The Witches of Wenshar Read online

  Tazey blushed still pinker, recognizing that Starhawk understood the compliment their cost implied. The Lord of the Dunes had arrived yesterday with his retinue, and, in the ensuing twenty-four hours, Starhawk had seen Tazey undergo a transformation from an unselfconscious girl to a young lady who knows herself to be not only wanted, but desired. It was a role she was not used to, but the very novelty, at the moment, gave her a sparkle of untasted delight. Whatever else could be said about Incarsyn of Hasdrozaboth, at least he knew the proper way of dealing with a bride who had been given no choice of her groom.

  The girl shook her head, took a deep breath, and met her eyes. “Warlady, listen,” she said. “I—I need to talk to you. I think I need help, but it can’t get to Father. Will you promise?”

  “No,” said Starhawk calmly, and saw the girl’s tanned face fall. She looped back a trailing end of her white veils. “Your father pays me for my loyalty—I can’t promise not to tell him something I don’t know, when it might touch the safety of his realm. But I do promise I’ll give you as much as I can.”

  Tazey looked relieved and nodded, understanding the distinction. Starhawk had time to think obliquely, She isn’t pregnant and she hasn’t learned some invasion plan of Incarsyn’s...before the girl said, “It’s Jeryn. He’s gone.”

  “When?”

  She shook her head. “This morning—maybe last night. I don’t know. You know Father had a fight with Captain Sun Wolf.”

  Starhawk shrugged impatiently, “The Chief fights with everyone he works for. It’s nothing. He’ll be back.”

  “Jeryn...” Tazey hesitated. “Jeryn asked me the night the Chief left if he’d gone for good. He said he didn’t think so, since you were still here. And I said, I—I thought he might have gone to the old city of Wenshar.”

  Starhawk’s eyes narrowed. “Why did you think that?”

  The absinthe green gaze avoided hers. “It’s the sort of place he might go if—if he were interested in magic and wasn’t afraid of the stories.” Her face still averted, she hurried on, “And then this morning, I went to Jeryn’s room because—because he’d been upset yesterday. Uncle Nanciormis said something to him at his lessons yesterday—you know Uncle’s back teaching him? I think he called him a coward...” She looked back at the Hawk, grief and hurt in her face at what she could neither control nor repair. “And he isn’t a coward, really he isn’t. Only...Anyway, his bed was empty. And I’m afraid he’s gone after the Captain.”

  Starhawk considered this in silence for some moments, wondering how much of the obviously fabricated tale was based in truth. Tazey’s gaze had fallen—she was an appallingly poor liar. Her hands, long and slender like Nanciormis’ and presumably her mother’s, though they were burned brown as a cowhand’s by the sun, pleated nervously at the silk-fine folds of her skirt.

  “You realize it’s far more likely he’s hiding somewhere because it’s time for his lessons? Especially if your uncle’s been calling him a coward.”

  Tazey’s face flushed, and she shook her head emphatically. “I—I’ve looked in all his usual hiding places. He’s not in the Fortress. I know it.”

  Starhawk forbore to ask her how she knew, knowing she would only get another evasion. She glanced out across the reg toward the crumbling black line of the Haunted Range, hiding behind its curtain of heat dance, then back at the girl. “I’m not free until after breakfast.” By the angle of the shadows that lay across the face of the Binnig Rock, the giant granite half-dome which loomed above the jumbled shoulders of the Dragon’s Backbone where they crowded close to Tandieras knoll, that would be fairly soon. “After this long, I don’t think an hour either way will make much difference to Jeryn.” She added, “You know it can’t be just you and me.”

  The girl swallowed apprehensively. “I go riding all the time without ’Shebbeth.”

  “That’s not what I mean and you know it,” the Hawk said, her voice gruff. “Could you trust Incarsyn?”

  There was a long silence while Tazey struggled between what she knew to be true and what she wished to believe about the man she was required to marry. Then she shook her head. “He wouldn’t understand.” She groped for a way to phrase the fact that the Prince, who, she wanted to think perfect, in fact had very little in common with her. “He wouldn’t think it proper that I go. I mean, that I ride a horse...” Miserably, she added, “Among his people, noble ladies all ride in litters.”

