jaran. 'I can guess what your message is. I suppose you're to return to camp with Tess?'
'Yes.'
'Then you'll have to stay with us.'
He was surprised enough to look straight at her, eyes widening. 'But Sibirin said-'
'Yetra, Niko Sibirin does not order me.'
'But Bakhtiian himself ordered-'
'Bakhtiian,' said Tess viciously, before she knew she meant to say it, 'can go to hell.'
Feodor's expression of surprise glazed over, freezing an instant from pure shock, and then he shook it off and addressed Nadine again. As if, thought Tess wryly, what she had just said was beyond response. 'Forgive me, tsadra. But Sibirin said that I was to bring your cousin-' He glanced from under lashes at Tess, who knew that her brown hair and green eyes did not resemble Nadine's black hair and eyes at all. '-back to camp before Bakhtiian returned from the coast. And not to return without her.''
'I won't force her to go back now. She doesn't intend to go back until I do. There you are. Will you come with us, then?'
'I have no choice.'
Nadine dismissed him with a shrug and signaled the troop to ride. Feodor turned his horse aside to fall in with the ranks as they started forward. Tess looked back to see the young man staring at Nadine. Everyone knew he was in love with her.
Were her own feelings so transparent? With one hand, she traced the curve of her mirror. It took no great skill to see that she had married into an impossible situation, that the confrontation that was bound to come was of her own making. Mostly she was angry at herself; sometimes she felt as if she was constantly holding up that mirror and staring at her own flaws, and she was getting a little tired of it.
'Brooding?' asked Nadine, mocking her, but Tess laughed in reply because she knew Nadine showed affection by being caustic.
And abruptly, the thought triggered in Tess an upwelling of the love, of the heart's warmth, she felt for her family-for Sonia and Katerina and Ivan and Kolia, for Niko and Juli, for Irena Orzhekov, for Nadine; for Aleksi, the brother she had adopted. And, God damn him to hell, for Ilya.
'I shouldn't have done it,' said Tess when Nadine halted her jahar in sight of the township of Basille. 'I shouldn't have come with you.'
'Losing your nerve?'
Tess chuckled. 'What do you think? But perhaps the dramatic gesture wasn't the wisest one.'
'It will certainly get Ilya's attention, though.'
'Damn it, it was just one last thing too many. Yaroslav Sakhalin himself picked me out. He told both Bakhalo and Zvertkov that he wanted me in his jahar. You know what an honor that is! And then before I was ever consulted, Ilya goes around behind my back and tells Sakhalin that I'm to be left where I am: still in training. Still in reserve. He never lets me out of camp except if I'm with him or maybe, maybe, on a safe scouting expedition with Ilya's picked thousand and Aleksi at my right hand.'
Nadine looked at Tess's scarlet shirt and black trousers, and then at her own, similar except in the stiff leather shoulder pieces and the pattern of quilting and embroidery running up the sleeves. 'It's true,' she mused, 'that Sakhalin is not the kind of dyan to pick you out in order to curry favor with Ilya. He chose you on your merits, nothing else.'
'Thank you.'
'Still angry? It was an honor.'
'An honor I'm never to receive the fruits of.'
'Do you want to fight in battle that much?'
Tess regarded her companion with a rueful smile. Behind Nadine's left ear, where her black hair pulled away into a waist-long braid, began the scar that followed parallel to the line of the braid, all the way down. Nadine's bronze helmet hung from her saddle and her lamellar cuirass was tied on behind, although most of her men wore cuirasses or scale girdles and belts. But then, Nadine preferred to keep her reputation for being reckless.
'No, not that much,' Tess admitted. 'But you know as well as I do that I can't just have the privileges of my position. I have to accept the dangers as well.'
'Otherwise,' said Nadine, slipping easily from khush into Rhuian, 'you're just a player in a masquerade. All show.''
'Yes, all show. I don't care to live that way. And I'm not jaran. So I don't have to. Ilya keeps forgetting that.'
'You're wrong, Tess. He's never forgotten it. That's why he wouldn't let you go to the coast with him.'
Tess went pale with anger, and her fingers clenched, and unclenched, on her reins. Zhashi shied sideways, and settled. 'The business with Sakhalin was inexcusable,' she said in a voice made low by fury. 'But to refuse me the journey to the coast to meet Charles-!' She broke off.
Nadine watched for a few moments the interesting spectacle of Tess Soerensen too angry to speak. Then she lifted a hand to signal the jahar forward at a walk. Rather than looking at Tess, Nadine examined the timbered palisade that surrounded Basille, noting its gaps and its open gates and the sudden blur of activity at the gates when the approach of two hundred horsemen was noted by its guards.
'He's afraid,' she said softly. Tess did not reply. Perhaps she had not heard her. Perhaps she did not-or could not-understand what Nadine knew to be true. 'Off the fields!' she shouted at two idiot stragglers, and she led them along a dirt track that wound in toward town.
Out in the fields, workers breaking the ground in preparation for the spring ploughing raised their caps to stare, while others scattered back across the furrowed earth to find safety in hovels and behind low carts. A string of watchers appeared on what still remained of the palisade of Basille.
Nadine regarded these signs pensively. 'Poor things. They hadn't a chance, you know, when they brought out their pitiful army against Veselov's ten thousand with my jahar and Mirsky's jahar in reserve. After the first day they saw it was useless and negotiated a surrender. They would have done better to close their gates and try to wait out a siege. We weren't very good at sieges that first year.'
Tess chuckled. 'You spent one year too many in Jeds, Dina. Are you sorry for them, now?''
Nadine shrugged. 'What the gods have brought them, they will have to endure. Still, it's true enough. One year too many in Jeds marks you, just like any good jaran woman is marked for marriage.'
'Like you aren't.' Tess touched the scar that ran diagonally from cheekbone to jaw on her left cheek.
Nadine smiled, unmarked. 'Gods, it's no wonder he married you. He would never have married a jaran woman, not after the years he spent in Jeds. Sonia and Yuri-that's why they only spent a year there. They didn't want to be changed. Or couldn't be.'
'Poor Yuri. It's probably just as well he died. He would have hated this. Three years of war-one battle after the next. So much killing. He would have hated it.'
Nadine examined Tess reflectively-the hair and eyes no color ever seen in jaran-born; a good rider, for a khaja; and she could fight, it was true. Nadine recalled the cousin she had last seen years before, that gentle boy Yuri. It was true he had hated fighting-could do it, but hated it. Tess was good, probably better than Yuri had ever been, but she lacked the love of the art itself, she lacked the indifference to killing: and to be a truly good fighter one must have both of those traits in moderation, or one in excess. Good timing, and a fine eye for distance: those were Tess's skills.
Tess watched her, one lip quirked up in ironic salute. ' 'Judged and found wanting?''
'Your skills aren't at issue, Tess. Just remember, there are only five women I know of in Bakhtiian's army. Before you came, not one woman rode to battle. It's no dishonor to you to choose not to ride now.''
The set of Tess's mouth tightened. 'It's not such a simple choice for me. It never was.'
Nadine sighed. Poor Tess, always agonizing over what was the right thing to do. She changed the subject. 'Would Yurinya have hated it? I never knew him that well. We weren't of an age, and anyway, he was so quiet.'
'Unlike you.'
'Judged and found wanting?' retorted Nadine. Tess grinned. 'The entire coast subject to his uncle's authority? Half the southern kingdoms that border the plains? We ride into a town now that gives us tribute so that we'll never again attack them. One more season of campaigning and we'll either all be dead or we'll see the other half
