Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (23 page)

Orris frowned. “You mean, others have seen bands as big?”

“Eh—twice and three times that size.”
Imber leaned forward to his carved chair and pushed his glass toward Ram, who had charge of the pitcher of mulled wine. “Fleg Barnhithe told me some sheepman from the Thanelands said there’d been a band there numbered near forty . . . ”

“Forty!” the others cried, aghast.

“They’re breeding up in the mountains somewhere.” Imber sighed, shaking his head. “It’s made fair hash of the overland roads. Them and other things, other kinds of monsters . . . ”

Starhawk frowned, remembering her words with Anyog in the half darkness of the corridor of the deserted Peacock Inn. “Breeding?” she said softly. “Now, I’ve heard tell they’re men—or were once men.”

“That’s impossible,” Orris stated, a little too quickly. “Blinding’s a punishment that’s practiced everywhere, and those who are blinded don’t even lose their reason, much less turn into—into those. And anyway, a blinded man doesn’t follow the way they do. Nor has any man that kind of—of insane strength.”

But his eyes flickered as he spoke, and there was a touch of fear in his voice; if the nuuwa had once been men, the hideous corollary was that any man stood in danger of becoming a nuuwa.

“I’ve seen men close to that kind of strength in battle,” Starhawk objected. She folded her long, bony hands on the waxed oak of the table top. “I’ve met men you’d have to kill to stop—men driven by necessity for survival out of all bounds of human strength.”

“But if it was a thing that—that happened, as if it were a sickness, wouldn’t it happen to women, too? I don’t think anyone’s ever seen a woman of ’em.”

“But that goes double for them breeding,” Ram pointed out, filling the glasses with the wine like molten gold in the gleaming lamplight. “Anyroad, they’d never reproduce—they’d eat their own young, as they do everything else they come on.”

“The Mother doesn’t mold them out of little clay bits,” Starhawk said.

Orris laughed. “You’ll never convince our Ram of it.”

“Nah, just because he didn’t have no schooling, bar what the wardens of the jail could give him . . . ” Imber teased, his eyes sparkling with mischief.

“Better nor what the kennelman gave you,” Ram retorted with a broad grin, and the discussion degenerated into the rough-and-tumble kidding that Starhawk had grown used to in that boisterous house.

But the memory of that evening came back to her now as she thought of taking the road again. She shivered and drew up her knees under the soft folds of the robe, resting her chin on her crossed wrists. Neither she nor Fawn had spoken to any of them of their destination; not for the first time, she was thankful for the brothers’ collective denseness that prevented them from guessing what Anyog had known. She had no desire to deal with the overwhelming rush of protectiveness that even the suspicion would have brought out in them.

From somewhere below, she caught Fawn’s voice, like a drift of passing perfume; “ . . . if that’s the case, then keeping a fortified post in the North open year-round would pay, wouldn’t it?”

Pel’s brisk tones replied, “Yes, but the returns on the trade in onyx alone . . . ”

It must have been years, the Hawk thought, since Fawn had been in company with the kind of people she had grown up with, years since she had heard that clever, practical language of finance and trade. Starhawk smiled a little to herself, remembering Fawn’s shamefaced admission that she was a merchant at heart. Her father—whose bones had been lying these two years, bleached where the robbers had scattered them—had tried to make a great lady of her; Sun Wolf had made a skilled and practiced mistress of her; it was only now, after trial and struggle and desperate adventure, that Fawn was free to fly her own colors. In spite of what she knew to be their rivalry for the same man, Starhawk was proud of her.

Heavy footfalls creaked in the hallway. Ram’s, she identified them, and realized that the room had grown dark. She got to her feet and lighted a spill from the embers of the glowing hearth. She was touching the light to the wick of a brass lamp in the shape of a joyous dolphin when the footsteps paused, and Ram’s hesitant knock sounded at the door.

“Starhawk?”
He pushed it shyly open. He, too, was sleek and damp from his bath, the sleeves of his reddish-bronze tunic turned back from enormous forearms, the thin, gold neck chain he wore like a streak of flame in the lamplight.

She smiled at him. “The infants all bathed?”

He laughed. “Aye, for all that Keltic wailed and screamed until I’d let her bathe with Idjit and me. It was a fine, wet time we had in the kitchen, let me tell you. It’s like high tide on the floor, and the steam like the fogs in spring.”

