Lady of Horses (57 page)

oOo

Walker’s allies were secured under guard for what remained
of the night. Walker was nowhere to be found. A few of the warband searched for
him, but most were preoccupied with the captives and with mourning for the
dead.

No one had much to say of it, but most were weary of him,
and inclined to let him go. The few who reckoned that unwise were not heeded.
There was too much else to think of. Too much grief. Too much anger. Time
enough, they told one another, to hunt the traitor down and kill him.

Those who could sleep slept—more than Keen might have
expected, in the peculiar horror of that night and its ending. She had her own
horror piled on grief: both Summer and Spring were reft of their milk-mother.
One of the Grey Horse women, whose name Keen did not even know, came to help as
she could; she had weaned her own daughter but yesterday and was glad, she
said, to relieve the ache in her breasts.

The children were looked after. But Keen, whose breasts had
never been enough to keep a child alive, and whose friend was dead, could only
sit in the small traveling-tent, staring into the dark.

Cloud never came, nor did she expect him. He had the offices
of the dead to perform, he and his mother. He had no time or strength to spare
for a lover.

She did not begrudge him the need to consider his own kin
and people. But it was cold, sitting here without him, and bleak. The children
slept fitfully. Spring made her uneasy: staring dark-eyed and silent, as if her
mother’s death had struck her mute.

Keen rocked them and sang, and waited for the night to end.
There was no sleep in her.

oOo

Late in the night, a step brought her alert from a
half-doze. She turned expecting Cloud, or maybe even Kestrel, who looked out
for her in quiet ways.

It was a tall man, one of the People, but it was not
Kestrel.

He did not even look at her. His eyes were on the cradle,
and on the bright-haired child sleeping in it.

Keen saw what he was doing in the instant before he did it.
She flung herself at him. But it was too late. He had Summer in his arms.

He bowled her over, running past her, trampling her
underfoot. She snatched wildly at him, raked flesh—heard his gasp and curse. He
did not even pause.

He was gone. She lay bruised and sore, and in her heart a
great and swelling cry. It rose up and up. When it reached the brim of her
heart, it poured out.

It seemed a very long time before anyone came. She knew that
she should go out and find someone—Kestrel, maybe, to hunt down the thief and
bring him back—but she dared not leave Spring alone. Rain’s daughter—and
Cloud’s, too—had made no sound, nor moved, when her milk-brother was taken
away.

Cloud came at last, and Sparrow behind him, and Kestrel
loping long-legged in the rear. None of them needed her to explain. They saw
the dark-eyed child alone in the cradle, and Keen’s bruises, and knew.

Kestrel smote his thigh with his fist and cursed. “Gods and
goddesses and black spirits below! I knew he wouldn’t just go away. But I
didn’t—”

“We all knew. But we thought him cowed—we reckoned that we
could hunt him at our leisure. We should have known that Walker of all people
would strike like a snake the moment our backs were turned.” Sparrow spoke
calmly, but her eyes were fierce. “We’ll get Summer back. Kestrel—”

“I’ll go,” he said. “When I find him I’ll kill him—once the
baby is safe.”

“Not alone,” she said. “Take the fastest riders in the
warband. The rest will follow in the morning as we had intended. We’ll all go
north, all of us who can, or who can be trusted. This will be settled at the
river.”

“Not if I find that baby-thief sooner,” Kestrel gritted.

“At the river,” she said. “Now go, ask Linden to give you
the riders. And tell him what I told you.”

“Linden is asleep,” Kestrel said.

“Happy man,” said Sparrow, hard-hearted. “Wake him.”

Kestrel snorted, not quite laughter, and went to do as she
bade.

While they settled that, Keen crouched where Walker had left
her. Cloud came, knelt, gathered her into his arms. She laid her head on his
breast and wept, not loudly, not particularly long, but deep. It did little to
comfort her.

He was weeping, too, quietly, as he held her. He had lost
his clan-sister this night, the mother of his child, the shaman who had been
meant to stand beside him when at last he was king. And now the son of his
heart was gone.

