Lyrna turned back to the war-band, seeing Mastek step towards his former Tahlessa, war club ready in a two-handed grip. “I offer you the knife, Alturk,” he said. “In remembrance of the battles we have fought together.”
Alturk shook his head. “Kill me but don’t insult me, Mastek.”
The warrior gave a nod, raising the club.
“WAIT!” Lyrna was on her feet, striding through the knot of warriors, stepping between Alturk and the advancing Mastek.
The old warrior stared at her, eyes wide in astonished fury. “You have no voice here,” he breathed.
“I am Queen of the Merim Her,” she told him, voice raised so they could all hear. “Called to parley by the Mahlessa herself, granted safe passage and all respect due my rank.”
Davoka appeared at her side, eyes scanning the crowd with considerable anxiety. “This is unwise, Queen,” she murmured to Lyrna in Realm Tongue. “This is not your realm.”
Lyrna ignored her, fixing Mastek with a harsh glare. “The Grey Hawks have spilled blood and lost warriors in my defence, they have honoured the word from the Mountain.” She pointed at the kneeling Alturk. “All at this man’s order. This places me in his debt. Amongst my people an unbalanced debt is the greatest dishonour. If you kill him without a reckoning, you dishonour me, and you dishonour the Mahlessa’s word.”
“I need no words from you, woman,” Alturk grated, head bowed, his large hands gouging into the earth. “Is the well of my shame not deep enough?”
“He is varnish,” Lyrna told Mastek. “Judged as such by his own war-band. His words no longer have meaning for the Lonakhim.”
Mastek slowly lowered his war club, fury still shining in his eyes but the slump of his shoulders told of something more-relief. “What would you have us do?”
“Give him to me,” she said. “I will present him to the Mahlessa. Only she can balance the debt I owe him.”
“And this one?” Mastek pointed his club at Alturk’s son.
Lyrna looked down at the young man, at the hatred in his face. He spat at her, wrestling against his bonds and trying to rise before swiftly being forced back to his knees by the surrounding warriors. “Weak!” he snarled at them. “This Merim Her bitch makes you her dogs!”
Lyrna turned back to Mastek. “I am not in his debt.”
He sang his death song as they looped a rope about his already bound hands and lashed it to the saddle of Mastek’s pony. Turning to face the rising sun, Alturk’s doomed son sang a dirge in lilting Lonak, most of the words archaic and unknown to Lyrna but she noted the phrase “vengeance of the gods” repeated several times. He was jerked from his feet in mid-song as Mastek spurred his mount into motion, dragging him away at the gallop, the rest of the band closing in around as they rode hard for the south. Davoka commented she had once seen a man last a whole day being dragged behind a pony. Alturk watched his former clansmen disappear from view and said nothing.
Lyrna felt Sollis’s eyes on her as she went to her pony, checking his hooves for signs of injury and working the worst of the knots from his mane. “Do you have something to say, brother?” she asked.
Sollis’s expression was as unreadable as ever but there was a new tone in his voice, the suppressed anger she usually detected replaced by what might have been respect. “I was just thinking, Highness, that the Lonak may have it right,” he said. “We are riding with a queen after all.” He gave a small bow before going to see to his own mount.
The mountains closed in again as they journeyed north, the peaks broader and higher even than those found around the Skellan Pass, the summits shrouded in perpetual cloud. The tracks they followed became ever more narrow, winding around hill-side and mountain in increasingly treacherous spirals. The first night out from the scene of the Sentar’s defeat they camped on a precipice above a drop Ivern judged at near five hundred feet, a damp blanket of mist descending as night came.
Alturk sat apart from them, still and silent at the edge of the precipice, not troubling to eat or make a fire. Lyrna had begun to approach him but stopped at an emphatic shake of the head from Davoka. Instead she went to sit opposite Kiral. Davoka had positioned the girl beside a smaller fire, as far from their own as was practicable, both legs bound together since there was no soft ground to stake her to. She regarded Lyrna with an incurious glance, reclining against a rock, every inch a bored adolescent.
“Does it hurt?” Lyrna asked her, gesturing at her scar.
Kiral frowned. “I don’t speak your dog tongue, Merim Her bitch.”
Not all gambits work, Lyrna thought with a rueful grimace. “The scar I left you with,” she said. “Does it pain you?”
The girl shrugged. “Pain is a warrior’s lot.”
Lyrna glanced at Davoka, seeing the wariness in her eyes as she watched their conversation. “My friend thinks you are no longer her sister,” she said. “She thinks her sister has been claimed by you, that what lives behind your eyes is no longer the girl she cared for.”
“My sister is blind in her devotion to the false Mahlessa. She sees lies where she should see truth.” Lyrna could see no particular emotion in the girl’s face, finding her tone flat, like a child reciting one of the catechisms of the Faith.
“And what is this truth?” she asked.
“The false Mahlessa seeks to slay the spirit of the Lonakhim, to turn the sight of the gods from us, to leave us with no stories for our fires or our death songs. Peace with you, then peace even with the Seordah. What will that make us? Will we grub in the earth as you do? Make slaves of our women as you do? Labour in service to the dead, as you do?” Again the same flat tone, fanatical invective delivered without a hint of passion.
Lyrna nodded at the hulking form of Alturk, dim and forlorn in the mist. “Do you know why I saved him?”
“Merim Her are weak. Your heart is soft, you imagine a debt where there is none. He followed the false Mahlessa’s word, you owe him nothing.”
Lyrna shook her head, eyes searching the girl’s face. “No, I saved him because I saw that you wanted him dead. Why is that?”
Nothing, not even a flicker of concern or a sign of deceit when she replied, “He has ever been the Sentar’s persecutor. Why would I not wish him dead?”
There’s no evidence here, Lyrna decided. The girl was strange indeed, quite possibly insane, but that was hardly proof of Davoka’s conviction. She got up to return to her place by the main fire.
“I heard a strange thing about Merim Her women,” Kiral said as she rose.
“And what is that?”
For the first time there was some animation in the girl’s face, a malicious curl to her lips. “Custom forbids them a man until they are joined. And after that they are only allowed their one husband. Is that true?”