Starhawk chuckled at the thought, noticing, as she smiled up at him, how the rose-amber of the light put streaks of deep gold in his brown hair and tiny reflections in his eyes. She saw the graveness of his face and her laughter faded.

“Starhawk,” he said quietly, “you spoke this afternoon of moving on. Going away to seek this man of Fawnie’s. Must you?”

 . . . this man of Fawnie’s.
She looked away, down at her own hands, spangled with the topaz reflections of the lamp’s facets. Trust Ram, she thought, to go protective on me . . . “I’ll have to go sooner or later,” she replied. “It’s better now.”

“Must it be—sooner or later?”

She said nothing. The oil hissed faintly against the cold metal of the lamp; the smell of the scented whale oil, rich and faintly flowery, came hot to her nostrils, along with the bland smells of soap and wool. She did not meet his eyes.

“If the man’s been missing this long, he’s likely dead,” Ram persisted softly. “Starhawk, I know you have vows of loyalty to him as your chief and I respect that, I truly do. But—could you not stay with us?”

The drumming of the rain on the slates crept into her silence, and the memory of the bleak cold of the roads. She felt the bitter, weary knowledge that she would have to find a wizard somewhere, if she wanted to have any chance at the tower of Grimscarp at all, and that the going would be harder now, with maybe only that final grief at the end.

If it’s this hard for me,
she thought, what will it be for Fawn, alone?

Doggedly, she shook her head, but could not speak.

“In the spring . . . ” he began.

“In the spring, it will be too late.” She raised her head and saw his face suddenly taut with emotion, the big square chin thrust out and the flat lips pressed hard together.

“It’s too late now,” he said. “Starhawk—must you make me write it all down, and me no good hand with words? I love you. I want to marry you and for you to stay here with me.” And with awkward passion, he folded her in his great arms and kissed her.

Between her shock that any man would ever say those words to her and the rough strength of his grasp, for a moment she made no move either to yield or to repulse. The two affairs she had had while in Sun Wolf’s troop had been short-lived, almost perfunctory, a clumsy seeking for something she knew from the start that she would never find. But this was different. He was offering her not the warmth of a night, but a life in this place at his side. That, as much as the shape and strength of a man’s body in her arms, drew her.

He must have felt her waver, unresponsive and uncertain, for his arms slacked from around her, and he drew back. There was misery in his face. “Could you not?”

Shakily and for the first time, she looked at him not as a traveler like herself nor as an amateur warrior to her professionalism, but as a man to her womanliness. It had been comforting to rest her head on that huge barrel of a chest and to feel the massive arms strong around her, a comfort like nothing else she had known. She found herself thinking, He is very much like the Chief . . . and turned away, flooded with a helpless sense of shame, bitterness, and regret.

Silently she damned Anyog for doing this to her, for making her aware of herself as a woman and of his nephew, that good, deserving ox, only in terms of the man she truly wanted and could never hope to have.

She heard the rustle of his clothing and stepped away from his hand before he could touch her again. “Don’t,” she murmured tiredly and looked up, to see the hurt in his eyes.

“Could you not give up the way of the warrior, then?” he asked softly, and the guilt that burned her was all the sharper for the fact that she had never spoken to him of another love. The very genuine liking she had for him made it all the worse.

But she loved him no more than she loved Ari; and she could not conceive of herself marrying a lumpish, earnest merchant and having to deal with his clumsy efforts to protect her and to rule her life.

“It wouldn’t be fair to you,” she said.

“To take me a warlady to wife?”
A faint smile glimmered in his eyes. “But you’d no longer be a warrior then, would you? I’d be the mock of my brothers, maybe, but then you could protect me and lay about them for me, you see.”

And when she said nothing, the flicker of mischief died from his face.

“Eh, well,” he said after a time. “I’m sorry I spoke, Hawk. Don’t feel you need leave this house before you wish, just to get clear of my ardor. I’ll not speak again.”

She lowered her eyes, but could find nothing to say. She knew she should speak, and tell him that, though she did not love him, she liked him hugely, better than either of his brothers; tell him that were she not struggling with a love as hopeless as it was desperate, she would like nothing better than to join his loud and brawling family . . . But she could not. There was no one, in fact, whom she could speak to of it—there was only one person whom she trusted with her feelings enough to tell, and he was the one person who must never know . . . this man of Fawnie’s.

