The Witches of Wenshar Page 4

  Anger heated in him, as she had no doubt meant it to; words crowded to his lips about frustrated spinsters who made a virtue of the fact that no man would tumble them on a bet. But, with a physical effort, he closed his muscles around those words like a fist. To buy the bread, he thought, you couldn’t insult the baker—and in any case, what she thought about magic was none of his business.

  But he’d be damn lucky, he thought dourly, looking at that pale, fine-boned face in the torchlight, if he didn’t end by strangling the woman with her own long, red hair.

  In his long silence, she studied him appraisingly. She had expected, he realized, some other reaction. After a moment she went on, “If you feel you have the strength and willingness to follow that path, come to me where I teach in the public gardens tomorrow afternoon.”

  She inclined her head with a graciousness that made Sun Wolf long to slap her and prepared to move off. Down in the Hall, the old laundress called out to her, “I’ll bet you’re pleased to have him join you—as a change from boys and women!”

  Kaletha’s face flushed with anger as she turned. Around the dirty old hag, the other laundresses and grooms were bellowing with laughter. As in the garden that afternoon, Kaletha was momentarily speechless with anger. In a flash of insight, Sun Wolf realized that, having no sense of humor, she was unable to slide from beneath this kind of indignity, unable even to understand it. And she must, he thought, have had to put up with it daily since she had announced her wizardry to the world.

  All this went through his mind in an instant; as Kaletha drew breath to stammer some reply, he cut in over her words, “It’s the sow in rut that squeals the loudest.”

  The old crone and her friends went into even louder guffaws. “Come down to the laundry and see, you old boar!”

  He gave an elaborate shrug. “I haven’t got all night to stand in the line.”

  The laundress laughed so hard he could easily have counted her teeth, had she possessed any. He turned back to Kaletha and said quietly, “I’ll be there tomorrow, my Lady, after I’ve seen the King.”

  As he and Starhawk walked from the hall, he was aware of Kaletha’s speculative gaze upon his back.

  The empty quarter of the fortress of Tandieras lay beyond the stables, a picked gray skeleton in the wan monochromes of dawn. From where he lay on the wide bed of waffle-crossed latigo and cottonwood poles, Sun Wolf could see through the half-open shutters of the window a broken labyrinth of crumbling adobe walls, fallen roofs, and scattered tiles—what had once been garrison quarters for the troops of Dalwirin, siege housing for the population of their administrative town, and barracoons for hundreds of slave miners. It was deserted now, covering several acres of ground; among the many things his father had considered unmanly for a warrior to possess had been an aesthetic sense, and Sun Wolf seldom admitted to anyone that he found such things as the stripped shapes of rock and wall or the sculpted dunes carved by the will of the wind beautiful.

  Extending his senses, as he had learned to in the meditations Starhawk had taught him, he could feel life stirring in the ruins still. Somewhere desert rats scrabbled over crumbled bricks; somewhere snakes lay dreaming in old ovens, waiting for the sun to warm their cold blood. He felt the quick, furtive flick of a jerboa heading for its burrow. Though it was light enough now to make out the fallen bricks, the dun-colored walls with their drifts of piled sand, and the thrusting black spikes of camel-thorn and bull weed against them, there was not yet any sound of birds.

  Traveling along the hem of the desert, he had grown familiar with all of them—sand warblers and wheatears and the soft, timid murmur of rock doves. The wells in the empty quarter should have drawn them by the hundreds.

  He frowned.

  Against his shoulder, Starhawk still slept, all her cheetah deadliness loosened and her thin face peaceful, her short crop of white-blonde hair ruffled and sticking up like a child’s. The Wolf liked to think of his relationship with this woman whom he had known so long as one of equals, warriors of matched strength and capability. But at times like this, he was conscious of feeling toward her a desperate tenderness, a desire to shelter and protect, wholly at odds with their daytime selves or the lion-like lusts of the deep night. He grinned a little at himself—Starhawk was probably the least protectable woman he’d ever encountered.

