His Conquering Sword Read online

  “You don’t think he’ll try to get caught on purpose—?”

  “No. He knows I’ll have to kill him. Whatever he may say, he loves his own life more than he loves me.”

  “Ilya.” She reached for him. He flinched away from her. She stopped dead, and then pulled back her hand. He had never rejected her before, not like this. God, what if he really did love Vasil more than he loved her? What if she had misinterpreted the brief scene played out between them? But watching him as he sat there strung as tight as a bow, edged as sharp as any saber, she knew beyond anything else that he hurt. His pain distressed her more than the knowledge—which could no longer be denied—that he did in fact love Vasil and had for many years. Ilya was not rejecting her; he was rejecting himself, and thus anything that loved him and might yet scorn him for what he had revealed himself to be.

  “I’m a damned hypocrite,” he said in Rhuian. The curtain had ceased swaying, but he still stared at it.

  Tess made a brief laugh in her throat. “Ah, Bakhtiian returns to the lands of the mortals. How unique you are. I’m sure you’re the only person afflicted with hypocrisy.”

  He twisted around to glare at her. “You don’t understand what that means!”

  “What? That you’re not perfect? But I’ve known that for a long time.” She could see by his expression that she was offending him, so she continued gleefully. “Of course! Why didn’t I ever see it before? Yuri always said so, that you thought you had to be the best. Kirill said it, too: that you always had to win. I didn’t see then that it also meant that you had to be the purest one, the one with no flaws, no stain on your spirit, the one who never committed the slightest offense or the least impolite exchange. Do you know how boring that kind of person is? Why, I’m relieved to see that you’re flawed like the rest of us. Even if it’s only with so common a sin as hypocrisy.”

  “How dare you laugh at me!” He looked livid with anger.

  “Because you won’t laugh at yourself. Someone must. Since I’m your wife, I’ve been granted that dubious honor.”

  “The gods do not grant their gifts lightly, Tess,” he said stiffly, “and with that gift comes a burden.”

  “Yes, a burden greater than that any other person has to bear. I’m well aware of it. I’m aware of it constantly, and it’s beginning to weary me. It may even be true, but that still doesn’t mean that you’re any different than the rest of us. That you’re any better.”

  “No,” he said softly, still not looking at her, “I am worse.”

  “Oh, Ilya.” This time when she leaned across to touch him, he sat motionless under her hands, neither responding to her nor retreating from her. As he had with Vasil. “You must know that I don’t think it’s wrong for you to love him. Only that I—” She hesitated. Their bed was a wild landscape of rumpled blankets, stripes and patterns muted in the lantern light, of furs thrown into topographical relief, mountains and valleys and long ridges and the far mound of her toes, of pillows, one shoved up against the far wall, two flung together at the head of the bed, more scattered beyond Ilya, and of his clothing, littering the carpet beyond. One boot listed against a stray pillow. His belt curled around the other boot, snaring it.

  He said nothing, but his silence was expectant, and courageous, too; how easily he might think it would be natural for her to repudiate him, based on the morals of his culture, faced with what she now knew of him.

  “He’s just so damned beautiful,” she said at last, afraid to say it, “that I can’t help but think that—that anyone would love him more than … me….” She faltered.

  “Tess!” He spun back to her, upsetting her balance. She tumbled over and landed on her back, half laughing, half shocked, in the middle of the bed. “You’re jealous of him!”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” she demanded, rolling up onto her side. He rested on his elbows a handbreadth from her, staring astonished at her. “You’ve known him a long time, much longer than you’ve known me. It’s obvious you still love him. All that keeps you apart is that the jaran don’t recognize, don’t accept, that kind of love.”

  “That is not all that keeps us apart, my heart,” he replied gravely, but humor glinted in his eyes as well. “I loved him with a boy’s awkward, headlong passion. But you,” his gaze had the intensity of fire on a bitter cold night. “You I love like…” He shook his head, impatient with words. When he spoke again, he spoke in his autocratic tone, one that brooked no disagreement. “You, I love.” As if daring her to take issue with the statement or the nakedly clear emotion that burned off of him.

