message to me to deliver. He said there was a problem in the kitchens that demanded his attention.”
She could hear the frown in Jan’s voice, though she didn’t look up. “The kitchens are more important than a communication from the Ambassador?” She heard his sigh. “Paulus is no Rance, I’m afraid. I need someone more competent to be my aide. Could that be you, Rhianna?”
Unexpectedly, Rochelle felt his right hand touch her arm, and she gasped, her head coming up. His fingers were gentle around her, but they also did not release her as she started. “So muscular,” Jan said, as if that were what he expected. “Somehow I’m not surprised by that, Rhianna.”
She could feel herself tensing. He was so very close, his face bending above hers, but she didn’t pull her arm away. “I don’t know what you mean, my Hirzg.”
His hand moved, sliding up her arm past the elbow. His fingers grazed the outside of her breast. “You remind me so much of her,” he said. His hand was at her shoulder now. Then, before she could respond: “I know that the Hirzgin treats you suspiciously, and I’m sorry for that. But I can handle Brie, if it comes to that. She knows when to…” He smiled down at her; his eyes were those of a hawk. “… look the other way if she must.”
“My Hirzg,” she breathed. “I love Emerin…”
“Ah, him.” Another smile. “I can guarantee his advancement in the Garde. Maybe even set him on the path to be a chevaritt. He would like that, wouldn’t he?”
She knew then that he would accept no answer but yes, and she could not. “I’m your daughter,” she wanted to scream at him, but he would ignore that as well, thinking she was saying it only to stop him. There was an eagerness in his face that she had seen before in men, and it was not a pleasant sight. She tried to pull away from him; his fingers tightened around her arm and started to pull her toward him.
She had no choice. No choice.
She surprised him by letting herself fall into his pull. He laughed, thinking that she was submitting, but her hands had gone to the scabbard at his waist and the ancient leather scabbard there, holding the dagger with the bejeweled pommel. She slipped the weapon from its sheath and brought it up quickly, pressing the double-edged blade against the side of his neck hard enough that he could feel it, that a thin line of blood trickled down from under the dark Firenzcian steel. “Back away,” she told him. “Back away, or I’ll kill you here and now.”
She wondered whether that was at all true, if she would have the resolve to follow through on her threat. It was not what she wanted. She felt tears starting in her eyes, and she blinked hard to clear them, sniffing.
His hands loosened around her. Holding his hands up as if in surrender, he took a step back, but his eyes were laughing and there was a smirk on his lips. She moved with him, keeping the dagger near his throat. “Not a sound either,” she told him. “If you shout or call out, I swear you’ll have a second mouth a moment later.”
“Rhianna…” He said her false name quietly. She was neither Rhianna nor Rochelle now; she was the White Stone. The tears had dried up, and her hand was steady on the knife’s hilt. It felt good in her hand, solid and wellbalanced, a piece as deadly as it was beautiful, the ebony handle ancient and much-handled. She glared at him as he stared at her, his hands still up in mocking surrender. She could see him considering whether to snatch at her knife hand; she wondered if he dared that-he was a soldier as well as the Hirzg, and he had fought many times. Her matarh had told her how brave he was in battle, how good with weapons, how skilled.
If he tried to prove his bravery now, could she kill him? She had attacked the Hirzg; Rochelle knew neither of them could ignore that, going forward. Her decision had changed everything, irrevocably. She wasn’t certain just how, yet.
“I only want to leave,” she told him, hoping that might make him reconsider his options. “I don’t intend to hurt you.”
He nodded, very slowly. The line of blood touched the collar of his bashta, the fabric blooming red. “Rhianna, I didn’t mean…”
“It’s too late now,” she told him. “It’s your fault. You’ve made everything impossible.” Suddenly, she lifted the knife from his neck. “I’m your daughter,” she told him. The words rushed out, and she could not stop them. “I’m Elissa’s daughter. The White Stone’s daughter.”
She knew the words would stun him, that it would take him a few breaths to process what she’d told him. She ran, still clutching the dagger. “Wait!” she heard him call after her, but she didn’t wait. She ran through the palais tents that she knew well, knew far better than Jan himself. She slipped into the space between two of the tents, a wellmasked passage she’d found a few days before. She heard Jan call after her-“Rhianna!”-and his footsteps pursuing her, but she was already gone, already slipping out at the rear of the encampment near the line of trees, already slipping into the cover of the trees with his dagger, Jan’s dagger, in the belt of her tashta.
She was the White Stone, and the White Stone knew better than any how to hide, how to escape pursuit, how to change appearance and name at need, how to blend in.
They would not find her. Not if she wished to remain hidden.
Niente
The desolation was nearly more than Niente could bear. The glare of his son sliced him open to his very bones.
He stood in the central square of Villembouchure, where he had stood once before in victory. The city walls were a tumbled ruin near the water, as were many of the buildings. On the hills outside those walls, the army of the Holdings was in retreat, though the farsighted among the Tehuantin claimed they could see lines of the Easterner warriors on the ridges overlooking the city. They might have retreated, but that retreat had been orderly and measured and they had not gone far.
If this was victory, it was a cold and bitter feast. That was what the Long Path demanded, but it didn’t make it any easier for Niente to stomach.
The Tehuantin warriors, their faces painted with the dark lines of battle and their bodies spattered with the blood of the Easterner defenders, trudged wearily through a gray landscape punctuated with fires and smoke. The city was theirs but it had cost them greatly; it had begun even as they approached. Nearby, Tecuhtli Citlali was huddled with the Tototl and the other High Warriors, his face grim and the glances he cast Niente were venomous.
There were too many bodies on the ground, and too many of them were Tehuantin. Their dead, gaping faces all seemed to accuse Niente. He remembered…
They could see the Easterners on either side of the A’Sele as they approached, just as the walls of Villembouchure tantalizingly appeared beyond the river’s bend. No one but Niente and perhaps Atl realized what the Easterners intended, nor the import of two crude stone buildings that had been erected on either side of the A’Sele.
Niente knew, and he braced himself. As the lead ships came abreast of the buildings, winches whined inside the structures and steel cables lifted menacingly from the brown waters of the river. The cables snagged the hulls of the lead ships. Great snarled hooks on the cable scraped and screeched, tearing gouges into their wooden hulls as the warriors and sailors shouted alarm, ripping planks and seams open so that the cold water rushed in. More cables lifted behind them, clawing at the ships behind.
Niente saw the first ships lift and cant over, stopped and snared to block the river. They took on water rapidly, the mast spars touching the water as men-warriors and sailors-spilled into the river, the lines and sails snarling and tangling in the mast of the nearest ship and bringing them down. The captains of the ships behind, tried to turn, tried to drops sails, tried to avoid colliding with the ships ahead of them in their way, but several could not-including the Yaoyotl, which crashed into the ship ahead of it, masts and spars snagging and breaking. Niente felt the impact, which knocked him from his feet despite his bracing. Through the screams and frantic shouting, through the smoke of fires started as lamps and cook fires were disturbed, he could see the A’Sele clogged with wreckage and disabled ships.
He could also hear the cheers of the Easterners on the shore…
“Taat!” Atl’s call brought him back to the present. His son’s tone was accusatory. He stirred, leaning heavily on his spell-staff, still warm from use. He felt older than the hills around them, older than the channel the river had carved in the land, as tired and ancient as the stones which were the bones of the place.
“Atl,” he answered. “Here I am.”
