"As a matter of fact, I'm starved," Shaylar said. "I don't really understand why. It's not like we've been burning off a lot of energy traveling for the last few days."
"No, we haven't," Gadrial Kelbryan agreed. "I'm hungry enough to eat a dragon myself, though. I wonder if it's because we're all finally in a position to take it a bit easier and pay more attention to little things like starvation?"
Her wry smile was almost impish, and Shaylar snorted in a combination of amusement and frustration.
Gadrial was a Ransaran, which meant she came from the Arcanan equivalent of Uromathia, but Ransar was very unlike the Uromathian Empire. Ransarans were much more like Ternathians—or even New Farnalians, like Darcel Kinlafia—than Uromathians, with a fervor for freedom and the rights of individuals which sometimes seemed to Shaylar's Shurkhali sensibilities to border on the fanatical, or the obsessional, at least. Not that Shaylar had any intention of complaining. She owed Jathmar's very life to the Ransaran ... sorceress, for want of a better term, and despite the unmitigated horror of the circumstances which had brought them together, Gadrial had become one of the closest non-Talented friends Shaylar had ever had.
But, for all of that, the slim, powerfully-Gifted magister was also one of her jailers. The fact that Gadrial was also a potent protector, one who'd demonstrated her willingness to literally step between Shaylar and a furious dragon, only made their relationship still more ... complicated. And the emotions Shaylar could sense out of Gadrial whenever the other woman looked at Sir Jasak Olderhan added their own unique strand to the impossibly tangled knot into which the gods had decided to weave all four of their fates.
"He is a throwback, you know," Gadrial said as the three of them left the passenger compartment and started down the carpeted hallway towards the luxury slider's dining compartment.
"Jasak?" Jathmar asked.
"No, Chief Sword Threbuch," Gadrial replied with a grimace. "Of course I mean Jasak!"
"It was intended as a simple expression of interest," Jathmar said with dignity. His own Andaran was improving steadily, although he remained substantially less fluent in it than his wife. Given her her utterly non-Andaran sandalwood complexion, flashing dark eyes, glorious midnight hair, and exotically musical accent, Shaylar could never have passed as a native Andaran-speaker, but her command of the language was at least as good as Gadrial's own.
"She knew that, Jath!" Shaylar scolded now, poking him sharply in the ribs with a jabbing index finger.
Then she looked at the other woman. "I think I agree with you, Gadrial, but exactly how do you mean that?"
"I sometimes think Jasak thinks he's living back during the days of Melwain the Great," the magister replied. Her tone was light, almost jesting, but Shaylar sensed a core of genuine concern under the amusement.
""thinspace"'Melwain the Great'?" she repeated, and Gadrial shrugged.
"Melwain was an Andaran king who lived well over a thousand years ago. By now, the legends crusted around him are so thick that no one really knows how much of his story is historical and how much is invented, but it doesn't really matter. He's become almost the patron saint of Andara because he lived such an unbelievably honorable life."
Gadrial rolled her eyes with such a fundamentally Ransaran combination of emphasis and resignation that Shaylar giggled.
"All very well for you," Gadrial said severely. "You didn't grow up living in the same universe as Andara! Those people—!"
She shook her head again, and Jathmar's deeper chuckle joined Shaylar's amusement.
"Actually," Gadrial continued after a moment, her voice and expression both considerably more serious,
"most non-Andarans really do find Jasak's people a bit hard to understand. Mythalans don't believe the concept of 'honor'—to the extent that they're even capable of visualizing the concept, at least—extends to anyone outside the shakira and multhari castes. And my own people spend a lot of their time scratching their heads and trying to figure out how anyone could define so much of who and what they are on the basis of an honor code that goes back well over a millennium and seems to consist primarily of accepting an endless series of obligations simply because of who you chose as parents. But there they are. They really still exist—some of them, at least."
"Not all of them seem to share Jasak's view of exactly what honor requires, though," Jathmar said more darkly, and Gadrial nodded.
"That's what I meant when I called him a throwback. Don't get me wrong, he's not unique. There are a lot of Andaran throwbacks, and I'm still a bit surprised by just how grateful for that fact I've become over the last couple of months. But there's what I guess you could call a 'new generation' of Andarans, as well. People like that poisonous little toad Neshok we met in Erthos, or even Five Hundred Grantyl, back at Fort Wyvern. Neshok couldn't care less about Andaran honor codes—he probably thinks they're all hopelessly obsolete, at best, and an object for contempt, at worst. Five Hundred Grantyl, on the other hand, just thinks they're old-fashioned. He's willing to accept that a lot of people still believe in them, and that, because of that, he has to put up with what those people believe they require, but it's all part of the fading past, not the future, as far as he's concerned.
"Jasak doesn't think that way. Neither does his father, from what I've seen and heard about the Duke.
They both believe, Jathmar, and they'll do whatever honor requires of them, and damn the cost. It's what makes them who they are, and, to be honest, it's part of what makes the Duke's political base so strong.
Even Andarans who are no longer prepared to subjugate their own lives to the requirements of traditional honor codes deeply respect people who are prepared to. People who demonstrate that they're prepared to ... and to accept whatever it costs them."
"Gadrial," Shaylar paused between steps and hooked one hand into Gadrial's elbow, stopping the other woman and turning Gadrial to face her, "you're worried. Why? You told us Jasak's father is the most powerful of all the Andaran noblemen."
"He is." Gadrial looked out the window for a moment, then back at Shaylar. "He is," she repeated, "and I know he'll accept Jasak's decision to declare you his shardonai. He'll protect you as he would the members of his own family—for that matter, you are members of his own family now—and he'll agree with Jasak's reasons for making you Olderhan shardonai. But what he won't do, what he can't do under that same honor code, is use the power of his office and his title to save Jasak's career or quash any courtmartial Jasak may face."
"Court-martial?" Jathmar repeated sharply.
"Do you really think the politicians and the most senior officers of the Union's military aren't going to be looking for a scapegoat if all of this goes as badly as it well might?" Gadrial asked bitterly. "Jasak hasn't discussed it with me—not in so many words—but he doesn't really have to. Someone's going to be blamed for what happened to your people, Jathmar. And if there is a war, someone's going to be blamed for starting it. And who's going to be an easier—or, for that matter, more reasonable—scapegoat than the man who was in command of the troops who wiped out the rest of your survey crew?"
"But—" Jathmar began, then chopped himself off, wrestling with his own complex feelings.
A part of him still couldn't forgive Jasak for what had happened to his friends. He suspected that whatever else might happen in his life, however his feelings might change in other respects, there would still be that small, bitter core where all the pain, fear, and loss was distilled down into a cold, dark canker. And that part was perfectly prepared to see Sir Jasak Olderhan pay the price for what had happened to his crewmates, to himself, to his wife.
Yet the rest of him knew Jasak was a decent, caring, honorable man who'd done everything he could to prevent that massacre. True, he'd made the mistake of doing what his own military's regulations required of him instead of relieving Shevan Garlath of command of his platoon, and he would never forgive himself for that. But after that mistake, he'd done everything humanly possible to stop the killing, and Jathmar and Shaylar were alive and as close to free as they were solely because of Jasak Olderhan. If there was a single human being on the Arcanan side who had consistently acted honorably and honestly throughout this entire debacle, it was Jasak.