The Ladies of Mandrigyn

1

What in the name of the Cold Hells is this?” Sun Wolf held the scrap of unfolded paper between stubby fingers that were still slightly stained with blood.

Starhawk, his tall, rawboned second-in-command, glanced up from cleaning the grime of battle off the hilt of her sword and raised dark, level brows inquiringly. Outside, torchlight reddened the windy night. The camp was riotous with the noise of victory; the mercenaries of Wrynde and the troops of the City of Kedwyr were uninhibitedly celebrating the final breaking of the siege of Melplith.

“What’s it look like?” she asked reasonably.

“It looks like a poxy proposition.” He handed it to her, the amber light of the oil lamp overhead falling over his body, naked to the waist and glittering with a light curly rug of gold hair. Starhawk had been fighting under his command for long enough to know that, if he had actually thought it nothing more than a proposition, he would have put it in the fire without a word.

Sun Wolf, Commander of the Mercenaries, Camp of Kedwyr below the walls of Melplith, from Sheera Galernas of Mandrigyn, greetings. I will be coming to you in your tent tonight with a matter of interest to you. For my sake and that of my cause, please be alone, and speak to no one of this. Sheera.

“Woman’s handwriting,” Starhawk commented, and ran her thumb consideringly along the gilt edge of the expensive paper.

Sun Wolf looked at her sharply from beneath his curiously tufted brows. “If she wasn’t from Mandrigyn, I’d say it was the local madam trying to drum up business.”

Starhawk nodded in absent-minded agreement.

Outside the tent, the noise scaled up into a crescendo. Boozy catcalls mixed with cries of encouragement and yells of “Kill him! Kill the bastard!” Between the regular troops of the City of Kedwyr and the City’s Outland Militia Levies, a lively hatred existed, perhaps stronger than the feeling that either body of warriors had toward the hapless citizen-soldiers of the besieged town of Melplith. It was a conflict that the Wolf and his mercenaries had stayed well clear off the Wolf because he made it his policy never to get involved in local politics, and his men because of a blood-chilling directive from their captain on the subject. The noises of drunken murder did not concern him—there wasn’t a man in his troop who would have so much as stayed to watch.

“Mandrigyn,” Starhawk said thoughtfully. “Altiokis conquered that city last spring, didn’t he?”

Sun Wolf nodded and settled himself into a fantastic camp chair made of staghorn bound with gold, looted from some tribal king in the far northeast. Most of the big tent’s furnishings had been plundered from somewhere or other. The peacock hangings that separated it into two rooms had once adorned the bedroom of a prince of the K’Chin Desert. The cups of translucent, jade-green lacquer and gold had belonged to a merchant on the Bight Coast. The graceful ebony table, its delicate inlays almost hidden under the bloody armor that had been dumped upon it, had once graced the wine room of a gentlemanly noble of the Middle Kingdoms, before his precious vintages had been swilled by the invading armies of his enemies and he himself had been dispatched beyond such concerns.

“The city went fast,” Sun Wolf remarked, picking up a rag and setting to work cleaning his own weapons. “Basically, it was the same situation as we had here in Melplith—factional splits in the parliament, scandal involving the royal family—they have a royal family there, or they did have, anyway—the city weakened by internal fighting before Altiokis marched down the pass. I’m told there were people there who welcomed him as a liberator.”

Starhawk shrugged. “No weirder than some of the things the Trinitarian heretics believe,” she joked, deadpan, and he grinned. Like most northerners, the Hawk held to the Old Faith against the more sophisticated theologies of the Triple God.

“The Wizard King’s Citadel has been on Mandrigyn’s back doorstep for a hundred and fifty years,” the, Wolf continued after a moment. “Last year they signed some kind of treaty with him. I could see it coming even then.”

Starhawk shoved her sword back into its sheath and wiped her fingers on a rag. Sun Wolf’s talent for collecting and sorting information was uncanny, but it was a skill that served him well. He had a knack for gathering rumors, extrapolating political probabilities from crop prices and currency fluctuations and the most trivial bits of information that made their way north to his broken-down stronghold at the old administrative town of Wrynde. Thus he and his men had been on the spot in the Gwarl Peninsula when the fighting had broken out between the trading rivals of Kedwyr and Melplith. Kedwyr had hired the Wolf and his troop at an astronomical sum.

