saw you come in here. You'll have to go out front and distract them with something, and he can sneak out the back.'
'You have a back entrance?' Vasil asked, looking interested.
'Go on,' said Tess, forestalling what Ilya was about to say, which she guessed would be ill-considered and rude. Vasil stared at him as he dressed, but he dressed quickly and pushed past the other man without the slightest sign of the affection he had shown earlier. A moment later, Tess heard voices outside, engaged in some kind of lively conversation. 'Here,' she said, standing up with a blanket pulled around her. She went to the back wall of the tent and twitched the woven inner wall aside to reveal the felt outer wall. Here, low along the ground, the felt wall overlapped itself and, drawing the extra layer aside, Tess revealed a gap in the fabric just large enough to crawl through. She knelt and peered out.
Vasil laid a hand on her bare shoulder. His fingers caressed the line of her neck. 'Here, I'll look. I've done this before.'
Tess made a noise in her throat and stood up, and away. 'I have no doubt of it.'
He hesitated, and bent to kiss her. Then he knelt and swayed forward. Paused, surveying his ground. A moment later he slid outside. Tess knelt and looked out after him, but he had already vanished into the gloom. She twitched the fabric back, let the inner wall fall into place, and called for Ilya. After a little bit, he came back in, swearing under his breath.
'Well, you can hardly blame him,' she began.
'I can do what I like,' he said peevishly. 'He's so damned charming that it's easy to forget how much trouble he causes.'
'I think I'd better sew that back entrance shut.'
He cocked his head at her. 'Probably.' He stripped and snuggled in beside her. And sighed. 'It was a stupid thing to do.'
'What? Letting him get out of here unseen?'
'No.' By the constraint in his voice, she could tell he was embarrassed. 'What-we did-tonight.'
'No, it was the right thing to do. It never does any good to run away from what you're afraid of. I should know. I've done it often enough.'
'What was I afraid of?'
'I don't know. But I don't think you're afraid of Vasil anymore.'
His face rested against her hair. He stroked her along the line of her torso and down along her hips, and up again, and down, while he considered. 'No,' he replied, sounding surprised, 'I don't think I am.'
'So. Is there anything else you haven't told me?'
His hand stopped. 'I've kept no more hidden from you,' he said indignantly, 'than you've kept hidden from me.'
Shame overwhelmed Tess. Gods, he didn't know the tenth of it. Yet what could she say? There was nothing she could say.
'It wasn't Natalia they were asking, anyway,' said Ilya, 'it was my mother and my aunt. It's decent to observe a period of mourning before marrying again'
It took Tess a moment to recall where they had left off their other conversation: with his sister, Natalia. 'But she did marry again?'
'Yes.' Although she wasn't looking at him, she felt him tense. 'That's when I left for Jeds. I hated him.'
'Why?'
Ilya let go of a shuddering breath, and he clutched her tighter to him. 'He mocked me. He scorned me. Gods, he tried to rape me once. He knew about Vasil; he caught us together, one time, and he held the knowledge of it over me like a saber. He used to fence with the boys, those of us who aspired to be riders, and he'd torment me. He'd cut me up, fine cuts all along my arms and my chest.'
'But, Ilya, how could your sister ever have married someone like that?'
'Oh, no one else knew. He made sure of that. He was charming to everyone else, a good rider, a fine fighter, good with horses and the herds. No one believed me. They all thought I was just jealous. They said I was too attached to Natalia. They said-' He broke off. 'Anyway, I left.'
'And you went to Jeds. It's strange, now that I think of it, how much I know about your journey to Jeds, and how little I knew of the reasons you left the tribes to go there. But, Ilya.' She laughed a little, into his shoulder. 'Does that mean that the courtesan Mayana was the first woman you ever slept with?'
'Yes.' He didn't sound amused; defensive, perhaps.
'She's so famous, though. I remember that she used to come have tea with Cara once a week. She must have been young, even though she seemed old to me. I was only-what? — ten. She'd just recently bought her freedom from the brothel she was indentured to, so it couldn't have been long after you left Jeds that I arrived there from Erthe. So it wasn't only a university education you got at Jeds.'
'Are you complaining about the education I got at Jeds?'
She canted her head back to grin at him. 'Not at all. Then you came back to the tribes. Was Vasil still with your tribe?'
'No. He appeared about two winters later. He'd heard that I had returned. My mother had already made me dyan, so no one wondered at first when I took him into my jahar. Josef left his tribe at about the same time, to ride with me. The Roskhel tribe traveled alongside of us many seasons during that time.'
'Why did Khara Roskhel turn against you? Gods, what brought him to murder your whole family?'
But the question evoked only silence. His left hand ran a pattern, up and down, along her lower back. She felt as if the gesture, repeated obsessively, was itself the answer, but in a language she did not speak.
'Ilya?'
'No.' He lay the index and middle fingers of his right hand on her lips, gently. 'No more, Tess. There's been enough today, and tonight. I'm exhausted.'
As well he might be. She sighed, knowing that if he would not confide in her now, as vulnerable as he was because of all that he had laid bare this night, he probably never would confess the truth of the troubling mystery of Roskhel's defection and subsequent horrible revenge.
She shifted until she was comfortable. His breathing slowed and gentled, and he slept. From outside, she heard the night guards conversing, the murmur of their words but not their meaning. Or perhaps it was just one of them, reciting an old story to keep them company on a dark night.
CHAPTER THREE
Boredom afflicted Jiroannes. He had nothing better to do than to interest himself in the goings-on in his guard-men's encampment. At dawn each day, he sent Syrannus to request an audience with Bakhtiian. Each day Syrannus returned with a polite refusal. In the mornings Jiroannes inspected the camp, ostensibly to make sure the women and children were being treated well by their keepers but in fact because the simple human contact with people other than Syrannus and the two slave-boys was as salve to him, who was otherwise alone.
There was something pathetic about how gratefully the women greeted him, eyes cast down, knowing as they did that it was on his sufferance they were allowed to be there. Sleeping with men of another race, soon to be pregnant with their children; and yet, most of them would otherwise have starved to death, or met a worse fate. They knew they were the lucky ones. The little children sucked on their fingers and stared at him. The older ones attempted to help out around the guards' camp. A few bold children even assisted Lal and Samae and the other slave-boy-whose name was Jat-in hauling water and beating carpets and collecting fuel for the benefit of Jiroannes himself. The guardsmen's camp tripled in size in ten short days. By the time Bakhtiian made his triumphal entry into camp, Jiroannes felt that he was master of an entire little tribe of his own.
When the citadel fell, his men went out searching for refugees. This time they brought back a princess. Waiting women and peasant women had been sheltering her, but the delicacy of her complexion and hands and the fine gold-braided shift she wore underneath the filthy gown her protectors had given her to camouflage herself in betrayed her high station. The captain brought her directly to Jiroannes as dusk lowered around them. Trembling, the woman knelt before him, hands crossed on her chest, head bent so that it almost touched the carpet, and
