Sword-Singer Read online

  She closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them she was dry-eyed, but curiously wounded. “You’ve had more of me than any other man,” she said softly, “except for Ajani.”

  I could not look away. After a moment I rose, tossed aside the pillow, crossed the room to the woman. Remembered that the self-possessed an-ishtoya, the deadly Northern sword-dancer, had had her girlhood stolen from her.

  And so I held her, only held her, and it was enough for us both.

  Six

  Sand gave way to dirt, scrub grass to thick-meshed turf, creosote to spearlike trees and spreading shrubs I couldn’t name. Even the smell altered; I sniffed, disliking it, tasting it on my tongue, and realized it came from the trees. A pungent, clinging odor, not so different from huva weed, though lacking the same results.

  The land itself changed also. The scattered hills of Harquhal merged here to form a family, touching hands and heads and shoulders. And promising more to come; in the distance I could see mountains rearing skyward out of the earth.

  We beat our way northward, following the Traders’ Road out of Harquhal. With each stride the stud took me farther away from the South, farther from what I knew, thrusting me into a foreign land like a sword through a man’s belly. I didn’t much like the picture, but I didn’t say so to Del.

  Well, I doubt she would have paid much attention anyway. She was locked up in silence, unusually quiet even for her. And yet I sensed expectancy, an anticipation that had nothing to do with fear or trepidation, or the discomfort I was feeling. Del was locked away, but not because she retreated. Because what she felt was intensely private: Delilah was coming home.

  I knew it at once, though she herself said nothing. It was a change in posture. A subtle straightening of backbone, a squaring of the shoulders, a lifting of the chin. And a slow, glorious smile that set her face alight.

  It was a remarkable transformation, but it only made me surly.

  Del stopped her speckledy gelding by a small stone cairn. She swung a leg over and slid off, burnous tangling briefly on the stirrup. She jerked it free absently and walked away from the horse, ignoring him as he tried to follow. After a moment he quit and turned away, dropping his head to forage in hummocky, turfy grass. Del paid no mind. She merely climbed up past the cairn and drew Boreal from her sheath.

  She faced north. Behind and below her, I could see nothing but Del’s back, all swathed in creamy silk. She lifted the jivatma, held it crosswise to the sun so that light danced off the blade, then brought it down and kissed the steel once, twice, thrice, in a gesture of homage and dedication.

  “Sulhaya,” she said aloud, thanking her Northern gods.

  I shivered. In the sun, it was warm, but I was cold to the bone. And then it passed and I was warm again, left with a nagging memory of something I could not explain.

  Sunlight glinted off Boreal’s naked blade. Del had not keyed the jivatma, and yet I saw the palest bloom of salmon-silver. As if the sword as well as Del knew she had come home at last.

  Uneasily, I shifted my rump in the saddle. “Bascha—”

  Del turned. Her face and posture were transfigured. I did not speak again.

  She slid the sword home. The moment had passed; she was Del again, but with a new smile on her lips. A smile I had never seen, and wished it was meant for me.

  “So,” she said, “I am home. Now it is your decision.”

  “My decision?”

  She gestured at the cairn. “There lies the border.”

  I had figured as much. But I glared at the cairn anyway; it represented a vast unknown. A place where sandtigers never roamed.

  Her voice was very quiet. “I would understand.”

  I looked at her. I saw comprehension and compassion in her eyes. She was not quite twenty-one, significantly younger than I in years, far older than I in insight. Sometimes, I hated her for it; now I hated myself. “Would you?”

  Judiciously, after a moment, she suggested, “Perhaps not.”

  Hoolies. Yes she did. As much as I myself did.

  And so, perversely, if only to prove her wrong, I rode across the border.

  And wished at once I hadn’t; there was something wrong here.

  Del, apparently oblivious, walked down to catch her grazing gelding. She turned him, led him up to the stud, mounted silently. And then she looked at me and thanked me, using the Northern word.

  “What?” I was distracted.

  “Thank you,” she repeated, this time in Southron.

