The Compass Rose

GAIL DAYTON
The Compass Rose

For Robert. Thanks for all the brainstorming help

and for paying attention when I told you

how much fun fantasy was. I’m glad you’re my kid.

And for Lindi. Keep at it. Dreams do come true.

CONTENTS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

GLOSSARY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Kallista Varyl-captain in the Adaran army, naitan of the North, lightning thrower

Torchay Omvir-Adaran sergeant, Kallista’s bodyguard

Stone, Warrior vo’Tsekrish-Tibran warrior

Fox, Warrior vo’Tsekrish-Tibran warrior, fighting partner to Stone

Aisse vo’Haav-Tibran woman

Obed im-Shakiri-Southron trader

Joh Suteny-Adaran guard lieutenant

Serysta Reinine-ruler of Adara, North naitan truthsayer

Viyelle Torvyll-Adaran prinsipella of Shaluine

Belandra of Arikon-the near legendary godstruck naitan who unified the first four prinsipalities to establish Adara, a thousand (or so) years ago

Huryl Kovallyk-Serysta’s high steward

Erunde Nonnald-Steward’s 4th undersecretary

Irysta Varyl-Kallista’s birth mother, East naitan healer

Karyl & Kami Varyl-Kallista’s twin sisters by blood

Mother Edyne-Mother Temple prelate in Ukiny

Huyis Uskenda-Adaran general in Ukiny

Merinda Kyndir-Adaran East naitan healer

Mother Dardra-Kallista’s 5th mother, Riverside temple prelate and administrator in Turysh

Domnia Varyl-founder of the Varyl bloodline, West naitan and prelate

Oughrath, Bureaucrat vo’Haav-docks and trading official in Haav

Beltis-South naitan firethrower, Adaran trooper under Kallista’s command

Hamonn-Beltis’s bodyguard

Adessay-North naitan earthmover, trooper under Kallista’s command

Kadrey-Adessay’s bodyguard

Iranda-South naitan lightmaker, trooper under Kallista’s command

Rynver-East naitan plantgrower, trooper under Kallista’s command

Mora-South naitan foodspoiler, trooper under Kallista’s command

Borril-Adaran guard sergeant

Smynthe-Tibran female magic hunter

Gweric-Tibran male magic hunter

GLOSSARY

Adara-the nation occupying the northern half of the continent south of the Jeroan Sea

aila (aili)-Sir or Madam, a title of respect in Adara

Alira River-tributary of the Taolind, descending from the Shieldback Mountains near Arikon

Arikon-capital of Adara at the edge of the Shieldback Mountains in western Adara

Athril River-center, navigable branch of the two western arms of the Unified River

Boren-town where the Alira becomes unnavigable, where the road to Arikon begins

Devil’s Neck-impassable isthmus connecting Tibran continent to the Adaran

Devil’s Tooth Mountains-the mountains that make the Devil’s Neck impassable, habitable only in the lower southern reaches, above the Empty Lands

Djoff-Tibran port on the western coast, at the mouth of the Athril

Dzawa-Tibran city where the Silixus descends from the central plateau to the coastal plain

Empty Lands-an ancient lava-flow desert on the northern edge of Adara, thought to have been created in the Demon Wars 2000 years ago, habitable if one is careful

Filorne-prinsipality north of Taolind, upriver from Turysh; coat of arms: crossed swords, black and silver

Gadrene-Ukiny’s prinsipality; coat of arms: blue-and-white ship

Haav-main port of Tibre, at the mouth of the Silixus River, easternmost of the rivers coming out of Tsekrish

Heldring Gap-wide valley in west central Adara, famed for the mines on either flank, and the swords made there

ilian (iliani)-four to twelve Adaran adults joined into a family unit, their version of marriage

ilias (iliasti)-spouse (spouses)

Kishkim-port city west of Ukiny, at the mouth of the Tunnassa River, known for its swamps and smugglers

Korbin-northernmost Adaran prinsipality, just south of Devil’s Neck land bridge in the Devil’s Tooth Mountains and the Empty Lands, Torchay’s home prinsipality; coat of arms: red-and-gold stag

Mountains of the Wind, Mother Range-mountain range that marks Adara’s southern border, Mother Range is Southron name; Mountains of the Wind is name used by Adarans

naitan (naitani)-a person with a magical gift

Obre River-westernmost branch of the Unified River, fast and full of rapids

Okreti di Vos Mountains-the name means “Arms of God” in the ancient language; separated from the Devil’s Tooth range by a lava-flow desert and from the Shieldbacks by the Heldring Gap

prinsep (prinsipi)-the ruler (male or female) of one of the once-independent governmental units now joined together to create Adara

prinsipality-the province ruled by a prinsep

prinsipella-the offspring (male or female) of a prinsep

Reinine-the priestess-queen chosen by the collective Adaran prelates and prinsipi to rule Adara; a lifetime appointment, but not hereditary

Shaluine-prinsipality north of Turysh, between Taolind and Tunassa Rivers; coat of arms: gold lion

Shieldback Mountains-a western mountain range separated from the Mother Range by the Taolind and Alira River valleys and from the Okreti di Vos Mountains by the Heldring Gap, where Arikon is located

Silixus River-important transport river in Tibre, easternmost of the three branches of the Unified River, the only one that empties into the Jeroan Sea

Taolind River-Adara’s major river, leading from northern coast at Ukiny southwest deep into the interior

Tibre-the nation made up of most of the continent north of the Jeroan Sea

Tsekrish-capital of Tibre, on the high central plateau where the Unified River breaks into three

Tunassa River-secondary river, north of the Taolind, rarely navigable, empties into Jeroan Sea at Kishkim, runs southwest to northeast

Turysh-Kallista’s hometown, at the confluence of the Taolind and Alira Rivers, also the name of a prinsipality, coat of arms: green tree surmounted by a gold crown

Ukiny-port city on Adara’s northern coast, at the mouth of the Taolind River

Unified River-flows into Tsekrish from northern mountains, once considered sacred

CHAPTER ONE

The wind off the sea snapped the banners to attention on the city walls. It ripped at the edges of the captain’s tight queue and set the two white ribbons of her rank fluttering from her shoulders. Kallista Varyl tugged her tunic, blue for the direction of her magic, into better order. Yet one more time she wished that if she had to have North magic, she might have been given some more useful type. Directing winds, for instance.

She abhorred the way the wind here in Ukiny constantly tugged at her hair, destroying any attempt at neatness and order. And wind magic had civilian uses. Practical, productive uses. Her magic had no use other than war, so here she stood, captain of the Reinine’s Own, on the walls of this besieged city waiting for the coming attack.

“What’s the mood below?” Kallista continued her slow patrol of the ramparts.

“Quiet. Tense. They know what’s coming.” Her shadow moved forward to fall into step beside her. Torchay Omvir had been her constant companion for the past nine years. His tunic was bodyguard’s black trimmed with blue to show whom he served. The folded ribbon set on his sleeve below the shoulder indicated his rank. When they went into summer uniform in a few more weeks, his tattooed rank would show on his upper arm. Most of the men making the military a career did the same.

“Not too tense I hope.”

He shrugged. “Who can say until the moment comes and the battle begins?” Torchay paced alongside her, always keeping his lean height interposed between Kallista and the enemy spread out on the fields and beaches below.

Their white tents dotted the land like virulent pustules of infection as far as the unaided eye could see. Ukiny stood on the lone patch of rock floating to the surface of Adara’s flat northern coast. The city’s chalk-white limestone walls towered over the plains where the enemy camped. That advantage hadn’t meant much so far.

“True.” She neither needed nor even wanted the information she’d asked for. She asked to force Torchay to answer, to have some contact with another human at this loneliest of moments.

Torchay preferred his invisibility, claiming he could protect her better if he went unnoticed. But hair the color of Torchay’s—deep, vibrant red—seldom escaped notice even when ruthlessly confined in a proper military queue. And wherever a military naitan went, everyone knew her bodyguard went also. At moments like this one, Kallista preferred company to protocol.

“Tomorrow?” Torchay stopped beside her at the northwest corner tower.

Kallista stared down at the rubble spilling from the breach in Ukiny’s western wall and on down the steep slope of the carefully constructed glacis below. The setting sun gilded those broken stones, mocking the coming death they heralded.

“Likely,” she said. “At dawn or just before. That’s when I’d attack, when we’re at our most tired.”

The enemy ships had appeared unexpectedly off Ukiny just a week ago, hundreds of them. Adaran ships were built for speed and trade, not fighting. With a North magic naitan to call winds on almost every ship, they rarely had to deal with pirates or more political forms of banditry because their vessels were hard to catch. The few local ships in port when the strangers sailed up had fled. The city—still reeling with astonishment that any would dare invade Adara—had fastened itself inside stout walls.

Soldiers had poured from the clumsy ships, hundreds and hundreds of them, unloading bizarre equipment and strange-looking devices. The foreign army outnumbered the small force garrisoning Ukiny before half their ships had unloaded.

By careful listening at staff meetings, Kallista had gathered that one of the quarrelsome kings on the continent across the Jeroan Sea to the north had taken all the lands he could on his own continent and now had cast his eye toward Adara. No one seemed to know what drove Tibre on its conquest, whether greed, religion or something else. They were strange people according to the traders stranded in town when the ships fled, divided among themselves according to rank, each rank worshipping different gods.

Stranger yet, they had no naitani of their own and were known to kill those from other lands who demonstrated a visible gift of magic. That was why, despite the overwhelming numbers ranged against them, the small Adaran garrison had been confident of victory over the invading Tibrans. If they had no naitani at all, they certainly wouldn’t have any attached to their army.

They had something else. Cannon.

Traders had been bringing reports for a number of years about the wars among the northern kingdoms. They told of a weapon that required no magic to break down walls and fortifications, a weapon far more effective, far more devastating than ballistae or catapults. The Adaran general staff had discounted these tales as exaggerations. The Tibrans might have something, but nothing without magic involved could have such a deadly effect. The generals were wrong.

Now they were paying the price for their smug assumptions. Adara was a nation of merchants, a matriarchal society that used its army primarily to control the aggression of her young men. A long succession of prelate-queens had seen little need for violent expansion. The last of the independent prinsipalities between the impassable Devil’s Neck land bridge to the north and the nearly impassable Mother Range spanning the continent to the south had joined Adara two hundred years ago, the result of diplomacy and trade, not war.

The Reinines in the years since had believed Adara’s superiority so obvious that no other nation would dare challenge it. And they hadn’t, even though some Adaran traders skinned those they traded with a bit too close to the bone. Adara had more naitani than any other land, and the naitani were Adara’s strength.

But they should have expected the other nations to develop alternatives to the magic Adara used so extravagantly. When the traders came home complaining of cloth made waterproof through the use of powders and mechanical techniques, someone should have noticed. This new stuff wasn’t as good as Adaran waterproofing, but it was much cheaper. How far from there to mechanical weapons as effective at massive destruction as a soldier naitan? More effective, because the cannon could be used by anyone and could be forged by the hundreds. A naitan had to be born.

These terrible cannon belched forth fire and destruction. They battered the city walls hour after endless hour, day upon day. The constant boom!-whistle-crack! as the iron ball exploded from the mouth of the weapon, sailed through the air and smashed into stone, was enough to drive anyone into screaming fits. Anyone, that is, of lesser moral fiber than a captain of the Reinine’s Own Naitani.

Kallista had destroyed one of the awful machines, the only naitan of her troop able to do so. The enemy moved them farther from the walls then, and still kept up the relentless bombardment. These cannon could fire their iron balls farther than she could throw her lightning. She could not hit what she could not see. At least her magic was line-of-sight and not touch-linked. She’d heard of some who could visualize what they aimed for and strike without seeing, but she could not.

This morning, the cannon had breached Ukiny’s walls. Soon the enemy would pour through the gap and bring its advantage of numbers to bear. Kallista knew her fellow soldiers would fight bravely, but the outcome was not optimistic.

“Have you decided where to post your troop?” Torchay never looked away from his view over the wall at the enemy.

Kallista sighed. That was the supposed reason for taking this little stroll into danger. She couldn’t tell her bodyguard that one more second in their austere quarters would have had her chewing holes in the furniture, even if he already knew it. “Yes. Half here—East and South. Except for Beltis. I want her fire-throwing skill with me and Adessay on the far side of the breach.”

“In the tower.”

“Tower’s too far away. On the wall. Near the breach.”

“Too close. It’s not safe.”

Kallista turned her head and looked at Torchay, at his bony, hawk-nosed visage silhouetted against the orange sky, waiting until he looked back at her.

“It’s a battle, Sergeant,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be safe.”

He gave a tiny nod in acknowledgment of that truth.

“We need to be as close to the breach as possible.” She moved to the edge of the battlements to peer over, ignoring Torchay’s hiss of displeasure. “It’s going to be up to us to slow their advance, thin their numbers as they come through.”

“You can’t do anything if you’re dead.”

“If we can’t stop them, everyone in the city could well be dead by this time tomorrow. And we haven’t enough regular troops to do the job. It’s going to require magic.”

“Just—” He broke off and took a deep breath. That wasn’t like him, to be fumbling for words. “Don’t make my job harder than it has to be, Captain. Promise me you’ll do nothing reckless.”

Kallista raised an eyebrow. “You forget yourself, Sergeant.”

“Probably. But if it means that you don’t forget yourself when the battle begins, I’ll bear the punishment.” Torchay held her gaze until Kallista had to look away.

She did have a tendency to take risks in battle. Too much caution could lose a battle. Generally her risks paid off, but once…Once, she’d nearly got the both of them killed.

“I’ll be as careful as I am able,” she said finally. “But if my action will make the difference in winning or losing, you know I will act.”

“If your lightning can turn the battle, I’ll carry you into it on my back.” Torchay paused then, so long that she glanced up at him. His gaze caught hers, held it. “But I won’t let you throw your life away on a lost cause, Kallista.” He turned away to look out over the enemy camped below. “Do you understand me, Captain? I will do my duty.”

“I never for a second thought you would do anything else.”

“Have you seen all you needed to see?”

Relieved at Torchay’s return to his normal self, Kallista tugged at the wide cuffs of her supple leather gloves and wished she could take them off. It was too hot for gloves, but a military naitan could not appear in public without them. Not unless she was about to call magic.

“Let’s go down.” She headed for the flimsy ladder leading through the trap door in the floor and below to street level. It would be simple to remove when the time came and prevent access either up or down. “I want the troop up here tonight. If we have to stumble from our billets and stagger into place half-asleep, we’ll be too late.”

Torchay didn’t answer, simply followed her down.

The streets were all but deserted, most shops already closed up, the owners and customers at home praying for rescue and hiding their valuables. The buildings near the wall showed signs of the enemy bombardment. Apparently, pinpoint targeting was not a strong suit of the Tibrans, but then with cannon, it didn’t seem to matter. The buildings here had not been of the sturdiest construction to begin with, mostly weathered wood hovels or sheds with a tendency to lean. Now some were patched with planks or canvas. Homes too near the breach in the wall had become little more than splintered debris. Kallista hoped the residents had found new shelter.

Nearer their quarters, the buildings on either side of the narrow cobbled streets at least stood up straight. More had stone walls rather than wood, and shops displayed a better quality of goods. Flags in bright colors advertised the business operating in the buildings where they flew. Here, shops of all sorts stood hip to thigh, unlike the capital where each type of business had its own street, if not its own neighborhood.

A tailor operated next door to a jeweler, next to a shoemaker, a grocer and so on. Because of the odors they generated, the tanners and the livestock markets were relegated outside the city walls. Kallista had worried about that, about running out of food during a long siege. But that was before the cannon made themselves known. The siege hadn’t been a long one.

A bakeshop along their route still displayed loaves and sweet buns on its fold-down countertop as the baker bustled about preparing to close.

“Wait.” Torchay touched Kallista’s arm, and when she stopped, he approached the baker. “How much for what you have left?”

“Can’t you read?” She jerked a thumb toward the sign. “Two buns or one loaf for a krona.”

“It’s the end of the day, your customers have gone home, and your bread was baked before dawn. You don’t advertise South magic preserving. It’s not worth that price.” Torchay spoke quietly, patiently to the baker. “I’ll give you two kroni for the lot.”

“Listen to me, soldier.” The baker spat out the word. “You got no business telling me what my wares are worth. I made these loaves with my own two hands. I don’t need magic for that. What do you make? Death? What value does that have?”

Kallista stalked toward the plump baker, her foul mood flaring into sudden temper. “What value is your life? If it weren’t for soldiers like him, you would already be living in a Tibran harim with half your iliasti dead. This man is ready to give his life for you, you ungrateful bitch, and you begrudge him a few loaves of bread?”

She knew her anger was out of proportion to the situation, but she couldn’t help it. She’d had enough self-righteous scorn from the locals who looked down their lofty faces at the soldiers defending them yet screamed for help at the first sign of trouble.

But she didn’t realize she’d removed one of her gloves until the shock of skin against skin made her jerk and stare down at Torchay’s bare hand clasping her own.

The baker’s wide eyes said she understood the threat, if not what had caused it, and she was tumbling bread into a rough sack as fast as her hands would move. “Pardon, naitan. Pardon. No offense meant.”

“None taken.” Though that was a small lie. Kallista had taken offense. And she knew better than to do so. She couldn’t change popular opinion. Her own behavior, though unconscious and unintended, had only reinforced the impression that those who served in the military were too wicked or too stupid to do anything else. Anything productive.

She considered removing her hand from Torchay’s grip and replacing the glove. But that would make her inadvertent action seem even more of a threat, withdrawn now that she had what she wanted.

“Thank you, aila.” Torchay held out two kroni. The baker waved them away and he set them on her counter. “I pay my debts, aila. I just mislike paying more than what is due.”

With the sack gripped tight in Torchay’s other hand, he and Kallista continued down the street. Around the corner, out of sight of the bakeshop, she jerked her hand free and rounded on her bodyguard.

“Are you mad? Have you lost the remaining threads of the feeble wits you might once have possessed?” Kallista held her bare hand in front of his face. “I am ungloved.”

“You hadn’t called magic. I was safe enough. I’d have been safe enough even if you had. You have more control than any naitan in the entire army. Probably in all Adara.”

Torchay’s calm unconcern infuriated her. “You don’t know that. The sparks don’t always show.”

“I know when you call magic. I don’t have to see the sparks. And I know you don’t have to unglove to do it. To do anything.”

Kallista yanked her glove back on in short, sharp motions. “Do not ever do that again. Ever. Do you understand me, Sergeant? If you do, I’ll have that chevron if I have to strip the skin off your arm to do it, and see you flogged.”

