The Novels of the Jaran (204 page)

Vasha felt more than heard Mother Kireyevsky take in a breath for the momentous pronouncement. “Inessa claimed to know who the child’s father was. It was her last wish, as she lay dying of a fever, that the boy be sent to his father. If it is at all possible….” His hearing hazed over as a roar of fear and hope descended on him, claiming him. Mother Kireyevsky continued to speak, but he did not hear her words, not until she pounded the final strokes: “She claimed that his father was Ilyakoria Orzhekov.”

Into the silence, Nadine Orzhekov’s reply was so light-hearted, caught on a laugh, that it seemed false. “My uncle, Bakhtiian.”

Vasha hunkered down. He knew what must come next. Now Nadine Orzhekov would repudiate the connection. She would laugh.

“Of course he must return with me,” said Orzhekov cheerfully, as if she had just been offered a prime stud. “I’m riding back to the army now. I will take responsibility for his well-being myself.”

Shocked, he looked up right at her. Did she mean it? Nadine Orzhekov eyed him coolly, disapprovingly.

“You are recently married yourself,” said Mother Kireyevsky, eyeing the scar on Orzhekov’s cheek.

“Yes,” replied Orzhekov in a cold voice. “I also command a jahar. You may be assured that the child is safe with me. What is his name? Vasha is short for—?”

“Vassily.”

“Vassily!”
Now
she looked astounded, where none of the rest of his sordid history had shocked her. “How did he come by
that
name?”

Stung, he forgot himself. “My mama told me that that is the name
he
said to give me.”

Mother Kireyevsky slapped him, and he hunched down, berating himself. Idiot twice over, for speaking at all and for giving Nadine Orzhekov any reason to think ill of him, to think he might actually
believe
the fiction that his mother had claimed was the truth: not just that Ilyakoria Bakhtiian was his father, but that Bakhtiian had known of her pregnancy and even told her what name to give the child. Only he
did
believe it. It was all he had to believe in.

“…and he’s always been full of himself,” Mother Kireyevsky was saying, “thinking that he’s the son of a great man. You needn’t mind it. Of course Bakhtiian can’t recognize him as his son—it’s all quite ridiculous, of course, that an unmarried woman…” Mother Kireyevsky was practically babbling, fawning over Bakhtiian’s niece in her desperation to be rid of him. “Of course he has no father, but we’re grateful to you for taking him—”

“He looks like him,” said Orzhekov curtly, cutting her off. “As I’m sure you
must
know.” She sounded disgusted, and in a blinding moment of insight, Vasha realized that she was disgusted with Mother Kireyevsky, not with him. “But in any case, I must go. I’ll need a horse—”

A horse! He was leaving!

“He’s got nothing,” said Mother Kireyevsky. “Her tent and a few trinkets.”

“He gave my mother a necklace,” said Vasha abruptly, emboldened by Orzhekov’s sympathy. Because he so desperately wanted her to believe him, to prove to her that it was all true, that it must be, because he knew things that a common boy would never know. “It’s gold with round white stones.
He
brought it from over the seas. From a khaja city called Jeds.”

“Go get your things, Vasha,” snapped Mother Kireyevsky, and he flinched, but she did not hit him again.

And when a horse was saddled and his pathetic handful of belongings and his tattered blanket tied on behind the saddle, and he mounted up and waited for Nadine Orzhekov, he realized all at once that Mother Kireyevsky would never hit him again. The thought terrified him. He had never in his life strayed farther than herd’s distance from his tribe. He was scared to leave, and yet he wanted nothing more than to go. No one came to see him off. That quickly, they rid themselves of him and went back to their lives, free of the burden of his presence.

They rode out in silence, he and Bakhtiian’s niece. He concentrated on his riding, and on keeping his hands steady and his mind clear, because fear threatened to engulf him, fear and excitement together.

Finally, she spoke. “How old are you, Vasha?”

He took heart at her straightforward question. “I was born in the Year of the Hawk.”

“Oh, gods,” she murmured, as if she was talking to someone else. “Eleven years old. Eleven years old.”

