Lady of Horses (39 page)

oOo

Sparrow rode into the camp on the fourth day after the
dark of the moon. She came in by the same way that Keen had come, riding on the
white mare. This time Kestrel was there to see, and to mark how the people were
at her coming: silent, still, bowing as she rode past. She seemed unaware of
them. Her eyes were dark, fixed as if blind.

But she could see. She saw Storm standing in the camp’s
heart, and Rain, and Cloud beside Keen. All of them she saw, and knew. But
Kestrel she seemed not to see at all.

The mare halted in front of the king. Sparrow slid from her
back, holding up the thing that she had been carrying in her hands: a skull-cup
such as warriors made, as richly and intricately ornamented as a king’s. Storm
sank down before it, to the ground, and everyone else followed—even, after a
moment, Keen.

Kestrel stayed on his feet. He had not known the one whose
skull this must be. He had not acknowledged her power, if such she had ever
had.

It was an empty defiance. No one seemed to notice it.
Sparrow spoke in a clear and carrying voice, simply but with clear strength of
will. “Your Old Woman is dead. She bade me come to you and give you her
farewell. Her spirit watches over you. Her voice intercedes with the gods for
you. She speaks as one of your ancestors, though she came from another kin and
tribe. That is the love she bore you, and the care she took for you.”

People wept, hearing that. They grieved as for one of their
own. But Kestrel’s heart was cold.

He had seen Sparrow. Now he could go. Indeed, he should,
while she and the mare were occupied; but he stood still.

What she had done was beyond forgiveness—even if it was not
she but the mare who had done it. She had taken the kingship away from the
People. He was bound by honor and duty to bring her back to the king for that,
and to see her suffer whatever penalty the king should exact.

Probably the king would put her to death. If Kestrel had
been king, he would have done it.

She had become a stranger, a violator of the laws of gods
and men. She stood among these people who looked so much like her, and spoke to
them in the voice of a shaman, and they bowed to her power. What she had done
to gain that cup she held in her hands, and the power that both filled it and
shone out of her, he did not want to imagine.

Yet she was still Sparrow. He looked at her and tried to be
cold, tried to hate her; and he could only hate himself, because after all they
had both done, he still loved her. He would always love her. Even if—or when—he
had to kill her for what she had done to the People.

He turned and walked away from her and from the people about
her. He went to the horses. He sat where he had sat on the night of the moon’s
dark, knotted as he had been then, and resolved that this time, when the sun
went down, he would be sensible and find a warm place to sleep.

Maybe that would not be in this camp, if she was in it. He
had to leave—he could not stay. Because if he stayed, he would have to invoke
his duty, seize her and carry her off and bring her to his king.

oOo

She found him there. It did not take much finding, to be
sure. The mare had come in among the herd, cowing the queen mare with teeth and
heels, and driving back the great white mountain of a stallion. Then, having
done that, she established herself near the young king, to the visible dismay
of the other stallions tethered along the line.

She fostered that dismay. She took pleasure in it, Kestrel
was sure.

Sparrow came and sat on the rock beside him, not touching,
but close enough that he could feel her warmth. She said, “If you try to take
him, the mare will stop you.”

“That’s what Keen said,” he said. He was amazed at how calm
he managed to sound. “I told her it really would be better if I took him.
Otherwise he’ll bring the People down on this country.”

“Yes,” said Sparrow.

He glanced at her. He was older; people said he looked it,
and certainly he felt it. She had changed, too, though maybe more subtly. She
had not grown taller as he had. Her face was much the same.

But her eyes were different. Shaman’s eyes. They were dark
and deep, and had seen beyond the world.

“You’re not afraid,” he said.

“Would it help anyone if I were?”

“It might help these people.”

She shook her head. “Horse Goddess will do whatever she
pleases.”

“Keen said that, too.”

“Keen understands.” Sparrow clasped her knees and laid her
chin on them. “I suppose we’re under some dire sentence. Is it death?”

