Lady of Horses (63 page)

“Do you want it?”

“Yes,” she said, “but—”

“He wants to marry you,” Linden said. “That would make you a
prince’s wife. It would also make a great alliance between our people and
his—between the plains and the south, and between Sky-father’s children and
Horse Goddess’ children.”

“Did you think of that?” Keen demanded of Cloud.

“No,” he said. “Not . . . at first.”

She slipped her hand out of his. He sat with her son falling
asleep in his lap, such a sight as the People had never seen in the king’s
circle before, and such a look on his face that if Kestrel had been a woman he
would have melted.

Keen was proof against it. “Is that why you want me? For the
alliance?”

“No!” he said.

“Then why?”

“Because,” he said, “I know you would want this.”

“I never said—”

“You never needed to.”

She sank down, forgetting that it was the royal horsehide
she sank to. Linden made no move to stop her.

She knelt in front of Cloud. “I will marry you,” she said.
“But if you ever doubted it—”

“Never,” he said.

“Good,” said Keen.

“And if I won’t give my leave?” said Linden.

They both turned to stare. They had forgotten him, maybe. He
laughed at their expressions. “Do you care if I give or deny it?” he asked
Keen.

She frowned. “You are my king.”

“Not if you’ve given yourself to this one,” Linden said.

“I am still of the People,” she said. “Until—”

“Yes,” said Linden. “Until marriage makes you one of his
people.”

“Will you allow that?”

“I think,” said Linden, “that it would be a very good thing.”

“You won’t raid the Grey Horse if they’re your allies,” Keen
said.

“Yes,” said Linden.

“And it would make you free of the south, which is rich
country, with fine grazing.”

Linden nodded. “And Horse Goddess rules us all, and Horse
Goddess’ priestess is mighty and holy and will keep us as honest as we can be,
but if we have a marriage to make us happy, it makes everything better,
somehow. Don’t you agree?”

Keen nodded gravely. “I’ll take him,” she said, “if I have
your leave.”

“You have it,” said Linden.

“Now? Will you do it now? Say the words. Do what’s needed.”

“But that needs nine days. And—”

“We can take nine days,” Cloud said. “We can hold a
festival. A great marriage, and an alliance. The end of a world—the world that
Walker would have made.”

“What is this world we make?” Keen asked.

“Anything we choose,” Cloud answered over the head of her
son that Walker had made—but Cloud had been more truly a father to the child
than Walker could ever be. “Anything at all.”

They went about it properly after all, because the women,
led by Willow, raised a great objection to preparing a wedding feast on a
moment’s notice. The morrow would be soon enough, Willow declared as she swept
Keen away into the seclusion proper to a bride.

Cloud was greatly amused—and Keen’s father undertook to be,
once he was found and informed of what his king had done with his daughter.

He was aging sadly; he had grown deaf. But he still had a
wonderful roar of a laugh. “Widowed a day and she’s found herself a prince?
There’s my girl!”

Cloud he seemed to like rather well, for a foreigner. No one
quite ventured to remind him of what it meant that Keen was binding herself to
a foreign king’s heir. The woman went with her husband, wherever he happened to
be.

oOo

Tonight the bride was hidden among the women. The
bridegroom found himself celebrated among the men, a nightlong carouse that
struck him as strange. “There are no women,” he said to Kestrel. “It’s only
men.”

Kestrel was corrupted. He was missing lighter voices, too,
and beardless faces, and sweet rounded bodies caressed by the firelight. One
body in particular . . .

“Do you think,” Cloud asked him, “that your people would
object terribly if I disappeared before middle night and found my way to my
lady? She’s put on a brave face, but what that man did to her—it left scars.”

“You’ll not be let near her till tomorrow,” Kestrel said.

Cloud’s face darkened. “That’s cruel.”

“It’s custom.” Kestrel spoke again quickly, because Cloud
looked ready to leap up and charge like a bull through the crowd of revelers.
“My mother is with her. Whatever comfort she needs, whatever healing she will
accept, Willow will give her. Sometimes,” Kestrel said carefully, “it’s not a
man a woman needs to talk to. Even the man who holds her heart.”

