Chapter Twenty-one
BEKTER STOOD BEFORE THE raven tent wondering how to explain his presence to the shamaness Toragana. He was supposed to be spying for his father, but he didn’t have the skills for it, even to serve the ulus. He’d done well enough the last time, he supposed; the shamaness had seemed happy when he promised to return. Five days had passed since then, however. Tinglut-Khan’s messenger had returned to announce the approach of a Tinglut prince, whose party would reach the tent city of the Qubal gur-khan in the morning. Tomorrow he would be called to attend to the duties of court; today he had a mission for his father.
Eye to eye with the raven guarding her door, however, he admitted to himself that he hadn’t come back for Mergen Gur-Khan. He needed advice, answers to questions he didn’t dare bring to Bolghai’s attention even if he could find him. The court shaman appeared and disappeared on his own calendar, heedless of the khan’s wishes or the needs of royal spies with disturbing dreams of their own. So he found himself waiting outside the shamaness’ tent once again, his own worries simmering off the fire while he listened to the old tales she told to the children of her clan.
In his world, tales still seemed to come to life. A prince had fallen in love with a princess of the toads, or so rumor said, adding that he had sickened from the poisons in her skin. Bekter knew better. Prince Tayy spent one night with a gut ache—too much drink, or something bitter in the pies—and recovered the next day. Even now he sat with the leaders of the royal guardsmen, planning a great hunt to entertain the Tinglut prince. The girl existed, of course, no toad but an apprentice in training to the shamaness in this very tent and one of the reasons he had come. The prince had better sense than to fall in love with her, though. Soon enough the khan would give him a political wife to be the object of his devotion.
Mergen wanted to know everything about her, just in case. That was the spying part of his visit. Back the other side of catching the prince by the river with her, he’d thought the khan overcautious for his heir. But he’d seen enough between them to realize that she’d bewitched him, or the prince had fallen under the spell of her eyes if nothing more sinister. Even an innocent connection could end in disaster; adding magic to the mix made catastrophe almost a certainty.
A shamaness might choose to walk out to the river with a young man because the night was warm and the grass was soft. Even a warrior should have better sense than to bring a shamaness in love to a casual bed, however. For the girl loved the prince, of that he had no doubt. He’d seen love denied for politics in his mother’s tent and understood why Mergen was so worried about Prince Tayy.
It seemed to Bekter that some things ran true in the blood, including a weakness for mysterious women with unearthly powers. He wondered what secrets ’Tula’s woman hid. His own preferences ran to simpler things, or it least it had until now. Which brought him to the second reason for his visit. His dream. He hoped it was a dream. Didn’t want to consider that the strange woman had entered his mother’s tent and his bed to offer him—what? Her body, certainly, but she hadn’t seemed that enamored of his person. What else she meant for him, he still didn’t know.
Needing a deep, calm mind to share his concerns, he’d thought first of the shamaness. He’d forgotten about the children, though. They were back as well. He had no desire to make of himself a meal for the gossips again in front of them, so he waited while dark clouds gobbled up the sky. The summer rains had come; soon he’d have to find shelter. For now he listened through the creamy felted tent cloths as the shamaness recited the story of Nogai’s Bear, or the part of it suitable for young ears. The death of the khan at the hands of the bear’s son, raised as his own heir, made no tale for children.
Entranced like the children by her voice, he waited through the first raindrops until the khan of the story had received his wife back in joy and rewarded Nogai with the rank of general and a place at his side. When the children ran out, declaring themselves to be the khan, or Nogai—the girls, he noted, seemed disinclined to suffer as the stolen wife or her grieving husband but wielded stick swords as Nogai—he still waited.
Finally, the shamaness came to him still wearing her robes of office, with the keen dead eyes of the stuffed raven judging him from atop her headdress. Holding back the door with a smile of welcome and a question in her eyes, she asked, “What can I do for you today, poet of khans?”
“My mind is uneasy,” he said, the proper formula when calling for advice on a problem that did not yet require a healing, and took from the purse at his waist a gold coin.
“Not gold, but a teapot,” she answered the coin with a dismissive wave of her hand and set about filling the teapot in question with crushed leaves and water hot off the firebox.
Bekter understood the old riddle well enough and answered with a smile. “What stands between friends.” Hospitality, that meant, and not a cash transaction. Then he saw the girl.
