His Conquering Sword (68 page)

And anyway, now that she and Charles and the rest of the cabal were set on this plan, they had to proceed in complete secrecy; they could not afford to arouse Chapalii interest in any fashion; and so, since Rhui was interdicted, it must stay that way, and there must be no awkward questions asked or betraying traffic to and from the planet other than that initiated years before when Charles had first established a foothold here as a kind of sanctuary from his duties as the first human duke, the first and only human to be granted a rank within the labyrinthine imperial Chapalii hierarchy.

But she still wondered. Should she tell them the truth? And if so, when? And if not, how long could she stay with them, truly? Because in the end she
would
have to return to Earth.

“Mama! Mama!”

Tess smiled, turning to greet her son. Yuri’s enthusiastic hug almost bowled her over. She laughed and steadied herself with one hand on the grass. With an impish grin, Yuri untangled himself from her and regarded Sonia gravely.

“I beg your pardon, Aunt Sonia,” he said, but Sonia merely smiled in answer and kept weaving. Yuri squatted down to watch her shuttle, and Tess just studied him, this wonderful boy whom she loved with an unsettlingly fierce passion, he and his older sister. Yuri was a sturdy five-year-old, still growing out of his baby fat. He had the world’s most equable temperament, quite unlike either of his parents, and a penchant for silliness. Sitting so still, though, his gentle child’s profile showed him serious and intent.

“Where is Natalia?” asked Tess.

“I don’t know,” he replied with a younger child’s blithe irresponsibility. “What pattern are you weaving, Aunt Sonia?”

“The Moon’s Horns,” she answered.

He grunted, content, and slipped onto his knees in order to watch her more closely. The rising sun shone gold lights through his brown hair. He fit there, beside Sonia, with uncanny ease. At five, he had greater patience for weaving than Tess had, but she was used to patterns taking shape more swiftly, nets and structures that she could build and dismantle at whim. She was trying to learn patience, but she hadn’t mastered it yet.

Instead, Tess rose, touched Sonia on the shoulder and gave Yuri a kiss, and walked down the hill toward camp. The wind fled in waves along the grass, great ripples darkening the ground for a moment as they spread and, at last, faded into the distance. Far off, she saw the amorphous mass of the horse herd and farther still, a glint of white marked the edge of the grazing line of sheep.

A hundred sounds drifted on the breeze, plaiting her footsteps into a greater whole. Tess hummed to herself. She smelled meat cooking. A hawk screamed above, and she tilted her head back to watch it soar on the cold blue bell of the sky. Already it was warm. By afternoon the camp would be well sunk into summer stupor; that was why everyone was so active now, in the cool of the morning. The bright spiral of the tents wound out before her, losing shape as she neared the bottom of the rise and the camp rose up and took shape as an inviting maze before her.

A whoop startled her out of her thoughts. She held her ground against the charge of three horsemen. Girls, to be more exact, on what were supposed to be quiet old sleeper horses. Her daughter grinned at her as she galloped by, chasing her reckless cousin. Tess winced. She could not get used to that child riding that way at such an age. She wasn’t even eight yet.

At a more sedate pace, riding a kind of distant herd on the trio, came another rider. He pulled up beside Tess and swung down in order to give her a kiss.

“Your daughter is wild,” she said accusingly.

“She is not!” Ilya laughed. “She is merely determined. Lara is the wild one, as you well know. Natalia and Sofia are just trying to keep up with her.”

“Lara is wild because her father spoils her,” said Tess, determined to have a pleasant argument with her husband.

“Just as I spoil Natalia?” asked Ilya. Then he grinned, knowing full well what she was about. He caught her face between his hands and stared soulfully down at her. “No more than I spoil you, my heart.”

Tess rolled her eyes. “You’re impossible to argue with when you’re in this kind of a mood.” But she kissed him anyway and then greeted his stallion, Kriye, who nosed at her sleeve, affronted by her lack of attention to him. He was an incredibly vain horse, as he, of course, had every right to be, and smart enough to know what he deserved.

