Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 65 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

The words stabbed him twice—once for their edge alone and once because she believed them. It didn’t matter to her that the child was sired of her enemy by a slave. She saw only an innocent life, and where the right was hers to end it out of vengeance, she wept because she could not save it.

‘Yes, my Father,’ thought Meoraq, once more in the tribune hall at Tothax with the daughter of Lord Saluuk weeping at his feet. ‘I hear you.’

And he was ashamed.

“I will send it and the others on with Onahi in the morning,” he said at last, but the words were ash in his throat. Onahi may yet have kin in Chalh, but the gates would never open to a man who had ended his time at Praxas as barracks-ward, a man who came with a procession of fatherless women, unhooded, unveiled. It would be a Sheulek’s command alone that could open those gates and win welcome.

Her hand stole in to touch him—that fearless hand—weakly gripping at his arm just below his sabk. “Please look at me.”

He tried, but her tearful face inspired only greater heat and furious urgency in his belly, and that was obscene to feel when he knew a life waited on his judgment. He stepped away from her, clapping a hand to his throat to try and cool the color rising there. “I can’t,” he said. “Leave me. I have to pray.”

She did not. She stood silent at his back as he forced himself to kneel and, as he was taking only the second of his first six breaths, suddenly her hand came out of the wind and slapped him in the head.

“Are you breaking up with me?” she shouted, sobbing so explosively that she could hardly breathe. “Because if that’s wuh-what this is, I can tuh-take it! But don’t you may-ake me fucking wuh-wuh-wait for it!”

“What are you talking about? What’s broken? What—”

And then he thought he understood.

“Do you think I’m putting you aside?” he asked incredulously while his belly groaned and his loin-plate strained. “Why would you even think that, woman?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she said, trying to sneer through her tears and succeeding only in sounding more pathetic. “You won’t touch me. You won’t look at me. You barely even talk to me and you’re always angry when you do!”

“I’m not angry.” His hand stole down to check the fit of his loin plate. He coughed out a bitter laugh, muttering, “I’m the furthest thing there is from angry,” but it didn’t feel true. The idea that Gann’s loathsome hand was on him came creeping in, as it had so often during these last days and burning nights—that he had breathed it in like a sickness somewhere in the raider’s camp or that it had rubbed off from the flesh of all these damned women…but not from Amber. Never from his Amber. Sheul could not give her back to him only to see her and him both tainted beyond redeeming.

“I’m not angry,” he said again, gazing into the darkening sky. “I just need time.”

“Time for what? Is it…Is it because I was one of them?”

That made no sense to him no matter how many times he turned over her odd human words. “One of what?” he asked cautiously.

She glared at him, flushed and trembling and miserable, and suddenly shouted, “A slave! Because I was their slave—his slave—and you’ve got a lot of goddamned nerve breaking up with me for that, you scaly son of a bitch!” The last words degenerated into fresh tears. She clapped her hands over her face and choked on them.

“You were never a slave. You were always mine! You are still mine!” He caught her wrists and forced them down, forced her to look at him through the wet shine of her tears. “Sheul Himself gave you to me and what He has bound, nothing breaks! How do you mark me, woman?”

She sobbed, if possible, harder.

“I will have an answer,” said Meoraq, beginning to be alarmed.

“You don’t mean it!”

“Stop telling me what I mean!” he snapped. “You’re always doing that and it’s infuriating!”

“You don’t!” she shouted. “You told everyone out there you forgave them! You told me there was no sin in conquest, but that’s still what you see when you look at them! That’s what you see when you look at me!”

He recoiled. “I do not,” he said, but it was only a half-truth and the Sheulek in him knew it.

“Then tell me that baby deserves to live! Tell me it doesn’t matter who its father was! Tell me you think Xzem is a good mother!”

He looked at her, and just as her eyes welled up with fresh anguish, he said, “Truth.”

She blinked, knocking tears loose, but not sobbing them out. “Huh?”

“Truth,” he said again, now frowning.

They stared at each other as the wind blew between them.

“You don’t believe it,” she said again, but timidly now.

“I don’t have to. I hear your words. I judge them truth. If I struggle with acceptance, that is my failing. I will have to pray about that.” He braced himself and gave her a tap, just the backs of his knuckles to the side of her arm, and still almost more than he could stand. “But you are still mine. I never questioned that.”

She looked away. “It won’t ever be the same.”

“As what?” Meoraq asked. “As life before my father’s death? Before you sailed your ship? I don’t want the same life, damn it, I want this one!”

