Exasperated, I permitted my voice to rise. 'What does it matter, Simonides? We're not prisoners here-' I paused with great elaboration, letting the implication hang itself upon the air in glowing letters of fire. '-are we?'
I had succeeded in horrifying him. He said something quickly and breathlessly in Skandic, which eluded both of us, then clasped both hands over his heart in a gesture of supplication. His breathing came fast and noisy, as if he were overcome.
'I'll take that as a 'no,' ' I said dryly. 'Now can we have our cart?'
His facial muscles twitched out of horror into subtle triumph. 'The metri sends to say you must tutor Herakleio.'
'What, the metri sends to say right now that I am to tutor Herakleio?'
'Indeed.'
I raised a skeptical brow. 'And when exactly, at what precise moment, did she send to say this? Just now, while we're standing here? If so, I didn't see her. And surely not before I found you to ask about a cart. Because surely you would have told me then the metri had sent to say I was to tutor Herakleio-except she hadn't sent to say anything, because I found you, you didn't come find me.'
'Tiger,' Del said, 'I'm getting gray hair.'
'Trust me, I have a lot more than you do, bascha …' I smiled in a kindly manner at Simonides. 'Well?'
He drew himself up. 'I am the eyes and ears of the metri.'
'So, I'm assuming one of your tasks is to guess what she might or might not like, and thus control the issue?'
'I do not guess,' he said with some asperity, 'I anticipate. ' Then, lowering head, eyes, and shoulders, he said, with a shift to dolorous dignity, 'I am the metri's slave. There is so little choice in my life-'
'Oh, no.' I cut him off abruptly. 'You're not using that line-or that expression-on me. I know you, Simonides: you're a master manipulator. You'd have to be to serve the metri so devotedly for all these years.' I gifted him with an overfriendly smile. 'Now, where were we?'
'Walking,' Del said.
Whereupon Herakleio wandered into the room and, through a mouthful of some kind of sticky confection, which also filled his hand, asked what we were talking about.
'Going into Skandi,' Del answered.
He blinked. 'Is this a difficulty?'
'We seem to be having a difficulty convincing Simonides, here, that we need a molah-man and his cart,' I explained.
Herakleio shrugged. 'Walk,' he suggested, and wandered out again.
I bent a brief but sulfurous glare on Simonides, who was looking rather deflated, then turned on my heel. And walked.
It was a long walk, and hot, but the breeze cut much of the heat and made it bearable. Then again, I'm so accustomed to the sun and the dryness of the desert that I found Skandi a gentle country, though with more moisture in the air. I think had there not been the breeze I might have been less enthralled; better the dry if searing heat than the wet thickness of moist air. People could choke in that.
Del and I, from habit, matched paces-not many men can do that with me, and no other women-and fell into a companionable, long-striding rhythm. The air was laden with the scent of grapevines, a tracery of cooksmoke, the taste of the sea. I realized it felt incontestably good simply to be out from under roofs, with the sun shining on my head. Which made me smile; May the sun shine on your head is one of the ritual blessings of the South.
'What are you grinning about?' Del asked.
I shrugged. 'I don't know. Just glad to be alive, I guess.' And free, for the moment, of the nagging apprehension.
'And glad to be alive to be glad you're alive.' She nodded vigorously. 'I feel it, too. We are free of- encumbrances.'
I glanced at her as we walked. 'Encumbrances?'
She thought about how best to explain. 'We have chased,' she said finally, 'and have been chased without true respite for too long.'
'What have we chased, bascha?'
'My brother,' she replied somberly. 'Poor lost Jamail, who, by the time we found him, wasn't truly my brother anymore, nor-' She broke it off abruptly as tears filled her eyes.
'Nor?' I prompted gently, though I had an idea where she was headed.
She blinked furiously; Del hates to cry. 'Nor had any wish to be.'
I couldn't adequately comprehend the loss, the sense of failure and guilt that had driven her so mercilessly and now seemed merely futile. I had no brother, no sister, nor ever had. But one thing that had come clear to me in three years with Del was that family, kinship, was part of the heart of the North.
'But you couldn't have known that,' I said. 'There is no way you might have predicted he would be so drastically changed by his experiences that he could bear no part of his past.'
'He wasn't-normal, anymore,' she said with difficulty. 'I don't mean because of what they did to him physically, but in his mind. He wasn't my brother anymore.'
Jamail had, I felt, fallen off the edge of the known world even as his sister shaped a new one. Made mute by the loss of his tongue, rendered castrate by the slavers, it did not in the least surprise me that he had sought relief as best he could, even if it meant surrendering sanity as we knew it. I had come close myself in the mines of Aladar.
'He could never be what he was, Del. But he found respect among the Vashni, and a measure of affection after the hoolies he inhabited. In like circumstances, I don't know that I'd have left them either.'
She shook her head. 'You have been changed by your experiences, yet you do not turn your back on your past. You've let it shape you into a stronger man instead of …instead of what Jamail became.'
'Maybe. But I was older than Jamail. For me it wasn't a question of having had stolen the means to return to my past, because my past was nothing any sane person would want. I understood that much, at least, and why I had to use the past to shape my future, and that I had to learn how to do it. That wouldn't come naturally.' I shook my head. 'You can't compare him to me, bascha. It isn't fair to Jamail.'
'But you became stronger because of what happened.'
'Not for a long time.' I scuffed through the cart-track, head bent as I watched dust fly. 'When I was free of the Salset at last, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Just-be free. But no part of life is free; it costs. Always. And I had to find a way to pay for it.'
'Sword-dancing.'
'Eventually. Once I'd seen a few matches in the circle, realized what a man alone in the world might accomplish. It seemed far more fair than anything I'd encountered with the Salset. So I found out what I could, and pursued it. But…'
'But?'
'But it was the shodo at Alimat who took the former slave-the angry, ignorant, terrified former slave-and made him truly free.'
She nodded. 'Because you were good.'
'No. Because I might become good. Might. If I worked very hard at it.'
'You are the single most physically gifted man I have ever seen,' she argued vehemently, who had trained as rigorously on Staal-Ysta. 'You are completely at ease in your body, and with your body; I think there is nothing you could not accomplish if you wished to.'
'Sheer physical ability is one thing,' I said, then tapped my skull. 'There is the dance up here as well.'
'That is what Alimat and the shodo taught you,' Del said. 'You had the body: quickness, stamina, size, power-'
'But no discipline. No patience. No comprehension of what the rituals meant, and were meant to instill. What I wanted most was to prove I was free, was no man's chula, no matter what was said, or implied, or rumored, or believed about me …' I let it go with a hitch of one shoulder. 'Let's just say I wasn't the most popular student.'
