Chapter Forty-one

 

THE GIFTS OF THE GODS. Among the baskets and other decorations of her shaman’s robes, Qutula hadn’t noticed or recognized the value of the little pouch where Eluneke had stored the gifts from the daughters of the sky gods. Commanded to dance, she drew out the drum and horse-head drumstick. As she danced, she remembered. The daughter of the drum had taught her all the languages of the animals, but more importantly, Eluneke had learned from the daughter of the spear the skill of casting out demons. Like most of the skills of a shaman, they only worked on other people, so they hadn’t helped her much with her own demon. Tayy was dead, something altogether different, but she hoped that while she tried to rescue him the incantations would protect them from the demons and hungry spirits that roamed in search of fresh souls.

With renewed confidence, she quickened the hopping steps of her totem dance while, clinging from her robes, the harem of the king of the toads urged her on. Once she had struggled to find her totem shape; now she set all her skill and concentration to finding the underworld in human form. It would have been easier as a toad, but Tayy had turned away from her monstrous face. She could not bear such a rejection again. To escape the world of the dead, he must follow her freely, so she danced as the girl he loved. When the urge to drop to her haunches and hop about on green-and-brown legs came over her, she fixed her mind on her purpose and the prince and set human feet on the path of the drum until, with one step, her foot passed through grass and earth like they were mist. With the next step she sank into the smothering darkness.

Nervously, Eluneke took a breath. Musty and damp though it was, she was relieved to find air, not earth in her throat. All around her was black as the bottom of a lake. With a hand held out in front of her, she trod as carefully as if through water, but met no resistance. She could see well enough if she didn’t think too much about the contradiction of it: a landscape of mountains pointed their roots at the sky, their whitecapped tops hanging precariously over her head.

Above her, a river like a mirror flowed through a roof of silver grass. Reflected in the water she saw the world of trees, and leaves blowing in breezes that stirred the land of the living. She thought she must be walking on the clouds, or their reflection, that must take the place of solid ground here in the underworld. Afraid of what she would see if she glanced down, however, Eluneke looked straight ahead.

Shapes without limbs or faces moved out of the darkness and passed without seeming to notice her. The harem of toads shifted uneasily in their baskets but, not surprisingly, were unwilling to leave her for their own explorations. Then something brushed against her leg.

“Ah!” she let out a little yelp, quickly suppressed before she called the attention of those gliding shapes down on her.

A nose butted against her hip while, on her other side, a second of the spirit creatures nudged its soft, triangular head under her hand. Dogs, she realized, and looked down at them to confirm her guess. Tayy’s dogs; the red whined anxiously and tugged at her sleeve, pulling Eluneke along.

“I’m coming,” she promised. The dogs seemed to glow with their own unearthly light in the darkness and it struck her that they had never behaved quite the way mindless beasts ought.

Who are you? She didn’t say the words aloud, but it seemed that in this realm one had only to shape the thought to be understood. The black dog looked up at her with his tongue hanging from the side of his mouth, his eyes wide and wet with dismay. Then he shook himself and his limbs began to lengthen and straighten. He’d been a large dog, but Chimbai-Khan had been a big man, and that was who sat at her feet. Or so Eluneke guessed, since her clans had stood too low in the ranks of the ulus for her to have seen his face when he had lived. But he wasn’t Mergen, and she didn’t know who else would wear such elegant silk robes or the silver helmet of the khan.

Even with a pyre and ceremonies performed with utmost care, spirits sometimes found themselves tied to the earth through some unfinished task or a bond in the mortal world they couldn’t quite let go of. For the spirit of the khan, that bond was to his son. He dropped his head into his hands and wept with dampening sorrow.

“Come, come, we don’t have time for indulging our grief!” A woman stood at Eluneke’s side. There could be no doubt of her identity either.

“My lady khaness,” Eluneke acknowledged the dignity of the lady with a deep bow. “Your son, Prince Tayyichiut, looks very much like you,” she offered as an explanation for her greeting. Then, “Did,” she amended with dismay, her own eyes dangerously near to tears.

