WIND FROM A FOREIGN SKY by Fantasy Novelist Katya Reimann

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Wind From a Foreign Sky

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Chapter Three

Long after Martin had been put to sleep in the attic over the chimney, Tamsanne woke Gaultry from her pallet of blankets by the fire.
"You're going out?" Tamsanne was dressed in a dark shawl and long skirts.
"He's asleep. I'm going down to the fen to pray."
Gaultry pushed her covers aside and put her bare feet on the cold stone of the floor. The fire had burned down to banked embers. It was past midnight. "Let me come with you."
"I want to go alone." Tamsanne brushed her niece's tumbled hair back from her worried face. "Stay. Rest yourself for tomorrow."
Gaultry reluctantly settled back into her bed. "He talks a lot about pledges and vows. And blood."
"He's a young fool. All Tielmarans owe it to themselves to support their Prince. Even before they owe it to the Great Twins."
"In the woods, the first question he asked about you was to know your blood. I said you thought deeds, not blood, were what gave a person importance."
Tamsanne sighed. "In Tielmark, blood itself can be a deed. Vows can pass from parent to child."
"That's not the worst way to pass on a promise."
"Isn't it?" Tamsanne stared up to the little wooden door that led to the attic. "You think the geas your father laid on that young man is worse?"
"Martin hates it! I hate it too! To be forced to wear an unasked for magic harness—"
"It saved you in the forest. I doubt either of you regret that. And it may save you again before this business finds a closure."
Gaultry stared stubbornly at her aunt. She would not play the child and say she preferred violation to owing her father a debt of gratitude for having sent Martin to be a protector, but that was very near what she felt. "Father abandoned Mervion and me when we most needed him," she said. "I won't forgive him for that."
Getting to sleep again after Tamsanne left her was not easy.

# # #

"Here," Tamsanne said. "Put it on."
It was a little after sunrise. Martin was out in the stable, readying his horse. Tamsanne had been out all night, with only Bellows for company.
Gaultry touched the delicate ring of mottled-grey stone that her aunt offered to her, then took it in her hand. It was a traveler's amulet. The stone ring was warm on one face, cool on the other. The young huntress looked round for her aunt's familiar. The old dog, returned with Tamsanne, had retired to a corner by the fire and curled into a tight ball. His dark fur seemed thin, touches of blue skin showing on his ears and tail. His doggy eyes, sensing Gaultry's gaze and cracking open to return her stare, were bloodshot and weary.
"It is strong," Tamsanne admitted, seeing where Gaultry was looking. "Don't take it off until after you find Mervion. Or until after you've burnt it to a cinder using it to protect yourself."
Gaultry tied the ring onto a leather thong and pulled the thong over her head.
"Don't go beyond Melaudiere's seat if you can help it." Tamsanne made spiral of the goddess-sign and took her niece's hand. The image of the Orchid card, the pale plant growing shyly in the crevice of the oak, flared briefly between them. "Why you pulled that card is the question that most needs answering. Concentrate on that above all."
"I'll make it my first concern after finding out why Gilles sent Mervion to Princeport in the first place," Gaultry promised. It had been agreed, the night before, that Martin and Gaultry would stop past Blas Lodge on their way to Melaudiere, to discover if Gilles, Gaultry's half-brother, was unharmed, and what he had to say about the situation.
After a quick breakfast, Gaultry swiftly completed her own preparations. There was little enough to do. Dressing in her sturdiest tunic and hose, she tied her bright hair under a cloth cap and made a satchel of her short hunting bow, some underclothes, and her second best dress—her blue market dress needed repairs after the previous day's escapades. She threw the long butternut brown cloak that Mervion had spun for her over the lot, and was ready.
This was her usual hunting costume. She cut a striking figure wearing it. When Martin brought his horse to the cottage door, he cast her an appreciative look. "You're quite the young woods-queen this morning. How's the knee?"
Tamsanne and Gaultry, thinking over the journey ahead, had decided to dispense with pretense. "Recovered," Gaultry said primly, ignoring the compliment as she helped him tie her bag onto the crupper of his saddle. "I won't have to ride with you today."
