Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses) (35 page)

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Authors: Sharon Shinn

BOOK: Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses)
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“Tonight, I don’t think you have to be a wild creature or an impressionable mystic to sense Senneth’s mood,” Kirra said.
It was too hot in here—too close—she couldn’t breathe. “I’m going outside for a while,” Senneth said, and headed for the door. Behind her she heard Justin ask, “I suppose we post a guard tonight,” and Tayse reply dryly, “I suppose we do.”
Outside, the frosty air was not even remotely cold enough to chill her blood. She wanted to find a river of winter ice and throw herself through the hard surface into the sluggish, frigid water below. Her skin was so hot she would turn the whole creek to steam; she would fill the whole forest with fog.
Her skin was so hot she might catch these harmless woods on fire just by brushing against a bare tree limb or setting her foot carelessly on a pile of withered leaves.
She pushed through the undergrowth, paying little attention to where she was going, trying only to put some distance between herself and the barn, herself and all living creatures.
Gods,
but her head screeched in agony; she wanted to reach up and rip it from her shoulders, toss it aside like a toxic ball. She knew from bitter experience that once the fire receded from her veins, leaving her spent and powerless, her head would feel even worse.
Hard as that was to imagine.
Suddenly, in the middle of her heedless charge away from the settlement, she was too weary to take another step. She sank to the ground right where she stood, by chance landing on a soft pile of pine needles, and pulled herself into the smallest possible shape. She hated them all, these smug, stupid, self-righteous townsfolk who dared to declare themselves better than someone else—dared to pretend their religion, their humanity, their bone structure made them right and everyone else wrong. Dared to say, “You’re different, and you deserve to die.” Well, she was different, and she would show them who deserved death.
She pulled her knees up and laid her cheek on the curved bones, cradling her head in her arms. But the problem was, she did not believe in exercising the power in her body to carry out such sentences. How was she any more capable of judging good and evil, of meting out punishment and reward, than these grim, fearful, and arrogant men? She hated them, but they hated her; maybe she was the canker, the witch, the atrocity they believed. And if she was not what they thought her—if she was not evil—she could not give in to evil impulses. She could not kill them all from a sense of vengeance. She could not allow herself to be guilty of such crimes. She did not want to be either as terrible as they thought her or as merciless as she thought them.
She had merely wanted to save that girl’s life.
“Senneth.”
Cammon’s voice—Cammon who had found her without, she was sure, a single misstep. Without looking up, she said sharply, “Don’t touch me. My skin will burn you.”
“We won’t touch you,” said a second voice, and that one did make her lift her head.
Tayse.
She stared at them, just shadows in the dark, the one solid and hulking, the other slim and fluid. “Go away,” she said, but she was too tired to put any threat in her voice.
Cammon squatted down beside her, but Tayse remained standing. “You can’t stay out here,” Tayse said. “We need to set a watch, and we can only guard one perimeter.”
She could not keep the edge from her voice. “And you really think one of them has the power to hurt me?”
“I think, when your anger fades, you’re going to feel like five kinds of hell,” Cammon said. “Give me your hands.”
She crossed her arms, tucking her fingers next to her ribs. “No. I’m not safe to touch.”
“You’re safe to touch
me,
” he said and held his palms out.
She gazed at him a moment, trying to read him in the dark, catching only glimpses of that smooth face and those flecked eyes. He was so young, and he didn’t have any idea what the limits of his own abilities were, and she had never, in her seventeen years of wandering, encountered any mystic with a power to equal her own. But he had made so few mistakes since she had met him; he had such calm confidence. And she wanted nothing so much as to siphon off the rage and magic circling through her veins, and lay her head down, and sleep.
Cautiously, she put her hands out and let them rest, just touching his. He winced, but barely, and before she could pull back, his fingers closed over hers. He was like cold starlight on a solstice night, like frost on a limitless field of sere grass. She closed her eyes and stepped into a cave of ice and crystal. Her body radiated waves of heat and fury but could not disturb the perfect black, the eternal chill, of that lightless cavern. Her pulse slowed, and her fever burned lower—and just like that, her veins were emptied of fire.
She opened her eyes and stared at him, glad he could not see her expression in the dark. Or maybe he could—or maybe he did not need to see her face to know what it showed. “How did you do that?” she whispered.
By his voice, she could tell he was smiling. “Something Aleatha taught me,” he said. “I didn’t think to have a chance to use it so soon.”
“And your hands?” she said. “I didn’t harm you?”
He released her to show her his palms, though she could see nothing in this light. “Perfectly fine,” he said.
“I’m almost cold,” she said. “I’m never cold.”
Cammon stood up, and Senneth rather shakily followed suit. The poison in her head sloshed from side to side, sending her momentarily off balance. Tayse caught her before she realized she might be falling.
“We’d better get you back,” Cammon said, sounding worried.
“You go back,” Tayse said. “We’ll be there in a minute.”
Senneth nodded, and Cammon turned to fight through the underbrush toward the barn. Now Senneth tried to use the patchy moonlight to read Tayse’s face, but it was even harder to see than Cammon’s. “Thank you,” she said. “I know this was not what you wanted to do tonight.”