She sniffled and rubbed her face. He couldn’t think of anything better to convince her and couldn’t keep looking at her, so he faced into the wind again.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked in a small voice.

“A little,” he admitted, and rubbed hard at the end of his snout. “Do you want to be broken from me? Is that what this is about? Because you don’t get that!”

“No!”

“Is it because I left you? Because I wasn’t there and you were…taken…”

“We can’t be together all the time. No, Meoraq, that was just…” She paused and uttered a short, tearful laugh. “I was going to say dumb luck, but you don’t believe in that. I guess you’d say it was God’s will.”

Meoraq thought about that.

“Perhaps it was,” he said slowly. “For Xzem’s sake. For Nali’s. For Onahi and his men. For N’ki. Even…for S’kot. I hadn’t thought of it that way…”

But he did now, thinking of all the wooded hills of Gedai and how easily he might have walked through them and on to Xi’Matezh, never suspecting the city of Praxas with its caged humans even existed. He had been meant to find them, to save them. No matter his personal feelings, God had given them a new chance at life.

Meoraq rubbed at his snout again. “Xzem…does seem to be a good mother.”

“She is. She really is.” Amber sighed. “And I want her to have the baby. I know she can take care of it better than me, okay, I know that. I just…worry about who’s going to take care of her, you know? But I’ve seen Onahi with her and if they’re not shacking up yet, they will be by the time you get to Chalh.”

Meoraq grunted, now thinking of Onahi meditating in his tent, patiently awaiting death at a Sheulek’s hand for his perceived corruption. And who was Meoraq to say it was not so? However good the man might seem, it was unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother. Was it a greater sin to end the man now, while he still had some chance of finding peace in Sheul’s Halls, or to wait until the unforgiveable act had occurred? The temptations of Gann were no easy ordeal (his constrained cock throbbed abysmally, sunk in fire, bruising the edges of his slit, and he was never going to have Amber against that fucking tree).

But wait…

It was unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother…unless the man had married her.

And suddenly Meoraq realized what had been before his damned eyes since leaving Praxas: There were six women in his care, five and Xzem, and six watchmen, five and Onahi.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I’ll marry them.”

“Who?”

“Onahi and Xzem. I’ll marry them. I’ll marry all of them!”

Amber stared at him, not in awe, but in horror. “You can’t do that!”

“Of course I can. And why are you looking at me like that?” he asked testily. “If I presented them at the gates of Chalh as fatherless women, they’d never be admitted. I will give them husbands and I will name those men soldiers under Uyane. There has to be a House Uyane in Chalh and its steward will have to take them in when I command it as Uyane of Xeqor.”

“Meoraq, you can’t! You’re just…passing them out. You’re not even discussing it with them first. It’s like they’re not even people to you, just…”

“Problems,” said Meoraq.

“I was going to say ‘things’.” She looked at him and just as swiftly looked away. “Are we all that way to you? Just problems you need to solve?”

“In the wildlands,” said Meoraq bluntly. “Yes.”

“Even me?”

“You?” He snorted again and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “No. There is no solving you, Soft-Skin. You are my problem forever.” And before she could turn away, he said, “I am yours. And you will never solve me either, but at least you are trying. I will take the baby to Chalh.”

She scrubbed her arm across her face, erasing the last trace of her tears. “Tonight?”

The wind gusted. He looked up to watch the high branches come together and sway apart. “Yes. Come with me,” he said hopelessly.

“I can’t leave my sister,” she said. He could have said it with her if only his mouth could make the words. “And I can’t leave those idiots to fend for themselves. They’ve been prisoners so long…If anything happened, they’d be helpless.”

If anything happened…

She saw his face, read his eyes. “Yeah, I know. But I can take care of my people. And you can take care of yours.” She seemed to grope for something more comforting to tell him, but in the end, all she had was, “We’ll be waiting right here.”

“In easy distance of Praxas. And there are uncounted raiders left in the wildlands! How shall I stand before Sheul and tell Him I left you unguarded when He has only just given you back?”

“You can tell him I begged you. I’m begging you, Meoraq.”

He looked away.

“I’ll be all right,” said Amber.

“You cannot know that.”

“Some things you have to just take on faith.” She hesitated, then said, “Do you have to pray about it?”

He glanced up at the grey heavens where Sheul watched him, then bent his neck. “No. So be it. Don’t,” he said as she reached for him. “I can let you go, Soft-Skin, but only if I do not hold you first. Go. Please.”