She sat on the layered carpets, weaving a little basket out of reeds. He recognized her instantly and should have been elated that he had a chance to observe her up close. Instead, he found himself frozen in disarray. He’d expected the shamaness to be alone and found himself torn suddenly between his own private errand and the need to learn more about the girl who had caught the prince’s eye and terrified Qutula, two good reasons to make the khan nervous.
Looking up from the cups she set out on a small chest—just two, Bekter noted—the shamaness followed the direction of his gaze. “This is my apprentice, Eluneke,” she introduced them with a question in the lift of her eyebrow. “Have you met before?”
The girl was watching him with wide, cautious eyes. She recognized him and wondered, he supposed, if he meant her harm as Qutula had threatened. He must have looked at her the same way. Qutula had seen her as a giant poisonous toad, after all. Too late to deny that they had met. Or something.
“Only from a distance,” he said, reining in his galloping imagination. “I’m a friend of the prince.”
“I see,” Toragana said, as if he had explained more than he might want her to know.
“You’re the other one’s brother, aren’t you?” Eluneke gathered a collection of little baskets scattered at her feet and tied them to the strings that hung from her shaman’s robes.
“Which other one?” Bekter asked the top of her head as she leaned over to scoop up the dried reeds she had used to weave the baskets. Remembering the rough treatment she had received at the hand of Qutula and his Durluken, he was suddenly reluctant to claim that connection.
“You know who I mean.” She gave him a sharp glance from under her downcast lashes, not flirtatious but attending to the reeds she picked up from the carpets.
“Qutula is my brother, yes. I’m not like him, though.”
“I know.” She nodded, coming to her feet. “The question is, whose side will you come down on when the prince’s life hangs between this world and the next?”
“What are you talking about? I’m no traitor!” Bekter drew himself up to his full, if unimposing, height. “And neither is my brother. But if you know something about a plot to harm the prince—”
“What if you’re wrong?” she insisted. It shouldn’t have answered his question, but it did.
“I am no traitor.” But if it came to believing ill of Qutula, how would he fall? He really didn’t know.
She searched his eyes for truth or falsehood and seemed content with what she saw for now. “All right, then,” she said, and then, to her teacher, “Will you be long here?”
“I’ll be where I need to be when it is time,” Toragana reached out and smoothed the girl’s hair in the loving gesture of a mother. “Until then, mind your own business, little flower, and trust me to mind mine.”
Which should have sounded like a reprimand, but rather came out as some playful code between them. Eluneke smiled mischievously up at the shamaness before she made a bow to Bekter and departed. He knew he ought to follow her, but he had come for other business and Toragana was watching to see what he would do.
Bolghai’s tent lay on the far side of the city. He wasn’t waiting for her at home, though; Eluneke turned toward the open land and started to run. The next step of her initiation was too dangerous to approach with magic, so she kept to her human form as she left the thinning lines of tents behind her. The soft grass crushed underfoot released sweet fragrances as it cushioned her step. She settled into a pace that ate up the li without stealing her breath. She needed that to call her totem animals to her. “King of toads, king of toads, I need you,” she chanted.
“By your oath at greatest need,
bring your troops to guide my way.
Heaven will reward you, king of toads.”
She had made of her headdress a comfortable seat for him, well guarded against a sudden fall by an elaborate casque of wicker. She owned few beads, but those she had—two coral ones small as seeds and a larger one of turquoise that had belonged to her mother—she had worked into the decoration of the headdress to honor the king who would make his seat there.
She had tied her baskets to the silver chains that hung from the slashed leather of her shaman’s robes. Some small enough to suit a toad no bigger than her thumb, some to house a guest larger than her fist, they flew in many ribbons about her as she ran, leaving bruises where they bounced against her legs and hips and on her breasts. She didn’t let the discomfort slow her pace, however. Bolghai was waiting, and heaven after that.
“ You can’t go where she is heading, good Bekter. You must, I fear, make do with the errand that brought you.”
“I’m no more a spy than a traitor!” he protested, but this time he couldn’t meet her eyes. She would know, and how could he expect her to believe him after such a lie, even for the gur-khan?
“Of course you are,” she answered, “But you’re far too gallant to mean her any harm and even the gur-khan himself, I think, wishes only to protect her.”
The thought that Mergen might care what happened to the girl had never crossed his mind. Hadn’t crossed ’Tula’s either, or he wouldn’t have threatened her. His brother was impetuous, but Bekter wouldn’t believe him a traitor. Now that Toragana had mentioned it, however, the notion planted itself and took root. How did the story reshape itself if Eluneke was more than an inconvenience to be rid of?
