Northlight (30 page)

Terris's breath caught in his throat. Even after she had taken her place on the carpeted floor and other dancers rose to the beating of the drums, he imagined the traces of her movements hung like ghosts in the air.

The dance
meant
something. He could feel it in the silence of the drums. What it was, he couldn't guess. At home he might have hazarded an interpretation, but here he didn't dare.

Now Jakon got to his feet and stood in the center of the room. He paused, balanced on both feet, his hands at his sides.

Jakon raised his arms, as slow and smooth as if the air itself were lifting them. Terris felt the change, the expectancy, the shift in focus that crackled through the room like an electrical charge. This was it — the verdict of the Northlight gods. He steeled himself for the worst.

Arms still overhead, Jakon lifted one foot and brought it down hard.

Stamp!

His feet were bare and made almost no sound on the dark patterned carpet, yet the whole room shuddered with the impact.

Stamp!

Again, the knee raised, the thigh muscles bunching through the supple elkskin, heel extended and foot flat against the ground. Again the soundless bone-shivering ripples.

Stamp!
Now with the other foot, alternating one after the other, and Terris heard the first faint tapping from the stool drum.

 Jakon lowered his arms to chest level and quickened the pace. He moved through space as if gathering it up, his braided hair swinging in counterpoint. Around the room, people began swaying with the rhythm with his dance.

Terris watched in fascination. Jakon's movements seemed so simple, and yet he could feel their power running in his blood, their rhythms in his heartbeat. The thing within him, deep and intuitive, that had given him a voice during that first crucial interview, now stirred in response.

Finally, Jakon slowed his movements and began a reprise of the opening stamps.

The room fell still, a beat longer than the usual pause between dances. Now Aviyya rose to her feet. She was tall, her shoulders wide and strong, her hips under the supple elkskin pants tapering to muscular legs. Where the norther women had seemed like a patterning in palest gold, she burned, incandescent. Her cheeks and lips glowed like rubies, her skin like pearl, her eyes molten silver. Slowly she turned, head high, her back slightly arched, breasts lifted beneath the pocketed Ranger's vest.

Aviyya raised her hands and untied the lacings of her braids. One after another, she let the thin leather strips fall to the ground. As she unloosed each plaited strand, she combed her fingers through it, still crimped from the tightness of the braid. Then she leaned forward and shook her head. Her hair tumbled past her shoulders, blue-black under the lights.

She left the leather bindings on the carpet and stalked back to her seat.

Slowly Terris got to his feet, with no clear idea what he was doing. His body felt awkward, all elbows and angles. He couldn't remember ever having danced a step in his life.

The northers, he sensed, danced as they always had, for their own people and traditions. Whatever this Northlight vision of Jakon's had meant, it represented a continuation of the past. It changed nothing for them. But it must — somehow he must make it change.

Avi too had danced as she always had. She'd danced for herself, that same sense of self and pride that had propelled her from Esmelda's house and kept her living right on the edge.

And I...what do I dance for?

Terris stood for what felt like a long time, hoping for a trickle of inspiration. He thought the northers might grow impatient with him, but they sat in perfect, serious attention.

What do I dance for? I don't know, but I have to try. I can't let things stay the way they've always been.

Terris began as had the other dancers, by lifting his arms, elbows bent slightly, palms outward. He flexed his knees and took a deep step, turning so that he faced the front of the room and Jakon. As he moved, his hands rose higher, his fingers pulled back so that his palms stretched outward. He took another step and then another, following a curved path. His feet sped on with an energy all their own, carrying him in an ever-widening spiral. He no longer thought about what he was doing — the dance itself moved his body. He felt rather than saw the spark of recognition in Jakon's eyes.

Time lost all meaning as he circled the room, faster and faster as if caught up in an invisible whirlwind. Energy sizzled up his spine and out his arms. His heart thundered in his ears, his lungs ached as he gulped breath after breath. Heat streamed from his body as from a furnace. The watching faces blurred, the room seemed to melt away. From below the thin-worn carpet and the rough flooring, damp rich soil rose up to cushion his tread. The echoes of his steps spread through the loam and into the bedrock.