It didn’t always work that way—in her eight years as a mercenary in Sun Wolf’s troop, Starhawk had seen one or two spectacular pieces of mistiming—but on the whole it had enabled the Wolf to maintain his troops in better-than-average style, fighting in the summer and sitting out the violence of the winter storms in the relative comfort of the half-ruined town of Wrynde.

Like all mercenary troops. Sun Wolf’s shifted from year to year in size and composition, though they centered around a hard core that had been with him for years. As far as Starhawk knew, Sun Wolf was the only mercenary captain who operated a regular school of combat in the winter months. The school itself was renowned throughout the West and the North for the excellence of its fighters. Every winter, when the rains made war impossible, young men and occasional young women made the perilous journey through the northern wastelands that had once been the agricultural heart of the old Empire of Gwenth to the ruined and isolated little town of Wrynde, there to ask to be taught the hard arts of war.

There were always wars to fight somewhere. Since the moribund Empire of Gwenth had finally been riven apart by the conflict between the Three Gods and the One, there had always been wars—over the small bits of good land among the immense tracts of bad, over the trade with the East in silk and amber and spices, over religion, or over nothing. Starhawk, whose early training had given her a taste for such things, had once explained the theology behind the Schism to the Wolf. Being a barbarian from the far north, he worshipped the spirits of his ancestors and would cheerfully take money from proponents of either faith. An understanding of the situation had only amused him, as she knew it would. Lately the wars had been over the rising of the Wizard King Altiokis, who was expanding his own empire from the dark Citadel of Grimscarp, engulfing the Thanes who ruled the countryside and such cities as Mandrigyn.

“Will you see this woman from Mandrigyn?” she asked.

“Probably.” The noise of the fight outside peaked in a crazy climax of yelling, punctuated by the heavy crack of the whips of the Kedwyr military police. It was the fourth fight they’d heard since returning to the camp after the sacking of the town was done; victory was headier than any booze ever brewed.

Starhawk collected her gear—sword, dagger, mail shirt—preparatory to returning to her own tent. Melplith stood on high ground, above its sheltered bay—one of those arid regions whose chief crops of citrus and olives had naturally turned its inhabitants to trade for their living. Chill winds now blew up from the choppy waters of the bay, making the lamp flame flicker in its topaz glass and chilling her flesh through the damp cotton of her dark, embroidered shirt.

“You think it’s a job?”

“I think she’ll offer me one.”

“Will you take it?”

The Wolf glanced over at her briefly. His eyes, in this light, were pale gold, tike the wines of the Middle Kingdoms, He was close to forty, and his tawny hair was thinning, but there was no gray either in it or in the ragged mustache that drooped like a clump of yellow-brown winter weeds from the underside of a craggy and much-bent nose. The power and thickness of his chest and shoulders made him seem taller than his six feet when he was standing up; seated and at rest, he reminded her of a big, dusty lion. “Would you go against Altiokis?” he asked her.

She hesitated, not speaking her true answer to that. She had heard stories of the Wizard King since she was a tiny girl—bizarre, distorted tales of his conquests, his sins, and his greed. Horrible tales were told of what happened to those who had opposed him, over the timeless years of his uncanny existence.

Her true answer, the one she did not say aloud, was: Yes. if you wanted me to.

What she said was, “Would you?”

He shook his head. “I’m a soldier,” he said briefly. “I’m not wizard. I couldn’t go against a wizard, and I wouldn’t take my people against one. There are two things that my father always told me, if I wanted to live to grow old—don’t fall in love and don’t mess with magic.”

“Three things,” Starhawk corrected, with one of her rare, fleeting grins. “Don’t argue with fanatics.”

“That comes under magic. Or arguing with drunks, I’m not sure which. I don’t understand how there could be one God or three Gods or five or more, but I do know that I had ancestors, drunken, lecherous clowns that they were... Hello, sweetpea.”

The curtain that divided the tent parted, and Fawn came in, brushing the last dampness from the heavy curls of her mink-brown hair. The pale green gauze of her gown made her eyes seem greener, almost emerald. She was Sun Wolf’s latest concubine, eighteen, and heartbreakingly beautiful. “Your bath’s ready,” she said, coming behind the camp chair where he sat to kiss the thin spot in his hair at the top of his head.

