Winter Be My Shield (10 page)

‘They'll work it out —'

‘No they won't! For the love of life, Laki, keep your wretched mouth shut.'

‘If we don't put it right, we'll be cursed! Our luck has already turned bad, but with this as well … I've already lost Markhan, I couldn't stand to lose you or Elli as well.'

‘So you'll betray me? You ungrateful bitch!'

Lakua closed her mouth with a snap, and Brekan's grip suddenly went slack.

‘Laki, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it —'

Wrenching the door flap aside, she ducked out into the night with Brekan on her heels. ‘Laki, wait! I'm sorry, please just let me explain —' He grabbed her by the shoulder, hard enough to wake the memory of the day Markhan was killed. ‘Let go of me!' she screamed and wrenched away.

‘Keep your voice down!' he pleaded. ‘Laki, they'll hear you —'

Too late. The door of the larger tent lifted and Cam leaned out with Eloba right behind him.

‘What in the Black Sun's name is going on?' Cam demanded.

 

In the main tent once again, Lakua blotted tears away with her sleeve and pulled her collar open to display the brooch. ‘I … I didn't sell it,' she whispered. ‘Brekan said he had some loot left over from when we were
with the Raiders. I was so upset remembering Markhan that I didn't even think about it.'

Eloba slipped an arm around her sister's shoulders. Both of them were flushed bright red with shame. Sullen and indignant, Brekan sat across the tent from them, scowling at the spruce.

‘I'm so sorry,' Lakua said to Sierra. ‘He's not a bad man, I swear …'

Sierra plucked a twig from the floor and began tying it in knots. After a moment, she realised that Isidro was watching her and she threw it down again and pulled her fists into her sleeves. Her power was pulsing within her, humming just beneath her skin. Rasten had taught her some tricks to keep it under control, but she'd never been all that good at them — that was why Kell had made the punishment bands, to give her an incentive to try harder.

‘You're all jumping to conclusions,' Brekan said. ‘I can't believe my own wives would accuse me of stealing from a guest!'

‘You were poking through her bag yesterday morning before we left,' Cam said to him. ‘I saw it myself, and no one's touched it since then.'

‘But you were going through it before that. Garzen gave the bracelets to you when he cut them off. Seems to me that it could have gone missing then just as easily.'

‘All four were there when I wrapped them up,' Cam said. ‘Isidro saw it, too.'

‘You've no right to be treating me this way,' Brekan said. ‘You'd be starving if it weren't for me bringing in game and finding a bit of coin once you'd frittered all yours away. You ought to be thanking me for making sure we could afford all those medicines Balorica needs.'

There was a reek of smoke in the air. Eloba cursed and scrambled to her feet. ‘By the Black Sun, the wretched bannock's burnt.' She snatched the pan off the stove and tipped it out onto a platter, charred and black. No one made any move towards it. There was no appetite left in the tent.

‘We should do a proper search of all the gear and supplies,' Garzen said. ‘And then everyone go through their bags. If we don't find it in the first round, everyone swap and search through someone else's kit.'

‘I'll have no part in this,' said Brekan. ‘You've all decided I'm guilty anyway.'

With a shake of his head Cam turned his back on Brekan and crouched down in front of Sierra. ‘Look, are you
absolutely
sure?'

‘You saw me go through it,' she said. ‘I'll do it again if you like, but it's not here …' Her hands were trembling so badly they looked palsied.

Cam raked his own hands through his hair. ‘He could have sold the whole thing, I suppose.'

‘If he did, he was cheated,' Isidro said, reaching over to pick up the bracelet resting on its bit of rag on Sierra's knee. ‘These stones are worth a king's ransom. The things you bought and the bit of coin you had left would only make up a fraction of their value.'

‘Don't bother tearing everything apart,' Lakua said. ‘He as good as told me he took it.' She rose shakily and came to kneel at Sierra's feet, reaching inside her shirt to unfasten the brooch. ‘I must apologise for my husband,' she said. ‘With the Bright Sun as my witness, I swear I didn't know he'd stolen from you. Please let me make amends.' She placed the brooch in Sierra's hand.

‘No!' Sierra closed her hand and pulled it away. ‘No, I can't … I mean, thank you, but I don't want it. I never cared about the stones, I was just afraid they'd use them to find me …'

Lakua caught Sierra's sleeve and looked imploringly into her eyes. ‘Please, you have to. He's my kinsman. If we don't help make atonement for his crime, the Goddess's curse will fall on us, too.'