“You don’t approve of flogging.”

“For this I do. Never touch my bare hands. You know this. You learned it the first day of your guard training.”

Torchay gazed at her. She could see the words building up inside his head, battering at his lips in their desire to get past them. Other naitani had trouble with their guards getting too close, wanting more from the relationship than was possible, but Torchay had never shown any sign of the failing. Was this how it began?

She didn’t want to imagine trouble where none existed. She and Torchay worked well together. She didn’t want that to change, didn’t want to offend him by making faulty assumptions. “If you have something to say, say it.”

He shook his head. “No, I have nothing—” His mouth thinned into a straight line, lips pressed together, stubbornly holding back the words. She would get nothing more out of him, not now.

Torchay turned his back to her, scanning their surroundings for potential danger, pulling back into his familiar role.

“Give me the sack.” Kallista held her hand out for it. He needed his hands free for weapons, now that she was safely gloved again. Civilian naitani weren’t required to go about gloved, but military magic was considered too dangerous to risk a naitan’s loss of control.

Anything covering the bare skin of the hands interfered to some degree with the magic. Leather blocked virtually all magic save for that under the most exquisite control. But Kallista didn’t have to remove her gloves to use her magic. She didn’t know any other naitan who could do what she could.

Torchay handed over the bread and moved down the street behind her toward the oversize home where the Third Detachment, Military Naitani, was billeted. The house towered three stories above the street, offering a view over the walls from the flat roof garden. The furnishings were elegant, gilded and ornamented to the extreme, what few furnishings there were. The table shared by the troop had curved gilded legs encrusted with more curlicues, and the top had multicolored woods inlaid in a geometric design. The mismatched chairs they used had tapestry-upholstered seats, or inlaid designs, and yet others were gilded within an inch of their lives. But most of the rooms were vacant, echoing with emptiness.

The ilian that owned it had once been much larger, a full dozen individuals all bound in temple oath to love and support each other and raise the children that resulted from their bonding. The loss of a child and his mother in an accident had fractured the family and a bare quartet of iliasti remained to finish bringing up the few children left to them. They had plenty of room for the entire troop.

Torchay bowed her into the house, but his eyes held hers as he did, watching her. It unnerved her. What did it mean? Anything?

Kallista tossed the bread sack to Torchay as he closed the door behind them. “Alert the troop. I want everyone ready to move into position by full dark. The general will be moving the regular troops into position then as well. The Tibrans won’t have far-seers to spot us in the dark.”

“And we hope they have no machines to do it for them.”

“Bite your tongue.” Kallista gave an exaggerated shudder, but it was indeed something to worry about.

Torchay opened the sack and tossed her a bun. “You missed supper.” He was gone to carry out her order before she could throw it back at him.

He returned moments later, while Kallista still stared at the bread in her hand. “Everyone is ready, save for Beltis and Hamonn. They went to dinner at the public house down the street and should be back shortly.”

Kallista sighed. Beltis was one of the naitani she worried about. The young South fire thrower was impulsive, romantic, and she was growing far too attached to her bodyguard. Hamonn was older, like most guards assigned to new naitani, and sensible, but—well, time enough to worry about it after the battle. If they all survived, she could talk to Hamonn then about reassignment or retirement.

“Bread is for eating.” Torchay slid one of his blades into a wrist sheath and drew another to test its edge. “Not staring at. It’s not a work of art. You’ll need the fuel tonight for your magic.”

“You’re my bodyguard. Not my keeper.” Kallista wanted to set the bun aside, but Torchay was right. She needed to eat. The bread tasted better than she expected for having been baked without magic and set out on display all day.

The silence caught her attention. No sound of steel on stone as Torchay sharpened one of his numberless blades. She’d tried to count them once, the dirks and daggers and short swords secreted in every place conceivable around Torchay’s body. But just when she thought she had them all, he would produce another from some invisible spot. And whenever he had a spare moment, he would sharpen them. The rasping sound had played accompaniment to every quiet moment of the last nine years. Until now.

He sat in his usual place beside the street door, a wicked little blade—needle thin and razor sharp—in one hand, his whetstone forgotten in the other as he watched her.

The skin between her shoulder blades prickled. She did not have time for this now, whatever it was. They had a battle to fight, probably before dawn. She refused to encourage him. But she could not refuse to listen if he chose to speak.

“Yes, I’m your bodyguard,” he said finally. “I’ve served you for nine years. I’d like to think I’ve done a good job of it.”

“You have. Exemplary.” Was that what had his hair on too tight? His qualifications record?

“For nine years, I’ve been no farther from you than a spoken word. I know you better than anyone. Better than your family. Better than your naitani.” He paused and looked at his blade as if wondering why he held it. “The battle tomorrow—it’s not like the bandits we’ve fought before. It doesn’t look good, does it.” He didn’t ask a question.

“No. It doesn’t.” Kallista still didn’t know where Torchay was going with this, but she had never given him anything less than the truth.

“This time tomorrow, we’ll most likely be dead.”

“Very probably.”

He looked at her then, his clear blue eyes holding her gaze. “If I’m going to die, Kallista, I want to die with friends. The army isn’t a good place for making them. You’re the only person I can think of who I’d consider a friend. You’re my captain, my naitan, and I’m your bodyguard. But—is it possible—could we not also be friends?”

Friendship. Was that all he wanted? Such a simple, utterly difficult thing. Someone who cared about him not because they had to, not for ties of blood or marriage, but simply because they liked him.

Did Kallista have friends? Naitani in the army were too valuable, too rare to concentrate them in large numbers, and the regular officers were often what the average citizen thought them: dim and sometimes cruel. She’d met a few fellow naitani she liked, but postings in the far corners of the Adaran continent kept her from furthering the acquaintance.

The person Kallista knew best, the one whose moods she could interpret just from the sound of steel on stone or the huff of breath through his beaked nose, the one who kept her secrets and guarded her privacy, was Torchay. Was that friendship?

She rather thought it was. “We are friends, Torchay,” she said. “You’ve perhaps been a better friend to me than I have to you, but we have been friends for a long time. Why else would we have lasted nine years?”

Torchay slicked his knife along the stone, a satisfied sound. “I thought so.”

“You know, you’ll sharpen that knife away to nothing if you keep that up.”

He grinned at the familiar comment. “Perhaps,” he said in his regular response. “But it will be a very sharp nothing.”

They were friends. Everything was exactly the same as before, and everything was different. She knew. At least one person in this world considered her a friend.

Torchay’s head came up at the noise of doors opening and closing, boots clattering on flagstone. “That will be Beltis and Hamonn.”

CHAPTER TWO

Torchay put away his blade so quickly Kallista did not see where and picked up the cloaks tossed on the bench beside him. The blue he handed to Kallista, and draped the blue-trimmed black over his forearm. It would likely get cold before dawn, she realized, and as usual, Torchay had already thought of it.

“I’ll have them assemble in the courtyard,” he said and disappeared into the outer rooms where the others lived.

Kallista led her troop through the dark streets of Ukiny by a pale steady light courtesy of the South naitan Iranda. Her best skill was lighting up a dark battlefield, but she could also scorch enemy soldiers, depending on how far away they were, how many they were and whether the local chickens had danced a waltz or a strut that morning. Iranda’s magic was not under the best of control, but she hadn’t burnt any Adaran soldiers since she’d been under Kallista’s command.

Only five naitani besides herself, plus their five bodyguards, made up Kallista’s troop. Three wore the yellow tunics of South naitani—Beltis the fire thrower, Iranda the scorcher and a girl from the eastern coast who could spoil the enemy’s food. Kallista wasn’t sure what use Mora would be in battle, but she was part of the troop, so she would be with them.

The lone naitan in the green of East magic could cause uncontrollable growth in plant life. Rynver was one of the few male naitani in the military. Men did have magic, but it was less common—perhaps one in every ten rather than the one-in-five rate of women born with magic. His parents hadn’t expected their son to have magic, so Rynver had never learned to control it. His military service had already stretched beyond the required six years, but when he learned control, like Iranda, he’d be gone. Back to civilian life, working on a farm somewhere.

The other North naitan wouldn’t have to wait. When Adessay turned twenty-two and finished his tour of mandatory military duty, he had a place waiting in one of the western mines. Today, he would be spilling debris from the breach down the glacis as the Tibrans tried to climb it, rolling stones in their path and generally disrupting their advance. He didn’t have a great deal of power to put behind his earthmoving, but that and his excellent control was why he would be welcomed outside the army.

Beltis would spend her life in the military, like Kallista, because her fire starting was too powerful, exploding ovens and setting houses on fire even after years of working on her control. Kallista’s control was so fine she could set tiny blue sparks dancing from finger to finger—and sometimes did when a staff meeting droned on and on and on. But no one had any use for her lightning, save Adara’s defense forces. Defending the helpless gave her magic some use, gave her life a purpose.

When her troop was disposed to her satisfaction, Kallista wrapped herself in her cloak and went to stand near the arrow slit in the parapet. The lights of campfires spread down the beach as far as she could see. She’d have suspected the Tibrans of lighting more fires than they had troops to demoralize Ukiny’s garrison, but she had watched them unloading. She had never seen such a vast army, never imagined a need for such a thing.

Kallista turned her face into the wind, feeling it rush past her from the shore, from the North. She squared up her shoulders, pointing them east and west so that North lay directly before her. First the Jeroan Sea, then the lower fringes of the Tibran continent. It rose to a high plateau ringed by cliffs, or so she’d been told, and beyond that, mountains. Mountains as high and wild as the Devil’s Tooth range along the neck that bridged the sea, but colder. Beyond the mountains lay pure North. Cold, clear, rational. Utterly unlike Kallista’s own hot-tempered, impulsive, passion-ruled nature.

Perhaps that was why the One had given her North magic, so that its icy control could provide what she did not possess in herself. Kallista opened herself to the North, calling its cold clarity into her mind and soul, filling herself with its sharp-edged magic.

She sensed Torchay’s presence behind her. “You should sleep, Sergeant.”

“So should you. Your rest is more important than mine. Your lightning will be needed. We guards have divided the watch.”

Kallista glanced toward Beltis’s stocky guard who stood over his charge. Hamonn gave her a tiny nod, acknowledging his duty, accepting it from her. “You’re right,” she said. “The battle will begin when it begins.”

She lay down where she was, her back against the fortification, and listened to the quiet sounds Torchay made as he settled close by. “Sleep well, friend.”

The silence that answered had her fearing she’d overstepped some unknown bounds, until at last he spoke, his voice even quieter than hers. “And you also…friend.”

“Stop! Wait, dammit—what kind of friend are you?” Stone bent over, hands on his knees, and tried to decide whether the contents of his stomach were going to come out. He knew he’d feel better if he could just shed his jacket in this infernal heat, but the padded gray nuisance was part of the uniform. They could unbutton it, but they couldn’t leave it off even in camp.

“I’m your only friend, thank you. No one else would put up with your rubbish.”

Stone tilted his head and peered up at Fox who had stopped after all and was waiting, swaying slightly in the offshore wind, his face strange and shadowy in the firelight coming from the nearby crossway between tents. Stone knew that face better than his own. Both of them named Warrior, of the highest caste Tibre had to offer, below only the Rulers themselves. Both of them vo’Tsekrish, of the king’s own city.

They had been partnered the day they left women’s quarters to begin warrior training, when they were six years old. They were now twenty-two. Or maybe twenty-three. Stone didn’t keep track of that sort of thing.

He and Fox had learned to read side by side from the same book. They had learned to fight back-to-back against the same teachers. They had even discovered the pleasures of women at the same time, though not with the same woman. Stone trusted Fox with his life.

But at the moment, he could cheerfully throttle him. “I thought you said you knew where women’s quarters were.”

“I didn’t say that. You did.” Fox grabbed a handful of Stone’s hair and pulled him more or less upright, leaning down until they stood eye to eye.

Stone envied him those few inches that made the lean necessary. “’S not fair,” he muttered. “I should be the taller. I’m lead in this pair.”

“You’re drunk.” Fox shoved and Stone staggered back several paces.

“Am not. If I was drunk, I’d have fallen. ’Sides, Stores won’t give us enough to get drunk. Just enough to get pleasantly snockered. Besides that, you’re drunk too.”

“Not drunk. Snockered.” Fox frowned. “Why d’you suppose that is?”

“Dunno.” Stone looked around for a place to sit. He didn’t recognize the tents—though why he thought he should since all something-thousand of them looked exactly alike, he didn’t know.

The tents were wide enough for a tall man to stretch out without getting his feet wet, long enough for six men to sleep side by side without quite touching, and high enough to stand up in if you didn’t mind ducking a bit. Or ducking a bit more if you were Fox. And they were set up in identical long rows with space between them for walking and mustering.

Stone didn’t recognize the warriors strolling about, either. Except for Fox. He recognized him. Worse luck. “Dunno why we’re snockered,” he said again, “’cept the First and Finest are always a little snockered when they go charging up through the breach. And ’cause they gave us the stuff and what else were we to do with it but drink it?”

“Maybe that’s why.” Fox set a small keg on its end and plopped down on it. “Give us these fancy red poufs of trousers so we’ll be sure to get shot at. Get us just snockered enough we’ll run like lunatics into that hellmouth, and call us a brilliant-sounding name like First and Finest so we won’t realize we’re something else entirely, like First and Foolishest.”

“No such word as foolishest,” Stone offered, nodding sagely. Or as sagely as he could, given that he was at least a quarter full of some truly vile liquor. “And you shouldn’t talk that way. It’ll get back to the Rulers. You do realize you’re sitting on a keg of black powder, don’t you?”

Carefully, Fox leaned to one side and peered down at his impromptu seat. “Damn me, so I am. Suppose it wouldn’t do to get myself blown to bits prematurely.”

“No. Won’t do at all.” Stone took his partner’s hand and hauled him to his feet. “D’you suppose we started drinking too early? They haven’t started the cannonade yet, have they?” He froze, trying to force thought through his slightly pickled brain, to hear what he ought to be hearing. “Have I gone deaf?”

Just then, the concentrated thunder of hundreds of cannon firing simultaneously at close range threatened to knock both men off none-too-steady feet.

“Did you hear that?” Fox said when the noise faded.

“Yes.”

“Then you’re not deaf.”

“Do you know where we are?” Again Stone tried to pick out landmarks.

“Haven’t a clue.”

“I don’t suppose you know where women’s quarters are from here.”

“Not a bit.”

Stone shoved his hair out of his face with both hands. “Why doesn’t your hair ever get in your way? It’s just like mine, yellow and curly. It should get in your way like mine.”

“I remember to get mine cut.” Fox produced a length of string, bunched Stone’s hair together on the top of his head and tied it off. “You look ridiculous. Like there’s a fountain sprouting from your head.”

“Don’t care. It’s out of my way. Thanks, brodir.”

“Anytime.” Fox paused, then pointed at the banner hanging above a nearby tent. “Isn’t that the vo’Haav banner?”

Stone turned, looked. The banner was hard to see in the firelight, but he thought he recognized a black bear on the yellow flag. “If a bear is vo’Haav’s emblem, then it is.”

“Our camp is always just to the east of theirs.”

“Don’t tell me you know where east is. The sun’s down. The moon’s not up yet.”

Fox pointed. “The city is east. Therefore east is that way. Our tent is also that way.”

Stone sighed, his chest heaving in his disappointment. “I really wanted a woman tonight.”

“One last time before we die.”

Anger flashing like sparks in dry grass, Stone swung, his fist plowing into his partner’s face, knocking him to his backside. Stone spat in the sand beside him, invoking the warrior’s god. “Don’t say that,” he ordered, fists clenched. “Maybe we’ll die, but maybe we won’t. It’s not up to us. You go into battle knowing you’ll die, Khralsh will give you what you want. Death is easy.”

Once more he reached down and pulled Fox to his feet. “You go into battle determined to live, maybe he lets you live. Life, that’s not so easy, not in battle. Either way, Khralsh decides. But if you ask for what you want, maybe he gives it.”

“And maybe he doesn’t.” Fox couldn’t meet Stone’s gaze.

“Maybe not.” Stone shook the wrist he gripped, jarring his partner’s whole body, willing him to understand, to believe. “But who guaranteed you life to begin with? Remember that Bureaucrat we saw get run down by the ale wagon? Or the Farmer who got gored by his bull? Everybody dies, Fox, sooner or later. Swear your life to Khralsh, let him look after it. You can’t.”

This time, Fox’s sharp brown gaze locked onto Stone’s. He envied Fox his eyes as well. Few others had the pale blue of Stone’s eyes. Their mentors had always shuddered and called them uncanny, witchy. But he didn’t mind uncanny now if it convinced Fox.

Slowly, Fox nodded. “All right. I’ll swear. With you at my shoulder I believe it.”

“Then swear. We swear together, we fight together, fight well, and surely Khralsh will let us live.”

“I swear. I swear myself to Khralsh. I ask for life, but my life in his hands whatever happens.” Fox spat in the sand, offering a body fluid precious to the warrior god.

Stone copied him. “And so I swear also. My life to Khralsh.”

They stood another moment, swaying faintly when the wind gusted through, setting tent walls to flapping.

“D’you suppose we ought to try to sleep?” Stone scratched his head, careful not to disturb his new topknot.

The cannon crashed again, less in unison than before.

“In this noise?” Fox turned his partner and pushed him in the direction of their division. “You can try.”

“Why do you always have all the answers?”

“Because somebody has to, and you obviously don’t.”

Stone punched Fox in the shoulder hard enough to send him reeling to the far side of the tent street. “What is it I have then?”

“Lunatic courage.”

“You have courage. Plenty of it. I’ve seen it.”

“Ah, but I have the sensible sort of courage. Somebody has to be the crazy one, the one who’ll charge cannon with a misfired musket or volunteer for First and Finest. And that’s you.”

“You were right there charging and volunteering with me.”

“We’re paired. Where else am I supposed to be but at your back, making sure you don’t get your fool self killed.”

Stone thought long enough they passed two tents, trying to work his way to Fox’s meaning. The cannon’s booming, now a steady rumble as the big guns fired at will, seemed to shake the alcohol from his brain. “You’re pissed.” He stopped in the throughway. “Not drunk pissed. Angry pissed. Because I volunteered.”

“I’m not angry.” Fox took his arm and got him moving again. “I was. But I’m not anymore. You convinced me we’d live through this. And if we don’t, Khralsh will welcome us to his hall.”

“Yes.” Stone believed it. He couldn’t believe anything else. “Volunteering for First and Finest will get us noticed. It could get us promoted.”

Fox sighed. “Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Of what?”

