The Ladies of Mandrigyn

13

The slaves cell of the jail under the city Records Office was damp, filthy, and smelted like a privy; the straw underfoot crawled with black and furtive life. For as many people as there were chained to the walls, the place was oddly quiet. Even those lucky enough to be fettered to the wall by a long chain-long enough to allow them to sit or lie, at any rate—had the sense to keep their mouths shut. Those who, like Sun Wolf, had had their slave collars locked to the six inches or so of short chain could only lean against the dripping bricks in exhausted silence, unable to move, to rest, or to reach the scummy trough of water that ran down the center of the cell.

The Wolf wasn’t certain how long he’d been there. Hours, he thought, shifting his cramped knees. Like most soldiers, he could relax in any position; it would be quite some time before the strain began to tell on him. Others were not so fortunate, or perhaps they had been here longer. There was a good-looking boy of twenty or so, with a soft mop of auburn hair that hung over his eyes, who had fallen three times since the Wolf had been there. Each time he’d been brought up choking as the iron slip-collar tightened around the flesh of his throat. He was standing now, but he looked white and sick, his breathing labored, his eyes glazed and desperate, as if he could feel the last of his strength leaking away with every minute that passed. The Wolf wondered what crime the boy had committed, if any.

Across the room, a man was moaning and retching where he lay in the unspeakable straw—the opening symptoms to full-scale drug withdrawal. Sun Wolf shut his eyes wearily and wondered how long it would be before someone got word to Sheera of where he was.

Drypettis would do that much, he told himself. She had been in the wrong to call him by his title rather than by his name; but much as she might hate to admit she’d made a mistake, and much as she hated him for supplanting her as Sheera’s right hand in the conspiracy, she wouldn’t endanger Sheera’s cause for the sake of her own pride—at least he hoped not.

The far-off tramp of feet came to him. Iron ranted. He heard Derroug’s rather shrill voice again, coldly syrupy. The Wolf remembered the jealous, bitter glare the little man had given him as the guards had dragged him down here. The footsteps came clearer now, the clack of the cane emphasizing the uneven drag of the crippled foot.

Sun Wolf sighed and braced himself. The fetid air was like warm glue in his lungs. Across the room, the drug addict had begun to whimper and pick at the insects, both visible and invisible, that swarmed over his sweating flesh.

There was a smart slap of saluting arms and the grate of a key in the lock. Sun Wolf opened his eyes as torchlight and a sigh of cooler air belched through the open door; he saw figures silhouetted in the doorway at the top of the short flight of steps. Derroug stood there, one white hand emerging like a stamen from a flower of lace to rest on the weighted gold knob of his cane. Sun Wolf remembered the cane, too—the bruise from it was livid on his jaw.

Beside Derroug was Sheera, topping him by half a head.

“Yes, that’s him,” she said disinterestedly.

He thought he saw the little man’s eyes glitter greedily.

A guard in the blue and gold livery of the city came down the steps with the keys, followed by another with a torch. They unlocked his neck chain from the wall, but left his hands manacled behind him, and pushed him forward down the long room, the torchlight flashing darkly from the scummy puddles on the floor. At the bottom of the steps, they stopped, and he looked up at Sheera, haughty and exquisite in heliotrope satin, amethysts sparkling like trapped stars in the black handfuls of her hair.

She was shaking, like a too tightly tensioned wire before it snapped.

“You insulted my sister,” Derroug purred, still looking down at the taller man, though Sun Wolf had the odd feeling that it was not he who was being spoken to, but Sheera. “For that I could confiscate you and have you cut and put to work cleaning out latrines for the rest of your life, boy.”

I’d kill you first, Sun Wolf thought, but he could feel Sheera’s eyes on him, desperately willing him to be humble. He swallowed and kept his attention fixed on the pearl-sewn insets of lace around the flounced hem of her gown. “I know that, my lord. I am truly sorry—it was never my intention to do so.” He knew if he looked up and met those smug eyes, something of his own desire to ram those little white teeth through the back of that oily head might show.

