The Ladies of Mandrigyn

3

“Ari sent you away?” Starhawk looked sharply from Little Thurg to Ari, who stood quietly at her side.

Thurg nodded, puzzlement stamped into every line of his round, rather bland-looking countenance. “I thought it funny myself, sir,” he said, and the bright blue eyes shifted over to Ari. “But I asked you about it then, and you told me...”

“I was never there,” Ari objected quietly. “I was never in Kedwyr at all.” He looked over at Starhawk, as if for confirmation. They had spent the night with half of Sun Wolf’s other lieutenants, playing poker in Penpusher’s tent, waiting for word to come back from their chief. “You know...”

Starhawk nodded. “I know,” she said and looked back at Thurg, who was clearly shaken and more than a little frightened.

“You can ask the others, sir,” he said, and a pleading note crept into his voice. “We all saw him, plain as daylight. And after the Chief had gone off with that woman, I thought he met and spoke with Ari. May God strike me blind if that isn’t the truth.”

Starhawk reflected to herself that being struck blind by God was an exceedingly mild fate compared with what any man who had deserted his captain in the middle of an enemy city was likely to get. The fact that they were in the pay of the Council of Kedwyr did not make that city friendly territory—quite the contrary, in fact. You can dishonor a man’s wife, kill his cattle, tool his goods, Sun Wolf had often said, and he will become your friend quicker than any ruling body that owes you money for something you’ve done for them.

She settled back in the folding camp chair that was set under the marquee outside Sun Wolf’s tent and studied the man in front of her. The sea wind riffled her pale, flyaway hair and made the awning crack above her head. The wind had turned in the night, blowing hard and steady toward the east. The racing scud of the clouds threw an uneasy alternation of brightness and shadow over the dry, wolf-colored hills that surrounded Melplith’s stove—in walls on three sides and formed a backdrop of worried calculations, like a half-heard noise, to all her thoughts.

Her silence was salt to Thurg’s already flayed nerves. “I swear it was Ari I saw,” he insisted. “I don’t know how it came about, but you know I’d never have left the Chief. I’ve been with him for years.”

She knew that this was true. She also knew that women, more than once, mistaking her for a man in her armor, had offered to sell her their young daughters for concubines, and the knowledge that there was literally nothing that human beings would not sell for ready cash must have been in her eyes. The little man in front of her began to sweat, his glance flickering in hopeless anguish from her face to Ari’s. Starhawk’s coldbloodedness was more feared than Sun Wolf’s rages. A man who had taken a bribe to betray Sun Wolf could expect from her no mercy and certainly nothing even remotely quick.

She glanced up at Ari, who stood behind her chair. He looked doubtful, as well he might; Thurg had always proved himself trustworthy and had, as he had said, been with Sun Wolf’s troop for years. She herself was puzzled, as much by the utter unlikeliness of Thurg’s story as by the possibility of betrayal. In his place, she would have thought up a far better story, and she had enough respect for his brains to think that he would have, also.

“Where did Ari speak to you?” she asked at last.

“In the square, sir,” Thurg said, swallowing and glancing from her face to Ari’s and back again. “He—he came out of the alleyway the Chief had gone down with that girl and—and walked over to where we were sitting in the tavern. It was getting late. I’d already talked to the innkeeper once about keeping the place open.”

“He came over to you—or called you to him?”

“He came over, sir. He said, ‘You can head on back to camp, troops. The Chief and I will be along later.’ And he gave us this big wink. They all laughed and made jokes, but I asked didn’t he want a couple of us to stay, just in case? And he said, ‘You think we can’t handle City Troops? You’ve seen ’em fight!’ And we—we came away. I thought if An was with the Chief...” He let his voice trail off, struggling within himself. Then he flung his hands out. “It sounds like your grandfather’s whiskers, but it’s true! Ask any of ’em!” Desperation corrugated his sunburned little face. “You’ve got to believe me!”

But he did not look as if he thought that this was at all likely.

