Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (14 page)

He remembered her in the war dance—the light, buoyant strength of her movements, the joy in her eyes at being only what she was. In the few days he’d been in Tandieras he’d become fond of her, with a virile middle-aged man’s affection for a young girl, that odd combination of paternalism and a sort of nonpersonal lust. But she was, he understood now, a wizard like himself, perhaps stronger than he. And she would be as terrified of her powers as he was of his. The sweetest daughter a man could want, her father had said of her. No wonder she was terrified to find herself, against her will, the thing he most wanted for her not to be. No wonder that knowledge drove her power inward, until her very soul was eating her body with guilt and grief and shame.

He let go of her hand and rose to open the casements of the windows, letting in the dry smell of the desert—the comforting mingle of stables, sage, and sky. Voices drifted to him—Kaletha’s short and defiant from the courts below, the Bishop’s full of querulous rage. Closer, he heard Anshebbeth’s sobs, muffled, as if against bedding or a man’s shoulder. Taking a stump of chalk from his pocket, he drew on the red-tiled floor around the bed one of the Magic Circles, a precautionary measure against evils that Yirth, when she had taught him this one, had been unable to define clearly. After a moment’s thought, he also traced the runes of wizardry, of life, of strength, of journeys undertaken and safely completed—marks that would draw to them the constellations of influences and could help to focus his mind. It was all done by rote—he had never used them before and had no idea how to do so, but went through the motions as he would have undertaken weapons drill with an unfamiliar piece of equipment. There was no sense neglecting his teaching simply because it meant nothing to him yet.

He returned to the bed and took Tazey’s hand.

He wondered if it was imagination, if it felt colder than it had. He drew three deep breaths and settled his mind to meditation. Clumsily, hesitantly, he pushed aside all the crowding worries and resentments, the random thoughts that the mind flings up to disguise its fear of stillness. He gathered light around him and, as if sinking into deep water, he sought the Invisible Circle, where he knew he would find Tazey hiding from herself.

She woke up crying. For a long time, she lay with her face turned away from him, sobbing as if everything within her body and soul had been torn out of her—as indeed, Sun Wolf thought, almost too weary for pity, it had been. He himself felt little but an exhaustion all out of proportion to the short time he felt he had meditated. Then, gently making her roll over, he rubbed her back as he had seen market women rub babies to soothe their wordless griefs.

Only after a time did he notice that the room was cool. The air outside the broad window had been drenched with light and heat when he had sunk into meditation; it was dark as pitch now. Listening, he tried to determine from the sounds in the building below how late it was, but that was difficult, for Tazey’s illness had cast a pall of silence over the Citadel. Someone—Starhawk, probably—had kindled the two alabaster night lamps that rested on the carved ebony clothes chest, and molten lakes of light wavered on the ceiling above.

He felt weak and a little strange, as if he had swum for miles. His legs, doubled up under him, were stiff and prickly as he shifted position. For a long time, he was content to remain where he was, only rubbing the girl’s back to let her know she was not alone. He had found her in the desolate country that borders the lands of death, wandering, crying, in darkness; he knew, and she knew, that she had not wanted to come back with him.

After a long time she turned her head on the pillow and whispered, “Is my father very angry?”

She was a mage like himself now, and he could not lie to her. Moreover, in the shadowlands of the soul there is always a bond between those who have sought and those who have been found. He said, “Yes. But you can’t let that rule you anymore.”

She drew in a quick breath and held it for a few seconds before letting it go. “I didn’t want this,” she said at last, her voice very thin. She lifted her face from the pillow, ugly, swollen, cut up with the violence of the sandstorm and crumply with tears. Her absinthe-green eyes were circled in lavender smudges, the eyes of the woman she would one day be. “I tried . . . ”

“Jeryn knew enough to ask you where I was.”

She nodded miserably. “I used to find things when I was little and he was just a baby. Once when he got lost in the old quarter of the Fortress I found him just by—by shutting my eyes and thinking about him. That’s how I knew you were in Wenshar and how I knew he’d gone after you. But later I—I tried not to do it anymore.” She sniffled, and wiped her reddened nose. “Does this mean that I’m damned?”

“It means that Galdron will say you are.”

She was silent for a time, digesting this distinction, then said, “I didn’t want this. I don’t want to be a witch. Witches are . . . ”

She paused and looked up at him.

