Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses) (26 page)

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Authors: Sharon Shinn

BOOK: Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses)
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CHAPTER 14
 
I
N the morning, they found themselves snowed in. The storm had continued soundlessly but relentlessly throughout the night, and now there was a good five feet of snow piled up all around the small temple.
“Just as well we didn’t try to camp in the open,” Tayse said, peering out the door and measuring the drifts with his eyes. “We’d have been buried.”
“I think we’re here for another day,” Senneth said. She was standing beside him, surveying the white landscape, and she did not sound overjoyed. “Or two.”
Tayse nodded. “Well, we’re safe—we’re warm—we don’t have to worry about going thirsty. I’m not sure how long our food supplies will last, though.”
“Kirra and Donnal can hunt,” she said so casually that for a moment he imagined them going off with traps and bows over their arms. Then he realized what she really meant, and a shiver of distaste ran down his spine.
“What about your pet raelynx?” he asked to conceal his reaction.
She smiled. “I’m not sure I trust it yet to go out killing,” she said. “The longer I can keep its violent instincts in check, the more contented it will stay. I think.”
He turned away from the door. “Whatever you think is best,” he said, and realized it was not a very good answer.
But for the moment, their supplies were adequate, and it was so cold that neither Kirra nor Donnal expressed much interest in taking predator shape and setting out in search of game. That left six people cooped up in a small space with nothing to occupy their time.
“Get out the practice swords,” Tayse said to Justin. “It’s time to do a little training.”
Kirra announcing that she would rather be hacked to pieces by Gisseltess men than ever attempt to learn swordplay, only the five of them spent much of the day engaging in mock combat. There weren’t enough practice blades to go around, and the only ones Tayse trusted to use real weapons were the two Riders, so he and Justin used their own swords and daggers while the others feinted and parried with clumsy wooden versions. Cammon was not so hopeless as Tayse had thought he might be, and for a while Tayse paused to watch the boy as he jousted with Senneth in front of the wall with the painted sun. Senneth was better, of course—Senneth was downright good, with natural-born strength and an excellent sense of her opponent’s techniques—but Cammon seemed to have an uncanny ability to dance out of her reach just before she was about to land a blow. Part of that mystical talent they claimed he had, Tayse supposed—the ability to read the thoughts and desires and plans of the people around him and somehow turn this knowledge to his advantage.
Tayse did not find the thought particularly comfortable.
They switched partners throughout the day, to expose them all to a variety of strengths and weaknesses. To Tayse’s amusement, Justin spent part of the day taking on both Cammon and Donnal at once, expending his furious energy by exhorting them to come at him, don’t be cowards, band together now, boys, and you might have a chance to do me in! But Justin was so very good. Even the two of them together, with their clumsy thrusts and lunges, would have no hope of disabling Justin.
“That leaves me to fight you,” Tayse pointed out to Senneth, and she willingly took up her sword.
“Though I have to say,” she said, “that my whole body is starting to ache. Woeful indeed will be the day I have to fight from sunup to sundown. I think my arm would fall off even before someone sliced me to ribbons.”
“The more you train, the stronger you grow, and the longer you can fight in the field,” he replied. Testing her while he spoke—thrust, feint, pull back, circle, strike. She was quick; her sword was before him every time, though she was not making much effort to attack.
“I cannot imagine ever training hard enough or long enough to be as good as you,” she said, panting just a little.
He grinned. “You have other skills,” he said. “You might combine those with your swordsmanship.”
“I would,” she retorted, “if my goal was to win. Right now my goal is to get better.”
He dropped his sword point to the floor. “Maybe you are the one who should be training me,” he said. “How to fight against magic.”
She lowered her own weapon, leaning gratefully on the wooden sword as if it were a cane. “Interesting idea,” she said thoughtfully. “But I only know my own magics.”
“When we had that skirmish on the road,” he said, “you did something to the swords of the others—turned them too hot to hold. How would I defend against that?”
She considered. “Carry a glove that can withstand great heat,” she suggested. “Such as the cooks wear in the kitchen. You could still hold the hilt and wield it. The blade might be even more dangerous then,” she added with a grin.
“Wait,” he said, and went back to dig through his packs. He had an old pair of leather gloves, clumsy and thick; he wore them to pull down the walls of burning buildings when he wanted to get to enemies inside. He had never tried to wield a sword while wearing them.
Tucking them into his belt, he returned to the place where Senneth waited. “Now,” he said. “If I am your opponent and you want to disable me, how would you fight?”
So they raised their blades again and the metal clashed against wood. Almost instantly, he felt the hilt burn against his hand, so hot a faint glow came off the metal. This was the trick—to toss the blade to his left hand, while with his right he pulled the glove free and slipped it on, all the while feeling the flesh on his other palm blister and peel. All the while parrying her advances. He was as quick as he could be, but he knew she could have done him some serious damage during that interlude if she had been really trying.
The glove on—the sword back in his right hand—awkward but not impossible to lift and swing the blade. Senneth was laughing, spinning in and out of his range, livelier now that she knew he was having some trouble adjusting. He was still stronger than she was and he parried without danger. He was starting to feel a little more confident when a sudden spark of fire against his belly and along his leg caused him to swallow a cry and glance down at his body.
