Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (13 page)

“What is it?” She would never, he knew, have come seeking him without reason.

“It’s Tazey,” Starhawk said quietly. “You’d better come.”

“So she’s been in a coma since then.” Starhawk held her horse in, fighting its not unnatural eagerness to put large expanses of the reg between itself and the harsh, maroon-black cliffs of the Haunted
Range’s outward face. “Kaletha tried to get in to see her last night. Osgard won’t hear of it, and it was all Nanciormis could do to keep him from throwing Kaletha out of the Household entirely.” There was no change in her soft, slightly gruff voice as she added, “I think she’s dying, Chief.”

He glanced sharply over at her. The cuts on her face from the sand and rocks of the storm still glared red and ugly; her gray eyes were fixed ahead of her on the dark notch of Tandieras
Pass, barely visible across the lifeless plain of black gravel. Nine years of fighting other peoples’ wars for money had taught them both that it is difficult to ride or fight while in tears. Tears were for later.

Sun Wolf squinted with his single eye at his horseback shadow on the pea gravel underfoot, calculating the angle of the sun. “What time did you leave there?”

“Midnight.
Osgard and Kaletha were still fighting.”

“Wonderful.” He pulled the end of his veil up over his mouth against the dust. “I can tell he’s going to be thrilled to death to see me.”

The shadows had turned and were beginning to lengthen again when they rode up the trail to the dark stone gatehouse of the Fortress on Tandieras
Pass. “No sound of mourning,” was Sun Wolf’s laconic comment. Starhawk nodded. They were both thinking like warriors of the next thing at hand—a cold-bloodedness they understood in one another. Sun Wolf felt no obligation to express his genuine fears for the girl, of whom he’d become fond in the few days he’d known her—nor did he assume Starhawk’s enigmatic calm to spring from unconcern. If Tazey died, there would be time enough for grief.

After three days of parched silence in the Haunted
Range, it seemed strange to him to see people moving around and to smell water and cooking meats, stranger still to realize he could believe in the reality of what he saw. As they rode in under the gloom of the gatehouse, a small, waiting shadow caught his eye. He reined in, letting Starhawk precede him into the dust-hazed confusion of the stable yards. The shadow stepped forward, pitifully small and thin in his dark doublet and hose and the sorry white ruffle at his neck. The pointy white face looked pleadingly up at him through the gloom.

“How’s your sister?” the Wolf asked quietly.

For a moment he had the impression Jeryn would run away. Then the boy ducked his head and mumbled, “You’ve got to help her. What’s wrong with her is magic, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Sun Wolf dismounted and stood looking down at the skinny, furtive little boy. “And I’ll do whatever I can do—but only if you get yourself back into bed. The Hawk tells me you caught one hell of a sunstroke coming out to fetch me.”

Jeryn colored slightly. “I’m better.”

Sun Wolf put his hand under the boy’s chin and forced the head up to look critically into Jeryn’s face. “The hell you are,” he replied evenly after a moment’s study of the too-white countenance under its short black curls. “A man who doesn’t rest his injuries isn’t just a fool—he’s a liability to his commander, because they’ll never heal properly and, sure as pox and blisters, they’ll act up when he’s needed most.” He passed his hand roughly over the boy’s hair, as if patting a dog. “I’ll take care of your sister.”

“Captain . . . ” Jeryn hesitated, then swallowed hard. “I—I’m sorry. It was all my fault to begin with but—but Uncle Nanciormis said I was a coward for not standing up for you to Father. He said if I didn’t like the way he taught me I should have tried to keep you here. And I—I’m not a coward,” he insisted, with the wretchedness of one who knows he will not be believed. “It’s just that . . . ” He stopped, his lips pressed tight. Then, embarrassed to show his tears, he turned to flee.

“Jeryn.”

Though it spoke so quietly, the rusted voice stopped him. He turned, fighting desperately not to cry.

“I never needed proof you were brave,” the Wolf said. In the white frame of veils, his face seemed dark in shadows, with its unshaven jaw and single, panther-yellow-eye. “And I never saw any reason to think you were a coward. What’s between your father and me is something you don’t have to concern yourself with. It has nothing to do with you.”

“No, sir,” Jeryn whispered. “I’m sorry, sir.”

The boy turned and started to run away when Sun Wolf asked, “Your dad with Tazey?”

He stopped again and turned back. “Yes, sir,” he said. Then, matter-of-factly, “He’s drunk, sir.”

Sun Wolf nodded. “Fighting drunk or passing-out drunk?”

