The little
fortress settled in upon itself slowly, as though made of wax only
slightly overheated. As soon as I fell asleep and could not
interfere, Goblin handed the magical siege work over to Tobo, who
did a creditable job of rooting the enemy survivors out of their
shelter. The wicked little thing had been taking lessons a lot
longer than he and his teachers would admit.
The garrison was bringing out its dead and wounded when a shout
awakened me. I sat up. Morning had begun to arrive. And the world
had changed.
“What’s Spiff’s problem?” I asked.
One of my veterans had recognized one of theirs.
The devil himself arrived to explain. “The guy in charge.
That’s Khusavir Pete, Sleepy. You remember, we thought he was
killed when the Bahrata Battalion got wiped out in the ambush at
Kushkhoshi.”
“I remember.” And I recalled something that Spiff
did not know, a fact I shared only with Murgen, who had been the
ghost in the rushes while the slaughter was taking place. Khusavir
Pete, at that time a sworn brother of the Company, had led our
largest surviving force of allies into a trap that efficiently took
us out of the Kiaulune wars. Khusavir Pete had cut a deal. Khusavir
Pete had betrayed his own brothers. Khusavir Pete was high on my
list of people I wanted to meet again, though until just now I had
been the only one who knew that he had survived and that his
treachery had been rewarded with a high post, money and a new name.
But just seeing him had some of the men figuring it out fast.
“You should’ve asked her to change your face,
too,” I told him when they flung him down bleeding in front
of me. “Though you’ve had a better run than you
probably expected when she turned you.” I held his eyes with
mine. What he saw convinced him it would not be worth his trouble
to deny anything. Vajra the Naga had come out to play.
More and more of the men gathered around, most of them not
getting it until I explained how Khusavir Pete had been seduced by
Soulcatcher into betraying and helping destroy more than five
hundred of our brothers and allies. Would-be greetings quickly
became imaginative suggestions of ways whereby we might reduce the
traitor’s life expectancy. I let the man listen until some of
the troops tried to lay hands on. Then I told Goblin, “Hide
him somewhere. We may have a use for him yet.”
The excitement was over. I had indulged in a decent meal. My
attitude much improved, I took the opportunity to renew my
acquaintance with Master Surendranath Santaraksita. “This
life seems to agree with you,” I told him as
I arrived. “You look better now than you did when we left
the city.” And that was true.
“Dorabee? Lad, I thought you were dead. Despite their
endless assurances.” He leaned closer and confided,
“They aren’t all honest men, your comrades.”
“By some chance did Goblin and One-Eye offer to teach you
to play tonk?”
The librarian managed to look a little sheepish.
“Not to play with them is a lesson everyone has to
learn.”
Sheepishness transformed into impishness. “I think I
taught them a little something, too. Card tricks were one of my
hobbies when I was younger.”
I had to laugh at the idea of those two villains getting taken
themselves. “Have you discovered anything that would be
useful to me?”
“I’ve read every word in every book we brought
along, including all of your company’s modern chronicles
written in languages known to me. I found nothing remarkable. I
have been amusing myself by trying to work backward into the
chronicles I can’t read by comparing materials repeated in
more than one language.”
Murgen had done a lot of that. He had had a thing about copying
stuff over, in cleaner drafts, and one of his great projects had
been to revise Lady’s and the Captain’s Annals for
accuracy, based on evidence provided by other witnesses, while
rendering them into modern Taglian. We have all done that to our
predecessors, some, so that every recent volume of the Annals is
really an unwilling collaboration.
I said, “We drag a lot of books around, don’t
we?”
“Like snails, carrying your history on your
back.”
“It’s who we are. Cute image, though. Doesn’t
all that study get dull after a while?”
“The boy keeps me sharp.”
“Boy?”
“Tobo. He’s a brilliant student. Even more amazing
than you were.”
“Tobo?”
“I know. Who would expect it of a Nyueng Bao? You’re
destroying all my preconceptions, Dorabee.”
