A Gathering Of Stones

10

Danny pushed the sweaty hair off Kori’s brow. “Why’d you change your mind?”

“I don’t know.” She moved her head as he started nibbling on an ear. “All those bubbles, maybe.”

“Mmmm.”

“Stop that.” She wriggling away from him. “Gods, man, I thought you’d be used up after…”

“All those bubbles.”

“They should bottle them and sell them to tired old men.” She giggled, then sobered. “That pretty pair. You didn’t tell me about them.”

“Didn’t know they were anywhere around.”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“Don’t believe me?”

“I melted three reasons out of your body.”

“Ah, well. I said, know.”

“What do you think, do we let them come?”

After tugging a fold of blanket from under him, he eased onto his back and pulled her against him, her head pillowed on his shoulder. When he was comfortable, he thought about the question. “It’s your call,” he said finally. “We could use the horses.”

“Yeh, the poor ponies, they’ve walked a long way. Why does Felsrawg want to come? I don’t think Simms does, not really.”

“Felsa looks round corners that aren’t there.”

“Huh?” She tilted her head to look up at him.

He brushed fine flyaway hair away from his mouth. “She’s decided to believe me about the Esmoon, but she doesn’t think I’d let Klukesharna get away. She intends to be there when I find it. It’s her key to Dirge Arsuid, if you’ll pardon the pun. She wants to go home.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Mmh.”

“What’s that mean?”

“If I answered that I’d feel like a damn whore.”

“Huh?”

“Selling my services. Or should I say servicings?”

“Do and you’ll lose your-asset.”

“Challenging me, Angyd Sorcelain?”

“Never, Addryd Sorcesieur. Offering my knee.”

“And a dainty one it is, if somewhat angular.” He rolled over swiftly, pinning her to the rustling mattress, shutting off her protest with mouth and hands. After several minutes of this, he lifted his head. “May I move where I need to be, love, or should I fear that militant knee of yours? I’ll take care to avoid it if you’ll just tell me which it is.”

“You talk too much.”

“Never say it. Ah, I’m crushed.”

“Hah! You stand tall for such a humble man.”

“You can bring me low quickly enough.”

“Talking again. It’s deeds I demand.”

“Command me, Angyd Sorcelain.”

“Hear me, Addryd Sorcesieur. Do again what you did before. If you can.”

“Be ready, Angyd Sorcelain. Here I come.”

“So soon? Ah! that tickles.”

“Good. Come has another meaning, love, you have a one-rut mind.”

“No, a rutting friend, pra… aise be t… to Tungjiiii!”

Korimenei left the ponies behind, paying a stablemaster for their care with money she borrowed from Danny, adding a gloss on the coins by summoning a salamander and holding him overhead to show the man what would happen to him if he mistreated or neglected them. They were affectionate, hardworking little beasts and they’d been part of her life so long it was like tearing an arm off to leave them behind, but they were exhausted by the rough going and would have a much easier winter in the Gsany village Fal Fenyott, dining on grain and rich mountain hay.

Always a breath ahead of storms as if the northwinds and the snow were chasing them, the mismated quartet rode south on the wave of power pouring from the melded sorcerors, unwilled as breathing and copious as an artesian spring, sustaining humans and horses both, injecting into them the strength for enormous effort, letting them flee from dark into dark without stopping to rest or breaking down.

Simms withdrew into himself as the days passed. With the poison out of him, he didn’t see any point in chasing the talisman; he had no real wish to return to Dirge Arsuid, in fact there were a lot of reasons he’d prefer not to, his lover had betrayed him to the Ystaffel when the guards came searching for him, his family had cast him out long before that, he was bored, he saw no challenges left in his profession or personal life. Lots of reasons. He watched Felsrawg nosing about Danny Blue and found the sight distasteful; the bond forged between the two thieves as they fought desperately to survive dissolved as soon as the danger was removed. On the tenth morning of that precipitous journey, he lost patience and left the group, riding east, bound for the river Sharroud and transport south to Bandrabahr. There he’d have a wide choice of destinations. Remembering what Danny had said about Croaldhu he had a vague notion of visiting that island, but mostly he wanted to escape the cold, the constant exhaustion and the disturbing urgency of that charge southward. He didn’t understand what was happening and he didn’t want to.