  Tess was wise enough simply to warm herself in the blaze, and vain enough to be gratified by it. She had heard what she had hoped to hear, and she knew him well enough by now to know he spoke the truth. Vasil was certainly more beautiful than she was, or could hope to be, but he was also the most self-centered person she had ever met. And she suspected that Vasil’s attraction to Ilya was likely not so much to Ilya as a person, as Ilya, but to Ilya as the gods-touched child, to Bakhtiian, the man with fire in his heart and a vision at the heart of his spirit.

  “Still,” she asked suddenly, “if it was possible, would that tempt you? A triad marriage?”

  He rolled his eyes and sat up, sighing with exasperation. “All you women ever think about is lying with men.” He surveyed the remains of the bed with disgust and rose and set to work straightening out the blankets and placing the pillows back in their appointed spots.

  “But would it?”

  His lips twitched. “I don’t know,” he said at last, flinging the last stray pillow at her, which she caught. He picked up his boots and his belt and folded his clothes in exactly the same order and with the same precise corners that he always folded them. She admired him from this angle, the clean lines of his body, the length of thigh, his flat belly and what lay below, the curve of his shoulders, his lips, the dark shadow of his luxuriant hair, tipped with sweat. He was a little thin yet, from the sickness, but that would pass. He sank down beside her, cross-legged, and considered her with a frown. “Does it tempt you?”

  She sat up as well and shrugged. “Not really. I wonder if there’s anything there, in him, past his undoubted beauty. Tell me about him.”

  He considered her. After a moment he slid in under the blankets and covered them both up. She lay on her right side, angling one leg up over his legs. But her belly, not yet large enough to need a pillow for support, still needed something. She shifted and grimaced; he turned by degrees until she found a comfortable position. She sighed and slid her shoulder in under his arm and rested her head on his warm shoulder. He lay on his back, with one hand tucked under his head and the other curled up around her back, fingers delicate on her skin.

  “I was a singularly unattractive boy,” he said at last, musing. “I was awkward. I was a dreamer, and I had strange ideas and stranger curiosities. I was also afflicted with—” He sighed. She had one hand tucked down under her belly, knuckles brushing his hip; her other hand rested on his chest, so she felt the force of the sigh under her fingers. “—very sudden and very strong desires, that winter, and no girl in any tribe we met that season had the least interest in me. Why should they? I was odd, and ugly. Then Vasil arrived. We were both passionate in our youthful desires.”

  “What was yours? Or was it only—”

  He chuckled. “No, no, it was both. The physical craving was strong enough, but never as strong as the other: I wanted to know everything.”

  “Then what was Vasil’s?”

  “I suppose I was. Vasil was radiant. He was beautiful. Girls followed him. They asked him everything they never asked me. They paid him as much attention as they paid the young men who had made a name for themselves riding with the jahar. I don’t know why he chose me.”

  “Perhaps he saw what you would become.”

  Silence shuttered them. Tess felt as if she could hear the sound of the blankets settling in around them, caving in with excruciating slowness to fill the empty space left
by the curves and angles of their intertwined bodies.

  “He believed in me when no one else did,” said Ilya, almost wonderingly, as if that moment of revelation, of the adolescent boy revealing with reckless daring his wild vision only to find that his listener did not scorn or laugh but rather embraced him, had set its mark so fast and deep upon his spirit that it had branded him forever.

  “Not even your father?”

  “My father rode out a lot in those days. He was a Singer. The gods called him at strange times, on strange journeys.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Natalia’s first husband had just been killed in a feud with the Boradin tribe, while she was still pregnant with her first child.”

  “Was that Nadine?”

  “Yes. Oh, Natalia was fond enough of me, and kind to me, considering what an embarrassment I must have been to her, but she was busy and preoccupied. Riders were already beginning to come round, to see what they could see of her, to ask if she was ready to marry again.”

