Rise of a Hero (The Farsala Trilogy) (44 page)

“How will you find them?” she asked again. “Those are big mountains.”

“Oh, I won’t go searching up and down the hills myself.” He sounded almost shocked at the
prospect. “Duckie prefers roads. I’ll just talk to the men in the mining camps. No one could establish a base in the mountains without the locals knowing about it—though they likely don’t know what the Hrum are doing there, or they’d have passed the word on already.”

“One man established an army in the mountains, without anyone noticing.” Soraya felt a bit smug, knowing something he didn’t.

“If you mean Commander Jiaan,” said the peddler, “the local folk knew all about it—they just didn’t tell the Hrum. But that’s the other thing I’ll need when the time comes, the help of some first-rate archers. And the young commander has the only archers I know of who aren’t Hrum. But I’m afraid he might have heard I’ve traded with the Hrum, and not be knowing the real reason. According to the local folk, he’s packed up his army and vanished, so I was wondering if you know where they are, and if you’d be willing to introduce me, you being . . . um . . .”

Jiaan was known to be her father’s bastard, though no one had ever been so rude as to say it in Soraya’s presence. She stood silent, watching him fumble with it.

Perhaps fortunately, Maok came to his rescue. “I don’t know if the stubborn girl will speak for you,” she said, turning away from Duckie. “But the army is here.”

“Here?” the peddler asked, looking around as if he expected them to spring out of the rocks.

“In the desert,” Maok went on. Soraya wondered what her teacher had sensed, that she spilled that secret so easily. “They began making their camp several weeks past, and just came there. We will send for the commander to meet you.”

T
HE ESCORT MAOK HAD SENT
to fetch Jiaan whistled to warn the camp of their return.

Soraya went to the mouth of the canyon where she knew they’d emerge. The rocks were a black-and-silver sculpture under the light of the near-full moon. Her father’s bastard son had come into his household as a page at the age of ten, but Soraya had never known him well. It was beneath a deghass’ dignity to befriend servants. But the boy had grown to look startlingly like her father—she’d have to brace herself for that.

The peddler came up to join her, along with
the spouses and children of the Suud who’d gone to find Jiaan.

The last time all three of them had been together—

The peddler noticed her sudden, indrawn breath. “What?”

“Nothing,” said Soraya. “Just that . . . just a thought.”

The last time all three of them had been together, her father had been alive.

But he was dead now, Soraya told herself firmly. And he’d had small patience with people who wept and moaned forever, instead of getting on with their lives.

So get on with it.

The small party came around the bend in the canyon, Jiaan walking with them. He hadn’t brought any of his own men—a sign of his trust in the Suud, in Maok, who had summoned him, without telling him why.

His eyes widened as he caught sight of her. She found she didn’t mind his resemblance to her—their—father as much as she’d expected. She had, after all, known him for most of her life.

“Lady Soraya!” he exclaimed, stepping forward.
“What are you doing here? I thought you’d gone with . . .”

The peddler had stepped up beside her, and Jiaan’s gaze fixed on him. Color drained from his face, then surged into his cheeks in a feverish flush. What—

She hadn’t even time to complete the thought. Jiaan took three running steps and hurtled into the peddler, knocking him flat, pounding his fists into the peddler’s body, his face.

“What are you doing?” Soraya shouted. “Stop this! Stop it at once!”

But Gorahz, the djinn of rage, had fully possessed Jiaan—he didn’t even seem to hear her.

The peddler tried to defend himself, to fight back. But few of his blows landed, and Soraya could see that he was already losing.

The Suud from the camp were running toward them, but Soraya ran the other way, to the stream where she snatched up an iron kettle, which earlier that morning she’d scrubbed out with sand. It took several long moments to fill it in the shallow water, but the shouts of the Suud, and the thud of blows, told her the fight still went on.

With muscles made strong by a summer of
hard work, she hauled up the heavy kettle and staggered back to the fight. By now she’d had so much practice changing water that it took only a moment of connection, of disciplined yielding, to reach its shilshadu, to remind it of melting snow, icicles, and cold running streams. A part of her heart shared its joy in changing, even as she ran up to the struggling men and hurled the icy water over the two of them.

