The Oathbound (2 page)

Then the raiders had come upon the Clan; and all that carefree life was gone in an instant beneath their swords.

Tarma’s eyes stung again. Even full revenge couldn’t take away the ache of losing them, all, all-

In one candlemark all that Tarma had ever known or cared about had been wiped from the face of the earth.

“What price your blood, my people? A few pounds of silver? Goddess, the dishonor that your people were counted so
cheaply!”

The slaughter of Tale‘sedrin had been the more vicious because they’d taken the entire Clan unawares and unarmed in the midst of celebration; totally unarmed, as Shin’a‘in seldom were. They had trusted to the vigilance of their sentries.

But the cleverest sentry cannot defeat foul magic that creeps upon him out of the dark and smothers the breath in his throat ere he can cry out.

The brigands had not so much as a drop of honorable blood among them; they knew had the Clan been alerted they’d have had stood the robbers off, even outnumbered as they were, so the bandits’ hired mage had cloaked their approach and stifled the guards. And so the Clan had fought an unequal battle, and so they had died; adults, oldsters, children, all....

“Goddess, hold them—” she whispered, as she did at least once each day. Every last member of Tale‘sedrin had died; most had died horribly. Except Tarma. She
should
have died; and unaccountably been left alive.

If you could call it living to have survived with everything gone that had made life worth having. Yes, she had been left alive—and utterly, utterly alone. Left to live with a ruined voice that had once been the pride of the Clans, with a ravaged body, and most of all, a shattered heart and mind. There had been nothing left to sustain her but a driving will to wreak vengeance on those who had left her Clanless.

She pulled a brush from an inside pocket of her coat, and began needlessly grooming Kessira while the mare ate. The firm strokes across the familiar chestnut coat were soothing to both of them. She had been left Clanless, and a Shin‘a’in Clanless is one without purpose in living. Clan is everything to a Shin‘a’in. Only one thing kept her from seeking oblivion and death-willing herself, that burning need to revenge her people.

But vengeance and blood-feud were denied the Shin‘a’in—the ordinary Shin‘a’in. Else too many of the people would have gone down on the knives of their own folk, and to little purpose, for the Goddess knew Her people and knew their tempers to be short. Hence, Her law. Only those who were the Kal‘enedral of the Warrior—the Sword Sworn, outClansmen called them, although the name
meant
both “Children of Her Sword” and “Her Sword-Brothers” —could cry blood-feud and take the trail of vengeance. That was because of the nature of their Oath to Her—
first
to the service of the Goddess of the New Moon and South Wind,
then
to the Clans as a whole, and only after those two to their own particular Clan. Blood-feud did not serve the Clans if the feud was between Shin’a‘in and Shin’a‘in; keeping the privilege of calling for blood-price in the hands of those by their very nature devoted to the welfare of the Shin’a‘in as a whole kept interClan strife to a minimum.

“If it had been you, what would you have chosen, hmm?” she asked the mare. “Her Oath isn’t a light one.” Nor was it without cost—a cost some might think far too high. Once Sworn, the Kal‘enedral became weapons in Her hand, and not unlike the sexless, cold steel they wore. Hard, somewhat aloof, and totally asexual were the Sword Sworn—and this, too, ensured that their interests remained Hers and kept them from becoming involved in interClan rivalry. So it was not the kind of Oath one involved in a simple feud was likely to even consider taking.

But the slaughter of the Tale‘sedrin was not a matter of private feud or Clan against Clan—this was a matter of more, even, than personal vengeance. Had the brigands been allowed to escape unpunished, would that not have told other wolf-heads that the Clans were not invulnerable—would there not have been another repetition of the slaughter ? That may have been Her reasoning; Tarma had only known that she was able to find no other purpose in living, so she had offered her Oath to the Star-Eyed so that she could pledge her life to revenge her Clan. An insane plan—sprung out of a mind that might be going mad with grief.

There were those who thought she was
already
mad, who were certain She would accept no such Oath given by one whose reason was gone. But much to the amazement of nearly everyone in the Clan Liha‘irden who had succored, healed, and protected her, that Oath had been accepted. Only the shamans had been unsurprised.