She changed her clothes and went downstairs to supper. She had little idea of what she ate or of the few things she replied to those who spoke to her. Ram was there, pale and quiet under the gibes of his brothers. Though she was past noticing much, Starhawk was aware that Fawn, too, had very little to say. Pel Farstep’s sharp, black eyes flicked from face to face, but the shrewd little merchant made no mention of their silence and was seen to kick her youngest son under the table when he bawled a question to Ram, asking, was he in love, that he couldn’t eat?

They always said that love affects women this way,
Starhawk thought, fleeing the convivial clamor in the supper room as soon as she decently could. Great Mother, I’ve eaten hearty dinners after sacking towns and slitting the throats of innocent civilians. Why should saying “No” to one lumpish burgher whom I don’t even love make whatever it was that Gillie spent her time and sweat in the kitchen for taste like flour paste and ash? The Chief would kill me.

No, she thought. The Chief would understand.

She paused before the mirror in her room and stood for a long time, candle in hand, studying the pale, fragile-boned face reflected there.

She saw nothing that anyone by any stretch of courtesy would call pretty. For all the delicacy of the cheekbones and the whiteness of the fair skin, it was a face cursed with a chin both too long and too square, with lips too thin, and with a nose that was marked with that telltale, bumpy crookedness that was the family resemblance of fighters. Fine, pale hair caught the candle’s light, which darkened it to the color of corn silk—in sunlight it was nearly white, tow and flyaway as a child’s. It had grown out some in her journeying, hanging wispy against the hollows of her cheeks. Sunlight, too, would have lightened her eyes almost to silver; in this light, they were smoke-colored, almost as dark as the charcoal-gray ring that circled her pupils. Her lashes were straight and colorless. There was a scar on her cheek, too, like a rudely drawn line of pink chalk. In her bath, she had noted again how the line of it picked up again at her collarbone and extended for a handspan down across pectoral muscle and breast.

She remembered a time when she had been proud of her scars.

Who but Ram,
she wondered, would offer to take a warlady to wife?
Certainly not a man who had his choice of fragile young beauties like Fawn.

The door opened behind her. The liquid deeps of the mirror showed her another candle, and its sheen rippled over a gown of brown velvet, tagged with the pale ecru lace such as the ladies of the Bight
Islands made, with a delicate face lost in shadow above.

She turned from the mirror. “How do you feel?” she asked.

Fawn shrugged and set the candle down. “Renewed,” she replied quietly. “As if—oh, as if spring had come, after a nightmare winter.” She crossed to the small table that stood beside the window and picked up her hairbrush, as was her nightly wont. But she set it down again, as she had set down untasted forkfuls of flour paste and ash at tonight’s supper. In the silky, amber gleam of candle and lamp, her fingers were trembling.

“Ready to take the road again?” the Hawk asked, her voice ringing tinnily in her own ears. This man of Fawnie’s, Ram had said. But that, she told herself, was nothing that she had to burden Fawn with. It was no doing of hers that she had been stolen away from her family and had taken Sun Wolf’s fancy. The Wolf was lost and in grave danger, and Fawn had put her life at risk to find him.

Fawn was silent for a long moment, staring down at the brush, her face turned away. In a muffled voice, she finally said, “No.” She looked up with wretched defiance in her green eyes. “I’m not going on.”

Even Ram’s unexpected proposal of marriage had not struck Starhawk with such shock. For a moment, she could only stare, and her first feeling was one of indignation that this girl would abandon her quest for her lover. “What?” was all she could say.

Fawn’s voice was shaking. “I’m going to stay here,” she said haltingly, “and—and marry Orris.”

“What?” And then, seeing the girl’s eyes flood with tears of shame and wretchedness, Starhawk crossed the room in two quick strides and caught her in a swift hug, reassuring her while her own mind reeled in divided confusion. “Fawnie, I—”

Fawn began sobbing in earnest. “Starhawk, don’t be angry with me. Please don’t be angry with me. Sun Wolf was so good to me, so kind—he saved me from I don’t know what kind of slavery and misery. But—but Anyog was right. I was there at the inn when he said we would never enter the Citadel without the help of a wizard—I was listening in the hall. And he’s right, Hawk. We can’t go against Altiokis by ourselves. And there are no wizards anymore. He’s the last one left, the only one . . . ”