02 - The Barbed Rose (3 page)

“You vouch for him?” Uskenda ignored Kallista’s implied plea. “You and your sergeant I know, but—”

“He’s no rebel.” Kallista risked interrupting the general. “He’s godmarked like the rest of us. Like our other iliasti. They’re carrying out a request from the—”

“We have no troops to spare,” the general snapped the words out, voice hard as iron. “Do not ask again, Captain. Do not even
hint
at asking.”

Kallista braced to hard attention, staring straight ahead at nothing at all. “No, General, I won’t.”

Uskenda didn’t waste another moment, turning on her heel. Kallista fell in behind her, Obed and Torchay on guard at either side. They marched past the long lines of people waiting their turn with the truthsayer. Their frantic desperation to get behind the safety of the walls and their resentment toward those who seemed to be bypassing the system gathered thick enough to make an almost physical barrier for the small party to push through.

Something had happened. Kallista knew it, but didn’t dare ask what. Not now. And sergeants didn’t question generals about anything, so Torchay couldn’t ask. She slid a glance toward Obed, the civilian. Would he understand what she wanted to know? And if he did, would he ask?

He met her look, flicked his eyes toward the crowd, the truthsayer, the full troop of guards at the gate, then looked back at Kallista. He somehow bowed without moving his head. “General,” he said, his exotic Southron accent stronger than usual, “has something occurred that makes all this security necessary? Why a truthsayer?”

“You don’t know?” Uskenda addressed her response to Kallista.

“We’ve been on the road almost a week and the courier took even longer coming with the Reinine’s orders, so our news of Arikon is a good two weeks old.” Kallista tugged at her gloves, a fresh attack of worry making her hands itch. Because the magic was returning? She stretched to keep up with the general’s brisk pace.

Uskenda’s face went grim, worsening Kallista’s fears. “Graceday before last, twelve days ago, assassins struck all across the country, targeting naitani serving with the army. Even here in Arikon itself. Thank the One, your location was kept secret for your safety, or likely they’d have attacked you as well.”

“We were already on the road coming here by then.”

“They’d no’ have touched her,” Torchay muttered at almost the same moment.

“Yes, well—double thanks to the One. Besides military naitani, they went after high-ranking officers—colonel and above. I would have thought they were Tibrans retaliating for your…for the deaths last year, but…”

Kallista hid her reaction. It still disturbed her, some of the things her new magic had done. When she had destroyed the demon, all those who had worshipped it—all the Tibrans in the Ruler caste and many of the high-ranking Tibran Warrior caste—had died with it. It had ended the war, but left Tibre in chaos. “Are you sure they weren’t Tibran?”

“They were Adaran. Adaran traitors.” The general spat her contempt on the gray cobblestone paving. “The one who attacked me wore her infantry uniform. Bodyguards turned on the naitani they’d sworn to protect.”

“Impossible!” Torchay burst out, shock and horror wiping out discipline.

“Not all of them turned, Sergeant.” The general’s eyes warmed in a faint smile. “But enough. They targeted the military naitani with the generals. I’m the highest ranking officer left. The army is in shambles, half or more of our soldiers gone over to the rebels. We’ve scarcely a dozen naitani still alive, and those that are—”

Uskenda paused in midstep, her foot hovering in the air while she seemed to make some decision. She pivoted, taking her step in a new direction. “The Reinine gave orders to bring you to the palace as soon as you arrived, and I am doing that, but we will take a different path.”

She held Kallista’s gaze as they kept moving through the crowded streets. “You need to know what we are up against.”

Fox took the warm, squirmy bundle Stone handed him and tucked her inside his shirt, next to his skin. A squeak of protest told him Lorynda was not yet interested in sleeping, so he turned her around to allow her to see out while he wrapped them both in his layers of clothing. He had trouble with some elements of infant care, particularly cleanup, since his blindness kept him from seeing when the job was properly done, for which he thanked the One daily. But he was a master at keeping the babies warm and not bad at getting them to sleep.

He leaned his head against the rock wall behind him, then as the cold from the stone penetrated, he fumbled for the hood of his cape to pull up an extra layer between himself and their shelter. “Still snowing?” he asked the cave in general.

