Lady of Horses (49 page)

“Such men as your Kestrel?”

“No,” said Sparrow. “Kestrel is reckoned odd and rather soft.”

Storm laughed, incredulous. “Soft? Your Sparrowhawk? He’s as
hard as a flint blade. Although,” she conceded, “he has a gentle heart.”

“These men have hearts of flint,” Sparrow said. “They kill
for joy.”

“And you will face them.” Storm sighed, and shrugged a
little. “We fight better than maybe you think. And maybe there will be no need
to fight. We’ll stay.”

oOo

She was not to be moved. She saw Bracken tended, fed, and
given a fresh horse. She would have been glad to offer him a bed for the night,
but he would not stay. “I’ve messages to run,” he said, “and tribes to visit.
Best I begin now.”

There were preparations to make. The people had to be told,
and offered the choice: to retreat to a more distant camp, or to stay.

Nearly all of them elected to stay. The ill, the old, those
who feared for their children, took horses and oxen and a strong store of
provisions and rode away south and eastward. The rest, men and women both,
brought out weapons Sparrow had not known they had: short bows but strong, for
shooting from horseback; spears of fire-hardened wood, sharpened or else tipped
with flint; quivers full of arrows. They had knives and clubs and darts. They
were well equipped to face a war.

“Raiders come,” Storm said, “and not all of them on two
feet. Wolves in winter, too, and lions, and once a herd of aurochs. Their bull
had a taste for manflesh.”

Sparrow was properly humbled. She had been thinking of these
people as strangers to war. But peace was a choice they made. They would fight
if so compelled.

oOo

Keen had not gone away to the safer camp. Sparrow tried to
persuade her, but she refused to go. “Rain is staying,” she said. “She’s
Summer’s milk-mother. Summer is much too young yet to wean.”

No matter that one of the other women would have been
pleased to take Summer to her breast. Keen was adamant. “When Walker sees
Summer,” Sparrow warned her, “he’ll want him. And if he sees what is between
you and Cloud—”

Keen paled, but she would not give in. “You’ll look after
them,” she said, “whatever happens to me.”

“I’d rather look after you,” Sparrow said, but the battle
was over. Keen stayed.

And they waited. Bracken’s people sent word of the
horsemen’s passage. It was not as swift as Sparrow might have expected. They were
advancing warily.

Sparrow wondered if that was Kestrel’s doing, or Walker’s.
Linden must be fretting endlessly at the delay. But someone among his advisors
was counseling caution—as if this were war indeed, and they could expect an
army to fall upon them.

She hoped that they were growing more unhappy rather than
less, the farther they rode, and the emptier the land was. Complacency might
serve her purpose, but mounting fear of the unseen would serve it best.

Walker counseled caution in the warband’s passage through
the southlands. Linden would have ridden straight on, but when scouts brought
word of camps discovered but empty of people, Walker insisted that they stop at
each one. Some had been abandoned as recently as a day or two before, but they
never found the inhabitants, even when they sent bands of riders to track the
tribes. Half a day or a day away from the camp, the trail invariably vanished,
or proved to be false.

“They know we’re coming,” Walker said by the king’s fire at
night. He could not sit still; he paced and fretted, as restless as everyone
would have expected Linden to be. But Linden, apart from an expressed and
rather obvious desire for a woman, was at ease.

“What makes you think they’re expecting us?” he asked.

Walker looked as if he would burst out in words of
unfortunate consequence, but he had a little self-control left. He answered
with tight-drawn patience, “People don’t just walk away from camps in summer,
not without cause. We are that cause. They’ve seen us. They’re running away
from us.”

“Pity,” drawled Curlew from the depths of a skin of kumiss.
“The king’s not the only one who’d be glad of a woman. Or a nice side of beef,
either. I’d be glad to raid some southlander’s cattle, take his daughter, take
a fat heifer, have myself a feast.”

The king’s companions sighed at that. “Kestrel,” said the
king, “do you think they’ll run, too—the ones we’re hunting?”

Kestrel began to regret that he had taken a place at the
king’s fire. He should have spread his lionskin on the camp’s edge and gone
undisturbed to sleep. But he had had a desire for kumiss and a hunger for the
gazelle that roasted over the fire.