He raised his eyebrows, teasing her a little. "Don't you want to share a saddle with me?"
Her cheeks went hot, and she turned nervously to Tamsanne. No, she didn't want to share his saddle. The pulse of her father's geas-magic waxing and waning in him, responding to her every mood, was too disturbing. She didn't want to think on her father, on how or why he had trapped this man into service. That was a cycle that could only make her more upset—and Martin more upset as his feelings tuned to hers.
"Start today with Gaultry running," Tamsanne said, coming to her niece's rescue. "You'll make better speed with her running than by fatiguing your animal all day with the weight of two riders."
"Fine," Martin said. "So long as her knee can take the pace."
"Give my regards to Gilles," Tamsanne said, as Martin made a last adjustment to his saddle and swung up. "I'll be thinking of you both."
"And of Mervion too, I hope," said Gaultry, giving her aunt a clumsy hug. Martin turned his horse for the forest, making a final salute.
Tamsanne stood at the cottage door, not moving until they were hidden from her line of sight by the trees.
They started with a gentle jog, Gaultry leading the way through the maze of narrow paths that led down towards the main track. It was a warm day, and the gentle jogging was easy and pleasant as the sun slowly rose in the sky, filtering long slanting rays down through the forest branches.
Gaultry, her eyes on the rubbly surface of track, soon found her thoughts drifting to the leg of the journey that lay ahead. She had been to and through Paddleways village many times, and ranged beyond it often enough, the times she'd served as a tracker for the villagers during their seasonal hunts. But she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she'd been past Paddleways to Blas Lodge.
Her strongest memory of Blas Lodge was from her last visit as a child, when her father had still been alive, and a loving, if distant, presence in the twins' lives. That had been the summer after Prince Benet's coronation. It had been an unusual summer. Benet's father, Ginvers, was dead of a poisoned wound he'd taken in battle during the summer campaign against the Lanai. Prince Ginvers's death had caused disruptions that had echoed out to the farthest reaches of Tielmark. Instead of spending his usual month at Tamsanne's, Thomas Blas had brought his young daughters to summer at his own house. He had shared his table with them, and even encouraged them to befriend their younger half-brother. The wonderful weeks they had spent together that summer had only intensified the surprise and pain their father had brought them the next year. Gaultry and Mervion had cried many nights, remembering that long summer month at Blas Lodge and wondering what they had done that had convinced their father that they could have no place there.
Of course Gaultry's most recent trip to Blas Lodge had been for her father's burial, barely two months past. The traveling, through the worst of the winter snow, had not been easy, and the news of Thomas Blas's untimely death had rested heavily on both sisters.
But for Gaultry, the return journey had been far worse. She'd known then that Mervion was coming home to Tamsanne's only to pack, eager to return to Blas Lodge to take up her place with Gilles and Anisia. Despite Mervion's assurances that the "visit," as she called it, would be only for the spring months, Gaultry had known that Mervion was unlikely to return to Tamsanne's on a permanent basis.
For Gaultry, the two days at Blas Lodge had been peculiarly wretched. Thomas Blas was put hastily in the ground on the first day. The second was preoccupied by arrangements for Mervion to join the lodge household. Gilles and Anisia, married less than two months, had seemed young and frightened, full of childish trepidation, their mourning for Thomas Blas more a matter of alarm that they had been plunged into the charge of an isolated rural estate than of grief at his untimely death. Gaultry, already a little jealous at the depth of their grief—they had been close to Thomas Blas in a way that she and Mervion had been denied—had been hurt by Mervion's eagerness to leave Tamsanne's to help them settle into Blas Lodge and life at the edge of Arleon Forest.
The young huntress had spent most of her time at the lodge yearning for home, and yearning uselessly for Mervion to want to be going home too. Unlike Mervion, whose magic had always taken a social bent, Gaultry drew strength from the cover of the deep-woods forest, and away from the heart of that source, she felt vulnerable. Mervion had always been the talker for the pair of them on market days—indeed, up until the past spring, when Gaultry had gone by herself to help with the village's seasonal hunt, without Mervion to help her, she had always felt shy and awkward, despite the villagers' friendliness.
