Winter Be My Shield (27 page)

Mira turned away, covering her face with her hands.

‘Don't talk to my cousin like that, Balorica,' Ardamon snarled. ‘Remember you're a guest of our clan —'

‘Ardamon, no.' Mira laid a hand on his arm. ‘He's right, as usual,' she said with a hint of irritation. ‘But a truce? Impossible. It would violate the laws the Gods themselves set down —'

‘Horseshit,' Isidro said. ‘The Gods made Sierra the way she is — why would they condemn her for doing the very thing they created her for?' He scrubbed a hand through his tangled hair. ‘But that's not important now. Mira, there's no way we can prevent word of this from reaching Kell and the king. You and Ardamon and your whole clan are screwed unless we can do something to change the state of play.'

‘And do what, precisely?' Ardamon drawled.

‘You have to kill Rasten,' Isidro said. ‘You'll never get another opportunity like this. Rasten is wounded and on the run and here —' he gestured to Sierra ‘— is the one person in Ricalan, other than Kell, capable of bringing him down.'

The tent fell silent and Sierra shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. ‘Issey,' she said. ‘I can't … he would have had me tonight —'

‘But you won't be meeting him alone,' he said. ‘You can do this, Sirri.'

‘You think killing Kell's right-hand man will make things
better
?' Ardamon said. ‘It would be a declaration of war!'

‘But it's a war the king doesn't have the men to fight,' Isidro said. ‘Kell is the only thing holding the Akharian army and their mages back from the Mesentreian settlements. He can't turn his attention away from that or the kingdom is lost. With Rasten gone the king will have no choice but to forge a new treaty with your clan. He'll need the Wolf Clan's support so desperately he'll agree to anything you demand. Surely you can see that you and Sierra have more to gain as allies than as enemies? Removing Rasten will change everything …' As he spoke, Isidro's face slowly turned grey but now he broke off abruptly and slumped forward in his seat.

Rhia lunged in to catch his shoulders. ‘Help me!' she demanded. ‘He needs rest. You must not tax his strength further!'

Together, Cam and Rhia laid him on the ground. Rhia shoved bundled blankets under his feet while Sierra brushed damp hair back from his forehead. ‘What's wrong with him?' Cam demanded.

‘I don't know! He's not in pain …' That wasn't entirely true, but it wasn't the sort of pain she could help. There was a dull, leaden ache in every fibre of his body. His breathing was fast and laboured but there was no one cause, nothing that she could identify and relieve to spare him.

‘He is not well and he has pushed himself too hard for too long,' Rhia said crisply as she loosened his sash, opened his coat and gently lifted his bound arm from the sling tied across his chest. ‘He will not admit how weak he is.' Isidro's fingertips, just visible through the bandages and splints, were an unhealthy dusky shade. Rhia held her hand out to Cam. ‘Give me a knife. Quickly. I must cut bandages off.'

Cam gave her his knife and she began cutting through the bandages. Without looking up, she said, ‘He needs lots of rest. Somewhere warm and comfortable where he will not be disturbed.' When the bandages were cut away, Sierra quickly looked away from the ruin of his arm. It was swollen, turgid and black with spreading bruises.

Isidro shifted his head and his eyelids fluttered open. He turned towards it and Sierra quickly reached out to stop him. ‘Don't look,' she said.

Somehow he managed a smile, a meagre quirk of the lips, but a smile all the same. ‘It's alright,' he said. ‘I've seen it before.' He lay back and licked his dry lips. ‘Is there any water …?'

Mira poured some from the kettle, cooled it with clean snow, and Sierra helped him lift his head enough to drink.

‘We could stay here for a few days,' Mira began, but Rhia interrupted with a shake of her head.

‘A tent is not good enough. Too cold, too much noise and disturbance. He needs to rest in a house, or perhaps a temple.'

‘Drysprings Temple has a good healer,' Mira said, turning to Ardamon. ‘It's only an hour's ride to the south.'

‘A little more than that at an invalid's pace,' Ardamon said. ‘But it's an easy journey.'

‘It's not that bad,' Isidro said. ‘I just need to sleep. I'll be well enough in the morning.'

‘Hush,' Rhia said. ‘He will manage that, but he must be carried in a litter. The bumping of a sled is not good. And there must be no more arguing or discussion,' she said, glaring at her patient.

