Sword Bound

Chapter 22

A TASTE OF SMOKE UPON THE AIR, the scent of burning wood. Before us, a deep gray-black column wound up to the skies, rising from the horizon.

Del and I rode abreast. “Fire,” I said.

She nodded. “We burn sick trees. We cut them down, feed them to a bonfire. To keep the others from blight.”

But I was uneasy. “Is that what it is?”

Before she could answer, Neesha turned back in his saddle. His tone was urgent, his expression deeply worried. “It’s too close. We have to go.”

“But if it’s sick trees they’re burning—” I began.

My son rode back to us, unwinding the mare’s lead-rope. “Take her. I can go faster without her.”

“Neesha—”

But his face was a mask. “Those are not burning trees.” And his bay was wheeled, sent headlong into a gallop straight away from us toward the smoke-clogged horizon.

“Oh, no,” Del said.

“Go,” I told her tautly, dallying the mare’s lead-rope around the saddle pommel. “I’ll be slower with her; go on.”

But not so much slower. As Del’s gelding kicked up clods of dirt, I sent the stud after her, nearly dragging the mare along until she sensed the urgency. She ran sideways to the end of the rope, ducked her head and let loose a buck. She tried to run even with the stud, then attempted to forge ahead. The rope kept her from it, the rough hempen rope that slid angrily across the stub of a former finger.

Neesha was gone. Del nearly so. There were things in this world more important than a horse. I unwound the mare’s rope, threw it at her. Hoped she wouldn’t trip. Then left her behind as the stud stretched out and ran, chasing Del’s gelding.

A house, and all of it burning, though the flames were dying. It wasn’t a fresh fire.

Neesha’s bay was loose and had taken himself away to stand upon a nearby ridge. Neesha himself, I couldn’t see. Del was dismounting, was setting the gelding free. Horses fear fire. Even those well-trained. Even the stud.

I reined in sharply, threw myself out of the saddle. Del was running toward the house. I followed swiftly, barely aware of aches and pains. Neesha was missing.

And then he came around from the back of the building, soot on his face. His eyes were wild. Through heavy coughing, he said, “I can’t get in! It’s too hot! Oh, gods above, I have to get in there!”

Soot coated his hands, his forearms. He had tried to lift charred timbers away, to tear them aside as he fought to go in. His hair was singed, flesh licked with flame. Coughing continued.

“Swords,” I said, even as Del unsheathed.

Neesha was in shock. He didn’t understand.

“Swords,” I repeated. “We’ll knock down some timbers, make our way in. We can do this, Neesha.” But inwardly, hiding in my heart, was the knowledge that it was much too late.

We knocked aside burning timbers as if in a sword-dance, sweeping with blades, smashing down charred wood. Three steps inside, we felt the heat. Too much heat. Neesha, frantic, was unheeding of his body, of the danger to himself.

Del, beside me, coughed in the smoke. “We can’t,” she said hoarsely. “It’s too late. Too hot. No one could be alive.”

A painful truth but truth nonetheless. Trying to suppress lung-tearing coughs, I took a long step forward, caught hold of the back of Neesha’s burnous; closed hands, through the fabric, on his harness. I yanked him backward so hard he dropped his sword and nearly stumbled. I swung him around, pushed him back through charred timbers, through the ruins of the house in which he had grown to manhood.

When he turned on me outside, when he shoved at me, when, with wild eyes, he tried to knock me aside, I tossed my sword away, grabbed handfuls of burnous at both of his shoulders, and threw him down. Threw him down hard.

“You’ll die,” I said flatly. “The smoke will fill your lungs. You’ll die choking to death. You might even catch fire.”

He tried to scrabble up. “I have to find them!”

As he gained his feet, I shoved him backward. Once, twice, thrice, slamming the heels of my hands into his shoulders. I backed him away, and away. “If they’re in there, they’re already dead! Nothing can be done! You’ll kill yourself for nothing!”

Neesha got to his feet once more, coughing, voice breaking from it. “I’m going in.”

