I shivered. If Del had asked what the problem was, I'd have told her it was a bit chill in the morning, and after all I was wearing only a leather dhoti for ease of movement as I went through the repetitive rituals that honed the body and mind. But it wasn't the chill of morning that kindled the response. It was the awareness again of the battle I faced. Or, more accurately, battles.
And none of them had anything to do with sword-dancing, or even sword fighting. Only with refusing to become what I'd been told, on Meteiera, I must become: a mage.
Actually, they'd said I was to become a priest-mage, but I'm even less inclined to put faith in, well, faith, than in the existence of magic.
And, of course, it was becoming harder to deny the existence of magic since I had managed to work some. And even harder to deny my own willingness to work it; I had tried to work it. Purposely. I had a vague recollection that those first days after escaping the Stone Forest were filled with desperation, and a desperate man undertakes many strange things to achieve certain goals. My goal had been vital: to get back to Skandi and find Del, and to settle things permanently with the metri, my grandmother.
I got back to Skandi by boat, which is certainly not a remarkable thing when attempting to reach an island. Except the boat hadn't existed before I made it exist, conjured of seawrack and something more I'd learned on Meteiera.
Discipline.
Magic is merely the tool. Discipline is the power.
Now I stood at the rail staring across the ocean, knowing that everything I'd ever been in my life was turned inside out. Upside down. Every which way you can think of.
Take up the sword.
I lived with and for the sword. I didn't understand why I needed to be told. No; commanded.
'You're still you,' Del said, with such explicit firmness that I realized she was worried that I was worried, not knowing my thoughts had gone elsewhere.
I smiled out at the seaspray.
'You are.' She came up beside me. She had washed her hair in the small amount of fresh water the captain allowed for such ablutions, and now the breeze dried it. The mix of salt, spray, and sun had bleached her blonder. Strands were lifted away from her face, streaming back across her shoulders.
I have been less in my life, dependent on circumstances. But now, indisputably, I was more.
I was, I had been told, messiah. Now mage. I had believed neither, claiming—and knowing—I was merely a man. It was enough. It was all I had wanted to be, in the years of slavery when I was chula, not boy. Slave, not human.
I glanced at Del, still smiling. 'Keep saying that, bascha.'
'You are.'
'No,' I said, 'I'm not. And you know it as well as I do.'
Her face went blank.
'Nice try,' I told her, 'but I read you too well, now.'
Del look straight at me, shirking nothing. 'And I, now, can read nothing at all of you.'
There. It was said. Admitted aloud, one to the other.
'Still me,' I said, 'but different.'
Del was never coquettish or coy. Nor was she now. She put her hand on my arm. 'Then come below,' she said simply, 'and show me how different.'
Ah, yes. That was still the same.
Grinning, I went.
When we finally disembarked in Haziz, I did not kiss the ground. That would have entailed my kneeling down in the midst of a typically busy day on the choked docks, risking being flattened by a dray-cart, wagon, or someone hauling bales and none too happy to find a large, kneeling man in his way, and coming into some' what intimate contact with the liquid, lumpy, squishy, and aromatic effluvia of a complement of species and varieties of animals so vast I did not care to count.
Suffice it to say I was relieved to once more plant both sandaled feet upon the Southron ground, even though that ground felt more like ship than earth. The adjustment from flirtatious deck to solidity always took me a day or two.
Just as it would take me time to sort out the commingled aromas I found so disconcertingly evident after months away. Whew!
'They don't need to challenge you,' Del observed from beside me with delicate distaste. 'They could just leave you here and let the stench kill you.'
With haughty asperity, I said, 'You are speaking about my homeland.'
'And now that we are back here among people who would as soon kill you as give you greeting,' she continued, 'what is our next move?'
It was considerably warmer here than on Skandi, though it lacked the searing heat of high summer. I glanced briefly at the sun, sliding downward from its zenith. 'The essentials,' I replied. 'A drink. Food. A place to stay the night. A horse for you.' The stud would be off-loaded and taken to a livery I trusted, where he could get his earth-legs back. I'd paid well for the service, though the sailhand likely wouldn't think it enough once the stud tried to kick his head off. Another reason to let the first temper tantrum involve someone other than me. 'Swords —'
'Good,' Del said firmly.
'And tomorrow we'll head out for Julah.'
'Julah? Why? That's where Sabra nearly had the killing of us both.' Unspoken was the knowledge that not far from Julah, at the palace inherited from her father, Sabra had forced me to declare myself an outcast from my trade. To reject the honor codes of an Alimat-trained seventh-level sword-dancer.
'Because,' I explained. 'I'd like to have a brief discussion with my old friend Fouad.'
' 'Discussion,' ' she echoed, and I knew it was a question.
'With words, not blades.'
'Fouad's the one who betrayed you to Sabra and nearly got you killed.'
'Which calls for at least a few friendly words, don't you think?'
Del had attempted to fall in beside me as I wended my way through narrow, dust-floured streets clogged with vendors hawking cheap wares to new arrivals and washing hung out to dry from the upper storeys of close- built, mudbrick dwellings stacked one upon the other in slumping disarray, boasting sun-faded, once-brilliant awnings; but as she didn't know Haziz at all, it was difficult for her to stay there when I followed a route unfamiliar to her. She settled for being one step behind my left shoulder, trying to anticipate my direction. 'Words? That's all?'
'It's a starting point.' I scooped up a melon from the top of a piled display. The melon-seller's aggrieved shout followed us. I grinned, hearing familiar Southron oaths—from a mouth other than my own—for the first time in months.
Del picked her way over a prodigious pile of danjac manure, lightly seasoned with urine. 'Are you going to pay for that?'
Around the first juicy, delicious mouthful I shaped, 'Welcome-home present.' And tried not to dribble down the front of my Skandic silks. Still noticeably crimson, unfortunately.
'And I've been thinking …'
Hoolies, I'd been dreaming.
And I regretted bringing it up.
'Yes?' she prompted.
'Maybe . . .'
'Yes?'
The words came into my mouth, surprising me as well as her. 'Maybe we'll go get my true sword.'
'True sword?'
I twisted adroitly as a gang of shrieking children ran by, raising a dun-tinted wake of acrid dust. 'You know. Out there. In the desert. Under a pile of rocks.'
Del stopped dead. 'That sword? You mean to go get that sword?'