On that return journey, through the depths of the winter snow, a selfish part of Gaultry had been forced to privately acknowledge that with Mervion gone, she was going to have to make more of an effort: in the village, with Tamsanne, and with any newcomers who came through Arleon Forest. She and Mervion had come close to quarreling over it. Adjusting to life without Mervion's support, had loomed as a real challenge for her. To an outside observer, it might have seemed that Gaultry had taken over Mervion's business in Paddleways Village easily enough, but behind her facade of calm, the transition had been painful. Compared with Mervion's charming ease of manners, Gaultry felt that her own efforts at sociability were painfully awkward.
Just as she found it painfully awkward to exchange pleasantries with the man at whose horse's side she now trotted.
"Do you think Tamsanne's right, sending us to my brother's before we go to Melaudiere?" she asked.
Martin, intent on gauging Gaultry's stamina, had been moving his mare at short trot-and-walk stints, leaving the young woman to her thoughts. Her question broke his concentration, startling him.
"Blas Lodge is on our route north," he said. "According to my liege Melaudiere, your marriage-sister risked her neck in passing on what she knew concerning your sister's torture-and Heiratikus's hunt for you. Without Anisia Blas, I would not have arrived in Arleon Forest in time to save you from Reido's men. Visiting your brother will be risky—but your aunt is right. We—you—owe it to your kin to stop there."
They reached the outskirts of the village well before noon, agreeing together to take the track around the village rather than pass through it. Lunch was a thin meal, cheese and bread, eaten under a tree as they watched a farmer and his two sons working their field. Martin ate without speaking. Gaultry suspected he was bored with their slow progress—or picking up on her own boredom.
"We could go faster," she told him, when they finished eating and he got up to pack the remains away.
"Oh?" He looked pointedly at her still-bandaged knee.
Gaultry flushed, wishing her aunt had let her unbind it. "It's stiff, yes, but we should press on."
"We should," he agreed. "We don't know where the men who attacked you yesterday have regrouped—or even if they've regrouped. The sooner we're past your brother's house and on the road to Melaudiere, the happier I'll feel."
"Then let's run a-ways," Gaultry said. "Let's run now." Guessing that he would agree, she leapt up and began to run, stealing a lead as he fumbled to buckle the last saddlebag.
Once in the saddle, he caught her easily, pushing the horse a few paces past her on the track. The look he shot over his shoulder as he crowded past was somewhere between a smile and a challenge—she smiled back, and ran faster, bringing herself level with his stirrup.
They raced on together past the last outlying fields north of Paddleways, past hayfields that didn't need spring plowing, past the village's northern screen of orchards, and back into wooded country. It was not very long before Gaultry began to regret the demanding pace she had teased Martin into setting for them. His pretty mare seemed tireless. She trotted briskly, her head held proud and high, her slender legs keeping such a relentlessly even rhythm that it became increasingly difficult for Gaultry to match.
Having provoked the game to begin with, Gaultry's vein of stubbornness forced her to continue running long after she began to want a rest. Shooting a quick glimpse at Martin's calm profile, Gaultry wished with increasing fervor that he'd think to spare her, and suggest a rest. The dust from the road permeated her clothes, then her nose, then her throat. She met his eye again and saw that he was half-hiding a smile.
"We aren't going to get there in one day, are we?" she called up, her voice choppy despite her effort to be casual. "Can we make a short stop?" They'd reached a crossing, a small wooden bridge over a stream with a rocky bed. The water looked deliciously cool and welcoming, and the grass by the side of the road particularly soft and inviting.
"If you like," he grinned.
"Yes!" Gaultry threw herself down next to the bridge. There was a wide V of dampness down her back. Taking a covert look at the mare, she was relieved to see that she too was grateful for the stop. Martin, to her slight annoyance, was relaxed and cool.
"Quite a test." He slid out of his saddle, rewarded the mare with a brief pat, and came to sit above Gaultry on the wooden rail of the bridge. "I begin to see how you managed to make headway against Reido and his men."
