Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (25 page)

Jin shook his head, a faint smile lighting his long face for a moment. “More than willing, Lord Alyea, if that’s what you want,” he remarked. “But no. That’s not why I’m here.”

Alyea glanced around helplessly. The small room offered no chair this time, just a bed, washbasin, and chamberpot. Her gaze fell on her pack, which had been under the bed when she left and now sat openly by the foot. She turned a hard stare on Jin.

He shrugged and said, without apology, “I didn’t take anything, Lord Alyea.”

“You’ve taken liberties,” she said sharply. “Rather a lot, so far. I suggest you talk quickly,
s’e
Jin, and be damn convincing.”

He snorted, unworried. “For all that you’re a desert lord now,” he said, “you don’t have enough real status to boss even servants around past the Horn. You have no alliances yet, Lord Alyea.”

“Scratha,” she pointed out.

“That doesn’t mean what it used to,” Jin said. He moved over, making room for her to sit. “And only one alliance isn’t worth much, in the south.”

She sat, drawing her own legs up into a southern-style sit, glad she’d chosen to wear pants rather than a dress to dinner. “And you’re here to offer me an alliance?”

“Maybe,” he said, tilting his head to one side. “What do you have to offer?”

“You’re the one came to my room in the middle of the night,” she said, indignant. “I think I’m the one ought to be asking that!”

He shook his head. “You’re still thinking in northern terms,” he said reprovingly. “I’m doing a favor by showing interest, Lord Alyea.”

“A favor to who?” she cut in, and won a smile from him at last.

“Now you’re thinking in southern terms,” he said. “Good. But I won’t answer that question just now, because you haven’t given me anything yet. What can Peysimun Family offer towards an alliance?”

She studied his amiable expression, considering. “That depends on who’s interested in the alliance.” His expression froze, then thawed into intent interest. “Sessin doesn’t need any help, from what I’ve seen, so you’re not from Sessin. The Aerthraim, if I understand correctly, don’t ally with anyone, so you’re not from there; the teyanain wouldn’t bother sending you out, they’d pull me in for a talk. So it’s Darden or F’Heing, and given my choice I’d say you’re from Darden Family.”

“Well thought out,” he said. “Why Darden?”

“Instinct,” she said. “You look like Lord Irrio, a little.”

He rocked back, caught himself with an outstretched hand against the bed, and regarded her with considerably more respect.

“Really. Not many people see that.” He paused, thoughtful, and finally said, “I was warned you’re sharper than most northerns. Very well. You’re close, but not entirely accurate. Lord Irrio is a cousin, but I’m not Darden. I’m from Toscin subfamily, and we’re looking for one of two things: either an alliance with Peysimun Family, or to lure you away to become our first desert lord. I’m allowed to offer you quite a bit of inducement for either path.”

She let out a sharp, surprised bark of almost-laughter. “Are you serious?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, no humor in his face or voice. “Rather unusual, really, that I’m telling unvarnished truth; but I have the feeling that nothing else would work with you, Lord Alyea.”

Alyea sat still and stared at him, blinking rapidly. She felt, briefly, as though all the blood in her body was congealing in a swirly, nauseated mass in her stomach. “You want to lure me away from my family?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Toscin does not have any desert lords,” Jin said as though it should be obvious. “To gain any status, to break away from subfamily status, we need desert lords.”

“You can’t be serious.”

He arched one eyebrow. “Are you implying that Toscin isn’t worthy or capable of hosting desert lords?”

She shut her mouth with a snap, inhaled sharply through her nose, then said, “No. Of course not. I apologize for my reaction.”

His lips lifted into a faint smile. “Accepted.”

In the following silence, the owl hooted again. Alyea shivered and glanced at the single, heavily shuttered window, the sense of dread stronger than before. She looked back to find that Jin’s expression had gone distinctly strained, his own gaze fixed on the window.

“Did you know,” he said, not removing his stare from the shutters, “that the owl is the favored animal of the teyanain?”

“I—”

Jin slid from the bed and stood, still regarding the window warily.

“Perhaps another day,” he said, “we can continue this conversation. Good night, Lord Peysimun.”

“What—”

The door shut silently behind Jin before the word had even fully left Alyea’s mouth.

