Wild Magic

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Penhari squatted and let go, feeling more pleasure as the urine hissed than she’d ever, got from sex.

She followed instructions as best she could, crumpled the leaves together, but either she did something wrong or Fadogur trees weren’t like those in Whenapoyr; the leaves broke into fragments that clung and started scratching her and absorbed nothing. She used the ragged veil to finish the job and flung it away; she hated the thing anyway.

She stretched, groaned as her muscles protested, opened and shut her hands, shook herself. All that padding and weight off her body made her feel almost a girl again. She danced a few steps, the coarse gray skirt flaring out from her long thin legs, shifted into the moves Desantro showed her in the garden that day, stamping and kicking and swinging in circles. Diyo, diyo, I can do it, I can do this, I can, I can, diyo di, I can do it.

Chuckling and breathless, she scooped up the bundle, grunting at the weight of it, and started round the shack.

Hahlaz was adding a few twigs to the small fire hissing beneath a battered copper pot while Desantro slapped the stopple back in the spout of one of the water skins. As she bent with an easy shift of her body to set the depleted skin beside the others, she smiled at Penhari. “Feeling better?”

Hahlaz looked up, froze. A second later he was on his feet, running at Penhari with his knife out, shrieking, “MAAAAAAL!”

Desantro gasped and dropped to one knee, caught up a stone from the ring about the fire, flung it with hard accuracy at his head.

It hit him behind the ear with a dull thump.

He fell, sprawled, hands coming open, knife dropping hilt down beside him.

Penhari stood clutching the bundle to her middle, her mouth open, too startled to be afraid.

Desantro scrambled to her feet, ran the few steps to the unconscious man. She knelt beside him, felt under his chin, swore in her home tongue, looked up. “The jegger’s still alive.”

Penhari licked her lips. “Why?”

“Come at you?” Desantro shifted her position, pulled her skirt closer to her legs. “Face it, hesla. Mals an’t the favorite people outside the Sirmalas.” She grunted with satisfaction as she saw the knife. “No doubt he had his reasons.” She wound a hand in Hah-

laz’s hair, jerked his head up and away from her, and cut his throat.

“Desa!”

Desantro wiped the knife on his shirt, set it down away from the body. “I’m done with being slave,” she said. She jumped to her feet. “Couldn’t trust him after this. He’d a killed you and sold me first chance he got. Put that down and come over here. Help me carry him.”

“I don’t…” Penhari gazed in bewilderment at the bundle she was clutching to her middle. “I…”

“Move ass, woman. I owe y’ something; I coon’t be getting loose without the coin. But I swear if you don’t get y’ tail over here and grab those ankles, I’m outta this, you c’n do what y’ want.”

They carried the body into the middle of the grove, heaped leaves over it. Desantro left immediately, but Penhari stood beside the mound for several moments, trying to work out a way of living with what had happened. The last remnants of the indifference and withdrawal she’d cultivated for decades were wiped away. She’d faced shock after shock. The beating. The death of her handmaids and the Kassian who was her closest friend. The exhaustion, the alternating terror and exhilaration, of the escape. Now this slaughter-with her the trigger that brought it on…

She turned hastily away, leaned against a tree and vomited up a few spoonfuls of yellow bile, then shuddered with dry heaves.