They said in the camp that Starhawk had not been born—she’d been sculpted. She considered him for a moment more, then asked, “He came out of the alley, came toward the tavern, and spoke to you?”

“Yes.”

“He was facing the tavern lamps?”

“Yes—they were behind me. It was one of those open-front places—I was at a table toward the edge, out on the square, like.”

“And you saw him clearly?”

“Yes! I swear it!” He was trembling, sweat trickling down his scar-seamed brown cheeks. Behind him, just outside the rippling shade of the awning, two guards looked away, feeling that electric desperation in the air and not willing to witness the breaking of a man they both respected. Frantic, Thurg said, “If I’d sold the Chief to the Council, you think I’d have come back to the camp?”

Starhawk shrugged. “If you’d thought you could get me to believe you thought you were talking to Ari, maybe. I’ve seen too many betrayals to know whether you’d have sold him out or not—but I do find it hard to believe you’d have done it this stupidly. You’re confined to quarters until we see whether the Council sends out the money they promised.”

When the guards had taken Little Thurg away, An shook his head and sighed. “Of all the damned stupid stories... How could he have done it, Hawk? There was no way he had of knowing that I wasn’t with ten other people—which I was!”

She glanced up at him, towering above her, big and bearlike and perplexed, the slow burn of both anger and hurt visible in those clear, hazel-gray eyes. “That’s what inclines me to believe he’s telling the truth,” she said and got to her feet. “Or what he thinks is the truth, anyway. If I’m not back from Kedwyr in three hours, hit the town with everything we’ve got and send messages to Ciselfarge...”

“You’re going by yourself?”

“If they’re hiding what they’ve done, I’m in no danger,” she said briefly, casting a quick glance at the piebald sky and picking up her sheepskin jacket from the back of her chair. “I can fight my way out alone as well as I could with a small bodyguard—and if the Council doesn’t know the Wolf’s missing. I’m not going to tell them so by going in with a large one.”

But on the highroad from the camp to the city gates, she met a convoy of sturdy little pack donkeys and a troop of the Kedwyr City Guards, bearing the specified payment from the Council. Thin and morose, like a drooping black heron upon his cobby little Peninsular mare, Commander Breg hailed her. She drew her horse alongside his. “No trouble?” she asked, nodding toward the laden donkeys and the dark-clothed guards who led them.

The commander made the single coughing noise that was the closest he ever came to a laugh. The day had turned cold with the streaming wind; he wore a black cloak and surcoat wound over the shining steel back-and-breast mail, and his face, framed in the metal of his helmet, was mottled with vermilion splotches of cold. “Our President came near to an apoplexy and took to his bed with grief over the amount of it,” he told her. “But a doctor was summoned—they say he will recover.”

Starhawk laughed. “Ari and Penpusher are there waiting to go over it with you.”

“Penpusher,” the commander said thoughtfully. “Is he that yak in chain mail who threw the defending captain off the tower at the storming of Melplith’s gates?”

“Oh, yes,” Starhawk agreed. “He’s only like that in battle. As a treasurer, he’s untouchable.”

“As a warrior,” the commander said, “he’s someone I would not much like to try and touch, either.” A spurt of wind tore at his cloak, fraying the horses’ manes into tangled clouds and crooning eerily through the broken lines of windbreak and stone. He glanced past Starhawk’s shoulder at the gray rim of the sea, visible beyond the distant cliffs. The sky there was densely piled with bruised-looking clouds. Over the whining of the wind, the waves could occasionally be heard, hammer like against the rocks.

“Will you make it beyond the Gniss,” he asked, “before the river floods?”

“If we get started tomorrow.” It was her way never to give anyone anything. She would not speak to a comparative stranger of her fears that they would not, in fact, reach the river in time for a safe crossing. It was midmorning; were it not for Sun Wolf’s disappearance, they would have been breaking camp already, to depart as soon as the money was counted. With the rapid rise of the Gniss, hours could be important. As the wind knifed through the thick sheepskin of her coat and stung the exposed flesh of her face, she wondered if the commander’s words were a chance remark or a veiled warning to take themselves off before it was too late.