“But after consulting with your—mistress—” The cool voice laid a double meaning upon the term of ownership, and Sun Wolf glanced up in time to see Derroug run his eyes appraisingly over Sheera’s body. “—my sister has agreed to forget the incident. You are, after all, a barbarian, and I am sure that my lady Sheera could ill spare your—services.”

He saw Sheera’s cheeks darken in the torchlight and Derroug’s insinuating smile.

He made himself say, “Thank you, my lord.”

“And since you are a barbarian,” Derroug continued primly, “I am positive that your education has been so far neglected that you are not aware that it is customary to kneel when a slave addresses the governor of this city.”

Sun Wolf, who was perfectly conversant with the laws of servitude, knew that the custom was nothing of the kind—that this little man merely wished to see a bigger one on his knees before the governor. Awkwardly, because his hands were still bound behind him, he knelt and touched his forehead to the stinking clay of the dirty steps. “I am sorry, my lord,” he murmured through clenched teeth.

Sheera’s voice said, “Get up.”

He obeyed her, schooling his face to show nothing of the rage that went through him like the burning of fever, wishing that he had Starhawk’s cool impassivity of countenance. He saw Derroug watching him intently, saw the little pointed tip of a pink tongue steal out to lick his lips.

“But I’m afraid, Sheera darling, that you are partly at fault for not having schooled him better. I know these barbarians—the lash is all they understand. But as it happens, I have something better.” The governor’s glinting brown eyes slid sideways at her, his gaze traveling slowly over her, like a lingering hand. “Would you object to my dispensing a salutary lesson?”

Sheera shrugged and did not look in Sun Wolf’s direction. Her voice was carefully unconcerned. “If you think it would benefit anyone.”

“Oh, I’m sure it would.” Derroug Dni smiled. “I think it will be of great benefit to you both. Lessons in the consequences of willful disobedience are always worth watching.”

As the guards conducted them down the narrow corridors under the Records Office, Sun Wolf felt the sweat making tracks in the grime of his face. A lesson in the consequences of disobedience could mean anything, and Sheera was evidently quite prepared to let him take it. Not, he reflected in that grimly calm corner of his mind, that there was anything she could do about it. Like him, she had the choice of trying to fight her way out of it now and very likely implicating and destroying all the others in the troop in the resulting furor or going along and gambling on her bluff. Among the lurching shadows of the ever-narrowing halls, her back was straight and uncommunicative. The gleam of the torch flame spilled down the satin of her dress as she held it clear of the filthy flagstones; Derroug’s hand, straying to touch her hip, was like a flaccid white spider on the shining fabric.

“Our Lord Altiokis has recently sent me—ah—assurances that can be used to punish those who are disobedient or disloyal to me as his governor,” he was saying. “In view of the recent upheavals, such measures are quite necessary. There must be no doubt in my mind of the loyalty of our citizens.”

“No,” Sheera murmured. “Of course not.”

Behind her, Sun Wolf could see she was trembling, either with rage or with fear.

A guard opened a door, the second to the last along the narrow hall. Torchlight gleamed on something smooth and reflective in the darkness. As he stepped aside to let Sheera precede him into the room, Derroug asked the sergeant of the guards, “Has one of them been let loose?”

“Yes, my lord,” the man muttered and wiped his beaded face under the gold helmet rim.

The little man smiled and followed Sheera into the room. Other guards pushed Sun Wolf down the two little steps after them. The door closed, shutting out the torchlight from the hall.

The only light in the room came from candles that flickered behind a thick pane of glass set in the wall that faced the door. It showed Sun Wolf a narrow cell, such as commonly contained prisoners important enough to be singly confined, its bricks scarred by the bored scrapings of former inmates. The room was small, some five feet by five; it hid nothing, even from that diffuse gleam. The reflections of the candles showed him Sheera’s face, impassive but wary, and the greedy gleam in the governor’s eyes as he looked at her.