“Tayy was always more handsome as a boy than I ever was as a woman,” the khaness waved away the compliment. “But we have little time for pleasantries. My son’s life hangs in the balance.”

Eluneke was not in the habit of conversing with the spirits of the ancestors; she was still an apprentice shamaness and this was her first visit to the underworld and she had expected humbler souls to teach her. She didn’t know the niceties of breaking bad news to such exalted spirits, but couldn’t go on while the lady suffered such a misapprehension. “I’m sorry, my lady, but your son is dead. Qutula has imprisoned him, body and soul, in the cold earth.”

“And you have come to save him. Of course. Did you bring your horse?”

Eluneke just looked confused at that. The lady examined her with a critical eye and took the horse-head drumstick that dangled forgotten from her hand. When the spirit touched it, the stick transformed itself, growing four legs and stretching its neck with a shake to settle its mane.

Chimbai-Khan had risen from his tears and by some magic of the underworld held the reins of two horses with eyes of fire, one black and one roan. “He can’t have gotten far,” he agreed with the Lady Temulun, his khaness. “But finding him will prove the simpler part of the task.”

They would have to fight the hungry spirits, Eluneke thought; already the faceless wraiths of forgotten ancestors were tugging at her clothes and tangling clawed fingers in her hair. Not wanting to hear the answer if it proved dire, she nevertheless had to ask, “Is Mergen here with you?”

Chimbai shook his head, but a new sorrow marked his bold face. “I chose wrongly in the ordering of my brother,” he admitted, and sighed, a sound more terrible when uttered by a spirit. “Only regrets bound him to the mortal realm, and those are quickly severed when the proper rites are performed. He has followed the path to the ancestors. In his next life, I hope he enjoys a greater peace of spirit than I ever left to him in this.”

Eluneke nodded, glad that her father had escaped the traps that might have bound him in torment as a hungry spirit. She worried a little on that score for the khan and his khaness, but they had neither the red and hungry eyes of the lost nor the rapacious apetite of those who would devour the living. She had to find Tayy before that could happen to him.

Reading her mind again, it seemed, Chimbai mounted his fire-eyed black steed. His lady took her place in the saddle of the roan and Eluneke climbed onto the back of her own mount, smoky pale as bone. With a cry, they were off, riding across a landscape of darkness with the silver grass over their heads bending in their passing, as if from the impact of galloping hooves.

The noise was overpowering. Battle cries clashed with the screams of the wounded and the frenzied calls of the horses caught in their own battle madness. Bekter hated it, just as he hated the smell of blood and fear that sharpened the sweat of man and beast. Once he’d led Jochi’s army past the demon’s spell, however, he’d had no choice but to wrap a silver band around his arm and join the general’s horde in battle.

He raised his sword over his head and brought it down in a slashing blow that took the arm off a man he vaguely recognized as an archery trainer in Chimbai-Khan’s army. In the midst of the chaos of battle, they’d stopped and stared at each other for a moment. Then the archer raised his bow and Bekter knew the silver band around his arm for a trick. Jochi had ordered his army to wear just such a band to identify them as the khan’s own.

Qutula had dressed his army with a band of green the color of the tattoo he wore on his breast: the emerald green bamboo snake that had caused the Qubal so much pain. By wearing silver, however, the archer had penetrated deep into Jochi’s horde before Bekter stopped him. He wouldn’t have had a chance against his older, more battle-hardened teacher, except that the soldier hesitated to attack the brother of his own general.

Bekter had no such qualms, though he tried his best to deliver a wounding rather than a fatal blow. With an involuntary grunt of shock, the old soldier went very pale and fell in a swoon from his horse. There was no way to save him. The battle swirled around them, horses crossing the ground where the wounded archer had fallen. When the armies rode on, his old teacher lay beaten into the soft ground, his bones shattered by the many hooves that had passed over him.

The sight of such terrible death turned his stomach, but Bekter refused to turn away. I did this, he thought. A man I once knew is dead because of me. This wasn’t his first battle, only his first against warriors he had grown up with, who had sworn their loyalty to his brother. In despair he would have ridden from the battlefield. How could he preserve his honor when all choices led to betrayal? Did he fight Qutula or commit treason against his khan?

