“Favorite of heaven!” she cried at the shan-yu 's retreating back.
Vughturoi spun round, surprised at the tone of command in Willow’s voice. She held up the torch to illumine the blood-splotched path of Silver Snow’s flight.
“Most noble shan-yu. ” Now that Willow had his attention, she spoke in a less imperious voice. “As the most sacred under heaven doubtless knows, blood holds great power; and that is the blood of your lady and the mother of your son. Grant that I protect her against . . . someone using that power to her despite.”
Vughturoi nodded. “Sable!” he called the name of his minor wife, then shouted for his warriors.
“When Sable comes,” he told Silver Snow, “let her take you back. You have done enough for tonight. And you—” he spoke directly, “work what magics you deem fit.”
“What will you do?” Silver Snow called after him.
Vughturoi shook his head. “What I should have done before, but I feared to shatter the unity of the clan. Now I realize that that unity was simply paint on ... on wood that has rotted,” he sought after and found an image from his days in Ch’ang-an. “Thus, now I shall bring fire to it—if I can. Give me your good wishes, lady, and I shall be the stronger.”
Again, the remnant of the courtly speech that he had learned in the Middle Kingdom.
“You have always had that.” Silver Snow smiled at him. “As well you know.”
Willow held up a free hand, gestured in a sign of blessing that Silver Snow had never seen. To her surprise, Vughturoi nodded thanks. “Shaman,” he said, according her Strong Tongue’s title.
Willow’s magics known now, she did not abase herself before the shan-yu any more than Strong Tongue had ordinarily done in the days of her favor. Days which, apparently, were to be ended at this very moment.
Vughturoi glanced down at his hand, which still held Tadiqan’s arrow. With an exclamation of loathing, he flung it from him.
Silver Snow shook her head, then regretted both the gesture and her lord’s rashness. “Fetch me that,” she asked Willow in a voice that was growing hoarse and feeble now. “He may need it for proof. I shall keep it safely hidden among my own arrows.”
She shut her eyes wearily and opened them only as Sable cried out in dismay and knelt at her side. All around them now were angry men, stamping and muttering in response to Vughturoi’s words. Some held torches, which gleamed on their weapons and their harness in the darkness and streamed out almost horizontally after the men who ran toward their horses or those who hastened toward Strong Tongue’s dwelling. From time to time, flickers shed light on the bronze hair and stooped back of Willow as she bent to scoop earth over Silver Snow’s bloodstained footprints.
Then Sable was easing her onto her feet and back toward her own tent. Weakened by loss of blood and her own passions, Silver Snow let her awareness drift. How strange, she thought, to find oneself in the midst of what anyone in the Middle Kingdom would have called savages, to know oneself the woman of the chief among them, and to feel more safe and more alive than she had ever hoped to feel.
“I must write to . . she murmured.
“Elder Sister?” Sable asked, easing Silver Snow down onto the furs of her bedding. “This will hurt,” she warned, pouring wine upon Silver Snow’s slashed foot.
It was the worst pain that she had ever felt in her life, but she bit her lips against it. Childbirth, when it came, would be worse; and she must not disgrace herself and her husband.
“Sleep now,” Sable urged her after she bandaged the cleansed wound.
Silver Snow shook her head. “I am queen,” she said. “He will need me with him. Help me up and robe me as a queen.”
The warriors were shouting outside. Silver Snow could feel the beat of many hoofs as horsemen left camp. She nodded. Had she been the ruler, she would have sent her most trusted officers to apprehend Tadiqan.
When Sable offered her a choice of robes, she waved both away. “Before I dress, fetch me silk, brush, and ink,” she told her. “No, I am not feverish, but I have thought of a way to help our lord, a way that he himself would not lower himself to take. And find me a man who will bear a message to the garrison.”
Lowering himself was what a Hsiung-nu might call it, but Silver Snow, before she did aught else, would write to the garrison commander whose father had served her own and beg him to send troops out on patrol. If they looked like allies massing against rebellious Hsiung-nu, so much the better. Vughturoi would never ask for help where he had meant to bestow it, but she was determined, all the same, that he should benefit from it.
Sable’s face, already dark with concern for Silver Snow (who had to be mad, she clearly thought, if, at this moment, she called for writing material), went even more somber. Had her brother lived, he would have been the queen’s chosen messenger. Still, there was no time to regret; and it was not the way of the Hsiung-nu.
Silver Snow’s hand shook as she picked up the brush. Did you shake so when you fought the bandits or the white tiger ; girl? she asked herself. And is a brush not a weapon, just like bow or blade? You are a general's daughter and a warrior's wife. Write, then; and no more of this frailty!
Despite Silver Snow’s impatience, the moon had grown to a faint, fragile crescent in the sky before Sable, Silver Snow’s thrice-vigilant guard, would permit her to try to rise. Before she actually was able to walk, however, the moon had grown more plump, and now assumed the shape of a slice of tempting, pale melon.
Shaking off Sable’s offer of a supporting arm, Silver Snow leaned on her bow as, robed as befitted a queen, she limped out of her tent. She met Willow coming toward her and greeted her warmly She had not seen the maid much in the days since her injury. Lacking the services of Strong Tongue, Vughturoi had pressed Willow into use as a seeress and, incidentally, as a guard for the shaman whom she was replacing.
The two women fell into step and walked haltingly toward the shan-yu 's tent. Why, our gaits match, thought Silver Snow. Yet Willow walked without a crutch; while her foot ached each time she set it to earth.
“It will mend, Elder Sister,” Willow, who knew her mind far too well to need to ask questions, told her. “Soon you will walk without pain and without a limp. I promise you, you will chase a little Hsiung-nu prince and not even grow short of breath.”
“How fares my lord today?” Silver Snow asked Willow.
The maid raised level brows in a surprise that she intended to be humorous. “Does he not tell you?”
Silver Snow shook her head. “He has said very little, preferring—or so he told me—to rest and for me to rest.”
What Silver Snow knew and would not tell Willow was Vughturoi’s reaction to her letter to the commander of the Ch’in garrison. “Once again, lady, you dare what I must not do! Though I may not ask for help, and do not need it, I shall be glad to see a troop of Ch’in soldiers, provided they speedily return to their own place.”
At that point, Silver Snow understood that she had interfered as much as she dared and turned her efforts to easing the shan-yu 's concerns. That he had been proven wrong had been a blow to his confidence; among the Hsiung-nu, such a blow could turn into a death blow. None of that, however, was something that she could tell Willow.
Perhaps, as a shaman, she sensed it already and, in her own loving way, took steps to heal him too.
Limping in step with her maid, Silver Snow entered the shan-yu' s great tent. Heat, noise, colors, and the scent of mare’s milk and seething meat struck her like a blow, and she stepped back involuntarily, just as she had the first time she had met Khujanga. Her healing foot came down on a pebble, and she suppressed a desire to flinch or cry out.