Images flashed through his mind, glimpses of sky and mountain and tumbling river; he caught the tang of salt, the lingering sweetness of flower fields, the rich savory must of ripened grain. His vision blurred, pictures overlapping so that he was no longer dancing in a globe-lit long-house, he was dancing across the length and breadth of Harth itself. Some of the scenes he had seen with his own eyes — the broad city avenues, the placid fields of barley, the flood-swollen rivers. Others he'd glimpsed in Gaylinn's paintings, still others in his own imagination. He danced through them all, reaching out, gathering them, weaving them together until there was no longer any difference between
real
and
dreamed.

Then he was no longer moving, except for the heaving of his chest. His hands stretched high above his head, his elbows locked straight, sweat-slick palms flat to the heavens, not the roof with its heavy dark beams, but the sky arching beyond it. The searing azure he remembered from his first view of the lake encampment. The soft powdery sun on the blossoming trees in Laureal City. The milky stars of the Ridge. The blackness of an Archipelago storm. The alkali-bitter sands scouring the eastern steppe.

He knew then what he swore by, what he danced for. He felt it in the very rhythms of his blood and bone.

The power that had surged through Terris vanished abruptly. His knees felt like jelly and his muscles turned to water. He lowered his arms, looked around for a confused instant at the assembled audience, and collapsed in his place.

Jakon stood up. “The dream is true.”

There was no response for a long moment, and Terris wondered if that meant they were now going to begin a long and heated debate, that the dance and all it carried was no more than a traditional preliminary. He felt tired, so tired, even more than after a day's running beside the sorrel gelding.

The next instant a murmur ran through the assembly, people nodded, some of them smiling as if satisfied. Then they got up, exchanged a few comments with their neighbors and left the long-house.

Terris thought of getting up, too, but he couldn't. His muddled brain told his legs to move, and nothing happened.

Etch came over and touched his shoulder. “You all right?” Terris nodded and wiped the cooling sweat off his forehead.

Kardith didn't move. She sat watching Aviyya, who sat staring at Jakon, still standing, until it was only the five of them and Grissem in the shadows of the emptied long-house.

Aviyya scrambled to her feet. She thrust her shoulders back and her chin forward, as if she meant to grab Jakon and shake him. She shoved one pointed index finger under his nose.

“My partner — my brother — they've been here all week, haven't they? And I never knew! When I moved to the women's tent, that's when they arrived, wasn't it?”

Before he could reply, she rushed on. “I thought you were beginning to trust me — what an idiot I was! I should have known something else was going on!”

She raised both hands, as if appealing to a celestial jury. “You've never believed a thing I've said, have you? Why did I even bother telling you the truth? What was the use of it? I could eat your gods-damned salt from now until the moons fall into the sea and you still wouldn't listen to me!”

Despite his tiredness, Terris felt an incredulity bordering on awe at Aviyya's outburst. It was so perfectly logical for the northers to keep their captives separate until they decided what to do with them. Esmelda would have done exactly the same, had the situation been reversed. What was most amazing, though, was the puzzled look on Jakon's face when he answered, in perfect seriousness, “I believed you. I just didn't trust you.”

“Then what in Harth's name
do
you trust?” Aviyya demanded.

“My dreams.”

“Your — ”

“Which have shown me that I alone cannot judge your story, or your brother's. Only in the Northlight will the truth be shown.” Jakon gave her no time for further protest. “You'd better listen to what your brother has to say. There's far more at stake for your Laurea than the fate of one headstrong woman Ranger. We leave at dawn tomorrow.”

“But — ”

“Rest well, Aviyya of the south. You wouldn't want any of us barbarians to — as you southers put it —
ride circles
around you, come tomorrow morning.”

With a hastily concealed quirk of his mouth, Jakon turned and stalked out of the long-house. Grissem also withdrew, but stopped just outside the door.