She had never in her wildest dreaming guessed what would come of that Oath and that quest for justice.

Kessira finished the pile of provender, and moved on to tear hungrily at the lank, sere grasses. Beneath the thick coat of winter hair she had grown, her bones were beginning to show in a way that Tarma did not in the least like. She left off brushing, and stroked the warm shoulder, and the mare abandoned her feeding long enough to nuzzle her rider’s arm affectionately.

“Patient one, we shall do better by you, and soon,” Tarma pledged her. She left the mare to her grazing and went to check on Kethry’s mule. That sturdy beast was capable of getting nourishment from much coarser material than Kessira, so Tarma had left him tethered amid a thicket of sweetbark bushes. He had stripped all within reach of last year’s growth, and was straining against his halter with his tongue stretched out as far as it would reach for a tasty morsel just out of his range.

“Greedy pig,” she said with a chuckle, and moved him again, giving him a bit more rope this time, and leaving his own share of grain and foraged weeds within reach. Like all his kind he was a clever beast; smarter than any horse save one Shin‘a’in-bred. It was safe enough to give him plenty of lead; if he tangled himself he’d untangle himself just as readily. Nor would he eat to foundering, not that there was enough browse here to do that. A good, sturdy, gentle animal, and even-tempered, well suited to an inexperienced rider like Kethry. She’d been lucky to find him.

His tearing at the branches shook snow down on her; with a shiver she brushed it off as her thoughts turned back to the past. No, she would never have guessed at the changes wrought in her life-path by that Oath and her vow of vengeance.

“Jel‘enedra,
you think too much. It makes you melancholy.”

She recognized the faintly hollow-sounding tenor at the first word; it was her chief sword-teacher. This was the first time he’d come to her since the last bandit had fallen beneath her sword. She had begun to wonder if her teachers would ever come back again.

All of them were unforgiving of mistakes, and quick to chastise—this one more than all the rest put together. So though he had startled her, though she had hardly expected his appearance, she took care not to display it.

“Ah?” she replied, turning slowly to face him. Unfair that he had used his other-worldly powers to come on her unawares, but he himself would have been the first to tell her that life—as she well knew—was unfair. She would not reveal that she had not detected his presence until he spoke.

He had called her “younger sister,” though, which was an indication that he was pleased with her for some reason. “Mostly you tell me I don’t think enough.”

Standing in a clear spot amid the bushes was a man, garbed in fighter’s gear of deepest black, and veiled. The ice-blue eyes, the sable hair, and the cut of his close-wrapped clothing would have told most folk that he was, like Tarma, Shin‘a’in. The color of the clothing would have told the more knowledgeable—since most Shin‘a’in preferred a carnival brightness in their garments—that he, too, was Sword Sworn; Sword Sworn by custom wore only stark black or dark brown. But only one very sharp-eyed would have noticed that while he stood amid the snow, he made no imprint upon it. It seemed that he weighed hardly more than a shadow.

That was scarcely surprising since he had died long before Tarma was born.

“Thinking to plan is one case; thinking to brood is another,” he replied. “You accomplish nothing but to increase your sadness. You should be devising a means of filling your bellies and those of your
jel‘suthro’edrin.
You cannot reach the Plains if you do not eat.”

He had used the Shin‘a’in term for riding beasts that meant “forever-younger-Clanschildren.” Tarma was dead certain he had picked that term with utmost precision, to impress upon her that the welfare of Kessira and Kethry’s mule Rodi were as important as her own—more so, since they could not fend for themselves in this inhospitable place.

“With all respect, teacher, I am ... at a loss. Once I had a purpose. Now?” She shook her head. “Now I am certain of nothing. As you once told me—”

“Li‘sa’eer!
Turn my own words against me, will you?” he chided gently. “And have you
nothing?”

“My
she‘enedra.
But she is outClan, and strange to me, for all that the Goddess blessed our oath-binding with Her own fire. I know her but little. I—only—”

“What, bright blade?”

“I wish—I wish to go home—” The longing she felt rose in her throat and made it hard to speak.

“And so? What is there to hinder you?”

“There is,” she replied, willing her eyes to stop stinging, “the matter of money. Ours is nearly gone. It is a long way to the Plains.”