The buckle of his belt glowing like a coal—the dagger in its hilt red with heat.
“Damn,” he muttered. Still fending off her attack, he forced his hand into the second glove and then unbuckled his belt and let it fall. “Does this mean I can’t go into battle with
any
metal anywhere near my skin?”
“If you’re in combat against me,” she said cheerfully. “But I have more tricks than this.”
“Keep them coming,” he said, and drove his hot sword straight toward her body.
Through a sudden wall of fire.
This time he did yelp and leap backward. A thin sheet of flame was suspended between them, and through its coruscating ruby surface he could see her pacing, waiting for him to make his next attack. It was as real as the fire last night; he could feel the heat against his face and throat. Behind him where the others were fighting, he heard all sounds of battle stop. Everyone must be staring in their direction.
“And how do I fight through this?” he asked.
“It depends on how greatly you fear fire,” she said.
“If I leap through it to reach you—what then?”
She laughed. “Then—any number of things. If I was truly afraid and I truly wanted to stop you, I would set you ablaze.”
“You can do that?” he demanded.
She nodded, or he thought he saw her nodding; it was hard to see much through the flames. “Living or dead, a man can burn at my hands,” she said a little grimly.
He dropped his sword point again, and she let the fire die away. “Then I don’t understand why you are so bent on acquiring poor skills like swordsmanship,” he said bluntly.
She held the hilt of her wooden blade in one hand, the tip in the other. “I want to learn every skill,” she said. “Anything that might defend me. Perhaps my enemy will be a mystic, one who can douse my fires as soon as I light them. One whose magic is so much stronger than mine that I will not be able to rely on sorcery. Then I want to be able to run him through the heart with a dagger.” She smiled, to make the words sound less vicious. But he had the sense she was entirely serious. “I want to arm myself with every weapon I can.”
Kirra had drifted over; the others, he saw from the corner of his eye, had also drawn nearer. “There cannot be many mystics with the kind of power you have,” Kirra said.
Senneth looked at her. “It would only take one.”
“And he would have to be your enemy,” Tayse added.
Now she looked at him. “And if he is?”
“You see enemies everywhere,” Justin said.
Her eyes went to him. “And a King’s Rider does not?” she said softly. “Why else are you the best-trained fighters on the continent? I am the King’s Mystic. I must be the best.”
Tayse lifted his sword to salute her. He could feel the tip against his forehead, still hot but cooling. “You are well on your way to that distinction,” he said.
They broke for lunch that Kirra, having nothing else to do, had made for them. Even with all the exercise to distract them, Tayse could tell the group was getting restless. Cammon and Donnal wrestled a bit—here was a skill Donnal was better at than all the others—while the women drew aside and giggled about something.
“We don’t have a basin, though,” Kirra was saying. “And I don’t want to use our camp bucket—”
“I thought I saw an old pitcher over there behind the—the altar, I guess it is,” Senneth said, and they went off to investigate.
Tayse glanced at Donnal, eyebrows raised in a question. “Bathing,” Donnal said. “They’ve decided to melt snow and try to get clean.”
Justin grinned. He was standing by his pack of belongings, sorting through the wooden swords to see if any of them had been nicked or splintered beyond use. “Naked women in a camp,” he drawled. “It’s a sight worth getting snowed in for.”
So quickly Tayse barely saw him move, Donnal leapt across the room and gave Justin a ferocious shove. “You touch her, you even
look
at her, and I will kill you,” the dark man said.
Justin’s dagger was out, half an inch from Donnal’s throat. Donnal stood unmoving, unafraid, staring him down. Behind him, Tayse could hear Kirra’s exclamation, Senneth’s soft footfalls. The raelynx yowled suddenly into the cold silence.
“Go ahead and try it,” Justin said, “if you think you can.”
Donnal’s face flickered from human to bear and back again. “If I want you dead,” Donnal said very softly, “you will be dead.”
It was that long before Tayse could gather his wits and push himself between them, knocking Justin to one side, Donnal to the other. He didn’t see Donnal shift, but he felt the bare whisper of claws along his own arm, an involuntary reaction or a hint of warning, he could not be sure. Then Senneth was there, her arm around Donnal’s neck, dragging him backward with no pretense of gentleness. Tayse turned his attention to Justin, who was still smoldering, and pushed the younger man backward another step with a hard arm to the chest.
“I didn’t start that,” Justin said, furious, his arms up as if he would fight Tayse himself, or at least defend himself against accusation.
“You’re both at fault. You’re both stupid,” Tayse said roughly. “We’re a small group, and we can’t afford to hate each other.”
“I do hate them,” Justin said intensely.
Tayse did not answer, merely kept his gaze, severe and cold, on the other man. After a moment, Justin dropped his eyes.
“All right,” Justin said. “I won’t provoke him.” He looked up. “But I won’t apologize.”
For a moment, for no reason at all, Tayse was transported back ten or twelve days ago, to the camp where Donnal had gotten injured in practice and Senneth had healed him with a touch. To the conversation where Senneth had said to him, “I feel so old.” He had laughed at her then. Now, briefly, he wanted to echo her. So much youth and bravado and undirected energy caged in one small space. He thought for a moment that there must be more important things to fight over; he was a man who had learned to conserve his strength and his hatred.
He finally said, “I don’t think Donnal will apologize either. Just refrain from antagonizing him. And keep your attention on our mission.”

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