She took one step away and there watched him while he took six breaths and six more. Then, finally, she left him.

Meoraq fought through three more slow-counts, keeping the Prophet’s name and Sheul’s holy Word close against his heart until the fires subsided. The rotten-tooth ache remained; he just knew he was bruising something down there. Cooled, if not at peace, he returned to his camp. He took Onahi, visibly braced for death, out of his tent and bound him to Xzem with a few terse words. He left the two of them staring at each other and went swiftly through the rest of them, matching man to wife without really looking at either of them and especially without looking at Amber. Then, before he could change his mind, he struck two of the tents, packed a portion of the kipwe, and loaded one of the litters. As the humans were beginning their first alarmed outcries, he gave the order that moved them on to Chalh.

Amber followed him as far as the walls, but no further. He left her there without a word (his throat was tight as Gann’s fist), but managed only six steps before he halted.

He turned around.

He walked back to her, seized her by the chin, pressed his unfeeling mouth to hers and then scraped the end of his snout hard along her throat, filling his aching head with her scent, her taste, her soul.

She unclipped the kzung from his belt and held it in her hand, searching his eyes. She didn’t speak either.

He stepped back, turned away. He took a breath (one for the Prophet) and walked on.

3

Unencumbered by humans, the journey to Chalh lasted only six days, the latter half on a good road. They were first hailed easily five spans from the city and escorted the rest of the way by three sentries in gilded uniforms. If that were not warning enough of Chalh’s nature, the walls of the city were trimmed in gold, or at least, gold paint, and a statue of the Prophet had been positioned over the gate, hands outstretched in benediction. The sleeves, Meoraq noted, were hollowed out, so as to pour hot oils or acids should any raider be fool enough to assault the first founding city of the Prophet.

“Where are the other five?” Meoraq asked, making half a joke in an attempt to appear patient while the gatekeeper meticulously checked his book of Houses.

The gatekeeper, having no sense of humor, replied, “Each has their own gate, sir. If you wish to be admitted through Gate Uyane, I can make those arrangements.”

Meoraq rolled his eyes discreetly. “That won’t be necessary.”

The gatekeeper continued his inspection with the same excruciating attention to detail, came to the conclusion that Meoraq was in truth who he claimed to be, and snapped his book shut. “It is Uyane before me,” he announced. “If it is your intention to seize the city of Chalh, you will have to wait in the arena hold for the Sheulek in residence to meet with you.”

“I am here to see my kin. My conquest shall be limited to that House.”

“Do you wish me to send for one of Uyane’s carriages?”

“Just a public carriage will do.” Meoraq tapped pointedly at the gate.

“Do you prefer to go under your House’s standard?”

“I would prefer to be behind walls before the damned year is out!”

The gatekeeper bowed and unlocked the gate. “If I can be of service—”

“Carriages for myself and my party, and an usher to take us immediately to House Uyane,” interrupted Meoraq, waving his people inside.

“It may take some time to locate a veiled carriage suitable to transport your, ah, women. Perhaps you would like to take the rooftop while you wait? The barracks of Lashraq’s Gate has an excellent meditation garden.”

“I must seem tense,” Meoraq remarked, but Amber wasn’t there to tell him he was, in fact, acting like a scaly son of a bitch and no one else was about to argue or, worse, agree. “Any carriage will do,” he said, looking back out into the open wilds, thinking of Amber. “Just fetch a few blankets and we’ll cover the windows.”

“My apologies, honored one, we have no blankets in Uyane’s colors.”

“Cover them in grain-sacks then! I don’t care! Great Sheul, O my Father, give me patience! And you, just give me a damned carriage!”

The gatekeeper bowed and locked the door before wandering unhurriedly away. And really, what could Meoraq do about it? It wasn’t as if he could just march all these unveiled women across the city on foot.

So he waited. The carriages eventually came, along with drivers and ushers and window covers emblazoned with the standard of the city. Meoraq put the women in one, the soldiers in the other, and himself alone in the last. The boy who held the carriage door passed him a bottle of cool tea before closing it. The driver leaned in through the window as Meoraq plucked idly at the cap and passed him a flask of hot nai.

“Keep it,” the driver grunted as Meoraq took his first swallow. “I see you’ve not got one, and it’s a hard lack on a long journey.”

Meoraq lowered the flask, staring.

The driver shut the window and snapped the tethers. Bulls bellowed. The carriage rolled on.