Sierra kept her hands closed. ‘By the Gods and all their children, I bear you and your sister no ill will. I'll swear it on the altar of the first temple I reach … after all, the damage is done.' She pulled her hands away and stood to face Cam. ‘We have to leave this place
now
.'

‘We can't leave now,' Cam said. ‘It's late, we're all weary and it looks as though the weather might turn. We were planning to move on in the morning and find fresh grazing for the horses. We'll leave as soon as the weather allows.'

Sierra closed her eyes and suppressed the urge to scream at him. ‘Moving a few valleys over is not enough. If they find those stones they'll follow your trail back here. They'll hunt me down, however long it takes.'

‘Who will hunt you?' Cam said. ‘Look, Kasimi, I understand you're worried but they'll never trace us back here. The village we went to is a hard day's ride away. Even if the men hunting you do find those stones the trail will be long cold. Trust me, we've been doing this for a long time.'

His words did nothing to calm her. Her heart was pounding and her
power was pulsing higher with each throb of her heart. It was going to spill over, and soon — she was past the point where she could call it back. ‘I need to get out,' she said. ‘I can't breathe in here.'

Cam snagged her coat off its peg. ‘Don't go far. You don't want to get lost once the snow moves in.'

‘Oh, go teach a crow to fly,' she snapped at him and blundered out into the cold.

 

Cam brought Isidro a chunk of torn bannock. Eloba had done her best to scrape off the char but it still tasted burnt. ‘Nervy, isn't she?'

‘Terrified, I'd have said.' Isidro rested it on his knee while he rubbed the back of his neck. His hair was still standing on end, his skin prickled with goosebumps, though it eased now that Brekan had taken himself off to the other tent and the tension in the atmosphere was going down. For a while there he'd felt as though there was a summer storm brewing around them, and the air was tingling with energy, though thunderstorms were rare in winter.

‘Do you have any idea why she's so afraid?' Cam asked.

Isidro shook his head. ‘She doesn't want to talk about it.' He lowered his voice. ‘And I doubt that Kasimi is her real name. She jumps whenever you say it.'

‘You noticed it, too?' Cam murmured.

‘Did you see any sign of people searching for her?'

Cam straightened. ‘They're definitely searching for someone …' He leaned over to his saddlebags. ‘They were looking at every woman who came into the village and searching the sleds. The captain had some cock-and-bull story about a woman who'd killed her child —'

‘Rhia would have said something if she'd had a child.'

‘That's what Lakua said. Ah, here it is.' Cam passed him a folded and crumpled sheet of paper and Isidro smoothed it against his leg. For a long moment they both gazed at the simple woodcut portrait.

‘Well,' Cam said. ‘I guess it could be her. I didn't think so when I first saw it but now that the swelling's coming down …'

There was Mesentreian text printed under the portrait.
The woman, Sierra, may be using a false name. She can be identified by scars on her back and around her wrists. A reward of 10,000 gold crowns will be paid for information leading to her capture.

The woman in the portrait stared out with wary eyes. As he studied it Isidro was certain he'd seen her somewhere before … but he couldn't pin down the memory. When he tried, it skittered away from him like a leaf on the wind, but he was certain it had nothing to do with the stranger Cam had brought to their tent.

Then it came to him in a rush — the heat, the smoke, the sickening stench of burning hair and skin, a jumbled memory of blood and sweat and pain. The girl huddled at Lord Kell's feet, her face hidden behind a curtain of tangled and sweat-streaked hair.

Isidro felt his good hand clench into a fist, crumpling the paper within it. Muscles twitched in his right hand, drawing a needle-stab of pain from the broken bones. With a deep breath he made himself relax and when he could trust his hand not to shake he folded the paper over and tucked it into his sash and then heaved himself to his feet.

‘Where are you going?' Cam said.

‘Out,' Isidro said, shrugging into his coat. He didn't intend to sound so short but he still couldn't bring himself to speak of what had happened while he was in chains.

Once again the belt defeated him and he had to let Cam knot it in place. ‘We'll have to do something about that,' Cam said, and then he lowered his voice. ‘What do you know, Issey?'

‘Nothing, yet.'

Outside the wind was blowing steadily, stirring the loose snow so that the landscape seemed to be veiled beneath a seething mist. The moonlight that had helped guide Cam and the others home was gone — the sky overhead was a black void of low cloud.