“Mine are taking a beating, too.” Tobo? Either
Santaraksita had an unsuspected talent for inspiring students or
Tobo had suffered an epiphany and had become miraculously
motivated. “You sure it’s Tobo and not a
changeling?”
The demon himself popped in. “Sleepy. Runmust and
Riverwalker and them are on their way over. Good morning, Master
Santaraksita.” Tobo actually seemed excited to be there.
“I don’t have any other duties right now. Oh, Sleepy,
Dad wants to talk to you.”
“Where?” Things had been happening too fast. There
had been no chance to catch up with Murgen.
“Goblin’s tent. Everybody but Mom thought that would
be the safest place to keep him.”
I had no trouble picturing Sahra being irritated about not being
able to share the occasional private moment with her husband.
When I ducked out, the young man and the old were already
settling with a book. I glared a warning at Santaraksita which, it
developed, was both wasted and unnecessary.
Goblin was not home. Of course not. He was working his way
through a long list of jobs bestowed upon him by me. Chuckle.
I found it hard to credit the possibility that one human being
could make so huge a mess in a space so constricted. The inside of
Goblin’s tent was barely wider than either of us was tall and
twice as deep. At its peak it was tall enough for me to stand up
with two inches to spare. What looked like a milkmaid’s
stool, undoubtedly stolen, constituted the wizard’s entire
suite of furniture. A ragged burrow of blankets betrayed where he
slept. The rest of the space was occupied by a random jumble,
mostly stuff that looked like it had been discarded by a procession
of previous owners. There was no obvious theme to the
collection.
It had to be stuff he had acquired since his arrival here.
Sahra would never have allowed him space on a barge for such
junk.
The mist projector stood at the head of Goblin’s smelly
bedding, tilted precariously, leaking water. “If this is the
safest place to keep that darned thing, then the whole Company is
mad with delusions of adequacy.”
A whisper came from the mist projector. I got down close to it,
which offered me an opportunity to become intimately aware of the
aroma permanently associated with Goblin’s bedding, some
pieces of which must have been with him since he was in diapers.
“What?”
Murgen’s strongest effort was barely audible. “More
water. You need to add more water or there won’t be any mist
much longer.”
I started to drag the evidence out of the tent.
Anger gave Murgen a little more voice. “No, dammit! Bring
the water to me, don’t take me to the water. If you suffer
from a compulsion to drag me around, at least wait until after you
water me. And don’t waste time. I’m going to lose my
anchor here in a few minutes.”
Finding a gallon of water turned out to be a challenging
experience.
“What took you so damned long?”
“Bit of an adventure coming up with the water. Seems it
never occurred to any of these morons that we need to have some
handy somewhere. Just in case the royal army decides to camp
between us and the creek where we’ve been getting it, which
is almost a mile away. I just unleashed several geniuses on the
problem. How am I supposed to put this in here?”
“There’s a cork in the rear. It might be of some use
to you to start doing readings from the Annals. Like they do in
temples. The way I used to do sometimes. Pick something
situationally appropriate. ‘In those days the Company was in
service’ and so on, so they have examples of why it might be
useful to haul water up the hill before you have to use it, and
such like. These are grown men. You can’t just bully them
into doing the right things. But if you start reading to them,
they’ll have heard tell of other times when the Annalist did
that and they’ll recall it was always right before the big
shitstorm moved in. You’ll get their attention.”
“Tobo said you want to talk to me.”
“I need to catch you up on what’s going on
elsewhere. And I want to make suggestions about your preparations
for the plain, one of which is to listen to Willow Swan but the
most critical of which is, you’re going to have to upgrade
discipline. The plain is deadly. Even worse than the Plain of Fear,
which you don’t remember. You can’t ignore the rules
and stay alive there. One idea would be for you not to burn or bury
the man who was killed by the shadow last night. Make every
survivor look at him and think about what will happen to all of you
if even one of you screws up up there. Read them the passages
chronicling our adventures. Have Swan bear witness.”
“I could just bring a handful of reliables in to get
you.”