  Something clammy ran down my spine. “You don’t need me.” Born of belligerence and discomfort, it came out rather more curtly than I’d intended. (Sometimes the truth, all tangled in unnamed feelings, makes me a tad bit sullen.) “You don’t need me. Not really. We both know that. You don’t need anyone. Not while you carry that sword.”

  Del frowned a little. And then a corner of her mouth twitched. “In your own special way, you are as invaluable as my sword.”

  “Uh-huh.” I kneed the stud into a walk. “Tell me another one, bascha.”

  “No,” she answered readily. “Because you are fishing, Tiger, and we are nowhere near a lake.”

  “Doing what?”

  She opened her mouth, shut it, considered me a moment, then opened her mouth again, and told me what fishing was. And what fish were, for that matter.

  “You eat them?” I was aghast; fish sounded like revolting creatures, all scales and fins and gills.

  A line drew her brows together. “In all your travels from Harquhal to Julah, surely you must have tasted fish. Julah, I think, is not so far from the ocean…and Harquhal is not so far from the North. Don’t men go fishing?”

  I scowled. “I’ve never spent much time in Harquhal…and as for Julah, how should I know how close it is to an ocean? I’ve never gone past the mountains.”

  Astonishment parted pale brows and sent them arching toward her hairline. “Have you never looked at maps?”

  “Of course I’ve looked at maps. I know the Punja, don’t I? I know where all the domains are, don’t I?—and the permanent villages, and all the waterholes. I know—”

  Del raised a hand. “Yes. I see. Indeed, forgive me; I do not doubt your wisdom.” So bland her tone, so serene her expression. Which meant she didn’t mean any of what she said, and said it merely for effect. (Or to shut me up.) “I only meant it seemed odd you are so uncertain of the borders and what lies beyond them.”

  “And I suppose you are certain.”

  “I was taught,” she said calmly. “It was a part of my apprenticeship, to know the land I meant to traverse. I have put it all up here.” She tapped her head. “In addition to learning the sword-dance, we must also learn mathematics, languages and geography.”

  Well, it explained why Del and one or two other Northern sword-dancers I’d met spoke my language so well. Southron is easy to learn, but Desert—the idiom of the Punja—is not. Del had required me to translate. She knew a little now, having picked it up from me, but mostly we conversed in Southron. It had seemed natural enough to me.

  As for mathematics and geography, the words were completely foreign, nothing more than sounds. My apprenticeship had been given over to the sword-dance only, to the physical forms and rituals that made sword-dancing so complete. I had spent my years learning how to move, how to fight, how to kill; there had been room for nothing else.

  I shrugged. “We’re different people, bascha…born of different customs.”

  After a moment, she nodded pensively. “Sometimes, I forget. There is always the circle for us, and the dance…it is difficult to recall there is more to us than swords and circles and dancing. In those ways, we are so alike…in others, so very different.”

  Downright voluble, was Del. Crossing the border into the North apparently unlocked a lot of the privacy she hoarded so carefully, freeing her to speak of things we neither of us usually brought up.

  “Yes, well, you’re a woman and I’m a man,” I pointed out affably. “There are
bound to be differences.”

  Del’s face was expressionless. “Bound to be,” she agreed, “even when there should be none.”

  “Oh, Del—now, let’s not start that. You know I’m the first one to give you credit for what you’ve accomplished. Hoolies, bascha, I’m the one who spars with you, remember? I know what you’re capable of. Do I hold back? Do I give way? Do I treat you differently because you’re a woman?”

  She considered it a moment. “Not as much as you used to.”

  “Sulhaya,” I said sourly, and subsided into silence.

  Del didn’t say much, either, the rest of the day. She seemed to cherish every step of the gelding that took her farther away from the South, while I caught myself, every now and then, looking back over my shoulder. Soon, too soon, the vastness of the desert was replaced with the immediacy of the North; there was no longer anything I could claim familiarity with. I was truly a stranger, cut off from the things I knew.

  I hunched on the stud and lost myself to thought, so accustomed to his rhythms that I could ignore him with impunity, except when he chose otherwise. For the moment, he didn’t; he plodded onward, upward, ears flicking in all directions, brass bridle ornamentation jangling with every bob of his head.

