Read the book: «The Soldier Son Trilogy»

Map

ONE
Magic and Iron

I remember well the first time I saw the magic of the plainspeople.

I was eight and my father had taken me with him on a trip to the outpost on Franner’s Bend. We had arisen before the dawn for the long ride; the sun was just short of standing at noon when we finally saw the flag waving over the walls of the outpost by the river. Once, Franner’s Bend had been a military fort on the contested border between the plainspeople and the expanding Kingdom of Gernia. Now it was well within the Gernian border, but some of its old martial glory persisted. Two great cannons guarded the gates, but the trade stalls set up against the mud-plastered stockade walls behind them dimmed their ferocity. The trail we had followed from Widevale now joined a road that picked its way among the remains of mud-brick foundations. Their roofs and walls were long gone, leaving the shells gaping at the sky like empty tooth sockets in a skull. I looked at them curiously as we passed, and dared a question. ‘Who used to live here?’

‘Plainspeople,’ Corporal Parth said. His tone said that was his full reply. Rising early did not suit his temperament, and I suspected already that he blamed me for having to get out of bed so early.

I held my tongue for a time, but then the questions burst out of me. ‘Why are all the houses broken and gone? Why did they leave? I thought the plainspeople didn’t have towns. Was this a plainspeople town?’

‘Plainspeople don’t have towns, they left because they left, and the houses are broken because the plainspeople didn’t know how to build any better than a termite does.’ Parth’s low-voiced answer implied that I was stupid for asking.

My father has always had excellent hearing. ‘Nevare,’ he said.

I nudged my horse to move up alongside my father’s taller mount. He glanced at me once, I think to be sure I was listening, and then said, ‘Most plainspeople did not build permanent towns. But some folk, like the Bejawi, had seasonal settlements. Franner’s Bend was one of them. They came with their flocks during the driest part of the year, for there would be grazing and water here. But they didn’t like to live for long in one place, and so they didn’t build to last. At other times of the year, they took their flocks out onto the plains and followed the grazing.’

‘Why didn’t they stay here and build something permanent?’

‘It wasn’t their way, Nevare. We cannot say they didn’t know how, for they did build monuments in various locations that were significant to them, and those monuments have weathered the tests of time very well. One day I shall take you to see the one named Dancing Spindle. But they did not make towns for themselves as we do, or devise a central government or provide for the common good of their people. And that was why they remained a poor, wandering folk, prey to the Kidona raiders and to the vagaries of the seasons. Now that we have settled the Bejawi and begun to teach them how to have permanent villages and schools and stores, they will learn to prosper.’

I pondered this. I knew the Bejawi. Some of them had settled near the north end of Widevale, my father’s holdings. I’d been to the settlement once. It was a dirty place, a random tumble of houses without streets, with rubbish and sewage and offal scattered all around it. I hadn’t been impressed. As if my father could hear my thoughts, he said, ‘Sometimes it takes a while for people to adapt to civilization. The learning process can be hard. But in the end it will be of great benefit to them. The Gernian people have a duty to lift the Bejawi folk and help them learn civilized ways.’

Oh, that I understood. Just as struggling with mathematics would one day make me a better soldier. I nodded and continued to ride at his stirrup as we approached the outpost.

The town of Franner’s Bend had become a traders’ rendezvous, where Gernian merchants sold overpriced wares to homesick soldiers and purchased hand-made plainsworked goods and trinkets from the bazaar for the city markets in the west. The military contingent had a barracks and headquarters there which was still the heart of the town but the trade had become the new reason for its existence. Outside the fortified walls a little community had sprung up around the riverboat docks. A lot of common soldiers retired there, eking out their existence with hand-outs from their younger comrades. Once, I suppose, the fort at Franner’s Bend had been of strategic importance. Now it was little more than another backwater on the river. The flags were still raised daily with military precision and a great deal of ceremony and pomp. But, as my father told me on the ride there, duty at Franner’s Bend was a ‘soft post’ now, a plum given to older or incapacitated officers who did not wish to retire to their family homes yet.

Our sole reason for visiting was to determine if my father would win the military contract for sheepskins to use as saddle padding. My family was just venturing into sheep herding at that time, and he wished to assess the market potential for them before investing too heavily in the silly creatures. Much as he detested playing the merchant, he told me, as a new noble he had to establish the investments that would support his estate and allow it to grow. ‘I’ve no wish to hand your brother an empty title when he comes of age. The future Lord Burvelles of the East must have income to support a noble lifestyle. You may think that has nothing to do with you, young Nevare, since as a second son you will go to be a soldier. But when you are an old man, and your soldiering days are through, you will come home to your brother’s estate to retire. You will live out your days at Widevale, and the income of the estate will determine how well your daughters will marry, for it is the duty of a noble first son to provide for his soldier brother’s daughters. It behooves you to know about these things.’