  I’m getting old, he thought ruefully. There was no fear in it, though a year ago it would have terrified him; he felt only amusement at himself. Old and soft.

  Like the ruins, Starhawk’s was a beauty of rocks and bones and scars. Moving his head a little, he kissed the delicate curve of bone on the outer corner of her eye.

  Still there was no sound of birds.

  His sleep had been unrestful, troubled by inchoate dreams. His anger at Kaletha had bitten deep; he realized that the anger was also at fate, at his ancestors, and at the fact that he’d had to go cap-in-hand to a woman and swallow her self-righteous insults, because only she could give him what he needed. In Wrynde, he remembered, it had been whispered that, like the mad God of the Bards, he had traded his eye for wisdom—he only wished that had been the case.

  Yet he knew that Starhawk had been right, as she usually was. What angered him most about Kaletha—her arrogant assumption that she needed no teacher and that she herself was qualified to judge her own progress and that of others—was precisely what he himself was doing in refusing to accept her tutelage.

  Beside him, Starhawk moved in her sleep, her arm tightening around his ribcage as if she found reassurance in the touch. He stroked her shoulder, the skin silky under his hand, and gazed out at the pink reflections warming the upper edges of the ruined walls. A stir of wind brought him the warm smell of the stables and the drift of baking bread from the palace kitchens.

  Then the wind shifted, and he smelled blood.

  Whether Starhawk smelled it, too, and reacted with the hair-trigger reflexes of a warrior in her sleep, or whether she simply felt the stiffening of his muscles, he didn’t know, but a moment later her gray eyes were blinking up into his. She’d been in deep sleep a moment ago, but she neither moved nor spoke, instinctively keeping silence against any possible threat.

  “Do you smell it?” he asked softly, but the wind had shifted again. There were only the scents of burning wood and baking bread from the kitchens. So it isn’t just the smell of chicken-killing for tonight’s dinner, he thought to himself.

  She shook her head. All the childlike helplessness of sleep had dissolved into what it really was—his own fancies—and the woman who had curled so trustingly into his shoulder had a knife in her hand, ready for anything. Starhawk, the Wolf reflected with a grin, was the only person he knew who could be stark naked and still produce a concealed weapon at a second’s notice.

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “I heard jackals and pariah-dogs out in the empty quarter last night...” He frowned again and closed his eye, stilling his mind as he had often done scouting, listening as a wizard listens. The empty quarter was silent. No murmur of the doves that must nest there, no shrill cries of swifts, though it was time and past time when birds called their territories. Though the red trace of blood touched his nostrils again, he could hear no stealthy pad of jackal feet, no querulous snarls of scavenger rats. In the stables nearby a horse nickered softly over its morning feed; a girl began to sing.

  Soundlessly, the Wolf rolled out of bed, found his boots and the buckskin trousers he’d worn down from Wrynde, his shirt and doublet, and his belt with sword and daggers. When Starhawk moved to join him, he shook his head and said again, “I don’t think it’s anything. I’ll be back.”

  The cold was sharp on his face and throat as he stepped out of the little room, a cell in a line of low cells that could have been workshops, guest rooms or makeshift prisons along a narrow, sandy court just off the stables. A storm last week had drifted sand deep against the eastern walls; the adobe faces of the buildings showed marks where pebbles and flying chunks of stone had gouged the so
fter brick. The other cells of the court were deserted. A pack rat went flicking around the doorpost of one to the shelter of the shadows within.

  Cautiously, Sun Wolf moved into the empty quarter. He found the place quite quickly, stalking through the silent maze of empty rooms and fallen beams, caved-in cellars and old wells shrouded thick in greedy vegetation. He had been expecting something, from the smell, but, even so, what he saw filled him with a loathing he could not explain.

  The door of the little adobe workshop had been torn off years ago by the killer sandstorms of the desert; most of the roof tiles had blown away, though rafters barred the open, warming sky. The walls were streaked with years’ worth of dove droppings, where they were not painted over with splashes of blood.