“You could. But the rest of the world wouldn’t be
very nice to the men you leave behind. Right now there’s a
shadow heading north to tell Soulcatcher where you are. She may
know enough already to figure out what you’re trying to do.
She definitely doesn’t want her sister and Croaker on the
loose and nursing a grudge. She’ll get here as fast as she
can. And aside from Soulcatcher, there’s Narayan Singh. He
retains Kina’s countenance, so he’s extremely hard to
trace but I do catch glimpses occasionally. He’s on this side
of the Dandha Presh and he’s probably not far away. He wants
to recapture the Daughter of Night and reunite her with the book
you traded for the Key. Which, by the way, you should take away
from Uncle Doj before he becomes overly tempted to try something on
his own. And so Goblin can study it.”
“Uhm?” He was a gush of information this morning,
all of it carefully rehearsed.
“There’s more to the Key than you see right away. I
have a feeling the Deceiver overlooked something. Doj keeps picking
at it, trying to find out what’s inside the iron. We should
find out more about it before we trust it. And we need to find out
fast. It won’t be all that long before that shadow gets to
Taglios.”
“River and Runmust are coming in. They’re halfway
responsible people. I’ll turn some of the work over to them
as soon as they’re rested up. Then I can worry
about—”
“Worry about it now. Let Swan sergeant for you. He’s
experienced and he’s got no choice but to throw in with us
now. Catcher will never believe that he didn’t betray
her.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You don’t have to do everything yourself, Sleepy.
If you’re going to take charge, you need to learn to tell
people what needs doing, then get out of the way and let them do
it. You keep hanging over their shoulders nagging like
somebody’s mother, you aren’t going to get much
cooperation. You seduced that fat boy yet?”
“What?”
“That local-yokel captain. The one who couldn’t keep
in step if you painted his feet different colors. You got him
wrapped up yet?”
“You’re zigging when I’m zagging. You lost me
completely.”
“Let me draw you a picture. You forget to tell him Catcher
is going to stop by. You get him to make a deal. He keeps his job.
He helps us out so he can get us out of his hair. When he
isn’t looking, you fix him up so when the shitstorm starts,
he don’t have no choice but to take his chances with
us.”
“I have him wrapped up, then. Seventy percent.”
“Hey. Blow in his ear. Throw a liplock on his love muscle.
Do whatever you have to. If Catcher loses him, she won’t ever
trust anybody else down here, either.”
Goblin used almost the same language as Murgen had when I
stopped to visit again. He found Murgen’s advice fully
excellent. “Grab fat boy by his prong and never let go. Give
him a little squeeze once in a while to keep him
smiling.”
“I’ve probably said it before. You’re one
cynical mud-sucker.”
“It’s all those years of watching out for One-Eye
that done it to me. I was a sweet, innocent young thing when I
joined this outfit. Not unlike yourself.”
“You were born wicked and cynical.”
Goblin chuckled. “How much stuff do you think you need to
collect before we go up the hill? How long do you think it’ll
take?”
“It won’t take forever if Suvrin
cooperates.”
“Never, ever, forget that you don’t have long. I
can’t emphasize that enough. Soulcatcher is coming.
You’ve never seen her when she’s all worked
up.”
“The Kiaulune wars don’t count?” He must have
seen something extreme. He was determined to pound the point
home.
“The Kiaulune wars don’t count. She was just
entertaining herself with those.”
I forced myself to make the visit I had been avoiding.
The Daughter of Night wore ankle shackles. She resided inside an
iron cage heavily impregnated with spells that caused
ever-increasing agony as their victim moved farther away. She could
escape but that would hurt. If she pushed it hard enough, she would
die.
It appeared that every possible step had been taken to keep her
under control. Except the lethal step reason urged me to take. I
had no more motive for keeping her alive—except that I had given
my word.
The men all took turns being exposed to her, in pairs, at
mealtimes and such. Sahra had not been lax. She appreciated the
danger the girl represented.
