Sword-Singer Read online

  I nodded thoughtfully. “Now, there was a time…”

  Del turned on her heel and left.

  Adara prevailed upon me to change clothes, since what I wore was thoroughly soaked. She unwrapped the remaining bundle I had lugged up and down Del’s “foothills” and handed me various pieces of alien clothing, then quietly took herself and her daughter around the side of the wagon while I shinnied out of wet silk, dhoti and harness.

  Unfortunately, cold as I was, I couldn’t replace wet clothes with new immediately. There was the problem of figuring out how to put them on.

  Eventually, muttering violent but indecipherable curses through chattering teeth (and coughing), I did sort things out, thanks to Adara’s quiet explanations from the other side of the wagon.

  Of something called wool, there were baggy trews that reached to ankles; gaiters cross-gartered with leather thongs stretching from knee to ankle; a long-sleeved undertunic. The sleeveless overtunic was of leather decorated with silver-tipped fringe. Low boots replaced my sandals.

  The woolens were blue, every last bit, though none was the same blue, but a tangle of brights and darks. The leather was a uniform bloody brown. I felt like a patchwork man.

  I looked down at the pile of sodden silk and damp dhoti. On top of both lay my sword and harness. I scooped it up and realized that for the first time in many years, the harness leather would no longer come in contact with my flesh. The Northern clothes were too confining.

  Del, I recalled, wore her harness strapped over her leather tunic. Time for me to do the same.

  Undoing buckles, I came out from behind the wagon. Cipriana peeped around the corner, saw I was clothed, giggled and said something to her mother mostly in Northern. Color stood high in her cheeks.

  Adara did not look at me, but at the massive sword hilt jutting from the sheath. “Is that a jivatma?” she asked.

  I stopped undoing and moving buckles. Her face was pale. Even Cipriana was taken aback, looking from my face to the sword and back.

  “What do you know of jivatmas?” I shifted buckles again, deftly lengthening straps. The sword-weighted sheath swung.

  “I—my husband was Northern. He told me a little about the swords, and the people who wield them.” She touched her throat in a betraying gesture of vulnerability. “Is that a blooding-blade?”

  I settled buckles into new places, snapped the straps, hooked arms through, head and neck, adjusted the fit with a rolling motion of both shoulders. “For another man, it was a jivatma,” I said quietly. “For me, it’s merely a sword. And only temporarily, until I can get another.”

  Adara did not move her head. I saw the pulsebeat in her throat. “Then—you are not a sword-dancer?”

  A tug here, pull there…it would take time for the leather to settle, and for me to adjust to it over layers of fabric instead of flesh. “I am a sword-dancer,” I said, “but a Southron one. There is a difference. I don’t know what your husband told you, but in the South a man with a sword is a man with a sword, not some sorcerer who claims a blade that comes to life when you sing a song.”

  “Sword-singer,” Cipriana said clearly, with more than a little awe.

  I frowned. “Well, I suppose the term applies, in a way—at least, when it comes to a jivatma.” I shrugged, dismissing it; reached over my left shoulder to snick the blade in its sheath. “But Del and I are sword-dancers.”

  There was a moment of icy silence. “Del, too?” Adara was clearly shocked.

  Slowly, I smiled. “What did you think she was? A woman who plays with a sword merely for effect?”

  It was a question Del had asked me once, when I was still blithely convinced she wasn’t what she claimed, but merely a foolish woman on a foolish, futile mission to find a young brother stolen by Southron raiders and sold to Southron slavers.

  Of course, I had come to know better.

  Eventually.

  Though she might argue otherwise.

  Adara shook her head slowly. “I thought—I thought—” She broke off. “I don’t know what I thought.” So numbly. “But I know what sword-dancers are, what they do…” Her green eyes were dilated dark. “Do you mean to say she has killed people?”

  It would do no good to deny it. “In the circle and out of it.”

  “And you?”

  “And me.”

  Even her lips were white. Dazedly, she asked, “What have I brought among us?”

  I sneezed. Sneezed again. Pressed the heel of a hand against my heavy head. “For the moment,” I mumbled thickly, “nothing more than a miserable excuse for a man.” I sniffed loudly and lengthily. “Gods—if you exist—could you just send me a little sun—?”