"I wasn't racing just now," Gaultry said, not wanting to explain about the dog she'd taken strength and speed from the day before. Despite the geas, the Rhasan card of the night before had shown her there was much he was keeping hidden. It wouldn't do to be fully open to him.
"The gods help me if you had been."
Gaultry smiled. "I've run wounded deer to their finish, and foxes to their dens. But I can't outlast a horse like yours." Not without a spell to help me, she added privately.
"Does Mervion run with you when she's home?"
Gaultry shook her head and grinned. "She's more subtle than I am. She makes things come running to her. I wish I had more of her spirit in me—I'd find myself getting into a lot less trouble. Except—" she frowned, bending to rub her legs so they wouldn't cramp. "Except in this last matter."
She looked up. "Mervion and I follow Elianté and Emiera, the holy twins. Mervion's always been for Emiera, the Lady-Queen—and I for Elianté the Huntress. If there wasn't such a strong division of ways between us. . . maybe Mervion wouldn't have left Arleon Forest, and been taken by the Chancellor's men."
"That's a question you can ask Melaudiere when you meet her," said Martin. "If you think past choices are worth revisiting."
"Tamsanne recognized the Duchess's name," Gaultry said, changing the subject. "I guess she's old enough that even out in Arleon Forest she's heard of all the court players. But I haven't. Who is she?"
"Melaudiere? She's the third highest of the ducal council, behind Basse-Demaine and Haute-Tielmark—but if you count years, she's held rank longer than any of them."
"What does that mean?"
"She's the same generation as Melaney Sevenage, the Chancellor's mother. She was one of the Common Brood—the seven witches who served at old Princess Corinne's wedding. That means she should have her Prince's ear," Martin said seriously. "As she felt that she did, until just before the new year, when things changed very quickly and Heiratikus seized control."
"Tamsanne must have known that," said Gaultry, wishing her aunt wasn't so fond of keeping secrets. "And how did you come to serve the Duchess?"
"I took a pledge of fealty."
Gaultry sat up, annoyed. "That's no answer. Was it Melaudiere who tried to remove your geas?"
"Leave that, Gaultry. We've established that my trying to get the geas removed was misguided."
Tamsanne, Gaultry thought, had been right to warn her to keep her distance from this man. His mouth was a hard line, and she could see his temper was rising. It seemed they couldn't help striking sparks off each other, even as they exchanged the simplest of questions.
"Don't be angry."
The responsive switch of emotion in the winter grey eyes, from ice to a quickening warmth, made her curse him and her father both. Looking into his handsome wolf's eyes, she too quickly lost any sense of what was geas-magic and what was Martin.
"Elianté's blood," she snapped, and turned away. "I'm already tired of looking at you and seeing that damn geas-magic staring back!"
Seeking escape, she went down to the little stream's edge and shucked off her shoes. Wading in up to her knees, she let the water cool her, wishing her temper could be as easily soothed as a pair of travel-worn feet.
When she returned to the bridge Martin had cut up some fresh bread and cheese.
"You should stop worrying about what your father did to me, or what I did to the geas." He handed her a slab of bread. "Having met you, knowing that there are real reasons you need my protection, the geas already fits more comfortably. Knowing that Mervion should have been a part of it helps. It's nobody's fault that I compressed a geas meant for twins onto you alone. It just happened."
"I stole Mervion's protection," Gaultry said, bitter. "If you could just meet Mervion, you'd understand. If she was in my place, you'd still probably find the geas had tailored itself onto me. She'd convince you it was all meant for my protection, and give up the part that was meant for her."
His smiled. "She sounds like someone worth knowing."
Would she have wanted to share this man's protection with Mervion? Gaultry cast a shy look at him as she ate her sandwich. Her father had chosen a fine man to champion them—or was she merely prejudiced in his favor because, despite his pangs of temper, he was so responsive to her moods?
She went back down to the stream to wash her hands, knowing he watched her intently as she did so. Beneath the geas, which exposed his emotions to her so constantly, he was a very private man-a quality that made the magic rest all the more heavily upon him. He resisted sharing even the simplest of information.
