The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (64 page)

It was a pretty steep grade, their trail, climbing steadily into the Tamarisks.  Ari hadn
’t even known their name, hadn’t known they even
existed
before the Kingsmeet…but then, he’d found out a lot of new things at the Kingsmeet.  Remembering, he steeled himself for the thousandth time at what he was; it hadn’t seemed so important this last week or so, especially with Dorian’s flattering interest in him.  He’d caught her again for a few moments last night, and with Rhoda’s song echoing uneasily around in his mind, had asked her why the Whiteblades had let him go.  If he’d been given to them ‘by Il,’ whatever that meant, why had they allowed Lord Herron to adopt him?  It had been a short and unsatisfactory conversation, full of rather vague answers indicating that they’d had no intention of keeping him ensconced in a remote  jungle his whole life and that Il’s ways were not the ways of the world.

The deciduous trees began to fade away, and the trail turned rocky as they climbed—a reddish-orange rock, dry and dusty.  The heat increased, but it was a delicious, dry heat, empty of bugs and swampy miasmas, with the cool breezes you find in the mountains.  Occasionally, the ground would drop away off to their left and an infinity of orange-colored sand stretched out as far as you could see to the horizon.  The Sheel.

Scrubby brush, cedars, pines, and firs began to dominate the landscape, their dark green needles dusted orange close to the trail.  Ari walked with deepening pleasure into the clear, searing heat; it wasn’t the High Wilds, but there was still that feeling of space, of openness, of freedom.

They had stopped to refill their waterskins at a little
spring trickling out of a rock face when Irise found them.  Everyone looked up alertly as a sudden suspicious din of birdlife impinged on the quiet mountain air, and within moments a tiny young woman came panting into view.  A crowd of Whiteblades appeared out of nowhere, clustering around from every direction like hounds rushing a food bowl.

She was breathing hard, this new Whiteblade, as if she
’d run all the way up the trail from the Swamps, which indeed she had.  Technically, she was no smaller than Sylvar or Nerissa, but her delicate bone-china features made her seem the tiniest they’d seen yet.  Tight black curls were piled enchantingly on her little head, tendrils around her face soaked with sweat.  Enormous eyes, dark and blue as sapphires, stared fixedly at the ground while she caught her breath.  There were great gulps of air going into that petite set of lungs, but she had an athlete’s fine control.  In a very few seconds, she was able to look up at Dorian, while still breathing in a way that would’ve meant death was imminent for any of the Northerners, and say tersely, “Skoline in riot.  Swamps flooded.”

“Yeah, no news there,” Rodge said wryly, leaning interestedly toward her.

“Worse than it’s been in decades,” she continued.  Her big eyes looked directly into Dorian’s for a second.  “Rheine and Saffron are trapped.”

Dorian
’s face went very still.  Not a sound was heard amongst all that press of people.

“Cinders,” Voral swore quietly.  Obscenity aside, it seemed to pretty much sum up everybody
’s feelings.

Dorian lifted her fair chin, luminous eyes gazing far out over the hills back north, as if searching out what was happening so far away.  “They have little enough time as it is,” she murmured.  Then, as if coming back to the present, she turned and swept the gathered girls with her piercing gaze.  “Arboress, Spear,” she said crisply.

“What do you expect me to do, swim them through?” Brook asked, to grins and chortles, but she and Nerissa were already moving off back down the trail to the north.

“Not her,” Rodge whispered tragically.

“Will they hold us up?” Melkin asked cagily.

“Nothing happens until we are all gathered,” Dorian answered smoothly.  “Let
’s get going.”

Camp that night was as if in a different world from the meadow.  But, as it was also a different world
from the Swamps, nobody minded.  And Cerise was in a positive ecstasy of ablutional rapture.  She spent
two hours
in the Pools.

“What is she doing up there?” Loren moaned for about the fifth time.  The rest of the group hadn
’t even seen the Pools yet.  When she finally came down the trail, she looked like she had scrubbed every ounce of tan off her skin.  Her pale hair was in the neatest pile they’d seen since Lirralhisa and she had the self-satisfied smile of a freshly cleaned woman anywhere in any world.