“Who is she?” he asked, and didn’t say, Why would Mergen care? The possibilities terrified him. His father favored his blanket-sons and had seen that they rose in the court. Caution sank deep roots in the gur-khan’s heart, however. He had never given any public sign of his affection, nor had he shown by any word that he recognized them as his heirs.
Though Sechule had been his favorite, they always knew their father had entertained other lovers. How much more cautiously would he protect a daughter from the schemes and attentions of the court? In Toragana’s eyes he saw the reflection of his own thoughts, and the moment when he came to the conclusion she had meant him to reach. Once the notion seized him, he thought he recognized the gur-khan in the girl’s dark eyes.
“Is she my sister?” he asked, in this unsettled moment telling her more about his own parentage than a lowly shaman from an obscure clan ought to know.
She didn’t look surprised at his revelation about himself. Carefully as Mergen himself might do, she answered with another question. “Does the gur-khan say so?”
He suppressed a dismissive movement of his hand. “No more than he has acknowledged his sons.”
It would make sense of the gur-khan’s interest in her, though. A word to her clan chieftain would have taken the girl well out of the prince’s reach, but Mergen hadn’t given that command. Suddenly he wanted her close by. Available to the prince? Bekter didn’t think so. But an emissary was due to arrive that night, in search of a wife for the Tinglut-Khan. He gave a little shudder in sympathy for the girl who might soon find herself wed to the old man who stood in uneasy alliance with her father. Was that why she pursued the robes of a shaman?
“You’ve heard the stories they are telling in the camp about her?” he asked instead. He doubted the foreign khan’s interest in a poisonous toad for a wife. The thought that he might be related to one clenched a tight fist around his belly. If he could have shed his bloodline like a snake its skin, he’d have done so that very moment.
Toragana shook her head, not denying anything he’d said, but exasperated, he thought.
“Stories grow in the telling.” She pointed him to a cushion on the rugs, near the firebox and away from the low stool for clients. “Sit, before you fall,” she said, and filled a cup with tea.
He did as he was told but refused to be lulled with her answer. “We both know that tall tales grow from true seeds. Qutula saw her in the shape of her totem animal.”
Flowers floated in the tea, which needed neither butter nor honey to improve the flavor. Idly he wondered if she had drugged him or merely sweetened the drink. “Could she poison him with her skin?” he persisted in spite of the snort of laughter he startled out of her. The notion that so dangerous a creature might be kin made him queasy all over again. “Qutula says she poisoned him when he touched her.”
“And what was he doing touching her in the first place?” Settling the ruffled feathers of her robes, the shamaness re-phrased his request. “Two questions, you mean to ask: ‘can she poison with her skin?’ and ‘would she use such a taint to harm the prince?’ ”
Toragana curled her leg under her and sat among the carpets, separated from Bekter by a stray beam of dusty light that pierced the smoke hole in the roof. “Rest easy,” she assured him, “The truth, as it happens, is ‘no,’ to both. Eluneke is no danger to your brother or your prince. She is a girl who sometimes wears the form of a toad, but who is always, at heart, a girl.”
Her eyes were clear and gray as the Onga River on a winter afternoon. He would have said they hid nothing, but he knew better than that. A shaman was made of secrets, and she gave him a glimpse of them when she added over her tea, “Bolghai believes she may be the prince’s salvation.”
He’d never really thought the girl a physical threat. Tayy was a hero, after all. He’d made allies of dragons. And Eluneke seemed to care for him even if she was an unearthly creature with or without a poisonous skin. The prince could hold his own against a lovesick cousin, even one with shamanistic skills. But what was Bolghai afraid of?
“Salvation from what?”
Bolghai waited for her by an outcrop of rock that on a day with more sunshine glittered with mica. Today clouds had closed over Great Sun, turning the day almost to night. The rocks didn’t glitter, but they did move, seething with a strange life of their own. When she drew closer, she realized the stones remained still and sleeping. Over and around them, however, crawled an army of toads.
“The king of the toads has kept his promise,” Bolghai informed her, though she could tell that for herself now.
As if waiting for the introduction, the giant toad crawled out of the mass of his court and croaked a greeting at her.
“I don’t understand.” Eluneke cast a helpless glance at her guide. She had to find the tree at the center of the world and climb to heaven in human form, but she could only communicate with the toads when in the shape of her totem animal.
“That’s all right,” Bolghai assured her with a little pat on her shoulder. “He understands you.”
That would do. “Welcome, Your Majesty,” she said, and bowed low to King Toad.