They walked along, following in the general direction the girls had taken.

“I saw a rider coming in,” Tess said. “What news?”

“He rode from Yaroslav Sakhalin’s army,” said Ilya. “Sakhalin has received submission from the prince of Hereti-Manas, but he has reports that the prince of the neighboring land of Gelasti is raising an army, perhaps with Mircassian soldiers among them.”

“Does the Mircassian king intend to support Gelasti?” Then she shrugged. “Well, why not? He hopes they will act as a buffer. If you are forced to waste your strength on Gelasti and the neighboring principalities, then it will go harder once the main force of Mircassia’s army takes the field against you.”

“It isn’t that simple,” began Ilya. She gave him a look. “But I feel sure,” he added hastily, “that you have more to say.”

“No. Not right now. I want to speak again with the merchant from Greater Manas who arrived here last month. The better we understand the relationships between the princely houses of the Yos princedoms, the better we will be able to exploit what seems to me are any number of internecine quarrels within their ranks.”

“Spoken like your brother,” said Ilya softly.

“No doubt,” replied Tess dryly. She felt a stab of guilt. She much preferred war in the abstract, discussing it, directing it, from out here on the plains, never having to see her words put into action. “Did Vasha send a letter?”

Ilya’s shoulders tensed. “Just a few lines, that said nothing.”

“And?” she asked, hearing the silence he did not want to fill.

“No mention of him by Sakhalin at all, but appended to Vasha’s letter was a lengthy diatribe from Katerina on how badly he’s getting along.” He paused. Tess waited him out. Finally, on a let out breath, he finished. “I shouldn’t have let him go.”

“You should have. Ilya, he had to leave, to go out on his own. You can’t keep him in camp. He has to grow up, to become his own man. Otherwise—”

“Otherwise?” Ilya demanded. This was not the argument Tess had wanted, but she braced herself to carry on with it anyway. “He will never be accepted as my heir in any case, Tess, so what does it matter?”

“He must be accepted as himself. Whatever else comes, will come. We can’t know what that will be.”

“He doesn’t get along well with other people.”

“You have been protecting him, Ilya. He
has to
learn to fend for himself.”

“He can’t fend for himself. He’s too young. He’s hotheaded and he plays the prince’s son too often.”

“He’s a good boy, Ilya. You know that, damn it. I admit he has too high a sense of his own consequence at times, but he’s willing to learn. But for God’s sake, he’s nineteen now. He’ll never become a man unless you are willing to let go of him.”

“But what if he—?”

“You have to let him make his own mistakes!”

Ilya relapsed into a stubborn silence. Irritated, Tess eyed him, feeling equally stubborn. After a bit, she began to enjoy the sight of him fulminating. He did it so splendidly.

His lips quirked. “I don’t want to argue with you,” he said in a stifling tone.

“You don’t
want
to, but you like to,” she retorted instantly. “Well, my love, Vasha is riding with Sakhalin’s army now. He’s out of your hands for the time being.” She forcefully restrained herself from adding:
And it’s just as well.

“I’d better go see what’s happened to those girls,” said Ilya, choosing evasive action.

But an instant later, two riders came pounding back to meet them. A flushed Natalia, flanked by an even redder Sofia, pulled up before them.

“Lara’s broken her arm!” Natalia announced in a satisfied voice. “She tried to jump old Flatrump over the hide that Grandfather Niko has staked out, and he balked and threw her. Serves her right.”

“How charitable of you, Talia,” said Tess. “I did not, of course, see you following after her at the same ungodly pace.”

“I didn’t try to jump!” protested Natalia. “Mother! I’m not
stupid
.” She patted her bay on the neck. “She’s too stiff to jump.”

“Who balked?” asked Ilya. “Niko?”

Natalia giggled. “No. But he’s scolding her right now.”

“And setting her arm at the same time, I hope.” Tess sighed. “Talia, let me tell her mother. Please.”

