Spear of Heaven (19 page)

“You mean I’m the curse,” said Kimeri. “Because I’m a
foreigner and I look funny. I’m not! We’re lost because you don’t know as much
about the palace as you thought you did.”

“We’re cursed,” he repeated. His face looked pinched and
nasty. His eyes were slits. “Cursed, cursed, cursed.”

“We are not!”

“Are.”

“Are not.” Kimeri started to hit him. He spat at her. She
whirled and ran away.

oOo

She did not care where she ran or how fast she did it. She
careened around corners and through doorways. She heard him behind her—running
and calling and trying to apologize, but she would not listen. He was only
scared to be left alone.

There was furniture, suddenly, to dodge around, and instead
of stone underfoot there were carpets. There were still no people. People were
all somewhere else.

Except for the one she fetched up gasping against, who had
come out of nowhere and stepped right in front of her. It was a tall narrow
person with strong arms that caught her and held her even when she struggled.
She was not thinking about that; once she did, she stopped.

The arms stayed strong, and kept holding her. She looked up.

A woman looked down. She was not old like Vanyi but she was
not quite as young as Daruya either, and she had a way of looking older than
she was. Her face was narrow and her lips were thin and she looked very severe,
particularly when she frowned.

Kimeri burst into tears. It was not anything she thought
about doing. It just happened.

The woman did not push her away, but held her and let her
cry. When she was almost cried out, the woman said in a voice that was both
rough and sweet, “There. That’s enough, I think.”

Kimeri sniffled hugely and swallowed the rest of her tears.
The woman gave her a cloth to wipe her face. She used it. Her face had been
very dirty: the white cloth was quite black when she tried to hand it back.

“No,” the woman said. “Keep it. Give it back to me later.”

And clean, she meant. Kimeri sniffled again, but that was
the last of it. “Lady,” she said huskily, “can you tell me where I am?”

“Do you have a particular need to know?” the woman asked.

“I got lost,” said Kimeri. “I can’t find my way out.”

The woman’s face was no less stern, but her eyes were a
little warmer. “I know how that feels. I’ve been lost here often myself. Have
you been about it long?”

“Forever,” said Kimeri, fighting back the tears again.

This was not a person to cry much in front of. She was like
Vanyi that way, and about as sharp in the tongue, too.

“It’s always forever,” the woman said. No: she was not quite
as sharp as Vanyi. But almost. “Here, I’ll show you the way. Does your friend
need help, too?”

But Hani was gone. Coward—he had recognized the room and
known how to get out of it and run while Kimeri was getting the front of the
woman’s coat wet. “I hate him,” she said. “I just hate him.”

“That’s often how we women feel about men,” the woman said. “We
never can stop living with them, for all of that. He’ll come creeping back, you’ll
see, and worm his way into your heart again.”

“He won’t,” said Kimeri. “He hates me.”

“I think he likes you and is afraid of me.” The woman looked
bemused at that. “People often are. It’s a puzzlement.”

“I suppose it’s because you’re so tall,” Kimeri said, “and
so narrow. And you look so severe. But you aren’t really, are you? If he’s so
afraid of you and he’s still my friend, he should be trying to rescue me from
you.”

“He’s a rarity in a male: he’s wise. Do forgive him for it.
It’s a virtue we see too little of.”

“I hate him,” said Kimeri.

“Of course,” the woman said. She was laughing inside, which
made Kimeri hate her, too. A little. Before she took Kimeri’s hand and led her
out of the room and down a passage and across the corner of a garden and up a
stair and to a door. “And past that,” she said, “is the court of the strangers
where your house is.”

Kimeri knew that it was. She could feel her mother near, and
Vanyi, and the others all together. None of them even knew that she was
missing.

The woman started to draw her hand out of Kimeri’s, but
Kimeri stopped her. “What’s your name?” she asked.

She could see it in the woman’s mind, as clear as everything
else that she might ask, such as what the woman was and what she was doing
here, but it was not polite to say so. Polite mages asked, and let people tell
them.

The woman’s brows quirked. “My name is Borti. What is yours?”