“This.” Fox swept his arm in a half circle, indicating the camp around them, the cannon, the city with its broken walls. “Living in tents. Slogging through mud or heat or rain or all three to the next camp. Fighting. Bleeding. Healing up so we can do it all over again. Don’t you wish we could rest for a little while? Go home, soak in the baths, spend some time with a woman who has all her teeth?”

“I don’t know, I rather like the toothless one. The way she can wrap her mouth aro—”

Fox shoved him and Stone broke off, laughing. His laughter didn’t last long. They’d reached their own tent, shared with two other pairs, all elsewhere just now. They probably knew how to find the women’s tents.

Stone took advantage of their absence to speak frankly, half shouting over the cannon noise. “This is the way it is, Fox. We were born Warrior caste. We are the King’s Fist. His Sword and Shield. Where our king sends, we go. It’s no use wishing it was some other way, because it’s not, and it won’t ever be. You’ll shatter your soul trying to fight it.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right.” Fox pulled his musket from the stack and sat down to clean it once more. “I think too much.” He grinned at his partner. “The curse of a brilliant mind.”

Stone grinned back, relief flooding him. “Crazy and stupid. That’s what a good warrior ought to be. You should work on that.”

“I will. Damn me! The flint’s cracked already. I just replaced it this morning.” Grumbling, Fox set to putting the finicky firearm back into working order.

Stone pulled out a whetstone and his bayonet. In a charge like the one facing them, they’d only get one chance to fire their muskets. A sharp bayonet seemed more useful.

The boom of cannon fire set the walls of the women’s tents to trembling. All night the bombardment had continued, a constant underpinning to the activity within the tents. The activity had ceased with the departure of the men. The women slept haphazardly wherever they found a comfortable spot, twitching when the cannon roared, but sleeping nonetheless. All save one.

Aisse vo’Haav, assigned to the Warrior caste, crept carefully from the communal areas to the tiny partitioned section where the women washed, dressed and kept their few personal belongings. If anyone woke, she would have questions, and though Aisse had answers, she couldn’t afford the delay.

She took the moments necessary to stop at the shrine to Ulilianeth, healer, seductress, protector of women, the only goddess in a heaven full of gods. Aisse felt the need for her blessing before embarking on her path.

Ulilianeth had spoken to Aisse in this place, had shown her that things could be different, that she could live a life of her own choosing, free of everything that had made her existence into hell. In this place, women could say no. And Aisse intended to be one of them.

She pressed a kiss to Ulilianeth’s stone skirt, then scurried to her corner where she ripped off the hated gauzy dress. She scrubbed herself until her skin felt raw, but still she didn’t feel clean. Aisse pulled the brown linen tunic from beneath her box, where she’d hidden it the day she bought it from the local boy selling bread in the camp. She put it on, smoothing it down over her thighs. It left her legs bare from the knees down. Studying her exposed legs critically, Aisse decided they did not look much like boys’ legs, too round and golden. She had to disguise them.

A short while later, she’d made her coverlet into a fair approximation of the leggings she’d seen Adaran soldiers wearing. Hers were lumpy and threatened to slip down because she couldn’t tie the bindings tight enough, but they would have to do. She got out the scissors she’d “borrowed” from Piheko. She’d listened to Piheko bemoan their loss for days. Aisse would be sure to leave them where they could be easily found. In seconds, her waist-length mane of gold hair lay on the ground.

Her neck felt cool, tingly, strange. But she didn’t have time to marvel at it or the way her head threatened to float away. Aisse gathered up the shorn hair and shoved it in with the straw of a spare pallet, scuffed the remaining strands into the dirt, and laid the scissors in a gap beside Piheko’s box.

From her own, she retrieved the bag of supplies she’d been collecting—dried meat, hard cheese, biscuit, a cup, extra shoes—and knelt to peer beneath the tent wall. No one passed by. After endless hours, the cannonade was at last rising to its crescendo. The warriors would be mustering on the field before the city, preparing for the attack. No one would notice a boy slipping from the camp.

She made it past the cannon, past the endless stacks of stores, past the officers’ mounts and the cattle waiting their turn to be slaughtered for rations. She could see the line of trees that marked the southern edge of the Tibran camp.

“Here! You—boy!”

Aisse froze, hesitating seconds too long before realizing she should run. Her face would never pass for a boy’s at second glance. But the Farmer caste tending the beasts already had hold of her arm.

“What are you doing here, boy?” He yanked, snapping her arm painfully upward. “Spying? Off to tell your witches all our plans?”

She kept her face turned away, hoping her hacked-off hair would provide sufficient disguise.

“Look at me, boy!” He jerked her arm again.

Aisse shook her head, trying to pull away from him. He swore and backhanded her across the face. She couldn’t stop the reflexive high-pitched cry. A girl’s sound, not a boy’s.

The farmer grabbed her face with the hand not gripping her arm and forced it upward, until he could see her. “Achz and Arilo!” He called on the Farmer caste’s twin gods in his shock. “You’re female.”

He shook her, violently. “What in seven hells have you done? By all that’s holy…” His voice trembled with horror.

And it was true horror to a Tibran male to think anyone might wish to escape his caste, to think a woman might wish to live some other life. Women lived in the women’s quarters of whatever caste they were assigned, doing women’s work, available to any man of any caste who might wish to use her. Most Tibran women didn’t mind. It was the way life was. Aisse hated it.

She couldn’t lose her chance at freedom now, not when she was so close. “Let me go!”

Her elbow punched into the farmer’s stomach as she struggled. He grunted with the blow, so she did it again, kicking, scratching and biting in desperate silence.

“Witch.” He shook her hard enough to rattle her eyes in their sockets. The first blow of his fist stunned her and she collapsed, held upright only by his grip. He waited till she regained her senses before he hit her again, to be sure she felt every least bit of the punishment he had in store for her. He told her so.

Torchay pressed his naitan closer into the angle between wall and walkway, his body covering hers. Not that mere flesh and blood were much defense against the cannon’s iron balls, but at least if he failed her this time, he would surely die first. He put his lips next to her ear and shouted so he could be heard. “We should pull back. They’re targeting the walls now.”

“And the town.”

Since the bombardment started, she had argued against leaving the walls because the Tibran missiles sailed over their heads to crash into the shops and houses of Ukiny. Then, she had been right. They were safer on the walls. But no longer.

The captain turned her head. Torchay pulled back, allowing her to find his ear.

“It’s too late to pull back.” Her lips brushed his skin as she spoke. “Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t do it now. We’re safer staying put.”

Torchay gave up. She was likely right, as usual. And even if she wasn’t, she was the captain.

A cannonball smacked into the crenellations behind them, sending stones tumbling to the walkway. Hands molded to his captain’s head, he waited till the biggest debris settled, then lifted his head just enough to peer behind him. The other guards lay over their naitani in the space beyond his feet.

“Hamonn!” Torchay bellowed the man’s name, but doubted he could be heard over the cannon’s roar. He propped himself on elbows to see better, and thought something moved past the South naitan’s guard.

“Status?” his captain asked.

“Checking.” He nudged Hamonn with his foot. Rubble spilled from the man’s back, but the man himself did not move.

“Casualties, Sergeant?”

“Hamonn isn’t moving. Don’t think he’s dead, but I don’t know. Don’t know about Beltis either. Someone’s moving beyond them, so I assume Kadrey and his naitan are unhurt.” He didn’t like reporting incomplete information, but his captain needed something and that was the best he had.

“Go check on Hamonn. See if Beltis is hurt. I need her with me.”

Torchay flattened himself over her as another ball hit close by. “When it’s safe.”

“Go now. By the time it’s safe, the battle will be over. That’s an order, Sergeant.”

When she said that, it meant she was beyond reasoning with. He had no choice but to obey, or risk her doing almost anything. Torchay rose onto hands and knees, but remained in place, his body still shielding hers. “Do not move from this spot.”

They’d fought this battle out their first year or so together, but he still held his breath every time he went on one of her errands, until he returned and found her again where he’d left her.

“I won’t. Now go.” Her shove sent him scooting on hands and feet to the pair under the debris behind them.

Torchay moved the worst of the stones off the older man and checked for a pulse. He found it, strong and steady. “Trooper? Beltis, are you injured?” He leaned close to hear any response over the cannon fire.

“I’m fine.” Her voice came muffled from beneath her guard. “Is Hamonn—”

“Breathing and well enough, given that he has a lump the size of my fist on the back of his head.” Torchay probed the injury and was rewarded with reaction.

Hamonn tried to shove him away. He might have groaned but no one could hear it in the crash of a cannonball nearby. So close that bits of rock blasted from the wall spun into Torchay’s face, making tiny cuts on his forehead and cheeks. Too close.

He looked up to see where it had hit in time to see the parapet above his captain begin to crumble. “Kallista!”

Torchay bellowed her name and scrambled to reach her. She was moving, getting out of the way, but not fast enough.

An enormous stone capping the structure plummeted down, striking her a glancing blow before it bounced off the town side of the walk. More stones followed. Torchay dove forward to keep them off her. He didn’t quite succeed.

A fist-size stone hit her head, leaving a cut oozing blood in the fine, pale skin of her forehead. With a cry, Torchay covered her head with his hands, ignoring the battering they took. He scooted forward until he could get his head over hers. His was undoubtedly harder, could take more of a beating. But the rocks had stopped falling. The entire parapet lay on the walkway around and over them.

Torchay shoved the rocks away from her, leaving streaks of blood on their chalky surface. His hands bled from a score of cuts, and at least one finger was likely broken. He used them to cup his captain’s face and turn it up to the full moon’s light. He bent his head till his beak of a nose brushed her small straight one, and he felt her breath stir against his skin. “Blessed One,” he whispered in gratitude.

“Is she dead?” Both young naitani peered over his shoulder, but it was Beltis who spoke.

It took Torchay a few moments before he realized Beltis sounded strange because she wasn’t shouting. The bombardment had stopped. Instantly alert, Torchay looked toward the breach and saw Hamonn, slightly the worse for wear, peering around what was left of the crumbled breastworks.

“They’re coming!” he shouted.

One of Iranda’s bubbles burst into bright light high above the city wall, illuminating all that lay below. Torchay made note of it. The captain would want to know so she could commend her later for her prompt and proper action.

“They’re coming!” Hamonn beckoned with a wave of his arm, but the two naitani still hovered.

“Go.” Torchay shoved at the yellow-clad girl. Adessay would follow her lead, if she only would.

“Is she dead?” Beltis asked again.

“No, but if she were, you’d still have to take command. You’re ranking naitan. It’s your duty to protect them.” He jerked his head in the direction of the city and wished he hadn’t. He’d taken a few too many stones to the head himself. “The enemy is coming.”

He could see them over the broken wall, rushing forward in waves, hopefully to break against Ukiny’s walls like the ocean on the shore. But like the ocean, they would pour through any gap they found.

“Naitan.” Hamonn had returned from the hole in the wall to kneel in front of his charge. He held his hands out, palm up. “I accept your gloves.”

Beltis stared at him half a second, then stripped off her gloves and laid them in Hamonn’s upturned hands. “Adessay.” Her voice cracked like a whip. “Come with me, Trooper. We have an army to stop.”

CHAPTER THREE

Beltis had to pick her way through the rubble that had felled Kallista, rather than striding decisively, but she was moving. The young North naitan removed his gloves, handed them to his guard and followed, his blue tunic less noticeable in Iranda’s light than Beltis’s yellow.

Fire exploded in the plain below, turning half the lead Tibran rank into human torches. Rock tumbled down the steep slope of the glacis, mowing down the ranks behind. From the tower on the far side of the breach in the wall, more magic came, causing vines and brambles to grow instantaneously in the field, impeding the enemy’s rush. Satisfied the naitani were doing their duty, Torchay turned to his own.

His muscles quivered from holding his weight off his captain for so long. He pushed himself up, gravel and dust cascading from his back, and went to his knees beside her. That she had not yet regained consciousness worried him. He had no East magic, no healing in his touch, but he had the best nonmagical medical training available. A bodyguard needed to be able to tend his naitan if he failed in his first duty and allowed her an injury.

Torchay cleared the area around his captain, blocking out the shouts and screams of battle. The youngsters seemed to be holding their own, so far. He straightened her limbs, checking for injury, working his way carefully toward her torso and head. She didn’t wake under his probing, even when he pressed on bruises he knew had to hurt.

She’d been struck in the head at least once, but he wouldn’t have thought that blow enough to render her unconscious this long.

Someone screamed. Beltis. Torchay looked up to see Hamonn clutch his chest as if arrow struck, but no shaft protruded. He staggered, then fell from the wall into the shattered hole where the breach had been forced.

“They have hand cannon,” Kadrey shouted back at Torchay as he pulled both naitani down behind the broken walls. “Long, with knives on the end like pikes, but firing tiny missiles. As bad as archers.”

Beltis screamed again, rising to her knees to fling fire at the enemy. Looking grim, Adessay crawled up beside her. Worried, Torchay turned his attention back to his own naitan. He had to wake her if he could.

She looked ghost white in the eerie light. Kallista usually appeared more pale than she actually was because of the contrast with her hair, so dark a brown it was almost black. But this paleness seemed extreme. Gently, Torchay slipped his hands around her neck to feel along her spine.

He loosened her queue, knowing she wouldn’t like it, but the tight weave of hair kept him from feeling her skull, finding injury there. When he found the lump, she flinched and gasped. Torchay grinned. A lump usually meant the swelling was expanding outward, rather than in against the brain. And she responded to pain.

He found no other injuries, save for the cut on her forehead and the second lump forming beneath it. He cleaned it with water from his bottle and a cloth from his pack.

“They’re coming!” Kadrey shouted.

“Stop. Hurts.” The captain moved her head away from his ministrations.

“I’m finished.” The cut was as clean as he could make it here. Torchay took her hand in his. “Squeeze.”

“Still hurts. Why?” She opened her eyes to slits, squinting against the bright illumination.

“You got smacked on the head with a great huge rock. Blame it for your headache, not me.”

“No. Why squeeze?” Her hand lay limp as yesterday’s fish.

“So I know you can. You might wiggle your toes while you’re at it.” That enormous boulder had barely brushed her, but Torchay’s stomach made fear-knots over what that light blow could have done.

“Oh.” She promptly squeezed his hand tight enough to hurt and waggled both feet up and down. Then she tried to roll over and sit up.

Torchay pushed her back down, realizing far later than he should have that the scuffling and shouting he heard were right on top of them. He ducked beneath the knife-on-a-pole of the nearest Tibran and buried a blade in his heart. He pulled it out and threw it at the head appearing over the wall at the breach. He just had time to see the hilt quivering in the dead man’s eye socket before the next crisis was upon him.

He drew the long knife from its sheath down his back beneath his tunic and slashed across the neck of the first man rushing them, then lunged forward onto one knee and thrust it into the gut of the man behind him. That gave them a little space of time before the next enemy reached them.

Torchay stood, bringing his naitan up with him. Holding her close, inside his protection, he surveyed the situation. Beltis lay draped over the parapet, the blood pouring from her neck denying any hope she might yet live. Adessay and his guard sprawled in a small heap, both of them gutted. Probably by the first man Torchay had just killed.

More soldiers in padded gray jackets and loose red trousers rushed down the walkway toward them, and yet more climbed onto the wall beyond.

“We should fall back.” Torchay tried to draw the captain toward the town side of the wall.

“Where to?” She was already stripping off her gloves, thrusting them at him.

“Anywhere. Somewhere safer than this.”

“And where is that?”

He could feel the hair-raising tingle of magic being called. Before he could tuck her gloves into his belt, lightning flashed from her hands. The massive blue-white spark leaped from man to man to man until all of them lay twitching on the walk a few moments before they fell still, their hearts stopped.

More of them climbed over the parapet, up ladders from town where shrill wavering screams tracked the progress of the Tibran sack of Ukiny. Kallista let her lightning fly in huge, jagged horizontal sheets, half toward the men on the wall, half toward the breach where countless more hordes poured through. She stood with her arms outstretched in supplication to the Source of Magic.

Again and again and again, she called on the One for power, until she was blind and deaf with it, sensing the enemy as much as seeing them. Bodies lay piled on the wall five and six deep, and still they came. They climbed over their fellows in the breach and burst onto the city streets, held back now only by Kallista’s lightning and the occasional rooftop archer.

“You can’t call enough magic to kill them all.” Torchay crouched beside her, head swiveling as he attempted to watch in all directions. “There are too many of them. We must fall back.”

“I can’t!” Kallista could hear the screams of the innocent as they died, smell the smoke of homes being burnt. She couldn’t save herself while they suffered. She could see gray and red on the tower where she’d stationed the rest of her troop. They had to have fallen like Beltis and Adessay.

“Kallista!” Torchay grabbed her waist with both hands, breaking her concentration. “Your death won’t save them.”

Sweet Goddess, he was right. But she couldn’t just give up. She lifted her hands high, calling yet again on the One, the Mother and Father of All, Giver of Life, Source of Magic. “Do something!” she screamed. “They are your children! Save them. Use me—whatever you want! Whatever you need. I’ll do anything, if you’ll just save your people. What kind of Goddess are you?”

The wind rushed past from the sea as it had since time began. The sun crept above the eastern horizon, casting the dead into pale shadows behind the wall, painting their spilled blood brilliant scarlet and crimson and dark, dull, brown. For a moment, Kallista waited to be struck down for her defiance.

Then power filled her in a turbulent rush, enough power to fill deep oceans, to shift whole mountains and build a hundred cities. It permeated her, deep into each strand of hair, every shred of callused skin on her feet. She screamed, and power poured in through her open mouth. She couldn’t contain it all. She had to rid herself of it somehow. Kallista threw her hands wide, as if throwing lightning from her fingertips, and the magic exploded from her.

Not in bright sparks, but as a shock wave of darkness, a sort of black mist, roiling out in all directions from where she stood at the epicenter. It settled over the landscape, clinging like some dark dew to everything it touched. And Tibrans began to die.

Some of them screamed, clawing at their faces as if it burned. Others just dropped in their tracks. Others—she couldn’t see clearly. A few turned and ran when they saw the opaque fog approach, but it moved as fast as the lightning she threw. There was no escape.

Panicked, Kallista tried to call it back, but the magic refused to answer. Would it kill everything it touched? She looked down at Torchay where he knelt by her side, head bent, saw the dark glitter clinging to the burnished red of his hair. She tried to brush it off, and it melted away like the mist it resembled, leaving nothing behind. Not even dampness.

Torchay turned his face up to hers, his eyes as wide and frightened as she knew her own must be. “What did you just do?”