“You will not.”

“I have to!”

“No,” I said, “you don’t.” And I knew what was coming, what he would say.

“You can’t stop—”

Before he could finish, I smashed a fist into his jaw. He dropped to the ground, limbs all askew. Unconscious. “Yes I can.”

“Gods,” Del said, voice raspy from smoke as she echoed Neesha. “Oh gods, Tiger…do you think they’re in there?”

“Tomorrow,” I said briefly, suppressing a cough. “We’ll look tomorrow. We ought to be able to make our way in. It will be hot, still, but the flames will have died, the smoke mostly lifted. If the bodies are in there, we’ll find them.”

Her expression was stricken. Blue eyes shone with tears. “I know what it is,” she said, voice uneven. “I know what it is, to lose a family.”

I couldn’t share that. I’d lost my family before I was even born.

“Gods—” she said. “Poor Neesha.”

I moved around his body. Squatted. Hooked my arms beneath his and dragged him farther away.

Del glanced around. Said, newly stricken, “Oh, no.”

I settled unconscious Neesha, putting loose limbs to rights. “What is it?”

“The corrals. Tiger, look. The poles are all broken.”

I followed her line of sight. “Horses,” I said heavily. “They came after the horses.”

Del looked back at the burning home. She ran two flattened, grimy hands across her skull, front to back, stretching hair taut, then dropped her hands to her sides. When she looked at me again, her eyes were cold. “We must go after them.”

“Of course we will, bascha. And we’ll bring the horses back. After the raiders are dead.”

Neesha roused some while later. In the meantime, as the flames died into charred timbers, as whiffs of smoke rose and coals burned hot, the wary horses returned. My stud, Del’s gelding, Neesha’s bay, and even the roan mare, who apparently did not like the idea of roaming across the grasslands on her own, trailing a lead-rope. All were bothered by the remains of the fire, but Del and I repaired one of the smaller corrals with a few strategic poles put into place and tied off with leather thongs, and turned the untacked horses into it. They had water from a trough. We pitched to them grass hay that had escaped the fire. Strangely, we found heaps of produce. We tossed that to the horses, too.

As late afternoon grayed out, the day promised an end. I’d struck Neesha hard, and it took him awhile to make his way back to awareness. Already his jaw was swollen. Bruises would follow.

And then he sat bolt upright, saw the remains of the house, remembered all, and scrambled wobbly to his feet.

In two long strides I had him by the arm. “Tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll go in tomorrow, if we can. It’s just too hot, Neesha.”

He tried to twist his arm out of my grasp. His face was smeared by soot, and there were some burns upon his hands. “I have to—”

Again, I didn’t let him finish. “No, you don’t. Neesha—if they’re in there, they’re dead. I don’t say that for effect, but because it’s true.”

“It is true.” Del joined us. “Neesha, you must see it. Either they died from smoke or burned to death.”

Each of us coughed from time to time, bringing up blackened mucus, breathing through the heaviness in our lungs.

He winced at her bluntness, but his attempt to break free of my hold was now less frantic, and I loosed him. As he stared at the house burned into ruin, his posture was one of defeat, of grief. He linked hands across the top of his skull, elbows jutting out.

“Gods,” he whispered brokenly in a tone harshened by smoke. “Gods, gods, gods.”

“We don’t know,” I told him quietly. “They may have gotten out.”

“Raiders,” Del said. “They wanted the horses.”

Neesha’s voice was thinned by grief. “I can’t wait until morning. Not to know? I can’t spend a night like that, waiting for dawn.” He lowered his arms, rubbed the back of a forearm across his brow, rearranging soot. “I must go in.”

Both Del and I shook our heads. “In the morning,” she said gently. “If they’re dead, they can wait.”

He could not accept it, looking from one to the other of us. His expression was wracked by sorrow, by a painful disbelief. “How can you tell me to wait, when someone may be alive in there?”