“Observe,” Derroug purred, his hand moving toward the window. “I have been privileged to see Altiokis* cell like this, built in the oldest part of his Citadel; I have been more than privileged that he has—ah—sent me the wherewithal to establish one of my own. It is most effective for—disloyalty.”

The room beyond the glass was clearly another solitary cell. It was only a little larger than the first, and utterly bare of furniture. Candles burned in niches close to the ceiling, higher than a man could reach. It contained four or five small lead boxes; one of them had been opened. The cell door, clearly the last door along the hall down which they had passed, was shut, but the Wolf could hear more guards approaching along the corridor. Mixed with their surer tread, he could distinguish the unwilling, shuffling step of a prisoner’s feet.

Something moved in the semidark of the room beyond the window. For a moment, he thought it was only a chance reflection in the glass, but he saw Sheera’s head jerk to catch the motion as well. In a moment there was another flicker, bright and elusive. There was something there, something like a whirling flake of fire, drifting and eddying near the ceiling with a restless motion that was almost like life.

Sun Wolf frowned, following it with his eyes through the protective window. Whether it was bright in itself or merely reflective of chance flames, he could not tell. It was difficult to track its motions, for it skittered here and there, almost randomly, like a housefly on a hot day or a dragonfly skimming on the warm air over the marshes; it was a single, moving point of bright flame in the murk beyond the glass.

There was a fumbling noise in the corridor. With astonishing quickness, the door visible in the other room opened and slammed shut again behind the man who had been thrust inside—the red-haired young slave who had stood opposite Sun Wolf in the jail. The prisoner stumbled, throwing his unbound hands wide for balance; for an instant he stood in the center of the room, gaping about him, baby-blue eyes wide and staring with fear.

The boy swung around with a startled cry.

Like an elongating needle of light, the flake of fire—or whatever it was—struck, an instantaneous vision of incredible quickness. The young man staggered, his hands going to cover one of his eyes as if something had stung it. The next instant, his screaming could be heard through the stone and glass of the wall.

What followed was sickening, horrifying even to a mercenary inured to all the terrible fashions in which men slew one another. The boy bent double; clutching his eye, his screams rising to a frenzied pitch. He began to run, clawing blindly, ineffectually, at his face, falling into walls. The Wolf saw the thread of blood begin to drip from between the grabbing fingers as the boy’s knees buckled. He registered, with clinical awareness, the progress of the pain by the twisting jerks of the boy’s body on the floor and by the rising agony and terror of the shrieks. Sun Wolf noted how the frantic fingers dug and picked, how the helpless limbs threshed about, and how the back writhed into an arch.

It seemed to take forever. The boy was rolling on the floor, screaming ... screaming...

Sun Wolf could tell—he thought they all could tell—when the screams changed, when the fire-poison-insect-whatever it was—ate its way through to the brain. Something broke in the boy’s cries; a deafening, animal howl replaced the human voice. The body jerked, as if every muscle had spasmed together, and began to roll and hop around the cell in a grotesque and filthy parody of life. Glancing at Sheera, Sun Wolf saw that she had closed her eyes. Had she been able to, she would have brought up her hands to cover her ears as well. Beyond her, Derroug’s face wore a tight, satisfied smile; through his flared nostrils, his breathing dragged, as if he had drunk wine. Sun Wolf looked back to the window, feeling his own face, his own hands, bathed in icy sweat. If there were ever a suspicion, ever a question, about the troop, the governor had only to show the suspect what he himself had just seen. There was no doubt that person would tell everything—the Wolf knew that he would.

The screaming continued, a gross, bestial ululation; the body was still moving, blood-splotched hands fumbling at the stones on the floor.

Derroug’s voice was a soft, almost dreamy murmur. “So you see, my dear,” he was saying, “it is best that we ascertain, once and for all, who can—demonstrate—their loyalty to me.” And his little white hand stole around her waist, “Send your boy home.”