She wept for Rain then, as she had not been able to before;
and that did ease the terrible aching in her heart. But the place in it where
Summer had been was an open wound, too deep and terrible to heal with tears.

oOo

When after a long while she could speak, she said, “I have
to go, even if I go with the slower riders. I can’t stay here.”

He nodded. “We’ll both go.”

“But the burying—Rain—”

“Rain is—was—a shaman. Their burials are shamans’ rites.
Such farewells as I can say, I have said. In the morning I’ll be ready to ride,
I and others of the Grey Horse.”

He met Sparrow’s eyes as he said that, as if he defied her
to stop him. But she said, “Tell them to bring their bows. We may need them.”

He inclined his head. If he was grateful not to be laughed
at, he did not show it. But then, thought Keen, Sparrow would never mock a Grey
Horse man or woman for lack of prowess in war. She knew how well they hunted,
and how skilled they were with weapons.

So it was settled. Cloud stayed with Keen after all, though
she urged him to go back to his kin. “They know where I am,” he said. “They’ll
know why soon enough. Let be. Rest. It’s a hard ride we’ll have ahead of us.”

Hard not because it was long or the journey arduous; it was
short enough by ways his people knew. But to hunt Keen’s child, in such fear as
was in her of the child’s father, was bitter indeed.

Not even a memory of love remained, or a flicker of desire.
Not even for duty would Keen take Walker back as a husband.

oOo

Two dozen of Linden’s warriors mounted the swiftest
horses, took what was needful and readied to ride. Sparrow would have taken the
silvermaned stallion, leaving the mare to her colt, but the mare would not hear
of it. She did a thing that no mortal mare would willingly do: she passed her
son to one of the Grey Horse mares who had lost a foal not long ago, left him
and bade Sparrow mount her and ride.

While the mare proved herself other than simple earthly
creature, Linden approached the stallion whom the mare had forced Sparrow to
abandon, and mounted him. The stallion offered no objection. Linden met
Sparrow’s glance, once she herself was mounted, with a flat and defiant stare.
This time, his expression said, nothing in heaven or earth would keep him from
the back of his beloved king.

She astonished him with laughter. Still laughing, she swept
them all together, gathered them and loosed them into the north.

oOo

It was strange to be riding those ways again, that only a
year before she had taken going southward. In that little time, the world had
died and been born again. She had become a shaman, and was to be a mother. And
here she was, riding with the king’s warband of the White Stone, and the Grey
Horse to follow come morning—armies that rode where she bade them, and kings
and kings’ heirs who looked to her for guidance.

The riders’ laughter as they went was bright and rather mad,
laughter masking a sacred anger. Their quarry was in front of them: he had
stolen a swift horse, and it seemed he had no care to keep it alive.

In the dawn Kestrel found a sign that Walker had met a
company of horsemen and set off again at a killing pace. “Cliff Lion,” he said,
pointing to a fallen bit of rein. It was braided in the colors and fashion of
the tribe.

Some distance past this, they found the first horse.
Vultures’ circling led them to it. It was still alive, its foreleg shattered.
It called to their horses as they came near.

Aurochs put it out of its misery. They could not stay to
bury or to butcher it; they had perforce to leave it to the vultures.

Sparrow would not let them ride as fast as Walker was
riding. “We’ll need mounts that can still stand, when we come to the river,”
she said.

“Two dozen riders against the full gathering of tribes,”
Linden said. He shook his head, but he was smiling. “We’re mad.”

“Two dozen riders, a shaman, and,” said Sparrow, “a king
mounted on a king. Remember what you are, my lord.”

“What I should be is dead,” Linden said.

“Only in the world as Walker would have it.”

“Then we must make a new world,” said Linden.

For all her air of headlong confidence, Sparrow was caught
out of her reckoning. What Drinks-the-Wind had done, what had followed upon it,
had shaken her visions, blurring and scattering them like images in water.

Walker’s allies were subdued, his kingmaking ruined, but he
was alive, like a snake that, crushed and stabbed almost to death, still
revives and strikes at its enemies.