The rest of the group tromped past her with nothing save a scowl or two.  It took the men all of about ten minutes, because they had to share the soap, to finish and head back down again.  Except Ari.  He dawdled deliberately, calling out, “Don
’t wait,” when the rest of them glanced over at his half-dressed person.  He wanted to be alone just for a minute at this…oasis.  This paradise. 

The Pools of Tiramina were set into the red hills, great western-facing slabs of rock forming the background for the fall of spring water about five yards or so up.  Big slabs formed the ground, too, in this part of the mountains, the crevices between them filling up into two- and three- and four-yard deep pools of the most beautiful turquoise water he
’d ever seen.  Palm trees and primordial ferns grew lushly at the edges, and brilliant birdlife swept through the air, riding the cool breezes.  Now, as the sun headed down, its rays turned the place into a scene of such glorious beauty that he could have stayed there forever.

The rocks were blushing, bared to the direct gaze of the setting sun, when a voice said, “It
’s beautiful, isn’t it?  It’s one of my favorite places in the world.”  He expected it to be a Whiteblade—who else would it be?—but he did not expect what met his eyes when he turned around.

Long, dark, whipping hair.  Wild, golden-brown oval of a face.  Eyes as dark a grey as dawn before the sun.  He would know her face standing a hundred yards apart, from a thousand years away.  She came to him and he wrapped his arms around her, trying not to do something stupid like sob, and she laughed low and deep in his neck—she was shorter than he would have thought, shorter than she
’d seemed in his dream.

He finally released her.  “What do I call you?” he asked huskily.  He
’d heard her laugh a hundred times in his memory, knew the sound of her voice now like he’d just heard it saying his prayers with him last night, but he’d forgotten her name.

“Though others call me Mother, I think it might be confusing if you did,” she said mischievously out of that beautiful face.  “My name is Roxarta.”

“You raised me.”

“I did.  You were a terrible child, with the most single-minded desire to find trouble I have ever seen.  I see that
’s not changed much.”  Her eyes danced with delight.

His stomach dropped and he felt his smile turn wooden.  “Surely…surely you knew what I was…?”

She looked at him, only her eyes still laughing.  Her face was haunting as a Dra’s in repose.  “We knew very little about you, Ari, only that Il had given you to us for a short while.  I…it broke my heart…to let you go.  But I had to.  What kind of a life could you have lived with us?  No man should grow up surrounded entirely by old women, secluded in a forest far from all that makes a young man’s heart beat fast.  It was for the best—I still believe that…though I have missed you every day of your life.”

He was getting uncontrollably mushy on his insides.  Quickly, he said, “But you know who I am now.  Tell me what is going on.  Why does Dorian want me?  What possible purpose can I have?”

“You have a great destiny in Il’s plan, as we all do,” she answered soothingly, and when he looked at her with his great greenish-blue eyes alight with frustration, she hastened to add, “Ari, please do not ask me anymore.  It is not my story to tell.”

And with that he had to be content.  The sun had set when they finally, hand in hand, picked their way down the rocky trail and came back into camp.  There was a flurry of greetings as Roxarta was spotted, and Ari separated from her to find the northerners.

They were all heading in to the fire to see and hear what was going on, but they stopped at Ari’s excited look.  “That’s her,” he said breathlessly.  “That’s the woman who raised me!”  They stared at him, eyes drifting to Roxarta’s slim, dark-haired figure, and back to him.

“Ari,” Cerise said carefully, “she
’s our age.”

‘
Rox,’ as everyone called her, reported to Dorian in private.  The Northerners had to pick up second-hand that the Aerach Ramparts were in an uproar and that Kyr was almost out of his mind with fury and grief and frustration, ‘restless enough to hunt Phoenix,’ as Adama put it, though no one would say why. 

  “They
’d settle down if they could do a little focused fighting,” Jordan said, and the entire camp echoed agreement.