Aviyya watched them go, mouth slightly open, hands hanging open at her sides. She took a heaving breath. “Drat.” Then she spun around, strode over to Kardith and held out her arms.

Even if he hadn't known they were lovers, Terris would have looked away. There was something intensely private about the way the two women embraced — the silence between them, the way their arms curled around each other and their bodies pressed together with no hesitation, the way the two heads, black and copper, rested on each other's shoulders.

Etch got to his feet, his mouth twisted in an unreadable expression and his eyes carefully averted from the two women. He glanced at the floor, at the drum stool, moved a few steps toward the door and paused, turned halfway back and held out a hand to help Terris up.

Aviyya looked Kardith in the eyes. “Don't you
ever
risk your hand for me again.”

“Oh,
that
,” drawled Kardith. “That was the easy part. The hard bit was back in Laureal City, facing that old dragon you call a mother. You owe me for that.”

“My
mother?
” Aviyya's voice rose half an octave. “You went to see my
mother?
”

“For some official clout to get those crotting orders changed, you're damned right I did. But all I ended up with was this old horse doctor — ” for just an instant, her eyes flickered across Etch's turned-away face, “ — and this greenie kid with a yen for fancy dancing.”

“Terricel!” Aviyya exclaimed as if she'd just remembered he was there. “Baby brother!” She hugged Terris hard. He was a little surprised at the strength of her arms coupled with the softness of the cheek pressed against his. She smelled faintly of elkskin and lye soap. Then she grabbed his shoulders and pushed him away.

“You've got to tell me — never mind, let's get out of here and then we can sort out the whole story. This is the horse doctor? You have a name? Never mind that, too. Griss!” She headed for the door, Terris in tow. “Where the hell is Jakon putting us?”

The tent Grissem led them to was actually a hut that had begun life as a root storage shelter and then been converted to overflow sleeping space when the trading camp was set up. The dirt floor lay about two feet below ground level, smooth but damp and very cold. Ratty furs from some unrecognizable animal covered the walls. Half a dozen fir-bough pallets encircled the central fire pit, which had been lit earlier and was now burning down to embers. Smoke curled upward through an opening in the conical roof. A pile of travel packs, saddlebags, and bedding stood just inside the single door.

“I wonder who we've kicked out,” Etch murmured, as he pulled his pack from the heap. “Or what they did to get stuck here in the first place.”

“Hunh!” said Kardith. “After the hole they put me in, this is downright lavish.” She sat down on one of the pallets and poked the stuffing. “Look, no bedmice.”

“I thought the northers kept men and women separate,” Etch said as he sat beside her.

“They do. Unmarried ones, anyway,” said Aviyya. “But they've probably given up on us amoral southers.” She pushed Terris down on another pallet and sat facing him. “All right, baby brother, what sort of mess have you been getting yourself into? Exactly what did Jakon mean by
more at stake
? And what the hell are you doing out here?”

“I'm rescuing you,” he said, bristling inside at being treated like a child. “At least that's how it started out.”

He began the story once again, beginning with the assassination of Pateros. He'd repeated the episodes so many times now they had a curious distant quality, like something from an outdated textbook. It was hard to believe he'd actually been there and several times he'd almost been killed. Some new, inner caution kept him from mentioning his suspicions about Esmelda's secret guardianship of Harth.

Aviyya proved a far different listener than Etch or Jakon. For one thing, she kept interrupting. Terris couldn't go more than a sentence or two without her interrupting with another question. She wanted every step explained, none of the details left out. Also, she'd burst out with “Drat!” at such increasing frequency that Etch finally turned to her and said, “Harth's sweet ass, woman, you come up with the most unimaginative swearing I've heard in my entire life!” While Kardith and Terris laughed aloud, Aviyya stared at him with a puzzled expression and went right on with her next question.

“This is bad, Terr,” she said when he was finished. “This is really bad. I wish you'd turned around right then and brought the dagger back to Esme. She would have known what to do with it.”