  “But, Ilya, women have no choice in marriage.”

  He tilted his head to look directly at her. His lips quirked up. “Nor should they,” he said, and grinned. Then he yelped, because she pinched him.

  “That for you, and don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for taking me down the avenue without me knowing what it meant, either.”

  “Perhaps it was rash—”

  “Perhaps!”

  “But, by the gods, I’d do it again. Tess.” He pressed her against him, as close as he might, and kissed her long and searchingly.

  There came a cough. There stood Vasil, framed in the entrance by curtain and striped wall. “If you will talk about me, then I wish you’d do so in a language I can understand. And, Ilya, my love, I don’t know how you can expect me to leave here unseen if you post guards at the entrance to your tent.”

  Ilya swore.

  “Wait,” said Tess in khush. “Ilya, it’s true he can’t get out by the front entrance without being seen. They all saw you come in here. You’ll have to go out front and distract them with something, and he can sneak out the back.”

  “You have a back entrance?” Vasil asked, looking interested.

  “Go on,” said Tess, forestalling what Ilya was about to say, which she guessed would be ill-considered and rude. Vasil stared at him as he dressed, but he dressed quickly and pushed past the other man without the slightest sign of the affection he had shown earlier. A moment later, Tess heard voices outside, engaged in some kind of lively conversation. “Here,” she said, standing up with a blanket pulled around her. She went to the back wall of the tent and twitched the woven inner wall aside to reveal the felt outer wall. Here, low along the ground, the felt wall overlapped itself and, drawing the extra layer aside, Tess revealed a gap in the fabric just large enough to crawl through. She knelt and peered out.

  Vasil laid a hand on her bare shoulder. His fingers caressed the line of her neck. “Here, I’ll look. I’ve done this before.”

  Tess made a noise in her throat and stood up, and away. “I have no doubt of it.”

  He hesitated, and bent to kiss her. Then he knelt and swayed forward. Paused, surveying his ground. A moment later he slid outside. Tess knelt and looked out after him, but he had already vanished into the gloom. She twitched the fabric back, let the inner wall fall into place, and called for Ilya. After a little bit, he came back in, swearing under his breath.

  “Well, you can hardly blame him,” she began.

  “I can do what I like,” he said peevishly. “He’s so damned charming that it’s easy to forget how much trouble he causes.”

  “I think I’d better sew that back entrance shut.”

  He cocked his head at her. “Probably.” He stripped and snuggled in beside her. And sighed. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

  “What? Letting him get out of here unseen?”

  “No.” By the constraint in his voice, she could tell he was embarrassed. “What—we did—tonight.”

  “No, it was the right thing to do. It never does any good to run away from what you’re afraid of. I should know. I’ve done it often enough.”

  “What was I afraid of?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think you’re afraid of Vasil anymore.”

  His face rested against her hair. He stroked her along the line of her torso and down along her hips, and up again, and down, while he considered. “No,” he replied, sounding surprised, “I don’t think I am.”

  “So. Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

  His hand stopped. “I’ve kept no more hidden from you,” he said indignantly, “than you’ve kept hidden from me.”

  Shame overwhelmed Tess. Gods, he didn’t know the tenth of it. Yet what could she say? There was nothing she could say.

  “It wasn’t Natalia they were asking, anyway,” said Ilya, “it was my mother and my aunt. It’s decent to observe a period of mourning before marrying again”

  It took Tess a moment to recall where they had left off their other conversation: with his sister, Natalia. “But she did marry again?”

  “Yes.” Although she wasn’t looking at him, she felt him tense. “That’s when I left for Jeds. I hated him.”

  “Why?”

  Ilya let go of a shuddering breath, and he clutched her tighter to him. “He mocked me. He scorned me. Gods, he tried to rape me once. He knew about Vasil; he caught us together, one time, and he held the knowledge of it over me like a saber. He used to fence with the boys, those of us who aspired to be riders, and he’d torment me. He’d cut me up, fine cuts all along my arms and my chest.”