The peddler had stopped fighting and had raised both arms to protect himself, so some of the water was deflected onto his chest and the ground. But the freezing cascade caught Jiaan full in the face, and he swore and lifted both hands to wipe his eyes.

Three Suud hunters, two of them the biggest men in the tribe, and the last the reckless Abab, caught Jiaan’s arms and shoulders and dragged him away. A fence of spears lowered between him and his victim. They also pointed spears at the peddler, but he showed no sign of leaping to the attack. In fact, as battered as he looked, getting to his feet might be beyond him for a while. His mouth and nose were both bleeding.

Soraya turned to Jiaan. “What was that
about?” Her voice held an arrogant command that would have made both her mother and her father proud.

Jiaan staggered to his feet, still staring at the peddler. He started forward, only stopping when half a dozen spears pricked his chest and abdomen. He finally looked at Soraya.

“What are you doing here? With him? He killed our father! He’s a Hrum spy!”

“Are you mad? Our father died fighting the Hrum.” He had to be mad, or possessed, or at least mistaken, for Jiaan had fought in the same battle.

“Oh, he didn’t do it personally.” How had the peasant boy she remembered learned to put so much contempt into his voice? “He’s too cowardly to fight face-to-face. He kills by sneaking, and spying, and lying. And betrayal. You don’t believe me? I can prove it. The Hrum mark their spies, just like they do with slaves. Watch.”

He started toward the peddler, who had risen to his knees, but the spears stopped Jiaan. He looked past Soraya’s shoulder, and she turned in time to see Maok nod consent.

The spears withdrew and Jiaan stalked forward, drawing his knife.

Soraya opened her mouth to protest, but Maok’s hand on her shoulder stopped her, and she subsided, watching. Watching, and dropping the mental shield that blocked her people sense. She had to know what was happening here, invasion of privacy or not.

Jiaan’s knife reached toward the peddler’s neck and Soraya stiffened, but he only slid the blade into the collar of the peddler’s tunic, and slit the fabric over the shoulder and down the sleeve.

Cloth fell away, showing a series of black diamonds running around the peddler’s upper arm, like half of a bracelet.

“There!” Triumph laced the seething fury she sensed from Jiaan. “That’s the mark of a Hrum spy. And that . . .” His knife flicked toward a thin, pink scar at the top of the peddler’s shoulder. It barely missed cutting the skin, and Soraya sensed the peddler’s flash of fear. He was harder to read than Jiaan, but she knew he was afraid. Afraid and angry.

“That,” Jiaan went on, “is the scar left by an arrow I fired at a Farsalan traitor who we saw passing information to the Hrum. He escaped then.”

The sudden flare of guilt and grief didn’t show in Jiaan’s face, but Soraya felt them.

“It was later that I realized I’d seen the traitor start to reach for his payment with his right hand, and then switch to his left. And I remembered whose mannerism that was, and I remembered that this peddler had been snooping around the camp, all curious and innocent. He’s the reason the Hrum knew our plans! He’s the reason they were able to ambush our archers!”

The peddler, still on his knees, drew a breath. “That’s true,” he admitted. “Well, the bit about the archers. The Hrum’s long lances would have destroyed that army, and your father would still be dead, even if I’d never met the Hrum. But I don’t expect a deghan to let a little thing like truth stand in the way of beating a peasant!”

His anger was different from Jiaan’s, sullen and slow burning as a forge fire, and perhaps the hotter for it. But if what Jiaan said was true . . .

“You don’t deny you’re a Hrum spy!” Jiaan shot back. “You don’t deny that you gave them Farsalan battle plans. You don’t deny that you scouted the Dugaz rebels’ camp for them, and probably other things as well!”

“Wait,” said Soraya. She had to come at the truth of this—and there were some things she knew that Jiaan didn’t. “That can’t be right. He’s been working against the Hrum! He’s the one who poisoned the garrison, and smuggled food into Mazad. And he helped me escape from their camp.”