Linden wanted an answer to his question. Kestrel gave it
unwillingly but honestly enough. “I can’t tell you. They’re not warriors, I
know that. They see no dishonor in flight, if it keeps the children safe.”

“Weaklings,” Linden said. “If they run, you’ll track them.
You found them before. You can do it again.”

“They found me,” Kestrel said. “I was half-dead on a riverbank.”

“You’ll find them,” Linden said.

It was lightly spoken, but Kestrel heard the growl beneath.
The king had laid a command on him—the same as before, but stronger now,
because Linden would ride wherever he rode. This time he could not escape his
duty.

oOo

Kestrel escaped soon after that. Walker was still pacing
and snarling. For all that it was his caution that had slowed their advance, he
was aquiver with impatience.

He was in rather a terrible state, Kestrel thought. Was it
just that he was blind to visions, and must have his sister’s eyes to see them?
Or was there something else that drove him to distraction?

Kestrel was not particularly inclined, tonight, to concern
himself with Walker’s anxieties. He had enough of his own.

Aurochs was asleep near where Kestrel had in mind to spread
his own bed. Kestrel unrolled the lionskin at arm’s length from his father and
smoothed it on the flattened grass. He lay on it, yawning hugely, stretching
till he felt the pull in his scarred ribs.

Sleep eluded him. People had begun to sing by the fire.
After a while he saw Linden leave it and walk not far from him, pausing just
within sight. A second figure crept from the camp to join him: from voice and
movement, one of the younger men of the Red Deer, so young his beard was barely
sprouted. He had a face as pretty as a girl’s, and a girl’s giggle, too. The
two of them went down in the grass, taking such comfort as warriors would take
on the march when women were far away.

Kestrel sighed inaudibly and rolled onto his belly, head on
folded arms. He did not need a girlish boy to ease his discomfort. What he
needed was close now, so close that when he closed his eyes he could see her.
But whether she would want to see him ever again—that, he did not know. He
could only pray. And hope that, somehow, she would forgive him.

The two in the grass were noisy enough to wake the dead. It
amazed him that his father slept through it. When at last they were done,
Linden left the boy panting and still giggling, and walked quickly back toward
the camp.

He paused by Kestrel. Kestrel considered feigning sleep, but
Linden seemed determined to wait him out.

He opened his eyes. There was just enough firelight, at this
distance, to see the king’s face. It was a little slack with satisfaction, its
smile lazy. “He’ll go another round if you’ve a mind. My taste is for finer
meat, or I’d have stayed.”

“I have no taste for such meat at all,” said Kestrel.

Linden dropped down beside him. “Truly? I’ve heard some say
you must prefer men, since you’re so seldom seen with women. Though from what
Fawn was saying after you had her that night . . .” His voice
trailed off. Fawn, as he must have remembered, was dead, buried with his
father. He shrugged, sighed. “Is it true, what Walker said? Did you lie with his
sister?”

Kestrel would not lie to this man, whom in his fashion he
trusted. “Yes,” he said.

“Did you lie with her in the south? Was that why you took so
long to come back?”

Far too often, Kestrel thought, one did underestimate this
man. Quick he was not. Stupid? Not in certain ways. When it came to the ways of
men with women, Linden was not stupid at all. “Yes,” he said again.

“I thought so,” Linden said without anger. “You know, I
never noticed her, except that she was different—little and dark. People said
her mother was a witch. Did she turn out beautiful?”

“Not particularly,” Kestrel said. “Not to most eyes.”

“But you think she is.”

“Her spirit is a white fire,” Kestrel said. “She really is a
shaman. Far more of one than her brother ever was or could hope to be.”

“A woman can’t be a shaman,” Linden said.

“In the south she can be.”

“That’s hard to believe,” said Linden.

“Believe it,” Kestrel said.

He thought Linden might leave then, but the king stayed.
“Walker says that I should kill you once we find the stallion. You betrayed us,
he says. You’re leading us into a trap.”

“Do you think that?” asked Kestrel.

Linden lifted a shoulder. “I think it’s strange that this
country is empty. We could be going to an ambush. But we’re strong. We’ll fight
our way out if we have to.”

“Will you kill me if it is an ambush?”

