Sword Born-Sword Dancer 5 (17 page)

Del's expression was sober now, almost severe as she considered. I had stripped away the youth with my words. Now the woman was back, the tough-minded woman who stepped into the circle and danced.

Or killed.

"But I am who I am no matter where I am," she said at last. "As you would be."

"Bascha, I don't know--don't understand ..." I shook my head again. "I have never belonged to anyone. Never been of anyone. Owned, yes, by the Salset. Trained, yes, at Alimat. And that was the closest thing I had to a family, those men at Alimat who learned as I learned the rituals of the dance, but there was always competition. Never friendship; we all knew one day we might meet one another in the circle. And now ..." I set my forehead against my wrists, spoke into the stone. "Now there's--this."

"Yes," Del said quietly. And as quietly, "Would it be so bad if you became what you would have become anyway?"

I turned my head. "What do you mean?"

"If you are this woman's grandson, then what she offers is what you would have had."

"If."

"Toss the oracle bones ten times," Del said, "and you will win, and you will lose. That is the only certainty in the game."

"In other words, the odds are about as good for me being her grandson as against." I reached out and cupped the back of her skull in my palm. "Or is it just that you want to benefit from the wealth?"

"Of course," she agreed. "I am selfish."

I ruffled slick hair, disarranging it. "I wouldn't have had it, Del."

"What do you mean?"

"The metri's daughter fell in love with an unsuitable man. He was not of the Eleven Families, not even remotely acceptable. He was a molah-man, responsible for carting the Stessas around the island, making certain they never soiled themselves by touching unblessed ground." I smiled sadly at her perplexity. "The metri's daughter asked that he be adopted, raised up by the metri herself, so he would become acceptable. And her mother refused."

"They left," Del said, seeing it now. "They left Skandi together, and sailed away to a place where they could be man and wife with no concerns for such things."

"She was pregnant," I told her. "Due to give birth in a month. The metri intended to give the child away."

Del's eyes closed. I knew she remembered her daughter, Ajani's daughter, the child of rape. The child she gave into others' keeping, because she had a task. A vow. An obsession. And no time, no room, for a baby in her life.

I continued. "But the only daughter--and only heir--of the Stessa metri left Skandi with the molah-man, and neither were seen again."

Her eyes opened. The clear blue, strangely, had been swallowed by black pupils. "Such a woman would never expose an infant in the desert," she said. "A woman who gave up a life of privilege, leaving her mother, her people, her land, her legacy." She looked at me.

"Such a woman would not have left you there, in the sand. Not by choice."

I closed my hand around the thick tail of soaked hair adhering to her spine. Squeezed.

"There is no way we can ever know, bascha. None."

"You could choose--"

"--to believe that was my mother? That she loved a man enough to leave her homeland so near to term, and travel into the Punja? Yes, I could choose to believe it. I could also choose to believe otherwise."

Her gaze was steady. "And if it's true?"

I shook my head. "It changes nothing. Not who I am, what I am, or what I will be."

Del opened her mouth to answer, but it was someone else's voice I heard. A man's.

Saying something in a language I didn't know, but the tone was clear enough.

We turned sharply as one, pushing off the side of the pool. A young man stood there on the far side, legs spread aggressively, arms loose at his sides. He was not kilted as the servants, but wore a thin-woven sleeveless linen tunic that displayed muscled, tanned arms. A copper-studded leather belt was wrapped around a slim, sashed waist.

He stared down upon us, green eyes fixed and fierce in a dark face. Brown hair sun-bleached bronze on top, not yet combed tame from the wind, tumbled carelessly around wide shoulders. His eyes narrowed a moment, and then he switched to a language we could understand despite the accent. "Are you the renegadas, who presume upon the metri's courtesy?"

He was young, big, angry, and of unmistakable presence. He was a man you couldn't ignore, especially when he stared at you. When he grew into himself, knew his body and its power as much as I knew mine, he would be formidable.

"Gods," Del breathed.

I glanced at her sidelong, saw the startled expression commingled with something else I didn't like much. She had told me once before that indeed she looked at other men, even as I looked at other women. Now I witnessed it.