Neither Chimbai nor Mergen had chosen Qutula to succeed them, however. It pained him to set his arm against his brother, but he couldn’t let Qutula tear apart the ulus to seize for himself a position to which he had been neither anointed nor elected. He couldn’t support his brother, but he hoped they might end this war with as little damage on each side as possible. And, he decided, he’d already done his share.

So Bekter forged ahead through the chaos of battle. Swinging his sword wildly to either side, he strove to keep his new enemies at arm’s length while striking none of them. His opponents knew him and gave way as he came on, but they harried him like herders, cutting him out of the herd and giving him their own direction to run.

Advancing without resistance, Bekter left his own army behind before he realized what had happened. Suddenly, he found himself surrounded by Qutula’s green armbands. Qutula himself came forward, a spear held lightly in his hand. The Lady Chaiujin, openly flaunting her influence over him, rode at his side.

“My brother.” Qutula’s smile, more serpentlike than his lady’s, sent a chill down Bekter’s spine. “I wondered when you would come to me.”

“I didn’t.” There seemed no point in glancing behind him. Qutula’s followers had moved them far out of the path of the fighting. Jochi’s troops couldn’t help him now; he had nothing to do but to brazen out this confrontation. Perhaps Qutula would let him go back to his own side. Probably not, but as a prisoner, he’d be in a better position to help the prince if needed. Or so Bekter hoped. The light in Qutula’s eye didn’t encourage defiance of his will, however. He signaled for his followers to move away, out of hearing, though not out of range of their bows. The lady stayed at his side, summing up Bekter with a steady gaze that said he’d make a tasty supper.

“I seem to have strayed from my position,” Bekter admitted with a self-deprecating bow over his pommel. “If you will just point me in the direction of the battle . . .”

“I’m doing this for both of us,” Qutula argued, clearly impatient to be done with his brother. “We were the khan’s own sons; we deserve the spoils of his death.”

“He gave us what he wished us to have. His death didn’t change that.”

“We would have had more, if Sechule hadn’t murdered him. We can still have more. You’ll rule over the South in Yesugei’s place, and put your hand under no foot but mine when I am gur-khan over the Qubal, as our father would have wished.”

Sechule had murdered their father? The shock rocked him in his saddle. He’d heard rumors about Qutula, but he’d dismissed even those. The court had lately buzzed with gossip about Sechule’s return to Mergen’s bed. He thought they’d come to some agreement. Now he didn’t know what to think.

“An accident, the wrong herb . . .” He denied the accusation, refused to believe she could do something like that out of malice. She was his mother.

“Don’t be a fool. He made her angry, and so she killed him. So we fight for what should have been ours by right of birth.” Qutula was hiding something from him, but still, if even part of what he said was true, it convinced him more than ever that Qutula was wrong.

“I won’t fight with you.” Dropping his sword, he moved his hands away from his sides to show he didn’t mean to fight. “I am your prisoner,”

“Pick. It. Up.” Qutula raised his spear.

They might have been strangers for all the recognition in Qutula’s stern countenance. He meant them to fight, and Bekter knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he couldn’t kill his brother. Not that his resistance to fratricide mattered to the outcome. Against Qutula in a killing rage he would have no chance. And Qutula was very, very angry.

“You’re my brother,” Bekter reminded him.

“No longer.” Qutula’s mare shied, and he brought her savagely under control, never taking his narrowed eyes from his brother. “You’ll fight, or you’ll die a coward.”

Bekter let his breath out in a sigh he tried to muffle between his teeth. Qutula meant what he said, but still he had to try. “If you can murder your own brother, an unarmed prisoner taken in honorable combat, then you will just have to do it. Because I won’t fight you.”

“Pick. It. Up.”

A call to honor wasn’t working. Qutula was going to kill him, and Bekter decided that he couldn’t watch him do it. Better to turn away with the memory of happier times marshaled about him to comfort his last moments.