I understood little, then, of what he was telling me. Of late, he talked to me twice as much as he ever had, and I felt I understood only half as much of what he said. He had only recently parted me from my sisters’ company and their gentle play. I missed them tremendously, as I did my mother’s attentions and coddling. The separation had been abrupt, following my father’s discovery that I spent most of my afternoons playing ‘tea-party’ in the garden with Elisi and Yaril, and had even adopted a doll as my own to bring to the nursery festivities. Such play alarmed my father for reasons my eight-year-old mind could not grasp. He had scolded my mother in a muffled ‘discussion’ behind the closed doors of the parlour, and instantly assumed total responsibility for my upbringing. My schoolbook lessons were suspended, pending the arrival of a new tutor he had hired. In the intervening days he kept me at his side for all sorts of tedious errands and constantly lectured me on what my life would be like when I grew up to be an officer in the King’s Cavalla. If I was not with my father, and sometimes even when I was, Corporal Parth supervised me.

The abrupt change had left me both isolated and unsettled. I sensed I had somehow disappointed my father, but was unsure of what I had done. I longed to return to my sisters’ company. I was also ashamed of missing them, for was I not a young man now and on my path to be my father’s soldier son? So he often reminded me, as did fat old Corporal Parth. Parth was what my mother somewhat irritably called a ‘charity hire’. Old, paunchy, and no longer fit for duty, he had come to ask my father’s aid and been hired as an unskilled groundskeeper. He was now the temporary replacement for the nanny I had shared with my sisters. He was supposed to school me in ‘the basics of military bearing and fitness’ each day until my father could find a more qualified instructor. I did not think much of Parth. Nanny Sisi had been more organized and demanded more discipline of me than he did. The slouching old man who had carried his corporal’s rank into retirement with him regarded me as more of a nuisance and a chore than a bright young mind to be shaped and a body to be built with rigor. Often, when he was supposed to be teaching me riding, he spent an hour napping while I practised ‘being a good little sentry and keeping watch’, which meant that I sat in the branches of a shady tree while he slept beneath it. I had not told my father any of that, of course. One thing that Parth had already instructed me in was that he was the commander and I was the soldier, and a good soldier never questioned his orders.

My father was well known at Franner’s Bend. We rode through the town and up to the gates of the fortress. There he was saluted and welcomed without question. I looked curiously about me as we rode past an idle smith’s shop, a warehouse, and a barracks before we reined in our horses before the commander’s headquarters. I gaped up at the grand stone building, three storeys tall, as my father gave Parth his instructions regarding me.

‘Give Nevare a tour of the outpost and explain the layout. Show him the cannon and talk to him about their placement and range. The fortifications here are a classic arrangement of defences. See that he understands what that means.’

If my father had looked back as he ascended the steps, he would have seen how Parth rolled his eyes. My heart sank. It meant that Parth had little intention of complying with my father’s orders, and that I would later be held accountable for what I had not learned, which had happened before. I resolved, however, that it would not happen this time.

I followed him as we walked a short distance down the street. ‘That’s a barracks, where soldiers live,’ he told me. ‘And that’s a canteen, tacked onto the end of it, where soldiers can get a beer and a bit of relaxation when they aren’t on duty.’

The tour of the fort stopped there. The barracks and canteen were constructed of wooden planks, painted green and white. It was a long, low building with an open porch that ran the length of it. Off-duty soldiers idled there, sewing, blacking their boots, or talking and smoking or chewing as they sat on hard benches in the paltry shade. Outside the canteen, another porch offered refuge for a class of men I knew well. Too old to serve or otherwise incapacitated, these men wore a rough mix of military uniform and civilian garb. A lone woman in a faded orange dress slouched at one table, a limp flower behind her ear. She looked very tired. Mustered-out soldiers often approached my father in the hope of work and a place to live. If he thought they had any use at all he usually hired them, much to my lady mother’s dismay. But these men, I immediately knew, my father would have turned away. Their clothes were unkempt, their unshaven faces smudged with dirt. Half a dozen of them loitered on the benches, drinking beer, chewing tobacco and spitting the brownish stuff onto the earth floor. The stink of tobacco juice and spilled beer hung in the air.