“Apologize to Drypettis?” Sun Wolf paused in the act of pouring; the golden brandy slopped over the rim of the cup and onto his hand. The pine table of the potting room was pooled with red wine and amber spirits; the laden air reeked of them, heavy over the thick aromas of dirt and potting clay. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and unnaturally steady. He had been drinking methodically and comprehensively since he had returned home that morning. It was now an hour short of sunset, and Sheera had just returned. His voice was only slightly thickened as he said, “That haughty little snirp should never have called me captain in public and she knows it.”

Sheera’s mouth looked rather white, her lips pressed tight together, her dark hair still sticking to her cheeks with the dampness of her bath. The Wolf was half tempted to pull up a chair for her and pour her a glass—not that there was much left in any of the bottles by this time. He had never seen a woman who looked as if she needed it more.

But Sheera said, “She says she never called you captain.”

He stared at her, wondering if the brandy had affected his perception. “She what?”

“She never called you captain. She told me she called out to you and told you to take a message to me, and you refused and told her you were no one’s errand boy...”

“That’s a lie.” He straight-armed the brandy at one shot and let the glass slide from his fingers. Then rage hit him, stronger than any drink, stronger than what he had felt for Derroug while on his knees before the governor in the prison.

“Captain,” Sheera said tightly, “Dru spoke to me just before I left the palace. She would never have called you by your title in public. She knows better than that.”

“She may know better than that,” Sun Wolf said levelly, “but it’s possible to forget. All right. But that’s what she called me, and that’s why—”

The controlled voice cracked suddenly. “You’re saying Dru lied to me.”

“Yes,” the Wolf said, “that’s what I’m saying. Rather than admit that she was in the wrong.” It crossed his mind fleetingly that he should not be arguing—not drunk as he was, not this afternoon, not after the kind of scene he was fairly certain had taken place with Drypettis immediately after what amounted to rape. He could see the lines of tension digging themselves tighter and tighter into Sheera’s face, like the print of ugly memories in her tired flesh, and the sudden, uncontrollable trembling of her bruised lips. But her next words drove any thought from his mind.

“And what would you rather do than admit you’re wrong, Captain?”

“Not He about one of my troops.”

“Hah!” She had picked up a small rake, turning it nervously in fingers that shook; now she threw it back to the table with ringing violence. “Your troops! You’d have tossed her out from the start—”

“Damned right I would,” he retorted, “and this is why.”

“Because she was never to your taste, you mean!”

“Woman, if you think all I’ve had to do in the last two months has been to put together a harem of assassins for myself—”

“Rot your eyes, what else have you been doing?” she yelled back at him. “From Lady Wrinshardin to Gilden and Wilarne—”

“Let’s not forget the ones who were assigned,” he roared, pitching his voice to drown hers. “If you’re jealous ...”

“Don’t flatter yourself!” she spat at him. “That’s what sickens you, isn’t it? You can’t stand to teach women the arts of war because those are your preserve, aren’t they? The only way you can take it is if you make them your women. They have your permission to be good so long as you’re better, and the ones who get to be the best you make damned sure will love you too much ever to beat you!”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about and you sure aren’t warrior enough to know what it means!” he lashed back at her, hurling the brandy bottle at the opposite wall, so that it shattered in an explosion of alcohol and glass. “The best of the women I know is better than any man—”

“Oh, yes,” the woman sneered furiously. “I’ve seen that best one of yours, and she looked at you the way a schoolgirl looks at her First beau! You’ve never given two cow patties together for anything about this troop! You wouldn’t care if we were all destroyed, so long as you aren’t threatened by anyone else’s excellence!”

“You talk to me about that when you’ve been a warrior anywhere near as long as I have—or the Hawk has!” he stormed at her. “And no, I don’t give two cow pats together for you and your stupid cause. And yes, part of it’s because of the ladies whom I don’t want to see get their throats cut in your damfool enterprise—”

“Tarrin—”

“I’m damned sick of hearing about pox-rotted Tarrin and your reeking cause!” he roared.

