'Ah,' she said, lifting a hand to interrupt him. 'Here is Svetlana. Yes, Lana, Lavrenti is ready for you.'
A young woman with pale blonde hair drawn back in four braids ducked inside the tent and knelt to pick up Lavrenti. The child gurgled and flopped down on his face and then pushed up again, scooting toward Svetlana. Aleksi watched her from under lowered lids. She had a bright face and an easy manner, and she paused long enough to examine Aleksi carefully before she scooped up the baby and carried him off outside. He knew he was blushing, but he tried to convince himself that Mother Veselov would not notice.
She coughed into her hand. He glanced up at her in time to see her hide a smile. 'Svetlana is an industrious young woman,' said Mother Veselov casually, 'good with children, and handsome, too, I think. She lost her baby this summer to a fever, but she has another child, a healthy girl of about four winters. She also has a younger brother and sister who came with her when their mother died last year. They're both very strong, and the younger sister is a fine archer already. The brother is good with horses and fights well, although he isn't old enough to ride with the army yet. They don't come from an important family, it's true, but their aunt is a good weaver and they have a cousin who's risen to become a second in the Veselov jahar.'
'Oh,' said Aleksi, stricken to dumbness. He felt a pang, knowing he could never marry Raysia Grekov; but then he thought of the smile that had played on the lips of Svetlana Tagansky, as she had measured her prospective husband, and he felt that he might endure her company easily enough.
'Go on.' Mother Veselov waved him away. 'Tell Tess mat she must come to me, when she can, since I'm not allowed to walk yet.' She sighed, and Aleksi could see the ready sympathy on her face for Tess's loss. 'Go on,' she repeated. 'You've seen what you came to see. May the gods watch over you in the battle tomorrow.'
He bowed his head and thanked her for her blessing. Outside, Svetlana Tagansky loitered under the awning- She smiled at him as he passed, and modestly, risking a glance straight at her, he smiled back. She had brilliant blue eyes, as fiercely bright as if fire lit them. A girl of about Kolia's age hung at her skirts, and farther off, two adolescents, a girl and a boy, stood staring at him. Aleksi had a feeling that the sudden addition of a family, so many and so varied, might well help Tess get over her grief. Or at least, it would keep her too busy to dwell on it. Even the prospect of a difficult and perilous battle tomorrow could not ruin his good spirits.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Vasil lay in an agony of pain, some of it physical. He had to stop himself from touching his face again, reading with his fingers the evidence of the wound that had destroyed his beauty. He raised himself on his left arm and tried yet again to get his legs to work, but they did not. He could see them, lumps underneath the blanket, and he could feel them, feel their presence, but he could not get them to move at all. He had only the vaguest memories of the event that had brought him here, to this blanket on the ground under an awning, here at the hospital. He remembered only succumbing to an overwhelming impulse to stop the Habakar king from being rescued: If he, Vasil, could spare Ilya that insult, then surely Ilya would be beholden to him; surely Ilya would turn to him in gratitude. Dr. Hierakis came down the aisle of wounded toward him, kneeling beside each patient, speaking a few words, examining them. A man two blankets down from Vasil moaned, helpless against the pain assaulting him, and his young sister, who attended him day and night, dabbed a damp cloth on his brow and spoke softly to him. It was all she could do. Others cried only at night, when they thought the rest were sleeping. But really, the men here had it best: They had received some kind of surgery and were expected to recover, and most of them had a relative who helped nurse them until such time as they could be released to their tribe. Vasil suspected that under another awning lay men who simply waited to die. He suspected that he ought to have lain under that other awning, but that other forces, other people, had decreed that he lie here. A young healer had told him that Dr. Hierakis herself had performed the surgery that had saved his life.
Reflexively, Vasil reached up and brushed his fingers along the ragged gash that had laid open his left cheek from his chin almost to his eye. It hurt, and it still oozed.
'Don't touch that, please,' said Dr. Hierakis, crouching beside him. 'You won't do it any good if you worry it like that.'