But Roxarta
’s companion was stealing the show while they were waiting to find all of this out.  Yve, a healthy, hearty Merranic with a cap of friendly brown curls and a smattering of freckles, was bent over the fire from the moment they met her.  As unlikely as the necessity of having a Cook would seem to be to an operation like the Whiteblades, that was apparently her role.

She
was
sublimely gifted, incidentally.  The cookfire became, for the rest of the trip, the very center of activity.  It saw more business and population density over the next several weeks than all the fires of the long months of the Northerners’ whole trip.  The northerners themselves weren’t exactly strangers.

It was the day after Roxarta and Yvetta had come in that Ari became aware of the faint rumbling behind them.  It was more a vibration or a sense than an actual sound, but there
’d been a whole aviary’s worth of bird calls flying around for the past couple of hours, so he knew something was up.  When Dorian pulled them over earlier than usual that afternoon, he was sure it had something to do with it.

Yve was always an hour or so ahead of them now, so they had the luxury of riding into camp with the fire and dinner already started—difficult to get used to, but one did what one could.  The rumbling grew all the way through dinner, and just as the light was softening into evening, the source finally came into sight.

It was a herd of horses, and at their head rode a proud, straight-backed woman on a coal black stallion.  She had the narrow face and dark hair, pulled into two midnight braids on each side of her face, of a Rach, but eyes that color green had never been seen outside Cyrrh.  Every inch of her was covered with dust, except those eyes, and when she slipped off the stallion’s bare back and came walking toward Dorian and a gathering crowd of Whiteblades, it puffed off of her with every step.

She also had a pronounced air of self-assurance.  She walked straight up to Dorian and extended her hand, palm out, fingers spread.  Very formally, Dorian did the same, their fingertips meeting in what must have been the Whiteblade greeting.  Watching it unfold so clearly, Ari realized he
’d been seeing it for days now.  They all did it; he’d just assumed it was some fond form of hand-clasping.

“Verrena,” Dorian said business-like.

“Dor,” the woman opposite her said.  She had a quiet, strong voice.  “I got held up at the Western Wings.  The Rach hadn’t seen the horses in a while.”  Taciturn as a Dra, her words still brought rueful laughs from everyone around.

After a few seconds she added slowly, “Spirit wouldn
’t come.”  This was apparently bad news.  Everyone sobered, looking at her quietly.  Dorian swallowed hard, which was the equivalent of a Northerner screaming, “What?!” but didn’t say anything.

Voral broke the clearly troubled tension by drawling, “Well, what good are you?  A Rider who can
’t even catch horses?”  A smile pulled at Verrena’s dusty countenance, and she stretched her hand out to greet her.  “Voral.”

Dorian
’s eyes were on Adama, who was pulling somberly at her lower lip.  She met her gaze with her own apple-cider tart one.  “The Ways of the Empress have ever diverged from ours,” she said slowly.  “It should not surprise us to see it here again, now.”

“He has been with the herd since the Peace,” Verrena said quietly.  “Why leave now?”

Silence permeated the wide, open space they were making camp in, disturbed only faintly by the homey sound of horses slurping at the nearby spring or chomping hungrily at the wiry yellow grass.

Adama raised her chin.  “The Empress will be there,” she said quite firmly, as if reassuring them all.  “And if she is not in need of Spirit afterwards…well, we also will not be in need of the horses.”

This brought a few snorts and a chuckle or two, and then people began drifting back to Yve and the food, Verrena and Dorian walking close together and talking low.

The Empress.  In these lazy days drying out from their saturation in the Swamps, Ari had forgotten their real mission (which had shown a remarkable tendency to stay obscure).  The Empress…the Statue that had drawn them all this space and time across the Realms, that hadn
’t even existed in that form for months before it had been a glare in Melkin’s eye.  Was she to remain an enigma until they walked into Zkag and were finally introduced?  How exactly was the whole Sheelshard thing going to work, anyway?  If the Sheelmen would kill them if they caught them…did that mean they were going to sneak into the very center of Sheelman civilization?  That seemed to defy belief.  And even if the Whiteblades could do it—and there didn’t seem to be much beyond them—most of the northerner group was definitely not in the same survival skill class.