He took her hand where it lay on his shoulder and, with a curiously tender gesture for so large and rough-looking a man, he pressed his lips to the white skin of her wrist. “Thanks,” he said. “Hawk, will you wait for a few minutes? If this skirt wants to see me alone, would you take Fawn over to your tent for a while?”

Starhawk nodded. She had seen a series of his girls come and go, all of them beautiful, soft-spoken, pliant, and a little helpless. The camp tonight, after the sacking of the town, was no place for a girl not raised to killing, even if she was the mistress of a man like Sun Wolf.

“So you’re receiving ladies alone in your tent now, are you?” Fawn chided teasingly.

With a movement too swift to be either fought or fled, he was out of his chair, catching her up, squeaking, in his arms as he rose. She wailed, “Stop it! No! I’m sorry!” as he bore her off through the curtain into the other room, her squeals scaling up into a desperate crescendo that ended in a monumental and steamy splash.

Without a flicker of an eyelid, Starhawk shouldered her war gear, called out, “I’ll be back for you in an hour, Fawn,” and departed; only when she was outside did she allow herself a small, amused grin.

She returned in company with An, a young man who was Sun Wolf’s other lieutenant and who rather resembled an adolescent black bear. They bade the Wolf a grave good evening, collected the damp, subdued, and rather pink-cheeked Fawn, and made their way across the camp. The wind had risen again, cold off the sea with the promise of the winter’s deadly storms; drifts of wood smoke from the camp’s fires blew into their eyes. Above them, the fires in the city flared, fanned by the renewed breezes, and a sulfurous glow outlined the black crenellations of the walls. The night tasted raw, wild, and strange, still rank with blood and broken by the wailing of women taken in the sacking of the town.

“Things settling down?” the Hawk asked.

Ari shrugged. “Some. The militia units are already drunk. Gradduck—that tin-pot general who commanded the City Troops—is taking all the credit for breaking the siege.”

Starhawk feigned deep thought. “Oh, yes,” she remembered at length. “The one the Chief said couldn’t lay siege to a pothouse.”

“No, no,” Ari protested, “it wasn’t a pothouse—an outhouse ...”

Voices yelled Ari’s name, calling him to judge an athletic competition that was as indecent as it was ridiculous, and he laughed, waved to the women, and vanished into the darkness. Starhawk and Fawn continued to walk, the wind-torn torchlight banding their faces in lurid colors—the Hawk long-legged and panther-graceful in her man’s breeches and doublet, Fawn shy as her namesake amid the brawling noise of the camp, keeping close to Starhawk’s side. As they left the noisier precincts around the wine issue, the girl asked, “Is it true he’s being asked to go against Altiokis?”

“He won’t do it,” Starhawk said. “Any more than he’d work for him. He was approached for that, too, years ago. He won’t meddle with magic one way or the other, and I can’t say that I blame him. Altiokis is news of the worst possible kind.”

Fawn shivered in the smoky wind and drew the spiderweb silk of her shawl tighter about her shoulders. “Were they all like that? Wizards, I mean? Is that why they all died out?”

In the feeble reflection of lamplight from the tents, her green eyes looked huge and transparent. Damp tendrils of hair clung to her cheeks; she brushed them aside, watching Starhawk worriedly. Like most people in the troop, she was a little in awe of that steely and enigmatic woman.

Starhawk ducked under the door flap of her tent, and held it aside for Fawn to pass. “I don’t know if that’s why the wizards finally died out,” she said. “But I do know they weren’t all evil like Altiokis. I knew a wizard once when I was a little girl. She was very good.”

Fawn stared at her in surprise that came partly from astonishment that Starhawk had ever been a little girl. In a way, it seemed inconceivable that she had ever been anything but what she was now: a tail, leggy cheetah of a woman, colorless as fine ivory-pale hair, pewter-gray eyes—save where the sun had darkened the fine-grained, flawless skin of her face and throat to burnt gold. Her light, cool voice was remarkably soft for a warrior’s, though she was said to have a store of invective that could raise blisters on tanned oxhide. It was more believable of her that she had known a wizard than that she had been a little girl.

