Authors: Kelly McCullough

Broken Blade (32 page)

BOOK: Broken Blade

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I was still flailing. “Could you elaborate on that? Obscure dueling codes weren’t really a major topic of study at the temple. Namara issued sentences of death, not challenges.”

Maylien nodded. “If I weren’t a mage and I wanted to challenge my sister, all I would have to do is walk up to the entrance of wherever she was and demand that I be taken to her to issue my challenge. Whoever met me at the door would then have to take me to her at once. She wouldn’t be allowed to use guards or other direct measures to prevent me from entering her presence, and we would duel on the spot. But Crown Law has put all sorts of barriers up around the conditions of challenge in the case of the mageborn.”

“Such as?”

“To start with, I have to send a formal announcement of my intention to challenge. Both to my sister and to the crown. In it, I have to name a day and a place, and that place must be on Marchon lands. The crown then sends a pair of witnesses to the event, and if I don’t show up, the challenge is considered forfeit. At which point, they declare me an outlaw and under sentence of death throughout Zhan.” Bontrang growled again.

“I think I’m starting to see how this works now,” I said. “I take it all those rules about not using guards or other direct measures to stop you from reaching your sister go out the window, too.”

“Exactly. She may use any means that were available to her at the time of the announcement of intent to challenge, though she may not increase the size of her guard or beg help of the crown.”

“Do you have to tie both your arms behind your back, too?” I asked.

“No. The Code Martial describes the conditions of the duel itself and those they have not been able to alter though I have little doubt they would like to do just as you suggest. That or simply have anyone with both the mage gifts and noble blood killed outright.”

“As much as I hate to interrupt,” said Heyin, “the toast will all too soon go from done to burnt if I don’t, and the tea is almost ready as well.”

Heyin handed out rough sandwiches then. As soon as I took a bite I realized just how hungry I was after two nights and a day of putting nothing in my stomach but alcohol. I took the tea when it was ready, too, since there was no graceful way to refuse, and drank a token sip before quietly setting it aside. As always, it reminded me too much of efik and what I had lost. Heyin finished eating quickly, then immediately started to clean up the campsite and pack away our small stock of gear.

“So, how bad is it?” Maylien asked Heyin as he reached for our blankets.

He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know.”

“How bad is what?” I asked.

“Whatever it is that’s making my captain very politely but very firmly push us to get moving.”

“I’m not pushing. I’m easing the way.” Maylien gave him a hard look, and Heyin held up a hand before she could say anything. “No, really. What I know doesn’t justify pushing. Reports of the place were both vague and unreliable, and we haven’t been able to get inside. But something about it nags at me.”

“The place?” prompted Maylien.

“A little keep not far from the Marchon seat,” said Heyin. “There’s been talk of your sister going there in secret, but no one knows why, and we haven’t been able to get inside. And we won’t without magic or a major assault.”

“Which needs either me or my orders.”

“More or less,” said Heyin. “But really, it would be better to show you. Tomorrow. After both of you have rested and eaten and bathed.” Heyin sniffed. “Especially that last.”

“Heyin!” Maylien glared at him, but he was impervious.

“It’s more than a day’s ride from here, and Exile House is almost on the way. We won’t lose much time by stopping, and I think it would be better if you arrived looking more like a baroness and less like a rag-seller. Your people expect you to look the part.”

Maylien tossed the last bits of bacon from her sandwich to Bontrang, then started helping Heyin with the packing. I got up to help, but Triss continued sleeping and wouldn’t be moved. As soon as I got more than a few feet away from Triss, though, I became aware of just how much of my nima was steadily draining away down the link between us—much as pulling a bandage off a seeping wound will make you aware of all the blood you’re losing. The feeling made me go all dizzy and staggery. That’s when Maylien ordered me to sit down again and poured me out the last of the rummer’s moonshine. That took the edge off my growing worry and made me feel a false sort of cheer, but only for a little while.

When it was time to go, I managed to wake Triss long enough to get him in the saddle with me, where he hid himself in my shadow, but then he went right back to sleep. Within an hour, I’d started seeing white blots again and lost track of everything but staying on the horse. Somewhere close to lunchtime, we stopped at the house of a prosperous farmer who hailed Maylien as his baroness. He cheerfully supplied us with a meal and a large jar of something almost painfully alcoholic that he called rice-white. It was basically a more polished cousin of the rummer’s stuff, and I spent the rest of the day teetering back and forth between keeling over from overtapped exhaustion and keeling over from the booze.

I got a bit of my strength back at sunset, shortly before we arrived at Exile House. So I was alert enough to register a sort of blurry impression of lots of ruined stone walls and collapsed structures wrapped around a tight core of carefully renovated and camouflaged buildings. There were a few dozen men and women around, most in rough martial attire with bands bearing an inverted emblem of House Marchon on their sword arms—upside down, the jade fox sitting in its gold field looked subtly wrong. Maylien and Heyin had put together a substantial counterforce. Unfortunately, getting down off my horse and into the bathhouse soaked up most of my reserves, so I didn’t find out any more then.

I dozed off twice in the soaking tub and had to be prodded awake by Chul, the young soldier Heyin had assigned to make sure I didn’t drown. He also found me a robe, and after I’d dragged myself to the privy and back, he led me to a tiny stone-walled room where a thick feather bed lay atop a low platform and some quite beautiful and obviously hastily-thrown-down rugs. It smelled strongly of last summer’s apples.