“Croak!” he said in answer, and climbed into his seat atop her headdress.
Once he had taken his place on the throne she had prepared for him, the toad court swarmed to find their own places on her dress. She had made baskets for ten, but none seemed willing to stay behind. They climbed into the baskets in pairs and fours, and when there was no room in the baskets even with legs and arms sticking through the wicker, they climbed onto the silver chains that held the baskets, and the hide ribbons that made up her costume itself. Each toad weighed little by itself, but with hundreds of them clinging everywhere to her clothing, she found it difficult to lift a foot. Running was impossible.
“I can’t do it!” she cried, “They are too many!”
The toads just clung more tenaciously, croaking their messages of encouragement or deep in their own noisy cross-conversations. The king of the toads said something, but not, apparently an order for any of the toads to disembark.
“In this journey, you will need all the help you can get,” Bolghai encouraged her, though whether he somehow knew the language of toads and translated for their king or just added his own thoughts to the noise she didn’t know. But the toads weren’t leaving.
“All right,” she said, and with great effort took her first encumbered step. Right, then left, then right, against the rain that had started as the gentle tears of heaven but had now become the blinding downpour of a raging storm. She tried not to think about where she was going, or how she was to find the tree at the center of the world. Bolghai had led her away from the narrow band of forest that lined the Onga. On the flat plain of the grasslands, no natural tree grew for li after li of waving grass and tearful wildflowers.
The shaman seemed to read her mind, or perhaps the perplexity that pursed her lips and drew her brows together. “The great tree will find you,” he said. “All you have to do is run.”
Toragana gave an apologetic tilt of her shoulder. It was hard, now that she had the ear of the gur-khan’s own poet, to admit how little she really knew about the danger to the prince or the role Eluneke would play in saving him from the death that loomed ahead.
“In a vision Eluneke has seen a death’s head riding the prince’s horse. Now we’re racing against fate and time to save him from what she has seen.”
The breath went out of him in a whoosh. Toragana took the teacup from his hand and set it down, dabbing absently at the spill soaking into the carpets. She’d had time to get used to the notion, but her visitor sat with his eyes wide and his cheeks pale as he asked the question that burdened her own heart. “How?”
“The vision doesn’t say.” She took his hand in hers, willing him to listen and believe. “Let me tell you a story.”
Bekter could walk away if he chose; she had already resolved to release him if he pulled his hand away. But he waited, patient eyes troubled. His presence gave her hope as she began the tale he already knew.
“When last you visited my tent, I was telling the children the story of Alaghai the Beautiful and the king of the Cloud Country. But some among the storytellers and shamanic orders know that the truth doesn’t end with a wedding and a happily-ever-after.”
“I know,” he said, and bowed his head as if he bore some terrible burden. A wisp of hair had escaped its braid and Toragana reached out with her free hand and brushed it from his forehead with the backs of her fingers.
“When a wound festers, the evil spirits often veil their poisoned breath behind the illusion of ruddy health,” she said. “If we wish true healing to occur, we have to cast out the evil spirits before they kill what they inhabit.”
“I know that, too,” he admitted. “But this tale cuts too close to my bones. I would not revisit it if I could help it.”
She would have spared him if she could, but Eluneke’s visions gave her little choice. “Sometimes the spirits of a sickness reside in the body,” she reminded him. “And sometimes they reside in the soul of a people. To hide from them only gives them a dark place to thrive.”
“Open the wound, then,” he said, and turned his hand in hers, offering the smooth pale underside of his arm as a symbol of the cutting she would do to his soul.
He still attracted her, but now was not the time to kiss the flesh that rose so sweetly from his wrist. Toragana entwined their fingers for her own comfort as much as for his. Then she took up the tale.
“Alaghai had two brothers who saw the king as an invader,” she began softly, “even if his weapons of choice were gifts and flowers. And so they hatched a plot between them. Luring their sister to a tent hidden far outside the city of the khan, they made her their prisoner and set guards around her from among their loyal followers. Then each set fist to the face of his brother and returned to the ger-tent palace with bruises to support the story they told, of an attack by bandits who seized the princess. They didn’t know that Alaghai had stolen away for a night of passion with her lover, the king, or that he had sneaked under the tent cloths to be with her under the khan’s own roof.
“When he heard the story of his sons set upon and his daughter abducted, the khan sent the gathered warriors of the ulus to search for the imaginary bandits. That first King Llesho likewise sent his most trusted aides to find the princess.