“I’m sorry,” he said, thinking of all the things he regretted, not least that he hadn’t paid more attention to his brother’s complaints before they came to murder. Not even Bolghai could turn back time, however. So he bowed to the false Lady Chaiujin and to his brother. Then, trembling with fear, he turned his horse and started back the way he’d come.

“Then join our mother among the ancestors.”

“Sechule—” Gods and spirits, his own mother. Qutula was mad. He had to be stopped.

The spear, when it struck, felt like like a punch between his shoulder blades. Bekter didn’t realize, at first, that he was injured. When he tried to breathe, however, his ribs refused to rise. He could draw not even a sip of air.

“Oh!” he said, surprised by the sudden pain that convulsed his hands on his reins.

Mother. His thoughts seemed to separate themselves from his body, which grew heavier as his head grew lighter, until he slipped from his horse. He landed with his face in the mud. The wound in his back suddenly caught fire, or so it felt. No images of his brother came to him now. If Sechule were dead as Qutula claimed, perhaps she would come for him. But in his mind’s eye Bekter saw the soldier he had wounded, trampled and broken and dead in the splinters of his own bones. They hadn’t lied about paybacks being a bitch.

“Leave him to the crows,” he heard Qutula say from the vast distance of his saddle.

Bekter heard the horses moving away, but no hoof touched him. Soon enough the battle would come this way, and then it wouldn’t matter. Though he waited, Sechule did not appear to guide him to his ancestors. Bekter closed his eyes and let the darkness hold back the pain for a little while longer.

 

 

 

“There’sfighting to the north, two armies engaged but no tents that I could see.”

The scout bowed low and Daritai accepted his report with a nod before turning to the next. He had pitched his tents the other side of a low rise in the grasslands so that the innocent camp followers going about their daily work in the Qubal tent city would not see a foreign horde threatening. They were in easy range of any spies that Mergen might choose to send. He’d already had news that some argument had split the Qubal, however, and his army was mounted and ready to ride at his command.

“And the gur-khan?” he asked the man who had been sent to spy out Mergen-Gur-Khan’s tent city. Around him his captains listened with sharp-eyed attention, adding up the odds for their success in the quarrels of their neighbors.

“Mergen Gur-Khan is dead,” the scout reported. “His blanket-son wages war against the prince, Mergen’s heir, leaving the tent city abandoned except for women and children and those too old to fight. General Jochi has left a mere handful of the Qubal horde to guard their tents.”

“There are rumors,” the first scout added to his report, “that the heir is also dead and General Jochi fights only to hold onto the ulus until Yesugei-Khan comes.”

The news didn’t surprise him. Daritai had seen the discontent simmering in the eyes of the young Captain Qutula. A Durluken youth had murdered General Jochi’s son, more reason for him to go to war against those who now moved openly to seize the ulus. But Yesugei-Khan had his own affairs to consider and was, anyway, far to the south.

“We’ll leave the general to fight over the broken remains of Mergen’s horde,” Daritai decided, “and take this city while his back is turned. Whoever survives to claim it will be weakened from battle when he faces our army, many times the size of his own which will be divided and suffering the absence of their injured and their dead.”

“We ride?” his captain asked

“When Great Sun touches the mountains,” Daritai agreed. They would fall on the Qubal like a great darkness out of the sunset. The shadows cast before them, stretched and weird as they passed over tents and across the avenues, would strike terror into the hearts of the city before ever a sword was drawn. With luck, he could take her with terror alone and no blood spilt on either side.

His captains bowed and began to file out of the command tent, to carry his orders to their lieutenants. They understood his purpose and would make his wishes clear: no plunder, no rape, no savagery. The Qubal would surrender to him out of fear. If he hoped to make any stand at all against his father, however, they must come to see him as their deliverer, freeing them from the chaos their leaders had brought on them.

He was alone with his adjutants and his messengers when the last of his scouts arrived, sweating and breathless from a hard ride. “Speak, and do it quickly,” he told the man, who put his hands to his thighs to brace his low bow. “We ride in an hour.”

“A messenger reached General Yesugei-Khan before I could intercept him.” The man dropped to his knees before his prince, knocking his head upon the carpets in abject apology for his failure. “General Yesugei has now left his own camp behind and flies to the aid of the Qubal.”