I could not imagine what he felt, or how he could believe there was a chance anyone had survived. “Neesha, what we can do is walk the area around the house. All sides, at increasing distance. If anyone did manage to escape, he or she may have made it away from the house.”

His tone was bitter. “Or died at the hands of raiders!”

I hadn’t said it, because it was so likely. The house, I could keep him from but not from anything else. Even if anyone had escaped the flames, I expected the raiders had probably caught and killed them.

“We’ll all go, the three of us,” I said quietly.

He wrapped both arms around his ribcage and hugged himself, staring at the ruins. He paced back and forth, struggling with the knowledge of what had come to him. He could not believe it. Could not. I could; I’d survived raiders even as my parents had not, born of my mother’s womb into Southron sand. Del survived raiders when she was fifteen, when all had been lost save for her and her brother; and she lost him later.

But my son had known only the kindness of life, brought up with no hardships of the body, no hardships of the soul. Del stepped closer to him, taking an arm into her own as she stood by his side. “I do know, Neesha. I know. But let this not change you as something very like this changed me.”

“My sister,” he said hollowly. “Would they have taken her?”

Oh, hoolies. I hadn’t thought about that. I’d been concentrating on the burned house and how to keep him out of it. But I understood the question and the two-edged answer: Had she not burned to death it was because she’d been taken for sport.

“We’ll look,” Del said. “There will be no answers until we have exhausted a search, in the house and out of it.” She paused. “Do you wish company while you search?”

After a moment, Neesha shook his head. “No. Let me be. Let me do this alone.”

She released his arm, and came back to me. There was loss in her eyes, a darkness of spirit. She remembered, I knew, what had been done to her. And worried, I knew also, that it might have been done as well to Neesha’s sister.

We searched in circles, each growing larger with every completion. Hoofprints aplenty, but human feet had left no impression upon the grass, only in the bare, beaten dirt immediately surrounding the house and corrals. Hoofprints and footsteps had carved narrow trails into the grass. But those small trails were made of frequent passage; someone running from the house, or riding from the house, making their own solitary way would not leave much to mark their going.

A man, a woman, a girl. But none of them was found. It gave us no joy, no relief, because until we could search the house we couldn’t know if the lack was good or bad. Hoofprints surrounded the house, led outward in rays from the house, from the corrals. Neesha mentioned pasturage apart from the corrals. But we could not imagine that any of his family had gone so far; had been allowed to go so far if seen by the raiders. And there were no tracks. Grass grew freely, tightly, and robustly. In it, no tracks had been laid by galloping horses, or by fleeing humans. Nonetheless, it offered the possibility that some of the horses had not been discovered by the raiders. A far pasture provided safety to frightened horses, and with so many mounts close to in corrals, I doubted the raiders would have bothered.

Eventually it was Neesha, as the sun went down, who said we should halt our search. It made no sense to continue looking; we had walked far, farther than anyone trying to escape the depredation of raiders could have managed; and in the dark we would see nothing. What we knew was that the corralled horses had been stolen and that we had no inkling of whether Neesha’s mother, stepfather, and sister had escaped or burned to death in the house.

Neesha would not sleep. Throughout the night he held vigil, praying for good fortune. And seeing, I knew, the faces of his kinfolk, the memories of life among them. None of us was hungry. We drank water, chewed journey bread so our bellies wouldn’t growl, and thought our own thoughts.

Del set her bedding very close to mine. We lay down together, full of silence. Del turned to me on hip and shoulder, scooting close; I wrapped an arm around her and held her tightly. We knew we could not offer peace to Neesha with simple words. Nor could Del and I banish our memories of hardship. But we lay there entwined, wordlessly sealing ourselves to one another, sharing strength to escape from how we had begun; to remember, now, we had a home between canyon walls, with sweet water and green grass and a life no longer fraught with daily danger.

Neesha, in his way, was being annealed as I had been atop the spires of Meteiera on ioSkandi; as a young Del was annealed on Staal-Ysta. I wanted to take it from him, but I couldn’t. It was for him to be annealed or to break of brittleness.