“Was the Healer…?”
“Arrived too late. This time it was my cousin who died, having given her soul to her Racha, who lived.”
Koba keened again, this time a throat-rasping cough that had almost the sound of a sob in it. Yaro rubbed Koba’s face with her hands, smoothing the feathers, somehow not cutting herself on the razor-sharp beak.
Dhulyn looked from woman to Racha and back again. “But that’s not possible…” She let her voice die away.
“So it was thought.” Yaro looked Dhulyn directly in the eyes. “The Healer came too late to save my cousin, but when she came, she had a Mender with her. They, Healer and Mender, saw that there were two of us, each with our broken bond-and so together they Mended us, and we were Healed.”
It had to be true. The bond was there, obvious. Real.
“You were Mended and Healed?”
Koba hopped up to Yaro’s shoulder as the Cloudwoman raised herself to her feet. “Together they did what neither could do alone. Koba and I were broken, sick at heart. Now we are whole.”
As she followed Yaro of Trevel and Koba the Racha back to camp, Dhulyn was conscious that she should feel honored by the woman’s confidence-and awed at the achievement of the Marked, Mender and Healer. But she went with her eyes cast down, paying special attention to her footing, struggling to keep her face from showing the churning of her thoughts. She found that, after all, she could not rid her mind of the other part of Yaro’s story. That part in which a Mercenary Brother left the Brotherhood, to return to clan and family.
The next day found them with a Cloud escort, following the caravan road west to avoid the Dead Spot, where legend had it that some magic of the Caids had gone badly wrong.
When the trail they followed came close enough, Mar looked out over the silent and empty expanse of twisted rock and sand.
“It looks like a glassmaker’s pot,” she said. As she let the reins fall slack, the packhorse came to a stop. “But only the dirty bits they don’t use.”
“There are three such places in the Letanian Peninsula,” Dhulyn Wolfshead said. “But whether that means that the Caids had their principal places here,” the Mercenary woman shrugged, urging Bloodbone along with her knees. “The Scholars are still arguing over it.”
“But what happened here?” The packhorse followed Bloodbone, and Mar looked back at the Dead Spot over her shoulder. “What went wrong?”
“Only the Caids know,” the Lionsmane said from where he rode behind her.
“The knowledge was lost,” Wolfshead added, “like so much of what the Caids knew.”
“And perhaps for the best, if their knowledge could do this.” Lionsmane gestured with a wide sweep of his arm. Wolfshead shook her head, but Mar couldn’t tell if she disagreed.
Their Cloud escort left them when the road turned northeast once more, though Yaro’s Racha bird Koba soared high above them a while longer, looking out and communicating with his bond mate in their private fashion. The whole morning Mar had kept to herself, unable to fully trust the Clouds, and finding herself looking even at her bodyguards from the corners of her eyes.
“That would be the first time you saw someone killed,” Lionsmane said.
Mar’s neck felt stiff as she nodded in reply. “I’ve seen dead people, but never…” Her voice trailed off as her gaze moved ahead to where the Wolfshead rode several horse lengths ahead of them. All because of me, she thought. Because of some letters from Tenebro House, a young man, younger than she was herself, a boy really, was dead.
When the letters had come, her world had suddenly opened to so broad and wide a thing that she could barely sleep for excitement. She hadn’t been unhappy with the Weavers, exactly, but she’d been just old enough when the sickness had taken her family to remember what it was like to have a Holding, to know that you were a part, however small, of a Noble House, part of a greater whole. The letters brought the chance of going to the capital and taking up her rightful place as a cousin of that House, and even the possibility of the restoration of her Holding, if she could show how well she understood her allegiance. She had letters she hadn’t shown Dhulyn Wolfshead, letters which had given her a job to do, for which she could be rewarded. Her task had been to hire two particular Mercenaries to guide and protect her instead of waiting for the spring salt caravans. A woman of the Red Horsemen and her Partner, the letters had said. Mar’d had all her friends on the lookout for them, and as soon as Rilla Fisher had seen them come off the Catseye, Mar had practically dragged Guillor Weaver to the Hoofbeat Inn to hire them. Dhulyn Wolfshead and Parno Lionsmane. She’d liked them, and even being on the trail with them had seemed like an adventure, once she’d got over the discomfort and the strangeness.
But the adventure had ended with the sight of Clarys’ blood spilling on the ground.
Mar risked a glance at the Wolfshead’s straight back. Lionsmane gave a great sigh, and she froze.
“Seeing someone killed does make a difference, doesn’t it?” he said, as if he were commenting on the sunshine.
Mar shivered, making the packhorse toss his head. “I must seem such a child,” she said, hardening her voice to make it stop shaking. “It’s not as though I didn’t know what soldiers and Mercenaries do.” She looked up at the golden-brown man beside her. “You’ll have seen many like Clarys?”
“I have,” he said quietly. “The first when I was much younger than you.”
“And killed them, too,” the girl said, her eyes returning to the back of the tall woman with blood-red hair.
“Yes,” he said more quietly still. “But that was later.” Mar glanced at him again, lowering her eyes quickly when he held her gaze.
“That’s not all that’s frightened you, is it?”
“I didn’t know if you were paid enough.” Mar cleared her throat. “I thought you might let them take me.”
“Fine bodyguards we would be,” Lionsmane said softly, “to let that happen. You needn’t worry about that.” He indicated his Partner with a tilt of his head. “Dhulyn might kill you herself, but she wouldn’t allow you to be taken and sold.”
“She might kill me?” Mar rounded on him, twisting in the saddle. Was he joking?
He shrugged. “No need to look like that. Anyone might kill you. Dhulyn’s been in slavers’ hands herself. Death is easier, she says. Not necessarily preferable, just easier. She was lucky enough to be taken from a slave ship by pirates when she was eleven, maybe twelve.”
“Lucky? Taken by pirates is lucky?”
“Of course lucky. She was first captured at eight, and no one takes an eight-year-old child to be a household slave.”
“What, then?”
Lionsmane looked sideways out of narrowed eyes. “A nice respectable family, the Weavers, eh? Did a good business but didn’t travel much?” He shrugged. “Ah well, it’s easier for the rich to indulge such vices. In certain circles, small children are sold as bedslaves.”
Mar felt her face grow stiff. Lionsmane nodded at her.
“The pirate who took Dhulyn was the Schooler Dorian the Black. He recognized her as one of the Red Horsemen from the south and put a sword in her hand.” Lionsmane looked ahead once more to where Dhulyn Wolfshead rode, and Mar, released from the focus of his eyes, relaxed. “We are members of the Mercenary Brotherhood. Soldiers and killers by trade. But certain kinds of people we-she and I-will kill for nothing.”