My first glimpse left me stricken with envy. Despite her
disadvantages, she had kept herself beautiful, looking much like
her mother in a fresher body. But something infinitely older and
darker looked out through her pretty blue eyes. For a moment she
struck me not as the Daughter of Night, but as the darkness
itself.
She did have plenty of time to commune with her spiritual
mother.
She smiled as though aware of the serpents of dark temptation
slithering the black corridors of my mind. I wanted to bed her. I
wanted to murder her. I wanted to run away, begging for mercy. It
took an exercise of will to remind myself that Kina and her
children were not evil in the sense that northerners or even my
Vehdna co-religionists understood evil.
Nevertheless . . . she was the darkness.
I stepped back, tossed the tent flap open so my ally, daylight,
could come inside. The girl lost her smile. She backed to the far
side of her cage. I could think of nothing to say. There was really
nothing we could say to one another. I had no inclination to gloat
and little news of the world outside to report, which might
motivate her to do something besides wait.
She had her spiritual mother’s patience, that was
sure.
A blow from behind rocked me. I clawed at my stubby little
sword.
White wings mussed my nattily arranged hair. Talons dug into my
shoulder. The Daughter of Night stared at the white crow and
revealed real emotion for the first time in a long time. Her
confidence wavered. Fear leaked through. She pressed back against
the bars behind her.
“Have you two met?” I asked.
The crow said something like, “Wawk! Wiranda!”
The girl began to shake. If possible, she became even paler. Her
jaw seemed clenched so tight her teeth ought to be cracking. I made
a mental note to discuss this with Murgen. He knew something about
the crow.
What could rattle the girl so badly?
The crow laughed. It whispered, “Sister, sister,”
and launched itself back into the sunlight, where it startled some
passing brother into a fit of curses.
I stared at the girl, watched the inner steel reassert itself.
Her gaze met mine. I felt the fear within her evaporate. I was
nothing to her, less than an insect, certainly less than a stubbed
toe at the beginning of her long trek across the ages.
Shuddering, I broke eye contact.
That was a scary kid.
The little
fortress settled in upon itself slowly, as though made of wax only
slightly overheated. As soon as I fell asleep and could not
interfere, Goblin handed the magical siege work over to Tobo, who
did a creditable job of rooting the enemy survivors out of their
shelter. The wicked little thing had been taking lessons a lot
longer than he and his teachers would admit.
The garrison was bringing out its dead and wounded when a shout
awakened me. I sat up. Morning had begun to arrive. And the world
had changed.
“What’s Spiff’s problem?” I asked.
One of my veterans had recognized one of theirs.
The devil himself arrived to explain. “The guy in charge.
That’s Khusavir Pete, Sleepy. You remember, we thought he was
killed when the Bahrata Battalion got wiped out in the ambush at
Kushkhoshi.”
“I remember.” And I recalled something that Spiff
did not know, a fact I shared only with Murgen, who had been the
ghost in the rushes while the slaughter was taking place. Khusavir
Pete, at that time a sworn brother of the Company, had led our
largest surviving force of allies into a trap that efficiently took
us out of the Kiaulune wars. Khusavir Pete had cut a deal. Khusavir
Pete had betrayed his own brothers. Khusavir Pete was high on my
list of people I wanted to meet again, though until just now I had
been the only one who knew that he had survived and that his
treachery had been rewarded with a high post, money and a new name.
But just seeing him had some of the men figuring it out fast.
“You should’ve asked her to change your face,
too,” I told him when they flung him down bleeding in front
of me. “Though you’ve had a better run than you
probably expected when she turned you.” I held his eyes with
mine. What he saw convinced him it would not be worth his trouble
to deny anything. Vajra the Naga had come out to play.
More and more of the men gathered around, most of them not
getting it until I explained how Khusavir Pete had been seduced by
Soulcatcher into betraying and helping destroy more than five
hundred of our brothers and allies. Would-be greetings quickly
became imaginative suggestions of ways whereby we might reduce the
traitor’s life expectancy. I let the man listen until some of
the troops tried to lay hands on. Then I told Goblin, “Hide
him somewhere. We may have a use for him yet.”