'Gods,' he said harshly, 'what does it matter? I'd be better off dead, anyway.'
'Possibly,' said the doctor curtly, and he flushed at her tone. 'You're going to have to find a different way to kill yourself next time, though, since I don't think you're going to be riding any time soon.'
He lay back down and stared at the awning. The fabric was, thank the gods, colorful enough, with the light shining through die pattern of squares set within circles set within a frame of squares. She pushed the blanket aside and examined his various wounds; a fine collection-she said so herself, in that dry, sarcastic tone she used. He winced when she touched his shoulder; winced at her hand on his abdomen, but below the hips he felt nothing but the weight of his legs and a steady, numbing ache. At last she shook her head and sat back on her heels.
'What's wrong?' he asked.
She sighed. As was fitting, the men on either side of him had turned their heads away to afford the healer and her patient privacy in these close quarters. 'Vasil.' She sighed again. The awning rose, filled with air, and bottomed out again. A few squares of sunlight dappled the ground, piercing through the palest colors in the design. 'I don't know if you'll ever ride again, or even if you'll walk.'
He gazed at her, at her serious expression, and then he realized what she had just said. 'What about my face?' he demanded. 'Will it ever heal?'
Her eyes widened. 'It will heal, in rime.'
'But I'll always be scarred.'
'Yes. It's going to be a bad scar, too. I won't lie to you.'
'Gods.' he murmured. What had she said? 'You're going to have to find a different way to kill yourself He had never done anything as rash in his life as riding out alone into that skirmish. He had always been cautious. But it was true enough that he hadn't cared any more whether he lived or died. But then why had he struggled back toward the jahar? Why had he cared enough to want to live? He should have just given in and let Grandmother Night take him, but every time in his life that Grandmother Night's hands reached out to gather him in, he had fled from her. Maybe Ilya was right. Maybe he didn't love Ilya more than he loved his own life.
'I'd be better off dead,' he murmured, but even as he said it, he knew he did not believe his own words.
'You have visitors,' said the doctor. 'I'll leave you now.' She rose and stepped away, and he saw Ilya approaching him down the aisle, flanked by his usual retinue.
Vasil grabbed the edge of the blanket, covering the laceration, and he turned his face to the side so that his right side, the unmarked side, showed.
Bakhtiian's retinue halted some ways down the aisle and dispersed to walk among the wounded. Ilya came on alone. He was pale with exhaustion and with some other overwhelming emotion. His eyes were dark with it, and the mark of marriage on his left cheek glared vividly against his dark skin. And yet, on Ilya, the scar did not mar his beauty; it had simply become part of him. His steps slowed as he caught sight of Vasil, and he halted beside him and knelt,
'Veselov,' he said roughly. Stopped. He reached out and took hold of the blanket, to draw it down. Vasil gripped it tighter and pulled away from him. Ilya let go and sat back. 'You saved my honor, in the battle,' he said in a low voice, in the formal style, 'at great cost to yourself. Is there some favor I may show you, to repay you?'
'What I want, you will never give me,' said Vasil. Tears burned at his eyes but did not fall. 'There is nothing else I want.'
'It was bravely done,' said Ilya in a whisper, eyes cast down. 'You ought to have died.'
'I ought to have died many times in the last eleven years. But I never did.'
A smile touched Ilya's lips and passed away into nothing. 'No, you never did. By such means does Grandmother Night work Her justice.'
Vasil shuddered, to hear Her name spoken in daylight, and he shifted farther away from Ilya. And then realized that he had done so. 'There's nothing more I want from you,' he said finally, hoarsely, 'except to see that my wife and children always have a tribe and a tent of their own.'
Bakhiiian lost even more color. Vasil listened to the ragged sound of Ilya's breathing while he controlled himself; at last he spoke. 'Tess lost the child. We burned it, five days past.'
Vasil felt the comment like a wound to his heart. All that pain in Ilya, and it was for the dead child, not for
