She sighed and stood up, and he stood with her, still holding her. "Yes, well, and I fought. I'll fight again, if I have to. But I've decided that a jahar of envoys is exactly what I want. Eventually, with good enough diplomats, your army won't have to fight at all. Think how many lives that will spare. Ilya, why are you here, anyway?"
He surveyed the field of battle, the square of wagons even now unwinding into the line of march. The last smoke from the pyre dissipated into the cool morning air. ' 'We discovered that a whole unit of khaja soldiers had circled wide around our line and gone back into the hills. Of course we came back, knowing that they might threaten the wagon train. With the line of wagons drawn out so thin along this narrow road, and the rearguard such a distance behind-" He shrugged. "But what were you doing out here, my love?"
"Trying to throw up."
He shook his head, looking perplexed, and cupped her face in his hands. "You aren't well? I was sick the first time I fought in a battle, too."
Tess smiled. "Were you? That gives me hope." She paused and thought back, calculating. She was over two months along, Earth standard. Surely that wasn't too early to know. Aleksi had already guessed. "I'm pregnant."
He let go of her as if she burned him. Then, an instant later, he hugged her so tightly that she could not breathe. She wheezed. He pushed her back, holding her by the shoulders, and just gazed at her. He was alight. He was radiant. He blazed.
"Oh, God," said Tess, "I'd forgotten how insufferably smug you get when you're happy."
He laughed and kissed her, right out there in the open where anyone could see them. "Oh, Tess." That was all. They just stood there for a while, not needing to say anything more.
Beyond, the first of the wagons lurched forward. "I'd better go," said Tess. "Mother Sakhalin doesn't wait for anyone, including me."
"No. You'll ride with me today."
"Will I?" she asked, trying not to laugh at his autocratic tone.
"Yes, you will. If it pleases you to do so, my wife."
"It pleases me to do so, my husband." They went to find their horses.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Diana would never have believed that she could sleep so soundly after living through a battle, but she did. She slept snuggled in between Quinn and Oriana, for comfort, under one of the wagons, for safety, and if she dreamed, she did not recall it in the morning. Anatoly spent all night on guard. In the morning they hitched up the wagons and went on as if nothing untoward had happened: nothing except the lingering ash of the funeral pyre and the mound of khaja dead. She was happy to leave it behind.
And yet, handling the reins of the wagon, she felt-not happy, not that, but valiant. She had seen the worst, she had run out into the line of fire with no weapon but only a shield to protect her, and she had saved lives. Terror had racked her, but she had done it anyway. And the worst terror hadn't been on her own account. The worst had been seeing Anatoly ride out of the protective square of wagons straight into the other army. Had she even breathed between the time of watching him ride away and seeing him return?
All day the wagons rolled on through a narrow valley whose heights rose in stark green relief against the hazy blue of the sky. In the late afternoon they drew up in a broad field that bordered a rushing stream, and the word came down the line that they were allowed to set up tents, for the sake of the wounded. Diana delivered her wagon to a Veselov girl and then walked back along the train to find the Company, to see if Owen intended to rehearse tonight. Although surely even Owen would allow them a break after what had happened yesterday.
She had to stop, though, to stare. Green still, the heights, ragged and steep and falling down to the fiat bed of the valley through which they rode. In the forty days since Anatoly had returned, their road had followed this kind of path: long valleys snaking along river bottoms through the hills and then a sudden ascent over a pass only to dip down again into another green valley. The heat grew stronger each day; perhaps the summer would soon bake the hills brown, but for now, it was beautiful. They had been harried a bit, but yesterday had been the first time a real skirmish had hit the train. Pockets of the basins were dense with cultivated fields and villages, but most of it seemed to be pastureland. The only city she had actually seen had been the ruined Farisa city, but Anatoly assured her that far greater cities, Habakar cities, lay ahead of them.
And there he came, leading his horse along the line of wagons, looking for her.
It was a little embarrassing, how quickly she smiled, seeing him. It was gratifying, how quickly he smiled, seeing her. He loved her. He said so every day, and she believed him. Because it was true. Because a Sakhalin prince had no cause to lie-that much she had learned about the jaran and their various tribes-and because Anatoly wasn't the kind of person who needed or wanted to lie.
He came up to her, glanced around, and thought better of kissing her in public where anyone could see. But his eyes kissed her by the very light that shone in them, and his smile promised more.
"My heart," she said in khush. "You must be tired."
"Not when I see you." Definitely promising more. "My grandmother wants to see you."
If she had actually tripped and fallen, the sudden plunge could not have jarred her more. "But I don't want to see your grandmother," she said without thinking. The old harridan practically haunted her, asking every other day at least about supper arrangements and where Diana's tent was sited in the Company camp. Making sure her precious grandson was being treated with the honor he deserved.
"Diana, I know you don't want to see Grandmother-"
"I have rehearsal tonight. I can't go."
It took him a moment to process that one through. They communicated in a hodgepodge of khush and Rhuian, each gaining more of the other every day, but they still stumbled now and again. He shook his head. "No rehearsal. I ask Mother Yomi. Before I find you."
"Today you asked?"
He nodded emphatically. "Now I asked. Diana, I know you don't want to see Grandmother. She doesn't respect you as she ought to. But this time, I think you should go"
Anatoly was impossible to fight with. He always gave enough ground that she could not stay angry with him, and yet, he always seemed to get what he wanted.
"Why?" she muttered, but already she knew, and he knew, that she was going to agree.
"We will eat. No one, not even Grandmother, can say that you did not act as a good woman in the yadoshtmi."
"Yadoshtmi. Is that a battle?"
"Battle." He thought about it. "No. It was a small thing. Not a battle."
Not a battle. All at once, she remembered being out beyond the wagons, she and Galina, dragging in a wounded jaran soldier, and she had looked to her left in time to see a man clawing at the arrow in his throat and reaching toward her in supplication, pleading, for what-mercy? death? healing? water? — she could not know. And they had gone on and just left him there. She gasped, it was so vivid, and covered her face with her hands, but that only made it worse, because then she saw vultures picking at the heap of khaja dead and heard the little girl sobbing over the body of her dead father.
Anatoly moved. He enclosed her in his arms and held her tight.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, almost incoherent, because she knew that he would be scolded by his grandmother for such behavior in public should anyone report the scene.
He only shook his head against her hair. "It's no shame for you to feel deeply," he murmured into her ear.
"Because I'm a woman?" She said it with anger, because anger was the only place she had to turn to. But she knew him just well enough by now to hear that his silence was one of puzzlement, and that dragged her out of the memory and back to him. She tilted her head back.