Northlight (28 page)

“Now...” Jakon's voice roughened. “Now you come to me with this devil's weapon and you say there are more to come. And worse? When will you have enough? When we are all dead and no one remembers what honor means? When you have laid waste all the north and there is no one left to stand against you?”

Terris couldn't move. His muscles locked and his pulse raced. He tried to draw air into his lungs to speak. But the voice within him had gone silent and he didn't know how to answer.

Was everything he'd learned in Laurea a lie? Everyone had always said the northers were a threat to civilization, the wolf at the gates, the mindless destroyers. No one had ever mentioned the children numb with hunger through the long cold nights.

He lowered his eyes, unable to find words for the feelings that rose up in him.

“Brassaford!”
Kardith's voice split the air like a whipcrack. “What about Brassaford?”

The room leapt into sharp focus — the complex, unreadable symbols of the carpets and hangings, the yellow-streaked blood seeping through the bandages on Etch's arm, the guards with knife scars and weather-grim faces. Jakon whirling with inhuman speed to bring the dagger point to Kardith's throat.

These people are not all innocent victims,
Terris thought, stunned.
And we've been enemies for a long, long time.

The poisoned tip almost touched the dried blood on Kardith's neck. Her pupils dilated, her eyes huge and dark. Jakon's hand quivered, then was still.

“Desperate people,” he said, “do desperate things.”

“Desperate things,” Jakon repeated as he slowly lowered the dagger. He balanced it in his hand, weighing its solidness. His brows drew together but he kept his eyes on Kardith. For a long moment, they stood facing each other, unmoving except for their breathing.

Kardith shimmered in Terris's vision, her body poised and taut. The poisoned dagger lay only an instant from her fingers. Terris was again reminded of a great hunting cat, but this time no blood-filled images rose up behind his eyes. Instead, he saw two glittering figures, a man of fire and a woman of copper and amber, creatures of sun and molten earth, matched in grace and deadliness.

Terris's heart caught in his throat. He'd never seen Kardith as beautiful before.

“Will you swear to keep from harm any living thing among us, man or beast,” Jakon asked her, “to share in our bread and our salt, to honor our holy laws as your own?”

A ritual formula,
Terris thought.
A prisoner's parole? A test? Or some kind of guest code?

Kardith didn't seem to have any doubts about that Jakon meant. “I am a Laurean Ranger,” she said, “and I am your prisoner.”

“And you?” Jakon's eyes sought Etch. The older man, his eyes fever-bright, glanced at Terris, then shook his head.

As Jakon faced him, Terris realized with a start that he was slightly taller than the norther chief, just as he was slightly taller than Kardith. He could feel Etch struggling to stay on his feet and Kardith's eyes on him, waiting. She'd said he wasn't under her protection, and it had made no sense to him at the time. Now he understood what she meant. He was the one who led them. He was the once to choose — and quickly, too, before the moment passed.

The decision was his alone. Kardith and Etch would follow him. The voice at the back of his mind whispered that the future of Laurea might turn on his next words.

But by all the undiscovered gods of Harth, they would be
his
words! Not Esmelda's, not Montborne's, not Pateros's.

His.

“I'll give you my word,” he said. “My word for all of us.”

“How do I know what your word means?” Jakon demanded. “You have no gods, you southers. Your promises are like water, like wind. What can you swear by?”

The gaea-priests would say, By All Grace or The Living Tree. Etch would swear on Harth's sweet ass, Kardith by The Mother.

For me, what?

He could swear on the dagger. He could say,
“I swear by this thing that lies between us, this thing that is as loathsome and despicable to me as it is to you, this thing that violates everything I believe in. I swear by this weapon aimed at the very heart of our world.”

No, he couldn't say that. It was as pompous as anything he'd recited in his dissertation proposal. Jakon would see through it in an instant and laugh in his face.

“You asked me before why I would betray Laurea to tell you about Montborne and his plot,” Terris said. “I wasn't completely honest with you. The truth is that it's Montborne who has betrayed Laurea and everything we stand for. The truth is that I have to stop him — and I need your help to do it. If I must swear by anything, let it be by that truth.”

A ripple of incredulity passed around the assembled northers.