“Gods
damnit!”
she exploded, then bit a knuckle hard to keep from shouting further.
Middle of the night,
she reminded herself,
people sleeping all around you, shut up!

She shut her eyes, drew a deep breath, let it out.

The owl hooted again, closer and more mournful than ever.

Alyea opened her eyes slowly, more than half expecting to find someone standing in the doorway or by the window, but the room remained empty in the uncertain candlelight.

“Bloody hells,” she muttered, and went to secure the door; a matter of throwing a hook into a loop, and not tremendously reassuring against her growing sense of unease. She knew perfectly well by now that the simple lock was intended as a gesture to placate northern sensibilities, and that the south relied more on status for protection than barred doors.

For the first time she regretted coming south alone. It would have been far safer to secure an ally to at least share a room, taking rest in turns. Instead she’d left herself utterly vulnerable to whatever games were underway now. Had Jin Toscin been sincere in his offer of alliance? Should she have jumped on it without hesitation? If she had, would she now be feeling less worried over her safety—or more? And what did Jin really want? Claiming honesty only meant he’d given her a piece of truth to mask deeper lies.

They use you,
Tank’s voice said in the back of her mind; a memory of a memory, oddly overlaid with a female timbre.
Desert Families use their people until there’s nothing left, and then they spit you out and discard you like garbage.

She blinked, rubbing her temples against the growing spikes of her headache, and wondered who’d said that to Tank, and why. But thinking about Tank threatened to bring up his childhood memories, and she wouldn’t
—couldn’t—
look at that again right now; so she pushed that issue aside and paced restlessly until the headache forced her, whimpering, into bed.

Deiq woke to the warmth of sunlight on his face and the weight of thick blankets tucked around him, a soft pillow under his head and the smell of harsh black teyanain coffee nearby. Without a word, he put out his hand and felt a rough mug pushed into it with equal lack of comment. He rolled to one side, his eyes still shut; propped himself on an elbow and took several sips of the steaming-hot, bitter liquid.

“Thank you,” he said then, and used his free hand to rub his eyes clear.

“You are welcome,” Evkit said composedly.

Deiq sipped coffee and looked around the room: small, and stone, of course, but not—surprisingly—aenstone; a mark of trust, that. It soothed his temper considerably. A series of ceiling tubes allowed sunlight to pour into the room, catching glints from veins of quartz and mica in the walls. The bed was northern-style, and soft; the blankets were thick teyanain weave, worth their weight in gold in any market north of the Horn and unsalable in any southern market.

Evkit offered no conversation, apparently content to wait.

“Explain,” Deiq said at last, holding out the empty mug.

Evkit took it and set it on a side table. “Teyanain split.”

Deiq sucked in a sharp breath. Those two words, put in that sequence, were the most dangerous he’d heard in hundreds of years. “When?”

Evkit rocked a hand back and forth, indicating uncertainty. “Long time. Before my birth. Before my father’s birth. Started as a small crack, became larger. Now it is a chasm, a big problem. You are caught in the middle.”

Deiq sat up, his attention caught by Evkit’s coherent phrasing.

“Yes,” Evkit said, meeting Deiq’s gaze evenly. “There is no point playing word games, ha’ra’ha. I need your help.”

Deiq stayed very still for a few breaths, studying the lines on Evkit’s face; dryly appreciative of the teyanain lord’s ability to remain unreadable to even a ha’ra’ha’s scrutiny, even in the midst of what must be, for the proud man, a dreadfully humiliating admission.

At last he nodded and said, “Go on. I’m listening.”

“I do not know who is the first behind the agitation, the treachery,” Evkit said, his expression and voice severe. “I know a few of my people who are solid, a few I still trust. But who worked with Chacerly to put the ugren cuffs on the Scratha heir and her mother-sister—the same, I think, who worked to arrange your kidnapping—this I do not know. I do not think they are within the Horn. This worries me.”

Deiq grunted, pushing himself further upright, and regarded the small teyanain lord with unapologetic skepticism.

Evkit shook his head, apparently unoffended.

“I not lie,” he said, then, with a slight grimace, corrected himself. “I am not lying, ha’ra’ha. I did not arrange your kidnap. A faction apparently wanted you let loose inside the Horn to kill me. It almost worked.”