“I—I thought they were all gone, long before we were born.”

“No,” the Hawk said. The lamplight sparkled off the brass buckles that studded her sheepskin doublet as she fetched a skin of wine and two cups. Her tent was small and, like her, neat and spare. She had packed away her gear earlier. The only things remaining on the polished wood folding table were the gold-and-shell winecups and a pack of greasy cards. Starhawk was generally admitted to be a shark of poker—with her face, Fawn reflected, she could hardly be anything else.

“I thought that, too,” Starhawk continued, coming back as Fawn seated herself on the edge of the narrow bed. “I didn’t know Sister Wellwa was a wizard for—oh, years.”

“She was a nun?” Fawn asked, startled.

Starhawk weighed her answer for a moment, as if picking her words carefully. Then she nodded. “The village where I grew up was built around the Convent of St. Cherybi in the West. Sister Wellwa was the oldest nun there—I used to see her every day, sweeping the paths outside with her broom made of sticks. As I said, I didn’t know then that she was a wizard.”

“How did you find out?” Fawn asked. “Did she tell you?”

“No.” Starhawk folded herself into her chair. Like everything else in the tent, it was plain, bare, and easy to pack in a hurry. “The countryside around the village was very wild—I don’t know if you’re familiar with the West, but it’s a land of rock and thin forest, rising toward the sea cliffs. A hard land. Dangerous, too. I’d gone into the woods to gather berries or something silly like that—something I wasn’t supposed to do. I was probably escaping from my brothers. And—and there was a nuuwa.”

Fawn shivered. She had seen nuuwa, dead, or at a distance. It was possible, Starhawk thought, watching her, that she had also seen their victims.

“I ran,” the Hawk continued unemotionally. “I was very young, I’d never seen one before, and I thought that, since it didn’t have any eyes, it couldn’t follow me. I must have thought at first that it was just an eyeless man. But it came after me, groaning and slobbering, crashing through the woods. I never looked back, but I could hear it behind me, getting closer as I came out of the woods. I ran through the rocks up the hill toward the Convent, and Sister Wellwa was outside, sweeping the path as she always was. And she—she raised her hand—and it was as if fire exploded from her fingers, a ball of red and blue fire that she flung at the nuuwa’s head. Then she caught me up in her arms, and we ran together through the door and shut and bolted it. Later we found places where the nuuwa had tried to chew through the doorframe.”

She was silent; if any of the horror of that memory stirred in her heart, it did not show on her fine-boned, enigmatic face. It was Fawn who shuddered and made a small, sickened noise in her throat.

“It was the only time I saw her do magic,” Starhawk continued after a moment. “When I asked her about it later, she told me she had only grabbed me and carried me inside.”

Across the rim of the untasted cup. Fawn studied the older woman for a moment more. Rumor in the camp had it that the Hawk had once been a nun herself, before she had elected to leave the Convent and follow the Wolf. Though Fawn had never believed it before, something in this story made her wonder if it might be true. There were elements of asceticism and mysticism in Starhawk; Fawn knew that she meditated daily, and the tent was certainly as barren as a nun’s cell. Though a cold-blooded and ruthless warrior, the Hawk was never senselessly brutal—but then, few of the handful of women in Wolfs troop were.

It was on the tip of Fawn’s tongue to ask her, but Starhawk was not a woman of whom one asked questions without permission. Besides, Fawn could think of no reason why anyone would have left the comforts of the Convent to follow the brutal trail of war.

Instead she asked, “Why did she lie?”

“The Mother only knows. She was a very old lady then—she died a year or so after, and I don’t think anyone else in the Convent ever knew what she was.”

Fawn’s tapering fingers toyed with the cup, the diamonds of her rings winking like teardrops in the dim, golden light. Somewhere quite close, a drunken chorus in another tent began to sing.

“All in the town of Kedwyr, A hundred years ago or more, There lived a lass named Sella...”

“I have often wondered,” Fawn said quietly, “about wizards. Why is Altiokis the only wizard left in the world? Why hasn’t he died, in all these years? What happened to all the others?”

Starhawk shrugged. “The Mother only knows,” she said again. As ever, her face gave away nothing; if it was a question that had ever crossed her mind, she did not show it. Instead she slapped the deck of cards before Fawn. “Bank?”