The excitement was over. I had indulged in a decent meal. My
attitude much improved, I took the opportunity to renew my
acquaintance with Master Surendranath Santaraksita. “This
life seems to agree with you,” I told him as
I arrived. “You look better now than you did when we left
the city.” And that was true.
“Dorabee? Lad, I thought you were dead. Despite their
endless assurances.” He leaned closer and confided,
“They aren’t all honest men, your comrades.”
“By some chance did Goblin and One-Eye offer to teach you
to play tonk?”
The librarian managed to look a little sheepish.
“Not to play with them is a lesson everyone has to
learn.”
Sheepishness transformed into impishness. “I think I
taught them a little something, too. Card tricks were one of my
hobbies when I was younger.”
I had to laugh at the idea of those two villains getting taken
themselves. “Have you discovered anything that would be
useful to me?”
“I’ve read every word in every book we brought
along, including all of your company’s modern chronicles
written in languages known to me. I found nothing remarkable. I
have been amusing myself by trying to work backward into the
chronicles I can’t read by comparing materials repeated in
more than one language.”
Murgen had done a lot of that. He had had a thing about copying
stuff over, in cleaner drafts, and one of his great projects had
been to revise Lady’s and the Captain’s Annals for
accuracy, based on evidence provided by other witnesses, while
rendering them into modern Taglian. We have all done that to our
predecessors, some, so that every recent volume of the Annals is
really an unwilling collaboration.
I said, “We drag a lot of books around, don’t
we?”
“Like snails, carrying your history on your
back.”
“It’s who we are. Cute image, though. Doesn’t
all that study get dull after a while?”
“The boy keeps me sharp.”
“Boy?”
“Tobo. He’s a brilliant student. Even more amazing
than you were.”
“Tobo?”
“I know. Who would expect it of a Nyueng Bao? You’re
destroying all my preconceptions, Dorabee.”
“Mine are taking a beating, too.” Tobo? Either
Santaraksita had an unsuspected talent for inspiring students or
Tobo had suffered an epiphany and had become miraculously
motivated. “You sure it’s Tobo and not a
changeling?”
The demon himself popped in. “Sleepy. Runmust and
Riverwalker and them are on their way over. Good morning, Master
Santaraksita.” Tobo actually seemed excited to be there.
“I don’t have any other duties right now. Oh, Sleepy,
Dad wants to talk to you.”
“Where?” Things had been happening too fast. There
had been no chance to catch up with Murgen.
“Goblin’s tent. Everybody but Mom thought that would
be the safest place to keep him.”
I had no trouble picturing Sahra being irritated about not being
able to share the occasional private moment with her husband.
When I ducked out, the young man and the old were already
settling with a book. I glared a warning at Santaraksita which, it
developed, was both wasted and unnecessary.
Goblin was not home. Of course not. He was working his way
through a long list of jobs bestowed upon him by me. Chuckle.
I found it hard to credit the possibility that one human being
could make so huge a mess in a space so constricted. The inside of
Goblin’s tent was barely wider than either of us was tall and
twice as deep. At its peak it was tall enough for me to stand up
with two inches to spare. What looked like a milkmaid’s
stool, undoubtedly stolen, constituted the wizard’s entire
suite of furniture. A ragged burrow of blankets betrayed where he
slept. The rest of the space was occupied by a random jumble,
mostly stuff that looked like it had been discarded by a procession
of previous owners. There was no obvious theme to the
collection.
It had to be stuff he had acquired since his arrival here.
Sahra would never have allowed him space on a barge for such
junk.
The mist projector stood at the head of Goblin’s smelly
bedding, tilted precariously, leaking water. “If this is the
safest place to keep that darned thing, then the whole Company is
mad with delusions of adequacy.”
A whisper came from the mist projector. I got down close to it,
which offered me an opportunity to become intimately aware of the
aroma permanently associated with Goblin’s bedding, some
pieces of which must have been with him since he was in diapers.
