The Very Best of Kate Elliott Page 5

  The bearded man released an arrow, the shot flying through the narrow gap.

  Vayek rose in his stirrups and twisted, feathers flashing, and the arrow shredded to bits in the metal wings. He settled back into the saddle, lashing the horse, and with a leap they cleared the opening between the fiery palisade and Edek’s burning feet. Again, and again, the bearded man released arrows, and again Vayek’s quick reflexes shielded him as the arrows shattered in the feathers. He pressed hard, slamming a sword stroke at the bearded man, who hastily flung up his wooden shield to protect himself, taking such a solid blow that his legs twisted away under him and he stumbled back. Yet he was a strong and canny fighter, not easily subdued; he threw himself behind one of the great standing stones for cover as Vayek pulled the weight of his horse around in the confined corral made by the stones and the ring of sorcerous fire. Carrying a crossbow, the witch ran down to Edek’s body and with her stone knife scraped the drying dregs of his blood out from Edek’s head toward the far end of the scar. She meant to close the circle.

  Kereka tugged at her ropes, hating this helplessness. All her life she had hated the things that bound her, just as poor Belek had hated his warriors’ training so much that their father had once joked angrily that it would have been better had they swapped spirits into the other’s body. Now, too—of course!—Belek had given up trying to break free; he had even shut his eyes!

  “Belek!” Kereka whispered, hard enough to jolt him. “Is there no magic the shamans taught you? Anything that might help us—?”

  Hoofbeats echoed eerily off the stones. She heard the snorting of a horse and then the horse loomed beside her, Vayek himself leaning from the saddle with a griffin feather plucked from his own wings held in his gauntlet. His gaze captured hers; he smiled, the expression all the more striking and sweet for its brevity.

  “Boldest among women!” he said admiringly.“You have a man’s courage and a man’s wit! You alone will stand first among my wives, now and always! This I promise!”

  What promises he made, he would keep. How could it be otherwise? He was a hero.

  And so he would rescue her, and the tale’s fame and elaboration would grow in the telling to become one of the great romantic legends told among the clans: his story, and she, like his noble horse, attendant in it.

  A bolt like a slap of awakening clattered on the stone’s face above Kereka’s head and tumbled down over her body: another arrow. He sliced with the feather toward her. Ropes and magic slithered away. As she collapsed forward, released from the stone, he reined his steed hard aside and clattered off at a new angle to continue the fight. Kereka’s hands and shoulders hurt, prickling with agony, but she shoved up against the pain. She had to watch. Movement flashed as a spear thrust from behind a huge stone monolith standing off to her right; steel flashed in reply as Vayek parried with his sword.

  Over by the fiery palisade, the witch cursed, rising with blood on her knife, the gap between Edek’s head and the scar now sealed. She raised the crossbow and released a bolt, but the missile slammed into stone to the right of the two warriors as they kept moving. She cursed again and winched in another bolt, then spun around as a bold rider tried to push through the remaining gap but was driven back by the intensity of the sorcerous flames.

  Vayek fought the bearded man through the stones, using the stones and his wings to protect himself while the bearded man, with the agility of a seasoned fighter, used the stones to protect himself, trying to get close enough to hook his axe into Vayek’s armor and pull him off the horse.

  But in the end, the foreign man was just that: a man. He was not a hero. He was already bleeding from several wounds. It was only a matter of time before Vayek triumphed, yet again, as victor. What glory he would gather then!

  All for him, because that was how the gods had fashioned the world: hawks hunted; horses grazed; marmots burrowed; flies annoyed. A man hunted glory while a woman tended the fires.

  So the elders and shamans said. Their word was truth among the clans.

  What tales they told themselves! How small was their world?

  Legs burning as with a hundred pricking needles, Kereka staggered to the pile of gear and grabbed the haft of the griffin’s feather Edek had found. Where her skin brushed the lower edge of a vane, blood welled at once. She grabbed the first leather riding glove that came to hand and shoved her bleeding hand into it, and even then the griffin feather bit through it; tugged on a gauntlet—Edek’s—and at last she could grasp it without more blood spilling. She sliced Belek free and hauled him up, the farmer’s head bumping against his thigh, still tied to his belt. She shoved him toward the flames consuming Edek’s corpse.