Fawn shuffled deftly despite her fashionably long, tinted fingernails. It was one of the first things she had learned when she’d been sold to Sun Wolf two years ago as a terrified virgin of sixteen—mostly in self-defense, since the Wolf and Starhawk were cutthroat card players.

Watching her, Starhawk reflected how out of place the girl looked here. Fawn—whose name had certainly been something else before she’d been kidnapped en route from her father’s home in the Middle Kingdoms to a finishing school in Kwest Mralwe—had clearly been brought up in an atmosphere of taste and elegance. The clothes and jewelry she picked for herself spoke of it. Starhawk, though raised in an environment both countrified and austere, had done enough looting in the course of eight years of sieges to understand the difference between new—rich tawdriness and quality. Every line of Fawn spoke of fastidious taste and careful breeding, as much at odds with the nunlike barrenness of Starhawk’s living quarters as she was with the rather barbaric opulence of the Chief’s.

What had she been? the Hawk wondered. A nobleman’s daughter? A merchant’s? Those white hands, delicate amid their carefully chosen jewelry, had certainly never handled anything harsher than a man’s flesh in all her life. The loveliest that money could buy, Starhawk thought, with a wry twinge of bitterness for the girl’s sake—whether she wanted to be bought or not.

Fawn laid the cards down, undealt. In repose, her face looked suddenly tired. “What’s going to become of him. Hawk?” she asked quietly.

Starhawk shrugged, deliberately misunderstanding. “I can’t see the Chief being crazy enough to get mixed up in any affair having to do with magic,” she began, and Fawn shook her head impatiently.

“It isn’t just this,” she insisted. “If he goes on as he’s doing, he’s going to slip up one day. He’s the best, they say—but he’s also forty. Is he going to go on leading troops into battle and wintering in Wrynde, until one day he’s a little slow dodging some enemy’s axe? If it isn’t Altiokis, how long will it be before it’s something else?”

Starhawk looked away from those suddenly luminous eyes. Rather gruffly, she said, “Oh, he’ll probably conquer a city, make a fortune, and die stinking rich at the age of ninety. The old bastard’s welfare isn’t worth your losing sleep over.”

Fawn laughed shakily at the picture presented, and they spoke of other things. But on the whole, as she dealt the cards, Starhawk wished that the girl had not touched that way upon her own buried forebodings.

Sun Wolf felt, rather than heard, the woman’s soft tread outside his tent; he was watching the entrance when the flap was moved aside. The woman came in with the wild sea smell of the night.

With the lamps at his back, their light catching in his thinning, dust-colored hair and framing his face in gold, he did look like a sun wolf, the big, deadly, tawny hunter of the eastern steppes. The woman put back the hood from her hair.

“Sheera Galernas?” he asked quietly.

“Captain Sun Wolf?”

He gestured her to take the other chair. She was younger than he had thought, at most twenty-five. Her black hair curled thickly around a face that tapered from wide, delicate cheekbones to a pointed chin. Her lips, full almost to the corners of her mouth, were sensual and dark as the lees of wine. Her deep-set eyes seemed wine-colored, too, their lids stained violet from sleepless nights. She was tall for a woman and, as far as he could determine under the muffling folds of her cloak, well set up.

For a moment neither spoke. Then she said, “You’re different from what I had thought.”

“I can’t apologize for that.” He’d put on a shirt and breeches and a brown velvet doublet. The hair on the backs of his arms caught the light as he folded his strong, heavy hands.

She stirred in her chair, wary, watching him. He found himself wondering what it would be like to bed her and if the experiment would be worth the trouble it could cost. “I have a proposition for you,” she said at last, meeting his eyes with a kind of anger, defying him to look at her face instead of her body.

“Most ladies who come to my tent do.”

Her skin deepened to clay-red along the cheekbones and her nostrils flared a little, like a horse scenting battle. But she only said, “What would you say to ten thousand pieces of gold, to bring your troop and do a job for me in Mandrigyn?”

He shrugged. “I’d say no.”

She sat up, truly shocked. “For ten thousand gold pieces?” The sum was enormous—five thousand would have bought the entire troop for a summer’s campaign and been thought generous. He wondered where she’d come up with it, if in fact she intended to pay him. The size of the sum inclined him to doubt it.

