No Quarter (8 page)

"Really?" Magda's eyes widened. "Wow." Then she smiled. "But you aren't targeted on me, and you won't be, so you're no danger to me. Right? And besides, you need me. Actually, they're more worried about Gyhard."

"Then the crossbow is less than useless."

"I've always thought so. You should see my father with a mountain bow. Or even my brother." She dropped onto a weathered plank bench with careless grace and patted the place beside her. "But that wasn't what I meant when I said we aren't exactly alone."

Vree turned her face into the breeze, and the breeze moved away to dance across the tops of the flowering mint. "Kigh."

"Uh-huh."

"Can you…"

"Sing them? Nope. I thought you
knew;
I'm not a bard, I'm a healer. Well, I will be a healer. Eventually. They keep saying that I Sing the fifth kigh, but I don't, not
really
. It's more like I
know
the fifth kigh." Her right fist thumped into her chest.

"In
here
and when I reach out, I can touch it. I can't do much with it yet, but I'm learning. My mother says she can hear me Sing while I do it, but I'm not so sure that it's me she's hearing." Kicking off a sandal, she brushed the bottom of her bare foot over the thyme growing between stones of the path. "Why did you expect there'd be more people around?"

Wrinkling her nose against the smell of the crushed herb, Vree sank down onto the bench. If she sat facing Magda, she could keep an eye on the guard with the crossbow. "Everyone thinks you're special."

"Really?" Magda looked pleased, then shifted uneasily. "They weren't supposed to tell you."

"I already knew about the fifth kigh."

"Oh. That."

Vree waited patiently. She was good at waiting, most people weren't. Most people had to do something or say something to fill the time.

After a few moments, the tips of her ears bright red, Magda murmured, "My mother's the king's youngest sister, but you're not supposed to know, so please don't tell them I told you."

*That explains a lot they didn't say,* Gyhard murmured thoughtfully.

*Doesn't it.* "They said your mother is a bard."

"They didn't go on about her, did they? I mean, that's
so
embarrassing."

"No, mostly they
hummed
at me."

Her giggle held as much relief as amusement. "Was it Petrelis? He always hums when he's concentrating. He's leaving on a Long Walk this afternoon, and he wanted to get the shape of a kigh before he left." Pulling a damp curl out of the corner of her mouth, she tucked it behind her ear and grinned. "You don't understand, do you? That's okay. You see," her fingers sketched patterns in the air,

"a fifth kigh is usually an intricate part of the body it wears, everything all mixed up together, and it's really hard to tell where the kigh ends and the body begins. But if you want to do anything with the kigh, it's
really
important to know where the boundaries are. I know, but it's hard to explain it to other people. With you—well, with you and Gyhard—the boundaries are really clear. His kigh is almost completely distinct from you."

"Almost!"

Magda blinked, a little stunned by the near panic in that one word. Her voice gentled. "It's all right." Needing to heal, she reached out to touch Vree's kigh and found herself pushed back.

"No. It isn't all right." Vree turned and stared down at the stone between her feet. "My brother and I nearly lost ourselves in each other. Gyhard and I have to stay separate. I can't go through that again."

"Ah." Magda nodded slowly, understanding dawning. "So
that's
why you're afraid to love him. Nothing tangles two kigh as tightly as love."

"I'm not…" but there wasn't any point in saying it because the girl knew and she'd already made it clear that she thought it was the most romantic thing she'd ever heard of.

*Vree, she's our only chance.*

*For what? Never mind.* Getting angry wouldn't solve anything. Walking away would solve even less. Vree pleated a fold in her wide-legged trousers, her fingers leaving damp prints behind on the fabric. "Look, can we just leave it?"

"Sure, we can leave it. But I want you to know that I only want to help. Really."

"I know." And to her surprise, she did.