He should not have lived. In every vision that showed the
kingmaking failed, it had failed because both Walker and Ash were killed. In
none of them had Walker lived, nor had he lived to seize Keen’s child and carry
him away into the north.

When Sparrow sought foreseeing, or even guidance, in that
act, she saw things that appalled her. Great wars, armies, conquests sweeping
across the world—and a monster at the head of them, a golden creature with a
face of light and a heart that was black darkness. This was the thing that
Walker would make of his son, this king of blood and slaughter.

In only one respect did the confusion of her visions serve
her. Walker, blind and deaf to things of the spirit, could not know that it was
all changed; that the foreseeings she had given him of both his defeat and his
victory were no longer certain.

Drinks-the-Wind’s spirit stood athwart them. In her
arrogance and her softness of heart, she had trusted him. She had reckoned him
an ally. But he had, after all, been the great shaman of the People. He would
serve the People first and himself after, and the rest as it pleased him. In
his eyes, a king of battles would not be an ill thing, even a king as blackly
cruel as Sparrow foresaw.

She fought to remember the vision that had guided her before
Drinks-the-Wind rode into the Grey Horse camp. Walker defeated, the northern
tribes overcome, Horse Goddess worshipped from the south to the farthest north.
And Sparrow as shaman and priestess of the goddess, serene among the people
whom above all she had made her own: the Grey Horse People, the white mare’s
following, Horse Goddess’ children.

She could still make that come to pass. She must. The golden
king, Keen’s son, raised by his mother and accepted by Cloud as his heir, would
rule according to her teaching, both wise and just.

It must be so. No other way was possible. So she told
herself as she rode north on her tireless mare, with her companions trailing
exhausted behind.

oOo

They did not catch Walker before he crossed the river. It
was close—they were almost near enough to see him; his track in the tall grass
was fresh. But he was gone and the river still some distance away, and the
light was fading.

The others would have pressed on. Sparrow would have flown
if she could.

She caught Aurochs’ eye, and something in it focused her
spirit. “We’ll stop till morning,” she said. “We know where he’s going.”

“If we catch him before he comes to the gathering,” Linden
said, “won’t it be better? We won’t have to fight all the tribes to get our
hands on him.”

“I think,” said Sparrow slowly, “that it would be worse if
we did kill him on the plain. He has committed great crimes against you and the
People. Let the People know that, and share in his judgment.”

“He’ll seduce them,” Linden said. “He always has.”

“Not if I can help it,” said Sparrow.

She hoped she sounded stronger than she felt. She was worn
down. The power that had burned in her on the hilltop was sunk to an ember. She
still wore the bit of black stone, but it was only an oddly heavy, rather
clumsy amulet about her neck.

They all needed sleep, and badly. As she considered that,
she decided something else. “Tomorrow we’ll stay here. We’ll hunt, and eat
well. The morning after, we’ll ride.”

“But—” said Linden for them all.

“We have to be strong,” she said. “We can’t stumble in as we
are now. They’ll cut us down and reckon it good riddance. We should ride among
the tribes as people of consequence, rested and fed and as clean as we may be.
As a king and his escort, not a band of wild raiders.”

oOo

Linden acceded to that, after a while: perhaps because he
was as tired as she, as much as that he was allured by the vision of himself as
king. When he went at last to sleep, Sparrow sought her own rough bed, with
Kestrel in it.

She did not slip at once into a dream. Kestrel was awake,
with such a look about him that she wanted to hit him. “What?” she demanded
crossly. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

“Then why are you staring?”

“Because I love to look at your face,” he said.

She fixed him with her fiercest glare. “You’re thinking I’ll
leave you all here, creep out, and get myself killed. Aren’t you?”

“I . . . had thought of it,” he admitted.

“Don’t.”

“I thought that, too.” He brushed his finger across her set
lips, and followed it with a kiss. “I think I’ll trust you.”

“Good,” she said, biting off the word.

He grinned, which truly made her want to hit him; then he
took her in his arms. Her body, the fool, did not struggle at all. It melted
against him and sighed.

“Sometimes I hate you,” she said.