“So? Are you not now of the mercenary calling?”

“Well, unless there be some need for blades hereabouts—the which I have seen
no
evidence for, the only way to reprovision ourselves will be if my
she‘enedra
can turn her skill in magic to an honorable profit. For though I have masters of the best,” she bowed her head in the little nod of homage a Shin’a‘in gave to a respected elder, “sent by the Star-Eyed herself, what measure of attainment I have acquired matters not if there is no market for it.”

“Hai‘she’li!
You should market that silver tongue,
jel‘enedra!”
he laughed. “Well, and well. Three things I have come to tell you, which is why I arrive out-of-time and not at moonrise. First, that there will be storm tonight, and you should all shelter, mounts and riders together. Second, that because of the storm, we shall not teach you
this
night, though you may expect our coming from this day on, every night that you are not within walls.”

He turned as if to leave, and she called out, “And third?”

“Third?” he replied, looking back at her over his shoulder. “Third—is that everyone has a past. Ere you brood over your own, consider another’s.”

Before she had a chance to respond, he vanished, melting into the wind.

Wrinkling her nose over that last, cryptic remark, she went to find her
she‘enedra
and partner.

Kethry was hovering over a tiny, nearly smokeless fire, skinning a pair of rabbits. Tarma almost smiled at the frown of concentration she wore; she was going at the task as if she were being rated on the results! They were a study in contrasts, she and her outClan blood-sister. Kethry was sweet-faced and curvaceous, with masses of curling amber hair and startling green eyes; she would have looked far more at home in someone’s court circle as a pampered palace mage than she did here, at their primitive hearth. Or even more to the point, she would not have looked
out
of place as someone’s spoiled, indulged wife or concubine; she really looked nothing at all like any mage Tarma had ever seen. Tarma, on the other hand, with her hawklike face, forbidding ice-blue eyes and nearly sexless body, was hardly the sort of person one would expect a mage or woman like Kethry to choose as a partner, much less as a friend. As a hireling, perhaps—in which case it should have been
Tarma
skinning the rabbits, for
she
looked to have been specifically designed to endure hardship.

Oddly enough, it was Kethry who had taken to this trip as if she were the born nomad, and Tarma who was the one suffering the most from their circumstances, although that was mainly due to the unfamiliar weather.

Well, if she had not foreseen that becoming Kal‘enedral meant suddenly acquiring a bevy of long-dead instructors, this partnership had come as even more of a surprise. The more so as Tarma had really not expected to survive the initial confro nta tion with those who had destroyed her Clan.

“Do not reject aid unlooked-for,” her instructor had said the night before she set foot in the bandits’ town. And unlooked-for aid had materialized, in the form of this unlikely sorceress. Kethry, too, had her interests in seeing the murderers brought low, so they had teamed together for the purpose of doing just that. Together they had accomplished what neither could have done alone—they had utterly destroyed the brigands to the last man.

And so Tarma had lost her purpose. Now—now there was only the driving need to get back to the Plains; to return before the Tale‘sedrin were deemed a dead Clan. Farther than that she could not, would not think or plan.

Kethry must have sensed Tarma’s brooding eyes on her, for she looked up and beckoned with her skinning knife.

“Fairly good hunting,” Tarma hunched as close the fire as she could, wishing they dared build something large.

“Yes and no. I had to use magic to attract them, poor things.” Kethry shook her head regretfully as she bundled the offal in the skins and buried the remains in the snow to freeze hard. Once frozen, she’d dispose of them away from the camp, to avoid attracting scavengers. “I felt so guilty, but what else was I do to? We ate the last of the bread yesterday, and I didn’t want to chance on the hunting luck of just one of us.”

“You do what you have to, Keth. Well,
we’re
able to live off the land, but Kessira and Rodi can‘t,” Tarma replied. “Our grain is almost gone, and we’ve still a long way to go to get to the Plains. Keth, we need money.”

“I know.”

“And you’re the one of us best suited to earning it. This land is too peaceful for the likes of me to find a job—except for something involving at least a one-year contract, and that’s something we can’t afford to take the time for. I need to get back to the Plains as soon as I can if I’m to raise Tale‘sedrin’s banner again.”