  It made Cipriana smile.

  The girl’s mother did not.

  Twelve

  Adara swung around stiffly and marched across the muddy little campsite to where I’d left dhoti and burnous piled on the ground. She picked them up, folded them neatly even though they were wet, and brought them back to me.

  Her tone was awkwardly proper. “We are grateful for the help you’ve given us with the wagon. But I must ask you to go.”

  “Go?”

  “Go,” she repeated firmly. “I will not have my children witnessing violence and murder.”

  Oh, hoolies. “Adara—”

  “Just go.” Her face—and mind—were closed.

  I sighed, knowing argument and explanation would accomplish nothing. I’d met her kind before. “Do you mind if I wait for Del?”

  She heard the dryness in my voice, but kept herself from responding in kind. “Until then, yes.” Her own words were clipped.

  “You should let them stay until morning.” Cipriana’s quiet suggestion startled us both. “They have helped with the wagon, and Del is bringing food. The least we can do is let them share our fire for the night.”

  The girl’s mother stared at her. Convictions warred with courtesy. Abruptly, she thrust the clothing into my hands. “Cipriana—you don’t know what they are.”

  “Sword-dancers.” The girl was matter-of-fact. “I’m not blind or deaf, and we are Borderers. We’ve all been to Harquhal. I’ve seen sword-dancers before, and so has Massou.” She shrugged. “I’ve even seen a sword-dance.”

  “Cipriana!”

  “I have.” Her eyes were steady. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  I smiled. “Most of the time, it isn’t. Not much more than an exhibition.”

  Cipriana nodded. “They were good, those men. Father even said they were, but not good enough to be ishtoya or an-ishtoya.” Pale brows interlocked. “What do the words mean? I asked, but he never told me.”

  I looked at Adara, expecting her to cut off the conversation. But she said nothing at all, merely turned away with a rigid spine and knelt down to tend the fire. Loosened hair, red as copper, fell forward to hide her face. Impatiently she thrust it back, mouth set in a thin, hard line.

  Cipriana waited. Her face was solemn, yet expectant, similar in bone and expression to Del’s. Both were blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned. But there was innocence in the younger girl’s eyes, even as there was experience in Del’s.

  I bent down and tucked dhoti and burnous into the bundle and rolled it up again. “They are Northern words,” I said, tying thongs. “Both mean the same thing, basically, which is ‘student’—but an-ishtoya is of a higher level than ishtoya.”

  A lock of loose, pale hair, fine as floss, fell forward over a shoulder. Cipriana hooked it behind one ear in a gesture habitual to Del. “What are you?” she asked.

  “Me? I’m Southron.” I grinned as I rose. “In the South, things are done differently.”

  “And Del?”

  “Del is—Del.” I shrugged. “It’s for her to say.”

  “Kaidin, is she not?” Adara’s voice was muffled. “She carries a jivatma.”

  I let that sink in a moment. “For a woman so opposed to sword-dancers,” I said lightly, “you sure know a lot about us.”

  She cast me a sharp, br
ight look of resentment, as if I’d offended her by doubting her intelligence. “I’m a Borderer,” she said curtly. “We learn many things out of necessity.”

  “And survival is one of them.” I ducked beneath the rainbreak, squatting by the fire. “And have you also learned—”

  But I was never able to finish my question because Massou came running down the nearest slope with something clutched in his hands. Adara rose and turned at once, slipping out from under ropes and rainbreak to tend her son.

  “Look!” he cried. “Look! See what nearly got me?” Stretched between both hands was a thick, dark rope of a snake. It was a pearly, indigo color, slicked with grayish speckles. “It tried to bite me, tried to kill me, but Del took out her sword and cut its head right off!” He displayed the headless end enthusiastically, oblivious to the gore. “It tried to bite me on the arm as I bent to lay a snare, but she cut the head off even as it struck!”

  The she he indicated came quietly down the slope behind him, empty-handed. Boreal was in her sheath. “The snares are set. By morning, we should have meat.”

