Death’s-head pranced by below, head and tail up, blood spiraling down both of his horns. Hopefully he was killing the right people.
Jame reached into the melee and pulled out Prid. “Da said that they’re after Gran Cyd. Come on.”
The children unraveled, leaving a mangled something on the ground, and streamed after her.
The Merikit queen stood before her lodge, a long-bladed knife in either hand, red-gold hair flying free. Her festival robe was slashed in a dozen places, her white arms streaked with blood. Noyat swarmed around her, darting in and out to strike or to be stricken. Half a dozen lay groaning or silent at her feet.
The children whooped and descended. Thin arms and legs wrapped around brawny limbs, tangled, and pulled them down. Someone screamed piercingly. Jame used wind-blowing to slide through the chaos, afraid to use her weapons without a clear target. Back to back with the queen, she shook down her short blade for maximum effect and waited.
Not for long. A big Noyat charged her with a spear, counting on its superior length. She parried it with one blade and hacked it short with the other. The Noyat looked very surprised, even more so when her return strike slashed his throat.
At her back, Gran Cyd was hard pressed. Her opponent had bulled his way inside her guard and locked knives with her. Jame lowered her scythe-arms and stabbed backward. The spurs passed on either side of the queen’s waist and buried themselves in her attacker’s belly. For a moment, all three of them were locked together. Here came another Noyat. Jame kicked him back with both feet. The impaled raider screamed as her weight dragged the spurs downward, disemboweling him.
Shrieking, the children’s mothers arrived, armed with whatever their lodges could supply. Men’s curses turned to howls. Pots, pans, and kitchen cleavers flashed in the firelight, adding their metallic clang to the general uproar. One man with a pot jammed on his head reeled back and forth as the women beat on it with soup ladles. Suddenly, the invaders were running. The dead they left behind, the rest they dragged with them. Jame saw the man with the scarred lip glance back at her, hatred in his eyes, and then he was gone.
“Well.” Gran Cyd sat down and surveyed her troops. “Well.”
Jame sank down beside her, panting. “Very much so, I think, all things considered. You Merikit do know how to throw a party.”
More shouts brought them to their feet, but it was only Chingetai returning victorious from the hunt.
The dawn of Winter’s Day came in a luminous wash across the sky.
On the east bank of the Silver on top of two hillocks, two fires burned, pale in the descending light, hot and hungry below where the night burned away.
Men danced around the northern fire where their enemies—both the dead and the dying—burned. A great victory, they cried, and a no less glorious hunt. All would eat well that coming winter. As for the Noyat, now they would know that the Merikit were no easy pickings. If they came again, they came to find another pyre.
A quieter group of women gathered around the southern fire, some weeping, others stony-faced, surrounded by silent children. If these flames rose higher, it was because their tinder was drier.
“The dead have lost the last breath of life.” Gran Cyd tossed a handful of fragrance herbs on the blaze. “Faithful to the tribe in life, no less loyal have they proved in death. We mourn their final passing. We will never forget them.”
Soft voices called out their names, each family remembering their own.
It was like Autumn’s Eve, Jame thought. She didn’t belong here—and yet, oddly, she did. They had all fought in the same cause, to protect the innocent, although it seemed strange to think of Prid and her sisters that way with their enemies’ blood proudly painted on their faces. She understood that they were still too young officially to claim their kills.
“Sit,” said Gran Cyd, and Jame gratefully sank onto the stool that someone had provided. It had been a long night.
She felt fingers on her hair and jerked awake. The queen was loosening her braid. “How many did you kill?”
Jame tried to remember. Only the Noyat whom she had eviscerated came to mind. Surely there had been more.
Gran Cyd combed out her long hair and began to divide it. “Add to that the ones accounted for by your rathorn,” she said, as if Jame had spoken, “and the dead whom the lodge-wyves and the children can’t. Add my own; I have too many braids already.”
Ma presented her with a brimming bowl of Noyat blood, turned dark and gelid. Jame made herself sit still as Gran Cyd braided each left-hand plait, then slathered it with the greasy fluid.
“Twenty. A good night’s work. And no, after the first time you don’t have to plaster it this way. But wear these braids anywhere on Rathillien and we of the hills will know what they mean.”
“Thank you. I think.” Would the randon at Tentir also know, or the Mount Alban scrollsmen? If so, ancestors only knew how they would regard her night out.
“And this too I tell you, Favorite.” The queen bent to speak softly in her ear, with a laugh in her voice. “We are all agreed: any child conceived on this Winter’s Day or Night will also be credited to you, and worth a right-hand braid each. Let Chingetai chew on that!”
XVI
Gothregor and Tentir
The Jaran Matriarch Trishien paced back and forth in her empty apartment, hands thrust into her pockets against the chill, her breath clouding the air. All her boxes were packed and gone, those containing books and scrolls far outnumbering all others. She herself was clad for travel with cloak and divided skirt—the last something she would never have worn if the other matriarchs hadn’t long since gone home.
Snow drifted in an open window to lie in rills on the sill and the floor. Perhaps she should have sealed up the suite of rooms, but nothing would be left in it. Trishien had a horror of fusty furniture, the smell, the feel of it. Better to take everything and leave the rooms open to winter’s cleansing breath. Ah, but it was cold.
A knock on the door. Her heart leaped, but it was only the captain of her guard.
“The morning is passing, lady.”
“I know. Just a few minutes more.”
What if Torisen didn’t come? In the past, she hadn’t needed to summon him: he had just dropped in, literally, through the window. Was that in part why she had left it open now? She had waited days, weeks, half a season for the Highlord to visit her after his trip north. At least he had returned Aerulan to her true home and, some said, clashed with Brenwyr in the process. She would dearly like to know what had happened that had left them both relatively unscathed.
Trishien paused in her stride: was it truly the desire to know, or had her vanity been piqued that he had stopped confiding in her? Some of both, she decided, along with a very strong desire to help Ganth’s son in any way that she could, for his father’s sake as well as for his own.
Besides, something had clearly happened to him since his clash or whatever it had been with the Brandan Matriarch. Before they had cleared, the Women’s Halls had been full of rumors.
Another rap on the door. This time the Highlord entered at her call, his wolver pup Yce, as usual, at his heels.
He looked terrible. Skin clung tightly to the bones of his face, purple showed under his eyes, and his hair had whitened noticeably. For the first time, she saw something of his father in the lines of his skull and in his haunted eyes.
“You wished to see me, Matriarch?”
“I wanted to say good-bye, also to see if you were all right. Your people are worried.”
Fretfully, he stripped off a glove and slapped it across his palm. “I feed them. I remember their names. Am I also obliged to be cheerful for their sakes?”