and had a horn of the bull's blood. It seemed much later that he traded the Duke's sword for another bull, and later still when a swaying Korioko convinced him that it was bad luck to ever let a coward's mark remain on one's body. Korioko yelled for a LastFriend to be brought to him, and when it arrived, he heated the snake's-tongue blade over the table's candles. Vandien willingly pushed his darkened arm out onto the table, sat still as the searing blade was laid over the mark of Kellich's rip. He smelled scorching flesh, and then a far-off pain itched at his arm. Before he could respond to it, Korioko was lifting the blade away and exclaiming with pleasure at how cleanly outlined the scar from the pronged blade would be. Everyone joined in congratulating him on the new scar, and the master of the Bloodhall donated a bull to the table in a rare display of Brurjan fellowship.
He wasn't sure when or why they went outside. It wasn't dawn yet, but a strange light suffused the streets. Halikira was leaning on him and he was struggling valiantly to support her.
'Keklokito. Black or white?' Someone demanded.
'Take white. The black won't face a pikeman,' Halikira hissed.
'White,' Vandien answered.
Someone gave him a leg up, and when he pushed the helmet from his eyes, he was atop a large white horse trapped out with the Duke's black and silver harness. It felt strange to be up so high, but good. 'Everything feels good,' he observed to Halikira.
'It always does,' she answered, 'after a Great Kill. Ride well and may your fangs taste blood often.'
He couldn't think of a reply to that, and when he lifted a hand and leaned forward to speak to her, the horse interpreted it as a signal to charge. He left Tekum at a gallop, noticing in passing that half of the town was ablaze. It seemed an odd way to end a festival, but then, he had never really understood what they were celebrating in the first place.
He tried to remember where he was supposed to be going. Home. That was it. That was fine. It was time he paid a visit home. When dawn began to break before him, he realized the horse had slowed to a nagging trot. He pulled it in to a walk, lifted his eyes to the sunrise. Ki came suddenly to his mind, and then the remembrance that he was dying. He had only moments for his grief. The physical pain hit him first, knocking him from the saddle before the first convulsion lashed him. When the fit finally passed, his vision seemed extraordinarily clear. His body gave him one last moment of stillness, a final glimpse of sunrise breaking over the green hills of his father's keep. The great cold uncurled inside him. 'I've come home, Father,' he said to the one waiting for him, and fell into the darkness.
NINETEEN
It wasn't a stone in his hoof; she could feel no heat or swelling. Damn and damn and damn. She'd haveto hope it was only a bruise. She patted Sigurd's filthy shoulder and got back up on the box. So, they'd walk, then. Just when she needed speed, this had to happen. She stirred the team up, sat back and tried to calm herself. It didn't work. There was a marked hitch to Sigurd's stride that filled her with fury. She'd like to kill Willow and Vintner. And if that was dawn breaking over Tekum, then Goat and Dellin would be expecting her anytime now, and she wouldn't be there.
Dawn meant another thing as well, something she pushed to the back of her mind. Dawn meant Vandien was dead, from Kellich's poison or the Duke's sword. It didn't much matter which had killed him. Either way he was just as dead. As dead as everything they had shared. She found she could think of him calmly. Much of the anger and tears had been worked out with a double-bitted axe and the wall of Vintner's barn. A numbness had replaced it. He was dead by now. How could it matter whether he had died for the rebellion or thinking of her? He was still as dead. She was still as numb.
She rubbed her eyes with dirty hands, looked again. Yes, dawn was breaking, but not over Tekum. The rosy glow over the town had to be something else. Fire? Maybe, but who'd set half the town ablaze?
Actually, more than half the town was ablaze, and the flames were spreading. The long hot days had made anything burnable tinder-dry. Sparks leaped the narrow streets in the winds of the fire's breath. She picked her way through the town, turning often to avoid the fires. Even avoiding the streets where the buildings still blazed, Ki choked in the smoke and blowing ash. No one seemed to be doing much about the fires. The fires must have been the final culmination to an earlier uproar. She saw only one body, but the signs of earlier violence were everywhere. Broken furniture was strewn through the streets, and door leathers dangled and flapped in the fire's wind. She saw very few folk, and the ones she did see were either salvaging or looting; Ki wasn't sure which.
The tree-lined main street had taken the worst of whatever had happened here. Ki guided the team between the wreckage of Festival booths, past burned-out buildings and scorched ones, between trees whose leaves hung blackened and lifeless from the fire's heat. Perhaps it had started here; no buildings along this strip were actively burning still. Mud brick walls, cracked and crazed by the heat, gaped emptily, their thatched or wooden roofs burned away. Ki saw a few street children salvaging bits of food from the wrecked booths. They were competing with crows, and both groups stopped their pecking to watch Ki suspiciously.
At first she didn't recognize the two figures coming toward her. The boy walked at the man's side, the man's hand on his shoulder. As she came abreast of them, Dellin lifted a hand in greeting. She halted the team. Goat immediately scrabbled into the side door of the cuddy. Dellin shrugged, and awkwardly clambered up to share the seat.
'Do you know what happened?' Ki asked.
Dellin shook his head. 'The Brurjans ran wild, looting and wrecking. They took everything they wanted, and wrecked the rest. Then they rode off toward Algona.' He shook his head again, as if trying to clear it. 'Such emotions as those creatures harbor! And no restraints on any of it last night. I tried to shield the boy, but...' Again he shook his head.
'What happened to your mule? The Brurjans?'
'No. Someone set fire to the shed where we were resting. No place was safe anymore, so I decided to come and find you. But once we were on the road, we met a wave of folk fleeing the town's destruction. A merchant with two heavy bags and a knife demanded our mule. He was so full of greed and fear that he would have killed us for it. The mule wasn't worth it, so I let him take it. I was too busy trying toprotect the boy's mind to physically shield him as well.'
'Isn't it wonderful,' Ki observed bitterly, 'how adversity brings out the best in all of us? The Brurjans turn on the merchants, and the merchants turn on you. But what triggered it all?'
Dellin shrugged. A Brurjan went amok and killed the Duke, I think. At least, the Brurjans were shouting his name through the streets and saying he had given the town to them. Keklokito, it was.'
So even that plot had gone awry. She wondered where Vandien had fallen, and how. The team stood still in the street. Ki's eyes wandered over the wreckage. 'Where do I go?' she asked the empty street.
Gotheris poked his head out of the cuddy door. 'You didn't find Vandien?' he asked. She heard anxiety in his voice.
'No,' she replied, and the word came out harder than she meant it. Dellin looked at her curiously, and she felt the probing she was powerless to stop.
'The bond is gone.'
She shrugged. 'He's dead.'
'The bond is gone. While it was there, I could tell he was alive. But now it's gone. He's let go. Or you have.'
'He's dead,' Ki repeated dully. Simple sorrow would have been a relief. Why did she have to deal with anger and betrayal and probing questions from a nosy Jore? Was he reading her irritation with him? Then let him, and be damned. She glared at him.
Dellin only looked at her.
Goat's face was worse. The look of sleepy bafflement hadn't left his eyes. A deep furrow divided his brows as he looked from her to Dellin and back. 'Something ... is wrong,' he said. He struggled with words. 'It isn't like ... you feel it is.'
She shook the reins. Useless to explain to the boy that she could not put her feelings into simple words. She didn't understand them herself. This was what all her hoping and searching came to. She felt cheated and
