Sword Born-Sword Dancer 5 (16 page)

"Empty!" I glared at her aggrievedly. "Hoolies, bascha, if you're going to drag my remains around in an aqivi jug, at least let it be a full one!"

She broke then, laughing, and turned hard against me, setting her head down into the hollow of my shoulder. I hooked an arm around her and contemplated the immensity of being alive after one has been dead. And the simple, unadorned joy of having this woman here beside me, as glad of it as I was.

"Del--"

She breathed it into my neck. "I know."

"Del--"

She put fingers across my lips. "If you say anything, you will regret it."

I extruded my tongue and licked her fingers purposefully. She removed them hastily. I grinned. "Why will I regret it?"

"Because I've seen you when you've had too much to drink. You get sad. Sappy."

"Sappy!"

"And the next day you've forgotten it entirely, which is no more flattering than you wishing you hadn't said it."

"I never wish I hadn't said what I've said to you." I reconsidered. "Well, maybe sometimes. When we have disagreements, though those are extremely rare." I was rewarded by the crimped mouth I expected to see. "But hoolies, bascha, I just came back from the dead! Doesn't that allow me some latitude to say what I want?"

"But then the Sandtiger will have divulged a portion of himself he wants no one ever to see."

"His sappiness?"

Del laughed. "You have survived by letting them think you are not soft."

I grunted. "Softness doesn't survive in the circle."

"So I have said." A strand of silken hair trapped itself against stubble and claw scars.

"But I know what you are. You needn't say it where anyone else might hear."

"At the moment what I'm feeling has nothing to do with, er, softness."

Del patted my lap. "I know."

I couldn't help the startled reflexive twitch of every muscle in my body. I caught her hand, gripped it, fixed her with a forbidding scowl. "Gently, bascha!"

"No," she said. "Fiercely. So I know, and you know, you're very much alive."

Oh. Well, yes. I could manage that. Being brought back from the dead does give a man the motivation to make certain all the parts still work.

Some hours later, the silent, kilted servant led me out of the house to a small, private terrace tucked into one of the niches between domed room and arched. Akritara appeared to be full of such places, cobbled together over the years from a set of chambers into a sprawling assemblage of them. And here I found an array of potted plants, all blooming so that the air was rich with fragrance. I was startled to see that a rising breeze blew the hedges along the low wall into tattered fragments; this must be the wind Nihko had mentioned, forcing the people of Skandi to train their grapevines into baskets.

I squinted against the dust, then turned back toward the house as the servants touched my arm. And there was the Stessa metri, seated in a chair. The linen of her belted tunic rippled slightly, but her chair had been set back into a niche that the wind only barely reached.

Her eyes appraised me coolly. "Do you feel better?"

I ran a hand down the front of my tunic. "A bath, fresh clothing, a meal--what more could a man ask?"

"I referred to none of those things."

I blinked, then felt my face warm. Which in itself annoyed me; I haven't blushed in, well, so many years I couldn't count them.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Do you feel better?"

"I'm just glad I'm alive to feel anything."

Her gaze yet probed me. "Did you not release your seed in her?"

I looked around for a chair. Didn't find one. Looked around for the servant in hopes he might bring one, but he was gone. So I sat down on the nearest portion of knee-high wall, in the wind, and smiled sweetly at her. "Aren't you a little blunt for a woman of your, um, maturity? Or are you just trying to shock me?"

One brow rose slightly. "Do you shock?"

"Not often."

"I thought not." She smoothed a fold in the sheer linen of her tunic skirts with a deft hand. "Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Release your seed in her."

I considered her. "Do you want me to believe you're a woman who takes pleasure in hearing bedroom tales of others?"

"Tell me," she said only.

I stood up then, left the wall, took three strides to her. Leaned down, looming, so that my face was but a thumb's length from hers. "Yes," I said. "Anything else you want to know? How many times, who was on top, how long I lasted?"

She did not recoil from my closeness, or my tone. "My heir," she said quietly, "must be capable of bedding a woman. Of what use is an heir if he can sire no children?"