  “She says we can eat this.” Diffidently, Massou held the bluish body out to his mother. But Adara ignored him—and the snake—altogether; instead, she stared at the woman who had saved the life of her son.

  “Bluesnake.” Del said briefly. “Better by far than cumfa.” She ducked beneath the rainbreak, squatted to pour tea, glanced at me over the rim. Her brows climbed slowly up. “A Northerner has joined us.”

  I sighed. “Yes, well, everything else was wet.”

  “It’s why I bought them,” Del agreed blandly. “The farther north we go, the colder it gets. You’ll be glad of the furs, too, once we reach Reiver’s Pass.”

  Massou was still full to bubbling over of his experience, wanting to share it with everyone, but particularly with his mother. “You should have seen me!” he exclaimed. “I was all bent down to set the snare—just like this—” He bent, flopping the dead snake in the mud “—and there it was, just waiting, all coiled up and reared back. It would’ve bit me, too, but Del saw it and zlipp!—cut its head right off!”

  Cipriana, having inspected the kill, made a face of bored distaste.

  “You didn’t look beforehand, Massou.” Del was quietly reproving. “The world is treacherous if you don’t pay attention.”

  Briefly chastened, he nodded, though deaf to the nuances in her tone. And he was too excited to pay mind to the words for long. Clearly he no longer judged Del unfit to set snares or anything else that was ordinarily a man’s concern; in his eyes, she had earned her place in a masculine world. “After it was dead, Del said we could eat it. I wanted to keep the head, but she said it wasn’t a trophy. She said a man should never be proud of his failures.” Blue eyes were fixed on me. “She said you wear a string of claws around your neck, but it’s a proper keepsake because you saved your people from a sandtiger who was eating all the children.”

  I looked at Del. Her expression was sanguine. “Well, yes—so I did.” I reached beneath all the leather and wool and pulled the string of claws free, hearing the familiar click and rattle. Somehow, before the boy’s disconcertingly direct gaze, I couldn’t embellish the story. But neither could I entirely ignore an opportunity. “Someone had to do it, and there I was.”

  “Was it hard?”

  I tapped my cheek. “Hard enough, and dangerous. See these scars?”

  “The sandtiger did that?”

  “It’s where I got my name.” Said casually enough, and regretted almost immediately.

  “Got your name?” Cipriana frowned. “Didn’t you have a name?”

  I glanced at Del, who clearly was sorry she’d said anything at all. We’d both been alone too long, or only with one another; we had forgotten how direct children can be. How demanding—and deserving—of simple honesty.

  I drew in a breath. “You’re a Borderer,” I said evenly. “What do you call slaves?”

  “Chula,” she answered promptly. And then covered her mouth with her hand.

  Massou’s blue eyes were huge. “You were a slave once?”

  Even Adara waited. Del sipped tea.

  “Once,” I answered quietly, “a very long time ago.”

  They stared, all three of them. Just stared. I found it discomfiting and otherwise irritating, although I knew they didn’t do it to offend me. And I suppose I even understood it: here I was, professional sword-dancer, freely admitting I had been a chula. In the South, slaves are less than chattel, less than human, and to illustrate it slaves are never named. So, when I had killed the cat, I’d taken on his name, to illustrate my new-found and hardwon freedom.

  Adara’s green eyes had the unfocused look of someone lost in recollections. Then, slowly, she turned from me to Del. “And you?” she asked. “Were you also a—”

  “—chula?” Del shook her head. “Northerners don’t keep slaves.”

  “Then…” Adara’s glance flicked down to the fire and held. “I should not ask.”

  “No, you shouldn’t.” Del’s tone was quiet. “But you have, and so I will tell you this much: I chose my life just as you chose yours…and I make no judgments when others take a different road than mine.”

  Adara’s head snapped up. “I have children to protect!”

  A muscle ticked in Del’s left cheek. “Yes. Of course.”

  “If you had children—”

  Del overrode her smoothly. “If I had children,” she said with quiet clarity, “I would teach them to think for themselves.”