“Because it was a man who wounded her?”

Kestrel nodded.

Cloud’s brows drew together. “Is she kept away from all men?
Or only from me?”

“Well,” Kestrel said, “men who are her kin can—”

“You are her kin,” Cloud said. “She’s in your mother’s tent.
Will you go? Will you speak to her for me?”

“I shouldn’t—”

“Speak to your mother, then. Let her carry the message.”

Kestrel sighed. Cloud was clearly determined, and Kestrel,
if he was honest with himself, was in no mood to linger over kumiss and bawdy
songs. Time was when he would have gone hunting to get away from it, but he was
a king’s companion and a shaman’s lover. He had to stay in the camp at least
until Keen was well and truly married.

oOo

The world was a quiet place away from the king’s circle, a
vault of stars over the camp, a whisper of wind. Willow’s tent—there; Kestrel
was corrupted again, calling it his mother’s rather than his father’s—showed a
gleam of light within.

He had heard that the women could carouse as long and hard
as the men. But this was a quiet gathering, and small: Willow, Sparrow, one or
two of his father’s lesser wives, and, most oddly, White Bird.

She had put aside her mad wild look and returned to the
seeming of a proper wife. But the eyes she turned on Kestrel were as strange as
ever. Not quite shaman’s eyes, but not simple mortal woman’s either.

Keen sat in the middle of them with Summer asleep beside
her. Her face was unexpectedly serene. It brightened at Kestrel’s coming; her
smile had no shadow in it.

“Are you well?” he asked her.

She nodded. “It’s over, you see,” she said. “He can’t touch
me ever again.”

Kestrel glanced at his mother. She shrugged slightly. It
would be as the gods willed, her expression said.

Keen seemed much calmer than Kestrel could remember—gods,
since she was a child. “Cloud sent me,” he said. “He’d come himself, if he
could.”

“He would,” Keen said. Her smile deepened and warmed. “Is he
terribly worried?”

“He won’t be, once I take word back to him,” Kestrel said.

“My poor love.” Keen shook her head. “I scared him, I know.
I was so cold inside. But now that one is dead and I have Summer back, all the
cold is gone. When we join hands tomorrow, I’ll have to take care, or the sun
will have a rival.”

“You’re happy,” Kestrel said.

It blazed in her. It made her laugh. “Oh! Is that what it
is? I keep wanting to sing.”

“Happiness,” said Kestrel. He stooped and kissed her
forehead. “For Cloud,” he said, “who will give you more and better tomorrow.
And for me—” He took her hands in his and kissed them, and held them briefly to
his heart. “I’m glad to see you glad.”

oOo

Sparrow went with him back to the king’s circle, and
waited in the shadows while he delivered Keen’s message. Cloud’s joy was as
great as Keen’s. It made him all the more eager for the morrow; but he was a
strong man. He could wait.

Kestrel did not need to be strong, nor did he need to wait,
either. He walked with Sparrow toward the river, close enough to feel her
warmth, but not touching. Not yet. When they had come to the bank, in the
rustle of reeds and the lapping of water he said, “I don’t suppose you want to
make it proper, too.”

“No,” said Sparrow. She stooped and dipped a handful of
water and drank.

“Why?” he asked. “Because a wife stays with her husband?”

“Because I can’t stay, and if you want to—”

“I told you,” he said. “Wherever you go, I go.”

“You’d leave the People for me?”

“I already did.”

“Do you really want a wife?”

“I want you,” he said. “Whatever you call yourself, whatever
you are to the world. If you won’t be a wife, then I’ll have you as a lover, or
mistress, or priestess and king. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but you.”

She turned suddenly and wrapped her arms about him, pressing
close. He could feel the shape of the child in her, protesting mildly at the
sudden narrowing of its world. “I could live without you,” she said, muffled
against his chest, “but I would much rather not.”

“I,” he said, “have forgotten how to live apart from you.”

She raised her head. “That’s not sensible.”

“No,” he said.