“What?”
Murgen’s strongest effort was barely audible. “More
water. You need to add more water or there won’t be any mist
much longer.”
I started to drag the evidence out of the tent.
Anger gave Murgen a little more voice. “No, dammit! Bring
the water to me, don’t take me to the water. If you suffer
from a compulsion to drag me around, at least wait until after you
water me. And don’t waste time. I’m going to lose my
anchor here in a few minutes.”
Finding a gallon of water turned out to be a challenging
experience.
“What took you so damned long?”
“Bit of an adventure coming up with the water. Seems it
never occurred to any of these morons that we need to have some
handy somewhere. Just in case the royal army decides to camp
between us and the creek where we’ve been getting it, which
is almost a mile away. I just unleashed several geniuses on the
problem. How am I supposed to put this in here?”
“There’s a cork in the rear. It might be of some use
to you to start doing readings from the Annals. Like they do in
temples. The way I used to do sometimes. Pick something
situationally appropriate. ‘In those days the Company was in
service’ and so on, so they have examples of why it might be
useful to haul water up the hill before you have to use it, and
such like. These are grown men. You can’t just bully them
into doing the right things. But if you start reading to them,
they’ll have heard tell of other times when the Annalist did
that and they’ll recall it was always right before the big
shitstorm moved in. You’ll get their attention.”
“Tobo said you want to talk to me.”
“I need to catch you up on what’s going on
elsewhere. And I want to make suggestions about your preparations
for the plain, one of which is to listen to Willow Swan but the
most critical of which is, you’re going to have to upgrade
discipline. The plain is deadly. Even worse than the Plain of Fear,
which you don’t remember. You can’t ignore the rules
and stay alive there. One idea would be for you not to burn or bury
the man who was killed by the shadow last night. Make every
survivor look at him and think about what will happen to all of you
if even one of you screws up up there. Read them the passages
chronicling our adventures. Have Swan bear witness.”
“I could just bring a handful of reliables in to get
you.”
“You could. But the rest of the world wouldn’t be
very nice to the men you leave behind. Right now there’s a
shadow heading north to tell Soulcatcher where you are. She may
know enough already to figure out what you’re trying to do.
She definitely doesn’t want her sister and Croaker on the
loose and nursing a grudge. She’ll get here as fast as she
can. And aside from Soulcatcher, there’s Narayan Singh. He
retains Kina’s countenance, so he’s extremely hard to
trace but I do catch glimpses occasionally. He’s on this side
of the Dandha Presh and he’s probably not far away. He wants
to recapture the Daughter of Night and reunite her with the book
you traded for the Key. Which, by the way, you should take away
from Uncle Doj before he becomes overly tempted to try something on
his own. And so Goblin can study it.”
“Uhm?” He was a gush of information this morning,
all of it carefully rehearsed.
“There’s more to the Key than you see right away. I
have a feeling the Deceiver overlooked something. Doj keeps picking
at it, trying to find out what’s inside the iron. We should
find out more about it before we trust it. And we need to find out
fast. It won’t be all that long before that shadow gets to
Taglios.”
“River and Runmust are coming in. They’re halfway
responsible people. I’ll turn some of the work over to them
as soon as they’re rested up. Then I can worry
about—”
“Worry about it now. Let Swan sergeant for you. He’s
experienced and he’s got no choice but to throw in with us
now. Catcher will never believe that he didn’t betray
her.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You don’t have to do everything yourself, Sleepy.
If you’re going to take charge, you need to learn to tell
people what needs doing, then get out of the way and let them do
it. You keep hanging over their shoulders nagging like
somebody’s mother, you aren’t going to get much
cooperation. You seduced that fat boy yet?”
“What?”
“That local-yokel captain. The one who couldn’t keep
in step if you painted his feet different colors. You got him
wrapped up yet?”
“You’re zigging when I’m zagging. You lost me
completely.”
“Let me draw you a picture. You forget to tell him Catcher
is going to stop by. You get him to make a deal. He keeps his job.