“The brothers had hidden their sister well. Weeks passed, and the king found no trace of his bride. But time made no secret of the babe rounding Princess Alaghai’s belly. Her brothers soon discovered what she had done with the king. If allowed to live, the child might one day rise up like the son of Nogai’s Bear to avenge their treachery and take the dais for himself. The brothers resolved to hold the princess in secret until she delivered the child and then kill it before its first cry. Only when they had secured their own positions with the murder of the babe would they lead the king to his death in battle for his bride.
“To kill the king, the two brothers concocted a plot out of magic and sorrow, a wonderfully carved spear they presented as a gift to show their love for the promised husband of their sister. But the spear was cursed.”
“And so for generations the khan’s family has been cursed with the blood debt of that terrible day,” Bekter said. He shuddered, waging an inner struggle against some horrific memory of his own. Toragana had seen the like in men lately returned from the battlefield. The words that followed came as no surprise.
“We just fought a war to pay that debt,” Bekter said, though she little needed the reminder. “I have seen the cursed spear in the hand of that king’s descendant. Our own Prince Tayyichiut nearly paid the curse with his life. But where does the tale lead us? Back to two brothers who commit treachery against all they should hold most dear? And for what? An inheritance I have never desired? I would never hurt the prince! Never!”
Toragana held his hand more tightly when he tried to pull away. “I know you love the prince, Bekter. I know you would do nothing to hurt him. But someone does wish him harm. The prince will die, soon, if we don’t figure out who, and how.”
“Of course,” he said, but his voice had grown wary and his eyes closed her out of his anguished thoughts. He gave up his efforts to untangle his fingers, however. She gave them a reassuring squeeze which he didn’t return, but to which he didn’t object. “But why this story? Why these brothers?”
“You tell me, poet.” She didn’t mention what they had both seen, Qutula with his hand around Eluneke’s throat.
Outside the rain had begun in earnest.
Beneath Eluneke’s feet the grass had flattened, grown slippery with the rain that beat against her shoulders and rattled the baskets where the tenacious toads clung. Growing accustomed to their weight, she gathered speed until she was running again, across the open plain where no trees waited for her at all. Where is it? she asked the darkening day. How do you find the center of the world? Where is the tree that grows there?
From the shadows of the storm lightning flashed, scattering branches of red and purple light from cloud to cloud and turning the vast and empty plain white and colorless as Great Moon Lun. Eluneke stumbled, righted herself amid the croaking protests of her riders. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she muttered under her breath.
She flinched as the thunder rolled over her. Not all of the water running down her face had fallen from the sky. Her own tears felt hot and salty with her terror next to the cold of the rain. No sane person went out on the plains during a storm. Thunderbolts from heaven scattered death at random. The gods used lightning to snatch the unwary right out of the mortal world and left them dead when they were done. She didn’t want to end up like that, lying in a puddle somewhere with the sign of the tree burned into her breasts.
Oh. Of course. The riddle was simple, really. A tree where no tree grows. Lightning, its towering trunk reaching from earth to heaven, with great branches holding up a crown of clouds. She would climb the lightning. It was impossible, but being a shaman meant doing the impossible on a regular basis. The hair prickled on her arms and neck, rising in bumps of cold and foreboding, but she ran on.
High above her little tent, thunder rumbled across the sky. Toragana thought of her pupil and the task she must complete. She should be out there with the girl, guiding her as her own teacher had done. But Eluneke had Bolghai, and Bekter, too, had a journey to make. She would have made it easier for him, but knew they needed to drive all the evil spirits into the open before they could be banished.
“I know how the story ends.” Bekter stared at their clasped hands as if he couldn’t quite figure out how they had got that way. Or as if he were looking into a different time and place entirely. Toragana wondered if poets, like shaman, could travel in waking dreams. She held on more tightly, unwilling to let him go there alone. His face gave no sign that he noticed, but some of the tension went out of his shoulders as he picked up the telling for her.
“A servant, fearing for the life of the princess at the hands of her brothers, told the king of the Cloud Country where to find the tent where they had hidden her. With his armies out of the Golden City he came to her rescue just in time to see the two princes strangle his newborn child.
“When he raised the spear in battle, the cursed gift pierced him through with poison, murdering him. The brothers died in the war that followed. Their sister, it is said, wandered in madness for the rest of her life. A new khan was set upon the dais, and that is the line from which our own Mergen Gur-Khan is sprung. Thus, the debt of blood we owed the Cloud Country in the name of the Qubal people. A debt we owe no more, having won the Golden City in battle against the Uulgar, under the banner of the god-king Llesho himself. I know the story. But that is history, a debt we paid in the blood of our own Prince Tayyichiut. What can it have to do with Eluneke’s visions?”