Red with rage, she shouted over his voice, “You can’t see any higher than your own comforts—”

He yelled back at her, “That’s what I’ve said from the beginning, rot your poxy eyes! I’d have washed my hands of the whole flaming business, and of you, too—stubborn, bull-headed hellcat that you are! I’m through with you and your damned tantrums!”

“You’ll stay and you’ll like it!” Sheera raged. “Or you’ll die screaming your guts out a day’ s journey from the wall, and that’s the only choice you’ve got, soldier! You’ll do what I tell you or Yirth may not even give you that choice!”

She whirled in a flame-colored slash of skirts and veils and stormed from the little room, slamming the flimsy door behind her. He heard her footsteps stride into the distance, crashing hollowly, and at last heard the thunderous smash of the outer door. Through the window, he saw her stride up into the twilight of the garden toward the house, past the rocks he had settled among the bare roots of juniper, and past the dark pavilion of the bathhouse. She was sobbing, the dry, bitter weeping of rage.

Deliberately, Sun Wolf picked up a wine bottle from the table and hurled it against the opposite wall. He did the same with the next and the next and the next—and all the others that he had consumed in the course of the day, since he had returned from seeing what it was that Derroug had hidden beneath his palace. Then he got up and made his way with a perfectly steady stride to the stables, saddled a horse, and rode out of Mandrigyn by the land gate, just as the sun was setting.

He rode throughout the night and on into morning. The alcohol burned slowly out of his blood without lessening in him the determination to thwart Sheera, once and for all. Anzid was just about the last choice he would have taken, had he been allowed to pick his own death, but horrible death of some sort would come to him for certain if he remained in Mandrigyn.

Today he had seen at least one that was worse than anzid. And in any case, he would die his own man, not Sheera’s slave.

He turned the horse’s head toward the west, traversing in darkness the half-flooded fields, spiky with sedge and with the bare branches of naked trees. Before midnight, he reached the crossroads where the way ran up to the Iron Pass and the greater bulk of the Tchard Mountains and out over the uplands to pass through the rocks of the Stren Water Valley down to the rich Bight Coast. It had been in his mind to ride north up the pass, knowing that Sheera would never think to seek him on Altiokis’ !, very doorstep. And seek him she would, of that he was certain. She would never endure this last defiance from him. He had vowed that he would not give her the satisfaction of ever finding his body, of ever knowing for certain that he was dead.

Besides, if she found him before the anzid killed him, it might be possible for her to bring him back.

But in the end, he could not take the Citadel road. He turned the mare’s head westward where the roads crossed and spurred on through the dripping silence of the dark woods.

He wondered if the Hawk would understand what he was doing.

Ari, he knew, would have apologized to Drypettis with every evidence of sincerity and a mental vow to take it out of that pinch-faced little vixen later. And the Hawk ... The Hawk would have told them at the outset that she would die and be damned to them—or else have found a way to avoid the entire situation.

What had Sheera meant about the way the Hawk had looked at him? Was it simply Sheera’s jealousy or her hate? Or did she, as a woman, see things with a woman’s different eyes.

He didn’t think so, much as he would have liked to believe that Starhawk had looked at him with something other than that calm, businesslike gaze. In his experience, love had always meant demands—on the time, on the soul, and certainly on the attention. Starhawk had never asked him for anything except instruction in their chosen craft of war and an occasional daf bulb for her own garden.

It was Starhawk, in fact, who had defined for him why love death to the professional, on one of those long winter evenings in Wrynde when Fawn had gone to sleep, her head his lap, her curls spilling over his thigh. He and the Hawk sat up talking, half drunk before the white sand of the ten hearth, listening to the rain drumming on the cypresses of the gardens outside. It was he who had spoken of love, who had quoted his father’s maxim: Don’t fall in love and don’t mess with magic. Love was a crack in a man’s armor, he had said. But the Hawk, with her clearer insight, had said that love simply caused one to cease being single-minded. For a warrior, to look aside from the main goal of survival could mean death. He could not love, if his goal was to survive at all costs.