“Yes,” Linden said. “I’ll hate to do it. I like you,
Sparrowhawk. You always tell me the truth. And you never treat me like a fool.”

“I don’t think you are a fool,” said Kestrel. “You could be
a better king, but I’ve heard of worse. You’ve the wits to let others rule
where it’s sensible, and you keep the women happy; and the young warriors love
you. Nobody loved the old king. Only you and Drinks-the-Wind mourned him when
he died.”

“My father was a good king,” Linden said. “Tell me. Did
Walker kill him?”

Kestrel’s eyes widened. “How did you know that?”

“I told him,” Aurochs said.

Kestrel started half out of his skin. His father was awake,
had perhaps been awake from the beginning. He lay on his side, eyes open and
clear of sleep.

“Did Walker kill him?” Linden pressed.

“Yes,” Kestrel said. “He did. Sparrow saw it—she was
watching. And Spearhead who is dead. He used a dart to sting the horse.”

“Do you think he’ll do something to me?”

Linden did not sound afraid. Kestrel, who had been thinking
such thoughts for a long while, was taken off guard, so that he could not for a
while think of anything sensible to say.

It was Aurochs who said, “I am thinking that it is near
midsummer, and in the old time they sacrificed the king on the Stallion’s
day—the third day, the day of the greatest sacrifice. I am also thinking that
Walker bade the shamans bring all the tribes to the river after the gathering.
He’ll be making a new king there, if I’m not mistaken.”

Kestrel shook his head to clear it of fogs that had been
filling it since he came back to the People. “Of course. That’s what he’s up
to. But he can’t kill Linden out here. He’ll want to do it where the tribes can
see.”

“The warband would do,” Aurochs said.

“But first he has to have the stallion.” Kestrel frowned,
pondering that. “It’s too close to midsummer. We won’t find the Grey Horse
before then, not if they’re camped where I think they are—and supposing they
stay there and don’t vanish into the hills and woodlands.”

“Midsummer this year is mid-moon,” Aurochs said. “It’s not
the time of power that the new moon would be—and Walker is a new-moon shaman.
Would you like to wager that he’ll push to find the stallion before the new
moon, and ordain that the sacrifice be then and not on the day of midsummer?”

Kestrel’s belly tightened. “Yes. Yes, that’s when he’ll do
it, if he does it. Then take the king’s head and the stallion’s head back to
the river, and raise up a new king there. But how is he going to make the royal
mares accept a stallion for his new king to ride?”

“Simple enough,” said Aurochs. “He’ll name a new royal herd,
and have the old one sacrificed. A great sacrifice, a mighty holocaust before
the gods.”

“The People would never allow that,” Kestrel said, appalled.

“They would if he declared that the royal herd was a
deception, a plot on the part of the southern witches, and cited as proof that
these witches are Grey Horse People. If their women took the shape of mares and
came to deceive us, and in the fullness of time stole away our kingship through
our stallion—who’d not believe that?”

“I would not,” Kestrel said. “No Grey Horse woman would do
such a thing, even if she could. What would she know of the People, or care?”

“My son,” said Aurochs dryly, “the People are the world’s
heart and center, its divine rulers. How could anyone, even a southern tribe,
fail to acknowledge their power?”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Kestrel.

“To you it is.”

Linden said, “That’s not true, is it? About the witches?
Because if it is—”

“Believe me,” Kestrel said, “the Grey Horse had never heard
of White Stone until I came there, and it has no care at all for our kings or
our troubles, except when we force them upon it. Anything the royal herd is or
does is Horse Goddess’ doing. No mortal man or woman has a part in it except by
her will.”

“But those are Horse Goddess’ children,” Linden said.
“You’ve told us so.”

Aurochs spoke before Kestrel could, in his quiet voice.
“Believe this, my lord. Walker lies as he breathes, for his very life. And
he’ll destroy yours to feed his power.”

“Then what do we do?” Linden asked. He was afraid, maybe.
Maybe he was only confused. But he believed—and that was what mattered.

“I think,” said Kestrel, since Aurochs’ glance passed the
question to him, “that we need to watch and wait. And decide whom we can trust.
Keep the companions by you always, my lord.”

“We should tell them,” said Linden.