“I wouldn’t go against Altiokis for fifty thousand,” he said calmly. “And I wouldn’t tie up on a word-of-mouth proposition with a skirt from a conquered city for a hundred, wizard or no wizard.”

As he’d intended, it prodded her out of her calm. The flush in her face deepened, for she was a woman to whom few men had ever said no. An edge of ugly rage slid into her voice. “Are you afraid?”

“Madam,” Sun Wolf said, “if it’s a question of having my bowels pulled out through my eye sockets, I’m afraid. There’s no amount of money in the world that would make me pick a quarrel with Altiokis.”

“Or is it just that you’d prefer to deal with a man?”

She’d spat the words at him in spite, but he gave them due consideration; after a moment, he replied, “As a matter of fact, yes,” His hand forestalled her intaken breath. “I know where women stand in Mandrigyn. I know they’d never put one in public office and they’d never send one on a mission like this. And if you’re from Mandrigyn, you know that.”

She subsided, her breath coming fast and thick with anger, but she didn’t deny his words.

“So that means it’s private,” he went on. “Ten thousand gold pieces is one hell of a lot of tin from a private party, especially from a city that’s just been taken and likely tapped for indemnity for whatever wasn’t carried off in the sack. And since I know women are vengeful and sneaky...”

“Rot your eyes, you—” she exploded, and he held up his hand for silence again.

“They have reasons for fighting underhand the way they do, and I understand them, but the fact remains that I don’t trust a desperate woman. A woman will do anything.”

“You’re right,” she said quietly, her eyes burning with an eerie intensity into his, her voice deadly calm. “We will do anything. But I don’t think you understand what it is to love your city, to be proud of it, ready to lay down your life to defend it, if need be—and not be allowed to participate in its government, not even be allowed by the canons of good manners to talk politics. Holy Gods, we’re not even permitted to walk about the streets unveiled! To see the town torn apart by factionalism and conquered, with all the men who did fight for it led away in chains while the wicked, the venal, and the greedy sit in the seats of power...

“Do you know why no man came to you tonight?

“For decades—centuries—Altiokis has coveted Mandrigyn. He has taken over the lands of the old mountain Thanes and of the clans to the southeast of us; he sits like a toad across the overland trade roads to the East. But he’s landlocked, and Mandrigyn is the key to the Megantic. We made trade concessions to him, turned a blind eye to encroachments along the border, signed treaties. You know that’s never enough.

“His agents stirred up trouble and factions in the city, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the rightful Prince, Tarrin of the House of Her, split the parliament—and when we were exhausted with fighting one another, he and his armies marched down Iron Pass. Tarrin led the whole force of the men of Mandrigyn to meet them in battle, in the deeps of the Tchard Mountains. The next day, Altiokis and his armies came into the city.”

Her eyes focused suddenly, an amber gleam deep in their brown depths. “I know Tarrin is still alive.”

“How do you know?”

“Tarrin is my lover.”

“I’ve had more women in my life,” Sun Wolf said tiredly, “than I’ve had pairs of boots, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you where one of them is now.”

“You’d know best about that,” she sneered. “The men were all made slaves in the mines beneath the Tchard Mountains—Altiokis has miles of mines; no one knows how deep, or how many armies of slaves work there. The girls from the city sometimes go up there to do business with the overseers. One of them saw Tarrin there.” The expression of her face changed, suffused, suddenly, with tender eagerness and the burning anger of revenge. “He’s alive.”

“We’ll skip over how this girl knew him,” Sun Wolf said. He was gratified to see that tender expression turn to one of fury. “I’ll ask you this. You want me and my men to rescue him from Altiokis’ mines?”

Almost trembling with anger, Sheera took a grip on herself and said, “Yes. Not Tarrin only, but all of the men of Mandrigyn.”

“So they can go back down the mountain, retake the city, and live happily forever after.”

“Yes.” She was leaning forward, her eyes blazing, her cloak fallen aside to reveal the dark purple satin of her gown, pearled over like dew with opal beads. “No man came to you because there was no man to come. The only males left in Mandrigyn are old cripples, little boys, and slaves—and the cake-mouthed, poxy cowards who would sell their children to feed Altiokis’ dogs, if the price were a little power. We raised the money among us—we, the ladies of Mandrigyn. We’ll pay you anything, anything you want. It’s the only hope for our city.”