  All around us the ground swelled like boils on a butt. Above us crouched the mountains, waiting to hem us in.

  I shivered once. Shifted in the saddle. Shifted again, scowling northward toward the mountains. Opened my mouth to say something to Del but shut it again, with a snap, and disliked myself intensely for nearly speaking aloud.

  But something here was wrong.

  It lifted the hairs on my body. Something stirred against my scalp. It itched in response and I scratched viciously, knowing perfectly well it wasn’t a nagging pest but something unknown. Something undefinable. And something that might, in Del’s eyes, make me an utter fool.

  I drew in a deep breath, trying to shake off the increasing sensation of wrongness. I meant only to blow air out again, but words spilled free instead. “I just don’t like it.”

  It surprised even me, slipping out that way, so clipped and definitive. Del snapped her head around and stared at me, upper body moving with the subtle rhythms of her mount. “Don’t like what?”

  I scowled down at the clipped mane of the stud. My fingers, of their own volition, picked at the loose weave of braided cotton reins. I saw wide fingernails, some curiously ridged, others squashed, and scarred, ore-pocked knuckles. The weight I’d lost in captivity had returned with a decent diet, but the scars were reminders of a more permanent sort. It hadn’t been all that long since Del and I had escaped the tanzeer Aladar’s imprisonment: me, from his gold mine; Del from unwanted attentions. A matter of months, only.

  “Tiger—what don’t you like?”

  There it was again. And I had no better answer. “I don’t know,” I said grudgingly. “It.”

  “It,” she echoed blankly, after a startled consideration.

  I lifted shoulders and rolled them, testing the fit of the harness and the weight of my sword. No, not mine; Theron’s. “Bascha—don’t you feel something?”

  “Oh, yes,” she answered readily.

  It relieved me immeasurably. “There. See? I’m not crazy. There is something odd…something uncanny—”

  “Odd?” she asked. “I think not. What I feel is home.”

  Yes, well, she would. But me, I didn’t. I felt decidedly discomfited. “Del—”

  She halted her speckledy gelding. Accordingly, the stud also stopped. Del set the flat of her hands against the low pommel of her saddle and leaned forward on stiffened arms, shifting weight from rump to wrists. “What you feel,” she said, “is frightened.”

  “Fri—”

  “Frightened,” she repeated, overriding my startled protest. “You have never been out of the South before. You have never left home before.”

  “Del, I’m not a child—”

  “Children adapt to change more easily than adults.” Her face was serious. “I know what you feel. I felt it myself, when I went south to find Jamail. Once I crossed the border from my land into yours, I knew I could not go back again until the job was finished. I knew myself cut off, denied my former life; that what I had to do was more important than anything else in my life—”

  “But I don’t have a job.” Rudely, I interrupted. “I’m just here because I felt like coming along.”

  Del sighed and tucked a fallen lock of hair behind an ear.

  I set my teeth and tried to be patient. “There’s something else,” I told her. “Something more. Tell me I’m crazy if you want, but I feel it. I know it’s here.”

  Del looked around. Each step took us a little higher, rising steadily out of the vast flatness of the South. Here, spangled with hills and rises and hollows, it was hard to believe the Punja even existed. “It might rain,” she offered at last. “Perhaps that’s what you feel.”

  “Hoolies, bascha, we’re not talking rain, here—we’re talking something else entirely, something serious.” I glared at her. “And if you don’t feel it, you’re deaf, dumb and blind.”

  Her jaw tautened. “Am I?”

  I drew in a deep breath. Shoved silken sleeve to elbow and bared a muscled forearm. Sure enough, the dark hairs were standing on end. “Well?” I asked.

  Del looked at my arm. Looked at me. Something was in her face, some form of inner turmoil that she fought to keep from showing itself too freely. I watched how carefully she considered the words she intended to use, and I saw her decide on them. “I think perhaps you have convinced yourself there is something odd—”

  “Convinced myself?” I didn’t let her finish. “Oh, no, bascha, this took no convincing. This is real. I’m not imagining anything.”