His teeth clicked together. He always did forget just how
direct Sparrow could be. “I was to bring you back alive.”

“So my brother can kill me.”

“No. Linden. Linden commanded me.”

That startled her. His heart stabbed at the hurt in her
face. All this time, all this power and wisdom, and she still yearned after
that pretty fool.

She did not try to deny what he had said, at least. That was
Sparrow: unflinching in the face of the truth. “He did love that horse,” she
said slowly. “He must have been very, very angry.”

“The word I would use,” said Kestrel, “is wrath.”

“Ah.” She sighed. “Yes, I suppose it would be that. We
couldn’t have done anything much worse than we did.”

“I can’t think of anything,” Kestrel said dryly.

“And he sent you. That was cruel.”

“He wouldn’t have known,” Kestrel said.

“I suppose not,” said Sparrow. “You can’t do it, you know.
Take the stallion, or take me. The goddess won’t allow it.”

“The goddess? Not you?”

“I would go,” she said, “if I could. I’m not particularly
afraid to die—and I might not. But the goddess forbids. We’re to stay here.”
She slanted a glance under those straight black brows. “You know that. You can
hear her, too.”

“I can’t—”

That was not true. Kestrel did not hear the goddess, nothing
so clear or so direct. He knew, that was all. He looked at the mare, and she
was going nowhere, nor was the stallion, nor was Sparrow.

As for him, whom the shaman here had named the Sparrowhawk . . .
he had failed of his hunting. He should go back and take the punishment that he
had earned.

“No,” said Sparrow as if he had spoken aloud. “You’ll stay.”

“I can’t.”

She reached across the narrow space that was between them,
and took his hand. “You will.”

He stared at his long thin hand in her small round one. His
fingers were cold. Hers were warm. He said, “You’re playing me like a flute.
Stop it.”

She did not let go his hand. “I will play a whole night’s
dance on you, if that’s what’s necessary. I won’t let you go back. They’ll kill
you.”

“I don’t think Linden will,” he said.

“It’s not Linden I’m thinking of.” She raised his hand to
her cheek. It turned of its own accord, fitting its palm to that soft curve.
“She brought you here, you know. The goddess. She tested you; she tempered you
with pain. She wants you here for what will come.”

“And if I won’t stay?”

“You, she won’t stop. But I will.”

“Can you?”

She closed the space between them, linking hands behind his
neck. “Ask me now,” she said.

She did not mean it. She did it because she knew what was in
his heart—not because she shared any part of it.

He knew that, and he felt himself falling. Honor, duty,
loyalty to his king—what had any of them been, from the beginning, but
obedience to her wish? She had asked him to look after Linden. He had done
that. Now he was here, and she asked him to do another thing, a terrible thing,
to abandon the king whom he had served at her will. All at her will, because he
had no power to resist her.

He groaned and willed himself to pull away. Of course he
could not. His arms, raised to thrust her off, folded around her, drawing her
closer.

He had dreamed of this. But in the dreams, she had loved him
as he loved her. That was not so in this waking world. She was saving his life,
that was all—that was how she would reckon it.

He could not make it matter. She was in his arms, willingly,
consciously, as he had always prayed she might be. He would hold her for as
long as she would allow it, for the memory; so that when she went back to being
herself again, he would have this to feed his dreams.

Sparrow had never intended to do what she did. To keep him
in this country, yes; to bind him here where he would be safe, at least until
the People came to take back their king of stallions. But to do it this way . . .
no, she had not meant or expected that she would do such a thing.

He was grown so splendid. When she saw him standing among
the Grey Horse People, so much taller than any of them, and so light and proud
in carriage, her heart had thudded wildly and then settled to a distressing
flutter. She had had all she could do to say what she must say, to be as
properly dignified as she should be before the king and the people.

It was worse for that, at sight of him, she had known
exactly why he was here. She had seen it in him, in images like the embroidery
of her coat: the command that bound him, the long hunt, the storms, the lion,
all the tests the goddess had forced him to endure. She had seen the woman
Rain, too, doing with him what a woman does with a man.