  “Run! Quickly!” She pushed him before her, and after a few clumsy steps he broke away from her and, clutching his belly, limped in a staggering run as he choked down cries of pain. Kereka easily kept pace beside him, and as the witch swung around, braids flying, bringing her crossbow to bear, Kereka leaped in front into the line of fire.

  “Do not kill us!” she cried,“and in exchange for my brother’s life and his debt to you, I will fetch you the griffin feathers you seek. I swear it on the bones of my father’s father! I swear it on the honor of Tarkan’s arrows.”

  A sword rang, striking stone, and sparks tumbled. A male voice shouted; a thump was followed by the straining howls of men grappling.

  The witch stepped aside.

  With the griffin feather held before her to cut away the searing heat of the palisade, Kereka dragged Belek through the breach. The cool breeze within the stones vanished and they ran through a haze of hot smoke and blackened grass to burst coughing and heaving into clearer air beyond. The sky throbbed with such a hollow blue like the taut inside of a drum that she wondered all at once what the sky within the stone circle had looked like. Had it even been the same sky? She looked back, but smoke and the weave of fire obscured the area.

  The Pechanek men closed around them, spears bristling, faces grim.

  “Don’t harm us!” Belek cried.“I’m the son of the Kirshat begh!”

  She gave Belek a shove that sent him sprawling in the grass. Waving the griffin’s feather, she shouted in her crow’s voice.

  “The foreign witch is almost vanquished, but her magic must be smothered once and for all! I come at Prince Vayek’s command to take to him the bundle of griffin feathers he captured. At once!”

  Women did not command warriors. They sat beside their fathers, or brothers, or husbands, and a man knew he must listen to the advice they dispensed lest he suffer for having foolishly ignored female wisdom. Yet a begh’s daughter cannot be trifled with, however unseemly her behavior. Nor would a common warrior wish to offend the future wife of his future begh.

  The horse with its corpse and cargo was brought swiftly, the thick bundle wrapped in leather cut free. She grabbed the cords and hoisted the bundle onto her back, its weight oddly light given the power of what lay concealed within. Brandishing the griffin feather to cut a path for herself through the witch’s sorcery, she ran back into the smoke before they could think to question her, although which one would have the courage to speak directly to her, who was neither kin or wife, she could not imagine. Grass crackled beneath her feet; soot and ash flaked and floated everywhere; the tapestry of flames rose as if to touch the pastures of the heavens, but she did not hesitate. She plunged into the maelstrom of scalding magic. Stinging hot ash rained on her cheeks and forehead.

  “Sister! Don’t leave me!”

  But her and Belek’s lives had been severed on the day Prince Vayek had ridden into the Kirshat clan with her bride price. It was the only reason cautious Belek had agreed to let her hunt with him: he was more afraid of losing her than of being beaten for taking her along where no one intended her to go.

  Blessed breathable air hit her chest so unexpectedly that she was gulping and hacking as tears flowed freely. She blinked hard until she could see.

  At the far edge of the circle, Vayek had caught the beard
ed man and pinned his axe against stone with his spear. The witch, her back to Kereka, loosed a bolt toward his magnificent profile, but he could not be taken by surprise. He twisted to bring his wings around to shield himself, and with the motion cut his sword down on his hapless prey.

  The bearded man crumpled.

  The witch shrieked.

  Kereka shoved the bundle against the woman’s torso and, when the witch flinched back, grabbed the crossbow out of her hands.

  “You’re not warrior enough to defeat him!” she cried.“Even I am not that! And there’s no glory for me in being dead! Here are your griffin feathers. If you want to escape, pretend to fall at my feet.”

  She tossed the crossbow to one side as she screamed in as loud a voice as she had ever used. “Husband! Husband! The witch weaves an evil sorcery even now. She means to wither my womb! Hurry! We must escape this wicked, evil trap or I will be barren forever, no sons born from your siring to join the Pechanek clan! Hurry!”