“Can’t tell.” Stone’s soured voice came back. “It covered the cave entrance sometime last night. But it’s been snowing for six days running. Why would it stop now?”

“At least we’re not out there in it.” Merinda spoke from near the fire.

Fox was getting heartily tired of her forced cheer, her “look on the bright side” comments. If it didn’t require moving from his spot, he’d throttle her. But as it did, he supposed he would have to let her live.

“You’re right.” Aisse’s voice so close to him would have startled him if he hadn’t
known
where she was. “We could be out in the storm, but we’re not. And I for one, am grateful not to be in the saddle all the hours of daylight. Fox, do you have room for Rozite, too?”

“Aye.” He opened his cloak and overshirt again and loosened the lacings on his tunic more. The second twin snuggled in next to her sister and seemed to take on some of her calm, losing her restless fidgeting. They were warm and soft and smelled like contentment.

Fox rested his cheek atop their fuzzy heads a moment as he wrapped the coverings more securely about them. Then, with the babies secure in his arms, he closed his useless eyes and let his senses flow outward. Somehow, the act of shutting his eyes helped him
know
the things he couldn’t see.

There was Aisse, lowering herself onto the pallet nearest the fire. Was it normal for her to sleep so much? He supposed it was, or Merinda would be jollying her awake. The healer took her responsibilities seriously, urging Aisse to eat more when she picked at her food, watching the babies with sharp eyes and with magic to see how they fared in this cold. Fox just wished she didn’t have to be so bloody
cheerful
about it.

At the moment, Merinda was busying herself near the fire with something or other. And Stone knelt near the cave’s entrance, his attention focused on it. Perhaps trying to measure the depth of the snow?

Fox let his
knowing
quest onward. It was how he had brought them all to this place, the day the late spring blizzard had fallen on them. Right up until the moment he “found” the opening in the rock, he’d been afraid that the odd extra sense Kallista had given him couldn’t do such a thing. But it had. They had shelter from the snow and the cold.

Outside the cave, the world lay empty and silent. They might be the only souls left in existence, for all Fox could tell. He couldn’t
sense
things at much of a distance. He stretched,
reaching
as far as he could, wanting desperately to feel Kallista’s comforting touch against…whatever it was she touched inside him. He found only emptiness.

It had been months and months since any of them had felt that seductive brush of magic across their souls. He missed it. He wondered whether they would ever get it back. Kallista said they would, but when?

Stone was moving, doing something where he knelt, but Fox couldn’t tell what it was. “Learning to dance on your knees like the horse tribes?” he asked.

“Digging a path out of this hole you’ve buried us in.” Stone’s voice sounded sharp, on edge. The women didn’t seem to notice, but Fox had been partnered with Stone for almost twenty years. Since they’d entered Warrior Caste training at six. He knew the man’s nuances.

Carefully, Fox rose to his feet and walked toward the cave entrance where he sat down with his back to the drifted snow. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re going to be sitting in snowmelt in another five ticks if you don’t move.”

Fox shifted a pace away and waited, wishing this
knowing
of his let him know more than mere presence or motion. He wanted to see Stone’s face, his expression. “Well?” he finally had to prompt.

“We’re running low on supplies.” Stone kept his voice quiet as he continued digging. “There’s enough for the adults for about a week yet, but milk for the babies—they’re too young to be able to eat our food, Merinda says, even were it chewed for them. They could do it for a bit, in an emergency, but not for long.”

Fox’s arms tightened around the little bodies snuggled in against his chest. “We have to find more. A cow. Something.”

“How, if the snow doesn’t stop?”

“We’ll find a way. I will not let our children die.” The fervor in his own voice surprised Fox.

Children had little value in Tibre, until the males joined their castes at six. Women had no caste save the one that they served, so girl children were worth even less. In Tibre, children belonged to the caste, to no one. These tiny girls were
his
. His and the rest of the ilian’s. That made all the difference in the world.

A gust of icy wind announced that Stone had broken through the layered snow. “Still snowing,” he said.

“How thick is the snow cover?”

“Maybe two paces. Not bad.” Stone moved a short distance away, then returned and laid something over the fresh opening that blocked the wind a bit. Fox touched it; a saddle blanket. Stone laid another atop the first.

