Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (4 page)

The answer was so pat that Sun Wolf was barely able to stifle a snort of laughter; Kaletha’s eye flicked to him, like a chilly draft, and then away again. If wishes were horses, Sun Wolf thought wryly, there’d be hoofprints all over my hide . . . 

“Excuse me, Commander, Captain,” the Bishop said, as Kaletha turned and crossed the dais to the doorway of the King’s solar. “I should probably be present when she attends to the King.”

“I take it she’s the only sawbones you could get?” the Wolf asked, as the Bishop, like a glittering little doll, hastened to follow the tall, red-haired woman through the door. In the hall before them, things were quieting down. The gray-haired hag, in the midst of a gaggle of grooms and laundresses, was recounting some story to snickers of ribald laughter. The Trinitarian novice, Sun Wolf observed, had in truth had no other business—he was still hanging around the archways into the vestibule, talking with two others of Kaletha’s disciples: a fattish boy of sixteen or so and a thin, worried-looking young woman, both dressed, like Kaletha and Anshebbeth, in black.

“On the contrary,” Nanciormis said, sipping the wine the servant had left and offering Sun Wolf the hammered bowl of dates. “Kaletha’s only recently come to that position, in the absence of anything better. Since she’s decided she’s going to be a wizard, she evidently considers it a part of her much-vaunted ‘destiny.’ But she’s always been part of the Household.”

“Has she?” the Wolf asked thoughtfully. It would account, he thought, for that bitter defensiveness. It was said that no prophet was without honor except in their own home village. Even he, when he’d announced to his former mercenary troops on his brief visit to Wrynde that spring that he’d become a wizard, had at least done so after going away and coming back. The Wizard King Altiokis had brooked no competition; Kaletha could not have so much as hinted at her powers while he was still alive. She’d had to announce it cold, to people who’d known her all her life. His too-ready imagination framed the notion of claiming wizardy in the village where he’d been raised, and his soul cringed from the thought.

Nanciormis shrugged casually. “She was lady-in-waiting to my sister, Osgard’s wife, the Lady Ciannis. When Ciannis died, Osgard kept her on in the Household as librarian, since she had a turn for it. It wasn’t until news came of the Wizard King’s death that she declared herself to be mageborn and began to teach others.”

He laughed, shortly and scornfully. “Not that anything’s ever come of it that I’ve been able to see. Oh, she claims to be able to teach magic, but who are her disciples? A lot of soured spinsters and frustrated virgins who haven’t anything better to do with their lives.”

“You don’t believe her power’s real, then?” It must have been the reaction of most of the people in the fortress.

Nanciormis waved a deprecating hand, chubby but strong with its ancient rings of worn gold. “Oh, I’ll admit the woman has magic—perhaps some of those poor fools who follow her do as well. But why pursue it? What can it buy you that money cannot? It’s been a hundred and fifty years since the old city of Wenshar in the desert was destroyed because of the witcheries practiced there, but, believe me, the local feeling toward it hasn’t changed.”

Sun Wolf cocked his head a little, remembering the way the girl in the inn had made the sign against evil. But she’s a witch, she had said. “Why is that?” he asked. “What happened in Wenshar?”

The doors of the solar opened, and Tazey emerged without her governess, looking anxious and preoccupied. Nanciormis glanced at the dark doorway behind her and said softly, “Least said of that is best. Have you paid for rooms in town, Captain? Osgard will want to see you in the morning, I’m sure. We can offer you bunks in the Men’s Hall . . . ” He gestured toward a wide arched door halfway down the Hall. “ . . . and the Women’s.” His nod took in the narrow entrance beyond the hearth. “Or if you choose, we can give you a cell to share down near the stable courts, in the empty quarter of the fortress. It’s mostly old workshops, kitchens, and barracks, but the closer rooms still have roofs and they’re shuttered against storms, should one rise in the night.”

Sun Wolf recognized by the inquiring gleam in the commander’s eye that the offer was prompted as much by curiosity as by hospitality; he said, “We’ll take the room out by the stables,” and saw the big man nod to himself, as if he’d satisfied in his mind the relationship between the two partners and how he must deal with them.