‘Well?' Isidro said, looking past Rhia to meet Mira's gaze.

Mira tossed her head with a rattle of beaded braids. ‘Very well then, a truce — but only until tomorrow, to give us time to think it over and discuss the matter.' She fixed her gaze on Sierra. ‘Do you think you can keep your word this time?'

‘I can if you can,' Sierra said through clenched teeth.

 

Sierra rode close to Isidro's litter on the journey to the temple, in case some jolt disturbed him, but Rhia had prepared him well for the journey and the need for her help never arose. She had pulled his arm as straight as the swollen flesh would allow and splinted it again and had laid him on the litter well wrapped with furs and packed all around with hot rocks to ward off the cold. Isidro would have hated the very idea of being consigned to a litter but as near as Sierra could tell he slept the whole way.

Cam rode nearby and, although Sierra felt full to overflowing with fears and worries of what lay ahead of them, she didn't want to discuss it with him where they might be overheard. So she held her tongue and let her concerns bubble and ferment inside her.

Since she had escaped from Kell's camp she had never been able to form a plan that reached more than a few days ahead. She couldn't remember a time when she hadn't had a cold knot of fear lodged in her belly or a sound sleep that hadn't been brought on by sheer exhaustion.
Her only respite had been the time she spent with Isidro between the furs, lost in the shared sensation, but even that was only a brief release.

All the time she had been a captive, she had believed things would be different if she could escape. She had to believe it — that hope was all she had to sustain her. Now she was free — as free as she would ever be — but nothing had changed. She still lived from day to day with no control over the future and with allies whose lives were as precarious as hers. Out here her power counted for nothing. It didn't matter how powerful a sorcerer she was, she couldn't survive if the people of Ricalan closed ranks against her. Rejection by the common folk had doomed far more powerful sorcerers than her in the past — Vasant and all his followers had known they were finished when the common folk had begun to refuse them shelter and aid. What hope did she have, untrained and friendless?

And now Rasten had marked her trail and tested her strength. He would heal and once he did he would be better prepared for her the next time they met. When that time came she knew she could expect no mercy.

 

Isidro woke when the bearers set the litter down. Rhia appeared over him and pressed him back down onto the sling. ‘No, Issey, lie still. It will not be long and they will take you inside.'

‘Where are we?' he said, still trying to sit up, but despite her small size, Rhia was strong and he was forced to admit defeat.

‘At the Drysprings Temple,' Rhia said, looking around with a frown. ‘Lady Mira sent word ahead for the priests to expect us. I don't know what is causing the delay.'

‘By the Black Sun, let me up. I'm not so far gone I can't walk a few paces to get inside.' He freed his left arm from the furs and levered himself into a sitting position. The effort set his skull pounding.

‘Do not do this to yourself  … Limitations come upon us all and fighting them does more harm than good.'

Isidro shook his head. ‘Don't treat me like a halfwit.'

‘I do not!'

‘Yes, you do!'

‘No! I only tell you what I learned when I was a slave. There comes a time when we cannot fight any longer, when we bow our heads to fate and do what we must to survive.'

The world was swaying around him as though he was on a boat and the world around him was a stormy sea. ‘So there does — but I'm walking inside.'

She sighed and offered him her hands. ‘As you wish, then.'

 

Chilled after the inactivity of the saddle, Sierra stamped her feet on the packed snow and tucked her mittened hands under her arms as one of Mira's men took the reins of her horse and led the beast away. The entire complex of shrine, halls and outbuildings was surrounded by a high stone wall broached by a gate at each of the cardinal points, although the wooden doors that had once existed to close them off were long gone. Behind the drifts of snow and a rime of ice the walls seemed oddly flat and regular, just like the caverns Kell had carved out of the rock beneath Lathayan. Even without closer scrutiny Sierra would have been willing to wager the walls had been mage-built.

A fitful lamp flickered beside the entrance to the Priests' Hall. So weary she could barely think straight, Sierra had been about to create a globe of light before she remembered where she was. She hadn't set foot inside a temple in years, not since the last time a priest had realised just what was odd about the young Herder girl who seemed so nervous. Many folk with latent powers were admitted to the priesthood and Sierra wondered how far inside she would get before someone recognised what she was. And how would her reluctant hosts respond then? When she saw Isidro struggling to rise from his litter she went over to help him, smiling to herself with a kind of humourless mirth. She would find out soon enough.