“By the way,” she asked, curvetting her horse away from the path of the little convoy, “where does Gobaris keep himself when he’s in town? Or has he left already?”

The commander shook his head. “He’s still there, in the barracks behind the Town Hall square, it’s his last day in the town, though—he’s getting ready to go back to his farm and that wife he’s been telling us about all through the campaign.”

“Thanks.” Starhawk grinned and raised her hand in farewell. Then she turned her horse’s head in the direction of the town and spurred to a canter through the cold, flying winds of the coming storms.

She found Gobaris, round, pink, and slothful, packing his few belongings and the mail that no longer quite fitted him, in the section of barracks reserved by the Council for the Outland Levies during their service to the town. Few of them were left; this section of the barracks, allotted to the men of the levies, was mostly empty, the straw raked from the bunks and heaped on the stone floor ready to be hosed out, the cold drafts whistling through the leak-stained rafters. The walls were covered with mute and obscene testimony of the rivalry between the Outland Levies and the City Troops.

“I don’t know which is worse,” she murmured, clicking her tongue thoughtfully, “the lack of imagination or the inability to spell a simple four-letter word that they use all the time.”

“Lack of imagination,” Gobaris said promptly, straightening up in a two-stage motion to favor the effect of the coming dampness on his lower back. “If one more man had tried to tell me the story about the City Trooper and the baby goat, I’d have strangled the life out of him before he’d got past ‘Once upon a time.’ What can I do for you, Hawk?”

She spun him a tale of a missing soldier, watching his puffy, unshaven face closely, and saw nothing in the wide blue eyes but annoyance and concern that the man should be found before the rest of the troop left without him. He let his packing lie and took her down to the city hall, shouting down the regular guards there and opening without demur any door she asked to see the other side of. At the end, she shook her head in assumed disgust and sighed. “Well, that rules out trouble, anyway. He’ll be either sodden drunk or snugged up with some woman.” It took all her long self-discipline and all the inexpressive calm of years of barracks poker to hide the sick qualm of dread that rose in her and accept with equanimity the Outland Captain’s invitation to share a quart of ale at the nearest tavern.

She was reviewing in her memory the other possible ways to enter the jail by stealth and search for other cells there when Gobaris asked, “Did your chief get back to the camp all right, then?”

She frowned, resting her hands around the mug on the rather grimy surface of the tavern table. “Why would he not?”

Gobaris sighed, shook his head, and rubbed at the pink, bristly rolls of his jaw. “I didn’t like it myself, for all that Ari’s a stout enough fighter. If the President had wanted to make trouble, he could have trapped the two of them in the town. It was dangerous, is all.”

Starhawk leaned back in her chair and considered the fat man in the cold white light that came in through the open tavern front from the square. “You mean Ari was the only man he had with him?” she asked, playing for time.

“Only one I saw.” He threw back his head, revealing a grayish crescent of dirty collar above the edge of his pink livery doublet, and drank deeply, then wiped his lips with an odd daintiness on the cuff of his sleeve. “He might have had others up the alley, mind, but none whom I saw.”

“Which alley?” she asked in a voice of mild curiosity, turning her head to scan the half-empty square. No booths or other tavern fronts opened into that great expanse of checked white and black stone today—a rainsquall had already dappled the pavement, and the fleeting patches of white and blue of the sky were more and more obscured by threatening gray.

“That one there.” He pointed. From this angle, it was little more than a shaded slot behind the keyhole turrets of an elaborately timbered inn front. “We were at that alehouse there, the Cock in Leather Breeches, waiting for your chief to get back. Then Ari came out of the alley, walked slap up to the bodyguard, and sent ’em off back to camp. I thought it wasn’t like the Wolf to be that careless, but nobody asked me my opinion.”

“You knew it was Ari.”

Gobaris looked surprised. “Of course it was Ari,” he said. “He was standing within a yard of me, wasn’t he? Facing the lamps of the inn.”