  She broke off, looking away again, fighting off the tightness in her throat that was not in keeping with the romance of the Prince’s ardent wooing. The worst of it was, Starhawk supposed, that Incarsyn would never understand.

  But there was nothing she could say; to avoid anything worse, she stuck to the matter at hand. “We’ll find some of the guard who’ll keep their mouths shut. You probably know them better than I. Be thinking about that between now and breakfast.”

  “All right.” Relieved not to have that open wound sympathetically prodded, Tazey smiled, gathered up a handful of skirts, and picked her way carefully down the ladder to the tower room below. A few minutes later, Starhawk could see her as a foreshortened oval of rose pink and straw, hurrying from the door at the tower’s base towards the Hall.

  A good and dutiful daughter, she thought, with ironic pity, doing her best to meet halfway a bridegroom whom she had no choice but to accept. And what choice had she? She had not even the freedom to choose, as Starhawk had once chosen, the solitary mysticism of the convent over a life as some man’s cherished brood mare and bedmate. The alliance with some Desert Lord not quite powerful enough to be a threat had to be made—the dowry had already been paid. Had the girl been able to make one good, cogent argument to her father against the match, she might have had a chance. But she could not, even to herself, allow the joy of her own freedom as a reason. Why give up a man who bore all conventional resemblance to the prince of your dreams on the grounds that you would never be able to ride again?

  Starhawk shook her head. The inconvenience of believing in the Mother—or the Triple God of the Trinitarians, for that matter—was the belief that events had some kind of universal meaning. Sun Wolf, at least, was secure in the knowledge that the spirits of his departed ancestors were no more able to control the random events of this world than he was—though, being dead, they could see them coming. She herself had long since given up trying to guess good from ill and let them all move in the Invisible Circle as they would. But her heart hurt for the girl, nevertheless.

  Starhawk saw Prince Incarsyn an hour and a half later, when she came to her late breakfast in the Hall. A few years younger than she, he was dazzlingly handsome, with the graceful vitality of a man who thinks with his body rather than his intellect. The clothing of the desert added to the feral beauty of his movements—loose trousers and half-boots, a tunic of dark indigo silk, thick with gold embroidery, and, over all, the flowing white cloak of the shirdar. Like all the folk of the desert, he had a complexion of sun-dyed bronze and black, curly hair, clubbed back from his temples in jeweled pins and falling almost to his waist behind. He paused in the act of handing Tazey graciously down from the dais to bow to Starhawk as she entered, and Tazey wavered, her hand still in his, torn between excusing herself from him to speak to Starhawk and prolonging his attentions to her.

  It didn’t help, of course, that Incarsyn had absolutely no doubt that she would accompany him.

  Starhawk said, “Let me get my breakfast, and I’ll see you in a few minutes,” and the girl nodded, grateful to be spared the awkward choice. Feeling Tazey to be shy as he conducted her toward the Hall door, Incarsyn chivalrously carried the weight of the conversation, clearly attributing her confusion to himself. His soft, well-modulated voice was lost among the other mingled voices echoing in the high ceiling of the Hall as Starhawk made her way to Kaletha’s small table.

  “I don’t like it,” Norbas Milkom was grumbling at the High Table beside the King. He reached into the dish of ham before him, a splash of rainbows dancing
from a diamond the size of a rabbit’s eye on his gnarled black finger. “I told you before and I’m here to tell you again—I don’t like it, and the miners don’t like it. This marrying into the tribes! Why can’t the girl be let to wed her own kind, eh? One of my boys or Quaal Ambergados’ son. The Three Gods know we’re as wealthy as any Desert Lord skulking about the sands with his handful of followers and goats—money we came by honestly, digging it from the ground with our hands, not plundering it from traders.”

  Nanciormis, sitting at the King’s other side, said nothing, but his pouchy eyes glinted at this slight to his people. Starhawk saw Anshebbeth—in hovering attendance on Tazey and her betrothed, but close enough to the High Table to be eavesdropping as usual—turn and glare back at Milkom with smoldering indignation.

  Was her anger for the sake of the shirdar—Anshebbeth’s own people, though she worked in the King’s Household and had given up going veiled as the deep-desert women did? Starhawk wondered, Or could it be for Nanciormis’ sake? It had not been lost upon Starhawk that, while she should have been keeping an eye on her charge, Anshebbeth’s glance kept straying to the commander’s broad, green velvet shoulders.

