Wings of Flame (6 page)

“Your ill luck began when you met me,” Seda said.

“Our ill luck began that night, it is true, the night of our crossing over into Vashti, and you are the only thing here that has combatted it. No, if there is a curse, I think it comes from out yonder somewhere.” He glanced away toward the darkness and the mountains and the noise of the demons. Then he reached over and lightly touched her hand. They both felt the ancient magic in that touch, the bone-deep comfort and the bond.

“I am not sure I believe in curses,” Kyrem added, “but if I do, then you must be my talisman, the jewel that sends harm away from me.”

Chapter Five

After the camp fire had burned down to embers, Seda went out a-thieving, as was her custom, and Kyrem lay in his blankets and dozed. When her thin hand shook him awake, he blinked in surprise. It was not yet morning. Darkness lay all around.

“I have seen a familiar face at the hostelry,” Seda said.

“What?” He did not understand.

“One of those who fought with you. A pinched face, small eyes like those of an animal. Weasel-face, I call him to myself.”

Fully awake now, Kyrem threw off his blankets. “They have followed us here? But weeks have gone by. I thought we were rid of them long since!”

“Vashtins do not ride.” Seda had grown more talkative of late. “If they have followed us, likely they have only now caught up to us. And it is to be hoped that they do not yet know we are here.”

“Those cursing demon things mark us! If they know the meaning of them. And I wager they do. Why else.…” Kyrem left the thought unfinished and rose to his feet, standing unsteadily. Urgently he felt the presence of an enemy, a relentless agent of misfortune that tracked him and pursued him, paring and paring away at his strength. “If only I can get on Omber—”

He could not. Try as he might by the faint light of embers, he could not, nor did he have the strength of body to control the steed, strength to focus his Devan power. Swaying but still determined, he coaxed Omber alongside a fallen log. The stallion was confused by what was happening, starting to feel restive.

“Give it up, Devan dog!” a horse-bird shouted. Enemies in the night. Kyrem suppressed his terror and ignored it.

“Seda,” he said, “get on.”

“But what of you?”

“Do as I say. Get on him.”

She scrambled onto the horse from the log, dragging after her a pack full of hastily gathered gear and supplies. Kyrem had just strength enough to boost her into her place.

“Now hang onto his neck and pull me up behind you.”

“Behind me?” she repeated stupidly.

“Yes. I am going to have to hold on to you, and you are going to have to learn to ride like a Devan, lad.”

Omber was a prince's steed. No one except Kyrem had ever sat him to control him. By his training, no one could. Now Seda was to try.

“Hold on by the mane,” Kyrem directed, his head already resting against Seda's thin shoulders.

The long, silky black mane. She laid the pack before her and grasped it.

“Squeeze with your legs just a little to send him forward.”

Omber did not move. He felt the presence of his master on his back, but strangely; something was wrong, and though he would not rear and hurl his master off, still, why should he obey this other? He pawed the ground angrily and flung up his head, shaking it, sending mane flying.

“Squeeze again, and concentrate your thoughts on going forward. It is his will against yours.”

Stubborn determination stirred in Seda, and her jaw grew hard, the line of her lips straight and narrow. She nudged with her legs again, then yelled and kicked.

Omber gave a stallion's scream of rage and sprang forward from a stand into a hard gallop. Seda hung on by the mane, and Kyrem hung on to Seda. And as the girl struggled to keep her seat and her balance, her legs fastened ever tighter around the horse, urging it on and on. There was no question of control; Omber took his own course. Back to the track and down the mountain straight through the village they sped, Omber snorting, the others riding intently, silent and pale, and the cursing demon things flapping above. A few late-goers saw the blue-black horse bearing down on them, unknown riders, weird retinue, and they sprang out of the way, clutching at the talismans they wore around their necks and holding them up to ward off evil.

“We've marked ourselves now for certain,” Kyrem gasped.

Seda nodded, for she had seen a pinched face peer from the shadow of a doorway. But Omber plunged on down the valley track, shying and swerving at every reaching tree, running crazily. Not until dawn did exhaustion slow him to a walk, the lather of his mad exertions shining whitely all over him, steam curling up from his flanks in the morning chill. Kyrem was leaning hard against Seda, nearly unconscious, and the girl set herself to learn on her own how to handle the beast that strode under her.