Ari was waiting for Starhawk at Sun Wolf’s tent when she came back from the city. The camp was alive with the movement of departure, warriors calling curses and jokes back and forth to one another as they loaded pack beasts with their possessions and loot from the sacking of Melplith. Starhawk, being not by nature a looter, had very little to pack; she could have been ready to depart in half an hour, tent and all. Someone—probably Fawn—had begun to dismantle Sun Wolf’s possessions, and the big tent was a chaos of tumbled hangings, their iridescence shot with gold stitching, of disordered camp furniture and cushions, and of mail and weapons. In the midst of it, on the inlaid ebony table where their armor had rested last night, sat a priceless rose porcelain pitcher in which slips of iris had been rudely potted. Beside it was a small leather sack.

Starhawk picked up the sack and weighed it curiously in her hand. She glanced inside, then across at Ari. The bag contained gold pieces.

“Every grain of gold he contracted for was delivered,” Ari said somberly.

The Hawk stripped off her rain-wet coat and threw it over the back of the staghorn chair. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “Gobaris says he saw you, too. Though if it were a setup...”

Ari shook his head. “I had the tents of all the men on that detail searched. Little Thurg wasn’t the only one, either...” He leaned out the tent door and called, “Thurg!” to someone outside. The doorway darkened and Big Thurg came in, making the small room minuscule by his bulk.

Big Thurg was the largest man in the Wolf’s troop, reducing Sun Wolf, Ari, and Penpusher to frailty by comparison. The absurd thing about him was that, although he and Little Thurg came from opposite ends of die country and were presumably no relation to each other, in face and build they were virtually twins, giving the general impression that Little Thurg had somehow been made up from the scraps left over from the creation of his immense counterpart.

“It’s true, sir,” he said, guessing her question, looking down at her, and scratching his head. “We all saw him—me. Long Mat, Snarky, everyone.”

“A double?” Starhawk asked.

“But why?” Ari threw out his hands in a gesture of angry frustration. “They paid us!”

Outside, someone led a laden mule past, the sound of the creaking pack straps a whispered reminder that time was very short. Big Thurg folded enormous hands before his belt buckle, his bright eyes grave with fear. “I think it’s witchery.”

Neither Starhawk nor Ari spoke. Starhawk’s cold face remained impassive, but a line appeared between the thick fur of Ari’s brows.

Big Thurg went on, “I’ve heard tell of it in stories. How a wizard can take on the form of a man, to lie with a woman the night, and her thinking all the time it’s her husband; or else put on a woman’s shape and call on a nurse to ask for a child. When the true mother shows up, the kid’s long gone. A wizard could have seen you anywhere about the camp, sir, to know who you were.”

“But there aren’t any wizards anymore,” Ari said, and Starhawk could hear the fear in his voice. Even among the mercenaries, Ari was accounted a brave man, for all his youth—brave with the courage of one who had no need for bravado. But there were very few men indeed who did not shudder at the thought of dabbling in wizardry. She and Ari both knew for a fact that there was only one wizard alive in the world—Altiokis.

Starhawk said, “Thank you, Thurg. You can go. We’ll have the guards let Little Thurg go, with our apologies.” The big man saluted and left. When she and Ari were alone, she said quietly, “The Chief got an offer the other night to go against Altiokis at Mandrigyn.”

Ari swore, softly, vividly, hopelessly. Then he said. “No. Oh, no, Hawk.” Around them, the camp was a noisy confusion, but the steady pattering of the rain against the leather tent walls and in the puddles beyond the door came through, like a whispered threat. It would be a long, beastly journey north; there could be no more waiting. Ari looked at her, and in his eyes Starhawk saw the grief of one who had already heard of a death.

She continued in her usual calm voice. “It would explain why the President sent us our pay. He knows nothing of it. The woman who came and spoke to the Wolf here was from one of Altiokis’ cities.”