“Need our help? Who are
you
to ask us for anything?”

“I am the son of Esmelda of Laurea.”

Jakon's eyes widened, a fleeting expression of surprise perhaps, or confusion...or amazement. “Es — melda. Ah.” He nodded slightly, as if some great mystery were now made clear. “And what were you, Terricel son of Esmelda of Laurea, doing on our borders? You're not the sort your mother would send to spy on our little trading camp. And you certainly didn't ride all the way here to ask my help in dealing with your renegade general.”

The deep, intuitive force that had carried him along disappeared abruptly, leaving Terris heartsick at his own weakness. Esmelda would never have let Jakon play on her emotions like that or get so carried away by the heat of the moment. But there was nothing he could do to unsay it now.

He lowered his eyes, unwilling to compound his stupidity with an outright lie. “No, I didn't. But the reason I came had nothing to do with you.”

For a long moment Terris couldn't look up. His words echoed, tinny and false-sounding, in his ears. If it had been only his own life he'd thrown away, that was one thing. He'd spoken for all of them. Perhaps for all of Laurea. He had spoken impulsively, without considering...

The next thing he knew, the poisoned dagger was back in its wrappings and Jakon was cutting through his bonds and then Kardith's and Etch's with a small knife from his belt. Terris felt only a tug as the blade sliced through the leather.

A wave of inexpressible relief surged through him, that somehow he'd blundered through the worst crisis of his life. He wanted to shout and cry all at once. The air in the long-house seemed brighter. He flexed his fingers, stiff and swollen. They tingled with the returning circulation.

Suddenly the guards who'd been standing quietly at the doorways moved into position beside Etch and Kardith and held them fast. Another grabbed Terris's arm and twisted it behind him.

“What the hell — ? Jakon, you took my word!”

“Indeed. And if I hadn't, you wouldn't be alive,” Jakon answered quietly. “We norther barbarians don't keep prisoners. Yes, I took your word, but I still don't know what it's worth.”

Jakon nodded toward Etch and Kardith. “Take that one to the healers and have his arm properly tended to. Take
her
to the root cellar. Under guard. If she even
looks
at a knife, set her out in a leaky boat in the middle of the lake and we'll see how well a woman of the Tribes can swim. And as for the cub here, throw him in the hold.”

Terris's vision went red. Air rushed through his lungs, hissing like steam. Blindly, he lunged at Jakon. He didn't think what he was going to do, he just hurled his body forward, jerking his arms to get free. The guard's grasp, which had seemed no more than a light restraint, clamped down on him like a vise. Pain lanced down his arms and back. Any notion of flight or attack vanished instantly. He fought only to breathe, to ease the wrenching leverage on his shoulder joints. Any moment now, they would pop out of their sockets. He could almost feel the ligaments creak and tear.

An instant later, the pressure on one shoulder loosened. The back of his neck was gripped by fingers that were blunt and calloused and iron strong. Carpet and floor and the edges of rough walls blurred past him. His feet stumbled forward of their own accord. His eyes watered and the skin around his mouth went numb.

Suddenly he came to a halt, his feet splayed out like a drunken man's and his vision still cloudy gray. The grip at the back of his neck was gone, leaving a slowly fading throbbing. Behind him, a wooden bar rasped home.

Terris wet his lips and tried a breath, then another. Every muscle in his chest ached. He blinked, bringing the room into better focus. He stood in a storage room lined with shelves and baskets of shiny dark wicker. The room was not nearly as lightless as he'd first thought; open slits for air ran just underneath the low slanting roof. Rounded parcels hung from every rafter, smoked meat, he thought, now that his sense of smell was returning, and skins of dried fruit or fermented grain.

In the center of the room, a space had been cleared for a pallet bed. He sat down on it. The dried fir branches crackled under the blanket of unbleached, tightly woven wool, the needles brittle but still slightly aromatic. Beside the bed sat an empty pot of coarse red clay, decorated with a complicated incised pattern and fired but not glazed, and another, large and wide-mouthed, by the side of the snug-fitting wooden door.

The bar slid back again and the door opened a crack. Terris scrambled to his feet, too slow to reach it before it closed again. A pot half full of water had been shoved inside, along with a bowl of steamed barley.