In the high mountain pass on the southern edge of the Mother Range, huddled over a feeble fire just at dawn, the trader lifted his head. He sensed something. A new thing, strange and powerful—and oh so seductive. He straightened, searching with all his senses. Was he finally to discover what he had been seeking for so long?

When it hit him, bowing him backward in a spine-cracking convulsion, he shouted for sheer joy. Incredible power rushed through him, recognizing him, welcoming him, promising him his every dream fulfilled. It left him as quickly as it had come, but this time it left him filled with hope, with eager purpose, rather than anxious desperation.

No, not this time. This was as like his previous experience as the sun was like the moon. It was promise kept. It pulled at him, compelled him onward, sped his steps. His heart’s desire awaited him, and the faster he traveled, the sooner he would have it.

He picked himself up from the dirt where he lay, his traveling companions hovering in a fearful circle around him. “Move, you sluggards!” he bellowed. “I want to be on my way before the sun reaches the treetops.”

He hurt. All over, but especially his head. And there was dirt in his mouth. And his mouth was too dry to spit. Stone tried anyway. He succeeded in getting rid of some of it. He wiped his hand on his pants and scraped more of the grit off his tongue with his fingers.

Where was he? What had happened? They’d made it through the breach, somehow alive and—Khralsh, his head hurt.

Ocean was gone, incinerated by an Adaran witch. He’d taken his partner, Moon, with him. River, Wolf, Snow—too many to name—had fallen to arrows or worse. But he and Fox had made it through. He was certain of that. They’d crossed into the city, cleared the houses nearest the wall, which were mostly cleared already save for a screeching crone who’d brained him with a broom and died on Fox’s bayonet. They’d reloaded, fired the houses and left them burning to advance to the next street.

Stone had killed the archer shooting at them from the roof and reloaded, then they’d checked the house. Empty. The dead archer was a woman. That had shocked him, but Fox reminded him she was dead now, paying the price of her blasphemy in the afterlife. They’d clattered back down the stairs and set the place alight. Then…

He scrubbed a hand across his face. The light hurt his eyes, even though they were still closed. It wasn’t supposed to be light, was it? Wait—yes, the sun had come up. He remembered that. It had just risen over the city walls when…When what?

Stone spit more dirt from his mouth, beginning to have enough spit to do it. He should get up. Find where they’d called muster. Report in. But lifting his head seemed more than he could accomplish. He tried opening an eye and managed that. It was hard to see, his vision veiled, blurred somehow.

This didn’t look like the city. Unless the city had crumbled around him. Was that what had happened? Stone opened his other eye. How could the sunlight hurt when everything seemed so dim? He lay over white stone rubble. Big rocks, little rocks, grit, gravel, bloody body parts…mighty Khralsh, he was in the breach.

Stone tried to scoot off the dead but there were too many of them. They carpeted the ground, layers deep, their limbs flopping bonelessly as he struggled to escape them. Heads lolled. Wounds gaped open. Stone’s hands slipped and he fell face first into some poor soul’s bloated entrails.

Retching his empty stomach even emptier, he slid farther down the slope only to fetch up against the brittle black corpse of one of the fire-witch’s victims. Stone recoiled in horror, scrambling, rolling, crawling on his belly until he reached a bare rock promontory jutting from the sea of bodies. There, he curled into a tight ball and shivered uncontrollably.

What was wrong with him? He was a warrior. Death was no stranger to him. He’d climbed across bodies to capture a city numberless times before. He’d been on burial detail, collecting bodies from the battlefield and lining them up in rows to record their names before consigning them to pyres of Khralsh’s flames. Granted, he’d never before seen men burst into spontaneous flame without a torch or spark to set the blaze, but fire was fire. It was natural. Not like…What? Why couldn’t he remember?

Had it been so awful that his mind wiped the memory blank? And where was Fox?

Stone uncurled from his tight knot, just a little. Fox had been with him, he knew. Fox was always with him, just as he was always with Fox. So where was he now?

“Fox!” He tried to shout, but his throat was raw, his voice a weak, raspy, croaking thing.

How far had he rolled from the breach? Stone looked through his veiled vision up the glacis. He was no more than halfway down, but could he make the climb back up? No witches were left to set him on fire or make the earth itself move beneath his feet. So he only had to face climbing back over the cold bodies of his onetime comrades.

Fox was up there. Had to be up there. Stone would do anything for his brodir. Spitting once more, calling on his god with it, he started back up, doing his best not to step on the bodies. Desperately, he tried to reconstruct events. Through the breach, kill the crone, fire the houses, next street.

They’d checked the dead archer. They’d fired that house. They left the house. There was a child. An Adaran child. Boy or girl, Stone couldn’t tell. Never could when they were that young, especially the way Adarans dressed them alike. The child was huddled in a doorway, terrified, staring at them with witchy pale eyes, waiting for death.

But they didn’t make war on children. “Run!” Fox shouted.

“Hide.” Stone opened the door behind the child, shooed it inside. Fox had marked the door when it was shut again, designating the building “Not for burning.” It was far enough from the wall that they had discretion as to which building to burn, and it was—hopefully—far enough from those already burning that the wood inside the stone walls wouldn’t catch. And then…Stone paused in his climb, pulled his hand back from the corpse it touched to wipe it on his filthy jacket.

And then, the air around them had exploded, the sun had gone dark and the world had come to an end.

Except that it obviously hadn’t. The same sun—at least Stone thought it was the same one—still shone overhead. The same wind blew past him on its way inland from the ocean. The same bodies still lay in the same breach of the same wall around the same Adaran city.

Not…exactly the same bodies. He’d noticed it on his climb, but only now began to piece together what he saw. There were more bodies. Hundreds had fallen in the charge on the breach, but some of these dead men wore badges from divisions Stone knew were not scheduled to advance until the walls had been taken.

Many of the bodies bore no marks at all. Others looked as if their heads had exploded, or their hearts had burst, or their internal organs simply decided to crawl out through their skin. Perhaps the world had ended after all.

End of the world or not, he had to find Fox. Something drove him upward, a desperate need to find what he was searching for. And what would that be but his partner? Stone tried calling his name again, quietly this time, for he sensed movement on the walls above and inside the city. Did Tibre hold it, or had the Adarans driven off the assault with their witch magic?

He reached the place where he had regained his senses, as near as he could tell, and began turning bodies over. Most Tibrans had hair some shade of yellow, but Fox’s was brighter than most, with a hint of red in the sunlight. Stone concentrated on those bodies with the brightest hair.

“Fox!” He called in a hoarse whisper, looking for some faint motion, some response. Fox had sworn to do his best to live. He couldn’t be dead.

His desperation growing, Stone searched through the gray-and-red-clad fallen there in the breach. His breath rasped louder in his ears with every step he took. His vision dimmed then cleared at whim. He called to his partner, sometimes forgetting to keep his voice quiet. Body by lifeless body, he worked his way through the breadth of the breach, from one broken wall to the other.

On the south side, where ladders had been propped for warriors to reach the Adaran witches and wipe them from existence, Stone saw yet another head covered in bright curls. Heart pounding in his chest, he rushed toward it, tripping over the corpses in his path.

Fox lay on his side, curled around the base of a ladder. His face looked peaceful. No, happy. A faint smile curved his lips. Stone’s vision blurred again and he wiped the wetness from his cheeks. He was afraid to touch him. Afraid to discover his partner had found Khralsh’s welcome.

Swallowing hard, Stone set his hand on Fox’s shoulder and tugged. Fox rolled to his back, his arm falling limp to the rubble beside him. Blood pooled on the ground from a gaping wound in his thigh. A man could bleed out in minutes from such a wound. It wasn’t bleeding now.

Stone swiped his sleeve across his face again and, fingers shaking, touched his partner, searching for a heartbeat. He could feel nothing through the short, padded jacket. Stone ripped it open, sending bone buttons flying, and laid his hand flat over Fox’s heart. Even the shirt could interfere, so Stone opened that as well. Nothing.

“Damn you.” Stone pounded on the silent chest, weeping openly now. “You swore to live. You swore to try! You broke your oath! You broke—”

The grief took him over and he sank back on his heels, crying out his pain to whatever god would hear him. He curled over until his forehead touched the rock where he knelt, and let the tears come, let them mingle with Fox’s blood on the ground. Tears and blood, the most precious thing a man could offer the warrior god.

He was still there when the Adaran patrol came. They tossed the bodies of the Tibran dead—including Fox—down the slope where what was left of the Tibran Fifth Army could collect them and burn them. They put Stone in shackles and marched him away. He didn’t care. He had nothing left to care about.

Aisse lay bleeding in the mud and dung of the cattle pens, waiting for the farmer to return and finish his punishment. Likely, it would finish her as well. Dawn had broken while she lay here and bled, and with the sun came a whisper of hope.

She could see her bag, the one she’d packed so carefully, lying tossed aside just beyond the rough rails of the pen. The tin cup was bent nearly flat, the biscuit crushed to powder, but perhaps the cup could be reshaped and the dirt brushed from the dried beef.

She dug her fingers into the mud and pulled herself forward. It hurt. Ulili, it hurt. But she moved. Focused wholly on the bag, she crept toward it bit by painful bit.

“Where do you think you’re going, witch?” The farmer’s harsh voice made her cry out.

But she couldn’t stop, couldn’t give up. Not until she had no breath left with which to whisper a prayer, no mind left with which to hope.

The farmer snatched her up by the hair and dragged her over the fence, the rough boards scraping her battered body mercilessly. “If you got life enough to move, you got life enough to feel this.” He raised his fist, but before he let it fly, screams echoed through the camp. Screams coming from masculine throats.

He dropped Aisse in the dirt, spinning to face the noise, his face going pale. “What—”

She didn’t care what caused the screams. He’d let her go. She stretched her arm out and forced her pain-racked fingers to close around the leather of her bag.

“Achz preserve us,” the farmer whispered, and took off at a run toward the battlefront. Though what he thought he could do, Aisse didn’t know. He was Farmer caste, not Warrior. But he’d left her blessedly alone.

Aisse dragged the bag close and clutched it to her chest as she crawled the few feet to her cup. It took her several minutes to fumble it into the bag, then she worked her way to the discarded beef. She didn’t try to clean it. She didn’t know whether she still had teeth strong enough to chew it. But she pushed as much of it as she could gather into the bag. Once that was done, she began to crawl the long, endless distance toward the cover of the trees outside camp.

The sun climbed higher in the sky while she crawled. At first, she flinched at every noise, tried to hide from the sound of running footsteps. But she couldn’t move fast enough to hide, and the footsteps always ran past, toward the city. Voices shouted one to the other about witches and evil and death magic. She didn’t care. As long as no one tried to stop her, they could blather about anything they liked. She was getting away.

Finally, she felt the cool shade fall across her head. Then her shoulders, her back, her legs. She kept going. She needed to find a place to hide. With so many dead—she’d understood that much, that thousands had died—they surely wouldn’t try to find her. They had more important things to do. But she didn’t want anyone stumbling across her accidentally and finishing the job the farmer had started.

Aisse crept off the path already formed by people walking to the nearby branch of the river. The trees were short compared to the high forests of her home, and most of the fallen wood had been collected and burned in fires over the last week. But down near the rivulet, she found a tree whose roots had been undermined by seasonal floods. The brown tangle had left a gap big enough to hide her.

She filled her bent cup with water and drank. Then she crawled into the tangle of roots. Her passage left marks in the sandy grit of the bank, but if she tried to erase them, she’d only leave more. Aisse curled into a ball and prayed that no one would find her. And if they did, she prayed for a quick death. She wouldn’t go back.

“Are you hurt?” Kallista whispered, searching Torchay for signs of injury.

He shook his head. After a moment, he stood. They huddled together on the city wall, staring out at what Kallista had wrought.

Nothing moved on the walls of Ukiny. After a time, a crow fluttered up and landed with caution. No arm waved it away. It cawed and pecked at the body where it stood.

Nothing moved on the plain west of the city, as far as the beginning of the white tents in the Tibran camp. The misty wave seemed to have lost power just there, for Kallista thought she could see wounded attempting to crawl back to safety.

On the waters of Ukiny Bay, Tibran ships sat at crazy angles, their masts snapped and splintered. They’d all been anchored closer to the city than the camp had been. Some ships had already sunk, the rest sinking or so damaged they’d never sail before next spring.

Within the city, Kallista could hear shouting, some of it joyous, some frightened. The mist hadn’t harmed Torchay. Could it have been so selective as to kill only Tibrans, leaving Adarans untouched?

“My gloves, Torchay. I need my gloves.”

“Yes, Captain.” He pulled them from his belt and helped her put them on, both of them fumbling at the task with shaking hands.

“Don’t be afraid of me, Torchay.” She fought to keep the quaver from her voice. “Please don’t be afraid of me now.”

“I am afraid for you. That’s a different sort of thing. Blessed One, Kallista, what happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t—You heard what I said. And then there was power. So much—” She shivered and Torchay wrapped his arms around her, sharing his warmth as he had before. Her shivers weren’t due to cold this time, but still his presence stopped them.

“It sounds almost as if…” His voice came hesitant, fearful. “Could you have been…marked?”

Terrified, Kallista stared at him. “That’s just legend. Children’s stories. It isn’t real.”

“Isn’t it?” Torchay looked over her head at the devastation on the plains below.

Kallista shivered again. Or perhaps it was more of a shudder. “Isn’t it supposed to leave an actual mark? Something you can see? Or feel?”

Torchay’s hand that had been absently stroking the nape of her neck came down to claim her hand. He carried it back up to where he’d been touching her. “What do you feel?”

There, beneath her untidy queue, she felt a faint raised ridge on her skin. Her fingertips followed it down to a sort of knot, where another ridge intersected the first. Cold gripped her heart.

“Can you see it?” She held her hair up, out of the way, while Torchay bent to look.

“Yes,” he said. Nothing more.

“Well? What does it look like?”

“A scar. A red, raised scar.” He paused and his fingers touched. He traced along her spine, then perpendicular to it. “North. South. East. West.” He touched the point where the lines crossed, where Kallista had felt the knot. “And a rose in the center. It’s a perfect Compass Rose.”

She dropped her hair, pressed it down over the mark, over Torchay’s hand. “Maybe it was there already.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Kallista, I’ve braided your hair almost every day for nine years. It wasn’t there.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“Oh, sweet heaven, Torchay.” Kallista had reached the end of her strength. She’d poured it all out and had nothing left for her precious control. A tear trickled down her cheek. “I’m a soldier. Nothing more. I don’t want this.”

All she’d ever wanted was an ordinary life. An ilian of her own. Family. Friends. But from the day her magic first woke when she was thirteen, and she killed one of the family’s supper chickens with an out-of-control lightning bolt, she’d been destined for the military.

Her dreams had shrunk from love and family to duty and comrades. And now, even that threatened to be taken from her. Punishment for finding a friend.

On his feet again, Torchay carefully wiped the tear away with his thumb. “Nevertheless.”

“I’d rather have a friend.”

“Is that what you’re fretting about?” His northern mountains accent came out as he teased. “You’ve still got that. You’ll not get rid of me so easily.”

“Naitan. Are you injured?” One of the regular Adaran troops put his head above the walkway, standing on a Tibran ladder. “General Uskenda has ordered every able-bodied soldier to assemble in the West Gate Square as soon as possible.”

Kallista nodded stiffly. “Tell the general I’ll be there. I am unharmed. My troop—” She took a deep breath. “I believe the rest of my troop is dead.”

The soldier nodded back, trying to stare at all the bodies surrounding her without appearing to do so. “Thank you, Captain.”

She hoped to put in an appearance at the assembly point and be dismissed to go check on her naitani in the tower. There was a chance, albeit a very faint one, that they yet lived. But the general spotted her quickly and gestured her to approach.

It had been a vain hope anyway, Kallista thought as she worked her way through the forming ranks. The blue and black she and Torchay wore made them stand out in the sea of dun-brown infantry tunics like flowers in a field of dead grass.

General Huyis Uskenda was in the midst of taking reports and giving orders when Kallista reached her side, and she didn’t stop. Kallista edged closer, hoping to hear something of the battle as a whole.

“They’re all dead,” the captain of the lone troop of cavalry was saying, her white rank ribbons lying limp and blood-spattered against the shoulders of her gray uniform. “Every Tibran in the city. They hadn’t penetrated as far as the Mother Temple, so I didn’t have to ride the whole city.

“They’re all dead on the plain too, at least what my troopers and I could see on a quick patrol. There may be survivors near the camp. We didn’t ride that close because I know for certain there are survivors in the camp. They took potshots at us from the tents with those hand cannon of theirs.”

“Good, good.” Uskenda nodded, the layered red ribbons of rank on her brown tunic so thick they looked like fringe.

Uskenda was better than the usual run of general, her mind sharp enough to adapt to freakish enemy tactics without panicking and still young enough to walk farther than from her bed to the dinner table. Promotion in the Adaran army was based on seniority. Those who lived long enough to achieve a general’s rank tended to cling to it until they died at their posts, whether they could still do the job or not.

This explained why Kallista was merely a captain at her age of thirty-four years, though promotion did tend to be a bit quicker among the naitani. She shuddered to think of some of the generals she’d served under who might have been assigned to defend this city. Uskenda was indeed a godsend in comparison.

“What about Adarans?” The general turned to an aide, a young man attached to her staff. “Did that…whatever it was…slaughter our people as well as the Tibrans?”

“No, General.” He referred to his notes on the scraps of paper in his hand. “We sent out patrols immediately after—”

“I know that. Don’t tell me what I already know. Are our people dead?”

“No, General,” he repeated. “The citizens within the range of the…weapon…for the most part seem to have taken no harm, according to those patrols. The first Adarans we’ve found dead so far have all been known criminals. Thieves. Extortionists. That sort of thing.”

Kallista leaned unobtrusively on her bodyguard as her knees threatened to buckle in relief. When Torchay had survived the dark magic, she’d begun to hope, but had been afraid to trust it.

General Uskenda nodded and turned her piercing gray glare on Kallista. “Well, Captain? What exactly did happen? What sort of—” she eyed the blue of Kallista’s tunic “—of North magic was that?”

“I…can’t say.” Not because it was a naitani secret, but because she didn’t know. However, generals—most of those she’d known—preferred secrets to ignorance.

The general snorted. “Never knew any North magic to behave like that.”

“No, General.” Not one of the naitani in the North Academy when Kallista was attending had shown any magic resembling what she had just done. No instructor had ever mentioned the possibility of anything like it. And as a mature naitan with well-established magic, Kallista should not have been able to do it. No naitan had more than one gift. Sometimes the gift manifested itself in different ways, like Iranda being able to both light and burn, but it was always the same gift.

