She walked back to the bed and leaned her shoulder against the gay carvings of the inlaid pillar, her long fingers lying among the curved patterns of ivory and gold, like something wrought there of alabaster, the strong knuckles and wrinkled, pink war scars like the work of a master craftsman against the alternation of abalone and ebony. “So here we are,” she said ironically. “Your father was right. Wolf. We’ve been spoiled for our trade by love and magic.”
He shrugged, leaning back against the shadowy silk of the many pillows. “Looks as if we’ll have to seek a new trade. Or I will, anyway.”
He reached up and touched the eye bandage again. As he suspected, his depth perception was completely gone. He’d have to retrain himself with weapons to compensate, if he ever wanted to fight again. “Sheera told you what happened to me that night in the pit?” he asked.
Starhawk nodded, without comment.
“Yirth was right. I need to find a teacher, Hawk. I feel the Power within me; there are things that I know I can do, but I dare not. I don’t want to become like Altiokis. I need to find someone to teach me to use my powers without destroying everyone and everything I touch. And the damned thing is, I don’t know where to look. Yirth was cut off from the line of her master’s masters—Altiokis managed to wipe out most of the lines. I’ll have to search—and I have no idea where that search will take me.”
He paused, studying that calm, unexpressive face that watched him in the shadows of the bed canopy. He scanned the strength of its bone structure under the straight reddish mark of a war scar, where once her cheek and jaw had been laid open to the bone, fighting to get him off a battlefield when he’d been wounded, and the cool, smoke-gray eyes that seemed to look at all things—including his soul and hers—with such lucid calm.
Then he gathered all his courage into his hands and asked, “Will you come with me? It will be a long search. It could take years, but...”
“Wolf,” she said softly, “years with you is all I’ve ever wanted,” She came quietly around the end of the bed and into his arms.
He was received by Tarrin and Sheera in a public ceremonial in the Cathedral Square the following day.
The cold and rains of winter had changed, seemingly overnight, into the first breath of spring. The windless balminess of the morning had a frost-edge sparkle to it, but the crowds that filled the square before the Cathedral of the Three all seemed to be wearing flowers on their shoulders, bosoms, and hatbands, like the pledge of beauty to come. Sun Wolf saw that most of the women wore what had come to be called the new mode, the flowing and easy-moving lines introduced by the fighting women. The men, laced into whaleboned and padded doublets, looked as if they were far thinner than they had been when they had worn that finery last. The faces of the men were pale; those of the women, brown.
The thirty-odd surviving members of Sheera’s corps, he saw, were standing in a body at the foot of the Cathedral steps, about where Drypettis had gotten him arrested the morning he had gone to ask Yirth to give him his freedom. Drypettis was not among them, though Starhawk had told him last night that the woman who had betrayed him had come to make her bow to Tarrin at the new King’s official reception into the city. She was, after all, the last representative of the most ancient and honorable House in Mandrigyn.
“I was half afraid she would kill herself,” he had said when Starhawk had told him, remembering the numerous, ugly scenes he had witnessed and heard of between Dm and Sheera. “Not that she didn’t deserve thrashing—but it wouldn’t have done Sheera any good. She was fond of the little snirp.”
Starhawk had shaken her head with a wry grin. “Drypettis is far too vain to kill herself,” she’d said. “In fact, I’m not entirely certain she’s even conscious that she did wrong. She still looked upon war as something that gentlefolk—particularly women—hired the ruder classes to do for them, not go out and do themselves. She honestly thought that Sheera had sullied herself and prostituted her soul by becoming a soldier. No, Drypettis will go to her grave believing herself ill-done-by, walling herself tighter and tighter into her own world of the past glories of her House, and exulting in her reputation as one of the original conspirators to the end.”
On the way to the square, the gondola in which Sun Wolf and Starhawk were riding had passed the House of Dru, the only one of those marble-fronted palaces of the old merchant nobility to be undecorated and without a hundred watchers on every one of its tiered, trellised balconies. As Sheera’s servants had poled the graceful boat past, they had heard music played in one of the rooms above; a single harpsichord, pure, lilting, and disinterested.
The other women were there, massed together as they had been that first night in the orangery, their eyes bright as they followed Sun Wolf’s movements. He saw Wilarne M’Tree with Gilden, Eo, and Tisa. Across the square, he saw a man whom he vaguely recognized as Wilarne’s husband with their stiff-necked, twelve-year-old son, looking haughty and uncomfortable. He thought Wilarne looked worn, her eyes stained with the blue smudges of fatigue. Here was one, at least, whose reunion had been less than peaceful. But she still stood with the women rather than with her family, and her menfolk did not look happy about this in the least.
There were others of the women who looked the same. But Amber Eyes and Denga Rey were like newlyweds in black velvet. Denga Rey glittered in her new panoply as Captain of the City Guards.
Yirth was there, too, standing a little to one side, her bony hands tucked into the star-stitched sleeves of her night-blue gown, her dark hair braided back, her face showing fully in daylight for the first time since the Wolf had known her—perhaps for the first time in her life. Even at a distance, before he realized what had changed about her, he knew she had passed through the Great Trial, sometime while he had been ill, and had grasped the wider understanding of such magic as she had been taught. The change was clear in her carriage and in her sea-colored eyes. Sun Wolf was quite close to her before he realized that the birthmark which had marred her face was gone, leaving only a faint shadow of a scar. It was, he thought, probably the first thing that she had done when she had the Power.
Near the women were the Thanes, and he glimpsed Lady Wrinshardin among them, haughty as an empress in her barbaric splendor, with marigolds in her white hair. Her gaze crossed his, and she winked at him, to the evident scandal of a podgy young man at her side who was obviously her son.
On the other side of the Cathedral steps, the dark-robed members of the parliament were banked, most of them still with the pale complexions and calloused hands of their former trade of deep-rock gold miners. Between the women and the parliament, Tarrin and Sheera stood like snow and flame, blazing with the pride of their love and triumph.
Clothed in the white silk majesty of his office, Tarrin of the House of Her, King of Mandrigyn, was no longer a dusty, quick-moving little man in a grimy loincloth, but a very elegant prince indeed. Against the miner’s pallor of his face, his hair was a golden mane, a shade darker than Amber Eyes’; but of very much the same texture, rough and springing; his eyes were vivid blue. The festoons of lace that fell from his sleeves covered the shackle galls on his wrists. Beside him, Sheera was an idol in bullion-stitched gold, her high, close-fitting lace collar not quite concealing the bandages underneath. Sun Wolf remembered seeing the sword cut on her shoulder and breast when they’d been together in the Citadel and thinking that she would carry the scar to her grave.
Most of the women who had been at the storming of the mines would bear such scars.
Sun Wolf and Starhawk came forward to the foot of the steps. Carpets of eastern work had been laid down on the pavement and on the steps above, crimson and royal blue, scattered with roses and daffodils. The roaring of voices silenced as the rulers of Mandrigyn descended the steps; a hush fell over the square.