  Del sighed a little. “You yourself have told me you don’t believe in magic, that for you, it doesn’t exist—”

  “What I’ve told you is that I don’t like it,” I said clearly. “Oh, it exists, all right. How, why or in what forms, I can’t explain. All I know is that most people don’t understand how to use it, and so they use it wrong.” I shook my head, glancing around uneasily. “There is something about the North—”

  “There is nothing about the North,” she interrupted curtly. “It is about you. About the Sandtiger, who puts no stock in what others may believe, ridiculing their emotions. And now he can’t deal with his own.” She unhooked a foot and threw a leg over the saddle, sliding down to wait for me on the ground. “Come down, Tiger, and I will show you what you feel are superstitions.”

  “What?”

  She stared up at me. “We will settle this, Tiger, once and for all, so I don’t have to listen to your muttering.” She stabbed a finger at the ground. “Come down here.”

  I considered pointing out that her tone left something to be desired—she might have asked, instead of commanding—but I decided arguing wasn’t worth it. So I stepped off the stud and waited.

  Del walked away from the horses and gestured for me to follow. I did, grudgingly, and halted as she did, in a hollow between two hummocky little mounds.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Unsheathe the sword and plant it in the ground.” She didn’t smile. “Pretend it’s a man’s belly.”

  I looked warily at the ground, then at her. “What’s supposed to happen?”

  “Nothing,” Del said, between set teeth. “Nothing at all will happen, and then you’ll see you’re spouting nonsense.”

  I sighed. “Fine. Just fine, bascha…take a man at his word.”

  “I’ll take the sword’s word.”

  I scowled at her. She was being purposely obscure simply to irritate me. (It nearly always does, too.) But this time I refused to let Del win; I unsheathed Theron’s dead sword and plunged the blade into the earth.

  Nothing happened.

  “There,” Del said, “you see—”

  Indeed, I did see, for as long as I was able. And then the ground around us exploded.

 
For a single insane moment, I wanted to laugh out loud. I wanted to rub her face in it, to shout aloud that I was right.

  But I didn’t. I was too busy trying to breathe.

  Eventually, my eyes stopped tearing, my ears ceased ringing, my chest halted its heaving. I sat up. Spat out dirt. Sneezed. Picked grass out of my hair. Peered through the acrid smoke and saw Del doing much the same. She was all right, then; it meant I could gloat with impunity.

  Except I wasn’t so sure I wanted to, anymore.

  The sword stood upright between us, untouched by the blast that had thrown us both to the ground. The earth around it was scorched, but the blade was clean of ash or charring. It glowed a pale, luminescent purple.

  I stood up slowly and slapped dirt and ash from my burnous. “Well,” I said lightly, “time to get a new sword.”

  Del remained seated. She contemplated the glowing blade. I saw astonishment and disbelief. Careful consideration. The line deepened between her brows as she scowled at Theron’s sword. To herself, she said, “It isn’t supposed to do that. Theron is dead.”

  “Now do you believe me?”

  She didn’t even glance up. “Touch it, Tiger.”

  I nearly gaped. “Touch it? Touch that? After what it did before? You’re sandsick, bascha. We’re leaving that thing stuck here in the ground for the next fool who comes along, and welcome to it!”

  She shook her head. “We can’t. It’s a jivatma—made for a particular person. It would dishonor the sword to leave it. We should take it to Staal-Ysta, for proper burial at Staal-Kithra.”

  She was rattling off strange names, but I was too upset to ask her about either of them. “Hoolies, Del, it might have killed us both.”

  “No,” she said calmly, “I don’t think so.” She chewed her bottom lip and looked from the sword to me. Twice, then once more. Thoughtfully. Deeply. As if she considered something new and wholly unexpected. And then she smiled slowly, so slowly, as if she realized something, and she laughed, as if what she considered was also an answer to a question. “The child goes where the man may not…” The phrase trailed off, but the light in her eyes did not. “Perhaps, after all, I can win.”