I straightened, startled. "This is about children?"

Her gray-green eyes were smoky. "Do you wish to believe I'm a woman who finds pleasure in hearing bedroom tales of others?"

I opened my mouth, shut it. Could find no response.

"Give me your hands."

"My hands?"

"I want to examine them."

"Didn't you get a good enough look at me before?"

Her eyes locked with my own. "Who was your mother, that she taught you no manners?"

Unaccountably, it stung. "Your daughter?" I challenged.

From that, she flinched. Color moved in her face, fading. Abruptly I regretted what I had said--exactly as Del had suggested a matter of hours before. It was true this woman had taken me completely off-guard with her questions, but that didn't mean she deserved rudeness in return.

Unless she expected it. Wanted it. To make it easier for her to dismiss me as yet another pretender.

I walked away from the woman then, returning to my perch upon the low wall. I spread my legs, felt the underside of my thighs clench to grip. Tapped sandaled toes faintly against the stone beneath my feet even as the breeze whipped my hair flat against one side of my head. "What happened?"

She told me. Calmly, quietly, with no obvious pain or sorrow, but it was there in her eyes. When she was done, I watched her watching me, weighing her story even as she had weighed mine three days before.

I rose, went to her. This time I didn't loom. I knelt down and offered my hands.

She took them, held them. Turned them. Felt the sword-born calluses, the scars, two knuckles that were enlarged, a little finger left slightly crooked in the healing after a break. I could not read what was in her face, but I thought I knew. This flesh could be hers, and the blood that ran beneath it. As much as perhaps it wasn't.

She released me. "I must know."

Still kneeling, I shook my head. "There are no easy answers."

"Even difficult answers are answers."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe not."

Her eyes were shocked. "You would rather not know what became of her?"

"Either way offers no comfort. If she died, knowing won't bring her back. If she gave me away voluntarily--"

"My daughter would never have done so!"

"Then maybe she wasn't your daughter. Maybe I'm not your grandson. Maybe I'm just a Southron/Skandic half-breed, or a full-blooded Skandic lost to the desert of a foreign land." I shrugged. "Or maybe I'm just the unwanted result of some man releasing his seed, and so the girl--released me." Into the Punja, where a newborn infant would die in a matter of hours, offering no proof of one night's pleasure. Or rouse the memory of rape.

"That, too, is possible."

"In which case I'll thank you for your hospitality, collect Del, and go."

"Wait." She gestured briefly as I rose, then dropped the hand to her lap. "Does it mean nothing to you that I might be your grandmother? A wealthy, powerful, dying old woman who was bred of the oldest and most respected family of the island?"

I had at some point shattered her demeanor. She was still proud, still strong, but a sere bitterness chilled her tone. I thought then of all the men who had come before her, claiming to be the grandson of a wealthy, powerful old woman bred of the oldest and most respected family of the island.

She had undoubtedly heard countless lies. I gave her none. Only honesty. "It would mean more," I told her, "just to have a grandmother. No matter who or what she is."

I left her then, as she wept.

TWELVE

GUESTS, we had been given the run of the place. Servants tended the household assiduously, all kilted, all quiet, all perfectly courteous. I didn't know where Nihko and his captain were, but I did know where to find Del. She intended, she'd said when I left her to see the metri, to drown herself.

She meant in a bath, of course. So I went to the chamber housing the tub.

It was far more than a tub, actually. The builders had dug a large, shallow, square hole in the ground, plastered it, laid out tiny tiles on the sides and bottom in an elegantly precise pattern of waves and clouds, blue on blue of every shade. Overhead arched the ceiling, very dark blue with a spray of silver and gold stars painted to mimic the night skies. Squares and slots were cut into the deep walls through to the exterior, then covered against wind-born dust and debris by membranes, opaque but scraped thin enough to let in the light. The shelf around the pool itself was stone as well, pale, worked slabs fitted together into an almost seamless array. Through some builder's trick with pipes the water was warmed and let in and out from beneath the surface. I had enjoyed myself immensely earlier, forgoing a shared bath only because if Del and I had shared, I'd never have answered the metri's request to attend her.