From the solar door, the Bishop Galdron emerged, looking fastidious and disapproving; behind him came Kaletha, the gold lamplight deepening the lines of tiredness and disapproval on her fine-boned face, showing up her age, which the Wolf guessed at a year one side or the other of thirty. Anshebbeth fussed at her heels, as if Kaletha’s comfort, not Tazey’s, was her primary concern. But Tazey, standing near her uncle Nanciormis’ chair, said nothing—evidently she understood her governess’ discipleship. From across the room, the two other disciples hurried toward their teacher’s side, only the novice keeping his watchful distance.

Pointedly ignoring Sun Wolf, the little group made for the doors.

Sun Wolf sighed. He had wanted to put this off until they were not in public, but his sense of timing warned him that to do so would only make the situation worse. There were some things which had to be done at the first available opportunity. He got to his feet and said, “Lady Kaletha.”

Her step wavered. She was debating, he thought, whether to make him call out to her and follow her. If she does, he thought grimly, with a momentary vision of shaking her until her pearly teeth rattled . . . Then he let it go. Whatever she had, it was what he desperately needed. He would have to ask for it, in whatever fashion she dictated. Stubborn, cake-mouthed female . . . 

Kaletha took another step, then seemed to change her mind, and stopped. She turned back, chin elevated, cornflower blue eyes regarding him as if he were a beggar.

He’d had runs up to enemy seige towers under fire that he’d enjoyed more. “My lady,” he said, his raw, rasping voice neither loud nor furtively quiet, “I’m sorry. I had no right to say what I said to you today, and I ask your forgiveness for speaking stupidly.” He forced his single eye to meet hers, aware of the stares of her disciples and of the others—servants, grooms, laundresses, guards, Taswind, and Nanciormis—in the Hall. He felt as he had during the Rites of Manhood in his village in the north long ago, stripped before the eyes of the tribe and obliged to take whatever abuse the shaman chose to give him. Only in that case, he thought dryly, at least those who watched him approved of what he sought to gain by the humiliation. That had been the last time, he realized, that he had ever asked for anything.

The chilly sweetness of her voice was as he remembered it from the gardens. “Do you say that because you are truly sorry,” she asked, “or because you know that I will not share my wisdom with you unless you apologize?”

Sun Wolf took a deep breath. At least she had answered him, and spoken to him as if she would listen to what he said. “Both,” he said.

It took away any possibility of an accusation of untruth and left her momentarily nonplussed. Then her blue eyes narrowed again. “At least you’re honest,” she said, as if sorry to learn of it. “That is the first thing you’ll have to learn about the arts of wizardry, if you pursue them, Captain. Honesty is almost as important to the study of wizardry as is purity of the body and the soul. You must be honest—utterly honest—at all times, and you must learn to accept the honesty of others.”

“You weren’t too pleased about my honesty this afternoon.”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Those were not your true feelings. If you look into your heart, I think you’ll find that it was your jealousy of me speaking what you wished to see, not what you actually saw.”

With great effort Sun Wolf stifled the first words that came to his lips. She can teach me, he reminded himself grimly. She’s the only one I have found to teach me. The rest of it is none of my affair. But he couldn’t resist saying, carefully keeping the irony from his voice, “I expect you’d know more about that than I would, my lady.”

From the corner of his eye he saw the impassive Starhawk put her tongue in her cheek, raise her eyebrows, and look away. But Kaletha nodded gravely, accepting his words on their face value and taking them as a deserved tribute to her clarity of insight. “It is something that comes when one has achieved a certain level of understanding.” Behind her, her disciples nodded wisely, like a well-trained chorus. “You must learn to accept discipline, to understand self-control. They may be alien to you . . . ”

“I’ve been a warrior all my life,” Sun Wolf said, annoyed. “There is discipline involved in that, you know.”

“It isn’t at all the same thing,” she responded serenely, and he bit back, How the hell would you know?

Patronizingly, she went on, “I’ve studied long and hard to achieve my power, Captain. It is my destiny to teach. With meditation and with spells, I can reach the deepest parts of the mind. The mind is all, if the body is pure—all magic comes from the purified intellect. I can wake powers in anyone, even in those who are not mageborn, if they are willing, honest, and pure.” She cast another chilly look up and down his big, heavily muscled form, as if seeing through his dusty clothes and disapproving of what she saw. Her glance moved past him, touched Starhawk, and the lines of disapproval pinched a little deeper at the corners of her mouth. “That’s something you’ll have to learn to accept, if you wish to enter into your powers.”