Why, for example, wouldn't he tell her how he had come to serve Melaudiere?
She could use the geas to force him to confide in her. The idea repelled her even as it rose. Why he was affecting her like this, making her contemplate such pettiness?
He stood on the track by his mare and rubbed the strong line of muscle that ran up her neck under her mane, encouraging her with soft words for the next leg of the journey. The sun shone on his dark hair, his strong hands cupped the animal's head as he whispered into her pricking ears. He was a well-made man: tall, strong, and handsome, and perhaps a little like her memories of her father, before he had turned on his daughters and abandoned them.
A lump rose in her throat. Martin would not have been there to help her if he had not had the geas-bond on him. How ironic that her father, who had not honored the bond of blood between them, had been the one to put such a powerful bond of magic on this man.
"Would you mind if we walked the next piece?" She climbed back up onto the track and gave the mare a brief pat, trying to draw a little comfort from its calm animal body. "I don't want to run now."
"You could ride while I run, if it's change you're looking for."
"I'd fall off. I don't know the first thing about sitting on a horse."
"Then sit on her at a walk. I'll teach you while I stretch my legs."
He was more soldier than gentleman, she thought, pleased by the offer. A gentleman wouldn't presume to teach a forest-girl to ride. At least there was that difference between Martin and her father! Something in her feeling oddly relieved, Gaultry grinned and let him help her clamber into the saddle.
The remainder of the afternoon flew by. Despite his sometimes forbidding manners, the bug soldier proved a patient teacher, with an excellent sense of detail. He showed her how to sit properly, tuck her knees in, and keep her hands low and firm on the reins. He was amused by the concentration she brought to the lesson, not understanding that her will to take everything in at once overlay a desire to familiarize herself with a new animal, a new kind of spirit over which she could overlay her magic, borrowing speed, strength, and stamina when she had need of them.
Gaultry had little knowledge of horses. In her rejection of the things her father had loved—Thomas Blas had been born to a family of ostlers and grooms, and he had worked with horses from his childhood-she had dismissed the creatures as fast and flashy, better for little more than the superficial enhancement of a man's prestige. But Martin's mare had impressed her with its spirited show of endurance. During the morning's run, the mare had known that Gaultry was racing her, and she shaken her dark mane, stomped her neatly clipped hooves, and let Gaultry know with every quiver of muscle that she wouldn't submit to coming second in a race against a paltry human. This was an animal Gaultry could respect.
By the time evening came, Gaultry had learned enough that she could feel the mare's spirit floating in the lithe body beneath her, and she could have channeled it into her body if she had so desired. Triumphant, the young huntress lay her palms flat on the animal's shoulders, reaching into the flesh to touch it delicately with her own mind, laughing as the mare rolled a suspicious eye at her.
—Not today, my beauty—she assured the mare silently, drawing gently back.
"You've got a good rapport," Martin called up, startling her. "Now relax, and concentrate on your seat."
"What about going faster, or jumping?" she asked.
"I won't let you learn to jump on this horse."
When it was almost dark, they made camp in a pine copse not far from the road. Martin both selected the site and insisted on doing the work to set up the camp. He knew how to get a fire going without fussing, and how to cook camp food so that it tasted of something other than cinders. It was a pleasant, well-sheltered refuge.
"I'll take the first watch."
Gaultry was just tired enough not to argue. He settled himself with his back against a tall hemlock. Gaultry kicked together a pile of pine needles to make herself a soft place to sleep, and unbound her hair.
"Don't stare," she said, lying down and curling into her cloak.
"I'm not staring," he said softly. "I'm wondering."
"Wonder while you're looking somewhere else."

# # #

It seemed her eyes had barely closed, her body scarcely relaxed, when Martin's mare started and gave an anxious snort, jerking on her tether. Gaultry, shaken into wakefulness, stumbled to her feet, grabbing reflexively for her bow. A dark shape loomed over the fire, scattering sparks.
"Martin!" A horrible flurry of horses and men filled the clearing.