“No?” Uskenda raised a gray-streaked eyebrow. “Are you saying you didn’t just single-handedly wipe out an army?”

“That’s not—” Kallista came to hard attention. “No, General. The enemy was destroyed by magic, and I did cast the magic. But—” She tried to keep her voice from sounding as distraught as she felt, but feared she failed. “I don’t know what it was that I did—other than casting the magic—and I don’t know how I did it.”

The general hmmphed again, staring at her as if she could tell that Kallista kept secrets. “Very well. Maybe the naitani at the temple will know. Report for investigation.”

“Now?”

“Of course now.” Uskenda’s scowl actually made Kallista shiver. “Do you think I mean next week? You decimated the Tibran army, you didn’t annihilate it. With their ships foundered, they’re trapped here. We’ve still got a city to defend. Our numbers might just be close to even now. If we can pin them here, keep them from shifting their cannon up the coast to Kishkim, where they’ve got another damn army but not so many cannon, maybe we can keep them from taking Kishkim and Ukiny. We need to know what you did and whether you can do it again.”

“Yes, General.” Kallista saluted and departed for the Mother Temple, Torchay shadowing her. She was so tired she could barely stand, much less walk straight, but General Uskenda was right. They weren’t out of danger.

Torchay took her arm, supporting her, though she knew he had to be at the end of his strength as well. “You need to rest,” he said. “Not answer a load of unanswerable questions.”

“I’m fine.” Kallista would have blamed Torchay’s insubordination on their “friend” conversation yesterday, save that he’d always been on the insubordinate side. Especially when it came to generals. She saved her breath for walking and keeping her eyes open.

Ukiny was large enough to have three temples. Two devoted themselves primarily to education and healing, though they also served their areas as worship centers. The other was the first temple in the city, the Mother Temple. It provided education and healing like the others, as well as local administrative needs. It sat in the center of a vast four-petaled square in the oldest section of Ukiny.

The worship hall, the central portion of the building, soared high above the more utilitarian sections. Tall arched windows of colored glass were set into white stone walls that hardly seemed the same material of which the city fortifications were built. Though Kallista hadn’t been inside the Mother Temple yet, she knew that corridors would lead from each of the four entrances to the sanctuary in the center. Every temple in Adara was built to the same plan, whether in the smallest village or the capital city.

Rooms to either side of the corridors conducted temple business; healing to the east, schools on the north, administration and records, including the city’s birth, death and marriage records in the south. To the west, the direction from which they approached, the rooms served as the temple’s library and archives. Centuries of records were stored in the rooms to either side of the black marble corridor they traversed.

The priests of each temple formed their own ilian—bound as mates by holy oath—and lived in a big house across the southern plaza from the temple. She’d been raised in such a house with a dozen parents and half a dozen sedili, her sisters and brothers in the ilian who were close in age. Memories swarmed Kallista’s mind as they entered the sanctuary. She was too tired to keep them at bay. She’d run tame with her sedili in the temple built of gray mountain granite shipped down the rivers that joined there in Turysh. She’d been the only one of them with magic. When her magic woke in the North the way it had, it had set her apart from her sedili even more.

“Wait here.” Torchay pushed her onto one of the benches against the wall in the worship center reserved for the old and infirm who couldn’t stand for long periods. “I’ll find the prelate.”

Kallista thought about protesting, reminding him that she was neither feeble nor aged, and was his superior besides, but at the moment she didn’t feel any of those things. Using her lightning often left her tired, but not drained like this. She leaned her head against the wall and watched the sunlight dance in the colored glass.

She traced its downward path till it sparkled on the floor mosaic, the compass rose depicted in every Adaran temple. A slash of blue tile lightning pointed north. To the east, the compass arm was a green twining vine. Yellow flame stretched south, a blackthorned briar pointed to the west, and in the center, uniting the four cardinal points was the red rose of the One.

The compass rose symbolized both the gifts of magic and the One Herself. Just as a rose had many petals yet formed a single flower, so the One had many aspects, yet was still One God, holding all that ever was and ever would be within Her being. All came from Her and all returned when its time was done.

Kallista had no idea how much time had passed before Torchay returned with a plump, smiling gray-haired woman dressed in a green robe over her loose white shirt and gray trousers. She struggled to her feet and bowed. “Honor to you, Mother. I am Kallista Varyl. I’ve been sent by General Uskenda to be examined—”

“Of course you have, dear. Come.” The woman put her arm around Kallista’s waist and guided her toward the leaf-and-vine-decorated entrance to the eastern corridor. “You’re exhausted. You should rest.”

“The general was most explicit that I be examined right away.” She had never failed in her duty and didn’t intend to begin now.

“How can I examine anything when you’re asleep on your feet? No, you come and rest, and your ilias with you.”

“He’s not my ilias.” It seemed as if she had to force the words past her cottony tongue. Or maybe it was her brain that was cottony. “He’s my friend. I mean, my bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard, ilias.” The woman waved a dismissive hand. “All the same. Like aspects of the One.”

She ushered Kallista into a small room containing a large bed, and pushed her onto it. “Rest. You too.” She pushed Torchay after Kallista. “Sleep. I will speak with those I must. When you wake up, we’ll talk.”

Something was wrong here. Kallista had to think for a wide space of time before she knew what it was. “Torchay doesn’t sleep with me,” she mumbled. “Not in the same bed. He’s my bodyguard.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” the prelate said as she was closing the door. “Of course he does. Now sleep.”

The word must have held magic, for instantly Kallista fell into unconsciousness. She fought it. There was something she needed to do, warnings she needed to give, but her body wouldn’t release her from its exhaustion.

She wandered in dreams through shining landscapes and blurring fogs, hunting something. Abruptly, she flew through the air, images blurring below her until she stood in the soot-blackened street before the broken wall around Ukiny.

The sun high in the sky near blinded her with its brilliance. Men and women swarmed the breach, clearing away rubble, stacking the salvageable stone near the wall in the space left after the Tibrans had burned the houses built against it. A small trickle of gravel spilled from the southern edge of the wall still standing.

“Back away,” Kallista shouted. “It’s unstable. It’s going to fall!”

But no one moved. No one seemed to hear her. When the wall gave way, sending massive stones and piles of rubble crashing down, shouts and screams of warning came too late. The workers couldn’t escape. The rock fell and they were beneath it.

“Quickly! Move the rock. Get it off before it crushes them. Adessay—” But he was dead. He couldn’t help. Kallista ran forward to pull people out of danger.

“Kallista!” Torchay called to her, drew her back, and she was lying fully dressed in a too-soft bed in a too-dark room with Torchay gripping her shoulders.

“A dream,” she breathed, rubbing her hands down her face. “It was just a dream like any other.”

“Not exactly like,” Torchay said, releasing her cautiously, as if he thought he might have to grab hold again. “I could always wake you from the others.”

“You woke me from this one.” Kallista let drowsiness claim her.

“Not till you were damned good and ready. Not till I shook you five turns and called your name five more.”

“Lie down. Go back to sleep.” She tugged at his sleeve and reluctantly, he did as she bid him.

“It’s not proper,” he grumbled. “I can take the floor. Or out in the corridor.”

“Too far away. And there isn’t any floor in this room. The bed’s too big. Big enough for two more bodies beside ours.”

“You didn’t want me here before.”

“Changed my mind. I need you to wake me from the dreams.”

He lay quiet a moment and Kallista thought he had gone to sleep. As much as he ever slept. He woke at the slightest noise. Then he spoke. “Nightmares aren’t part of a bodyguard’s duty.”

“I know.” Kallista grinned, knowing he couldn’t see it in the dark. “But they are in the Handbook of Rules for Friends. Right after ‘See that your friend gets back home after drinking all night.’”

Torchay turned his back to her. “Go to sleep.”

Kallista turned over and settled her back against his, as they slept in the field while hunting bandits. “Yes, Sergeant.”

She slept the sun around before waking early and alone on the second morning. A smiling acolyte in the yellow-trimmed white of a South naitan-in-training led her to the baths on the floor below. Kallista paddled about in company with a trio of chubby toddlers and their pregnant minder before being escorted firmly but politely to breakfast in the prelate’s office with her hair dripping down her back. There she not only found the green-robed elder, but Torchay looking entirely too comfortable. The first finger on his left hand wore a white-bandaged splint, but it didn’t seem to interfere with his ease.

“Eat, child.” The woman indicated a tray near overflowing with food.

Torchay picked up the plate and began filling it, ignoring Kallista’s sour look.

“I am sorry, Mother,” she said. “I don’t know your name.”

“Mother is fine. Mother Edyne, if you insist on more.”

Kallista took the food Torchay handed her and began to eat, discovering an appetite she hadn’t recognized.

“Your guard has told me what he observed that morning,” Mother Edyne said without waiting. “Tell me what you experienced.”

Over sweet buns, early melon and steaming cha brewed from leaves shipped over the southern mountains from the lands beyond, Kallista told her. When she had finished, the prelate frowned.

“This magic…” Mother Edyne shook her head. “It has frightened people. It smells of the mysteries of the West. That is why I’ve kept you here, you know. So that their fear would have no target.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” Kallista shuddered. No one had been found with West magic in over fifty years. “But I am a North naitan. I’ve always been North. Not West.”

“I admit it puzzles me.” Edyne peered at Kallista, her eyes sharp green. “Have you found a mark somewhere on your body? One that you did not have before.”

Kallista felt Torchay’s gaze on her as she lied. “No. Nothing like that.”

The magic she had already was enough to bear. She didn’t want more. Maybe if no one knew, it would just go away. She reached back and combed her hair down closer over her neck. She didn’t have to wear a queue. It wasn’t regulation for officers the way it was for other ranks. She could grow her hair longer.

“Hmm,” the prelate considered. “Has there been anything else? Any sign of other magic? Foreseeing perhaps? That has always been the most common sort of West magic.”

“No, Mother Edyne.” The dream had been merely a dream. Nothing more than that. It couldn’t have been anything more.

Kallista could feel Torchay’s agitation rising off him in waves. Next, Mother Edyne would be claiming that was a sign of West magic, and not part of knowing him so well for so long.

“Well, that’s that, I suppose.” Mother Edyne stood and the other two scrambled to their feet with her. “No, no. Stay. Finish your meal. And then I suppose you must return to your duties. Unless there is something more you wish to tell me?”

Kallista widened her eyes, doing her best to look as if not only did she have no secrets at this moment, but she had never had any secret in her entire life. “No, Mother. Nothing.”

“Very well.” She motioned them back into their chairs and let a hand rest on each head as she passed from the room. “Be well, my children.”

When the door was closed and Mother Edyne gone, Torchay drew his little blade and stabbed it through a melon slice. “And why,” he asked through clenched teeth, “did you not tell the prelate the truth?”

Kallista hunched her shoulders, embarrassed by her fear and by the lies she’d told to cover it. What she had done terrified her. She didn’t wish it undone. Ukiny would have been taken and thousands more dead or enslaved if she had not done it. But she feared the consequences of her impulsive request.

Already, according to Mother Edyne, people whispered. West magic involved the unexplained and the unexplainable. It dealt with hidden things and with endings, including the ultimate ending: death. No wonder people feared it.

“I’m sure it’s temporary.” Kallista focused on the last of her meal, unable to meet his eyes. “Now that the enemy has been cut down to a reasonable size, I’ll have no need for such a magic. Why bother the prelate with it?”

“When the One gives a gift, She rarely takes it back.”

“But a onetime event is more common—more likely than my having permanent magic from two Compass points.”

“You have the mark.”

She refrained from smoothing her hair down over her neck only through sheer force of will. “Legend. Fable. Nothing more.”

Torchay growled, a sound of utter disgust. She’d heard it countless times.

“Besides,” she said, risking a glance in his direction, “talk is already circulating. I have no doubt word is already flying to the Barbs. How much quicker would they come to investigate if the Mother Temple here added its weight to the gossip?”

The Order of the Barbed Rose believed an ancient and stubborn heresy, that West magic was evil, and that if it and all its practitioners were eliminated, death itself could be eliminated. The Order had been suppressed for centuries and yet could not be entirely crushed. The fear of death and the will to conquer it was too strong. Even the One’s promise of life eternal after physical death was not enough to quell this persistent falsehood.

Everyone feared the Barbs. Their secret membership fanned out through all Adara, investigating any magic that seemed the least bit out of the ordinary. It occurred to Kallista now that perhaps true West magic hadn’t been seen in so long because the Barbs had somehow found a way to identify those rare ones so gifted and eliminate them before or as their power manifested.

“I can deal with any Barb who comes calling,” Torchay said. “As could you. But do you really believe Mother Edyne would contribute to gossip in any way?”

She didn’t, but she shrugged her shoulders. “The fewer who know a thing, the easier it is to keep it secret.”

“Lying to a prelate has its own consequences.”

“I’ll risk it.” Kallista set her plate aside and stood. “We should report in.”

There were funerals to attend. Flames competed with the blaze of the setting sun as Kallista stood with General Uskenda and the honor guard in the plaza west of the Mother Temple. She let the tears flow, blaming them on the sun’s glare, and commended the souls of her entire troop, all five of the naitani and their five bodyguards, into the welcoming arms of the One. Never had she lost so many.

Never had the Adaran army and its naitani been cast into a battle of such size. They fought bandits. They patrolled remote mountain passes and distant, lawless prinsipalities. They did not fight pitched battles against massive armies. They’d never had to. Until now.

Kallista fought back her grief. So many bright young lives, so full of promise, ended here. Adara could not afford such losses. She feared that they would be facing many more such funerals if changes were not made. But Blessed One, did she have to be the one to change?

When the sun had set and the fires burned to embers, there were letters to be written, paperwork to be done. How could she write so many at once? How could she put it off?

The breeze, not so strong inside the city where it was broken by wall and building, stirred her hair. Kallista tucked it behind her ears yet again as they walked back to quarters.

“If you will not braid your hair,” Torchay said from his place at her shoulder, “you should cut it.”

“Oh, that will cover my neck so well.” She pulled her hair back from her face and held it with one gloved hand.

“Don’t cut the back. Just the front, so it can’t get in your face. Or you could—”

“This is not a time to be thinking about hair.”

“True.” He picked up his pace and took her elbow to escort her quickly through a crowd spilling out of a public house. “But it was noticed. Today it was taken as a sign of mourning for the death of your troopers. If you continue to wear it so, it could be taken as a sign of something else. Perhaps that you attempt to hide something.”

Kallista sighed. She was a soldier. That had been her duty, her destiny for twenty-one years. It kept things simple. She would rather things stayed that way, but the complications kept mounting. “We’ll work out some explanation later.”

The sun must have hurt her eyes more than she realized. They kept watering during the short walk, even as Torchay ushered her into their too-empty billet. The setting sun must bother his eyes as well, given the way he was blinking them.

Kallista gave him the courtesy of privacy, looking away even as she briefly touched his shoulder with an ungloved hand. “I have letters to write.”

She managed three, writing to the accompaniment of steel on stone, before her eyes began to cross with weariness. Torchay tumbled her into her narrow bed and took his place on the pallet in front of the door.

Once more her dreams were filled with shine and fog. Again the city wall fell and again she shouted a warning that no one heard. But the dream did not end there.

She dreamed of a man, golden-skinned and golden-haired, his hard body moving over her and in her. As she cried out in passion, he changed. His black hair tumbled around her face, and he changed yet again. His dark skin paled, his hair going bright, and it was Torchay making love to her, Torchay making her cry out.

She jerked, struggling to wake, but something caught her soul and drew her back. She went spinning across the dreamscape, colors of light and darkness flashing by and through her, until she was released to roll tumbling across a rough stone floor, fetching up against a fat table leg.

Before she could pick herself up, a blade was pressed against her throat. The woman holding it shone fierce and bright with power. She was not young, perhaps ten or even twenty years past Kallista’s age. Her red hair was streaked with gray, her freckled face lined with experience. Her green-brown eyes stared deep into Kallista’s.

“Who are you?” the woman demanded. “How did you get in here?”

“I…” How did she get here? “…I don’t think I am here.”

With a snarl, the woman sliced her knife across Kallista’s throat.

CHAPTER FIVE

Kallista recoiled, hands flying up to push the madwoman away. She called for Torchay as she scrabbled backward across the stone floor, her voice a hoarse croak, surprised she still had a voice. She reached up to stanch the wound…but there was no blood pouring down over her undertunic. No pain. Carefully, Kallista felt her neck. There was no wound.

“So. You’re the new one.” The woman stood, tossed the knife on the table above. “How long has it been?”

Kallista ran her hands over the whole of her throat. How could that knife not have cut her? She had felt its sharpness, felt it prick her. “How long has it been since what?”

“Since I died, of course. What’s your name?” The woman poured wine from a silver pitcher into an ornate cup. “I’d offer you some, but I’m afraid you couldn’t drink it.”

“Why not?” Kallista got awkwardly to her feet, staring at the high chamber around her. It was dark, the windows mere slits in the gray stone walls, the candles blazing from bronze candlesticks insufficient to make up for the lack of sunlight. Banners in subtle colors with strangely familiar devices attempted to soften the stone, and a fire burned on a circular hearth, the smoke finding its own way out the hole in the roof. This was the most realistic dream she’d ever had.

“I can drink in my dream if I want to,” she said, recalling what the other had said about the wine.

“It’s not a dream.” The woman gave her a sour look. “Not exactly. You should know that—Here, what is your name?”

“Kallista. What’s yours?”

The woman laughed and took a drink from her cup. As she drank, the smile faded from her eyes. She set the cup on the table, staring at Kallista in shock. “You really don’t know me, do you?”

“Should I?”

“Yes.” The woman had no small opinion of herself if she expected a complete stranger to recognize her and know her name.

“Sorry.” Kallista lifted her shoulders in a tiny shrug. “I don’t.”

“How long has it been since my death? Since the death of Belandra of Arikon?”

Kallista stared. She was more than ready for this dream to end. It was becoming far too strange. “Belandra of Arikon never lived. She’s a story. A tale told by the fireside to frighten children and thrill young men.”

“I never lived? Never lived?” The woman—Belandra of her dreams—snatched up the silver cup and threw it across the room. Wine flew in all directions, none of it spotting Kallista’s pale blue undertunic.

“How then did I unite the four prinsipalities into one people?” Belandra demanded. “How did I fight and defeat the enemies of the One? How did I—” Her mouth continued to move, but Kallista could not hear her. It was as if some barrier had dropped between them, cutting off all sound.

In the far distance, she could hear Torchay calling her name and turned to go, to answer him.

“Wait.” Belandra caught her arm. “How long?”