  “But, Ilya, how could your sister ever have married someone like that?”

  “Oh, no one else knew. He made sure of that. He was charming to everyone else, a good rider, a fine fighter, good with horses and the herds. No one believed me. They all thought I was just jealous. They said I was too attached to Natalia. They said—” He broke off. “Anyway, I left.”

  “And you went to Jeds. It’s strange, now that I think of it, how much I know about your journey to Jeds, and how little I knew of the reasons you left the tribes to go there. But, Ilya.” She laughed a little, into his shoulder. “Does that mean that the courtesan Mayana was the first woman you ever slept with?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t sound amused; defensive, perhaps.

  “She’s so famous, though. I remember that she used to come have tea with Cara once a week. She must have been young, even though she seemed old to me. I was only—what?—ten. She’d just recently bought her freedom from the brothel she was indentured to, so it couldn’t have been long after you left Jeds that I arrived there from Erthe. So it wasn’t only a university education you got at Jeds.”

  “Are you complaining about the education I got at Jeds?”

  She canted her head back to grin at him. “Not at all. Then you came back to the tribes. Was Vasil still with your tribe?”

  “No. He appeared about two winters later. He’d heard that I had returned. My mother had already made me dyan, so no one wondered at first when I took him into my jahar. Josef left his tribe at about the same time to ride with me. The Roskhel tribe traveled alongside of us many seasons during that time.”

  “Why did Khara Roskhel turn against you? Gods, what brought him to murder your whole family?”

  But the question evoked only silence. His left hand ran a pattern, up and down, along her lower back. She felt as if the gesture, repeated obsessively, was itself the answer, but in a language she did not speak.

  “Ilya?”

  “No.” He lay the index and middle fingers of his right hand on her lips, gently. “No more, Tess. There’s been enough today, and tonight. I’m exhausted.” As well he might be. She sighed, knowing that if he would not confide in her now, as vulnerable as he was because of all that he had laid bare this night, he probably never would confess the truth of the troubling mystery of Roskhel’s defection and subsequent horrible revenge.

  She
shifted until she was comfortable. His breathing slowed and gentled, and he slept. From outside, she heard the night guards conversing, the murmur of their words but not their meaning. Or perhaps it was just one of them, reciting an old story to keep them company on a dark night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BOREDEOM AFFLICTED JIROANNES. HE had nothing better to do than to interest himself in the goings-on in his guardsmen’s encampment. At dawn each day, he sent Syrannus to request an audience with Bakhtiian. Each day Syrannus returned with a polite refusal. In the mornings Jiroannes inspected the camp, ostensibly to make sure the women and children were being treated well by their keepers but in fact because the simple human contact with people other than Syrannus and the two slave-boys was as salve to him, who was otherwise alone.

  There was something pathetic about how gratefully the women greeted him, eyes cast down, knowing as they did that it was on his sufferance they were allowed to be there. Sleeping with men of another race, soon to be pregnant with their children; and yet, most of them would otherwise have starved to death, or met a worse fate. They knew they were the lucky ones. The little children sucked on their fingers and stared at him. The older ones attempted to help out around the guards’ camp. A few bold children even assisted Lal and Samae and the other slave-boy—whose name was Jat—in hauling water and beating carpets and collecting fuel for the benefit of Jiroannes himself. The guardsmen’s camp tripled in size in ten short days. By the time Bakhtiian made his triumphal entry into camp, Jiroannes felt that he was master of an entire little tribe of his own.

  When the citadel fell, his men went out searching for refugees. This time they brought back a princess. Waiting women and peasant women had been sheltering her, but the delicacy of her complexion and hands and the fine gold-braided shift she wore underneath the filthy gown her protectors had given her to camouflage herself in betrayed her high station. The captain brought her directly to Jiroannes as dusk lowered around them. Trembling, the woman knelt before him, hands crossed on her chest, head bent so that it almost touched the carpet, and begged him for mercy.