"Save yourself! Get back under the trees!" There was a terrible building fury in his voice, cut through with geas-magic. Gaultry whirled away, trying to follow the order. A man on a tall horse blocked her. As he came down off the horse, she darted back a pace and nocked an arrow in her bow.
He didn't have a weapon, and he was fool enough not to expect her to use hers.
Her arrow took him in the chest, with a horrible splash of gore. He fell, shrieking, and did not get up.
Behind him, another. Gaultry recognized this one from the previous day's attack. She glanced around. Three other men, all mounted. That left two of Reido's band of seven unaccounted for.
Martin slipped in behind her, protecting her back, and the onslaught was suddenly checked. His sword flashed out, clearing a space in front of him. Gaultry nocked another arrow, trying to ignore the muffled crying of the man she'd shot.
Their attackers had lost the element of surprise.
"They haven't got armor on," she whispered. "Or at least the one I shot didn't."
"More fools they," he said. "Not that we do either."
Their attackers hung back, wary, and waited for an opening. The man Gaultry had shot was on his knees, trying to crawl away.
Finally one man stepped forward, breaking the stalemate.
"Leave her to us, Stalker-man, and we'll let you live."
"They know who you are!"
Martin ignored Gaultry and menaced the man with his sword. "I'll kill any one of you who dares so much as to touch her."
They attacked, lightning-fast. One man charged with his horse, forcing Gaultry and Martin to choose between losing the protection of each other's backs or being trampled. Gaultry's arrow skittered harmlessly into the trees. She caught a quick glimpse of Martin's sword flashing out to disembowel the rider. She reached for a fresh arrow, but her quiver, hastily thrown on her shoulders, skewed out of reach, and she wasted precious seconds fumbling. There was time only to grab a single arrow before she took a blow in her ribs that made her gasp and drop the bow.
"Take her!"
There were two of them. She got one in the groin with a knee, bucking like a deer as the other grabbed her shoulder. This one got his face too close. She struck out with the arrow. The point ripped his cheek. He hit her in the face and she had to let go of that as well.
"Bitch-Queen!" The man couldn't hold her alone. "Stop wetting yourself and give me a hand" —this to the comrade she'd kneed in the groin. That worthy clutched at her legs. She kicked out again and caught him in the stomach.
"Gods, she's strong!"
"Take her arms. I'll get her legs—" With their combined strength, they wrestled her to the ground. Her hair came loose in the struggle, and tangled painfully into the melee. The man she'd kicked seized a thick handful and snapped her head back. It felt as if he'd broken her neck, but she went on struggling, scrabbling at the ground for a stick, a stone—anything she could use to protect herself.
"They're not holding him!" There was panic in the man's voice as he glanced across to where Martin was wreaking havoc on the rest of the party.
"Knife to her throat. It'll keep him off." The words were like a splash of cold water. Gaultry stopped her panicked struggling. She clenched one fist into her stomach and began to pray, calling a spell, a bane so fierce it would make both men regret they'd dared raise a hand against her. Her fear and her anger would fire the spell—
The man who held her legs let go suddenly and threw up an arm, trying to shield himself, only to have his guard shattered by Martin's sword. The remaining man let out a cry—cut short, as Martin scrambled across Gaultry's fallen body to finish him. The little copse of pines went deathly quiet.
Gaultry climbed dizzily to her feet, appalled by the slaughter. In the red light of the fading embers of the now-scattered fire, Martin was a demon, his dark hair sleek against his skull, his blade black with blood, his eyes pools of violence. Gaultry had seen plenty of forest savagery in her day—chases and pack fights and animal squabbles for territory, and even merciless hunts for outlaws and murderers—but nothing compared to this, one man cutting down others as if they were wheat before a scythe. An uncontrollable fit of trembling seized her. The witch's bane that she'd called in anger and left uncast pulsed threateningly in her hand, and wouldn't fade. Feeding from her fear, it took on an uncomfortable, pulsing life, burning, uncontrollable, in her palms, waiting to be cast—
Martin did not, could not, understand. "Gaultry, calm down."