  “Kings must marry their own kind, Norbas,” Osgard said patiently. “If she did not wed one of the Desert Lords, it would have to be the son of one of the Lords of the Middle Kingdoms.”

  “Why must it?” Milkom demanded, the old tribal scarring on his face flexing with his frown like braids of rope. On Nanciormis’ other side, the Bishop Galdron leaned forward amid a glitter of bullion embroidery and jeweled sleeve borders.

  “I confess to a certain apprehension for the welfare of the Princess Taswind’s soul,” he said in his mellifluous voice. “The shirdar are pagans, remember, worshiping the djinns of the desert. As a woman of an Ancient House, she will have to be initiated into the cult of the women of the family. There are evil influences there...”

  “The old beard-wagger sees evil influences under his chamberpot.” The voice spoke almost in Starhawk’s ear. She swung around, startled, to the place she’d thought vacant at her left—dammit—she’d turned her head a moment ago and seen it vacant. The novice Egaldus sat there, a cup of coffee cradled between his well-kept hands, smiling in discreet triumph at her and Kaletha’s astonishment.

  “Not bad, eh?” he grinned, eyes dancing like the boy he still mostly was.

  Kaletha’s back seemed to lengthen. “Scarcely a seemly use of your powers.”

  “Kaletha...” He reached across Starhawk, to put a hand over the Witch’s cold, white fingers. Kaletha made as if she would draw away, but did not. “I’ll have to be in attendance on him this afternoon. Perhaps if I came later?” The bright blue eyes were ardent with hope. Kaletha averted her face, but her hand remained where it was. “I have power—you raised it in me,” he coaxed softly. “You’re the only one who can teach me. Please.”

  He certainly knew how to ask, Starhawk thought, amused. No wonder Sun Wolf annoyed Kaletha.

  Old Nexué’s voice croaked out, “Well, it’s her Little Majesty!” and Starhawk glanced up to see Tazey had come back into the Hall. “Been giving you a wee taste of the wedding-night beef?” Tazey, blushing furiously, hurried over to where Starhawk sat as the old woman and the gaggle of laundresses with her, hooting with lewd glee and making gestures and comments as old as woman and man, pushed their way out the kitchen door and back to their work. The King and his party had risen and left; the High Table was empty now save for Nanciormis, who sat alone, long fingers stroking the silver wine cup before him, his dark, curving brows pulled together in thought. Anshebbeth, lingering on the dais in some private reverie, jerked about at the old woman’s first cackle and stamped her foot, calling furiously after her, “Stop it! How dare you, you filthy hag!”

  But by that time, Nexué had gone.

  “’Shebbeth, don’t,” pleaded Tazey, though her own cheeks were red as if burned. “She didn’t mean any harm.”

  As she and Starhawk climbed the dark inner stair to her rooms so that she could change to riding clothes and head veils, she added “She—and Kaletha, who just burns up inside about it—should know by now that Nexué always gets worse about something if you show you’re upset over it.”

  At the corrals they were joined by two young guards named Pothero and Shem, who, Starhawk guessed, had been childhood friends of Tazey’s. As they came near, Shem, who was the taller of the two and black, said, “Jeryn’s pony, Walleye, is gone.”

  Tazey flinched, startled, then recovered herself and nodded. “Yes, I—I know,” she stammered—but she hadn’t known. If she had, Starhawk thought, adjusting her veils, she’d have brought it in as evidence. She knew he was gone, but wasn’t about to tell me how. With the uneasy sense of edges not matching, she mounted the stringy yellow dun the boys had saddled for her and followed Tazey through the Fortress gate and down the knoll, swinging through the steep rocks and out onto the desert floor. The two young guards brought up the rear, head veils fluttering in the dry mid-morning heat.

  The stillness of the air increased Starhawk’s disquiet. The horses’ hooves were a swift splatter of sound, like thrown water on the hard, dusty earth; the electric quality of the air prickled against her exposed cheeks. It was autumn, the season of the killer storms—the season of the Witches, they called it in Wenshar. She knew there was no telling when such a storm would strike. They were riding across the open palm of fate.