Korimenei drove Danny and Felsrawg south and south and yet south; she was more and more aware of the child growing in her, of the need to find a place where she could rest and feel safe. She wanted this hideous journey over, she wanted to be done with her brother’s demands. The eidolon came every night to quiver over her after Danny had gone to sleep; Tre said nothing, but she felt him pushing at her to hurry, hurry, hurry. The passionate playful exchanges between her and Danny Blue, begun in Fal Fenyott and continued through the first few days of travel had turned brutish and wordless, greedy and needy, like the time in Ambijan. After Simms left she felt odd, lying with Danny while Felsrawg was rolled in her blankets outside the tent, listening… maybe not listening, but hearing it all; she was uncomfortable, it was too much like a public performance, but she couldn’t stop, or let him stop. It was as if something was generated between them that was necessary to the journey and until that journey was finished she could neither understand it or do without it.

Danny Blue rode beside Korimenei, watching her, worrying about her. His half-sire Daniel grew up in a vast and fecund family, Family Azure on Rainbow’s End in another reality altogether, but a woman here was no different from a woman there so the Daniel phasma was soon aware of Kori’s pregnancy and passed the word to his semi-son. The Ahzurdan phasma hung about, gibbering his fear and distaste, his growing resentment of Kori, sneering at Danny for being so protective of another man’s child. The Daniel phasma snarled back, scornful of such intolerance. In Family Azure all children were treasured, all mothers were the responsibility of the Family, not merely the particular male who’d got the woman pregnant; the Daniel phasma’s protectiveness was automatic and all the more powerful because of that and it was transferred almost intact to Danny Blue.

There was another reason for the sharpening conflict between the two phasmas and the headache they were giving Danny Blue. Korimenei could send him home-or rather into Daniel’s reality, a place Danny was more and more thinking of as home. He didn’t have to hunt up Settsimaksimin, he had his transport; after seeing how easily she handled the massive mancat, he was sure she could do it once she was free to put her mind to the problem. He was determined to stay with her and give her what protection he could until that moment came.

Felsrawg’s hopes eroded as the days passed. By the time they reached the Gallindar Plains, she was forced to concede she’d make a mistake. Danny Blue wasn’t going after Klukesharna, he was tied to the heels of that woman. He trotted after her like a dog after a bitch in heat. It wasn’t an edifying sight, Felsrawg thought, and burned with a jealousy she wouldn’t admit even to herself. Especially to herself. She thought about leaving like Simms had, but she stayed. I’ve nowhere else to go and I want to see what happens when we reach the end of this journey, maybe I can wring some profit out of it, the woman’s got a reason for half killing us like this, I want to know what it is. She refused to countenance what she considered her silly yearning for the man, it was too demeaning. She wasn’t some sickly teener bitch, she’d survived a two decades against the odds, been wholly on her own for the second of those decades. But she couldn’t help going soft in the middle whenever she looked at him. And she couldn’t stop wanting to skin that sorcelain who had her claws in him.

South and south and south they raced, outrunning hostile Gallinasi bands, flattening Gallinasi youths out to win their coup-studs with foreign ears and noses, south and south until they reached the shore of the Notoea Tha, and even there Korimenei wouldn’t stop, barely paused, terrifying a misfortunate smuggler (who’d come slipping through the Shoals to trade Matamulli brandy for Gallindar pearls) into carrying them yet farther south, down the Fingercoast of Cheonea.

On a cold blustery morning, gray with a storm not yet broken, the smuggler landed Korimenei, Danny Blue and Felsrawg Lawdrawn at the mouth of a smallish creek, then hoisted sail again and got out of there fast as the wind would take him.