  He reined his horse hard away from the stone, casting a glance as swift as an arrow toward her. The bearded man lay slumped along the base of the black megalith. It was too late for him. But not for Kereka.

  The witch had not moved, caught in a choice between clutching the precious bundle of griffin feathers or lunging past Kereka for the crossbow.

  Kereka tripped her neatly, using a wrestling move she’d learned from Belek, speaking fast as she released her. “If it’s true there are paths between the stones, then open a way now with your sorcery. But wait for me! Remember that I have fulfilled a debt and I want payment in return. Remember to trust me.”

  She leaped back as if fleeing something she feared more deeply than death itself. Vayek thundered up behind her, sword raised for the running kill, but Kereka held her ground with the griffin’s feather shielding the witch’s body.

  “I’ve killed her!” she shouted.“Your courage has emboldened me! Now it won’t be said that you laid hands on a mere woman! Quickly, let us go before her sorcery sickens me!”

  She bolted toward the fire like an arrow released from Tarkan’s heavenly bow, praying that Vayek would dismiss the woman as not worthy of his warrior’s prowess. She ran, and he followed.

  The fire’s hissing crackle, the horse’s weight and speed and heavy hoof-falls as it plunged toward the wall of fire; the high thrumming atonal singing of the wings in the presence of powerful magic; all this perhaps distracted Vayek as she raced ahead and dashed through that flaming gap in front of him. Fire roared. The smoke poured up to greet her, and because she was only one small human on two small feet, she darted to one side even as the clothes on her back grew hot and began to curl and blacken. He galloped past like the fury of the heavens, not even seeing her step aside because he was blinded by the tale he had long since learned to believe was the only tale in all the world.

  But it wasn’t the only tale.

  She could follow Vayek back onto the sea of grass into a life whose contours were utterly familiar and entirely honorable. Handsome, brave, strong, even-tempered, honorable, famous among the clans for his prowess, with two secondary wives already although he was not ten years a man, he would be the worst kind of husband. A woman could live her life tending the fire of such a man’s life. Its heat was seductive, but in the end its glory belonged only to him.

  She spun, feet light beneath her, and raced back through the gap.

  To find the witch already in action. She had bound the bundle of griffin feathers to her own back. Now she had her arms under the bearded man’s shoulders, trying to hoist him up and over a saddled horse. Kereka ran to help her, got her arms around his hips and her own body beneath him. Blood slicked her hands and dripped on her face, but his rattling breaths revealed that he still lived.

  The woman spared her one surprised glance. Then, like a begh, she gestured toward the other horses before running to a patch of sandy soil churned by the battle and spotted with blood. She unsheathed her obsidian knife and began, as one might at the Festival dance with Tarkan’s flaming arrows, to cut a pattern into the expectant air.

  A distant howl of rage rang from beyond the sorcerous fire.

  Kereka ran to fetch the three remaining foreign horses who had come with the witch and the bearded man as well as her own mount. The other horses were already saddled and laded, obedient to the lead. She strung them on a line and mounted the lead mare as an arch of golden fire flowered into existence just beyond the obsidian blade. The witch grabbed the reins of the bearded man’s horse and walked under the fulgent threads.

  Into what she walked, Kereka could not see. But riding the shore of the river of death was the risk you took to find out what lay on the other side.

  Wings sang. The shape of a winged man astride a horse loomed beyond the fire. Vayek burst back past the writhing white fire of Edek’s corpse and into the circle. The complex weave that gave the arch form began to fray at the edges, flashing and shivering.

  Griffin feathers are proof against sorcery.

  She flung Edek’s griffin feather away; it glittered, spinning as on a wind blowing out of the unseen land beyond the arch, while Edek’s gauntlet fell with a thud to the dirt. Then she whipped her mount forward, and they charged into a mist that stank of burned and rotting corpses, of ash and grass, of blood and noble deeds.

  Her eyes streamed stinging tears; heat burned in her lungs.