I was naked, he was not. But not much was shielded by the thin linen. "Answer me!" he snapped.

I couldn't help myself: I smiled winsomely. "Guest," I declared, "presuming upon nothing we haven't been given by the metri herself."

Dark brows arched up beneath a lock of thick hair fallen across his unlined brow. "Then you must be the latest pretender."

So much for being winsome. I was none too pleased to be caught weaponless and naked in the water, arguing with a boy. "What I am is none of your concern."

He stepped to the edge of the pool. "It is," he said with surprising equanamity, "when I am the metri's only living--and acknowledged--relative." He smiled as he saw us exchange disbelieving glances. "Ask," he suggested gently, eyes alight with triumph, then turned on his heel and walked away. It was then I marked the sheath at the small of his back, and the knife riding lightly in it.

"Now I'm confused," I muttered as he disappeared. "And I don't like being confused. Not when I don't have a sword." Being without a blade set the fine hairs on the back of my neck to rising, now that I was challenged.

I pushed my way through water to the edge of the pool, grasped stone, and pulled myself up. Dripping, I bent down to reach for Del's hand. "Either he's a pretender, or I am, or the metri herself is conducting some kind of competition--" I broke off. "Are you getting out?"

As if it were afterthought, Del finally reached up so we could clasp wrists. I braced and pulled; she came up from the pool in one fluid motion, all ivory-silver and bleached gold as the water sheeted off her, Her expression was a combination of perplexity, disbelief, and startled comprehension.

I picked up the drying cloths left by a servant. Flung one at her even as I started rubbing myself down with the other. "All right," I said crossly, "you've proved that women look, too. But he's gone, Del... you can stop now."

"What?" Coming belatedly out of her reverie, she bent and began to dry off.

"The young godling here a minute ago." I tossed down my cloth, grabbed up the baggy trousers and began dragging them on one leg at a time. "I don't think he's that impressive, but you certainly seem to."

Del blinked at me. "Tiger--"

"He's a kid, bascha ... barely formed. Not much character there yet--other than arrogance, of course, which he obviously has in full measure." I hitched the waist over my hips, tied off the drawstring, snatched up the tunic and tugged it on over my head.

"But I suppose he's pretty enough to look at." I scowled. "So long as that's all you do."

"Yes, he's pretty enough to look at," Del declared. "He looks like you."

That stopped me cold. "What?"

"Without the years. Without the scars." She pulled a long linen shift over her head, yanked folds free of hips and buttocks so that the hem settled around her ankles. "But very much with your ill temper." She bent over, swept her hair into some kind of complicated turban, all wrapped up in the cloth.

"My what?"

"And arrogance." She straightened, balanced the turban, snugged the woven belt around her waist with sharp jerks, stalked off.

I watched her back. It was very stiff.

"Looks like me?" I turned back to study the place where the young man had stood, recollecting my first impressions of him. "Him? Nah."

Surely not.

Scowling, I went off to find the metri and learn for myself what in hoolies was going on.

THIRTEEN

BY THE TIME I found the metri, the others already had. The kid, for one--although I confess he didn't look like much of a kid from the back. With Del's observation still foremost in my mind, I studied him with new eyes. He was broad enough, tall enough, and the coloring was the same. Aside from that, though, I didn't think there was so much resemblance.

He wasn't the only one with the metri. Prima Rhannet and her first mate were there as well. Everyone except the metri was talking loudly, trying to raise voices over one another until the room rang hollow with shouting. Dumbfounded, I stopped short in the doorway and stared. Didn't even blink as Del joined me there, wet hair combed out, saying something cross about enough noise to wake the dead.

The metri sat in a chair, hands folded into her lap. She wore the mask I associated with her so long as we were not discussing her daughter or the man her daughter had married: calmly self-contained and utterly unmoved by anything anyone said.

There was much gesticulation and tones of hissing hostility. Del's godling rounded on Prima and Nihko, seemingly accusing them of something they didn't much like, as they answered in kind. I was not surprised to see the red-haired captain so animated, because it was like her; but Nihko Blue-head only rarely showed so much emotion. As for Del's godling, well, I didn't know him at all, but he seemed extremely comfortable with shouting, so I assumed he had lots of experience.