*You trust her?* Gyhard sounded as surprised as she felt. *I don't want to discourage this, Vree, but why?*

*Because she isn't afraid of us. Of either of us.*

The Imperial Ambassador to the Court of Shkoder stared at the Imperial sunburst on the packet delivered the night before by the mate of the
Gilded Fancy
and sighed deeply. He hated opening packets that bore the Imperial seal as they invariably contained something unpleasant, but he'd delayed opening this one as long as possible. Taking a last, slow swallow of the orange juice he imported from his sister's estates in the Seventh Province, he pushed the dishes from a late lunch aside and picked at the golden wax with one gleaming fingernail.

"I hate unpleasantness," he murmured. There had been trade difficulties of late between Shkoder and the Empire. Shkoder had been complaining for some time that the much larger country to their south had been flooding their market with cheap iron. The complaints had become more forceful, and something was going to have to be done—the Empire had no desire to cut exports. The very nature of the Empire insisted it had to keep expanding, one way or another.

"I hate trade." The ambassador sighed deeply as he broke the seal. "It's such a lousy reason to start a war. If I'm really lucky, this will be nothing more than another Imperial kidnapping."

The details of Prince Otavas' abduction had been under the last golden sunburst he'd received. He'd been informed only because a Shkoden bard had been involved.

He read the thick parchment packet twice.

The Empire had sent an assassin into Shkoder and not just any assassin, but one of the two who'd recently rescued His Imperial Highness and been released from her oaths as a result.

Technically, she was no longer an assassin.

Nor did she think she'd been sent.

She was staying with the bards.

"And just what exactly am I supposed to do with this information?" he asked himself, wondering why everything in Shkoder always seemed to come back to the bards.

When Bannon had shared her head, it had been difficult to find where her thoughts ended and her brother's thoughts began. Their shared lives had created a tangle of hers and his and theirs. Thinking about it afterward, she'd been surprised that Bannon had been able to pull free so easily when the chance came to return to his body. Thinking about
that
later still, during the long days she'd spent wandering the confines of the bardic suite in the Imperial Palace, she realized Bannon had always known which parts were him. Why shouldn't he? She'd defined him all their lives.

Gyhard was different. He was always there, but he never tried to be where she was. She could think around him and be reasonably certain he wouldn't become tangled in the thoughts.

Tucked into the thick window embrasure, Vree stared out over the Citadel wall and down at the city, her hands busy with a dagger and whetstone, needing no guidance after so many edges. If she wanted to leave, they couldn't keep her. She was small enough to fit out of the window, and the jump to the top of the wall—her lip curled—would be less than challenging. The wall itself would be ridiculously easy to descend.

And then what?

Until Gyhard, Bannon had been the one person in her life. There was the army

—a living, breathing, single creature—there were targets, and there was Bannon.

Occasionally, bits of the army would become more separate than other bits—Emo had almost become a person—but it never lasted. Anyone outside the army was lumped under "other" and forgotten.

She'd had to notice Gyhard; he'd been wearing Bannon's body. Then there'd suddenly been Karlene, just when she needed a hand and Bannon's no longer reached for her. Now, there was Magda, who so desperately wanted to help she was next to impossible not to trust. Three people to take the place of Bannon and an army___

From a room higher in the four-story building, Vree could hear a voice lifted in song. From the other end of her floor, two instruments clashed, sorted themselves out, and began to make music. A breeze lifted her hair off her forehead, and Vree slipped down off the windowsill and inside. If the bards were going to watch her with the kigh, she wasn't going to make it easy for them.

Slipping the dagger into its sheath, Vree caught sight of her reflection in the blade and suddenly wondered if the sifting of her past originated with her or with Gyhard. Was it the situation that drove her to self-discovery or was it him?

*Hey.*

*Hey, what?* he answered and her awareness of his presence grew.

*Are you messing around in my head?*

*I wouldn't think of it.* She saw the memory of his smile as he spoke. Bannon's smile. No. Bannon's face. Gyhard's smile. *I'm leaving everything exactly as I found it.*

*Liar.*

The bittersweet sense of inevitability accompanying that single word closed off further conversation.

There were a number of things Gyhard wanted to say, but he couldn't, not without letting Vree know that he had access to more of her thoughts than she realized. Perhaps her need to consolidate her identity did come from him, he had no way of being sure.