  The foul miasma cleared, and she was trotting free down the slope of a hill with blackened grass flying away beneath the horses’ hooves and the sun setting ahead of her, drawing long shadows over the grass. The witch had already reached a familiar-looking stream, and she was kneeling beside the body of her comrade as she cast handfuls of glittering dust over his limp form. Saplings and brush fluttered in a brisk wind out of the west.

  Kereka twisted to see behind her the same stones, the very same stone circle, rising black and ominous exactly where they had stood moments before. Vayek and his warband had vanished.

  Did the witch possess such powerful sorcery that she could pluck men from the present world and cast them into the spirit world?

  No.

  The carpet of burned grass had cooled; its ashy stubble had been disheveled by strong winds; green shoots had found the courage to poke their heads above the scorched ground. She dismounted, tossed the reins over her mount’s head. Her mare nipped one of the pack horses, who kicked; she separated the steppe horse and hobbled her, then trudged on aching feet back up into the stones. The soles of her boots were almost burned away. Her clothes shed flakes of soot. Her hands oozed blood from a score of hairline cuts. Her chest stung with each breath she inhaled.

  There lay what remained of Edek, flesh eaten away by the unearthly fire and skeleton torn and scattered by beasts. Cut ropes lay in heaps at the base of three stones; the litter had been mauled by animals but was mostly intact. Their gear was gone, picked up to the last knife and bridle and leather bottle. The ashes of the campfire were ground into the earth. The wind gentled as dusk sighed down over them.

  The moon shouldered up out of the east, round and bright, the full moon on which she was to have been wed. The moon could not lie. Half a month had passed since the night of the sword moon. The witch had woven a path between that time and this time, and they had ridden down it.

  A whistle shrilled. Standing at the edge of the stones, Kereka saw the witch, standing now and waving to catch her attention. Trusting fool! It might well be easy to kill her and take the bearded man’s head while he was injured and weak, before the witch fully healed him, if he could be healed. She could then ride back to her mother’s tent and her father’s tribe and declare herself a man. She knew what to expect from a man’s life, just as she knew what a woman’s life entailed.

  So what kind of life did these foreigners live, with their sorcery and their crossbows and the way they handed a shovel from one to the other, sharing the same work, maybe even sharing the same glory? It was a question for which she had no answer. Not yet.

 
; She went back to the litter and grabbed the leather tow lines. Pulled them taut over her own shoulders and tugged. Like uncertainty, the burden was unwieldy, but she was stubborn and it was not too heavy for her to manage.

  Could she trust a witch? Would a witch and a foreigner ever trust her?

  Pulling the litter behind her, she walked across the charred earth and down through the tall grass to find out.

  LEAF AND BRANCH

  AND GRASS AND VINE

  A HAND POUNDING ON her cottage door woke Anna, just as it had that terrible night almost three months ago. Jolting upright, she wiped a hand across her mouth as if to wipe away the taste of fear and grief but it did not go away. Beside her on the wide mattress, her two youngest children slept like the dead, and she was glad for it. No sense in cringing and stalling; the bad news would come whether now or at dawn, and she did not want the children to wake.

  From the other room, where she had long slept with her husband, rose a murmur of voices: her daughter and her new husband waking to the summons.

  She wrapped her well-worn bride’s shawl over her shift and padded to the barred door. Pointless to bar the door, really, since she had left the glass window unshuttered. The light of a full moon bathed the plank floor in a ghostly light, enough that she need not grope for a precious candle. By the measure of the shortened shadows, she knew it was barely past midnight.

  She set a hand on the latch.“Who is there?”

  “Anna, it is Joen. No trouble here, but I need you at once.”

  Her brother’s familiar voice calmed the pounding clamor of her heart. She let him in just as the door into the other room opened and Hansi stuck his head out, holding a lit candle in one hand and his butchering knife in the other.

  She said, “Holding a light in the darkness means the other man can see you but you can’t see him.”

  Hansi chuckled. He was a good-natured young man, slow to take offense to his pride. “My apologies, Mother Anna. Is that Uncle Joen I hear?”