For a time Ari did not speak, only stood with his head bowed, listening to the noises of the camp and the rain and her soft-spoken words of doom. The fading afternoon light laid a gleam like pewter on the creamy brown of his arm muscles; it winked on the gold stitching of his faded, garish tunic and on the jewels among the braided scalps that decorated his shoulders. His gold earrings flashed against his long, black hair as he turned his head. “So what are we going to do?”

Starhawk paused and considered her several courses of action. There was only one of them that she knew she could follow. Knowing this, she did not inquire of herself the reasons why. “I think,” she said at last, “that the best thing would be for you to get the troop back to Wrynde. If Altiokis had wanted the Chief dead, he would have killed him here. Instead, it looks as if he spirited him away somewhere.” A dozen tales of the Wizard King’s incredible, capricious cruelty contradicted her, but she did not give Ari time to say so. She knew that, if she accepted that explanation, she might just as well give Sun Wolf up for dead now. She went on, “I don’t know why he took him and I don’t know where, but the Citadel of Grimscarp in the East is a good guess. I know the Wolf, Ari. When he’s trapped by a situation, he plays for time.”

Ari raised his head finally, staring at her in horrified disbelief. “You’re not going there?”

She looked back at him impassively. “It’s either assume he’s there and alive and can be rescued—or decide that he’s dead and give him up now.” Seeing his stricken look at the coldness of her logic, she added gently, “I don’t think either of us is ready to do that yet.”

He turned from her and paced the tent in silence. On the other side of the peacock hangings. Fawn could be heard moving quietly about, preparing for departure. Sun Wolf’s armor and battle gear still hung on their stand at one end of the room, a mute echo of his presence; the feathers on the helmet’s widespread wings were translucent in the pallid light from the door. Finally Ari said, “He could be elsewhere.” She shrugged. “In that case, it’s short odds that he can get himself out of trouble. If Altiokis has him—which I believe he does—he’ll need help. I’m willing to risk the trip.” She hooked her hands through her sword belt and watched Ari, waiting.

“You’ll go overland?” he asked at last.

“Through the Kanwed Mountains, yes. I’ll take a donkey—a horse would be more trouble than it was worth, between wolves and robbers, and it wouldn’t add anything to my time. I can always buy one when I reach the uplands.” Her mind was leaping ahead, calculating the campaign details that could be dealt with—road conditions, provisions, perils—to free herself from the fear that she knew would numb her heart.

There’s nothing you can do right now to help him, she told herself coldly, except what you are doing. Feeling fear or worry for him will not help either him or you. But the fear smoldered in her nevertheless, like a buried fire in the heart of a mountain of ice.

Ari asked, “Whom will you take with you?”

She raised her brows, her voice still calm and matter-of-fact. “Who do you think could be trusted with the news that we might be messing with Altiokis? I personally can’t think of anyone.”

As he crossed the room back to her, she could see the worry lines already settling into his face—the lines that would be there all winter, maybe all his life. Morale in the troop was going to be hard enough to maintain in the face of the Wolf’s disappearance, without dealing with the added panic that the Wizard King’s name would cause, and they both knew it.

She went on. “A lone traveler is less conspicuous than a small troop, especially in the wintertime. I’ll be all right.”

The echo of a hundred nursery tales of Altiokis was in Ari’s voice as he asked, “How will you get into the Citadel?”

She shrugged again. “I’ll figure out that part when I get there.”

Ari was the only one to see her off that night. She had delayed her departure until after dark, partly to avoid spies, partly to avoid comment in the troop itself. Her close friends in the troop—Penpusher, Butcher the camp doctor, Firecat, and Dogbreath—she had told only that she was going to help the Chief and that they’d both be back at Wrynde in the spring. Altiokis was not spoken of. After packing most of her things to be sent back to Wrynde, she had spent the afternoon in meditation, preparing her mind and heart for the journey in the silence of the Invisible Circle, as they had taught her in the Convent of St. Cherybi.

Ari was quiet as he walked with her down the road toward the dark hills. By the light of his torch, she thought, he looked older than he had this morning. He was in for a hellish winter, she knew, and wondered momentarily if she ought not, after all, to remain with the troop, for she was the senior of the two lieutenants and the one who had more experience in dealing with the town council of Wrynde.