Kallista felt Torchay’s voice pulling at her, drawing her back, but Belandra’s hand anchored her in place. “A thousand years. The four prinsipalities were united a thousand years ago. There are twenty-seven prinsipalities in Adara now. But the first Reinine was Sanda, not Belandra.”

The older woman’s smile showed a deep affection that made Kallista shiver. “My ilias was much better suited to governing than a hot-tempered naitan like me.”

Torchay called again, stretching her thin.

“I have to go.” Kallista clawed at the fingers holding her.

“Take this.” Belandra pulled a ring from her forefinger and pressed it into Kallista’s hand. “I will have many questions when next we meet.”

Which will be never, if I have aught to say about it. Kallista closed her hand reflexively around the ring. As soon as she did, Belandra released her. She went flying back through the light and the dark and the colors to slam into her body with a force that bowed her into a high arc. She gasped, drawing air into lungs that seemed to have forgotten how.

“Kallista.” Torchay held her face between his hands, fear in every line of his moonlit expression.

“I am here. I’m awake.” She resisted the urge to touch him in return, to be sure he was solid and real.

With a shaking hand, he brushed her hair back from her face, then sat up straight on the edge of her bed, setting his hands in his lap. “You were no’ breathin’,” he said, never taking his eyes from her. His thick accent showed the depth of his agitation. “You shouted, like you did before. I came to wake you, but you would no’ wake. Then you quieted. I thought the dream was over so I went back to bed. But you called my name.”

He stared at her, his eyes haunted. “You called my name, and you stopped breathin’. And no matter what I did, you would no’ start again.”

Kallista shuddered. Had that been while she was in that strange place talking to the woman who claimed to be Belandra of Arikon? Could some part of her have literally been in another place? That place? Impossible.

“I’m breathing now,” she said.

“Aye.” He was shaking, trying to hide it, but failing.

She reached for his hand. He took it, gripped it tight. But it wasn’t enough. She used his hand to pull herself up. She put her arms around him and held on tight until her trembling and his went away.

“Do no’ do that again,” he said over and over. “Ever. Do not.”

“No,” she said again and again. “No. I won’t. Never.”

When she could let him go, Torchay picked her up and stood her beside the bed.

“What are you doing?” She had to catch his arm to keep from staggering.

“Moving your bed. I’m too far away across the room. You’ll be sleeping next to me till the dreams stop.” He lifted the bedding, mattress and all, from its rope frame and set it on the floor. “We can bring in a larger bed in the morning.”

“It’s against regulations—” Kallista began, but fell silent at the flash of his eyes.

“It’s against regulations for me to allow you to die. It’s against nature for you to stop breathing like that. I want you at my back.” He crossed the room to collect his mattress from the doorway and laid it beside hers. He was on his knees rearranging the blankets when he paused.

“What’s this?” Torchay plucked a small object from the tangle of her blankets.

“I don’t know.” Kallista held her hand out for it. “What?”

“It’s a ring.”

She could see it now as he held it up to the candlelight, examining it. Cold coursed through her veins.

“I didn’t know you had a ring like this. Pretty.” He set it in her hand and went back to straightening blankets.

Kallista didn’t have a ring like this. It was thick and gold, bearing the marks of the hammers that had shaped it. Incised deeply into the flat crest was a rose, symbol of the One. The ring was primitive and powerful. It called to her, demanding that she put it on. Kallista curled her hand into a fist, resisting the urge. She did not own this ring. She could not. Because it had been given to her in a dream.

She opened her hand and let the ring fall to the floor. She didn’t want it, didn’t want what it might mean.

“Careful. You’ve dropped it.” Torchay shifted to his other knee and picked it up. He held it out to her but Kallista ignored it, so he set it on the chest. “You’re too tired for words. Not breathing’ll do that to you. Come to sleep.”

She was tired. Tired of strangeness and impossibilities and mysteries she couldn’t comprehend. She wanted her life back the way it had been before the Tibran invasion, but she feared that was one of the impossible things, and it frightened her.

Torchay lay down and turned his back to her, waiting for her to set hers against it. Careful in her weariness, Kallista stretched out on her own pallet. Rather than turning her back, she tucked herself in behind him and wrapped her arm around his waist. He startled, then lay still. Too still, as if afraid to move, to breathe.

“I need to hold on to something tonight,” Kallista said. “Let me hold you.”

He didn’t reply, but the tension slid out of him. She snuggled closer, the tip of her nose just touching the top of his spine. This was against regulations, rules she had carefully kept for years. The rules had a purpose, one she agreed with. But right now, tonight, she didn’t care. She needed to hold on to something that was real, that was flesh, blood, bone, against the dreams coming again.

Aisse lay in her hiding place for a day, a night and another day. She crawled out only for water. By the second night, though every inch of her body ached, she could stand, and even walk without too much dizziness.

The noise of the camp—animals bellowing, men shouting, warriors marching—sounded much too near. Now that she could walk, she needed to move farther away, to a hiding place where they couldn’t find her no matter how hard they searched.

She crawled back beneath the tree and gathered her few pitiful belongings, then she returned to the riverbank. Aisse looked downstream, toward the camp. That way lay death. She turned her face upstream and began to walk. This direction might not hold life, but as sure as the sun rose every morning, she knew it at least held hope.

Three days later, Kallista had finished all ten of her damned notification letters and delivered them to headquarters, to be included with the next set of dispatches to the capital. River traffic had returned almost to normal. The Tibrans no longer had enough manpower to interdict travel by boat along the Taolind, and they’d never had enough boat power. The river was the best means of travel to the interior, to Arikon far to the west, and regular dispatches were getting through again.

But now, Kallista had nothing to do. She had no younger naitani to train in their magic. She had no call on her own magic once she chased the cannon from closing on the river gate. Her paperwork, the bane of her existence, was complete. She’d even had time to experiment on her hair with Torchay, settling on simply tying back her front hair in a small horsetail on the back of her head, and leaving that behind her ears to fall free over her neck. She was bored.

Boredom and curiosity had her taking the long way from her billet to the Mother Temple’s library by way of the breach in the western wall. Repairs had begun already and Kallista wanted to see how they were going.

Torchay stalked at her side like some bright avenger, scowling at anyone who came close. He didn’t like all the gossip about the “scythe of death” as the dark magic she’d done was beginning to be called. He took the epithet personally, unable to shrug it off as well as Kallista could, which wasn’t all that well. She tried to tell him it was useless to resent people for their ignorance, but he didn’t seem to hear.

The streets grew thicker with people as they neared the breach. Kallista could see the two walls of mortared stone that formed the inner and outer surfaces of the city wall, and some of the rubble filling the wide gap between the two walls that provided much of its strength. Civilians and a few companies of infantry conscripts swarmed the breach now, clearing away the broken and fallen stones so the walls could be repaired.

She frowned, squinting against the sun’s fierce brightness. The scene seemed familiar, as if she had been here before. A woman dressed in darkest blue straightened, beckoned to the child carrying the water bucket. And there—two men used iron bars as levers to pry up a larger stone. And the brown-haired woman in red lifted the shoulder yoke holding two filled baskets and staggered toward the dump. Kallista clutched Torchay’s arm as terror froze her in place.

“What’s wrong?” Torchay looked outward, hunting the threat.

She couldn’t answer. This was her dream. She had dreamed it four nights in a row, always the same. Now, the man in the white tunic would call his daughter down from the pile of rock. He did. Her eyes snapped to the southern edge of the broken wall. The thin trickle of sand poured from the mortared interior.

“Get back!” she shouted, throwing herself forward. “Get away from the wall! It’s going to fall!”

Unlike her dream, heads turned. People heard her. They started to move, slowly at first, uncertainly. But when the trickle of sand became a stream of gravel, they ran.

“Hurry!” Kallista snatched up the disobedient girl and thrust her into her father’s hands. “Run! That way!”

Torchay grabbed Kallista and shoved her into the shelter of a deep doorway just as the first of the dressed stone fell from the top of the mortared wall to shatter on the street’s cobbles. He held her there, shielding her with his body until the thunder of falling rock ended and he allowed her to push him away.

Fine dust clouded the air. Kallista coughed as she peered into the collapse, trying to see broken limbs, crushed bodies.

“This was your dream.” Torchay’s voice held no doubt.

“Yes.” There should be casualties. A child’s body there, beneath that largest stone—but no, Kallista had given that child to her father. And the woman who should be moaning, trapped over there with her face bloodied—Kallista had seen her run into an alley two houses over.

As the air cleared, people began to emerge from the cover they had taken, staring about them from frightened eyes in dust-whitened faces.

“Who’s hurt?” Kallista shouted. “Is anyone missing?”

“My sedil, Vann,” a man called.

“No,” another answered. “I’m here. Not hurt.”

The workers milled about, shouting an occasional name, but in the end, all were accounted for. The cuts on Torchay’s legs and back where the shattered rock had struck him were the worst injuries. He and Kallista had been closest to the collapse.

“But how did you know?” the mason in charge of repairs asked. “How did you know it would fall? Even I had no warning.”

Anxious to get Torchay to the temple for healing, Kallista did not want to take time to answer. Torchay hung back. “Do you not see the blue of her tunic? She is a North naitan. She can read the earth and the things carved from it. Not often. But sometimes. When there is danger.”

“Ah.” The mason nodded in understanding as Kallista urged Torchay on.

“Your back is still bleeding badly,” she scolded. “We do not have time for these delays.”

“Better to give them an explanation they can swallow than leave them to wonder and invent something even more outlandish than the truth.”

“Fine, fine. It’s done.” Kallista lifted her hand from the deepest cut to find it still bleeding. She put it back, but it wasn’t easy to maintain sufficient pressure as they walked. “Just don’t bleed to death before we reach the temple.”

Torchay chuckled. “Such tender concern for your underling.”

She pressed harder, knowing it hurt him, but wanting the bleeding to stop. “Hush.”

For a while he did, but she knew it was too good to last. “While they’re tending my back,” he said, “I want you to talk to Mother Edyne. Tell her about the dreams. Tell her everything.”

Kallista scowled. She didn’t want to. If anyone else knew, it would somehow become more real. “I’ll consider it.”

“Tell her, Kallista. You must. It’s no’ normal, what’s happenin’ to you. What if you stop breathin’ again and I can’t bring you back? I didn’t last time.”

“Yes, you did.” They hadn’t talked about what happened, though they’d slept back-to-back every night since then. She didn’t want to talk about it now, but it appeared Torchay was of a different mind. “You called me back.”

“Back from where?” He stopped at the temple door and gripped her arms, the light, clear blue of his eyes blazing almost white as he glared at her. “Where were you? It wasn’t a dream, was it? You don’t know what’s happening to you. I certainly don’t. You need to find someone who does.”

“You think that’s Mother Edyne?”

“I don’t know. Neither will you until you tell her.” His hands tightened, digging in till it almost hurt. “Promise me you’ll do it.”

She dragged her gaze away, stubbornly silent. She couldn’t make that promise. She just couldn’t.

“Pah!” Torchay pushed away and strode into the temple.

Kallista scrambled to catch up, rushing down the long corridor after him. “Dammit, Torchay, you’re bleeding again.”

“Let it.” He rounded on her again, just outside the entrance to the sanctuary, bending down until his nose almost brushed hers. “At least I have sense enough to be going to get it mended, unlike some too-stubborn-for-her-own-damn-good naitan I know.” He whirled and stalked across the worship hall.

“Torchay—” Kallista called after him, but he only gave one of his disgusted growls. Better to let him go. Maybe he’d be in a better temper later.

She wandered toward the center of the worship hall, her hand drifting to the ring in her pocket, the one she could not possibly possess. The ring given to her in a dream. She had yet to put it on a finger, but neither had she been able to leave it behind, lying on the chest in her room. She’d carried it in a pocket the last three days.

Kallista drew the ring from her pocket. The rose on its crest was identical to the one inlaid in the center of the temple floor, the faint reddish hue derived from the wax left behind when it had been used as a seal. What did it mean? How had she come to possess it? She had far too many questions and far too few answers.

Perhaps she should consult Mother Edyne. But what could an East magic prelate of a provincial temple know about mysteries such as these? Kallista started to put the ring back in her pocket and almost dropped it.

She caught it again, gripped it tight in her hand, heart pounding. She couldn’t lose the ring, no matter how little she wanted it. Somehow, she was certain that it was a key to many of the answers she wanted. She didn’t understand how an inanimate object could answer questions, but the certainty would not leave her. Perhaps she was meant to look the ring up in some archive or other. However the answers were to be had, she could not lose the thing. And the safest place for it…

Kallista sighed, resigned to the inevitable. She removed her right glove and slid the ring onto her forefinger where the dream Belandra had worn it. But it would not fit over her knuckle. Her hands were apparently bigger than the dream woman’s. The ring went on the third finger of her right hand. It looked good there.

“It’s about time.” The woman’s voice behind her brought Kallista spinning around so fast, she lost her balance. It could not be.

But it was. Belandra lounged carelessly against the wall not far from the western corridor. She looked younger than she had in Kallista’s dream, her hair a brighter red, her body more slender, but still a decade older than Kallista.

“Who are you?” Kallista wavered between backing away in horror and drawing near with curiosity. “How did you come to this place?”

“I told you. I am Belandra of Arikon. As for how I came here—you brought me.” She gave a mocking smile as she waved her hands in a flourish. “You have questions? I have the answers. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to give you all of them.”

“Why not?”

“Because some things you must learn for yourself.”

Kallista shook her head, trying to clear it. That wasn’t what she wanted to know. She tried to sort the questions crowding her mind, to find those most urgently needing answers. “How did I get this? What is it?”

“A ring.” Belandra rolled her eyes, seeming to mock Kallista for asking something with such an obvious answer. “And I gave it to you back before I died.”

“A thousand years ago.” Kallista let her doubt show.

“Give or take a few dozen, about that.”

“That’s not possible.”

“For the One, all things are possible. Obviously it did happen, because I am here talking to you. You had to have something of mine in your possession before I could come to you. And here I am, at your service.” Belandra pushed herself off the wall and bowed, as much a mockery as most things she’d done.

“You’re a ghost.” Kallista didn’t believe in ghosts. Or thousand-year-old dream rings. But the one on her finger had come from somewhere.

“Something like that, but not exactly.” Belandra shrugged. “Oresta who came before me explained it, but I never quite understood. Does it really matter? I’m here now. And I probably ought to tell you before you use them all up that you’re only allowed six questions each time I am allowed to come to you.”

“Allo—” Kallista cut herself off, trying to count up how many questions she’d already asked. She couldn’t remember. “Who allows it? When will you come back? What questions may you answer? What are the rules? Are you truly dead?”

Belandra waggled an admonishing finger. “That’s five. You only had two left. Which means I can answer the first two, but the others will have to wait until next time, provided you still want to ask them again. Though I already answered the fifth, if you will consider. Unless you believe I could still live after a thousand years.”

“I’m not sure I believe you ever lived at all.”

“Believe what you like. Your belief doesn’t alter the truth. Do you want me to answer your questions?”

“Please.” Kallista gestured for her to continue.

“It is, of course, the One who allows me to appear here before you, and at least one Hopeday must past before you next summon me.”

“I didn’t summon you this time.”

“Did you not? You put on the ring. You desired answers. I am here.” She gave Kallista a sardonic grin. “My first year, I summoned Oresta every chance I got.”

“Your first year of what?” Kallista demanded. Belandra’s answers only created more questions.

“Apologies, my lady Kallista.” The grin on the woman’s face didn’t look very apologetic. “But you are out of questions.”

“Who are you talking to?” Torchay’s voice brought Kallista’s head around to see him walking across the worship hall as if he thought his steps might fracture the tiles beneath his feet. His expression held barely disguised fear. Behind him came Mother Edyne, whose expression was more guarded.

“To her. Belandra.” Kallista waved a hand in the other woman’s direction.

“Naitan,” he said, voice as careful as she had ever heard it. “There is no one there.”

Kallista turned, looked, and Torchay was right. “She must have gone.”

Torchay reached her, moved between her and the place where Belandra had been. “I have been here listening and watching for some time. Since you asked whether—she?…were dead. You spoke. You listened. You spoke again. And I saw no one. Who was it?”

She let out a long breath, looking past Torchay’s worried face to Mother Edyne’s curious one. “The woman who gave me this.” She held up her ungloved right hand, showing the ring. Mother Edyne, to her credit, did not flinch at the sight of the naked hand. “Belandra of Arikon.”

CHAPTER SIX

Safely behind the closed doors of Mother Edyne’s chamber, Kallista told her the rest of the story while the prelate tended Torchay’s cuts with her healing East magic. She sat with head bowed while Mother Edyne examined the mark Kallista had never herself seen. Finally, the older woman let the hair fall and sank into her chair with a sigh.

“Well?” Kallista hoped Mother Edyne had more answers than Belandra had proved willing to share. Provided Belandra had been anything more than a flicker from a fevered mind.

Edyne shook her head, hand over her mouth. After another moment, she removed it. “I fear that I have neither the knowledge nor the wisdom to deal with such mysteries.”

Kallista hid her instinctive wince at the word. Mystery was of the West. “Then what should I do?”

“Ask the Reinine. The oldest records in Adara are in Arikon. What the Reinine does not know, she will be able to learn. Most important, she should know that this happened.”

“I’m a soldier, I cannot go here or there or to Arikon on my own whim.”

“I will speak to the general. It will be arranged.” Mother Edyne rose, the other two with her.

“Do you not have a—a guess as to what all this means?” Kallista didn’t want to beg but couldn’t seem to help it.

The prelate opened her mouth as if to speak, then shook her head. “Better not to guess. You will know soon enough. The Reinine will know.”

Kallista nodded. “Come, Torchay. Seems we should pack.”

They sailed upriver with the dawn.

“What’s wrong with you?” Someone had hold of Stone’s hair, shaking his head as if it were a sackful of kittens to be drowned.

His mind felt full of kittens, crying and yowling and crawling over each other. His head hurt. And his hands. He was shocked to see his fingers raw and bleeding. “What did you do to me?” His voice croaked like a frog’s.

“What have we done?” The fat guard gave Stone’s head another shake. “You’ve done it to yourself, you barmy idiot. Clawin’ at the walls, bangin’ your head on it. We should’ve give you back to your side. Let them keep you from killin’ yourself.” He grabbed an arm and hauled Stone to his feet. “Come on.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Not that it matters—whatcha goin’ ta’do? Not come?” The fat man laughed at his feeble joke. “But you’re getting’ a cleanup. General wants you. Told ’er you were barmy, but she don’t care. You’re the only one we found alive. She wants to see you.”