This looked and sounded like nothing so much as a family quarrel. I began to suspect there was a lot more to the story than a renegada captain and her tattooed first mate, and a kid who looked enough like Nihko to be his son. And since Nihko himself resembled me, this made it a very tight-knit family indeed.

And I couldn't understand a word of what anyone was saying.

Out of patience, I drew a very large breath deep into my lungs and let loose a roar that overrode them all. "Hey!"

Even Del jumped.

Now that I had everyone's attention, I smiled my friendliest smile. "Hello," I said with cheerful courtesy. "Would you care to repeat all that in a language I can understand?"

"We," Del murmured.

"We," I amended. When no one said anything at all, I glanced at them one by one.

Prima Rhannet's hand was at her waist where her knife generally resided tied to her belt, but she wasn't wearing the knife, or even that particular belt. Like Del, she wore an ankle-length sleeveless tunic gathered at the waist into a woven sash. Nihko never was so blatant about his weapons, which he didn't have at the moment, either; he just stood with his head turned slightly toward me, eyes glittering. But the godling, as youth so often does, had turned to face me squarely, to challenge the unexpected, every powerful part of him poised for movement.

Hoolies, Del was right. He could be me. If you stripped away fifteen years and all the scars from me.

Or added them to him.

It was eerie. You don't usually recognize yourself in others. For that matter, you don't usually recognize yourself in a silver mirror or a pool of water unless you know it's you, and only then you know it's you because logic argues it must be: if you're peering into a mirror or water, the image staring back very likely is your own. I knew my hands best of all because I was so accustomed to using them, to watching them as I did things with them, even without thinking about them. But unless one studies oneself from head to toe every day, one isn't even aware of certain aspects of one's appearance.

But he was me. Or I was him. Del had already noted it, and now the renegadas and the metri did as well. The kid and I stood there staring at one another in startled recognition and unspoken, unsubtle territorial challenge, while Prima Rhannet began to laugh, and Nihko ... well, Nihko grinned widely in a highly superior and annoying fashion, brow-rings glinting.

They had tossed the bones, the captain and her mate. And won.

I touched the thong of sandtiger claws around my throat. The metri had given me back the brow ring she'd cut from the necklet, saying that so long as Nihko was present I'd do better to wear it lest I lose most of my meals. Since I had yet to learn a way of maintaining any measure of decorum while spewing up the contents of my belly, I accepted the ring, knotting it back into the thong. One of these days I was going to find out just why Nihko made me sick.

Other than for the usual reasons, of course.

The kid said something under his breath. The metri responded with a single word that flooded his face with the dusky color of embarrassment, or anger. As he glared at me I began to appreciate, in a very bizarre and detached sort of way, just why so many people gave way to me when I employed the most ferocious of my stares.

There was no subtlety about Del's godling, but he might learn it one day. If he lived.

"Family argument?" I asked lightly.

"They soil this household," the kid hissed, switching languages easily. "As do you."

"Herakleio," the metri said only.

His hands were fists. "They do," he insisted. "All of them. Prima is a disgrace to her father, her heritage--and Nihkolara is ikepra! This man"--he meant me, of course--"is a pretender." He shifted his furious glance to Del, all fired up to make other accusations, and realized rather abruptly he knew absolutely nothing about her.

Except that she was beautiful. And, I didn't doubt, that he had seen her in the pool.

Without clothing.

I watched the change in him. The anger, the touchy pride remained, but slid quietly beneath the surface as something else rose up. Color moved in his face again. He drew a breath, expelled it sharply through his nostrils, then consciously relaxed the fists into hands again.

I gave him marks for honesty: he did not try to charm the woman who had just seen his childish display of temper. He accepted that she had, was ashamed of it, but did not deny it.

The metri moved slightly forward in her chair, immediately commanding the attention of everyone in the room. She was smiling in triumphant delight, rather like a cat, as she looked first at the boy who claimed he was her kin, then at me who claimed I was not.