Fox was about to rise and head back nearer the fire when Stone sat on the cold cave floor beside him. Apparently in the snowmelt he’d warned Fox against, for he swore and moved to Fox’s other side.

“So,
is
Merinda ilias? Like the rest of us?” Stone asked in a voice quieter than any Fox had heard from him.

“I—” The question tumbled Fox’s thoughts into a stinking pile. “What do you think?” Maybe if he played for time he could dredge an answer from his memory.

“I don’t know. You were there when it happened, right before we left. You heard what Kallista said when she gave her the bracelet.”

“Ilian together,”
Fox quoted. “But that’s not what she said—what any of us said—the night you all married me. Was it the same before?”

As one of the original four in their ilian, Stone had been through the ceremony three times, once when the ilian was formed, once when Obed joined them and once for Fox. “Those were all the same. Not like with her. So I’m asking. Is it just to help look after Lorynda and Rozite, or is it—?”

“You want to have sex with her?”

“Khralsh.” Stone swore by the warrior face of the One they all worshipped. “It’s the other way round. You can’t see the way she’s always touching me, or the looks she gives me. She says we’re ilian now, that I don’t have to be—
uncomfortable
, she said. You know how long it’s been, what with Kallista so soon after her time and Aisse so near hers and the magic gone besides. It wouldn’t be a problem, except Merinda’s always…
there
.”

“And you never were one to turn down sex.” Fox grinned. “I wish I
could
see it. Stone Varyl, vo’Tsekrish, evading a woman’s advances like some—some girl before her rites.”

Stone clouted him openhanded on the back of his head, gently, because of the babies. Otherwise he’d have dealt him a blow hard enough to lay him flat. All in fun, of course. “You’re just jealous she’s not chasing you.”

“Damaged goods.” Fox couldn’t blame her. What woman wanted a man cursed with blindness?

Stone snorted in derision. “I think she’s more afraid Aisse would have her head if she tried.”

“Aisse?” He went still, as one of the babies twitched in her sleep then settled again. “Not that she couldn’t do it, but why would she want to?”

“Beside the fact you sired the child in her belly? She favors you. Over all of us.”

Fox choked off his laugh. “Small favor. Just because she will consent on rare occasions to actually speak to me as well as point and order.”

“See? Favor. So what do I do about Merinda?
Is
she ilias?”

Fox sighed. “I don’t know, and there’s no one to ask who does, with all of us here born Tibran.”

“Except Merinda.” Stone’s sigh was a longer echo of Fox’s. “I won’t betray my ilian.”

“No.” His
brodir’s
loyalty was never in doubt. Once given, it remained. Fox took another deep breath. “
Ilian together
, Kallista said.”

“And Torchay.”

“So.” Fox moved a tiny hand that was digging tiny furrows in his skin with tiny fingernails. “All we can do is assume that means what it says. We are ilian together, in all ways. If you want what she offers, take it.”

Stone remained where he sat. “I wish Kallista were here.”

“So do I. But since she’s not, we can only muddle through as best we can.” He froze. “There’s something outside.”

Stone scrambled for weapons as Fox stretched his peculiar sense in a desperate attempt to discover what it was. Rozite squalled when Merinda plucked her from inside Fox’s shirt but quieted once she was placed against Aisse’s warmth.

“Not human,” Fox said, relinquishing Lorynda to the healer. “Large. A deer, perhaps. We hunt.”

“In the storm?” Stone asked as he handed Fox a quiver of arrows and a spear.

“I can find our way back,” he said with a confidence he did not quite possess. “The babies might not like the blood, but it will feed them, will it not?”

Stone merely moved aside the blankets from the entrance and ducked through it.

CHAPTER TWO

T
he new path General Uskenda took led Kallista and her men around the bulk of the palace, along the broad surrounding avenues where trees planted decades ago for beauty were being cut down to recreate the defensive space. On the downhill side east of the palace, they passed through an iron gate in a high wall. Kallista felt the tingle of barrier magic as they crossed into a quiet garden where invalids wrapped in thick dressing gowns basked in the pale spring sunlight while they sat on scattered benches. Beyond the garden rose a tall sprawling building, Arikon’s main healing center.