Could a woman who loved speak of love with such clear-eyed brutality?

Could a woman who didn’t?

Dawn came, slow and gray through the wooded hills. Yellow leaves muffled the road in soaked carpets; overhanging branches splattered and dripped on the Wolf’s back. He rode more slowly now, scouting as he went, taking his bearings on the crowding hills visible above the bare trees. South of the road, those hills shouldered close, massive and lumpy, stitched with narrow ravines and a rising network of ledges, half choked in scrub and wild grape. Here and there, he heard the frothing voices of swollen streams, booming among the rocks.

Wind flicked his long hair back over his shoulders and laid a cold hand on his cheek. He had forgotten how good it felt to be alone and free, even if only free to die.

It was midafternoon when he let the horse go. He sent it on its way along the westward road with a slap on the rump, and it trotted off gamely, leaving tracks that Sheera was sure to follow. With any luck, she’d trail it quite a distance and never find his body at all. It would rot that hellcat’s soul, he thought with a grim inward smile, to think that he might, by some miracle, have eluded her—to think that, somewhere in the world, he might still be alive and laughing.

He was already beginning to feel the anzid working in his veins, like the early stirrings of fever. He struck back through the woods in an oblique course toward the rocks of the higher hills and the caves that he knew lay in the direction of Mandrigyn. It was a long way, and he went cautiously, covering his tracks, wading in the freezing scour of the streams, and finding his way over the rocky ground by instinct when the daylight faded again into evening.

He had always had sharper senses in the dark than most men; he had had that ability as a child, he remembered, and it had been almost uncanny. Even in the cloud-covered darkness and rising wind, he made out the vague shapes of the trees, the ghostly birches and leering, gargoyle oaks. His nose told him it would rain later, destroying his tracks; wind was already tugging at his clothes.

The ground underfoot grew steep and stony, rising sharply and broken by the outcropped bones of the earth. He found that his breath had begun to saw at his lungs and throat, a cold sharpness, as if broken glass were lodged somewhere inside. Still the ground steepened, and the foliage thinned around him; vague rock shapes became visible above, rimmed with a milky half-light that only the utter darkness of the rest of the night let him see at all. Weakness pulled at him and a kind of feverish pain that had no single location; nausea had begun to cramp his stomach like chewing pincers.

The first wave of it hit him in the high, windy darkness of a broken hillside, doubling him over, as if a drench of acid had been spilled through his guts. The shock of it took his breath away and, when the pain faded, left him weak and shaking, feeling sickened and queerly vulnerable. After a time, he got to his feet, hardly daring to move for fear the red agony would return. Even as he staggered on, he felt it lying in wait for him, lurking behind every fiber of his muscles.

It took him another hour to find the kind of place that he sought. He had been looking for a cave deep in the hills, so far from the road that, no matter how loudly he screamed, no searchers would hear. What he found was a ruined building, a sort of chapel whose broken walls were wreathed and hung with curtains of winter-brown vines. In the crypt below it was a pit, some twenty feet deep and circular, ten or fifteen feet across. Thrown pebbles clinked solidly or rustled in weeds; the little light that filtered through the blowing branches above him showed him nothing stirring but wind-tossed heather.

By now he was sweating, his hands trembling, a growing pain in his body punctuated by lightning bolts of cramps. Cautiously, he hung by his hands over the edge, then let himself drop.

It was a mistake. It was as if his entire body had been flayed apart; the slightest shock or jar pierced him like tearing splinters of wood. The sickening intensity of the pain made him vomit, and the retching brought with it new pains, which in turn fed others. Like the first cracking of a sea wail, each new agony lessened his resistance to those mounting behind it, until they ripped his flesh and his mind as a volcano would rip the rock that sealed it. Dimly, he wondered how he could still be conscious, or if the agony would go on like this until he died.