“No one’s asking you to decide right now,” Sun Wolf said quietly. “But I, for one, want to thank you, with all my heart, for saving the Hawk’s life. You saved Jeryn, too, and your friends Pothero and Shem.”

“But they’re afraid of me now,” she murmured, and another tear crept down her puffy cheek.

“Probably,” he agreed. “But I don’t think Jeryn is, and I know the Hawk’s not—so it isn’t everybody.”

Her voice was distant, wistful, as if she already knew she was speaking of someone else. “I don’t want to change. I mean—I might not like what I’ll become.”

Tenderly, he brushed aside the snarly rats of her dust-laden hair. “Then don’t change tonight,” he replied. “You can’t change at three in the morning anyway, nobody can . . . ” Her sob caught on a laugh. “Sleep now.”

“Will you . . . ” She swallowed, embarrassed. “Do you think you could—could stay with me for a little while? I had dreams . . . When I was asleep, before you found me, I dreamed . . . awful things. The Witches . . . ”

“I’ll be here,” he reassured her softly, weary as he was from the long day’s ride and from last night’s watching. (He had been known to sit for longer than this in all-night watches on some enemy camps.) He held Tazey’s hand, large and strong and warm now in his own, while her soft breathing evened toward dreamless sleep. Detachedly, he studied the smudgy, chalked circles around the bed—the Circle of Light, Yirth had called one, and the Circle of Darkness, though why they were so called she had not known. He shook his head. Kaletha was right, he thought. She would have to be taught, and he knew that neither he, nor, he suspected, Kaletha, was equipped to do it.

Another thought crossed his mind, and he frowned, wondering why it had not occurred to him before—not only for Tazey, but for himself.

Tazey murmured something, stirred in her sleep, and then lay quiet again. Though she still slept lightly, he could see no dreams tracking her discolored eyelids. Soundless, as if on patrol, he climbed stiffly to his feet and crossed to the curtained door.

“Hawk?” he said softly into the dimness beyond.

There was no reply.

He stepped past the curtain to the candlelit outer room. Muted radiance played over the carved wooden armoire, the oak chairs with their red leather seats, and the little round corner fireplace. On the polished sideboard, a couple of candles in silver holders shed soft rings of brightness. The heavy curtains had been drawn over the archway to the balcony—a stray gust of dry wind stirred them, a ripple of reflected flame danced along their gilt borders. There was no one there.

He walked to the other doorway, which led to the inner stair down to the Hall. Through it he could see torchlight and shadow from the hall below playing across the stone vaults. A muffled clamor of voices came to him, rising and falling, agitated but unintelligible. If Galdron’s making more trouble for her, he thought grimly, or Nexué . . . If Kaletha’s carrying on again about her poxy rights . . . 

A shadow swept across the red glow from beneath, and a moment later he heard a cat-soft stride on the stairs that could only be Starhawk’s.

“What is it?” he asked when she appeared in the doorway.

Her face inexpressive, she said, “Nexué the laundress.”

Sun Wolf’s single yellow eye glinted dangerously. “What’s the bitch been up to now?”

“Not much,” said Starhawk calmly. “She’s dead.”

With quiet viciousness, Anshebbeth said, “I can’t say I’m surprised to hear it. Sooner or later someone was bound to wring that filthy old woman’s neck.” She stared into the fire with dark eyes that smoldered like the logs crumbling there.

“Don’t talk like that.” Kaletha shot her an angry sidelong glance; in her black homespun lap, Sun Wolf observed that her hands were shaking.

The governess looked up at her, hurt at the rebuke. “You—” she began, and Kaletha cut her off.

“Hatred is an impurity of the soul as foul as the fornications of the body,” she said too quickly. “If I’ve taught you nothing else, you should have learned that.”

Her dark eyes filling with wounded tears, Anshebbeth nodded, her hand stealing to her tightening throat as she mumbled that she had not meant it. Annoyed, Kaletha looked away. Egaldus, talking quietly with Nanciormis, the Bishop, and two shaken-looking guardsmen down near the door, raised his head at the shrillness of her words; but after a moment’s hesitation, he stayed where he was.

Quietly, Sun Wolf moved to the wine cabinet at the far side of the dais from the dim glow of the hearth where the two women sat, and filled two silver goblets of wine.