An adjutant stepped forward, anticipating a change in the orders given to his captains, but Daritai waved him away. “A problem we must soon consider, but not today. Unless Yesugei-Khan follows more closely than I had believed?”

“He’s closer than I expected to find him,” the scout conceded, “But he won’t reach the tent city for another day at least.”

“A tight race,” Daritai mused, more to himself than to his spy. “But with the help of our benevolent ancestors, we can still win it.

“Catch what rest you can, for we ride as planned,” he told the spy and strode from the tent to find his mount. They were going to pay a call on a lady. He hoped, for Tumbinai’s sake and that of his family in hiding, that he hadn’t judged wrong on this.

 

 

 

“My child!” The heartbroken cry of the spirit-khaness drew Eluneke to her side. There she found the prince lying with his back to the grassy ceiling and his face staring down at his rescuers in horror. Around him howled the hungry spirits, limbless and faceless except for their small red eyes and huge, sharp-toothed mouths that slavered as they shrieked. Already they had fallen on him, tearing great chunks of flesh out of his dead body as they devoured his living spirit.

“Stop!” Chimbai drew his sword, slashing about him at the hungry spirits, but the vaporous blade passed uselessly through bloodless bone.

“Take this!” Eluneke leaped from her mount and reached into the pouch that she had brought back from heaven.

“Don’t let go of the reins!” King Toad’s wife reminded her. Eluneke clasped the reins tightly in one hand, and drew out the spear that the sky god’s daughter had given her with the other. Along its shaft ran a dragon of silver and one of gold. The magic of the heavenly warrior goddess pulsed in her fingertips and glowed with a golden light through the spirit stuff of the khan when she handed it to him.

Chimbai took the balance of the weapon in one large hand and grinned at her. Then he turned on the spirits devouring his son. This time, when the spear touched them, the hungry spirits screamed as if heaven itself burned their fleshless souls.

Eluneke moaned a shaman’s chant that the sky god’s daughters had taught her. It was supposed to banish the spirits that brought disease to the sick and, while it didn’t send the hungry spirits flying, it did make them more wary of her. When her pale horse became again the smooth carved shaft of her horse-head drumstick, she flung herself into the fray with a crashing blow, and another.

Smoke rose in curls where the horse-head drumstick struck the hungry spirits. They scattered, screaming in rage, only to meet the sky god’s daughter’s spear in the hands of the prince’s father. The love of the ancestor spirit added its own pulsing silver glow to the weapon, entwining with the heavenly powers so that the dragons etched in silver and gold on its shaft seemed like living creatures, writhing in their own battle against the hungry spirits. Where the spear touched a devourer, rips appeared, shredding soul-stuff until it could no longer hold itself together, and shrieking, disappeared into oblivion.

Eluneke paused to chant a prayer for the lost ones as they vanished, that they might find healing. She feared that they had gone too far down the path of destruction, however, and were lost to the wheel of life forever.

“Don’t stop! You’re winning!” croaked the voices from their baskets on her robes. These souls were lost already, but she still had a chance to save Prince Tayy. Urged on by King Toad’s harem, Eluneke swung her stick about her, raising it again and again to drive off the ravening mouths. At last, when she doubted she could lift her arm for one more blow, the few who had escaped Chimbai-Khan’s deadly spear turned and fled, cursing all living things.

“There,” she said, and blew at a strand of hair that had escaped her headdress and fallen across her nose.

“They’ll be back, bringing more of their kind to fight us,” the khaness warned her. “But we’re safe for now.”

Only then did Eluneke notice the gouge chewed out of the lady’s side, and the vapors of her soul leaking like a mist from the wound.

Chimbai-Khan joined them then. A part of his leg was missing and like his wife’s injury, leaked soul-stuff like smoke from the wound. His hand, where it held the spear, had burned to char, and like the spirits he had attacked with it, his arm seemed to have shredded to tenuous threads. “Thank you,” he said, though she could see the pain of his wounds in his eyes.

“I’m sorry!” Eluneke reached for the spear in horror. “I didn’t realize.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he chided her as she took the weapon and put it back into the little pouch. “ I’m truly grateful.”