Isidro buried himself within his cowl and hood and turned to the west, in the opposite direction from the tent Brekan shared with his wives, going slowly to let his eyes adjust to the night.

Out in the darkness a blue light flickered, casting deep bars of shadow between the trees. It caught the scatter of falling snow and lit the drifting flakes like a myriad of stars.

Isidro headed towards it, forgetting for the moment just how weak he was. Beyond the circle of trampled snow around their camp site the crust on the surface of the unpacked snow was too thin to hold his weight. Once his feet broke through he sank to his knees and within a few dozen paces he was out of breath and sweating despite the cold wind working
its way in at the neck of his coat. When he stumbled again and began to cough he realised what a stupid idea this was; it sickened him that even the smallest of challenges was more than his weakened frame could bear.

Ahead of him the light flashed again. Isidro buried his chin in the collar of his coat, trying to breathe the air warmed by his body and calm the racking cough. Through watering eyes he made out a silhouette moving towards him in the midst of the flickering glow.

She dropped to her knees at his side, using her body to shield him from the wind as the cough raked claws through his chest. ‘What are you doing out here?' she shouted over the wind.

Her face was red from the cold and still a little swollen from her brush with frost. In a few days she would have recovered enough that he'd probably have recognised her anyway. Face to face, there was no doubt left in his mind.

The light flickered again, a blue glow spilling around them, but all Isidro could see were her eyes, deep blue like the sky at a summer's midnight. In those oceanic depths, lightning struck, and for a moment he glimpsed the storm raging within her.

‘Hello, Sierra,' he said.

There had been a time when Ricalan had mages of its own — once they had been the third part of the triad that ruled Ricalan, beside the ruling clans and the priesthood.

It was hard to know just how different life would have been in those days. The histories said only that mages were an evil influence, poisoning everything they touched. Isidro's mother had told him stories of life before the War of the Mages, tales told to her by her elders and handed down in secret to those who inherited the taint. She spoke of buildings and bridges built in a day, growing out of the ground like mushrooms; of floods and lava flows being turned away from villages, of fires extinguished and avalanches cleared. She told him that for centuries before the alliance with Mesentreia the mages had defended Ricalan's coast against Raiders from the south.

In those days there had been as many factions of mages as there were clans. The war had begun when some of those factions decided there was no need for them to accept the clans and the priests as equals and that mages, by grace of their power, were the rightful rulers of the land. While the factions squabbled over just which of the mages should rule, many people who had taken no part in the fighting were caught up in the skirmishes and killed. One of them was a young noblewoman by the name of Jenova, born of the Lion Clan and the daughter of Leandra the First, ancestor to Cam and his aunt, the second queen to bear that name.

At first Leandra had been interested only in finding and punishing the mages responsible, or so the histories said. But when all of the three factions involved turned her messengers away and refused to help her find the truth, her plans changed. Leandra entered an alliance with her neighbouring clans, and with one of the factions of mages, and led an attack against the other two, in which they were wiped out to the newest trainee. In the
victory celebration that followed Leandra and her allied clans turned on the mages of their own alliance and slaughtered them as well.

It could have ended there, but Leandra was not content with avenging her daughter's death. After seeing what mages could do when they wielded their power in anger she was determined to destroy them all, even if it meant overlooking centuries of raids and depredations and allying herself with Mesentreia. After all, the Southern Isles had killed or expelled all their mages half a millennia before and an alliance would end the raids in a manner the mages had never managed to achieve.

It took years of bloody and brutal warfare but Leandra and her armies killed the last of the mages, led by the man now known as the Demon Vasant, at the foot of the northern mountains, where molten rock flowed from the ground like blood from a wound.

As a boy Isidro had been unable to comprehend how Leandra and her armies had been able to wipe out a class of people as powerful as mages were rumoured to be. Once he and Cam had been forced to survive on their own he had grown to understand. At least the two of them were able to ask for help either from the common folk for a warm place to spend the night or from the ruling clans, who in the early days had provided them with horses and weapons in honour of Drosavec and Leandra's memories. A mage's power might provide him or her with shelter and warmth but it wouldn't keep them fed and clothed through six months of darkness and snow. When the common folk turned against them, swayed by the stories Leandra and her allies spread of the atrocities carried out by mages, their power didn't protect them from poisoned food, arrows in the back or a knife across the throat as they slept, or from traps and snares. Ricalan was a difficult place for outright warfare and in winter guerrilla attacks and swift surprise assault were the only course. A mage who was cold, hungry and weary was as vulnerable as any other warrior under poor conditions — perhaps more so, as they were accustomed to their power providing them with every comfort they desired. Leandra's army simply wore them to exhaustion and killed them once their powers were spent.