“You’re a hunter. You can’t be living constantly in my
shadow. You certainly can’t—”

He silenced her with a finger on her lips. “I’m not that
besotted. I’ll run off often enough, no fear of that. But I’ll always come
back.”

“Promise.”

“By my heart. By this child between us.”

“Your daughter,” she said.

His heart leaped like a stag. “It is? Truly? You see it?”

“I see her,” Sparrow said. “She looks like you.”

“Ah, poor child.”

“She’ll be beautiful when she’s grown.”

“Maybe. But the getting there . . .”

“Oh, hush,” said Sparrow, half in exasperation, half in
unwilling amusement.

“Well then; what shall I name her? It should be something
lovely, but not too soft. Maybe—”

“
I
shall name
her,” Sparrow said. “You may name the sons.”

“Sons? There will be—”

“If you’re willing to help me make them.”

“Sons?” Kestrel could not stop repeating it.
“And—daughters?”

He had not known there was tension in her until he felt it
ease. She sighed against him. “You don’t mind,” she said. “That the firstborn
is—”

“You expected me to mind?”

“Men are strange,” she said. “Even you. And when it comes to
sons, you can be impossible.”

“A man shouldn’t want sons?”

“A man should want daughters, too. Except he seldom does.”

“Your father wanted you.”

“He did, didn’t he?” She let him go, turning slowly, face to
the stars. “This one is a shaman, too, or more than a shaman. Priestess; Horse
Goddess’ servant. And the next one a hunter. And the one after that—”

Kestrel stopped her with a kiss. “I shall be delighted to
help you make any and all of them. But tonight, if you please, we’ll keep for
ourselves. And tomorrow . . .”

“Tomorrow Grey Horse and White Stone unite in marriage.”
Sparrow smiled. “They don’t know yet what that will do. Women riding
horses—that’s only the beginning.”

“A good beginning.”

“Very good indeed.” Her smile widened. “Oh, the things I
see!”

“Will you be letting Linden keep the stallion?”

“The stallion chose him,” Sparrow said. “But the royal herd—that,
we take back with us, as Keen’s marriage-gift.”

Kestrel’s breath hissed between his teeth. “You’ll ask for that?
That’s almost worse than taking the kingship from the People!”

“Almost,” she said. “We won’t take them all. We’ll leave a
mare or two. And the stallion. Linden will be content with that. The rest will
learn to be. It’s only mares, after all, and an excess of fillies.”

“
Only
mares.”
Kestrel shook his head. “Someday, my love, the men of the People will wake and
see what you’ve done to them.”

“I’ll wait eagerly for that,” she said.

With a sudden movement she stripped off her shaman’s tunic,
standing naked in starlight. The shaman-marks on her breasts and belly seemed
to stir like living things. She stretched, whirled about, danced along the
riverbank.

Kestrel caught her sudden wild mood, the joy that was in
her, the dizzy gladness. He shed his own garments and laughed for the pleasure
of the night wind on his bare skin. When she leaped into the water and struck
off swimming, he was hard on her heels.

They played like otters, tumbling, laughing, till Kestrel
swallowed a gulletful of water and came up gasping. He scrambled toward the
shore, found purchase for his feet, and paused to breathe.

She floated into his arms. She had always swum more easily
than he, as if water were her element. Truly, she did look like an otter, with
her wide dark eyes and her round mischievous face. He, he supposed, looked like
a bedraggled falcon, all wet feathers and dampened dignity, and water dripping
from his long arched nose.

She did not seem to find him unpleasant to look at, though
her eyes danced upon him. “Beloved,” she said, “it’s a long life we’ll have
together, and laughter enough to brighten a world.”

“That is true seeing?”

She kissed him so long and so well that he almost forgot
what he had asked. But in the end she answered him. “Pure truth,” she said, “in
the goddess’ name.”

LADY OF HORSES

The Epona Sequence, Vol. 2

Judith Tarr

Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61138-383-6
Copyright © 2000 Judith Tarr

First published: Forge, 2000

Production Team: Cover Design, Pati Nagle; Proofreader, Mary Anne Mohanraj; Ebook Formatter, Vonda N. McIntyre

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Digital version: 20140405vnm