“But your wounds—”

“Are nothing,” he said, “In life, I would have given body and soul to save my son. In death, I would pay no less to preserve his spirit.”

“Leave us behind if you must,” the khaness ruled, “but free our son.” In perfect agreement on that point the khan and his khaness leaned against each other, to ease their spectral hurts.

“Where am I?” Prince Tayyichiut asked. His brows drawn tight in a confused frown, he looked to Eluneke for answers that she felt ill-equiped to give him.

“Do you remember rescuing me?” she countered. It felt odd looking up at him where he lay on the grass overhead, but she was relieved to see that the hungry spirits had had little time to do serious damage to his body. If she could get him out of here, at least he’d still have all his parts.

“I fell into Qutula’s trap,” he corrected her interpretation of events.

“You fought Qutula’s demon-servant with all the courage I could hope for in a husband,” she reminded him in turn. “No mortal could have won that battle.”

“A serpent,” he rememberd. “Did it—” Then he saw the khaness.

“Mother?”

“My son.” The two fell into each other’s arms, enfolded in the love of mother and child. Eluneke found herself torn between sorrow that she could not embrace her own mother one last time and relief that the illness hadn’t turned her mother into one of the hungry spirits. Toragana was a good shamaness. Eluneke had been certain of it before, but she felt it even more so now, when her own travels in the underworld were setting all her assumptions on their heads.

Sort of like the people. Tayy was still clinging to the roof of the underworld. His mother and father, clutching him in their desperate embrace, moved as spirits within it. The resultant confusion of her senses made Eluneke slightly queasy in spite of her full heart.

Though she hated to be the one to say it, they were running out of time for farewells. “We have to go,” she said. The prince had already sustained attacks in both the mortal realm and the underworld. The one left his body moldering in the ground, the other had nearly devoured his spirit. If she were to rescue him from his dire fate, she must do so quickly, while there remained enough of either to make him whole.

Chimbai-Khan clung more tightly to his son. When he turned to face her, Eluneke saw that his features were growing less distinct, all except for his teeth. Desire created hungry spirits, she realized. And Chimbai had within his reach the thing he most desired in all the worlds, his tragic loss restored to him. His son. The underworld had begun to fade the memory of his purpose, to return the prince to the living world. He stood in danger of devouring the very thing he loved.

But the khaness put a gentle hand on his ravaged sleeve and when he looked at her, she shook her head sadly, but very sure.

“You have to let him go,” she said. “He doesn’t belong here. If you try to keep him, you can only destroy us all.”

“He is my son.”

“You want grandchildren, don’t you?” the Lady Temulun asked him wisely. “And what about your daughter? Who will protect her?”

“You’re right, of course.” Chimbai hid his face, but slowly he let go of his son and took a drifting step back. “Take care of my children,” he begged Eluneke.

“I’ll try,” she answered him.

Tayy looked confused, as if awaking from a long sleep. He hadn’t been dead for very long, but Eluneke well knew that time moved differently in the underworld. She took his hand to lead him back to the mortal realm. Then she realized that she didn’t know the way.

 

 

 

They had made no secret of their coming, so it didn’t surprise Prince Daritai to find the grand avenue leading to the ger-tent palace deserted. The women and children would be hidden away, and the old men who attended the Lady Bortu would have gathered at the palace. As for the few hundreds who guarded her—ah, there they were. Daritai raised a hand to halt the war party that had followed him to the parade ground in front of the palace. There the Lady Bortu’s honor guard awaited in battle formation, some with mustaches too grizzled, and some with no mustaches at all. None of the men left behind to defend the tent city were of a fighting age, he saw.

Daritai had brought only a small portion of his force with him into the city. For the moment, they were evenly matched. The lady khaness must know that his ten thousand now circled the city, however, and were making their way to the center from all sides even as the Tinglut prince rode toward her. So he wasn’t surprised to find her mounted on a caparisoned horse at the head of her guardsmen. Her towering silver headdress rattled with beads and precious ornaments as she inclined her head in a precise nod to acknowledge him.