“Merian,” Kimeri answered, “but they call me Kimeri—
ki-Merian, because I’m little. But I’ll grow.”

“That,” said the woman, looking her up and down, “you will.”

“May I see you again?” Kimeri asked.

Borti smiled. She did not look severe at all then, or even
very old. “Yes, you may. Come to this door and take the way I showed you, and
if I’m free I’ll be in the room where you met me first. I’m often there at this
time of day, and usually alone.”

Kimeri knew about alone-times. She needed them herself. She
gave Borti her best smile and let her hand slip free. By the time she opened
the door she was running. But she paused to look over her shoulder at Borti,
who stood where Kimeri had left her, watching. She lifted a hand, the one that
burned sun-hot, and ran through the door.

Not long after her foray into the teahouses of the Summer
City, Daruya began to make a habit of going to the stable in the mornings and
riding whichever of the seneldi seemed to need it most. It was dull enough work
when she thought about it, riding in circles within the same four walls, but
there was an art to it, like a dance of rider and mount. Her mare in particular
had a talent for it.

It took the edge off boredom, certainly, and filled the
mornings. She was close to happy, one bright cool morning, trying something new
with the mare: a flying trot, legs flashing straight out, reined in by degrees
until all the mare’s swiftness and fire contained itself into a powerfully
cadenced trot in place.

The mare was amenable to a degree, but found it much more
enjoyable, once contained, to lighten her forehand until she sat on her
haunches. If Daruya urged her forward then, she reared up and sprang on her
hindlegs. If Daruya sat through it, she came back lightly to a standstill,
enormously pleased with herself.

At last, after considerable negotiation, Daruya coaxed the
mare to permit half a dozen strides of trot-in-place. The mare bestowed them
with the air of a lady granting an enormous favor. Daruya praised her lavishly,
which she felt was no more than her due, and sprang from her back, and nearly
jumped out of her skin.

A stranger, a Shurakani, stood watching, grinning at her.
After the first shock she recognized him: the man from the teahouse, whose name
right at the moment was emptied out of her skull. But not the eyes. Not the
clear strong presence of him. He was larger than she remembered, broader in the
shoulders, and he was quite as tall as she.

“That’s a splendid display,” he said without even taking the
time to greet her. “You should offer it as an entertainment for princes. They’d
give silk to see such a rarity.”

“I am not a hired entertainer,” Daruya said stiffly.

The mare snorted and rubbed an itching ear on Daruya’s
shoulder. She turned her back on the intruder and tended the senel, taking her
time about it.

He was not at all dismayed by her rudeness. He watched with
perfect goodwill, and had the sense not to offer to help. She took off the mare’s
saddle and bridle; he stood by, curious. She walked the mare to cool her; he
followed. She sponged the mare with water from the fountain; he watched. She
led the mare into the house that had been made into a stable; he strolled
after, with a moment’s hesitation as he realized that all the walls had been
taken down and partitions set up, and the house filled with strange horned
beasts.

Daruya was used to it. She led the mare to her stall, fed
her a bit of fruit, and stood smoothing the damp neck, ignoring the watcher
with strenuous concentration.

She was still aware of him. It was impossible not to be. He
regarded the seneldi warily but without fear, walking down the lines of stalls.
The first nose that thrust inquisitively toward him, he shied at, but he came
back bravely enough and stroked it. He was prepared for the next, and for the
one after that.

The seneldi approved of him. He found the itchy places
behind ears and at the bases of horns, and he was respectful of flattened ears
and snapping teeth. He had brought nothing sweet for them to eat, which was a
count against him, but they made allowances for ignorance.

He made a circuit of the stalls, coming to a halt at last
outside of the one in which Daruya was standing. “These are marvelous animals,”
he said. “And the way you ride them—astonishing! Would you teach me?”

“Everyone asks that,” said Daruya, addressing the mare’s
mane, which she was combing and smoothing with unnecessary precision. “It’s
easiest if you learn as a child.”

“But not impossible to learn as a man grown?”

He sounded plaintive. She refused to be swayed by it. “It
would take years to learn to ride as I ride. Just to stay on—that’s possible, I
suppose.”

“It would make a beginning,” he said.