“Fighting drunk, sir.”

“Wonderful.” The Wolf sighed. “Thanks, Scout. Now you get to bed.”

“Yes, Captain.” And the boy was gone like a shadow.

“You have to hand it to the King for stamina,” Sun Wolf grumbled, unwinding his head veils as he and Starhawk climbed the sand-drifted path up from the stables toward the black, square towers of the Hold. “A man’s got to be tough to stay fighting drunk for over twenty-four hours without moving along to the passing-out stage.”

“I used to work for a man who could do it,” Starhawk commented, as they mounted the outside stair. Sun Wolf checked his step as if she’d pinked him with a dagger in the back.

“That was different!”

“Different was one word for it,” she agreed mildly.

Sun Wolf growled, “That’s the damn thing about falling in love with your second-in-command,” and resumed his stride up to the balcony with its row of arched doors, Starhawk unsmiling at his heels. “They are with you too long and they know you too well.”

“Yes, Chief.”

Jeryn and Taswind occupied the last two rooms along the balcony shared by the King’s Household. The brazen sun slanted along the dark granite curve of the building’s southern face, hurling the shadows of the two partners like an inky scarf into room after room. Anshebbeth, sitting in one of them, sprang up with a nervous cry, her hands reaching out, her face pale and hollowed with sleepless strain. When she saw who it was, she sank back and resumed twisting her hands.

Even out on the balcony, Sun Wolf could hear Osgard’s braying voice.

“I won’t have it, I tell you! That foul-mouthed nag Nexué’s been all over the town, and there isn’t a man who isn’t saying my daughter’s a witch!”

“Although I take exception to the connotations of the word witch,” Kaletha’s caustic voice said, “you cannot deny that what happened has proved that Taswind is mageborn.”

“The hell I can’t deny it!” He turned to loom furiously over Kaletha as Sun Wolf pushed aside the patterned curtain that led into the outer chamber of Tazey’s rooms. “She’s no more a witch than her mother was! A sweeter, dearer, more obedient girl never walked the face of the earth, do you hear me?”

Kaletha only stiffened and looked down her nose at the bloodshot, unshaven, sweaty giant before her. As usual, her dark red hair was pulled back in braids and loops as intricate as potter’s work and her plain black homespun gown spotless; her very fastidiousness a scornful rebuke. “She is mageborn,” she insisted stubbornly. “You owe it to her to let me teach her the ways of power.”

“I owe it to her to keep her the hell away from you! I won’t have it said, and I’ll personally take and thrash you if you go near her with your sleep-spells and your weather-calling, and your filthy, stolen books! What man’s going to want to marry her, Desert Lord or no Desert Lord, if lies like that go around?”

Her protuberant blue eyes blazed. “They are not lies, and there is no shame attached to it.”

“You uppity hag!
She’d die of shame before she’d be what you are! Get out of my sight, before I—”

“If you will admit me instead of that useless, whining Bishop—”

“To have her be your student?”
Osgard roared, losing what little remained of his temper.

“She needs a teacher, and as I’m the only one—”

“What my daughter needs is a husband! I’ll have the man crucified who says she’s a witch—or woman, too! I tell you this—she’ll never be a student of yours! Now get out!”

The inner door curtain moved, its woven pattern of reds and blues like a wind-stirred garden where the edge of the sunsplash hit it. The Bishop Galdron stepped through, white hands folded before his belt. Though minus his brocaded ceremonial tabard, he still reminded Sun Wolf of an overdressed doll, robe and stole and surcoat all worked with a blazing galaxy of jeweled hieratic symbols. His cold blue eyes touched Sun Wolf and the Hawk, still standing in the arched doorway, then moved to Kaletha. Sternly, he said, “Yes, go. You have done harm enough by your mere presence. Better Taswind had died than had damned her soul with witchery.”

“She’s no witch!” Osgard roared, livid.

“She is a witch.” The old man’s red lips folded taut within the silky frame of mustaches. “And as a witch, she is damned . . . ”

“Get out off here, both of you!” Osgard’s face was scarlet, a tear-streaked mess of graying stubble and broken veins. “You should talk about witchery, you stinking hypocrite, when your own acolyte has been keeping company with Kaletha for months!”

Galdron turned, startled and deeply shocked, and Kaletha could not repress a smile of smug and vicious triumph at his discomfiture. Then she swept past Sun Wolf and out onto the balcony. Galdron, face pink with anger, hastened at her heels. The curtain swirled in the backwash of their wake, then settled over the folded-back storm shutters once more.