But she let the thought pass. Her mind was already set on her quest, with the cairn single-mindedness with which she went into battle. In a sense, she had already severed herself from Ari and the troop; and in any case, she was not sure that her own road would not be the harder of the two.

“Take care of yourself,” Ari said. In the sulfurous glare of the torch, the coat of black bearskin he wore gave him more than ever the look of a young beast. The hills stood before them, tall against the sky; above the sea to their backs, the clouds rose in vast pillars of darkness, the winter storms still holding uncannily at bay.

“You, also.” She took the donkey’s headstall in her left hand, then turned and put her right hand on Ari’s shoulder and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I don’t know who’s in for a worse time of it.”

“Starhawk,” Ari said quietly. The wind fluttered at his long hair; in the shadows she could see the sudden jump of his tensed jaw muscles. “What am I going to do,” he asked her, “if someone shows up sometime this winter, without you, claiming to be the Chief? How will I know it’s really him?” Starhawk was silent. They were both remembering Little Thurg, speaking to Ari’s double in the square of Kedwyr.

Sweet Mother, she thought, how will I know it’s the Chief when I find him!

For a moment, a shiver ran through her, almost like panic; the fear of magic, of wizards, of the uncanny, threatened to overcome her. Then the face of Sister Walla returned to her, withered in its frame of black veils; she saw the hunched back and tiny hands and herself, as a curious child, helping to sort dried herbs in the old nun’s cell and wondering why, of all the nuns in the Convent of St. Cherybi, Walla alone, the oldest and most wrinkled, possessed... “A mirror,” she said.

Ari blinked at her, startled. “A what?”

“Put a mirror somewhere, in an angle of the room where you can see it, A mirror will reflect a true form, without illusion.”

“You’re sure?”

“I think so,” she said doubtfully. “Or else you can take him out to the marshes on a night when there are demons about. As far as I know, Sun Wolf is the only man I’ve ever met who could see demons.”

They had both seen him do it, in the dripping marshes to the north of Wrynde, and had watched him following those loathsome, giggling voices with his eyes through the ice-bitten trees.

“It may be that a wizard can see demons, too, by means of magic,” Ari said. “It was said they could see through illusion.”

“Maybe,” she agreed. “But the mirror will show you a fraud.” It occurred to her for the first time to wonder why Sister Wellwa had kept that fragment of reflective glass positioned in the corner of her cell. Whom had she expected to see in it, entering the room disguised as someone else she knew?

“Maybe,” Ari echoed softly. “And what then?”

They looked into each other’s eyes, warm hazel into cold gray, and she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

She turned away from him and took the road into the darkness of the hills. Behind her and to her left lay the dim scattering of lights visible through the broken walls of Melplith and the collection of red sparks that was the mercenary camp. By dawn tomorrow, the camp would be broken and gone. Kedwyr’s Council had smashed its rival’s pretensions, and the overland trade in furs and onyx would return to Kedwyr, high tariffs or no high tariffs. Melplith would sink back to being a poky little market town like those farther back in the hills, and what had anybody gained? A lot of people were dead, including one of Gobaris’ brothers; a lot of mercenaries were richer; a lot of women had been raped, men maimed, children starved. The wide lands north of the Gniss River were still a burned-over wasteland in which nuuwa and wolves wandered; demons still haunted the cold marshes in whistling, biting clusters; abominations bred in the southern deserts, while the cities of the Peninsula fought over money and those of the Middle Kingdoms fought over religion.

The raw dampness of the wind stung Starhawk’s face and whipped at her half-numbed cheeks with the ends of her hair. She’d meant to crop it before leaving, as she did before the summer campaigns every year, but had forgotten.

She wondered why Altiokis had wanted the Chief. Sun Wolf had obviously sent Mandrigyn’s emissary packing—and had himself vanished without a trace the following night.