He knew what the days of hard travel had done to his appearance, let alone the battle at the raider’s nest, the mountain crossing, and all the days that had gone before. Meoraq had been fully prepared to recite his lineage, show his signet, and perhaps even battle their champion to prove his kinship, but he did not expect the gates of Uyane to open on the steward himself.

Meoraq knew at first sighting this was no toy-lord, no high-born diplomat with a stable of Sheulteb to do his fighting for him, but a Sheulek in his retirement. He dressed not in lordly robes, but in plain leather breeches with a warrior’s harness snug over his open tunic, displaying his scarred chest and hard belly with careless indifference. The bone hilt that cased the ancient blade hanging around his neck stood out like lightning over his scales, polished by use and yellowed with age.

They eyed each other, and then Meoraq took the first step forward and boldly raised his hand. “I come to you as kin and conqueror,” he began. “Your House stands in the shadow of—”

Lord Uyane let out a rude, barking laugh. “By Gann’s crooked cock, you even sound like him.”

And before Meoraq had could even think of how to react, the steward stood aside, already beckoning to a small crowd of sleepy-eyed boys. Onahi and the other men of Praxas, along with their nervous women, were led away to be billeted and Meoraq was taken to the warden’s office to sign them all over into Uyane-Chalh’s garrison. As swiftly as this was accomplished, however, an usher from the governor still managed to be waiting before they were through, and Meoraq spent the next two hours reporting to Chalh’s leaders.

It should not have taken so long, but Praxas had sent a messenger to warn against the ravings of the wildland-maddened Sheulek and even if they had not, Meoraq’s tale of men who sold their daughters to raiders and who kept scaleless people in cages was too fantastic to be believed. Meoraq answered their questions without embellishment, but when they began to repeat themselves, and worse, to ask if he were sure he had seen this or if he could clearly recall that, his temper began to fray. Ultimately, he was compelled to challenge them all for the truth, and after some muttered discussion, the governor sent down not one but all three of his Sheulteb to meet him. Meoraq was burning almost as soon as he crossed the threshold into the arena, and although he knew none of it, he supposed Sheul must have made an impressive showing in the battle that followed because the first thing he heard as he came slowly out of the black was the governor’s reedy voice ordering Praxas to be struck from the roster of cities under Sheul and all their people to be turned back from this hour onward as children of Gann. So that was done. Meoraq refused the girl the governor presented and left the arena hold at once, still spattered with the blood of three good men.

But it had been many days of travel, a battle, a mountain crossing, and it caught up to him at last. His desire to see Amber safely within his reach once more could not take the weight from his weary clay and when Uyane’s usher met him at the governor’s gates to escort him back to that House, he went.

The boy brought Meoraq to the vacant room of the steward’s own eldest son, where a warrior’s meal of cold meat and fat-toasted bread awaited him. As he struggled to stay awake long enough to eat it, a knock sounded.

It was Lord Uyane, accompanied by two servants, both carrying steaming ewers. Meoraq’s first impulse was to turn them all away, but remembering that he would be sleeping in another man’s cupboard and it might be a kind gesture not to cake it in the grime of an old trek through the wildlands and a fresh fight in the arena, Meoraq gave humble thanks and stood aside.

The servants brought a bath out from a closet and filled it, then bared their faces, demurely averting their eyes as they awaited his selection.

“Understand that I am not in the habit of offering mere servants to the Sheulek I am honored to receive,” Lord Uyane remarked, watching Meoraq pointedly resume his meal. “But as we share blood, any kin of mine is kin of yours.”

“Understood and forgiven.”

“I suppose I should offer my wife,” the steward continued, casually folding his arms and laying his fingertips across the hilts of his sabks. “But she’s not feeling well tonight.”

“My prayers for her recovery,” said Meoraq.

The steward watched him eat. The servants glanced at one another. One of them fidgeted briefly with her sleeve.

“How long have you been traveling?” the steward asked suddenly.

The question caught him by surprise. He had to think about it. “I left the walls of Tothax mid-autumn…after the gruu harvest,” he said, recalling the last judgment he’d made there. Lord Arug and his curse of daughters. And Shuiv, another good man with a blade broken under Meoraq’s heel. “Not long after the night of the burning tower, if you heard of that here.”

“We heard. I admit I heard it for a child’s knee-time tale, but I believe it better than I believe a man could walk away a quarter of the year and not want a woman.”

Meoraq glanced at the servants. They dipped their necks in unison and let out twin mewls. He had to suppress a shudder as he turned back to his meal. “I thank you for your consideration, steward, but I would make poor company tonight.”