“Almost.” Deiq didn’t bother making it a question.

Evkit’s teeth flashed in a sharp grin. “I am not so stupid or old just yet,” he said, then paused. “Those who made this plan would have seen the entire of my people killed to get to me,” he added, more than a slight hint of growl emerging in his words. “They would have risked every child in our lands for the chance of destroying me.
That,
I do not accept or forgive. I will see every one of these traitors horribly dead, along with any offspring they may have sired. I will see their names and lineages erased from every Book of Blood in the
world.”

Bitter fury edged every line in Evkit’s weathered face.

Deiq nodded, not in the least surprised. “And now you want me to tell you who to kill,” he said, understanding, with the experience of centuries, the next steps Evkit would want to take. “Who within your people has betrayed you.”

“No,” Evkit said. “I know who many of the traitors are.”

Deiq blinked, startled. “And you haven’t killed them yet?”

Evkit’s smile showed too much tooth for any real humor. “The ones within my reach, they do not know what I know,” he said. “They are small, they are fledglings. They did not know you were being brought here; they would have died with the rest. So I will wait until they bring me to the larger ones, who will lead me to the ones who caused this split. The only traitors I have in reach are the little ones. The important traitors who know important things have moved outside my lands, outside my reach.”

Deiq put a hand over his eyes.
“Shit.”

He didn’t like this at all. Renegade teyanain wandering the southlands: if they’d forsworn their allegiance to Lord Evkit, they could be anywhere, planning anything. The teyanain had always been the most dangerous and most violent tribe; they held grudges for centuries. There was even a phrase coined to fit their notion of retribution:
teyn-shatha hadinn:
literally, “justice’s cold bite”. It meant a revenge taken long after the other party had forgotten the initial offense.

Was Evkit telling the truth? He’d dropped the fractured speech, but that just meant he wanted to sound convincing. Deiq wasn’t nearly young enough to think that Evkit knew only one way to lie.

“I make mistake,” Evkit said, but the words only deepened Deiq’s doubt. “Hai, ha’ra’ha, even teyanain do sometimes. I let you live, I forgive your presence on our land when you promised not to return. I am trying to show good faith.”

“I didn’t have much choice about being brought here,” Deiq retorted. He wanted to stand up, to loom over the much shorter man; but Evkit’s prickly pride was already flaring from Deiq’s obvious doubt.

“Not our concern,” Evkit returned, abruptly calming. He even smiled, as though at some fine joke.

“How
did
I get here?”

“You are forgiven,” Evkit said loftily, flicking a hand to dismiss the matter. “I need your help. But now, you rest, you recover. You have had a hard time. Morning is early enough to talk more.”

He clapped his hands. Four teyanain no larger than himself entered the room, their gazes only on Evkit. He rattled off orders in the language of the teyanain; Deiq managed to catch the words
patio
and
guest
and
stay
out of the flood of words.

“You go now,” Evkit said at last, turning a cheerful smile to Deiq. “We will talk later. Now you go, you rest. Morning, in the morning, we will talk more.”

“Lord Evkit,” Deiq said, rising deliberately to his feet, “I would rather not wait until morning.” He locked gazes with the teyanain lord.

“But I am the host,” Evkit said, unconcerned, “and you are still weak. I will not speak with a wounded guest. It is impolite. You recover. Then we talk.”

Deiq cast an assessing glance at the four guards around him. Their faces held no expression, but he could see their taut readiness to attack if he refused further. Each one rested a hand on a small belt-pouch.

Bloody godsdamned stibik powder,
Deiq thought bitterly, and wondered if any of them actually knew what they were handling when they dug their fingers into the gritty white powder.

“They not,” Evkit said, his brows drawing down fractionally. “You not say.”

Deiq narrowed his eyes at Evkit. “Not say what?” he asked, and bared his teeth in a humorless grimace.

Evkit snorted, his mouth twitching into a faint smile. “You go rest, ha’inn,” he said. “Then we talk.”

Deiq felt his nostrils flare. Resisting a swell of temper that urged senseless violence, he dipped his head in a slight nod. “Thank you,” he said without irony. “I will go rest, and then we will talk.”

And one day,
he added to himself as the teyanain guards herded him out the door,
I’ll find a way to wipe that damnable smirk off your face.