“My lady khaness.” Daritai crossed his hands over his pommel to show he had drawn no weapon and bowed a greeting in return from his saddle. “Your city is taken. I mean you no harm nor any insult, and will shed no Qubal blood if I can help it. But your guardsmen are outnumbered, my ten thousand to this small force. I would not have them throw away their lives in a vain attempt at glory.”

“They needn’t kill ten thousand,” she pointed out. “One would do.”

She meant him, of course, the leader of that army, but she was much too wise in statecraft to believe her own words. “You would be doing my father a favor,” he pointed out, “ridding him of a troublesome son, and you would find my half brother, Prince Hulegu, a more exacting taskmaster.”

“We’ve lately had one of those ourselves,” she groused sourly. He figured she meant Qutula and agreed with her assessment. Hulegu was very different from Mergen’s blanket-son, being his father’s heir and also less than forthcoming in battle. That Qutula might share Hulegu’s coldly ruthless streak of vicious self-interest, however, he had no doubt. He said nothing of this, but nudged his horse forward and rode past the lady, ignoring the angry rumbling of her guardsmen. He understood their frustration, but prayed no one acted on their emotions. He didn’t want to kill an old man or a child today for throwing a rock at his head. He didn’t want a massacre if they threw a spear instead.

He made it through the lady’s defenses unmolested by the glaring old men, however. A young one with more courage than sense pulled a knife on him, but a sharp cuff against the boy’s head sent him reeling from his horse. The distraction saw him safely to the door of Mergen’s ger-tent palace.

There were ritual insults to be observed when conquering a neighbor, and defiling the home of the deposed khan was one of them. So he ducked his head low and rode his horse inside. Just a handful of his men followed.

He did it well, sustaining his dignity when his horse released a steaming pile on the carpets. As he rode past the firebox, he took stock of the painted chests with all their treasures as he remembered them. They were his now, or would be if he could just outwit old Tinglut-Khan. When he neared the dais, however, his resolution failed him.

Densly packed around the center of the dais, the old and infirm among the Qubal nobles sat in all their finery. He counted perhaps forty or more, not one of whom carried a weapon more imposing than a small dagger. And yet, he knew, they would sit where they were and die without raising a hand before they would move a single step. At their center was the Princess Orda, bundled in a blanket with the silks of her little coats peeping through where it had slipped.

She started to smile at him, then cast a fearful glance at the nobles who protected her on the dais. A tiny fist seemed to have got hold of Daritai’s throat when he thought that he had frightened her. He had a daughter and shuddered to think of his own tents seized, his own family thrown into despair by a ruthless enemy. May the spirits preserve them, he’d gotten them out safely, he thought, all but Tumbinai.

Then the little princess put a warning finger to the side of her mouth. “You’re not supposed to ride your horse inside,” she whispered, loud enough for all the nobles to hear. “You’ll get in trouble.” Her little face took on a look of horror that would have been droll if he hadn’t been the cause.

Behind him he heard the rustle of silks and realized that her formidable grandmother had caused that sudden fright. For his sake, not her own. Ritual insults were fine and well in the abstract, he decided, but they made him feel foolish in practice.

“Then I suppose I should have these nice men take her outside for me, shouldn’t I?” He dismounted and gave the reins to a warrior who had the good sense to suppress his grin on the way out.

“Now the Lady Bortu won’t be mad at me.”

The snort behind him told him otherwise, but the little girl relaxed at once. The next step would be trickier. He needed to take possession of the princess. That meant making his way past the old retainers who surrounded her. But first he had to overcome his own fatherly misgivings about hurting the people who protected her. And there was the whole not wanting to scare her thing.

He hadn’t counted on the princess herself, who stood up in her little boots with their upturned toes and picked her way carefully through the rows of old nobles to stand in front of him. With her solemn, trusting eyes fixed on his, she lifted her arms to be picked up. Since that was exactly what he had wanted, he obliged.

He had not exactly feared for his life until now. Something in the very air of the ger-tent palace shifted when he lifted the princess into his arms, however. Rumor said the old khaness had strange powers of her own. His back was feeling very exposed.