  “Why do you think Jeryn went seeking the Chief in Wenshar?” she asked, as the jutting, dark mass of Tandieras knoll, the Fortress, and the looming, eroded shoulders of the Binnig Rock dwindled to ragged darkness behind them. Ahead, the ground lay hard and speckled dun, studded with widely spaced tufts of wiry grass and an occasional waxy-leaved camel-bush. In spite of the nearness of the winter, it was still stiflingly hot; heat dances, turned the air to water, concealing the broken line of dark, glazed sandstone mountains far ahead. “And don’t say you don’t know,” added Starhawk quietly, and Tazey bit her lip.

  For a while, the girl only concentrated on the barren landscape before them, her gloved hands sure and steady on the reins. Then she ducked her head a little, as if ashamed.

  “As I said,” she murmured, “Wenshar is where a mage would go. Because of the Witches.”

  “Who?”

  Her voice was barely audible over the soft thud of hooves on stone-hard earth. “The Witches of Wenshar.”

  Starhawk urged her horse up beside the girl’s thick-necked bay, so that they rode knee to knee. “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Father doesn’t like them talked about.” Tazey glanced nervously at Starhawk, then away. “There used to be a saying—there still is, in the town—‘Wicked as the Witches of Wenshar.’ Only sometimes it’s ‘Wicked as the Women of Wenshar,’ because all the women of the Ancient House of Wenshar were witches. Their souls were damned because of it, the Bishop says. They could summon the sandstorms, or dismiss them; they could part the winds with their hands, or call darkness in broad day just by combing their hair, or summon the dead. They were cruel and evil and they ruled all these lands along the foothills of the Dragon’s Backbone, before the Lords of the Middle Kingdoms came and took the lands away and dominated the other Desert Lords. I suppose it’s why Father was so angry when he found out any teacher of Jeryn’s was mageborn.”

  “Because of the reputation they gave the mageborn in Pardle Sho?” Starhawk asked, puzzled.

  Tazey turned to look at her, green eyes wide in the gauze frame of rippling veils. “Because of Mother. She was the last Princess of the Ancient House of Wenshar. Father is afraid—has always been afraid—that people would say the evil is in our blood. And it isn’t,” she added earnestly, as if worried that Starhawk would think so, too. “Jeryn can’t stand Kaletha. I—”

  Starhawk raised a hand, silencing her, and reined in. “Stay back,” she ordered the others sharply, already swinging down from the saddle as Tazey drew rein beside her. “Don’t foul the ground.
”

  “What is it?”

  They had reached the harsh, stone plain of the reg, a landscape that made the desolate scrub closer to the foothills seem a pleasure garden. Here nothing grew, nothing lived. The seeds which slept elsewhere in the desert soil, awaiting rain, had long ago died in their sleep; the eternal carpet of pebbles lay hot, black, and utterly lifeless underfoot. Starhawk felt the burn of it through the soles of her boots, through the buckskin knee of her breeches where it touched the ground, and through her gloved hands. The storms could turn the reg into a flaying hail of rock—the riders had stopped twice already, to pick the small, vicious stones from their horses’ feet. Now Starhawk picked up a small stone and held it to the hot afternoon sun. On its upper edge was a faint smudge of blood.

  She smelled it, then wet her finger and touched the dried patch of brown. “Last night, it looks like.” She tossed it down.

  “Look, here’s more.” Pothero sprang down a little further on. The smudge on that stone was smaller, barely a fleck.

  “Not drops.” Starhawk squinted out over the bleak, stony carpet of the reg. In the heat-shimmer, eroded columns of sun-blackened stone rose from the barren pebbles, some singly, others in ragged lines. Tsuroka, the shirdar called them—guards posted by the desert djinns to keep watch on the dead land. “How much did Jeryn know about horses, Tazey?”

  The girl shook her head. “Not much. He hated riding. He always got sunburned because he’d never do it enough, and it made his bottom sore. And Father and Uncle Nanciormis were always making him ride horses too strong for him—to build up his courage, they said.”

  Starhawk cursed without heat.

  Tazey went on, “Walleye used to be my pony; he was just a fat, old slug Jeryn could ride on when he was about five. But he always liked the pony best because he wasn’t afraid of him.”

  “Is he afraid of horses?”

  The girl hesitated, thinking about it. “Not horses in general,” she said after a moment. “But of the horses Uncle gives him, yes. And they are pretty high-spirited.” She smiled. “This one I’m riding is really his.”