Natalia bit down so hard on a grin that her cheeks puckered in. Even Sofia, a preternaturally solemn child, smiled. “It’s too late. Her father saw it all.”

“What did he say?” asked Tess, dreading the worst. Sofia giggled and clapped a hand over her mouth. Natalia preened for a moment, well aware that she held important information like a great treasure. She had her father’s black hair and dark coloring, and spirited eyes. She wasn’t really wild, but it terrified Tess that she didn’t seem scared of anything. “He said that he’ll have to get her a real horse, one that won’t balk.”

“Gods,” muttered Tess.

“Father…” began Natalia coaxingly.

“No,” said Ilya.

“But—”

“No. When you are ready, not before.”

Natalia, thank goodness, did not pout. “Oh, all right,” she said, all reasonableness now. “Lara made a fool of herself, anyway.”

“A practical attitude,” mumbled Tess. The two girls rode off to spread the news, looking gleeful. “It’s true that you spoil your children,” Tess commented, “but unlike Feodor Grekov, at least you know where to draw the line.”

“Your flattery is boundless, my wife.”

“You and Kriye are very alike, you know. You both demand a certain amount of praise. Otherwise you grow peevish.” But she had made the mistake of amusing him. He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes, playing at modesty while she flattered him in tone although certainly not in words. He knew how to look at her just so. Her heart took that familiar awkward lurch and she smiled, agreeably overwhelmed by the sudden warmth of her feelings, and shook her head. “Oh, stop it,” she said.

“Stop what?” he asked innocently.

She ran a hand up his sleeve, brushed under his beard with her knuckles, and traced his lips with the tips of her fingers. His eyes sparked. “Never mind,” she said softly, knowing he knew she was laughing at him. After twelve years, she felt so comfortable with him on this level that it was as if she had always known him. It was the same way with the children: They were now so completely a part of her consciousness of the world that she could scarcely recall the day when they did not exist.

She just held his hand for a moment. Even out here, such simple shows of affection might be considered unseemly. Then she dropped his hand and turned to face the camp. “We’d better go stem the tide which is no doubt swelling even now.”

Ilya raised dark eyebrows and examined the vast sprawl of the camp. “I’m sure if it was quiet enough we could hear Nadine roundly cursing Feodor for all the ills of the world, not to mention Lara’s wildness.”

“She’s such a sweet girl, though. Most of the time.”

“But aren’t all of us like a fine weaving? The pattern the world sees often hides the threads.” Tess stared, his words were so close to what she had been thinking earlier. He had one hand on Kriye’s withers, and he stared over the horse’s shoulders toward camp, that huge, living entity that was itself an unfinished, ever-changing pattern. “We don’t see the warp and the weft that created us, but only the bright design. And some, like Lara, are woven in two faces, a different one on each side of the weaving.”

Was he thinking of her as he spoke? Did he suspect how much she was keeping from him? Tess wasn’t sure that she wanted to know the answer to those questions.

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Kate Elliott has been writing stories since she was nine years old, which has led her to believe that she is either a little crazy or that writing, like breathing, keeps her alive. Her most recent series is the Spiritwalker Trilogy (
Cold Magic
,
Cold Fire
, and
Cold Steel
), an Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-nineteenth-century Regency ice-punk mashup with airships, Phoenician spies, the intelligent descendants of troodons, and revolution. Her previous works include the Crossroads trilogy (starting with
Spirit Gate
), the Crown of Stars septology (starting with
King’s Dragon
), the Novels of the Jaran, the Highroad Trilogy, and the novel
The Labyrinth Gate
, originally published under the name Alis A. Rasmussen.

She likes to play sports more than she likes to watch them; right now, her sport of choice is outrigger canoe paddling. Her spouse has a much more interesting job than she does, with the added benefit that they had to move to Hawaii for his work; thus the outrigger canoes. They also have a schnauzer (a.k.a. the Schnazghul).

April Quintanilla