She saw his big shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “If I’d seen a bunch of men torturing a dog, or a boy, I’d have pulled my sword and scattered them all,” he said. “Which is more or less the same thing, though my methods aren’t as—spectacular—as yours.”
She smiled, if he could see that, and waited for him to ask the real question. But he was silent. He wanted her to volunteer the story, she realized, and she could just as easily choose to say nothing. But he deserved to know. They all deserved it, and Kirra already knew it, and Cammon may have guessed it, because Cammon could read souls, but Tayse was the only one she would tell.
“When I was seventeen, I had a baby boy,” she said, starting the story with absolutely no preamble. “My father had not known till then that I was mystic—or chose not to know it, since I so rarely came his way, and I was strong enough to control my power until that point. But the baby made me—made me careless, or made me clumsy, I don’t know. And the baby himself was powerful—he came into the world so strong and so angry that the bed caught on fire as he fought from my body. I loved him,” she said, her voice breaking on the words. “He was a bundle of pure rage and beauty, and I never knew that anyone could hold my heart so hard between his two small hands.”
“What happened to him?” Tayse asked.
“When he was two weeks old, my father killed him. Came into the room and strangled him in his cradle.”
There was a moment when she realized she had finally managed to shock the unshockable Tayse.
“It was before I knew how strong I really was, or I might have killed him in return,” Senneth added. “He turned from the cradle and pulled me from my bed, and dragged me down the hall, and threw me out the door. Well, you’ve heard this part of the tale before. My mother hung back, and my older brothers merely watched. But my younger brothers gave me what money they had, and my grandmother gave me this pendant as I was stumbling down the walk. And then she cursed my father, and he died anyway, though not at my hands. I don’t know—some days I’m glad that I didn’t kill him, and some days I’m sorry. I do know that, on my blackest nights, it’s a comfort to me to know he’s dead.”
“If we killed all the unkind people in the world, there would be scarcely anyone left alive,” Tayse said.
“I know.”
“But I am glad you were able to save that baby tonight,” he added.
“Yes,” she said. “I am, too.”
She wanted to say more—she wanted to explain something to him, everything she had thought before, about good and evil and right and wrong and who truly deserved the power of vengeance—but she was so tired. She was so heavy. Her body felt like flaking limestone, solid-seeming but easy to chip apart. She had to get back to the barn, she had to lie down, she had to rest her head on a solid surface, or she would come to pieces right here.
She took a step and nearly fell. Tayse’s hand was on her before she had done more than wobble. “Is it your head?” he asked sharply. “I can put pressure on your back where you showed me before.”
“Yes—my head—but it’s more. I’m so tired,” she stammered. “I just—I have to lie down—”
Without another word, he swept her into his arms and held her to his chest tightly enough to avoid knocking her into overhanging branches as he strode back down toward the barn. She wanted to protest—she wanted to thank him—she found herself incapable of speaking at all. She rested her cheek against the rough cotton of his shirt and surrendered herself to his strength.
T
HEY rode out the next morning right at dawn.
No one had slept well in what few hours they had allowed themselves to rest, and they all knew that, with daylight, the townsmen would find fresh courage. So they rose early, left a few coins in payment, and were on their way before most of the town was astir.
“I’m thinking we might want to avoid all towns from here on out and sleep only in camp,” Tayse said, as they trotted past the last house facing the road.
“Except that the point of our entire trip is to discover the mood of the people,” Kirra said. “Hence, we must observe the people.”
“The mood of the people is rabid-dog mean,” Justin said. “Let’s go back to Ghosenhall with our news.”
Senneth smiled but didn’t add much to the discussion. She was feeling odd today and having a hard time deciding if her reactions were physical or emotional. The headache was gone—and she had the clearest, most vivid memory of the feel of Tayse’s hands, chasing the pain away with brute force—and she was only a little tired. But she felt awkward and almost shy, as if she had thrown a tantrum or otherwise behaved badly, and people around her might eye her askance. She covered her uncertainty with her usual stoic mask, but she didn’t feel like contributing much to the conversation.
“No, I believe it’s Nocklyn for us,” Kirra said, “and maybe a trip to Nocklyn Towers.”
“I’d like to see this place Aleatha talked about,” Tayse said.
“What? The Lumanen Convent?” Kirra asked.
He nodded. “Like to judge how many fighting men have gathered under the banner of the Daughters of the Pale Mother.”
Kirra seemed to ponder that. She looked sideways at Senneth, who didn’t bother to voice an opinion. “It’s an interesting idea,” she said. “Maybe on our way down from Nocklyn.”
Tayse looked at her. “And from Nocklyn we go where?”
Kirra laughed lightly. “Where else?”
He nodded. “Gisseltess.”
To see Halchon Gisseltess. Senneth could hardly wait.
They rode in a tight formation this day, Tayse too worried about repercussions from last night’s episode to send scouts before and behind. There were too many of them to ride all abreast, so as the hours passed they spurred forward and dropped back to fall in line next to varying companions. After an hour or two of riding, when she began to feel more normal, Senneth worked her way to the head of the column, next to Tayse. The other four rode a few yards behind.
“Let me know,” she said, “when you think it is safe enough to send Donnal off hunting.”
He glanced over at her, the expression on his face completely neutral. By the way he treated her, he might have been introduced to her this morning and already forgotten her name. “You think we need fresh meat?” he said. “I thought we had enough provisions to see us through another day or two.”

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