It was only the beginning of an endless night.

Sheera found him in the pit, long after the dawn that barely lightened the blackness of the rainsqualls of the night. Wind tore at her wet riding skirts as she stood looking down from the pit’s edge and snagged at the dripping coils of her hair. Though it was his screaming which had drawn her, his voice had cracked and failed. Through the rain that slashed her eyes, she could see him still moving, crawling feverishly through the gross filth that smeared every inch of the pit’s floor, groaning brokenly but unable to rest.

In spite of the rain, the place smelled like one of the lower cesspools of Hell. Resolutely, she knotted the rope she had brought with her to the bole of a tree and shinned down. Her lioness rage had carried her through the night hunt, but now, seeing what was left after the anzid had done its work, she felt only a queer mingling of pity and spite and horror. She wondered if Yirth had been aware that the death would take this long.

From fever or pain, he had thrown off most of his clothes, and the rain made runnels through the filth that smeared his blue and icy flesh. He was still crawling doggedly, as if he could somehow outdistance the agony; but as she approached, he was seized with a spasm of retching that had long since ceased to bring up anything but gory bile. She saw that his hands were torn and bloody, clenched in pain so tightly she thought the force of it must break the bones. After the convulsion had ceased, he lay sobbing, racked by the aftermath, the rain trickling through the stringy weeds of his hair. His face was turned aside a little from the unspeakable pools in which he half lay, and the flesh of it looked sunken and pinched, like a dying man’s.

There were no sounds in the pit then, except for the dreary, incessant rustle of falling water and his hoarse, wretched sobbing. That, too, she had not expected. She walked a step nearer and stood looking in a kind of horrible fascination at the degraded head, the sodden hair thin and matted with slime, and the broken and trembling hands. Quietly, she said, “You stupid, stubborn bastard.” Her own voice sounded shaky to her ears. “I’ve got a good mind to go off and leave you, after all.”

She had not thought he’d heard. But he moved his head a little, dilated eyes regarding her through a fog of pain from pits of blackened flesh. She could tell he was almost blind, fighting with every tormented muscle of his body to bring her into focus, to speak, and to control the wheezing thread of his scream-shattered voice into something that could be heard and understood.

He managed to whisper, “Leave me, then.”

Her own horror at what she had done turned to fury, fed by the weariness of her long night’s terrified searching. Through darkness and clouds of weakness, Sun Wolf could see almost nothing, but his senses, raw as if sandpapered, brought him the feel of her rage like a wave of heat. For a moment, he wondered if she would kick him where he lay or lash at him with the riding whip in her hands.

But then he heard her turn away, and the splash of her boots retreated through the puddles that scattered the pit’s floor in the rain. For an elastic time he lay fighting the unconsciousness that he knew would only bring him the hideous terror of visions. Then he heard the rattle of her horse’s retreating hooves, dying away into the thundering clatter of the rain. He slipped again into the red vortex of delirium.

There was utter loneliness there and terrors that reduced the pain ripping through his distant body to an insignificant ache that would merely result in his eventual death. Worse things pursued and caught him—loss, regret, self-hate, and all the spilling ugliness that festered in the bottommost pits of the mind.

And then, after black wanderings, he was aware of moonlight in a place he had never been before and the far-off surge of the sea. Blinking, he made out the narrowing stone walls of one of those beehive chapels that dotted the rocky coasts of the ocean in the northwest, the darkness around the Mother’s altar, and the shape of a warrior kneeling just beyond the uneven circle of moonlight that lay like a tiny carpet in the center of the trampled clay floor.

The warrior’s clothing was unfamiliar, the quilted, shiny stuff of the Bight Coast. The scarred boots he knew, and the sword that lay with the edge of its blade across the moonlight, a white and blinding sliver. The bent head, pale and bright as the moonlight, he could have mistaken for no other.