Anger heated in him, as she had no doubt meant it to; words crowded to his lips about frustrated spinsters who made a virtue of the fact that no man would tumble them on a bet. But, with a physical effort, he closed his muscles around those words like a fist. To buy the bread, he thought, you couldn’t insult the baker—and in any case, what she thought about magic was none of his business.

But he’d be damn lucky, he thought dourly, looking at that pale, fine-boned face in the torchlight, if he didn’t end by strangling the woman with her own long, red hair.

In his long silence, she studied him appraisingly. She had expected, he realized, some other reaction. After a moment she went on, “If you feel you have the strength and willingness to follow that path, come to me where I teach in the public gardens tomorrow afternoon.”

She inclined her head with a graciousness that made Sun Wolf long to slap her and prepared to move off. Down in the Hall, the old laundress called out to her, “I’ll bet you’re pleased to have him join you—as a change from boys and women!”

Kaletha’s face flushed with anger as she turned. Around the dirty old hag, the other laundresses and grooms were bellowing with laughter. As in the garden that afternoon, Kaletha was momentarily speechless with anger. In a flash of insight, Sun Wolf realized that, having no sense of humor, she was unable to slide from beneath this kind of indignity, unable even to understand it. And she must, he thought, have had to put up with it daily since she had announced her wizardry to the world.

All this went through his mind in an instant; as Kaletha drew breath to stammer some reply, he cut in over her words, “It’s the sow in rut that squeals the loudest.”

The old crone and her friends went into even louder guffaws. “Come down to the laundry and see, you old boar!”

He gave an elaborate shrug. “I haven’t got all night to stand in the line.”

The laundress laughed so hard he could easily have counted her teeth, had she possessed any. He turned back to Kaletha and said quietly, “I’ll be there tomorrow, my Lady, after I’ve seen the King.”

As he and Starhawk walked from the hall, he was aware of Kaletha’s speculative gaze upon his back.

The empty quarter of the fortress of Tandieras lay beyond the stables, a picked gray skeleton in the wan monochromes of dawn. From where he lay on the wide bed of waffle-crossed latigo and cottonwood poles, Sun Wolf could see through the half-open shutters of the window a broken labyrinth of crumbling adobe walls, fallen roofs, and scattered tiles—what had once been garrison quarters for the troops of Dalwirin, siege housing for the population of their administrative town, and barracoons for hundreds of slave miners. It was deserted now, covering several acres of ground; among the many things his father had considered unmanly for a warrior to possess had been an aesthetic sense, and Sun Wolf seldom admitted to anyone that he found such things as the stripped shapes of rock and wall or the sculpted dunes carved by the will of the wind beautiful.

Extending his senses, as he had learned to in the meditations Starhawk had taught him, he could feel life stirring in the ruins still. Somewhere desert rats scrabbled over crumbled bricks; somewhere snakes lay dreaming in old ovens, waiting for the sun to warm their cold blood. He felt the quick, furtive flick of a jerboa heading for its burrow. Though it was light enough now to make out the fallen bricks, the dun-colored walls with their drifts of piled sand, and the thrusting black spikes of camel-thorn and bullweed against them, there was not yet any sound of birds.

Traveling along the hem of the desert, he had grown familiar with all of them—sand warblers and wheatears and the soft, timid murmur of rock doves. The wells in the empty quarter should have drawn them by the hundreds.

He frowned.

Against his shoulder, Starhawk still slept, all her cheetah deadliness loosened and her thin face peaceful, her short crop of white-blonde hair ruffled and sticking up like a child’s. The Wolf liked to think of his relationship with this woman whom he had known so long as one of equals, warriors of matched strength and capability. But at times like this, he was conscious of feeling toward her a desperate tenderness, a desire to shelter and protect, wholly at odds with their daytime selves or the lion-like lusts of the deep night. He grinned a little at himself—Starhawk was probably the least protectable woman he’d ever encountered.

I’m getting old,
he thought ruefully. There was no fear in it, though a year ago it would have terrified him; he felt only amusement at himself. Old and soft.