Leandra wasn't content with wiping out the living mages of Ricalan — she set about making sure that in future generations, mages would never rise again. She destroyed their books and halls of study; she stripped the history books of any mention of mages and of any version of events but hers. At her order, the priests twisted the rituals used to
identify children with a talent for mage-craft and used them instead to select those who were forced to wear the amulets that would suppress their power and mark them to be watched. Some of them were inducted into the priesthood itself — they needed some talent to perform the rituals and create the amulets in the first place, but all other use of power was forbidden on pain of death.

Nothing, however, could stop new babes from being born with the talent. Perhaps most of them were like Isidro, carrying only a feeble spark of power, but there had to be some whose power burned too bright and fierce to be extinguished by a priest's mumbled and half-understood rituals. Isidro had always dreamed of meeting one  — but he'd never imagined it would happen like this.

Sierra slung his good arm across her shoulder, taking some of his weight as she guided him to the shelter of a copse of trees. It was only once he was leaning against the naked trunk of a birch that he was able to look at her properly.

Miniature bolts of lightning coursed over her with an unearthly blue glow, writhing over her skin and through her hair. Raw power hissed and crackled around her hands and sent long, questing tendrils to the ground where they writhed around her feet. When one flickered too close to her face she swatted at it with a mittened hand as though to shoo it away.

‘You're the real thing, aren't you?' Isidro said hoarsely, and coughed again. ‘A Child of the Black Sun.'

She gave him a wry smile. ‘Something like that.'

A minor mage-talent such as the one he'd inherited from his mother was one thing — useless without training and easily contained by the warding-stones — but Sierra was in a different class entirely. A Child of the Black Sun was to him what a tiger was to a house cat. If he was tainted by the touch of power he carried, then she was nothing less than a demon in the flesh. When there had been mages in Ricalan, the Children of the Black Sun were their elite. Over time, his meagre talent would atrophy like an unused limb for want of training; folk like her would be consumed by the power that lived beneath their skin.

In Mesentreia, a child with the talent would be killed. Even if her family tried to protect her there was no defence against a mob prepared to beat a child to death in the street. The priests in Ricalan denied they would allow any such thing but no one ever said exactly what would
happen if the Children's Festival discovered a child who had been touched by the Black Sun. They were every bit as dangerous as a rabid bear — anyone who doubted it had only to look at Lord Kell and his apprentice.

‘I knew you'd recognise me eventually,' she said. ‘You saw me clearly when Rasten brought you into the tent, but I wasn't sure how much you remembered.'

‘It wasn't you I recognised — not at first, anyway.' He pulled the folded paper out of his sash and handed it to her. She unfolded it carefully, her mittened hands clumsy as the wind tugged and tore at the sheet. He watched her eyes rove over the printed text and realised she could read Mesentreian. ‘I like this tale Kell concocted. Foul enough that no one would shelter me, but not so bad they'd want to kill me on the spot.' She gave a small sigh of resignation. ‘If the clans knew what I am they'd kill me rather than let Kell take me back …' She handed the paper back and met his gaze. ‘I'm sorry, Isidro,' she said. ‘I would have stopped them if I could —'

‘Sorry for what?' he said. ‘From what I saw you were as much a prisoner as I was.'

For a moment neither of them spoke and the only sound was the moaning of the wind in the pines.

‘Who else knows?' Sierra said.

‘No one, yet. I only picked the likeness because I'd seen you before. Cam will work it out in a few days — the others might, too, if they got a good look at that portrait.'

She took a step back, stricken, and her breath hitched in her chest. ‘I'll leave,' she said. ‘First thing in the morning. I've endangered you all enough already.'

‘You can't,' he said. ‘It'll be weeks before you can see clearly in daylight. If you leave now you'll be dead inside of two days — if the soldiers or Charzic's men don't find you first.'

‘I can't stay,' she said. ‘I can't hide what I am for long — I'll only give myself away. It's better if they never know.'

Isidro remembered the heavy green stones in her pack. ‘The warding-stones — you could put them on again.'

She shuddered violently. ‘I
hate
those things! They're not strong enough by themselves anyway. That's why Kell made the punishment bands.'