Her voice rose, strong as martial music, and Sun Wolf leaned back in his chair and studied her thoughtfully. He took in the richness of the gown she wore and the softness of those unworked hands. Supposing the city were taken without sack—which would be to Altiokis’ advantage if he wanted to continue using it as a port. Sun Wolf was familiar with the soft-handed burghers who paid other men to do their fighting, but he had never given much thought to the strength or motivations of their wives. Maybe it was possible that they’d raised the sum, he thought. Golden earrings, household funds, monies embezzled from husbands too cowardly or too prudent to go to war. Possible, but not probable.

“Ten thousand gold pieces is the ransom of a king,” he began.

“It is the ransom of a city’s freedom!” she bit back at him.

Starhawk was right, he thought. There are other fanatics besides religious ones.

“But it isn’t just the cost of men’s lives,” he returned quietly. “I wouldn’t lead them against Altiokis and they wouldn’t go.

It’s autumn already. The storms will break in a matter of days. It’s a long march to Mandrigyn overland through the mountains.”

“I have a ship,” she began.

“You’re not getting me on the ocean at this time of year. I have better things to do with my body than use it for crab food. We’ll be a few days mopping up here, and by then the storms will have started. I’m not waging a winter war. Not against Altiokis—not in the Tchard Mountains.”

“There’s a woman on board my ship who can command the weather,” Sheera persisted. “The skies will remain clear until we’re safe in port.”

“A wizard?” He grunted. “Don’t make me laugh. There are no wizards anymore, bar Altiokis himself—and I wouldn’t take up with you if you had one. I won’t mix myself in a wizards’ war.

“And,” he went on, his voice hardening, “I’m not interested in any case. I won’t take ten thousand gold pieces to buy my men coffins, and that’s what it would come to, going against Altiokis, winter or summer, mountains or flatland. Your girlfriend may have seen Tarrin alive, lady, but I’ll wager your ten thousand gold pieces against a plug copper that his brain and his soul weren’t his own. And a plug copper’s all my own life would be worth if I were fool enough to take your poxy money.”

She was on her feet then, her face mottled with rage. “What do you want?” she demanded in a low voice. “Anything. Me—or any woman in the city or all of us. Dream-sugar? We can get you a bushel of it if you want it. Slaves? The town crawls with them. Diamonds? Twenty thousand gold pieces ...”

“You couldn’t raise twenty thousand gold pieces, woman, I don’t know how you raised ten,” Sun Wolf snapped. “And I don’t touch dream-sugar. You? I’d sooner bed a poisonous snake.”

That touched her on the raw, for she was a woman whom men had begged for since she was twelve. But the rage in her was something more—condensed, like the core of a flame—and it was this that had caused Sun Wolf to speak what sounded like an insult but was, in fact, the literal truth. She was a dangerous woman, passionate, intelligent, and ruthless; a woman who could wait months or years for revenge. Sun Wolf did not rise from his chair, but he gauged the distance between them and calculated how swiftly she might move if she struck.

Then a draft of wild smoky night breathed suddenly through the tent, and Sheera swung around as Starhawk paused in the doorway. For a moment, the women stood facing each other, the one in her dark gown sewn with shadowy opals, with her wild and perilous beauty, the other windburned and plain as bread, her man’s doublet accentuating her wide shoulders and narrow hips, the angular face with its cropped hair. Starhawk’s rolled-back sleeves showed forearms muscled like a man’s, all crimped with pink war scars.

They sized each other up in silence. Then Sheera thrust past Starhawk, through the tent flap, to vanish into the blood-scented night.

The Hawk looked after her in silence for a moment, then turned back to her chief, who still sat in his camp chair, his hands folded before him and his fox-yellow eyes brooding. He sighed, and the tension seemed to ebb from his muscles as much as it ever did on campaign. The door curtain moved again, and Fawn entered, her dark hair fretted to tangles, falling in a soft web over her slender back.

Sun Wolf stood up and shook his head in answer to his lieutenant’s unasked question. “May the spirits of his ancestors,” he said quietly, “help the poor bastard who falls afoul of her.”