Stone’s knees sagged at the reminder. Fox was dead. They were all dead. Save him.

He submitted tamely to the humiliation of his bath. They stripped away the stained remnants of his uniform and stood him in a courtyard with a drain in one corner, his hands fastened before him in finely wrought steel shackles. He’d never seen such expert workmanship wasted on a prisoner. The fat guard pulled a lever and cold water poured down on Stone from a pipe over his head.

He was scrubbed from head to toe with a rough brush, drowned again in the water and dressed in an Adaran-style tunic and trousers of unbleached cotton. Again the quality of the cloth was much higher than he would have expected. If this was their poor stuff, no wonder the king wished to rule here.

With the clothing sticking to his wet skin, Stone was marched into a second room where his hands were bandaged and his hair was taken down from the tangled top knot tied there days ago by Fox. Stone didn’t protest. He wanted the memory gone. Remembering caused pain.

The fat guard waited while another man combed the knots from Stone’s hair and began to braid it into one of the tight pigtails worn by Adaran warriors. No, not warriors, soldiers. They were not born to their trade. His hair was too short in the front and kept falling away, but the rest was caught tight.

“Perhaps your birthmark is the reason you survived the dark scythe,” the hairdresser said as he tied off the tail of hair.

“What birthmark?” Stone had one on his hip, round and small, but it was covered.

“This one.” The man ran a finger over the nape of Stone’s neck. “Shaped like a rose. Maybe the One protected you, since you bear His symbol.”

“I don’t have a birthmark there.” He’d never seen the back of his neck, but Fox would have teased him mercilessly about any flower-shaped mark.

“Of course you do.”

“Let me see.” The guard lumbered closer and shoved Stone’s head forward to expose his nape. After a few seconds, he made a sound through his nose and backed away. “You’re clean enough. Time to go.”

The guard kept his distance as he escorted Stone out of the prison and through a square to a squat, imposing building, prodding him with the heel of his pike to indicate direction. He’d used his hands on Stone before, dragging and shoving him. Before he’d seen the rose supposedly marking Stone’s neck. Did he fear the mark? What did it mean?

Stone walked through corridors and antechambers filled with Adaran soldiers clad in dun and gray, their tunics decorated with bold devices like those on divisional banners in the Tibran army—green trees, gold lions, red stags. Most soldiers had ribbons in white, yellow or red tacked to the shoulders of the sleeveless tunics, left to fall free front and back. Stone’s skin crawled when he realized that the majority of the people wearing the uniforms were female. Why did the gods not punish them for their blasphemy?

Then the guard was opening a door, ushering him into a large room faced with maps and charts. A soldier stood at the window beyond the wide, paper-cluttered desk, back to him, shoulders sprouting a veritable fringe of red ribbon. The guard came to attention, snapped the heel of his pike against the floor and held it at ready. “General Uskenda. Sergeant Borril reporting with the Tibran prisoner as ordered.”

The gray-haired general turned around. Stone staggered and would have fallen except for the guard catching his arm. The commander of Adaran forces was also a woman. How could this be? The defenses should have fallen the first day. Everyone knew women had no war skills, no war sense. Of course, they had won through magic, not in a fair fight. That had to explain it.

“So.” Uskenda walked toward him, around him, as if conducting an inspection. “You are the one who lived.”

Stone stared straight ahead, refusing to speak to any woman who did not know a woman’s place.

“What is your name?”

He remained silent.

The general sighed and moved away a few paces, clasping her hands behind her back. “You would do well to answer of your own will.”

Stone’s eyes flickered toward the guard. He let his contempt show. Nothing they could do would change his mind.

“Oh, I know physical persuasion will do no good.” Uskenda lifted a sheet of paper, perused it briefly. “That’s why we rarely use it. We have no need. Corporal!”

The door behind Stone opened and a man spoke. “Yes, General?”

“Tell the naitan I have need of her.”

“Yes, General.” The door closed again.

Naitan. The word Adarans used to name their witches. Cold rushed from Stone’s heart into his outermost parts, and the hair along his spine rose.

“Do you understand me?” Uskenda leaned against the desk. She somehow looked like a warrior with her stern face and close-cropped gray hair, despite her femaleness. How was it possible? “I think you do. I think you understand every word I say.”

The guard came to clashing attention again and spoke when Uskenda looked his way. “General, the prisoner speaks perfect Adaran.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.” She crossed her arms and studied Stone. “How did you come to learn it?”

How indeed? And when? Stone had picked up a word or two of the local language in the week after landing, but no more than that. He hadn’t realized he was speaking Adaran until this moment. His mind had been too filled with…what? Grief? Must have been. His thoughts were so fogged by grief that he scarcely knew how much time had passed since his capture. That was likely how he’d learned the language without realizing it, listening to his captors.

“What is wrong with his head, Sergeant?”

“General. The prisoner injured himself by striking his head against the wall, General.”

She tapped a forefinger against her mouth. “And why did you do that? I wonder.” She studied Stone a moment longer, then moved behind the desk and sat in the high-backed chair. “Ah well, no matter. We will know soon enough.”

They waited. Stone and the guard stared straight ahead. General Uskenda reviewed papers on her desk. The door opened once more and the general looked up.

“Ah, good.” She smiled. “Thank you for your promptness, naitan. Please, come in.”

Uskenda came forward to greet a tall, slender woman. The naitan was dressed in a pale blue robe open over a tunic and trousers much the same color as those Stone wore, but of an even finer quality. Her brown hair fell past her shoulders in a froth of curls. She looked much like any woman found in any women’s quarters. Until she turned her eyes on him. They were the same blue as his own. Stone shuddered, suddenly understanding how uncanny they seemed to others.

“I will allow you one more chance to give your own answers,” the general said to Stone. “The naitan holds North magic. She is Ukiny’s far-speaker, speaking mind to mind with others of her gift. Do you understand what I am saying?”

Stone tried to hold his gaze steady, to focus only on the window in the far wall, but his eyes rolled toward the blue-eyed witch again before he could jerk them away.

“She can touch minds. There is a kind of North magic that can reach into your mind and see what is there. You do not have to say anything at all. A naitan can simply take what we wish to know from you.” Uskenda pursed her lips. “Of course, sometimes it isn’t easy to find what we are looking for. Who knows what havoc might be worked upon your mind?”

In his peripheral vision, Stone could see the witch looking most unhappy. Did the process perhaps cause her discomfort too?

“General, I don’t—” the witch broke off when the general raised a hand.

“Naitan, does this sort of magic do all that I have said?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And,” Uskenda interrupted, “does it not on occasion leave those who are mind-searched…altered?”

“Yes, it might, but I—”

“Do not bother to explain the techniques. This Tibran would not understand. His kind have no magic. Is this not true, Tibran?”

Stone tightened his jaw and stiffened his spine yet again. He feared no man. Nor did he fear any woman. Any ordinary woman. But this witch and her magic…how could he not fear a thing that could go crashing about in his thoughts, shredding them to bits, stealing away whatever seemed interesting?

Long moments slid away while Uskenda watched Stone and Stone watched the far wall.

“Shall we start again, warrior?” The general’s gentle voice reminded him of ease, of soft comfort in women’s quarters. “What is your name? A simple thing, your name.”

Simple, yes. But the first word spoken, the first truth told would change everything. Would the gods forgive him for failing to punish this woman’s sacrilege? Would they count his blasphemy against him for following her orders? The warrior god was a harsh one, demanding much and forgiving little. But surely he would understand about the magic.

Uskenda sighed. “Naitan—”

“Stone.” The sound of his own voice startled him. “Stone, Warrior vo’Tsekrish.”

Uskenda came to attention and saluted him. “Warrior.” She nodded at the witch. “I believe we will not be needing your services after all, naitan. But please hold yourself in readiness in case our Tibran friend changes his mind.”

The witch smiled, bowed and left the room. Stone sagged in relief, but only for a second.

“Stone, Warrior vo’Tsekrish.” Uskenda paced the floor before him. “You are a long way from home, are you not?”

“Yes, General.” He hoped all his answers would be so guilt free, but the hope was small.

“How did you learn our language, warrior?”

“I…do not know. I—after the assault, when I was taken prisoner, the soldiers spoke to me, and I understood.”

“This was after the—” She checked a paper on her desk. “After the dark scythe, the magic, was it not?”

“Yes, General.”

“You were captured in the breach?”

“Yes, General.”

“And you never advanced into the city. Is that correct?”

“No, General.”

Her head came up and she stared. “No?”

“Fox—my partner and I were in the First and Finest, those leading the assault. We took the breach, held it for the next wave, then advanced into the city.” Talking about the past, things that had already happened would surely hurt nothing.

“How far into the city?” She spread a map on the desk, obviously expecting him to come look. Stone spared a glance for his guard who grunted and prodded him forward with the pike.

Uskenda indicated the position of the breach and the high-spired temple with its colored windows. Stone pointed to a street a quarter of the way between, his shackles rattling. “Here.”

“Are you sure?” She held his gaze, the light gray of her eyes almost as unsettling as the blue of the witch’s. “Every other Tibran within the city walls was found dead.”

Stone studied the map again, letting the shivers take him. He was among witches now. He had to live with the fear. “It might have been here.” He pointed at a place a few streets to the south. “My memory isn’t good, not for those minutes—but I know we were inside the city.”

“Then how is it you were found in the breach? Alive?”

He met her gaze, held it, willed her to believe him. He did not want her to call the witch back when he was telling the truth. “I do not know. I remember the world coming to an end. And then I remember waking up in the breach. Nothing else.”

They stared eye into eye for a long moment more, until Uskenda broke contact, looking down again at the map. The guard crashing to attention startled both of them. “General,” he rapped out.

“What is it, Sergeant?”

“There is a mark on his neck.”

The general’s eyes widened and her eyes flicked from one man to the other. “What kind of mark? Show me.”

The guard seized Stone by the scruff of his neck, forcing him to his knees, shoving his head forward. He raked the pigtail out of the way. Uskenda’s gasp as she touched a finger lightly to the nape of Stone’s neck sent a thrill of terror shooting through him yet again. What was this mark? What did it mean?

The guard released Stone’s head, but held him on his knees with a foot on the chain connecting wrist shackles to leg irons. Uskenda shuffled through the papers on her desk. She found the one for which she searched and scanned it quickly.

“You say this man has been behaving strangely?” she asked the guard.

“He beats his head on the wall and claws at the stones. You see the bandages. His hands are much worse than his forehead.”

“Does he know he is doing this?”

The guard shrugged. “Who can say? All Tibrans are barmy, you ask me.”

“Are you aware?” Uskenda asked Stone. “When you do these things?”

He didn’t want to answer. But more, he didn’t want magic mucking through his mind, making things worse than they already were. “No.”

Uskenda touched the back of his head and he bent it obediently forward. She moved the pigtail aside but made no attempt to touch him again. Then she released him and stepped back, her boot heels a brisk clap against the polished wooden floor. “Make ready to take the prisoner to Arikon.” Her orders snapped out with spine-chilling authority, the corporal appearing again to take them. “I wish I had seen him earlier so I might have sent him with Captain Varyl, but no matter. He will go on the next boat, at dawn tomorrow. Inform your captain. I want him escorted by an officer and a quarto of her best soldiers.”

Once more, the guard stiffened to attention. He hauled Stone to his feet and hustled him out of the building and back to his prison. What would befall him next in this cursed land?

Torchay spent the first day of the week’s journey upriver fighting sleep. Since the night his naitan had suddenly stopped breathing, he’d scarcely slept at all, dozing off and jerking awake seconds later, afraid it had happened again. It hadn’t, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t. The riverboat hadn’t enough room for him to keep moving and every time he stilled, sleep tried to claim him.

He studied the boat, hoping the mental activity would help. Typical of its class, the Taolind Runner was long and narrow with a shallow draft to keep it running when the water level dropped in late summer. The exposed wood of the decks gleamed with varnish, but the exterior hull had been stained inky black with tar before it was sealed and proofed by South magic. The single triangular sail was set well forward in the crew section, its lack of wear evidence of more South magic. A pair of North naitani wind-callers took turns keeping the blue-and-gold-striped sail filled, moving it briskly against the current.

All the magic that had gone into this boat gave evidence to the prosperity of the owner who captained the ship and served as one of the wind naitani. The four elegantly furnished passenger cabins near the ship’s stern attested to the same. On this leg of the journey, only two cabins were taken. Torchay would have expected some of the wealthier citizens of Ukiny to take advantage of the opportunity to escape the city, but the general had apparently forbidden it.

His head bobbled and he jerked his eyes open, blinking rapidly in an attempt to convince them to stay that way.

“Go ahead and sleep,” his captain said from the chair beside him under the blue-and-gold-striped awning stretched over the passenger area at the stern.

Confinement area, to speak truth. The crew did not want passengers wandering indiscriminately about the ship. Torchay had been sent politely but firmly back to the “passenger section” several times already. “I need to be alert, watch for threats.” He scanned the bank to either side, peering into the scattered trees for human shapes.

“You can’t be alert if you don’t get some sleep,” she said, sounding far too reasonable. “No one can function without sleep, and I know you’re not sleeping at night. Sleep now. I’ll watch.”

“It’s against regulations. My duty is to—”

“How can you do your duty if you’re asleep on your feet? We’ve been on this boat all day. We’re beyond the Tibran lines. There are no bandits or river pirates between Ukiny and Turysh. We took care of the last band ourselves two years ago, remember? Sleep. I’m tempted to sleep myself.”

He didn’t want to admit it, but she was right. He needed to sleep. “We should go to the cabin.” They would have more protection there.

“It’s too hot. If you’re that worried about my breathing, ask Uskenda’s courier to keep an eye out.”

“Excellent thought.” He could tell by her expression when he stood that she hadn’t expected him to take her suggestion seriously and was none too pleased that he had. But he would take no chances with his naitan.

The courier, an amiable young man, seemed surprised and not a little nervous at Torchay’s approach. Those in bodyguard’s black often evoked that reaction. Still, the courier willingly agreed with a little puffing out of his chest to move his chair closer and keep watch.

Torchay stretched out on the long wooden chair, arranged the cushions behind his back, stuffed one under his head and closed his eyes. But now that he had the opportunity to sleep, it eluded him.

Sounds intruded—the slap of water along the boat’s sides, the creak of the sail’s rigging, the murmur of voices as the boatmen talked and laughed among themselves. He could feel the hum of magic over his skin as the naitan on shift directed the pocket of winds pushing them against the current. He opened his eyes a slit to be sure his own naitan hadn’t moved. Their chairs sat side by side, wooden flanks touching, but too far for him to sense her continued presence.

“Oh for—” She took his hand, laced her fingers through his. “There. Now you’ll know if I decide to run away.”

Content, he closed his eyes again. The sounds swelled then faded away as he categorized and dismissed them. Without their distraction, his mind began to buzz. He was seriously worried. The not-breathing business was only a small part of it. Though she tried to pretend otherwise, something more had happened to Kallista when that dark and deadly magic swept through her.

She dreamed things that came true. She saw people who weren’t there and talked to them. Dead people, by her own words. Torchay felt a faint chill slide down his spine. West magic was as much a gift of the One as any other. He believed that. But it still unnerved him by its very nature. Not that it mattered. His place was by her side.

She could manifest magic from all four cardinal directions at once and his place would not change. He was her bodyguard. Her welfare, her life was in his charge. And that was why he worried. That, and the fact that he loved her, had loved her for years.

He’d loved her since she took the blame for the fiasco he’d caused, almost getting them both killed in their first year together, in his first combat. He’d been wounded, nearly gutted, spent months with the healers recovering. She’d visited nearly every day. And when he came out, she insisted he be reinstated as her bodyguard. How could he not love a woman like that?

There had been a great deal of hero worship about it at first, but after nine years at her side, he loved her for her flaws as well as her virtues. He would never inflict his emotions on her. She didn’t want it. Her highly disciplined, carefully controlled, duty-bound life had no room for anything as messy as love. But he could pour his devotion out on her without having to speak the words. It had taken nine years to gather the courage to speak of friendship. That was enough.

Shouts from the front of the ship brought Torchay bolt upright out of a sound sleep he didn’t remember falling into. The lanterns on the very back of the ship held back the night’s darkness. He had been asleep for quite some time. He still held Kallista’s hand clasped in his.

Torchay stood, releasing her hand. “I had better go see what that is. Go back to the room and wait for me.”

She gave him her “think again, Sergeant” look and followed him down the narrow walkway beside the passenger cabins.

Just past the cabin area where a passageway cut from one side of the ship to the other, half a dozen crew members were standing over a huddled figure crouched on the deck, arms folded protectively around its head.

“What’s happening?” Torchay asked.

Kallista leaned over the boat’s rail to look around him, trying for a better sight of the situation. Torchay elbowed her back upright with a snarl to stay hidden. She crouched to peer beneath his elbow. His protectiveness could be so annoying.

“We found a stowaway. A Tibran spy.” One of the sailors kicked at their find.

“Don’t hurt me. Please don’t!” the stowaway cried in the high-pitched voice of a child or woman. “I mean no harm. I’m no one. I’m not a spy.”

Kallista tried to squeeze past Torchay. She should have known better. The man could give lessons in immovable to mountains. “What are you, then?” she called past the barricade of his body.

“A woman. Only a woman.” The stowaway shuffled around on her knees to face Kallista’s direction as much as she could. She wore a torn and dirt-stained tunic. Her hair was chopped raggedly short, matted with more dirt, and her thin arms were dirtier yet.

All the crew members had stopped their abuse to stare at Kallista. Even Torchay looked over his shoulder at her until he recalled his duty and swung around to face front.

“Tibran?” Kallista said. “Are you Tibran?”

“No longer. I was born in Haav, over the sea, but I have left Tibre. I am here and here I wish to stay.” Still curled into a ball, the woman stretched her hands along the deck, reaching toward Kallista in supplication.

“Why? Why abandon your home?”

“It has never been my home.” The woman’s bitterness startled Kallista.

“Do you understand her, naitan?” one of the crew members asked. Kallista thought he was a boat’s officer since he wore a tunic rather than going about bare-chested like most of the other males in the crew.

“Yes.” She almost continued with a question but thought better of it. Setting her hand against Torchay’s taut back, she leaned forward and murmured in his ear, “Please tell me you understand what she’s saying.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Torchay turned his head slightly to reply. “No, Captain. I cannot. Is it—could you be speaking Tibran?”

Kallista sighed, letting her forehead come to rest on his shoulder. She was so very tired of waking up every day to discover some new peculiarity about herself, some new magic that had made its home inside her. She wanted it to stop. “I suppose it must be,” she said. “She says she’s from Haav. Isn’t that one of their ports?”