Isidro blinked. ‘The burns …' He remembered the blisters and her charred skin.

She looked away, fierce blue-grey eyes searching the darkness around them. ‘They were supposed to teach me to control myself.'

All at once the thought of Rasten alone with her hit him like a punch to the gut. After that first day, once they knew Cam was beyond their reach, Kell and Rasten had shown him every way a man could be tormented, degraded and humiliated while still leaving him more or less in one piece. Isidro knew it was stupid, a worthless remnant of a pride he no longer had the right to claim, but the thought of someone else being forced to submit as he had filled him with rage.

Sierra frowned at him and he wondered if she could read the pain in his face. ‘What's wrong?'

‘Rasten,' he said. ‘And you —'

‘Ah,' she said, and shook her head. ‘No, thank the Gods for small mercies, he never touched me. Kell made sure of that. Rasten was like me once, but Kell ruined him by taking him too hard, too young. He wanted to make sure the same thing didn't happen to me. If he finds me again, though, that will be the least of his concerns.' She bit her lip. ‘
When
he finds me. Will you tell Cam?'

‘I have to,' Isidro said. ‘He needs to know the danger we're in.'

She turned away with a snarl and kicked at a clump of snow. ‘That wretched Brekan! He's got no idea what he's done.' The lightning bolts coursing around her had settled but now they sprang up again; a bolt as thick as his finger arced between her hand and the ground and coursed up her arm to her shoulder, crackling like dry leaves in a blaze.

‘Do you have anywhere to go?' Isidro said. ‘Anyone who will take you in?'

She shook her head. ‘No. No one.'

‘How badly will Kell want to find you? Once the Akharians meet the king's army surely he and Rasten both will be needed there — they won't have time to search the wilderness for you.'

‘It's not as simple as that.'

‘No? Why not?'

She bit her lip, and Isidro guessed she was debating just how much she should tell him. ‘I'm a Sympath. Do you know what that means?'

‘No. Is it an Akharian word?'

She frowned. ‘I don't know. Kell came from there, so I suppose it might be. A Sympath is a mage who generates power from pain. Kell
can raise power on his own with his rituals but it's nothing compared to what he can take if I'm there, too. He'll stop at nothing to get me back.'

He could still picture her, chained and kneeling on the floor. How many souls had suffered and died in front of her while she was powerless to prevent it?

‘You must have kin somewhere,' he said.

She looked away. ‘They're probably dead. When Kell found me, he had us trapped in a ruined temple. He said he'd spare them if I gave myself up. I had no choice.'

‘I heard something about that,' Isidro said. ‘There were rumours the king's torturer had a new apprentice.'

‘A new slave, more like,' she said with a toss of her head. ‘What else did you hear? Was there any word of survivors?'

Isidro shook his head. ‘No. I'm sorry.'

‘He killed Rasten's family. They tried to hide him and Kell slaughtered the lot of them. Rasten was twelve.'

She was looking away — she couldn't have seen the expression that crossed his face at the sound of the apprentice's name. Isidro screwed his eyes shut, fighting against the memories that welled up. Sierra had been there — she'd felt every moment of it. Isidro shoved the thought to the back of his mind. Better to forget.

‘You should go back inside,' Sierra said. ‘Come on, I'll help you.'

The energy spilling from her had died down, but whether she had brought it under control again or simply burned off the excess, Isidro wasn't sure. He didn't protest when she offered him her arm and they started back towards the tents.

‘You know,' Sierra said. ‘You're the only person who's seen me shed power like that who hasn't run like a pack of wolves was after him.'

‘Really?' he said.

‘Except for Kell and Rasten. Even my family were frightened of it. My fathers were furious every time I let it slip.'

‘Well, I've never met anyone who carried the taint who was willing to talk openly about it,' Isidro said. He wanted to say more but between the cough and the cold he was still breathless and light-headed. His wits were sluggish enough that something she'd said earlier only struck him then.

‘Wait a moment — Kell is
Akharian
?'

‘Of course. He left their mage-school when he was young and found a master in Mesentreia to train him to the Blood Path. I think it happens a lot — many of the Blood-Mages in Mesentreia come from Akhara. Mesentreian children who show the talent tend not to survive, but sometimes the parents are tricked into handing the children over to a Blood-Mage, thinking the mage will keep them safe. The mages either use them up or turn them into apprentices if they're strong enough to survive. If their families knew what they were letting the children in for they'd smother them with pillows. It would be kinder.'