He heaved a very great sigh, and Toragana wanted to fold him into her arms and keep him safe there, but he wouldn’t understand it if she did and—
His head dropped to her shoulder. Perhaps he would understand it after all.
“She cannot mean that I would hurt the prince. I would never—”
This time, it was her turn to say, “I know, I know.
“The old tales teach us hard truths, that sons will have their day and more than warriors suffer when princes go to war. But we are meant to learn from the old stories, not borrow their guilt. Bolghai and I are shaman, like the one who cursed the spear, but we would sooner die fighting such a curse than seal a man’s doom with one. You are a brother, like the brothers in the tale, but you are a good and loyal man who would no more betray your prince than you would betray yourself. Eluneke is a princess, and she loves the prince. But she is more powerful by far than that long-ago Alaghai and is forewarned by her visions. If any hand can stop it, ours can, brought together out of a story, perhaps, but destined to change its ending.”
“You’re right.” Bekter straightened his spine, rubbing his eyes as he moved away from the shamaness. The skin felt stretched over his cheekbones, as if he were waking from a dream. Outside, he heard the thunder roll across the sky. It would be a muddy hunt in the morning. He couldn’t avoid the obvious conclusions anymore.
“If Eluneke is the gur-khan’s daughter, a lot of things make more sense. He wants the girl stopped. It’s not just a romantic ballad; politically it’s a mess. There are khans and emperors and apadishas from Pontus to the capital city of the Shan Empire watching to see what match the gur-khan will make for his nephew.
“Eventually, he will have to make more children or acknowledge some among those he’s scattered in the camps of the ulus to soothe the nervous posturing of the losers in that contest for the heir’s bed.” With a bitter laugh he gestured at his own person. “A fat musician will be hard to shift. A pretty girl a lot easier, but not if she’s a shaman.”
“Not so difficult as that.” She smiled in spite of the seriousness of their conversation. “If the fat musician has eyes as deep as the night sky and a smile soft as a spring day.” She untangled their hands, trailing her nails across the pads of his fingertips. “And a touch that wrings music from a woman’s soul.”
His music was adequate at best, though he’d never tried a tune upon a woman. In Toragana, though, he was beginning to find harmonies he didn’t know existed between men and women. But he still had the problem of Eluneke and the prince, and the tragedy of a tale caught up in a vision.
“Even a khan must sometimes choose between the thing he wishes and the thing he must have,” the shamaness reminded him, reading the questions in his eyes. “If he wishes a daughter to trade for peace, he will lose an heir and that peace as well. That’s the lesson for us in the story.”
“You think Qutula will kill the prince.”
“Unless we stop him, someone is going to kill Prince Tayyichiut. But if we turn the stampeding horses at the wagons we don’t have to repair the tents. At the least Qutula has threatened Eluneke, who may be the only chance we have to save the prince.”
That was an easy enough riddle to solve. If they could find the assassin before he struck, they could fight him on their own terms with a much greater hope of success. He couldn’t believe Qutula would plot murder—his brother loved the prince as much as he did—but it gave them a place to start.
He had forgotten something he had planned to tell her. But the rain beat on the tent cloths and the angry bellow of the thunder roared overhead, while inside the little tent he was warm and dry. Toragana looked at him with such heat in her eyes that she could only mean one thing by it. And, he discovered, he rather liked the thought of an older woman under his blankets after all.
“Stay until the storm passes.” She reached for his hand, a gesture that had grown as familiar as his matching one, to twine his fingers with hers. She crossed the step between them, so close now that he could smell the herbs in her hair and the leather of her shaman’s robes, and the warm and musky woman smell.
The raven watched him disapprovingly from atop her shaman’s headdress, but not for long. Releasing his hand she lifted the nest from her head and set it away from the firebox. Her robes followed, carefully hung on a peg. Then she stood in nothing but her shift, a smile lighting her eyes. “It’s cold outside, in the rain,” she said. “Come, warm my bed a while.”
The furs looked inviting, and by the heated glow of the firebox, Toragana’s skin seemed flushed with youthful vitality. Not at all like—oh. The woman who had come to him in his dreams. He’d meant to tell her, but this didn’t seem the time. “I’d like that very much,” he said, and let her untie the strings of his clothes.