“I’m very sorry about the state of your . . . bedroom,” he said, sounding both deeply embarrassed and confused. “The baroness has told us to treat you as the most honored of guests, and we would normally have given you one of the tower rooms, but she also asked that we put you in a place where the sun doesn’t shine. She specified no windows and as many feet of wood and stone between you and the sky as we could manage. That made things . . . difficult.”

“It’s perfect,” I said. “Mayl—your baroness is a very wise young woman.” I lowered myself gladly onto the bed. It felt wonderful.

“We had to take the latch off the door because it wasn’t really designed to be opened from this side. So just give it a shove when you want to get out. There’s no privy down here, but I can bring you a piss-pot if you’d like.”

I tried to answer, but all I managed was a mumble before sleep reached up and pulled me under.

Something
cool and wet touched my forehead, and I blinked my eyes open. A shadow crossed through the dim lanternlight that came in through the door of my little sleeping chamber. My eyes flicked upward. Triss hung on the wall above and to my left, his paw extended toward my face, where a wet cloth lay just above my eyes.

“How do you feel?” he asked quietly.

I stretched. Tentatively at first, then with more enthusiasm. I was stiff and a little weak but not really sore anywhere except my throat, which, for reasons unknown, felt awfully hashed. I was also
seriously
hungry.

“I feel pretty good, Triss. Apparently a solid night’s sleep in a nice bed was just what I needed.”

A wry chuckle drew my attention to the foot of the bed. Maylien stood just inside the doorway, with Bontrang perched on a leather pad on her shoulder.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Try a week’s sleep interspersed with bits of delirium,” said Maylien.

I looked at Triss. “Really?”

He shrugged his wings. “That’s what they tell me, but I couldn’t really say. I’ve only been up and around since sunset yesterday myself.”

“What happened?”

Triss contracted briefly in embarrassment. “Apparently, I did. The magelightning hurt me much worse than I let on—”

“Triss . . .”

He looked off to the side. “At first I didn’t want to worry you because you were in rough shape, too. You needed to stay focused on getting us clear of the Elite. After, I knew you’d be mad that I hadn’t told you, and I was so busy just holding myself together that I could barely string two words together. It just seemed easier not to have to argue about it.” He shrank again. “I’m feeling much better now . . .”

“You should have told me, you muttonhead.” I reached up and ran a fingertip along the underside of his jaw, reveling in his scaly solidity.

“I know. I’m sorry. When we couldn’t get you to wake up after I did yesterday night, I was really worried.”

I glanced a question at Maylien.

She shrugged, but only with the shoulder opposite Bontrang. “I don’t know. You’d need to talk to a healer who specializes in mage care to figure out what happened there. If I had to guess, I’d say that for most of the week, Triss was draining your magical reserves away faster than you could replenish them, and it took you some time to recover after he stopped. Call it soul-exhaustion maybe, since nima rises from the well of the soul.”

“That sounds ugly,” I said.

Maylien nodded. “We weren’t entirely sure either of you was going to make it. If the healers hadn’t been able to get you to drink some clear soup and rice-white in your brief rounds of waking delirium, I don’t think you would have.”

“That’d explain the throat then. That rice-white stuff tastes like it runs three parts paint thinner to one part water.”

Triss gave me the hairy eyeball but didn’t say anything. I pushed myself up and back to lean against the wall in a half-sitting position—the longer I was awake the better I felt . . . and the hungrier. Like a monster that had been wakened by hearing its name, my stomach let out a quite audible growl.

“So, if it suddenly occurred to me that I was ravenous, what would be the chances of my getting something to eat?”

“Well, if you’re up to moving, I can take you to the kitchens and see what’s available. Otherwise, I’ll send someone to get you something.”

“Let’s go then!” I flicked the blankets off, then hurriedly recaptured them when I realized I was naked.

Maylien blushed prettily and looked away. “I forgot about that. Let me arrange some clothes for you.” She backed into the hall.

“You weren’t so shy on the road,” I teased.

“Uh, about that . . . just a moment.” She turned and said over her shoulder into the hall, “Chul, could you find a pair of pants and a shirt for our guest?”

“Of course, Baroness.” From the tone of his voice, Chul didn’t much like the idea of leaving his baroness alone with me, but he didn’t argue either.

Once the sounds of Chul’s moving away had grown faint enough to indicate some real distance, Maylien looked back at me, her expression carefully blank. “I have to apologize for my conduct on the road, Aral. As Heyin has been at pains to remind me, the duties and conduct demanded of a baroness are not at all the same as those of the Rover’s apprentice I used to be. When we were alone together on the way here, I treated you as I might have treated a fellow Rover in my traveling days. I said and did things that were not in keeping with my present obligations. I’m very sorry if I gave you an impression I shouldn’t have.”

I felt like all the air had abruptly left the room, or like I’d caught a solid kick just under the ribs. In either case, I found it very hard to draw the breath I needed to reply as I should. It wasn’t about sex, though it could have been nice if things had gone that way. It was about the sudden severing of a connection that had only begun to form, the first such connection I’d tried to make in years.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said quietly. “I should have remembered why you sought me out and treated you like the baroness I intend to help you become and . . .” I trailed off lamely, unable to say “not like Jax or one of the other Blade women”—that wouldn’t be appropriate either. Finally, after the silence had gone on too long, I forced out, “I should have treated you like a baroness and not an old friend.”

Bontrang hissed sharply, and the look on Maylien’s face shifted from blank to tightly closed. I felt even worse. But before I could do anything to repair the situation, Chul returned, and Maylien stepped aside to let him into the room.

“Thank you, Chul. Could you make sure that . . . my guest is dressed properly, then bring him up to the kitchens for food? Aral, I’ll see you later. I’ve got things to attend to.”

And then she left me.