Moongather (40 page)

“Yes.” Her curt monosyllable seemed to amuse him even more than her presence here. She swung around and ran cool eyes over his pudgy body. She hadn't seen him since he'd moved into the gatehouse, though she'd certainly heard enough about him. She grinned at him, willing, for no reason she could think of, to share his amusement. “We're being kicked out, Dom.”

“Thought so.” He rubbed at his nose, then bounced to his feet, his mood changing suddenly from amusement to an irritated frustration. He stared out the window at the drying flowers and listless vegetation, tilted his head back to gaze at the mountains rising to the north. She remembered then the other things that occupied his time (besides riding, play with sword and staff and endless loveplay), the hours in the Biserica library pouring over maps and searching through reports, the time he spent with meien new come from the mijloc, probing into Floarin's words and deeds, into the words and deeds of the Followers and their Aglim. She watched the strong square hands clasped behind his back.
He wouldn't have stayed here much longer anyway. But why did she send for him now?

When Yael-mri opened the door to her varou, Hern swung around, Serroi rose to her feet. Yael-mri smiled at Serroi. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long, but I had a visitor I didn't expect.” Her lips compressed to a thin line, her face stern and disapproving, she turned to Hern. “Dom.”

“Prieti-meien.” He bowed, graceful in spite of his bulky body, but when he took a step toward the door, Yael-mri stiffened; anger flashed in her light brown eyes. To depress his presumption, she stopped him with a chopping gesture and beckoned to Serroi. “Come, meie.” She stepped aside and let Serroi move past her into the varou. As soon as she saw her seated, she waved Hern in.

Ignoring his affronted scowl, she walked calmly to a wide table and arranged herself in the high-backed chair behind it. “If you will sit, Dom Hern, I wish to discuss something with the two of you.” She leaned back, her hands resting palm down on the age-smoothed arms of her chair, brown eyes shifting from Hern to Serroi and back, the flecks of gold in the brown catching the light, lending the commonplace color an odd unstable quality. Between the two of you, life in the Valley is becoming impossible.” She tapped long thumbs against the chairarms. “You, Dom Hern, are getting to be more than a nuisance. Two knife dances yesterday alone and a hair-pulling brawl.” She snorted. “You needn't look smug, Dom. It's no compliment to say you have the sexual habits of a yepa in heat. What my meien do off-duty is no business of mine. Keeping the peace most certainly is. I won't have this nonsense disrupting our defenses, not when we're threatened as we've never been before.” She scowled, leaned forward, slapping her hand on the table, looking—in spite of this vigorous action—drawn and weary. “I think it will be no surprise to either of you that I require your absence.” She twisted around, reached a long arm to a taboret beside the table, took a small silver box from it, straightened, turned the box over in her hands then set it on the table and slid it toward Serroi. “You'll remember this.”

Serroi lifted the box, drew her thumbnail along the smooth metal. “The tajicho?”

“Yes. Don't open the box here.” She leaned forward to fix disapproving eyes on Hern. “What are your intentions toward the mijloc?”

Serroi bent slowly, slipped the box into the top of her boot. As she tucked it away, some of her anxiety flowed out of her. Slumping back in the chair, eyes unfocused, smiling a little, she drifted away from Yael-mri's inquisition of Dom Hern into memory of that stormy night when she turned aside from her return to Oras (duty and penance) to defend the small furry creasta-shurin from the hideous great worm that was eating them into extinction. When the Nyok'chui fell to her arrows, she remembered old tales from the books in the tower of the Noris, cut the third eye from the Nyok's skull and called down lightning to form the crystal that could deflect the farsight of sorcerers and seers, that could turn spells back on the spieler. Once it was out of the shielding silver and touching her, hers again, no one could take it from her. It turned aside men's eyes like a shuri's fur turned water. And the Noris would have to let her be, stay out of her dreams if she couldn't force him from her memory.

“Meie.”

Serroi blinked and sat up.

Yael-mri tapped her thumbs on the tabletop, her eyes flicking once more between her visitors. “You'll be leaving the valley this afternoon, both of you. The Biserica will provide mounts and supplies and a little gold. Not much, I'm afraid. Dom Hern, you have named half a dozen possible destinations but you don't seem much committed to any of these.”