Now I was finished with that, and Del was still in the pool. Alone.

Perfect.

For the second time in three days I stripped down for a woman, leaving borrowed clothing heaped upon the floor, although I confess this time the experience was much more pleasurable. Del, floating easily, challenged me to dive in, which she knew very well I couldn't and wouldn't do. Instead, the best I could manage was to bend down, catch my balance one-handed against the stone shelf, and slip over the edge.

The water came to mid-chest even in the center of the pool; I was in no danger of drowning. Unless Del had some nefarious plan to rid herself of me.

The closest she came to it was to hook a hand into the thong holding the claws and tug gently, urging me closer. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"What did the metri say?"

The metri. I sighed, dipped down to wet myself to my chin, stood up again. Soaked hair straggled down well onto my shoulders; I really needed to cut it. Del's was slicked back against her skull, baring all of her face. The Southron sun had not been kind to her Northern skin, incising a faint fan of lines at the corners of her eyes, but with a sheen of moisture over her face and the dissipation of habitual readiness, she also shed years. She looked maybe eighteen. At the most.

I felt a stab of some unnamed emotion: more than ten, possibly as many as fifteen years separated us. Before me there had been only Ajani, the Northern borjuni who had, with his men, slaughtered her family, save Del and her brother, and burned the caravan. Who had utterly altered her life, making a sword-singer out of the girl who would have been wife and mother, instead of living vengeance.

Before Ajani, she had been fifteen. And innocent of men.

Those days, those years were past now. She had slain her demons, the living as well as the dead. She was as much at peace as I had ever seen her. And young again. So young.

"Well?" she prodded.

The metri. "She wants to be certain."

"That's understandable."

"And she doesn't know how."

Del was silent a moment. "No," she said finally. "There is no way to be certain. It must be taken on faith."

I shook my head. "I'm not the man for it."

"To be her grandson?"

"To be trusted. To be taken on faith."

She stood before me, facing me: a tall, strong woman of immense will and purpose.

Unsmiling, she put a hand on either side of my head and stripped my hair back, combing it behind my ears. "You are the most trustworthy man I have ever met."

"Not for this. This is--important." I recalled the metri's expression as she examined my hands. "This may be more important than anything in my life, because it's her life."

Del stared hard into my eyes. "And do you see why, now, I say you are the most trustworthy man I have ever met?"

"It's only the truth, bascha. Nothing more."

"And nothing less."

I turned my face into her hand, kissed it. "I don't know why, bascha. I think she wants me to be the one, but she's afraid."

"Why would she be afraid? Surely she has prayed to have her grandson returned to her."

"Returned for how long?"

Del frowned. "What do you mean?"

I shook my head. "I can't stay here. Even if I am this grandson. This isn't my place."

"You could make it your place."

I recalled how comfortable I was in Akritara, how very much at home I did feel, despite never having been here before. I had never in my life felt so at ease in an unknown place. Skandi fit me. Somehow, some way, it fit me.

"Why not?" Del asked.

I turned and pushed my way through the water. At the side I hooked arms over the edge, spreading elbows along the stone, and settled chin on wrists layered one atop the other. Frowning even as Del came up next to me and mimicked my posture, one elbow lightly touching mine.

"It... I'm--" I sighed, ducking my head to scrub forehead against hands. "I don't know. I guess I'm still just a Southroner at heart."

"No. Not since I taught you wiser ways."

It raised a smile, as she meant it to, but I couldn't hold it. "I think I will always be a Southroner. Even if I meant not to be. Too much of it is in my blood."

"And if your blood is Skandic?"

"It's more than blood that makes you of a place," I told her. "More than blood, or bone, or flesh. It's as much spirit, and heart, as anything else." I turned my head to look at her, even as I leaned my temple into my hand. "You are a Northerner, born and bred of its customs, its people. The rituals." She nodded slightly. "And no matter if you never return there for the balance of your life, it's what you will always be."