  White and gray feathers were stuck in it and in the puddles on the floor that were still slick and only tacky-dry. From where he stood in the doorway, the Wolf could see the curled, pink feet and torn-off heads of the birds thrown into the corners, already half-invisible under swarming clots of ants.

  He made a move to step into the room, but then drew back. There was something loathsome here, foul and utterly evil—a psychic stench that drove him back in fear, although he knew that whatever had done this was gone. He had sacked cities from the Megantic Sea to the Western Ocean and, when it was necessary to make his point, had cut men and women up alive. He did not know why that small cube of adobe-walled dawnlight and rafter-crossed sky, silent but for the persistent humming of flies, should turn him sick.

  Only three or four doves were dead, less than he’d eat for supper. It was, he reminded himself, no business of his who had killed them, or why.

  But he was a good enough tracker to see, with even the most cursory examination, that there were no footmarks, either entering the room or leaving it.

  Chapter 3

  “DAMNED WOMAN.” OSGARD ANTIVAR, King of Wenshar and nominal Lord of all the K’Chin Desert, propped himself up on the low ebony divan and impatiently shoved aside the blue silk pillow from beneath his left knee. “Says she won’t be responsible if the wound opens up again. Damn her, I’ll be responsible! I’m not going to lie here like a maiden lady with the vapors all day!” The tray of silver-traced copper on the delicate, jointed shirdar camp table beside the couch contained a decanter of wine, but, pointedly, only one wine cup.

  The King fished beneath the divan’s pillows and produced a second one, which he slopped full. “Sit down, Captain, and drink up. You can, even if I’m not supposed to. Damned woman.” Against the vivid reds and blues of the loose bed-robe he wore over shirt and breeches, he still looked gray from loss of blood, save for where the slight flush of fever colored his pouchy cheeks. “I could stand her when she was just the damn librarian. She kept her place, then.”

  Sun Wolf took the indicated chair—like the divan, of heavy, gilt-trimmed ebony—looted fifty years ago from the Governor’s Palace and recently reupholstered in a local red wool. The King’s solar was a big room, built out of the end of the Hall, and lined with windows on two sides. The ever-present storm shutters had been thrown open, and morning sunlight poured through, dazzling on the glass-smooth marble checkerwork of the floor as if on the sea. Like shaggy islands, the white pelts of mountain sheep alternated with black bearskins and scattered rugs of deep-desert work, bright, primitive mosaics of red and blue. It was a comfortable room for a King who’d worked in the mines as a boy.

  “Kaletha tells me that tourniquet of yours probably kept me from being laid up worse than I am. Seems I have to thank you twice.”

  Sun Wolf shrugged dismissively. “I’d already gone to the trouble of saving your hide; be a pity to have wasted my time, after all.” He slouched back in his chair, relaxed but watchful. Under his booming heartiness, the King was on edge; the wine, which Sun Wolf never touched at this hour of the morning, and the tray of white rolls, butter, honey, ham, and dates, which a noiseless servant now brought in, implied more than a man simply thanking another for keeping robbers from making pemmican of him. The King wanted something.

  “That’s what I like!” Osgard laughed. “A man who does what he has to without a lot of bother and fuss—a fighter, a man of his hands!” He threw a glance after the departing servant and refilled his wine cup. “They say you were the best mercenary in the West—at least you commanded the highest prices, back when we were fighting old Shilmarne and her troops. But by the Three, you delivered the goods! What are you doing ragtagging it like a tinker through the Middle Kingdoms, without the price of a roof over your head? You lose your troop?”

  “I gave it up.”

  “Because of that?” Osgard gestured with his wine cup to the leather eye-patch.

  The Wolf shook his head easily. “Just say I gambled high stakes with the gods.”

  “And lost?”

  He touched the patch, the fire-seared socket beneath. “And won.”

  Osgard regarded him shrewdly for a moment, hearing in his shattered voice the echo of all those reasons and knowing that it was all of them that he would hear. He was silent for a moment, his big, work-knotted hands fidgeting with the stem of the goblet. His eyes shifted away, then back. Here it comes, the Wolf thought. Osgard said, “I want to hire you to teach my son.”