Sun Wolf remained, facing the King.

“You . . . ” Osgard’s voice was thick and slurred. “You—it’s your fault. My son ran away to see you . . . ”

“Your son ran away because he was too scared of you to speak for me, and your daughter was too scared to ask your help.” Sun Wolf folded his arms, his whole body relaxed into battle-waiting, a deceptive, hair-trigger readiness. “Now will you let me save her life, or are you going to have her die to prove yourself right?”

Osgard’s face went white with speechless anger; Sun Wolf wondered clinically if he would suffer a stroke on the spot. Then, with a bellow like an exploding furnace, he roared, “I’ll have you crucified for that! Guards!” In a swirling gust of stale wine fumes the King sprang for Sun Wolf’s throat.

Reflecting in the split second between the King’s attack and his own reaction that his father had been right when he’d cautioned him, in the name of all his ancestors, never to mess with magic or argue with drunks, Sun Wolf sidestepped the attack. He blocked the outstretched hands with a swipe of one forearm and used the other hand to deliver a neat, straight punch to the stubbly jaw that the King walked directly into.

Osgard went down like a felled tree.

Sun Wolf stepped back from the unconscious King just as Nanciormis and half a dozen guardsmen came bursting through the door that led down to the inner stair from the Hall. For a moment the Wolf and Nanciormis faced one another across the slumped body, the guards clustering at his back and clutching their sword hilts in readiness for anything. Then the commander turned to the guards and said gravely, “His Majesty is fatigued. Take him to his room.”

He stepped aside as they bore the King out past him and down the stairs, watching inscrutably until they turned the corner down into the Hall. Then he glanced back at Sun Wolf.

“I see I was wrong about the uses of magic,” he said quietly. “Do what you can for her. I’ll see you’re left alone.”

“I’d call that magnanimous of him,” Starhawk remarked softly, as the commander passed through the wide arch out onto the balcony and thence, presumably, to his own room down at its farther end. “Except that he waited until he was damn sure nobody was around to hear him say it.”

“Maybe.”
Sun Wolf watched thoughtfully as the vast curtain settled back to stillness once more against the hard glare of the arch. “He’s a politician, Hawk—and as a politician he deals with the way things are, not how they’re supposed to be. Whatever else can be said about him, he’s enough of a shirdar lord to know that magic has nothing to do with the Bishop’s threats of Hell.”

He turned for the inner door to Tazey’s room, and Starhawk said quietly, “ ’Shebbeth should be here.”

He stopped, a little surprised, knowing she was right. For all she was a soldier, the Hawk had a woman’s acute sensitivity to social usages. “If you think she’d be of any use, you’re welcome to go look for her,” he said. “Though it’s my guess Osgard turned her out—and no wonder.”

Starhawk paused, remembering the governess’ tear-streaked face and hysterical hand-wringing, glimpsed through the balcony door, and said no more on the subject.

The windows of Tazey’s small bedroom faced northwest, toward the harsh chaparral desert and the rugged mountains beyond. At this time of the day, the room was flooded with sunlight and, with the windows tightly shut in accordance with good medical practice, unbearably hot and close. The air was heavy with the smells of burned herbs, sickly after the dry movement of the desert air from which Sun Wolf had come. Tazey lay stretched out on her narrow bed; but for the movement of her young breasts under the sheet, she might have been dead already. Her tan stood out like a bad coat of paint against the underlying waxiness of her flesh; from the corners of her shut eyes ran the dried tracks of tears wept in her sleep.

Hesitantly, Sun Wolf knelt beside the bed and took the girl’s hand in his. It felt cold. He counted the pulse, when he found it after long search, and it was leaden as a stream choked with winter ice. A lifetime on the battlefield had given him a certain skill at rough-and-ready surgery; later, Yirth of Mandrigyn had shown him the spells to hold the failing spirit to the flesh until the flesh had time to respond to medicines. But this was not a matter of the flesh at all. The symptoms resembled, if anything, those of freezing and exhaustion.

He had no idea where to start. He had healed warriors with warriors’ means, but this was different. In the last nine months, he had done a very little healing by means of the few spells Yirth had taught him and had always been astonished when they worked. He looked down now at the girl’s browned face against the pillow, the scattered, sun-streaked hair, and the blue smudges of exhaustion that shadowed the tensed eyelids. For the first time, he released his hold on a warrior’s readiness and felt grief for her, grief and a terrible pity for what had befallen her.