He'd seen a man once who'd fallen from a bridge and broken his neck. Against all odds he'd lived, even though the closest thing around to a healer was the village midwife. The man could see and hear and speak, but he couldn't move or do anything with the body he wore. Gyhard had wondered at the time how he'd kept from going mad.

He found himself wondering it again.

The bardic touching, the tracing of his boundaries, had left him restless.

Strengthening his sense of self was quite probably the most dangerous thing they could do. He wanted…

He wanted Vree. To hold her. To love her. To be held by her. To be loved by her.

He wanted them to be able to make a future together. Whether death would eventually have a part in that future, he wasn't sure.

It had been enough just to be with her.

Had been. Now, he wanted a body of his own.

And this is after only one day of poking about at us
. Carefully, he reached out and touched Vree's memory of the moment she dragged him back from oblivion.

She'd been willing at that instant to do anything rather than lose him. He was trying very hard to do the same.

"Well, can you do it?"

Magda carefully anchored the scroll she'd been studying, one hand resting lightly on a faded line drawing of a caraway plant. Talent made up only a very small part of being a healer and healer's apprentices spent a lot of their evenings in the library. She twisted lithely until she could look the Bardic Captain in the face. "I'm not even sure I know what it is I'm supposed to do."

"Find the abom… Gyhard a body with no one dying to provide it."

"Uh-huh. And how am I supposed to do that?"

Liene scowled, drummed her fingers against the head of her cane, and finally stomped away.

Magda shook her head and went back to her reading. It was a good thing both her mother and Stasya had warned her that the old woman's bark was worse than her bite. Although Stasya
had
pointed out that Liene still had all her teeth.

They'd warned her about a number of other things as well, but she'd happily disregarded most of them.

Sighing, Magda brushed a curl away from her face. "A body without a kigh is a dead body and I can't just shove his kigh into a dead body." She made a disgusted moue at the thought. From the mice the cats used to leave on the steps of the keep to those the healers had not been able to save, dead bodies were
not
among her favorite things.

The pass between Shkoder and the Empire looked as though a giant had carved it out of the Smitts Mountains with a knife. Sheer rock walls rose up on either side of a broad passage years of use had made as easy to travel as any lowland road.

Long before the current king's grandmother had convinced their due to join the kingdom, the miners of the mountain principality of Somes had traded iron ore with the First Province of the Empire through that pass, picks and shovels amending what nature began.

As Jazep approached the guard tower on the Shkoder side, he could just barely make out through the early morning haze the Empire's sunburst flying next to the crowned ship at the midpoint of the pass.

Two of the three guards came hurrying out to meet him.

"Jazep? Is that you?"

A huge smile split the bard's grizzled beard. "Nastka! I was wondering why I hadn't seen you in town!"

"Now you know." Tossing her helm to her companion, she returned his hug with equal enthusiasm, leather armor creaking. "What brings you up here? Not crossing surely? We had two of those Imperial fledglings up here during my last shift. Who was with them? I know, Tesia. She took them to the halfway point and said she was letting them feel the difference you get in earth kigh when you're standing on your own soil. She wasn't kidding me, was she?"

"No. The kigh can always tell when you've come home." He shifted his feet and his smile faded. "I backtracked a disturbance in the kigh to the pass."

"Do tell." Nastka retrieved her helm. "Trouble?"

Jazep shrugged. "I don't know. Troubling. It's almost as if they're afraid."

"The kigh? Afraid? I don't like the sound of that."

"No, neither do I." He turned and looked toward the Empire. "Can you remember what and who came through five days ago?"

"I can do better than that. Mila—oh, this is Mila, by the way." The second guard nodded shyly. "It's her first shift at the pass. Jakub's up at the beacon. You remember him, skinny guy with too much red hair?"

"I remember."

"Of course you do. Mila, go get the lists." As the younger woman ran back to the tower, Nastka grinned proudly. "Due's seeing to it that everyone in the guard can read and write."

Jazep had actually heard that from the Due of Somes herself, but the disturbance in the kigh had driven it right out of his mind. "Her Grace has a lot of good ideas."