  White-faced, Adara looked at her children. First at Cipriana, clothed in gray wool, no longer a girl but not quite a woman; at Massou, a boy, in brown, still clutching his thick-bodied snake. Towheaded, blue-eyed children, showing their father’s heritage. I knew she balanced Del’s words against her own convictions, weighing past behaviors, past pronouncements. Of her children, neither said a word, not unaware of the tension singing between the two women, but also not knowing how to respond.

  And then the tension faded out of Adara, replaced with resignation. “I will prepare the snake.”

  “I can do it.” Del’s offer was meant to help settle ruffled feathers.

  Adara understood. She smiled crookedly. “No. Your task was to catch the meal; mine is to prepare it.” There was dryness in the Border woman’s tone, as if she regretted the ordering of the tasks, but no hostility. She took the snake from her son. “Cipriana, will you help me?”

  The girl opened her mouth, clearly torn; there were things she wanted to ask the two strangers with swords on their backs. But she said nothing at all to either of us, merely nodded and went to her mother.

  Adara did not turn away at once. Obscurely, she asked, “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Del said, “but you should understand that we are not the enemy.”

  Adara shoved fallen hair away from her face with the back of a callused right hand. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “it’s so very hard to tell.”

  We ate Massou’s snake, talked a little, went to bed. Adara and the children slept in the little wagon, while Del and I bedded down outside, a little apart from the wagon. The night air made me cough; I buried my head in goathair and tried to still my lungs.

  Del stirred against me. “Your cough is getting worse.”

  I freed my mouth from goathair. “Am I keeping you awake?”

  “Well, I’m not asleep…what do you think?” And then she sighed, heavily, and hitched a hip higher on my thigh, pressing her spine against my belly. “No. It isn’t you. It’s me. I’m doing something I swore I’d never do.”

  I waited. She didn’t answer at once. Eventually, I gave in and asked what it was.

  Pale hair was silver in the darkness. I could see little of her face. “I’m thinking,” she said wearily. “Thinking about—”

  “—how things might have been,” I finished. “Wondering what kind of person you would be, and what you might be doing.”

  She was silent a moment. Then, “Do
n’t you?”

  “Wonder about you, or me?”

  “Both.”

  I smiled into her hair. “Never.”

  Del stiffened, then thrust herself up and over, settling back down beneath blankets to face me this time. Blue eyes bored into mine. “Never?”

  “I know what I’d be, bascha. A chula, or maybe dead. Probably dead; I’d have killed someone for my freedom, and the Salset would have killed me.”

  “If they’d caught you.”

  “They might have. Although Sula probably would have given me food and water and helped me to escape…and paid for it eventually, if they’d found out.”

  Del sighed. “A strong woman, Sula. She would have risked her life for you.”

  Sula. I hadn’t thought of her in months, although it had been only six or so since I’d seen her. Del and I had been left for dead in the Punja, intended as Sun Sacrifices, but the Salset had rescued us. An odd thing, that; half a lifetime before they had tried to kill me. But then I’d been a chula, and unworthy of a name.

  Except Sula had given me one. She had given me dignity.

  Old memories hurt. I shoved them away and resorted to my customary tone. “I inspire that kind of loyalty. Look at you, Delilah.”

  Del said something obscene. I laughed, then had to stifle another round of coughing.

  Her fingers were cool on my wrist. “Am I wrong to do what I do?”

  “Just because Adara thinks you are doesn’t mean you are.”

  “I’m not asking Adara. I know what she thinks. I’m asking the Sandtiger.”

  I snorted. “I’m a fine one to ask. We share a profession, bascha…and other things as well.” I paused significantly. “Sometimes, that is. When loki aren’t around.”

  Del sighed and shut her eyes. “Can’t you ever be serious?”

  “I’m serious most of the time. As for you—”

  “What do you want in a woman, Tiger?”

  I froze. “What?”

  “What do you want in a woman?” She hitched herself up on an elbow. “A soft, helpless thing, requiring your protection? Or a woman like Elamain was, hungry for constant bedding?” She sighed a little, looking over my shoulder toward the wagon. “Do you want a woman who cooks for you, cleans for you, bears you countless children…do you want a woman like Adara?”