Revenge? She shuddered inwardly at the tales of Altiokis’ revenges. Or for other reasons? Will Ari, during the course of the winter, find himself faced with a man who claims to be Sun Wolf?

On the hillside to her left, the slurring rush of the wind through the bracken was cut by another sound, a shifting that was not part of the pattern of harmless noise.

Starhawk never paused in her step, though the burro she led turned its long ears backward uneasily. In this country, it would take a skilled tracker to follow in silence, even on a windy night. The ditches on either side of the hard-packed dirt of the highroad were filled with a mix of gravel and summer brushwood, and the sound of a body forcing passage anywhere near the road was ridiculously loud to the Hawk’s trained ears. When the track wound deeper into the foothills, the ditches petered out, but the scrub grew thicker. As she walked on, the Hawk could identify and pinpoint the sound of her pursuer, thirty feet behind her and closing.

Human. A wolf would be quieter; a nuuwa—if there were such things this close to settled territory—wouldn’t have the brains to stalk at all. The thought of Altiokis’ spies drifted unpleasantly through her mind.

To hell with it, she told herself and faked a stumble, cursing. The scrunching in the brush stopped.

Limping ostentatiously, Starhawk hobbled to the side of the track and sat down in the dense shadows of the brushwood. Under cover of Fiddling with her bootlaces, she tied the burro’s lead to a branch. Then she slithered backward into the brush, snaked her way down the shallow, overgrown ditch, and climbed up onto the scrubby hillside beyond.

The night was clouding over again, but enough starlight remained to give her some idea of the shape of the land. Her pursuer moved cautiously in the scrub; she focused on the direction of the popping of cracked twigs. Keeping low to better her own vision against the lighter sky, she scanned the dark jumble of twisted black trunks and the mottling of grayed leaves.

Nothing. Her shadow was keeping still.

Softly her fingers stole over the loose sandy soil until they found what they sought, a sizable rock washed from the stream bed by last winter’s rains. Moving slowly to remain as quiet as she could, she worked it free of the dirt. With a flick of the wrist she sent it spinning into the brush a few yards away.

There was a satisfactory rustling, and part of the pattern of dark and light that lay so dimly before her jerked, again counter to the general restless movement of the wind. The vague glow of the sky caught the pallid reflection of a face.

Very good, the Hawk thought and eased her dagger soundlessly from its sheath.

Then the wind changed and brought to her, incongruous in the sharpness of the juniper, the sweet scent of patchouli.

Starhawk braced herself to dodge in case she was wrong and called out softly, “Fawn!”

There was a startled shift in the pattern. The shape of the girl’s body was revealed under the voluminous folds of a mottled plaid cloak—the dull, almost random-looking northern plaid that blended so deceptively into any pattern of earth and trees. Fawn’s voice was shaky and scared. “Starhawk?”

Starhawk stood up, clearly startling the daylights out of the girl by her nearness. They stood facing each other for a time on the windswept darkness of the hillside. Because they were both women, there was a great deal that did not need to be said. Starhawk remembered that most of what she had said to Ari had been in Sun Wolf’s tent; of course the girl would overhear.

It was Fawn who spoke first. “Don’t send me away,” she said.

“Don’t be foolish,” Starhawk said brusquely.

“I promise I won’t slow you down.”

“You can’t promise anything of the kind and you know it,” the Hawk retorted. “I’m making the best time to Grimscarp that I can, over some damned dirty country. It’s not the same as traveling with the troop from Wrynde to the Peninsula or down to the Middle Kingdoms and back.”

Fawn’s voice was desperate, low against the whining of the wind. “Don’t leave me.”

Starhawk was silent a moment. Though a warrior herself, she was woman enough to understand the fear in that taut voice. Her own was kinder when she said, “Ari will see that you come to no harm.”

“And what then?” Fawn pleaded. “Spend the winter in Wrynde, wondering who’s going to have me if Sun Wolf doesn’t come back?”

“It’s better than being passed around a bandit troop and ending up with your throat slit in a ditch.”