She came to understanding with Omber gradually, directing him with the tug at the mane, with the pressure of one hand against his neck, with the pressure of the opposite heel against his belly, bending him to the way of her choosing, with the shifting and settling of her body weight, and above all, with the focusing of her will. A sense grew in her slowly that was unlike anything she had ever felt before, a sense of power. It sang in her, and she listened, unbelieving. Her, power? She had always been powerless in every way and shut off from all Vashtin magic. She who had always had to struggle even for scraps to eat, she could not believe she was controlling the stallion between her knees.

“It is in your blood,” Kyrem said, recovering somewhat. “Born in you—you are doing beautifully. Are you sure you are not a Devan, Seda?”

She shrugged. She was neither as dark as a Devan nor as fair as a Vashtin. She looked like dirt, they had always told her. No matter.

“It is the air,” she said, meaning the freedom, the mountains, the ways of the open road. Getting away from her bondage and the scorn of Vashtins. Knowing the company of Devans. It smote her that all but one of the Devans were dead. And the strength of their bright horses—she remembered the names of the horses, Chert, Agreeable, Topaz, Alabaster, Superb, Sard of Suth, My Difficult—that was the black.… She mourned the horses too.

“We are in the foothills,” Kyrem marveled.

They had, indeed, made good speed. The land had turned grassy, red earth contained by shelving terraces of blue rock; wild goats gamboled on the outcroppings, and only the rounded crests of the grassland were forested with thorn. They could see to all sides, and for the time they had certainly outdistanced their enemy, if the weasel-faced man were their enemy.

“Look,” said Kyrem. “Even our demons are fewer.”

It was true. With the dawn and the foothills, several of the black horse-headed birds had circled away and left them, flapping back toward Kimiel.

Kyrem laid his head down again. “I hope I am in better fettle before we reach Avedon,” he muttered.

Seda was feeling weak and sore as well, battered by that first wild ride. But they kept on at the quiet gaits throughout the day, eating a few scraps of bread from Seda's pocket, drinking from her flask, fearing that if they stopped to rest, they would not be able to go on again. The sun grew hot, for in these parts it was already summer, and the heat sapped their little remaining strength. When at last evening came, they stumbled from their mount with no thought for fire or food. Seda stood swaying for a moment and rubbed Omber's forehead where the sweat had dried on it, giving him Devan thanks or greeting, and he stood gravely. Then she unblanketed him, pulled her own sleeping blanket from the pack and tossed Kyrem his, and they both nearly fell into them, sinking to the ground.

“Besides me, you are the only one who can ride him,” Kyrem murmured. There was a warmth in his voice, an ungrudging generosity that made Seda blink and moved her to words.

“Thank you, Ky,” she said softly. Sometime during his illness she had started calling him Ky.

“He is starting to like you,” Kyrem added.

“Shuntali! Shuntali!” shouted a demon from the dark.

The next day as she rode, Kyrem still weak and leaning against her, Seda learning more and more of an accord with the horse, she felt an odd, sticky sensation under her and realized to her horror that she was bleeding. The onset of women's flux—she could not realize for a moment what it was, for she had almost forgotten that she would be a woman. Then her eyes opened wide in consternation. This must somehow be hidden from Kyrem. They could not be together if he found her out.

She rode the rest of the day in a paralysis of worry. Luckily Kyrem, faint and weary, noticed nothing. Luckily also the blanket on which they rode was red, like Kyrem's lost cap. They stopped that evening by a stream, and Kyrem lapsed at once into a sleep that was almost a swoon. Seda washed out the blanket, wet with more than the horse's sweat, and washed her own clothing and herself, and that night she stole more than food. She came back with someone's old patched tunic swaddled and wadded underneath her trousers. Then after they had eaten, she slept contentedly and dreamt of riding Omber.

In the nighttime of far away an other opened her dark eyes, startled awake. This dream, this sense of a great beast, a stallion, moving between her legs, what could it mean? And the sun, the warm breeze—and the grasslands, the blue rock, and not so far behind, the mountains! Great lofty crests of sorrel with their mane of black trees—things she had never seen, yet she saw them so clearly—and she herself, had she not been … a boy? A stripling half drunk by a wayward power?