“Is it true?” he asked. “Is he really my father? My mama always said so, but… but she lied, sometimes, when it suited her. She said he would have married her, but she never said why he didn’t, so I don’t think he ever would have. Only that she wanted him to.” He knew that, like Mother Kireyevsky, he was babbling out of desperation, but he couldn’t stop himself. He recalled his mother so clearly, her pretty face, her warmth, her scent, her cutting words to her cousins and the others in the tribe, to men who courted her, to women who tried to befriend her, her constant harping on the man she had loved and borne a child to—a man who had never in all the years afterward returned or even sent a message. “Every tribe we came to, she asked if they’d news, if he’d married. He never had, so she said he still meant to come back for her. Then after my grandmother died, the next summer we heard that he’d married a khaja princess. Mama fell sick and died. Both the healer and a Singer said she’d poisoned herself in her heart and the gods had been angry and made her thetile of it.” He gulped in air, it hurt so badly to think of her, of her dead, of being alone. “No one wanted me after that.”

And why should the Orzhekov tribe want him? Why should Nadine Orzhekov take responsibility for him? Perhaps she needed another servant in her camp. Better to know the worst now.

“I think you’re his son,” she said so calmly he thought at first he had heard her wrong.

“But how can I be?” he demanded. “He wasn’t married to my mother.”

She sighed. “I’ll let
him
explain that.”

Him.
It hung before him like a talisman, and though their journey was a strange one for a boy who had never before traveled outside of his tribe, that
him
hung before Vasha as a fog disguises the land, all through the days that they rode, with strange companions and into khaja lands, toward
him.

Their party came at last to a vast army camped before a huge, gleaming khaja city, and Nadine took Vasha beside her, riding forward alone to come into camp at sunset. He had never seen so many tents, so many horses, so many people—women and children and countless men armed for war—all in one place. They dismounted at the very center of camp, and two men led their horses away. Nadine herded him forward toward the great tent that loomed before them. Terror clutched hold of him, and he slunk back behind Nadine when she stopped under the awning of the tent. She greeted the two guards and rang a little bell three times. The guards eyed him curiously but said nothing.

A cool, commanding voice answered from inside the tent. “Send them in.”

A shudder shook through Vasha, so hard that at first he thought he could not walk. But Nadine Orzhekov was all he had. When she swept the entrance flap aside and ducked in, he followed tight against her, practically hugging her side. Vasha had never felt more afraid in his life.

Two men stood on either side of a table in the outer chamber. In that first instant, glimpsing them—one dark and stern, one fair and breathtakingly handsome—either one could have been the man he had dreamed of all these years. Dressed simply, and yet gifted with the commanding presence a general and great leader must have. Both tall. Both of them radiant. He could have fallen at the feet of either of them, and been happy to gain their notice. He clenched his hands and fought back tears. And remembered that his mother had always spoken of Bakhtiian as a dark-featured man.

Like an answer to his thought, the dark man started forward and embraced Nadine. “Dina! Have you just ridden in? Where is the prince?”

“About two days behind us, with the pack train. I rode ahead, Uncle.”

Oh, gods.
Bakhtiian looked past her. It took every ounce of courage that Vasha possessed to hold his ground against that severe gaze. Bakhtiian had dark hair, a beard, and eyes that pierced right through him. “Who is this?” he demanded of his niece, without taking his eyes off of Vasha.

“I see I’ve come at just the right time,” replied Nadine sarcastically. “Where is Tess?”

“Come here. What’s your name?”

Vasha gulped down a breath and stepped out from behind Nadine, into the full force of Ilyakoria Bakhtiian’s stare.

“Vasha, this is Bakhtiian,” said Nadine brusquely. “Pay your respects.”

All the years of waiting and dreaming weighed on him. He had never believed it would come to this. How badly he wanted to make a good impression. “I am Vassily Kireyevsky,” he said softly, because it was all the volume he could manage. “My mother was Inessa Kireyevsky.”

“Inessa Kireyevsky! Gods.” Bakhtiian stared at him, and Vasha wanted only to drown, to spin away into the air, into nothing. The haze descended once again, and although he knew the others went on talking, he paid no attention to them, he only stared at Bakhtiian, memorizing him, the man he had never seen and yet knew as well as … his own father. But a spark rose burning within, fighting his paralysis: Bakhtiian
remembered
Inessa Kireyevsky. That was hopeful.

The curtain into the inner chamber stirred and opened, and a woman stepped out. “Isn’t Inessa Kireyevsky the one you lay with out on the grass, under the stars?” Her voice was low, touched with a kind laughter, generous and full.