Where he’d been welcome . . . and trusted.
She faced the peddler, who was wiping blood off his chin with his sleeve, and opened her sensing as wide as she could. “Explain,” she demanded.

The peddler snorted, splattering fresh blood onto his face. “What for? Yes, I sold Farsalan battle plans to the Hrum. And yes, I’ve been working against them since.” He was telling the truth. He had sold her father’s battle plan to the Hrum. A chill began to grow in Soraya’s heart. Hatred, but cold rather than hot. Cold as steel.

The peddler wiped his face again. “But deghans never care why a peasant does anything. So instead, I’ll tell you something you might care about—you can’t beat the Hrum without my help. The country folk trust me, and they won’t trust you. Not with their lives. You can’t find the camp without them. You can’t sabotage the siege towers without them. You can’t—”

“Siege towers?” Jiaan interrupted. “What siege towers?”

“The ones the Hrum are building in a hidden camp, to take Mazad,” said the peddler. “The siege towers you wouldn’t have known about till they rolled up to the walls, if I wasn’t spying on the Hrum for your Flame-begotten cause. But you won’t care about that, either,” he finished bitterly.

It was true, Soraya realized over the cold boil of her own anger. If it hadn’t been for him, they wouldn’t have known about the siege towers. If it hadn’t been for him, she might still be looking for a way to get word of Nehar’s treachery to Mazad. If it wasn’t for him, she would still be a Hrum slave, with scars on her back, and perhaps a broken spirit to go with them.

And compared to the fact that he’d had a hand in losing the battle that killed her father, none of it mattered at all. She wanted to kill him, to smash him with her fists like Jiaan had, to go on and on until he was obliterated, and her father’s death was obliterated, and the whole nightmare was gone, and she was home and safe.

But killing him wouldn’t bring her father back.

“I don’t believe you,” said Jiaan. “You’re playing a double game—winning Mazad’s trust so you can betray them too!”

“That’s not true.” The peddler’s voice was almost calm.

“He is telling the truth,” said Soraya. How could she sound so remote, so dispassionate, when she hated so much?

“How do you know that?” Jiaan demanded.

A reasonable question. Soraya shrugged.

“Whether I’m telling the truth about that doesn’t matter,” said the peddler. “Because I am telling the truth when I say you can’t get the Hrum siege towers without me. You can’t even find them.”

And that was also true. Even Jiaan knew it, but he covered his sudden doubt with bluster and anger. “I don’t care. We’ll find them somehow, and destroy them somehow. When they’re being taken to Mazad! We can attack them on the road!”

“Now, there’s a deghan’s answer if ever I heard one,” said the peddler. “You’ll sacrifice half your army—maybe more, since every man Garren can spare and some he can’t will be guarding those towers by then. But they’re just peasants, after all.
What are their lives, compared to a deghan’s vengeance? And you’ll likely lose, and those towers will bring down Mazad, and all its folk will be shipped off as slaves. But what’s that, compared to a deghan’s vengeance?”

Even Jiaan fell silent.

If her father had had scant patience with weeping and moaning, he’d had nothing but contempt for those who wasted life in vengeance. Unlike Jiaan, she could sense the emotions behind the peddler’s words. His hatred, his bitterness. His own outraged anger, as deep as hers. As justified? No.

But that sensing let her work past her anger, to clear thought.

“He’s right,” she told Jiaan. “You can’t kill him. We need him.”

A year ago she would have taken Jiaan’s knife and slit the peddler’s throat without a second thought. The peasant was right—it was a deghan’s answer. But this deghass had a baby brother who was going to grow up as a Hrum slave. She would do anything she had to, to change that. And that meant defeating the Hrum, and to do that they needed the peddler, so . . .
“You can’t kill him,” she repeated. “And you know it.”

He did, and that knowledge was even more intolerable to him than it was to her. Jiaan backed away a step, then another, and then turned and fled into the moonlit shadows of the canyon.