"You killed them. All of them." She stared wildly at the shattered bodies, the spreading damp of blood.
"What would you have had me do?"
"They weren't trying to kill me."
"They were trying to kill me. They would have killed me and taken you." His eyes were hot, dangerous. He took her by the shoulders and shook her, trying to stem her rising hysteria, lest she whip them both into panic. "Are you saying that you wanted that to happen?"
"Don't touch me! You should have offered them quarter—" Gaultry wrung her hands, trying to stand free. If she touched him, the spell would take him.
"They wouldn't have honored it." He loosed her abruptly, his battle-flushed face hurt and angry, and looked away, around the darkened clearing, the wreck and bloody carnage grimly lit by the dying embers. "Believe me, they wouldn't have honored it."
Gaultry wrung her hands, trying to turn the bane aside, fighting now to turn the power she'd called back into herself.
"This has become a foul place," he said, sensing her upset, but at a loss to understand. "If we must argue, let's do it somewhere where we don't have an audience of the dead."
The spell dimmed, and seemed to quiet. Gaultry almost burst into tears with relief. She didn't want to argue with Martin about the attack. Not now. She recovered her bow and the arrow she'd dropped when the man had hit her. As for her killing arrow, snapped off the vane with its distinctive red feathers and left the rest of the shaft in the dead man's chest.
"Maybe I should take one of their horses." She looked dubiously at the skittish shapes that lingered just outside the fire's light.
"That's the most sensible suggestion you've made yet."
Gaultry was too shaken to make a decision. Martin picked for her: a big sorrel mare with a black nose. They cut the saddles from the remaining horses and sent them running into the woods. Martin would have searched the bodies, but the suggestion nauseated Gaultry, so they left them where they lay, unmolested. Neither had words for the other as they picked their way carefully along the dark track and left the death-site behind them.
Half a mile down the road, they found another sheltered spot. Still without speaking, they gathered a fresh pile of kindling. Martin built a new fire.
As the flames leapt up, Gaultry saw, for the first time, the spreading stain of blood on Martin's shirt.
"You're hurt."
"I took a cut on my ribs. It's fine."
His face was white with pain. "Martin—" Her revulsion against the violence in him shaded to concern. "Sit down. I'll bind it." She opened her satchel, and pulled out the bandage Tamsanne had prepared for her knee the night before. "I don't need this anymore, but it can do you some good. Get out of your shirt."
"Don't try to tell me your aunt didn't cure you last night," Martin said. He scowled, and pushed the bandage away. "You weren't doing today's running on yesterday's knee."
"She decided to cure it after she had the poultice made." She showed him the salve that Tamsanne had spread on the inside of the cloth. "Look, it's clean. I wouldn't offer it if I though it wouldn't do you good."
Giving the bandage a suspicious look, he grunted assent. "All right. You'll have to help me with my shirt."
The blood on his body had begun to clot, and the range of motion he had left in the arm on the same side as the body cut was feeble.
"I'll help you." Gaultry touched his good shoulder, trying to distract him from the pain. "I'll help you."
His body was flushed with the heat of battle. Underneath his sturdy grey and green jacket, his shirt was white, a finer linen than Gaultry expected. The sword cut that ran across it had ruined it. Martin smelled sweaty and bloody but not unpleasant. As she pulled his shirt off his shoulders, she was a little embarrassed to find herself covertly admiring his body and arms, the strong column of his throat, so close to her own. Around his neck, he wore a glass amulet-a green fish biting its own tail. She pulled his left arm free of its sleeve, revealing a long, recently healed scar that ran almost the length of his arm. As if any of this mattered while the blood spread like an unstoppable stain down his chest. . . .
The new sword stroke cut from his right collarbone around to the left of his rib cage. At first she was relieved, seeing the mostly shallow wound, a bruise breaking the clean line of the cut where the shoulder strap of his scabbard had crossed his body and protected him. Then she realized that it was the strap alone that had prevented the sword stroke from opening him up like a filleted fish. Had the blow landed with any greater force, the scabbard strap would almost certainly have snapped, and he would not have survived.
