we weren’t the first southers to come barging over the borders with unlikely stories,” said Terris.“Except,” he added grimly, “we were the ones with the dagger.”