He smiled amiably and said nothing.

Yael-mri sighed. “You don't make it easy.” She pinched at an earlobe, lifted her eyes to the carving above the door—a striding macai. “I have a quest for the pair of you if you choose to accept it.”

Hern continued to look bland, heavy lids drooping over his pale eyes. “Quest?” he murmured.

“Perhaps an ally for you, Hern.” Yael-mri's voice was dry; her mouth drew momentarily into a small pursed smile. “You don't have many of those.”

Serroi saw a muscle twitch at the corner of Hern's mouth; he didn't like being reminded of how isolated he was or how bad his chances were of doing anything at all about Floarin's usurpation.

“I'm listening.” His mask in place again, he looked sleepy and a little stupid.

Yael-mri looked grim. She splayed her fingers out on the table, stared down at them, watching them tremble, forcing them still, obviously reluctant to continue. There was a strained silence in the office for several minutes, then she spoke. “There exists a being of very uncertain nature but great power who calls himself Coyote.” She rubbed her long thumbs across the glossy wood. “He … ummm … pronouns are a difficulty. Coyote is neither male nor female nor … I'm blathering. Dom Hern, Coyote is capable of disrupting anything the Nearga-nor do. In … well, let it be his … in his own way, he is greater than the Nearga-nor and the Biserica combined. But he's capricious and inclined more to mischief than constructive aid to either side in this battle of ours. Coyote … he picked up that name in his travels
elsewhere;
Maiden alone knows what he means by it, but he told me it fitted him more nearly than any other he tried on … Coyote is capricious, as I said; he is also intensely sentimental, intensely curious, inclined to poke his finger into events just to see what happens and inclined also to weep copiously over the havoc he creates. And he pays his debts, though more often than not with disastrous results. Remember that, Dom, as you decide. However, if you can find him, if you can coax him into letting you look into his mirror, if you can make the right choice among the choices he offers you, then you will have the best chance you'll ever get to take back the mijloc. In doing this you will be, in effect, defending us in the Valley, so.…” She contemplated Hern, shook her head.
Impossible to tell what he was thinking, to know if he was thinking at all
, Serroi thought. She watched them both, amused at the antagonism between them—two dominants maneuvering for points like sicamars jousting for a hunting range—and startled at the embarrassment both obvious and incongruous on Yael-mri's face each time she mentioned the oddly named character.
Coyote. A strange word, I wonder where he picked that one up, I wonder if I'll ever know
. She scratched thoughtfully at the side of her nose.

Hern opened his eyes, raised his brows.

Yael-mri's tight smile wavered. “Coyote owes me a favor.” A faint color strained her face, the tip of her nose reddened. “As the defense of the Biserica is involved you may use my name once you find him. This might catch his interest long enough to gain you a hearing. As I said, he pays his debts. I promise nothing, but I do swear to you, Dom Hern, that there is no other way that offers any comparable chance of defeating the Nearga-nor. I can tell you where he sometimes shows his … um … face when he's not elsewhere; what you make of him will be up to you.”

Hern blinked lazily. “Both of us, you said. The meie is coming with me?”

Yael-mri stiffened. “If she so chooses,” she said after a moment, each word edged with ice. “The meie is free to accept or reject the quest as she wishes. She most certainly will not be
with
you in the sense you mean, not subordinated to you in any way.”

“We'll work that out.” He smiled at her with practiced charm, then sat up, his lazy mask dissolved. He dropped his hands on his thighs, leaned forward, intent grey eyes hard on her face. “Details, please.”

CHAPTER III:

THE MIJLOC

When the sun was only a promise in the east, hands shook Tuli gently awake. She blinked up into an unsmiling face whose features were side-lit by the pale red glow of the dawn. Hearing the soft breathing of her sisters, she sat up, scrubbed at burning eyes, still dazed with sleep, vaguely wondering why her mother had waked her so early. Then she remembered.

With a hiss of pure rage she shoved at her mother's encircling arms, pushed with knees and elbows at her mother's bending body as she fought to kick free of the quilts and launch herself at Nilis who lay deep asleep with no remorse or fear troubling her in the bed by the two windows, her traitorous mouth slack, the breath issuing in small snores through her long nose. Mama Annic grasped Tuli round the waist, lifted her kicking and struggling from the tangled quilts, somehow got a hand free and clapped it over her mouth, muffling the animal whines and squeals she made, somehow half-carried, half dragged her from the room, by a miracle waking neither Nilis nor Sanani.