“Come,” he said, and invited the Lady Bortu with a glance he hoped conveyed casual command and not the vague unease he was feeling. “We can talk more comfortably on the dais.”

Whatever she saw in his face, she followed him and settled herself on the right side of the dais. She didn’t try to take the little girl away from him, but seemed to challenge his honor on that score with eyes too dark for comfort. It didn’t matter. He set the Princess Orda down beside him and made a little den out of his arm for her to cuddle in as his own daughter liked to do. And like his own daughter, the princess tucked herself among the folds of his sleeve and peeked out at him with a hopeful pout.

“Is Tumbi here?” she asked.

He closed his eyes, unable to speak for the moment. The old woman was watching, cataloging his weaknesses, but the sudden sharp pain was too new for any practice at hiding it. “Not this time, my sweet,” he told her. Not ever, he thought, unless he turned the Princess Orda over to his father the Tinglut-Khan. The problem was, he didn’t think he could do it.

Lady Bortu saw more than he wished her to see, and perhaps understood more than he did himself about what he would and would not do and what that line might cost him. At any rate she was giving him a look he hadn’t seen much in his life. Sympathy.

“Come here now, child,” she called the princess to her side with brusque disapproval. “Don’t tire our guest with your questions.”

Princess Orda crawled out of her nest beneath his arm and curled up next to her grandmother, who smoothed her coats with grumbling sounds of normalcy. “So tell me about this Tumbi,” she told the little girl, with a warning glare at Daritai to keep his teeth shut around his objections. “Do you like him very much?”

“He’s nice,” the princess assured her grandmother. “And when I grow up, I’m going to marry him.”

“Oh, are you now, girl? And don’t you think your khan may have something to say about that?”

“Tumbi could steal me away, like in the story of Quchar and Nomulun,” she said, defiant in her determination.

“Who is telling you such tales?” The old khaness chided her. “Children shouldn’t listen to such stories, much less make plans for acting them out when they are bigger!” She laughed to take the bite out of her scolding, however. It seemed to Daritai that Lady Bortu didn’t object to the idea but tested the feelings of the little girl. Though she had seen only seven summers, the royal family of the Qubal was well known for sprouting witches on their family tree.

Daritai had seen the value of the match the first time the idea had come to him, over a Qubal murder. Unfortunately, his plans depended on keeping both of the children alive, which didn’t seem all that likely at present.

“Well, we’ll see what we can do, then.” The Lady Bortu gave the princess a hug. “We can’t have you running away like Quchar and Nomulun.” With the sweet dark head tucked under her chin, she looked at Daritai, measuring up all that he was thinking. Lines of concern etched the corners of her eyes, but she gave him a little nod, accepting the bond forged by two children that would unite them as more than conqueror and conquered. He just had to get Tumbinai out of Tinglut’s clutches alive.

“But first,” the lady continued, and this time she spoke to Prince Daritai, though still in tones that wouldn’t frighten the child. “We must stop my foolish grandson, who is causing such a fuss.”

“Prince Tayy?” the little girl asked.

“No, my dear. The other one.” The old grandmother patted the child reasuringly, but tears gathered in her eyes.

Daritai knew that all he had surmised and the worst that his spies had gathered was true. “Let me help you,” he said. “For Tumbinai’s sake.”

 

 

 

The crows had started to gather. Sprawled in the rusty mud awash in his own blood, Bekter had accepted his approaching death. Already his mind and spirit withdrew from the terrible pain that racked his flesh. He would have liked to see Toragana one last time, though, to tell her that he’d changed his mind about older women. One of them, at least. He would miss her.

A bird settled too close to his face and he flinched away, closing his eyes tightly against the threat of its sharp beak. He was getting used to the agony in his back, but the thought of ending his life in blindness and rending pain as the creature ripped the eyes out of his living head was more than he could bear. Please, he tried to say, though nothing escaped his lips but a scarlet froth of blood. Not my eyes.

He didn’t know whose mercy he would have begged, but a gentle hand wiped the blood from his mouth and fluttered softly to his cheek.

“I know, my love. You’re safe now. Be still.”