Lord Uyane’s spines twitched forward. He looked at the servants and then at Meoraq again. “Company?” he echoed. “If it’s company you’d rather have, I could set out a game of Crown-Me or read the Word with you, but unless you make it a Sheulek’s command, I’ll be damned if I bathe you.”

It wasn’t worth the explanation. “You, then,” said Meoraq, waving at the girl on the left.

At Lord Uyane’s nod, the other girl hooded herself and took Meoraq’s boots away with her to be cleaned. The steward remained, unabashedly watching as Meoraq unbuckled his harness. “Have you any other requests of me, honored one?” he asked, and immediately snorted and muttered, “Honored one. To think I’ve lived so long as to give Razi’s sprat my obedience. You are the very image of him, you know.”

“How did you know him?” Meoraq asked, allowing the servant to finish undressing him.

“He came crawling over the mountains in his first striding years and stayed the winter with us. New Sheulek, eh? They want to see the sun rise over the edge of the world and drink the waters that come washing in from whatever lies beyond. Never understood that,” he added. “The sun is the sun no matter where it rises and that water tastes like fish fuck in it. You look a little old for that nonsense, yourself. Pilgrimage?”

“Yes.”

“To Xi’Matezh? What else is out here?” he asked wryly at Meoraq’s startled glance. “They tell me Gedai used to be the center of the world in the age before the Fall. Ha. Nothing out here now but rock and ruins. And the ocean, I suppose. Where the fish fuck. I could tell you the way to the temple easily enough,” he went on. “There’s no road as roads are reckoned, but there’s a broad enough footpath most of the way and a few underlodges for pilgrims to take a night’s ease. I try to make the walk myself once a year. Usually try to time it with the Festival of the Fifth Light so I don’t have to listen to all those fucking bells.”

“Have you ever seen the doors?”

“You mean, have I seen them open? Not for me and not for your father, but I know they do. Happened right in front of me once.”

Meoraq’s spines swept forward and he sat up fast, splashing water over the sides of the bath.

The steward glanced down, scratching his toes through the spreading puddle on his tiles. “I don’t like to think of it, but it’s truth. I’d been there most of the day and I’d have sworn to our true Father’s face that I was alone the whole time, for I never heard a sound inside, but then the doors opened. A man came out. Sheulek. I didn’t know him. He looked…” The steward’s gaze shifted to the servant, who was trying very hard to be invisible as she went about her duties despite what must be very exciting talk to one of her kind. “He looked like a dead man,” he said finally. “And he looked at me like I was a dead man.”

Meoraq felt the servant shiver a little as she scrubbed his back.

“I was burning a candle there. Nothing fancy, just a sign to the Six. Most do. He looked at it and he looked at me. Then he started walking. He took his blades off—his sabks, I mean—and he broke one and stabbed the other through the Prophet’s mark without ever breaking stride. He walked through the doors and out of the shrine and then he walked himself right off the edge of the world. There’s a drop, you know, and the rocks where the ocean rolls in. He never said a word, never took a breath to brace himself. He went over like it was what Sheul told him to do.”

Amber’s voice, like a chill breeze through a warm room: If you jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you.

“Never said a word,” the steward said again, rubbing at the side of his throat with one rough thumb. “To say truth, that was the last time I went in as far as God’s doors, but I keep going back. How long will you be staying with us, honored one?”

“Just the night.”

“I’ll freshen your pack then. Have you any special requests of my provisioner?”

“No…Wait. A set of women’s clothing. Her size is near enough,” he said, gesturing up at the servant.

Lord Uyane’s spines twitched again, but, “Have you a preference as to color?” was all he said.

Meoraq didn’t, but before he could say so, he found himself thinking of Amber’s eyes. “Something green. With slippers. Eh, best make it boots. And…” What else did women like? “A girdle. Something…pretty.”

“It shall be do—” He broke off with a sigh and rubbed his brow-ridges, then slapped his thigh and said, “I can’t pretend I’m not intrigued. You’ve got a woman with you? Ha! Wouldn’t that have made some long walks shorter back in my striding days?”

“My wife,” said Meoraq, feeling as though he’d ought to say something in Amber’s defense.

“Well send her in, for our Father’s sake! My Nraqi would love to see a fresh face, if only for the night. She’s not fevered or anything catching, just thin-blooded and slow to come out of winter’s grip.”