She looked up, and he saw tears glittering on the high cheekbones, like rain fallen on stone. She whispered, “Chief?” d got haltingly to her feet, her eyes struggling to pierce the gloom that separated them. “Chief, where are you? I’ve been looking for you...”

He held out his hand to her and saw it, torn and filthy, as he had seen it lying in the slime of the pit. She hesitated, then took it, her lips like ice against it, her tears scalding the raw flesh.

“Where are you?” she whispered again,

“I’m in Mandrigyn,” he said quietly, forcing the scorched remains of his voice to be steady. “I’m dying—don’t look for me further.”

“Rot that,” Starhawk said, her voice shaking. “I haven’t come all this way just to—”

“Hawk, listen,” he whispered, and she raised her eyes, the blood from his hand streaking her cheek, blotched and smeared with her tears. “Just tell me this—did you love me?”

“Of course,” she said impatiently. “Wolf, I’ll always love you. I always have loved you.”

He sighed, and the weight settled heavier over him, the grief for what could have been. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasted the time we had—and I’m sorry for what that did to you.”

She shook her head, even the slight brushing movement of it tearing at the rawness of his overtaxed body. He shut his teeth hard against the pain, for he could feel himself already fraying, his flesh tugged at by the winds of nothingness.

“The time wasn’t wasted,” Starhawk said softly. “If you’d thought you loved me as you loved Fawnie and the others, you would have kept me at a distance, as you did them, and that would have been worse. I would rather be one of your men than one of your women.”

“I see that,” he murmured, for he had seen it, in the twisting visions of the endless night. “But that speaks better of you than it does of me.”

“You are what you are.” Her voice was so quiet that, over it, he could hear the distant beat of the sea on the rocks and the faint thread of the night wind. Her hands tightened like icy bones around the broken mess of his fingers, and he knew she could feel him going. “I wouldn’t have traded it.”

“I was what I was,” he corrected her. “And I wanted you to know.”

“I knew.”

He had never before seen her cry, not even when they’d cut arrowheads from her flesh on the battlefields; her tears fell without bitterness or weakness, only coursing with the loneliness that he had himself come to understand. He raised his hand to touch the white silk of her hair. “I love you, Hawk,” he whispered. “Not just as one of my men—and not just as one of my women. I’m sorry I did not know it in time.”

He felt himself slip from her, drawn back toward that bleak and storming darkness. He knew his body and his soul were breaking, like a ship on a reef; all his garnered strength sieved bleeding through the wreckage of spars. All the buried things, the loves and hopes and desires that he had derided and forgotten because he could not bear to see them denied him by fate, poured burning from their cracked hiding places and challenged him to deny them now.

They were like ancient dreams of fire, as searing as molten gold. He heard his father’s derisive jeers through the darkness, though the voice was his own; the old dreams burned like flame, the heat of them greater than the pain of the anzid burning through his flesh. But he gathered the dreams into his hands, though they were made of fire, of molten rage, and of wonder. The scorching of their power seared and peeled the last of his flesh away, and his final vision was of the stark lacework of his bones, clutching those forgotten fires.

Then the vision disappeared from him, as his own apparition had faded from Starhawk’s grasp. He opened his eyes to the slanted wood of the loft ceiling, fretted with the wan sunlight that filtered through the bare trees of Sheera’s courtyard. He heard the murmur of Sheera’s voice from below in the orangery and Yirth’s terse and scornful reply.

Yinh, he thought and closed his eyes again, overborne by horror and despair. All his efforts of that long day to hide his trail from Sheera—and she had only to ask Yirth to speak his name and look into standing water. The night he had spent in the pit, the pain, and the unnamable grief had been for nothing.

Weak and spent, there was nothing of his scoured flesh or mind that would answer his bidding; had he had the strength to do so, he would have wept. The women had won. He was still alive and still their slave. Even had he been able to find a way to elude Yirth’s magic, he knew he would make no further attempt at escape. He would never have the strength to go through that again.