  Sun Wolf considered this for a moment in silence. It was the first he’d heard of the boy, for only the King’s daughter had come flying to her father’s side last night. The way word went around a small community like the fortress, there was no way the boy could not have heard. But he only asked, “How old is he?”

  “Nine.” The man’s voice turned flinty. “Nanciormis has started him on sword and horses, but the boy’s a sniveler. He’d rather run and hide than face his lessons like a man. His uncle has his own duties and can’t go after him as he should. It’s time the boy learned to be a man.”

  The tone of hard challenge made Sun Wolf remember his own father. Mistaking his silence, Osgard went on, “I’ll make it worth your while, Captain. He’s the Heir of Wenshar—the first born Heir in a hundred and fifty years, since the days when the Ancient House of Wenshar ruled this land. He’s the foundation of my line, and, by the Three, I want him to be a King that knows how to wield a sword and hold his own!” He drank off his wine and set the cup crashing down on the bronze of the small tabletop, his wide, light-green eyes blazing with the intentness of a man who has always been able to strive for and win what he sought.

  “I’m the fifth King of Wenshar since we threw out the governors and freed ourselves from slavery. I fought alongside my uncle Tyrill against the desert bandits and against old Shilmarne’s troops and whatever you care to name. When Tyrill died, he named me his heir, the way Casfell Ghru named him, and old Kelden the Black before him. None of those men had an heir, barring Kelden’s, who was killed in battle—they all chose the best man they knew as their successor. By the Three, it’s kept the land strong!

  “But it’s different now. My uncle fell when I was young, and I married...” He hesitated infinitesimally, and when he spoke again, it was with a quieter note. “I married a lady of one of the Ancient Houses, the last Princess of the old House of Wenshar.”

  Sun Wolf cocked his head, curious. “Wenshar? From the old city out in the desert?”

  “No.” Osgard cut him off shortly, and his green eyes flickered for a moment with anger. Then, as if realizing he’d spoken more than he meant, he explained awkwardly, “That is—none of her people had been near there in generations. That city’s empty, dead—the armies of the Middle Kingdoms destroyed it when they conquered these parts. But yes, her people used to rule all this country and much of the desert besides. Their house had no power anymore, but they were one of the Ancient Houses, nonetheless. And she was the kindest woman in all these lands and bore me the sweetest daughter a man could want, who’s to marry one of the shirdar lords to seal their alliance with us...And she bore me a son.” He sighed and refilled his cup again, the sunlight blinking hotly on the purple surface of the wine. “The boy’s my heir
. I want him to be the best man as well. He’s got to hold what I’ve held, after I’m gone.”

  Sun Wolf sopped a piece of bread in the honey and said nothing. He was remembering the scene in the tavern last night, the little black man, Norbas Milkom, drinking to the Lady Taswind’s health, and not to her affianced lord’s.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jeryn.” A little too loudly, after a little too long a pause, Osgard went on, “The boy’s not a coward. But he needs discipline. He reads too much, that’s all. I’ve put that right, but he needs to be taught by a warrior, a man who can think in an emergency—a man like yourself. They say you used to run a school up in Wrynde for warriors. Is that true?”

  “It paid to know who I was getting in my troop.”

  The King grunted his approval. “And it pays me to know who this country will be getting as King. Your woman’s a fighter, isn’t she?”

  “She was my second-in-command. She’s gotten me out of places so bad I don’t even want to think about them.”

  “You think she’d take a post in the guard here, if you take it up to teach my boy?”

  He paused in the act of smearing butter on his bread. “Depends on what you’d pay her, probably.”

  Osgard laughed. “There’s a mercenary talking,” he said with a grin. “A silver eagle every fortnight—and you won’t find purer coin anywhere in the Middle Kingdoms. Why should we water our silver? We dig it out of the ground.”

  “Sounds good.” Sun Wolf knew that as currency went, Wenshar’s was, indeed, one of the best. There were cities in the Gwarl Peninsula where the silver content of the coinage varied from week to week.