He helps us out so he can get us out of his hair. When he
isn’t looking, you fix him up so when the shitstorm starts,
he don’t have no choice but to take his chances with
us.”
“I have him wrapped up, then. Seventy percent.”
“Hey. Blow in his ear. Throw a liplock on his love muscle.
Do whatever you have to. If Catcher loses him, she won’t ever
trust anybody else down here, either.”
Goblin used almost the same language as Murgen had when I
stopped to visit again. He found Murgen’s advice fully
excellent. “Grab fat boy by his prong and never let go. Give
him a little squeeze once in a while to keep him
smiling.”
“I’ve probably said it before. You’re one
cynical mud-sucker.”
“It’s all those years of watching out for One-Eye
that done it to me. I was a sweet, innocent young thing when I
joined this outfit. Not unlike yourself.”
“You were born wicked and cynical.”
Goblin chuckled. “How much stuff do you think you need to
collect before we go up the hill? How long do you think it’ll
take?”
“It won’t take forever if Suvrin
cooperates.”
“Never, ever, forget that you don’t have long. I
can’t emphasize that enough. Soulcatcher is coming.
You’ve never seen her when she’s all worked
up.”
“The Kiaulune wars don’t count?” He must have
seen something extreme. He was determined to pound the point
home.
“The Kiaulune wars don’t count. She was just
entertaining herself with those.”
I forced myself to make the visit I had been avoiding.
The Daughter of Night wore ankle shackles. She resided inside an
iron cage heavily impregnated with spells that caused
ever-increasing agony as their victim moved farther away. She could
escape but that would hurt. If she pushed it hard enough, she would
die.
It appeared that every possible step had been taken to keep her
under control. Except the lethal step reason urged me to take. I
had no more motive for keeping her alive—except that I had given
my word.
The men all took turns being exposed to her, in pairs, at
mealtimes and such. Sahra had not been lax. She appreciated the
danger the girl represented.
My first glimpse left me stricken with envy. Despite her
disadvantages, she had kept herself beautiful, looking much like
her mother in a fresher body. But something infinitely older and
darker looked out through her pretty blue eyes. For a moment she
struck me not as the Daughter of Night, but as the darkness
itself.
She did have plenty of time to commune with her spiritual
mother.
She smiled as though aware of the serpents of dark temptation
slithering the black corridors of my mind. I wanted to bed her. I
wanted to murder her. I wanted to run away, begging for mercy. It
took an exercise of will to remind myself that Kina and her
children were not evil in the sense that northerners or even my
Vehdna co-religionists understood evil.
Nevertheless . . . she was the darkness.
I stepped back, tossed the tent flap open so my ally, daylight,
could come inside. The girl lost her smile. She backed to the far
side of her cage. I could think of nothing to say. There was really
nothing we could say to one another. I had no inclination to gloat
and little news of the world outside to report, which might
motivate her to do something besides wait.
She had her spiritual mother’s patience, that was
sure.
A blow from behind rocked me. I clawed at my stubby little
sword.
White wings mussed my nattily arranged hair. Talons dug into my
shoulder. The Daughter of Night stared at the white crow and
revealed real emotion for the first time in a long time. Her
confidence wavered. Fear leaked through. She pressed back against
the bars behind her.
“Have you two met?” I asked.
The crow said something like, “Wawk! Wiranda!”
The girl began to shake. If possible, she became even paler. Her
jaw seemed clenched so tight her teeth ought to be cracking. I made
a mental note to discuss this with Murgen. He knew something about
the crow.
What could rattle the girl so badly?
The crow laughed. It whispered, “Sister, sister,”
and launched itself back into the sunlight, where it startled some
passing brother into a fit of curses.
I stared at the girl, watched the inner steel reassert itself.
Her gaze met mine. I felt the fear within her evaporate. I was
nothing to her, less than an insect, certainly less than a stubbed
toe at the beginning of her long trek across the ages.
Shuddering, I broke eye contact.
That was a scary kid.