When she came to Isidro's side Rhia gave her a noncommittal nod of greeting. Over the past week, Sierra had noticed that the physician's hostility towards her depended on how much pain Isidro was in. The more he needed her, the more Rhia tolerated her presence.

Isidro swung his head towards her, but it took a few moments for his eyes to focus on her face. ‘Sirri …'

‘Hush, Issey. Let's get inside.'

The steps leading up to the doorway gave them some trouble. Cam met them at the door and quickly backed up to hold the heavy draught curtain out of the way. On the wall opposite the entrance a mural of the Bright Sun gazed serenely down at them, bedecked with garlands of flowers and finished with gold leaf that glittered in the lamplight.

‘The priests have a chamber ready for him,' Cam said. ‘This way.'

Another curtained doorway admitted them to the common room, the gathering place at the centre of the Priests' Hall. Three sides of the large room were divided into chambers by partitions of wicker and carved wood. The remaining wall incorporated the furnaces that warmed the hall, a complex network of chimneys and chambers that trapped the heat in the stone and radiated it back to warm the air.

The chambers against the walls were raised above the floor-level of the common room by a platform that housed another set of furnaces, heating the floor from beneath. Off in one corner was a stairway that led to the second level, where the lower-ranking priests and temple dependants had their quarters.

At this hour the common room was empty except for a handful of priests wrapped in yellow robes, who gathered around Mira as she spoke to a stooped old woman with white hair and the red robes of the High Priestess. Most of the chambers were dark, but the one Cam led them to had lamps lit within, the glow filtering through the blankets hung across the latticed partitions. As they approached it a priest wearing a yellow robe trimmed with a wide green band detached himself from the others and gestured them into the chamber. ‘In here, if you please. I've added a brazier, so it should be quite warm by now.'

Sierra fell in behind Cam and Rhia, letting them shield her from the gaze of the priests, but it seemed to her that she could feel hostile eyes upon her, and when she dared glance up she saw the High Priestess watching her intently. The old woman had a walking stick in her gnarled hand and she raised it to point at Sierra. ‘That girl,' the High Priestess said. ‘Who is she? Have her come here.'

Sierra stopped where she was, her weight balanced on the balls of her feet. Her weariness had lifted, blown off like a fog in a strong wind and her power was bristling within her like a dog with its hackles up. Kell walked with a stick and when he pointed with it like that it was usually a sign that horrible things were about to happen.

Sierra took a deep breath and forced her power down. Losing control now wouldn't help her one bit. Isidro must have sensed the flare of it because he stopped in his tracks and turned, reaching for the doorframe for support. ‘What's the matter?' he said.

Sierra turned towards the priestess. ‘You wish to speak to me, Honoured One?'

Mira frowned as the old priestess looked her up and down. ‘You carry the taint, girl. You reek of it.' Her watery eyes fixed on Sierra's wrists and she reached out with one gnarled hand to seize her left arm. Sierra didn't resist when the old woman turned her hand over to reveal the mutilated remains of her kinship tattoo and the healing burns that encircled her wrists. ‘Hah!' the old woman said. ‘Even the guardian of your mothers' line has disowned you. What manner of demon are you? And what possessed you,' she said turning to Mira, ‘to bring a creature like this into a holy place?'

‘She is here as my guest,' Mira snapped. ‘Whether she is a sorcerer or not, the laws of hospitality bind my hands. You may complain to my clan elders if you wish, but she will not be turned out.'

‘You foolish chit of a girl! Do you have any idea what you've brought here? A weak taint can be contained, through prayer and the Gods' goodwill, but this one? She should have been sent back to the Black Sun the moment her feckless mother realised what she'd birthed! It's no wonder our people are being enslaved and our lands overrun when we've filth like this bringing death and destruction down upon us!' The priestess swung her stick at Sierra as though shooing away a dog. Sierra quickly stepped back out of range. She could have blocked it with a shield — Fires Below, she could have taken the blow; the old woman had no strength in her skinny arms and gnarled hands — but she didn't trust her power not to rear up and break loose.