“So you say. Perhaps you pleaded them to bend you over and-”
Skahill shot to his feet, slamming a fist on the table as he did so and roaring in wordless rage. Calrach shoved the man next to him as he began coming around the table. Skahill did the same, upsetting chairs and the people in them, clawing with one hand for his dagger.
Faster than Rialus could follow with his eyes, Sabeer went from sitting to crouching on top of the table, with an arm thrust toward either man. Each fist clenched a curved crescent of steel. She stayed that way a moment, lean and gorgeous. Utterly terrifying. “Stop it! Keep bickering and I’ll take you to death myself. Say another word in anger. Either of you. Just one more word…”
Neither man took her up on that. They continued to glare at each other, but they held their tongues and crashed back into their seats. If they had not been warriors they could have been chastened, angry children.
What in Hadin’s name is going on here? Rialus wondered. He had never seen the Auldek so ill-tempered. Herith glared at Sabeer’s back as she climbed down from the table. Or so melancholy. Millwa leaned forward on the table, his head cradled in his hands. Or so distressed. Jafith… Well, if Rialus had not found the idea impossible, he would have said that Jafith had been crying recently. And Devoth wore a look of profound perplexity written on the lines of his forehead and with the vague, unfocused way his gaze floated without fixing on anything.
What in Hadin’s name? Rialus avoided the empty seat at Devoth’s side. His seat. He slunk around the edge of the chamber and found a stool that hid him behind the bulky shoulders of several of the chieftain’s assistants. There he listened. As the chieftains paid those behind them no mind, he even scooted up beside the assistants and whispered questions to them. In the hours that followed, he pieced together a mental mosaic of what had transpired.
The battle had not gone well for the Auldek at all. Instead of a day of glorious slaughter, they had experienced one of confusion, frustration, humiliation, and even an Auldek death. This latter thing it took him some time to understand. He could not picture how it came about, but somehow Mena had cut through most of Howlk’s neck in midair, both of them riding on Nawth’s back. The impact from his fall finished the job, sending his head twirling across the ice, through the feet of the high-stepping, horrified Auldek. His body spasmed through death after death, all his lives tearing themselves out of him in one long agony. The Auldek who saw this from up close-including Jafith-were shaken to their cores.
Nawth did not die from the fall, but he was so crippled that the clan chieftains had decided he would have to be abandoned. Freketes could not be killed for some sacred reason that Rialus could not fathom, but neither could injured ones be kept alive. Their bones do not heal, apparently. Nawth would never be anything more than broken. Better he be dead, then, by Auldek logic.
Incredible. And there was more.
The things he heard stoked the fires of rebellion inside him. The Auldek could make no sense of the tactics Mena had employed, but he could. He saw the results of the things he had told Mena in all of it. She had cut the amulet off Nawth’s neck because he had told her she should. Right? Of course. Yes. She had avoided fighting the Auldek because he had told her about their impenetrable body armor. And she had sent volleys of arrows into the slave flanks because he had said they would be vulnerable. It all seemed so obvious to him. His culpability swam in his head, making him dizzy.
I did this, he thought. I helped this…
“Rialus leagueman!” Devoth’s voice snatched him up from his paroxysms of self-congratulation. He had quite forgotten himself, and was stunned to find all the chieftains gazing at him. “Come to my side,” Devoth said.
When Rialus managed to reach him, after stumbling over stools and having to squeeze among bodies that stubbornly did not move to let him pass, Devoth said, “Where have you been?”
Exactly the question Rialus had feared. His short-lived euphoria evaporated, replaced by the dread he had become so used to. “I-I’ve been trying to understand.”
“You and all of us. Why do they not fight us, Rialus?”
Feeling his pulse quicken, Rialus picked up the stylus on the table before him as if he had just remembered something he needed to make a note of.
“Tell me. You know them. Why will they not fight us as they should? Are they cowards? Have we come across the roof of the world to fight cowards?”
No, you’ve come across to die, Rialus thought. He said, “Yes, they are cowards. Look no f-f-further than that. They’re cowards.”
Devoth did not seem to have heard. “It’s like they are wolves and we the prey. They attack our weak points, the lame, the young. They avoid the strong. I did not expect this.”
“Don’t compare them to wolves,” Herith said. “The Wrathic are not cowards.”
“Perhaps the Acacians are not either,” Sabeer said. She spoke to Herith, but her eyes were on Rialus.
He looked down and stayed that way as the conversation circled around the idea of Acacian cowardice.
Some time later, Sabeer remained the only one who saw something other than cowardice in the events of the day. “The princess did not avoid Howlk and Nawth,” she said. “You cannot say she is a coward.”
“Exactly,” Rialus said. He regretted it the moment the word was out of his mouth. She had just said something so obviously true the affirmation slipped out of him.
The other chieftains fell silent. Devoth turned and looked directly at Rialus. “No, she showed bravery in that, at least. How did she know to cut loose the amulet?”
“She knew more than that,” Sabeer said. “She knew our strengths and avoided them. She did not strike at us-at the Auldek-or engage the mounted warriors. Arrows may be cowardly, but they felled thousands of divine children. She hurt us more than we hurt her. Clever, in a way.”
Having not taken his eyes off Rialus, Devoth pressed, “Rialus, how did she know these things?”
Rialus kept his head bent, his attention on the page. He did not want to speak. Words bubbled in him too ferociously. He did not want to let them out, and yet he did not even shrug. He did not motion with his fingers or purse his lips or give any answer to Devoth at all. He knew he should, but he did not. He wrote, How did she know? How did she know?
“Stop scribbling.”
How did she…
“Stop scribbling and answer me!”
“I have no answer to give!” Rialus snapped. He slashed the stylus across the words he had written and tossed it down. He looked around at the Auldek faces staring at him. “What do you want me to say? That I snuck out of camp in the night, ran across the ice to them, told them all your secrets, ran back across the ice, and crept into my quarters unseen? Would you believe that? Even know I’m a spy? If you were wise, you would kill me, kill me now before I bring your entire race to ruin!”
Rialus finished shouting. His face flushed red and his hands trembled. The Auldek around the table stared at him with mild revulsion, as if he had just demonstrated his insanity in some depraved manner. Devoth asked quietly, “Is that true?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I did,” Rialus said. His voice dropped to match Devoth’s and lost its edge, but he looked at the chieftain as he said it. “I met a lioness on the way and I broke her neck.”
The room was silent for a moment. The chieftains stared. The officers and assistants behind them craned forward. “Broke her neck?” Devoth asked.
“With my bare hands.”
A grin tugged at one corner of Devoth’s lips, and then won over the other as well. “All right, Rialus leagueman. All right.” He slapped Rialus on the back and shared his sudden humor with the others. “He is a lion killer,” he said. “Our Rialus. Who would have thought it?”
“Lioness killer,” Sabeer corrected. The others guffawed, enjoying yet another joke at Rialus leagueman’s expense.