Appalled by the risk he had taken, fighting without armor, and still a little intimidated by the brutality with which he'd ended the lives of so many men, Gaultry concentrated on cleaning the wound so that she could bind it.
"It's better than it looks," she said encouragingly, wishing she didn't have to hold her head so close to his as she worked.
"It feels better, now that I can see it." He rotated his arm, trying to bring back the full range of movement. "What happened to you?" He touched the place on her cheek where the man had hit her.
"Nothing—compared to what I did to him." Pushing his hand away, she told him about gouging the man's face with the arrow. "He called me a bitch-queen."
"Appropriately enough."
"Hardly." She finished the binding, and rocked back on her heels, nervous and more than a little light-headed. Something had shifted between them, and her fright for him, and of him, was gone. She wasn't sure about the emotion that replaced it.
"That should do you," she said, and fumbled for his shirt.
"Should it?" He took the cloth she'd used to clean the wound, and began to wipe at the slick of blood that had run down his body below the cut—the blood Gaultry had been too shy to do more than dab at. There was blood everywhere: on his stomach, on the top of his hip, across the belt of his trousers. Gaultry stared, fascinated, watching his hands.
He glanced up. Seeing where her eyes had come to rest, something deep in him brought out a harsh laugh. The grey wolf's eyes, meeting hers, went dark and intense. She stood hastily, tucking in her shirttails. He stood too, fluid as water.
"Why are you laughing?" she demanded, trying to step away. He was frightening her anew. She didn't like the brooding look on his face, the hard, flat cheekbones that caught the firelight, the arrogant curl of his mouth.
"Why are you asking?" He reached out and twisted a handful of her hair into a thick rope, drawing her to him. "I can feel every damn thought that goes through you."
His lips were on hers, he was kissing her, and she was doing nothing to stop him. A shocking heat lanced through her spine, and she stared at him, bewildered. He was a dark wolf with dangerous eyes, a wolf that had been sent to protect her. She shouldn't want him. For a moment she relaxed against him, luxuriating in the feel of his body beneath her hands.
Then she looked into his dark eyes and saw the now-familiar slash of silver geas-magic cutting through him. She cried out, disillusioned, and tried to push him away, convinced that the spiral of feeling between them was a twisted thing fed by magic, by a bond that had nothing to do with real desire. "Don't touch me!" Her voice was a hoarse whisper. "I don't want this!"
Dark fought with silver in his eyes, neither dominating. "I'm here to protect you, Gaultry." He was still kissing her. "I can't hurt you."
He didn't understand her fear: he could feel the pleasure running through her body like fire, and he didn't want to know her fear. "Gaultry—" He took her hands in his, his grey wolf's eyes flickering to dark, to passion.
Something blind and angry in her leapt out, and the spell she'd called earlier, for the hunters, coursed from her hands, more powerful than she had intended. He gasped with pain as it took him, and doubled over.
She stared down at his pain-wracked body, horrified.
Then his face turned up to her, and she found herself transfixed by the murderous eyes of the black wolf, sharp and clear as when she'd first seen them on the Rhasan card.
Fear overtook her; any hope at reason departed. She scrambled away and tripped against his mare, where he'd tied her close by them. Before she could even think what she was doing, she burrowed her hands deep in its mane and threw her mind open like a shuddering funnel. The mare shrieked and stamped in alarm, feeling her animal-spirits siphoning from her. Gaultry's body shuddered with burgeoning strength.
The horse slipped to the ground, legs thrashing.
Gaultry tossed her head, flooded with the animal's power, and learned faster than she wanted that a horse was not just strength and stamina: it was also nervous emotion, emotion that was bundled over a hidden mass of animal-panic. Combined with her overexcited condition, taking from the horse was a foolish, foolish folly. Its will swamped hers, magnifying and expanding her fright, her desire to flee—and then Gaultry was off, running breakneck down the road.
In the shrunken corner of her mind that was still capable of rational thought, she could only bitterly reflect that this had been happening to her far too frequently these past days.

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Last Modified: March 5, 2002