She shot him a glance. “Right now?”

He was startled—his eyes went wide. But he laughed and
spread his hands. “Why not?”

He had not the faintest conception of what he was getting
into. She thought briefly, nastily, of setting him on Vanyi’s gelding and
letting him loose, but it would hardly do to kill or maim a man of high house
in Shurakan, simply because he was presumptuous. She fetched the star-browed
bay instead, a plain, sweet-tempered, imperturbable animal who made no
objection to being saddled and bridled and subjected to the weight of a large
and substantial man who had never sat a senel before.

He had, however, sat an ox—and not badly, either, Daruya had
to admit. There was no finesse in the way he scrambled into the saddle, but he
balanced well, he took quickly to the commands to start and stop and turn, and
he could ride the gelding on a circle and keep it there. He might, with time,
come to have a decent seat on a senel.

He knew it, too. His expression reminded Daruya forcibly of
the mare after her most impressive leap on her haunches: pure
self-satisfaction.

Daruya felt much less charitable toward the man than she had
toward the mare. “You have talent,” she said, because she could not lie about
that, “but you have no art.”

“No? Then will you teach me?”

She did not want to. It would take time to do it properly,
far more than she had or meant to have in Shurakan, and she could not for pride
do it otherwise than properly. But he annoyed her.

“I’ll teach you,” she said, “if you can be taught. Beginning
here.” She slapped his back. He stiffened in outrage. She showed him the count
of her teeth. “You’re slouching. Sit up straight. No, not as if you had a rod
for a spine. Softly, flowing with the movement of your mount. Now let your legs
fall as they want to, softly, always softly. Ankles, too. Let them follow as he
moves. Yes, like that.”

She worked him to a rag. It was only a brief span by the sun’s
ascent, and it was a bare few moments’ exercise for the bay, but the man slid
from his back and nearly fell as his knees buckled. “By the gods! I’m
destroyed.”

“You’ve barely begun,” said Daruya. “And you still have to
cool him and unsaddle him and take him to his stall.”

“You are merciless,” said Bundur.

“You asked for it,” she said.

She lent him a hand, not out of pity for him, of course not,
but out of concern for the senel. He gained back much of his strength as he
worked, which was the object of the exercise—and a curse on his cleverness, he
saw that, too. When he was done, he had most of his arrogance back. Enough to
say, “Tomorrow, again?”

“You won’t want to,” she said.

“Yes, I will. Tomorrow?”

She wondered if the Shurakani had a god who protected fools
and innocents. “Tomorrow, then. If you can walk this far.”

oOo

As it turned out, he could. Just. Once he had pulled and
hauled and heaved himself onto the senel’s back, and gasped as he perceived the
full and painful extent of his folly, he rode creditably enough.

“My muscles are so insulted, they’ve expired in protest,” he
said from the saddle.

“Sit up,” said Daruya. “You’re slouching again.”

“O cruel,” he sighed, but he obeyed.

oOo

He came back the next morning. And the next. Sometimes
early enough to watch her ride—and to mourn his own ineptitude. Sometimes so
late that she feared—hoped, she corrected herself in considerable
irritation—that he was not coming at all, until she saw him striding through
the door. Then she was snappish, because her heart had leaped so suddenly,
startling her. He never seemed to notice.

What he thought of her, he did not tell, and she did not try
to read as a mage could. Because it mattered too little, she told herself;
because, her heart muttered to itself, it could all too easily matter too much.

He never stayed longer than it took to saddle, ride, and put
his mount away. He talked freely enough and most engagingly, but he never said
a word that was not perfectly proper. However bold his eyes might be, his
tongue was as circumspect as any woman could wish.

He never offered to accompany her wherever she might be
going afterward—to the house, usually, or to wander in the city. He did not,
ever, bring a friend and ask her to increase the number of her pupils.

That rather surprised her. Most ambitious princelings would
have been flaunting their new accomplishment all over the court.

For all she knew, he was doing that—but keeping the rest
from besetting her. She was not invited to court, nor was she courted by
various of the palace functionaries as Vanyi was. She was quite the isolate,
quite perfectly the nobody, and she was determined to be happy in it.