“You run that risk yourself!” And when Starhawk did not answer, but only hooked her hands through the buckle of her sword belt, Fawn went on. “I swear to you, if you won’t take me with you to Grimscarp, I’ll follow you on my own.”

The girl bent down, the winds billowing the great plaid cloak about her slender body, and picked up something Starhawk saw was a pack from among the heather at her feet. She slung it over her shoulder and descended to where the Hawk stood, catching at the branches now and then for balance, holding her dark, heavy skirts out of the brambles. Starhawk held out a hand to her to help her down to the road. The Hawk’s grip was like a man’s, firm under the delicate elbow. When they reached the road together. Fawn looked up at her, as if trying to read the expression in that craggy, inscrutable face, those transparent eyes.

“Starhawk, I love him,” she said. “Don’t you understand what it is to love?”

“I understand,” Starhawk said in a carefully colorless voice, “that your love for him won’t get you to Grimscarp alive. I elected to search for him because I have a little—a very little—experience with wizards and because I believe that he can be found and rescued. It could easily have been any of the men who came. I can hold my own against any of them in battle.”

“Is that all it is to you?” Fawn demanded passionately. “Another job? Starhawk, Sun Wolf saved me from—from things so unspeakable it makes me sick to remember them. I had seen my father murdered—” Her voice caught in a way that told Starhawk that the death had been neither quick nor clean. “I’d been dragged hundreds of miles by a band of leering, dirty, cruel men, I’d seen my maid raped and murdered, and I knew that the only reason they didn’t do the same to me was because I’d fetch a better price as a virgin. But they talked about it.”

Her face seemed to burn white in the filmy starlight, her body trembling with the hideous memories. “I was so terrified at—at being sold to a captain of a mercenary troop that I think I would have killed myself if I hadn’t been watched constantly. And then Sun Wolf bought me and he was so good to me, so kind...”

The hood of her cloak had blown back, and the stars glinted on the tears that streaked her cheeks. Grief and compassion filled Starhawk’s heart—for that distant, frightened child and for the girl before her now. But she said, with deliberate coldness, “None of that means that you’ll be able to find him safely.”

“I don’t want to be safe!” Fawn cried. “I want to find him—or know in my heart that he’s dead.”

Starhawk glanced away, annoyed. She had never questioned that she should look for the Chief—her loyalty to him was such that she would have undertaken the quest no matter what Ari had said. Her own unquestioned prowess as a warrior had merely been one of the arguments. Her native honesty forced her to recognize Fawn’s iron resolution as akin to her own, regardless of what kind of nuisance she’d be on the road.

The older woman sighed bitterly and relaxed. “I don’t suppose,” she said after a moment, “that there is any way I could prevent you from coming with me, short of tying you up and dragging you back to camp. Besides losing me time, that would only make the two of us look ridiculous.” She stared coldly down her nose when Fawn giggled at the thought. “You know, don’t you, that you might cause the troop’s departure to be delayed if Ari takes it into his head to search the town for you?”

Fawn colored strangely under the starlight. She bent to pick up her pack again and start toward where the burro was still tethered, head-down against the wind. “Ari won’t look for me,” she said. “For one thing, you know he wouldn’t delay the march north. And besides.. .” Her voice faltered with shame. “I took everything valuable of mine. Clothes, jewels—everything that I would take if I were running off with another man. And that’s what he’ll think I did.”

Unexpectedly, Starhawk grinned. Fawn might not be able to reason her way past their arguments, but she certainly had found a matter-of-fact means of discouraging pursuit. “Don’t tell me you have all that in that little pack?”

Startled at the sudden lightening of the Hawk’s voice, Fawn looked quickly up to meet her eyes, then resumed her smile ruefully. “Only the jewels. I thought we could sell them for food on the way. The rest of it I bundled up and dropped over the sea cliffs.”

“Very nice.” Starhawk smiled approvingly, reflecting that she was evidently not the only person in the troop to hold possessions lightly. “You have a good grasp of essentials. We’ll make a trooper of you yet.”