The water was cold and Terris found himself surprisingly thirsty. Hungry, too, for the chewy nut-like grain. As he finished it and then drained the last of the water, he realized how easily either could have been drugged. Or poisoned. Jakon had picked up the fake dagger by the hilt, knowing the same thing.

Terris spent the next hour trying to analyze the norther people, but he derived little comfort in the exercise. His imagination kept straying to increasingly uncomfortable visions of what lay in store for Kardith, for Etch, for himself. The University and everything else in Laureal City seemed very far away.

He spent the second hour prowling the room and thinking of all the ways he could make weapons from the materials at hand, and the third hour talking himself out of it.

Putting him here, in this storage room that was far from secure, was a test. It must be. There was no need for immediate or desperate action. Jakon had accepted Terris's word enough to not kill them immediately, and Etch was being given some kind of medical care.

What would he do if he escaped, anyway? The first norther he encountered would have no trouble recapturing him, and then the situation would be even worse for all of them. Eventually, reason won out over panic. He sat back down to wait for what would come next.

He didn't have to wait much longer. The wooden bar slid back, and outside stood the same guard who'd shoved him in here earlier, the dour-faced norther who'd led the capture party. He carried a short, barb-headed spear.

“Your friend's wound has gone bad,” the norther said. “The healer says it's too close to the body and cutting off the arm won't help. Jakon asks if you can use your souther medicines.”

Terris got to his feet.
Please god — any god — it's not too late.
“The supplies are in my travel pack.”

“It waits for you in the healer's tent.”

Terris emerged into the quickly chilling shadows of the fir trees. The storage room that had been his prison was in a series of subdivided chambers taking up one end of the long-house. Beside it stood several low, wide tents and a huge outdoor cooking pit, from which blue smoke and tantalizing odors curled upward. Beyond the edge of the clearing, the few tents and log structures were smaller, half-hidden in the spaces between the trees.

The healer's dwelling was a combination of tent and cabin. Coarse woolen fabric, draped like the walls of a tent, lined the rough-cut log walls. Terris ducked his head to avoid the slanting roof as he entered. Inside, the temperature was noticeably warmer.

Screens of stretched hide panels, richly decorated, separated off a little alcove where Etch lay on a pallet. Beside him squatted an old man in pale gold elkskins several sizes too big for him. He tested the pulse at the side of Etch's neck and did not look up as the norther guard stood back for Terris to approach.

Etch's chest and shoulders were bare, but blankets covered the rest of his body. His arm had been bandaged with a fresh-smelling herbal poultice. Fiery red streaks stretched along his skin from the wound toward his heart.

Terris knelt and touched Etch's hand. The skin was hot and papery dry. Etch did not respond. His eyes stayed closed, his breathing fast and shallow.

“Is he dying?” Terris said.

The healer looked at him with pale blue eyes, alert and piercing. Terris realized he wasn't as old as he'd first assumed. His apparent age was an effect of the premature wrinkling of his skin and his extreme thinness.

“There is nothing more I can do for him.” There was a slight, almost bitter emphasis on the word
I.
“I have cleaned the wound of dead and rotten tissue, but...” He indicated the low shelf along the wall screen, with its row of small pottery cups of mashed herbs and dark brown liquids, covered baskets, waterskins in wicker frames. “All my herbs can do is give his body a chance to heal itself.”

The travel pack lay at the foot of Etch's pallet. Terris grabbed it and yanked open the main pouch. He thrust his fingers inside the protective inner pocket. It must have been thoroughly searched for the poisoned dagger to be found and yet everything else, with the exception of his cooking knife, was neatly in its place. Money, clothing, food. A flat box of stiffened leather, the first-aid kit.

Each item in the kit had been wrapped in layers of oiled silk to keep out moisture. There were small vials of water purification tablets, fever and inflammation reducers, disinfectant, bandages, sutures. Yes, there they were, two packets of bacteriostats effective against common infections and a pressure syringe of concentrated broad-spectrum bactericides, powerful drugs that would kill every circulating pathogen within a few hours. Like any other educated Laurean, Terris had been taught how to use them.