“That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it?” demanded Kaletha as Sun Wolf’s shadow fell over her. “Drink—like that pathetic sot Osgard . . . ”

“My answer to everything is having you relax, woman.”

“I am relaxed, and I don’t need your wine, nor does ’Shebbeth.” Anshebbeth stopped her hand in mid-reach for the goblet, then obediently folded it with her other in her lap.

Nanciormis left the little group beside the arched vestibule doors and strode the length of the Hall to the dais to put a gentling hand on Anshebbeth’s shoulder. In the wavery glow of the sconces on either side of the hearth, his curving black brows stood out sharply, as if, beneath the bronze of his tan, he had gone pale at what he had heard.

“Perhaps Anshebbeth should go up and sit with Lady Taswind,” he suggested softly. “I need to speak with the Captain alone for a few moments.” To Sun Wolf, in private, he had made any number of crude jests at the governess’s expense, but part of his charm lay in his knowing when to say the right thing.

Shebbeth’s anxious glance shifted from Nanciormis to Kaletha, but Kaletha, still irrationally annoyed with her subservience, looked away in pointed disgust. That she would have been still more annoyed had Anshebbeth not immediately agreed with her, as she had done in the public gardens when the subject of physical love came up, evidently had no bearing on the matter. Anshebbeth, with the tight misery on her face of one who knows she can do no right, gathered her dark skirts and hastened away up the winding stair.

“At least that gets her out of our hair,” Nanciormis murmured, taking one of the goblets from Sun Wolf’s hand and leading him away from the carved bench where Kaletha now sat alone. “How is Tazey?”

Sun Wolf shook his head. “Sleeping all right, now,” he said softly. “She’ll live—but I tell you right now, she won’t be the same.”

The commander let out his breath in a sigh. “Dear Gods—” He used the shirdar word for gods. “Never in a hundred years would I have thought Jeryn would try to go after you. Frankly, I didn’t think the boy had it in him—but it was a stupid thing to say, nevertheless.”

“What did you say?” The Wolf paused in his step and regarded the commander curiously under the harsh doubled light of a pair of torches on the wall.

The gold rings that held his braids flashed as Nanciormis shook his head. “I no longer remember exactly, though I should. He’d been whining all afternoon—that Sun Wolf hadn’t made him climb ropes and Sun Wolf hadn’t made him do tumbling and Sun Wolf hadn’t made him lift weights—which I knew perfectly well you had. At last I lost my temper and said that if he preferred your teaching, he should have had the nerve to stand up to his father for you. That’s all. I never meant that he should go after you.” He took a quick gulp of the wine; some of the color was returning to his heavy cheeks. “And now this . . . ”

Sun Wolf glanced along the Hall to the guards, still grouped in a whispering cluster around the dark archways to the vestibule. “What happened?”

Nanciormis took another drink and shook his head. “It must have happened sometime late last night,” he said quietly. “Whoever did it has to have been tremendously strong. Nexué was literally hacked into pieces. I don’t know what they used—an axe or a scythe, perhaps . . . ” He swallowed, still shaken by the memory.

He had seen war, Sun Wolf thought. This was different.

“A strong man can do a lot of damage with a sword.”

He turned his own untouched cup in his hands, watching the torch-glare flash on the dark wine, but not drinking. He had eaten nothing since their nooning stop at the edge of the reg, and he knew his capacity for wine was not what it once had been. “And this happened last night?”

“Or early this morning.
She was found in one of the old workshops in the empty quarter—by the blood trail, she’d been pursued there . . . ”

“What was she doing down there?”

Nanciormis let out an ironic bark of laughter. “There’s a servants’ privy near the wall—by the look of it that’s where she was bound, though she could have been going anywhere. Nexué was a sneak and a spy as well as a gossip—there wasn’t much going on in the Citadel she didn’t know about. The empty quarter’s been used for assignations before this.”

“And she wasn’t found until tonight!” Sun Wolf’s tufted eyebrows plunged down over his nose, making the worn eye patch shift.

“What with . . . ” Nanciormis hesitated. Even with Osgard snoring in his bedchamber, he was treading softly. “With the uproar over Taswind, no one noticed her absence until this evening when the wind turned.”