Annic edged the door shut with her toe; breathing hard with emotion and exertion, she hauled Tuli down the hall to the carved and painted linen chest by the head of the stairs and dropped onto it with a puffing sigh of relief, then tugged at Tuli until she collapsed onto her lap. She held her tight, patting her shoulders, rocking her until the fit of rage passed off. “I know, bebe,” she murmured. “I know, my little fire-head, it's not easy, not easy at all. It's my curse too and I gave it to you. It will get better, I promise you, it will get better.” Annic continued to hold Tuli until she felt the sobbing and shaking stop.

Tuli hiccoughed herself at last into an exhausted calm. She lifted her head from the damp folds of her mother's robe, hot with shame that she, almost a woman, sat like a baby in her mother's lap, feeling all elbows and knees as she tried to wriggle loose from her mother's hold. Annic smiled and shifted Tuli off her knees onto the chest beside her. “I thought I'd better wake you early.”

“She.…”

Annic's hand closed tight on her shoulder, stopping her. “I know, Tuli. Your father left not long after you got home. I thought you'd want to know.”

Tuli's hands moved restlessly on her sleeping smock. She stared at them, blinking, then curled the fingers under to hide the black crescents under the nails, dirt picked up from climbing about walls and digging into the earth outside the granary window. “What's going to happen, Mama?” She twisted her hands into the thin cloth, shifted restlessly on the chest lid.

Annic sat silent for what felt like a long time, her eyes fixed on the far side of the hall though she didn't seem to see the wall tiles. “I don't know.” She sighed, ruffled Tuli's, short brown hair. “Stay away from Nilis, bebe. Your father will deal with her when he gets back. The orchard needs work and it's far enough off to keep you out of her hair.” She sighed again. “I wish I could keep her out of mine.” With a quick vigorous push of her legs, she got to her feet. “Chop away at those weeds and suckers, firehead, till the rage is small enough to hold in the palm of your hand.” She laughed softly, bent and patted the backs of Tuli's hands, then went quickly and gracefully down the stairs.

Tuli hacked furiously at suckers growing like green whips from the roots of the chays tree. When she had them all slain, each one Nilis for her, she tossed the sharp-edged trowel aside, gathered the suckers and cast them into the aisle between the rows of fruit trees where someone else would chop them into the soil.

The orchard was some distance from the house, planted in the wide curve of a stream that wandered through the Tar before heading for RiverCym—a dozen rows of trees, most of them long mature, though a few saplings replaced the storm-lost. Malat for their crisp red fruit and the cider that warmed many a winter evening. Chays trees, chewy golden chays to be pitted and strung on grass twine after drying and hung in loops from kitchen rafters, chays—sweet and tart at once, best of all on cold stormy nights with long glasses of hot spiced cider. Pleche and rechedd, chorem and lorrim, bursting with juice, small round fruits, translucent garnet skin over golden flesh, long twisted oval fruits with blue-purple skins and red-black flesh, small green rounds growing in tight-packed bunches, red-cheeked waxy green fruits with hard tart flesh, fruit for drying, winter sweets, fruits for jams and jellies, fruit to ferment for wine. And all of it thin upon the branches. Shadows flickering across her face, Tuli sat back on her heels, wiped at her forehead with the back of an earth-stained hand, scratched at her nose. Nilis blew up storms whenever Tuli slipped out of the house and went to work in the fields. Man's work, she said. Not proper for a daughter of the house, she said, scolding Mama for permitting this. Tuli snorted, wiped her hands on her skirt. Not proper, never mind that Tuli hated being shut inside, that she was useless at any kind of sewing, that she couldn't clean anything without leaving streaks no matter how she tried. Not proper, Maiden bless, from a daughter of the house who just might've condemned her own father to prison or death—if he couldn't talk his way free. Tuli had great faith in her father's nimble tongue, if only he got a chance to wag it. She caught up the spading fork and dug vigorously around the roots, each stab a stab into her sister's disloyal heart, easing still more the simmer of anger and frustration inside her.