“She stayed behind with her people so that I could travel more quickly. There was an infant among my camp and she was concerned that it should come out of the wildlands as soon as possible.”

The steward’s spines flicked as he smiled. “Fine woman. I’ll let Nraqi pick a few things out for her. She knows more about pretty things than I do. Sylseth, make yourself available for sizing when the Sheulek is done with you.”

“Yes, lord.”

The steward left them alone at last and Meoraq leaned back and let the girl bathe him. It was his first real bath since Tothax, and he enjoyed it but did not prolong it even for his pleasure. The girl was pleasing also, but mewled and bowed and proved herself so, well, grotesquely feminine that what arousal she inspired in him soon withered. It was Amber he wanted…and Amber was worth waiting for. Cleaned, dried and oiled, he dismissed her untouched and put himself to bed.

* * *

He slept like a stone, yet woke far too early, so that when the boy came trotting in to ring the daylight bells in House Uyane’s foyer, Meoraq was there to see it. He had been waiting as deferentially as was possible when lurking in a relative’s foyer, but as soon as dawn’s hour had been rung, he put a blunt end to courtesy and sent the boy to find him an usher out of the city.

Shortly afterward, as Meoraq stared broodingly at the tilework on the ceiling in an effort not to pace, Lord Uyane himself arrived to see him off. He brought with him a few servants to manage Meoraq’s provisions and a veiled woman walking slow at his side. She averted her eyes and mewled as her husband made the necessary introductions, then raised her open hands and called him kin and made all the proper obedience a wife was expected to show to the conqueror of her husband’s holdings, and then she reached right out and caught at Meoraq’s sleeve. “My Lord says I mustn’t ask,” she began, dipping her head prettily even as Uyane rolled his eyes and strolled away to inspect the bell-house. “But if you have no will in the matter, perhaps your wife might stay with me a small time while you make what remains of your journey? It is not so very far to Xi’Matezh, I know, but women do not measure distance or hardship as men do. We are very weak and silly things, sir, and a small time here among her kin would be a pretty present to grant her before she makes the terrible journey to Xeqor.”

“Wife,” murmured Uyane.

“I do not say that Xeqor is terrible,” she hastened to assure Meoraq. “Even here in sacred Chalh, Xeqor is known as one of Sheul’s brightest lamps, but even one hour in the wildlands is a terrible thing to a woman. Oh, please send her to me, sir! She shall be my daughter while she is here and have a mother’s love once more, if only for a few days. How find you?”

Flustered, Meoraq looked at Lord Uyane, but he was no help at all, deep in the study of the bells so that he would not have to notice his wife’s scandalous behavior.

Which was certainly far less scandalous than spear-hunting or wearing pants or calling her man a scaly son of a bitch or any of the myriad scandalous things that Amber did. All at once, Meoraq felt a momentary divide of sight: he saw the woman clinging on his sleeve and looking at him with those shy, earnest eyes the way he would have seen her a year ago, as a grossly unmannered embarrassment, and he saw her as she surely was, a lonely woman bored with lying around and convalescing, who would risk even her husband’s displeasure for a chance to see a new face and hear talk of the greater world beyond these walls. Just a lonely woman, who didn’t mind mewling at a stranger or calling herself weak and silly if it meant that, believing it, he might grant her just a few short days of fresh company. Amber’s company, even.

‘Perhaps they could go hunting,’ Meoraq thought, and laughed aloud.

Lord Uyane’s eyes were on him at once, narrow as a knife’s edge.

Meoraq put his hand over hers until she, with a sigh of defeat, removed it from his sleeve. He said, still smiling, “I do have a will in this matter, kinswife, and it is my will that the fierce woman who has dared as much as I to make this journey stand at my side when the doors of Xi’Matezh open. Yours is a kind offer, but I do decline.”

The woman gave obedience and retreated a few steps, enough to pick at one of the bundles carried by a stone-faced servant. “I set some things aside for her, although I had to guess at the fit,” she said, not quite pouting but near enough to it that her man sent her a censuring glance. “They’re all my own and not new, but in very good repair. I haven’t fit in this in ages,” she sighed, lifting out a richly embroidered girdle for a last wistful look. “And this…this is the cloak I myself wore when I came to Chalh to be married…and the crownet that went with it!” she exclaimed, holding it up to be admired. It was an uncommonly fine thing—a long strip of golden mesh meant to fit around a woman’s spine-ridge, with a clip on the end to keep a hood in place—although he doubted Amber would ever have any use for it. He thanked her anyway.