But how could she have dreamt such a strange thing? She was a maiden, humbly born and just thirteen, just entered on her first flux. Soon there would be the ceremony of passage, the lengthening of her skirts to below her ankles, and already her mother and her mother's noble mistress had been adjuring her to sit more gracefully, walk more sedately as she grew into women's estate, speak more demurely and more seldom and with circumspection, conduct herself always in such a way that her chastity would never be questioned. And it was true that she had never slept far from her mother's bed.

Then who had been the man, the youth, pale of face, comely, curly of jet-black hair—and how could it be that she had dreamt of sleeping by his side? Only a dream, she told herself. Yet even on waking she remembered his face as clearly as though she had seen it in flesh and in fact, as though she had gazed on it with longing. And her heart throbbed with the memory.

Atop the mountain, the most holy mountain that men called Kimiel or Anka, the enemy heard report from his black horse-headed servants and frowned. All the Devans destroyed except the one who mattered the most! And this little Vashtin, this shuntali, what was he to thwart the most holy rage? The Old One bent his mind that way and frowned again. Something was wrong; he found no outcast lad, but a virgin girl in her first red moon dew and full of powerful magic.

He frowned yet again and sent orders winging to his other, human servants.

As Seda and Kyrem rode past one last rampart of the mountains the next day, orange rock came roaring down at them, and Omber's best speed barely took them out of danger. Looking back, Seda saw human figures, black and tiny with distance, standing where the landslide had begun. A few of the cursing, black demon things circled above them, and a few more from their own unofficial entourage left them, flapping back to join the others.

“If those are our enemies from the inn back there,” said Kyrem, “they will be hard put to catch up with us afoot.”

They pressed the pace a little. But they could not ride long or late with Kyrem still so weak. And the next day, as they threaded their way down the rocky valleys of the foothills, an arrow flew at them from some distant thornwoods, barely missing them, parting the air between them with a rush. As Omber leapt forward in response to their panic, another flew just behind his haunches, and as they fled, another fell to the track at their feet.

“Bowels of Suth!” Kyrem muttered, having learned blasphemy from black mentors.

They rode as long and hard as they were able, camped in secrecy with no fire, rose early to ride again. Each day, as Kyrem grew stronger, they made more miles, and for a while there were no more incidents.

By the time Seda was over her flux and had secretly discarded the old tunic, Kyrem had mostly regained his former fettle. Once again he took his place as rightful rider of his steed, and once again Seda rode behind him. Though she was not as timid with him as she once had been, she felt too timid to speak her mind about this arrangement. It was his horse after all.

They had come far down the foothills; they would soon be in Avedon. All but two or three of the cursing demons had deserted them. But those few reminded them constantly of danger and the enemies and misfortune that had followed them thus far.

“Die! Die! Devan dogs!”

In Avedon there would be safety for Kyrem, Seda felt sure. All the energy of her will was bent toward bringing him safely there. Kyrem also pressed on toward Avedon, but with a different feeling, not thinking of safety and hardly thinking he would ever actually arrive. The journey had become its own reality to him.

“There it is!” Seda exclaimed, and Kyrem stared, unbelieving.

Atop the breast of the last soft foothill, they looked down on Auron's city. It seemed all white and brilliant, sparkling gemmily in the strong Vashtin sunlight. City walls, spiral towers, stately buildings were white-plastered and ornamented with mosaics, some of them, Seda had heard, made of real semiprecious stones; they blazed in the sunshine, and beyond the city stood a blaze of red, the flamelike trees of the sacred grove. They marched up the sides of the flat-topped promontory called Atar-Vesth, the place of fire, and they surrounded the spring of Suth whence sprang the welling river, Ril Acaltha. Mirrorlike, blinding bright in the light, it looped and spiraled clear around the city, winding its way under narrow bridges, rimmed with yellow sand.… And flowers: the yellow flowers that gave the river its name, and other flowers, tall spires of red, pillows and froths of white and blue and pink—every terrace was bordered with flowers. The red land was all done up in such terraces to either side of the river, with troughs and buckets always working to bring the water up. Avedon fed on the Ril Acaltha.