Bakhtiian did not shift his gaze from Vasha, and the boy felt smothered under the weight of his stare. “You’ve a good memory, my wife,” he said in that same even voice that smothered the turmoil in its depths.

“For some things,” she replied.

An odd accent graced her voice, light, even pleasing, but obvious. Vasha tore his gaze away from Bakhtiian and stared at her: at her brown hair and her fine, exotic features. Her calves and feet were bare, but a silken robe of gold covered the rest of her. The fine sheen of the fabric caught the light, shimmering as she moved forward through the chamber. She was pregnant. She was
not
a jaran woman.

“You’re the khaja princess!” he blurted out.

“Yes.” She examined him. “What’s your name again? Vasha?”

Her interest seemed benevolent enough, although he was not sure he could trust her. “Vassily Kireyevsky.”

“How old are you, Vasha?”

“I was born in the Year of the Hawk.”

“And you’ve no father? Did your mother never marry?”

He hung his head in shame. Again, the truth had to be told. He wanted so desperately for them to like him. “My mother never married. That’s why my cousins wished to be rid of me.”

“Inessa never married?” said Bakhtiian, sounding skeptical. “I find that hard to believe.”

To Vasha’s surprise, it was Nadine Orzhekov who came to his defense. She rested a hand on his shoulder. He hadn’t even known if she liked him. “They treated him poorly enough. They didn’t want him. That’s why I thought he’d be better off here. Especially since Inessa claimed up until the day she died that you were the boy’s father.”

Bakhtiian flung his head back. He looked astonished. He fairly crackled with life. “How can I be his father? I never married her!”

“Vasha,” commanded the khaja princess. “Come here.” He obeyed, walking over to her. She placed a finger under his chin and gently tilted his head back, the better to examine his face. She was—not beautiful like his mother, but strong, with her odd khaja features, and she measured him kindly, with compassion in her eyes such as he had not seen since his grandmother died.

At that moment, he fell in love with her.

“It could be,” she said generously. “There’s a strong enough resemblance, once you look for it.”

“But, Tess—”

She cut off her husband ruthlessly. “Don’t be stupid, Ilya.” Then she lifted a hand and brushed Vasha’s dark hair lightly. “Vasha, do you know why your mother never married?”

He risked a look at Bakhtiian, who stood glowering at them. He swallowed, but knowing the princess expected him to speak, he managed to. “Because she thought that Bakhtiian was coming back to marry her. But he never did. And she never wanted anyone else.” All at once he realized that these words might offend the princess. He flushed, sick with worry. Bakhtiian’s fixed expression cowed him, and he was too afraid to look at the princess.

But the princess, when she spoke, merely sounded puzzled. “Surely this was inevitable?” she asked the others. Her hand traced a path down Vasha’s neck and came to rest on his shoulder. He melted against her, seeking shelter, and she gave it to him, tightening her arm around him.

Bakhtiian just stared. “Gods, I didn’t think she meant it when she told me she was pregnant.”

“Is it just a coincidence that he’s named Vassily?” asked the princess calmly.

In reply, the other man came to life, the fair one who stood over to one side of the princess, saying nothing, only watching. Given an instant’s choice between them, Vasha would have guessed that the fair man—on beauty alone—must be Bakhtiian, but he was someone else and thus did not count. Until now. “Do you mean to say,” he asked hoarsely, “that you told her to name the child after me?”

Frightened by this outburst, Vasha huddled closer in against the princess. As if in answer, she looked down at him. “Vasha. Is that what you wish? To be our son?”

The ground dropped out from under his feet. He could not speak, not even to beg for what he wanted more than anything in the world.

Like a slap, bringing him back to earth, Bakhtiian snapped at his wife. “Tess! We can’t take him in. That’s absurd. I’ll raise no objection if Nadine wishes to foster him, but—”

“You already made the choice, Ilya. You lay with her. She bore a child.”

“But, Tess—”

“Gods, Ilya, just look at him. By the laws of Jeds, this boy would be recognized as your son.”

Bakhtiian stiffened, and Vasha recognized, even through his stupor and the pain of his hope, the bearing of the general who had united the jaran tribes. “This isn’t Jeds,” he said in a taut, threatening voice, “and neither are the laws of Jeds my laws.”