She had seen much too much. Rather sooner than was strictly
polite, she had escaped the king and the people and gone looking for him. When
she found him sitting all alone and knotted in misery, her heart had run on
without her, had spoken for her, acted for her, brought her into this embrace.

She did not yearn for him as she had yearned—in a way still
yearned—for Linden. He was more beautiful than Linden, because his beauty was
less perfect. His face was long and rather austere, not a face made for
lightness or laughter. His body was lean and panther-lithe and strong, with a
way about it that made her breath catch. The way he moved, his light smooth
stride, the way his head turned just so, that steady gaze of his from under
lowered eyelids—she had known them since they were children, but she had never
truly seen them.

She could not help it. She had to touch; to hold him fast.
He was a little repelled, a little horrified. She could see it in his face. And
yet she could not stop herself.

This must be what drove women to lie with men. Sparrow had
thought she wanted to lie with Linden, but when she came to the point of
imagining it, she could not. She could easily imagine lying with this man. Oh,
easily indeed.

This man. Her friend, her better-than-brother. This king’s
companion who had been set on her trail like a hunting hound, whom honor and
duty bound to capture her and carry her back to her death.

That was a torment in him. She, foolish heart, held him all
the closer for knowing that, and tried to kiss the pain away. But that was not
wise—no, not wise at all.

Men, so incited, could be as fierce as stallions. That,
everyone knew. What Sparrow had not known—what she had never expected—was that
a woman could be fiercer.

She should stop. She must stop. He was not struggling, which
surprised her. He must be frozen with shock.

Until she met his eyes, and saw what made her cry out. “You,
too.
You, too!”

They tumbled from the stone onto grass all sere and dry with
winter, where the sun had melted such snow as the wind had not scoured away. It
was surprisingly soft and surprisingly warm. Not that Sparrow cared—the fire in
her was enough to warm a world.

He stared at her, struck dumb perhaps by the sight of a
woman naked in the winter sunlight. Then he touched her as she stooped above
him, tracing the spiral that Old Woman had drawn round about her breast.

She gasped. His touch woke—something. Not desire only. It
was as if, under his hand, the power grew stronger. And as he traced each
intricate and interwoven swirl, it gained in strength, till she was like to
burst with it.

She would burst, unless she did the last thing, the thing
that all this had led to. But she could not do it—she would not—if he was not
willing. If he did not understand.

She stopped his hand as it came to rest above the thicket of
her sex, where the spirals came to their completion. She held it there, cool
against the fire of her body. “Do you love me?” she asked him.

He regarded her in—despair? “With all my heart,” he said.

Her own heart leaped. “Is that truth? Do you swear it?”

“By Earth Mother’s womb,” he said, “it is the truth.”

And then he said, “Do you love me?”

And she understood. As clear as his vision was, this he
could not see. He could not pierce the defenses she had raised about her heart.

He thought she hesitated. His despair deepened. “It doesn’t
matter,” he said. “Whatever you can give—”

She silenced him with her finger on his lips. “Don’t say
that. Don’t think it! How can you doubt that I love you?”

“As a sister,” he said. “As a friend.”

“Surely,” she said. “And more.”

“Not more,” he said. “Don’t lie to me. I’m glad of what I
can have.”

“
I
am not,” she
snapped, “if that’s all you think I’m capable of giving you.”

There: her temper startled him out of his silliness. Not
altogether, maybe, but enough that he began to believe her.

The joy that woke in him then, however tentative, however
uncertain that it dared exist, so brightened his beauty that she blinked,
dazzled. Austere, had she been thinking? Stern, and little given to laughter?
Not this man who lay in the winter grass. He was as light as air, and as
golden-bright as the sun.

She took him so, as a man might take a woman: with both
passion and gentleness. She was braced for the pain. What she had not
expected—what she had not been prepared for—was the sheer white pleasure.