“I believe so, naitan.”

“She also says she’s left Tibre. She wants to be Adaran now.”

“Oh, she does, does she?”

Kallista could feel the suspicion bristling from Torchay like some prickly cloak.

“Naitan.” The tunic-clad officer spoke again. “Captain’s compliments, and would you come to the foredeck and assist in interrogating this stowaway?”

“Yes, sir, I would be happy to.” Kallista straightened.

Torchay held his position while the stowaway was hauled to her feet and hustled up the gangway to the high foredeck at the prow of the boat. Only when the party was a certain prescribed distance ahead did he follow, always keeping himself interposed between Kallista and the Tibran.

“I doubt that poor child is much of a threat.” Kallista stalked slowly behind Torchay’s broad back.

“As do I. But anything is possible, and I will not be careless of your life.”

As she rolled her eyes, he spoke again. “And do no’ roll your eyes at me.”

Mouth open in surprise, Kallista halted two steps down from the high deck. “How do you know—”

He turned and held out his hand to escort her the rest of the way. A smile lurked in his eyes and nowhere else on his solemn face. “Because you always do when I say such things.”

She shook her head, smiling despite herself as she took the hand he offered. “I think you have been my bodyguard far too long.”

The stowaway stood before the stout, stern-faced captain, shivering in the night’s warmth. Obviously a woman, now her delicate build and surprisingly full breasts could be seen, she hugged herself, head down, eyes on the deck beneath her bare filthy feet.

Kallista greeted the riverboat captain, one of a prominent trading family based in Turysh. Kallista had known a number of her children in school before the lightning came.

“Who is she and what is she doing on my boat?” The captain clasped her hands behind her back and rocked on her heels waiting for Kallista to translate.

Hiding a sigh, she summoned military posture and took a step past Torchay to see the woman she was to interrogate. “Stand up straight,” she said, disturbed by the woman’s abject demeanor. “Have you no pride?”

The stowaway flinched as if under attack, and huddled tighter.

Torchay leaned close and murmured in Kallista’s ear. “That was Adaran. Maybe if you tried speaking Tibran…?”

She glared at him. She hadn’t known she was speaking Tibran in the first place. How was she supposed to know which language she spoke when they sounded the same to her?

Abruptly, the stowaway threw herself to the deck again, so swiftly that Torchay had a blade out and poised to strike before holding his blow. The woman curled onto her knees, arms once more stretched toward Kallista.

“Please, please,” she said. “Allow me to stay. I will do anything you ask. I will cook your food and wash your clothes. I will rub your feet. I will even service your man—” There came a little pause in the woman’s babbling before she went on. “Though, if I could choose, I do not think I would choose to, because he looks large and would probably hurt me, and he is rather ugly, but if you wish it, great lady, I will do it.”

Kallista could hide neither her shock nor a quick amused look at Torchay.

“What?” he muttered, flipping the naked blade in his hand. It was a good-size one, narrow and long enough to come out the back if he thrust it in the woman’s throat.

“What? What is she saying?” the captain echoed.

“She wishes to stay. She is offering herself as my servant.” Kallista turned to Torchay and lowered her voice, letting her amusement out. “And she offered to ‘service’ you, though she’d really rather not, since she thinks you’re ugly and probably too big.” She finished with a significant glance below her bodyguard’s waist, expecting a snort and a roll of the eyes. She got it, along with a blush she didn’t expect.

Puzzled, she swung back to the prostrate stowaway. Was Torchay attracted to the woman? Was that where the blush came from? She’d thought he had better taste.

“How did she get on board?” the captain said.

Kallista finally repeated all the questions.

“I am Aisse, woman of Haav, assigned to Warrior caste. I climbed onto the ship from the water, during the night, when the watch was on the far side.” The woman did not move from her submissive posture. “I beg of you, great lady, if you will not let me stay, allow me death rather than sending me back.”

“Why?” Kallista asked before translating for the captain.

“I will face death anyway, but theirs will not be a gentle one. It is so for anyone who rebels against his lot in life, but it is worse for a woman.” The Tibran, Aisse, looked up then, finally exposing her face to the lanterns’ light.

Kallista recoiled, shock exploding in gasps from throats around her. This Aisse might have been beautiful, might be beautiful again. At this moment, it was impossible to tell, given the swollen discoloration of bruises covering her face.

“What—” Kallista reached for the woman’s hand, beckoning when she did not seem to know what was wanted. “Stand up. Stand up straight and look me in the eye.”

Aisse did as she was told, slowly straightening from her hunched defensive attitude until she stood in a smaller echo of Kallista’s. Her eyes were a dark, rich brown, rarely seen in Adara. The smudges on her arms were more bruises, not dirt.

“What happened to you?” Kallista asked. “Who did this?”

“One of the Farmer caste.” Aisse shifted a shoulder. “I did not know him. He caught me as I was escaping. The morning the warriors died.”

The day of the dark magic. Kallista stifled her shudder as she translated, sensing Torchay’s impatience. He did not respond well to a lack of information.

“When they died,” Aisse went on, “I got away.”

That sent another chill through Kallista. Did she sense the hand of the One in this? “You were already running away, before this beating?”

“Yes. One beating is much like another, just as one man is like another. They are a woman’s lot, men and beatings. But I wish to choose. I want a life that is mine.”

The sincerity in her voice rang clear to Kallista’s soul. She too had wished for more choices than she’d been given, though she’d had more than Aisse. “Neither men nor beatings are a woman’s lot in Adara.”

“That is why I want to stay.”

Kallista nodded, her mind made up. “Will you renounce Tibre and swear loyalty to me as representative of Adara’s Reinine?”

Aisse started back to her knees again, joy shining through the bruises on her face, but halted at Kallista’s upraised hand and the sight of Torchay’s glittering blade.

“What are you doing, Captain?” Torchay asked through gritted teeth.

Kallista shifted her upraised hand to halt him as well. “Slowly,” she said in Tibran. “Kneel. Swear on the One, the Mother and Father of all, that you renounce all ties and loyalty to Tibre.”

“I worship Ulilianeth, great lady,” Aisse said as she knelt, eyeing Torchay’s blade all the way down.

“A beautiful aspect of the One, but only a small part of Her glory. Do you swear?” Step by step, Kallista led her through the oath, cobbling it together on the spot from other vows she had heard and sworn over the years.

“Naitan.” Torchay stepped close, bending to growl in her ear, “Kallista, what are you doing?”

“This woman has renounced her Tibran birth and begged citizenship in Adara,” Kallista said in Adaran as she gestured Aisse to her feet. This time it did not take so long for her to stand straight.

“And you gave it?” Torchay demanded.

“I will take responsibility for her as my servant, until we reach Arikon and the Reinine can decide whether to grant her request,” she said to the riverboat captain, “and of course I will pay her passage to Turysh.”

“And you’re sure she’s not a saboteur or spy?” The captain studied Kallista’s new servant with doubt.

“I’m sure.” Though her certainty bothered her. How was she so sure?

“How?” Torchay asked, voice ringing through the foredeck. “How can you know she speaks the truth?”

I just do. But that wouldn’t convince them. “My magic is of the North.” Her blue tunic would have told them so already, but truthsayers were also of the North. It wouldn’t convince Torchay, but it might the others. Probably.

He retreated first, however, giving her a hard look that faded to worry, then stoic acceptance. He bowed. “As you say, naitan.”

His acquiescence convinced the others. The captain nodded, dismissing the crew still standing guard.

“If I could beg a bath for my servant Aisse?” Kallista said.

The male officer, in charge of passengers and cargo, if she remembered right, bowed. “I will see to it, naitan.”

“I will be watching your new ‘servant’ with careful eyes, naitan,” Torchay murmured as he gestured for Aisse to follow the other man.

“I expect nothing less.” Kallista gave him a wicked grin. “That’s why I’m putting her in your charge. See that she has what she needs—new clothes and a pair of shoes to start with. Probably food. And then, teach her Adaran.”

“I’m no scholar.”

“No.” She patted his shoulder. “Which means your teaching will be eminently practical. Just try not to teach her too many curse words.”

“Here! What are you doing? Are you mad?” A hand caught Stone’s arm, jerked him back.

Stone was standing at the prow of a boat, trying to climb onto the railing. The shackles he wore on his ankles and wrists wouldn’t allow it.

“Of course you’re mad,” the voice attached to the hand muttered. “What was I thinking?” It was male, belonging to the officer in charge of the soldiers escorting Stone up the river to the Adaran capital.

“Sergeant!” He shouted back down the length of the boat, and the fat guard from the prison came clattering up the stairs to the high foredeck.

“Sir!” The sergeant came to attention, obviously missing the presence of his pike. He had nothing to pound on the deck.

“Who, Sergeant, is supposed to be guarding the prisoner this watch?” The icy fury in the lieutenant’s voice made even Stone shiver with fear.

“I am, sir. Me and Dyrney. The Tibran’s asleep.” The guard’s voice faltered as he realized just who his superior held by the elbow. “Or he was. How’d he get out?”

“Precisely what I would like to know.”

So would he. Stone had lost time. Hours, if not days. He did not remember boarding this boat.

Stone tried his voice, swallowed and tried again. “How long—” His voice crackled, as if he’d either not been using it, or been using it too much.

“I dunno, sir,” the sergeant answered the lieutenant. “I swear we was watchin’ him. He couldn’t’ve got out the door.”

“Then perhaps he left by the window, hmm?” The officer turned to Stone, impaling him on the glare from his uncanny blue eyes. Save for those eyes, this man looked like a proper officer. His brown hair was pulled smoothly back from a high forehead into that tight Adaran queue, his face set and hard with an attitude of command. His rank was marked by a single white ribbon on either shoulder of his dun-colored tunic.

“How long?” He repeated Stone’s question. “Are you with us, warrior?”

Stone cleared his throat. “How long have we been traveling?”

The man leaned closer, peering into Stone’s face. “Yes, I believe you are here. Welcome back. Do you recall who I am?”

It took some effort, but Stone finally dredged up the information. “Lieutenant Joh…I don’t remember your other name. Twenty-first Infantry.”

“Joh Suteny, but that doesn’t matter.” He continued staring.

“How long?” Stone asked again.

“Oh. Yes. We have been on the river almost one full day.” He gestured at the lowering sun, then at the stairway. “Shall we go down?”

Surprised by the courtesy—it was seldom offered to prisoners in shackles—Stone shuffled toward the steps. The sergeant moved as if to take Stone’s arm, but the lieutenant got there first.

“I will secure the prisoner,” he said, his voice all ice and iron. “Since it seems your incompetence knows no bounds.”

“Yessir. Nossir.” The fat guard bobbed his head, backed away.

The lieutenant had to hold Stone upright during the descent down the steep gangway. The shackles made it almost impossible to maintain his balance.

“However did you get up there?” Suteny asked in a mild conversational tone as they made their slow way down the walkway to the cabin that was his prison during the river journey.

“Up is easier than down.”

“When you leave us—” Suteny opened the cabin door and ushered him inside, then followed to lean against the closed door “—where do you go?”

Stone shuffled to the bunk and sat down. How had he got out of the cabin? He would have sworn his shoulders could never fit through that porthole.

“Warrior?” The Adaran spoke.

Oh yes. He’d asked a question, hadn’t he? Stone fought through the fog clouding his mind. He didn’t have the brains Fox had, but he’d never had trouble thinking. What was wrong with him? Was he mad? “I don’t know,” he said. “I—the time is just…gone. I don’t—”

But he did remember something. An urgency. A pull. A need to—“I have to go…somewhere. I’m—I’m looking for something. I don’t know what it is. But I must find it. I must. Or…” He shook his head again. “I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen if I don’t find it. Bad things, I think.”

“I see.” The lieutenant looked down, seeming to think. “I am afraid we are going to have to add to your burden. I have been ordered to treat you with courtesy, as far as I might. But when you do not yourself know what you are doing…

“I will make the chain a long one so that you may move about the cabin, and you may take the air on deck with an escort, as the journey is several more days. But—for your own safety—I must chain you in place. Do you understand?”

Stone nodded, hiding the relief that ebbed through him. A chain would hold him. Even if he injured himself fighting the chain, which he feared was likely, at least he could not plunge to his death over the side of the boat.

“You seem a reasonable man, warrior—Stone, is it?” Suteny waited for an answer. Stone nodded and the other man went on. “When you are here with us, that is. Do you know what triggers these…little spells of time?” The lieutenant put his head outside the door and spoke in a voice of quiet authority before closing it again and turning back to Stone.

Hunching his shoulders, Stone shook his head. He wished he knew. He wanted to be rid of it, his madness or whatever it might be.

“Would you allow me to try calling you back?”

Stone stared at the pale-skinned Adaran. “You wish to do this?”

Suteny seemed surprised by Stone’s surprise. “It would make my job easier, would it not? If you could retain better possession of your senses.”

“True.” Stone shrugged. “I see no reason why not. Try.”

“Very well. We are agreed.”

A knock sounded at the door and the lieutenant opened it to admit one of the other guards, young, with a dogged determination that made up for his lack of experience. He proceeded to attach a long chain to Stone’s ankle bonds and to the bolts holding the cabin’s bunk to the floor.

“Is there anything else I can provide for your comfort?” Lieutenant Suteny asked. “Some reading material perhaps?”

Stone shook his head, testing the chain’s length. “I can speak Adaran, but I can’t read it.” He’d tried to read the words on the general’s map.

“Oh?” A single eyebrow arched high on Suteny’s forehead. “Pity.”

Stone shrugged. He’d never been much for reading anyway. Not like Fox.

Suteny watched him another long moment. It made Stone uneasy. As if the man was studying him. Preparing a report. He probably was. When they reached Arikon, he would likely be called upon to report to his superiors everything observed about their Tibran prisoner and whether he was too mad to be of any use. Stone would like to know the answer to that himself.

Aisse was sitting in complete idleness on the back of the boat a short space apart from her mistress and the man. It was the second afternoon from the time she had been discovered and Aisse still did not understand what sort of service was expected of her. She didn’t understand much of anything in her new country.

Kallista was the captain, but it did not seem to mean the same as it would in Tibre. She did not own the man. Nor did he own her. He protected her. He served her, carrying out duties Aisse had thought would be hers.

When the man came that first night, while she was in her bath, Aisse had feared his purpose. But he had ignored her naked self to empty her bag on the floor and search it, then carried her clothing away. Aisse had been confused, then amused when she realized the man had been searching for weapons, things that could harm the captain. Then she remembered that in this place, women were indeed as dangerous as the men, if not more so.

The man brought her new clothes, a tunic much like the old one and trousers to cover her legs, all the way to her waist. Aisse liked trousers. The man brought her to the cabin, gave her a blanket and a corner for sleeping. He gave her food and the words for food and blanket, for cup, bowl and spoon. But when she tried to begin her duties by putting away the captain’s things, he had growled and sent her away.

He would not allow Aisse to touch anything belonging to either the captain or himself. He did not allow her to collect their food from the boat’s kitchen. He did not trust her. It was a strange feeling for Aisse, to be considered important enough for suspicion, worthy of distrust.

She rested her head on her knees and wrapped her arms around her folded legs as she watched the captain and her man. She did not understand relations between men and women in this new country either. She had thought women ruled here—and they did, but not in a way Aisse could comprehend. She did not have words for the things she saw.

The man argued with the captain. They did not shout, but spoke quietly through clenched teeth and glared lightning bolts at each other. It amazed Aisse that he would dare to argue, but dare he did and without any apparent fear of punishment. She did not understand. But that was not all that confused her.

Aisse had thought the man did not make any demands for sex because he belonged to the captain. And he did in some way, but she did not know what it was. They slept side by side, their bodies touching, and they did not have sex. The man did not touch the captain save for when they slept and when he tied up her hair. He did not grope, squeeze, fondle, or anything at all.

The captain touched him sometimes, on the hand or arm, or perhaps laid a hand on his shoulder. But not often. It didn’t make sense. Did she want the man or not? Did he want her? If he did, maybe Aisse could stop worrying over having to do sex.

She was trying to puzzle the matter out when one of the boatmen approached her, the one who had ordered the others to bring her bath. He sat in the chair beside her, speaking his pretty language. She shrank into a smaller ball, struggling to pick out a word or two. She could not remember what she had learned. He was too close. He frightened her.

“He means no harm,” the captain said. “He’s only saying how sorry he is you were hurt and that you must be very beautiful indeed, for even now you are beautiful.”

Aisse made a face. Much good beauty had ever done her. Captain Varyl laughed. The boatman spoke again and she translated. “He says if there is any service he might do for you, you have only to ask.”

“I want him to go away,” Aisse said, surprising herself with her bravado. “I will not do sex with him. But I want to say it myself. What are the words?”

The captain had to have her man give the words to Aisse. The boatman did not look angry or frustrated when she said them, merely sad as he rose to do what she ordered.

“He was not looking for sex,” the captain said. “He’s one of the boat captain’s iliasti. Didn’t you see his anklets?”

Aisse looked as the boatman climbed the stairs to the foredeck and saw a pair of narrow gold bangles encircling one ankle, and three more shining from the other. “They mean he belongs to the captain?”

“And she belongs to him and both of them to the rest of their ilian.”

That word was in Adaran, like the other strange words she used. “What is that? Ilian?”

“It means they are—are mates. Oathsworn to each other in the temple, joined by love in a family to raise their children. They all belong to each other.”

Aisse shook her head. She was confused by more words than just ilian. Love was what a person owed the Rulers. How could love join someone? Family—that had to do with children, she thought. Aisse had no children, would never have them, so she wasn’t sure of that term. She understood swearing an oath and belonging. But one person belonged to another and the one who was owned could not then own the one who owned her. Could she?

She frowned. “The boatman and the boat captain…love?”

“Yes. And their ilian. It has six members. Didn’t you see? He wore five anklets, three on the right and two on the left. Three women and two other men. The captain wears five bracelets, two on the right and three on the left. They belong to their ilian and do not—don’t have sex with anyone else.”

“Your man does not have an anklet.”

The captain sighed. “Torchay is my bodyguard. Not my ilias. We are not bound in that way.”

“Then who does he do sex with?” Should she worry after all?

“Whoever he wishes, I suppose.” The captain’s face turned pink, but Aisse did not understand the reason for the blush. “And if she wishes it as well. Sex must be agreed to by all involved.”

Aisse nodded. She could like that rule.

The captain’s blush faded and she turned thoughtful. “He’s never taken a lover though, not for more than a night or two.”

“Have you? Taken lovers?” Aisse needed to understand.

“Yes.” The captain’s face was pink again. “And I believe this conversation has ended.”

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