As we passed by, Parth glanced longingly into the low windows, and then delightedly hailed an old crony of his, one he evidently hadn’t seen in years. I stood to one side, politely bored, as the two men exchanged reports on their current lives through the window opening, Parth’s friend leaning on the sill to talk to us as we stood in the street. Vev had only recently arrived at the fort with his wife and his two sons, having been mustered out after he injured his back in a fall from his horse. Like many a soldier when his soldiering days were done, he had no resources to fall back on. His wife did a bit of sewing to keep a roof over their heads, but it was rocky going. And what was Parth doing these days? Working for Colonel Burvelle? I saw Vev’s face lighten with interest. He immediately invited Parth to join him in a beer to celebrate their reunion. When I started to follow him up the steps, Parth glared at me. ‘You wait outside for me, Nevare. I won’t be long.’

‘You’re not supposed to leave me alone in town, Corporal Parth,’ I reminded him. I’d heard my father reiterate that carefully on the ride here; young as I was, I was still a bit surprised that Parth had forgotten it already. I waited for him to thank me for the reminder. I considered that my due, for whenever my father had to remind me of a rule I had forgotten, I had to thank him and accept the consequences of my lapse.

Instead Parth scowled at me. ‘You ain’t alone out here, Nevare. I can see you right from the window, and there’s all these old sojers keeping an eye on you. You’ll be fine. Just sit yourself down by the door and wait like I told you.’

‘But I’m supposed to stay with you,’ I objected. My order to stay in Parth’s company was a separate order from his to watch me and show me the fort. He might get in trouble for leaving me alone outside. And I feared my father would do more than rebuke me for not following Parth as I was supposed to.

His drinking companion came up with a solution. ‘My boys Raven and Darda are out there, laddie. They’re down by the corner of the smithy, playing knife toss with the other lads. Whyn’t you go and see how it’s done, and play a little yourself? We won’t be gone long. I just want to talk to your Uncle Parth here about what it takes to find a cushy job like what he’s found for himself, nursie-maiding for old Colonel Burvelle.’

‘Keep a civil tongue in your head when you speak of the boy’s pa in front of him! Do you think he hasn’t got a tongue of his own, to wag on about how you talk? Shut it, Vev, before you put my job on the block.’

‘Well, I didn’t mean anything, as I’m sure Colonel Laddie knew, right, lad?’

I grinned uncertainly. I knew that Vev was needling Parth on purpose, and perhaps mocking my father and me into the bargain. I didn’t understand why. Weren’t they friends? And if Vev were insulting Parth, why didn’t we just walk away like gentlemen, or demand satisfaction of him, as often happened in the tales my eldest sister read aloud to my younger sister when my parents were not about? It was all very confusing, and as there had been much talk over my head of late that I must be taught how men did things now or I should grow up to be effeminate, I hesitated long over what response I should make.

Before I could, Parth gave me a none-too-gentle push in the direction of some older boys lounging at the corner of a warehouse and told me to go and play, for he’d only be a moment or two, and immediately clomped up the steps and vanished into the tavern, so that I was left unchaperoned on the street.

A barracks town can be a rough place. Even at eight I knew that, and so I approached the older boys cautiously. They were, as Vev had said, playing a knife toss game in the alley between the smithy and a warehouse. They were betting half-coppers and pewter bits as each boy took a turn at dropping the knife, point first, into the street. The bets wagered were on whether or not the knife would stick and how close each boy could come to his own foot on the drop without cutting himself. As they were barefoot, the wagers were quite interesting apart from the small coins involved, and a circle of five or so boys had gathered to watch. The youngest of them was still a year or two older than me, and the eldest was in his teens. They were sons of common soldiers, dressed in their father’s cast-offs and as unkempt as stray dogs. In a few more years, they’d sign their papers and whatever regiment took them in would dust them off and shape them into foot soldiers. They knew their own fortunes as well as I knew mine, and seemed very content to spend the last days of their boyhoods playing foolish games in the dusty street.

I had no coins to bet and I was dressed too well to keep company with them, so they made a space in their huddle to let me watch but didn’t speak to me. I learned a few of their names only by listening to them talk to each other. For a time, I was content to watch their odd game, and listen intently to their rough curses and the crude name-calling that accompanied bets lost or won. This was certainly a long way from my sisters’ tea parties, and I recall that I wondered if this were the sort of manly company that of late my father had been insisting I needed.

The sun was warm and the game endless as the bits of coin and other random treasure changed hands over and over. A boy named Carky cut his foot, and hopped and howled for a bit, but soon was back in the game. Raven, Vev’s son, laughed at him and happily pocketed the two pennies and three marbles Carky had bet. I was watching them intently and would scarcely have noticed the arrival of the scout, save that all the other boys suddenly suspended the game and fell silent as he rode past.

I knew he was a scout, for his dress was half-soldier and half-plainsman. He wore dark-green cavalla trousers like a proper trooper, but his shirt was the loose linen of a plainsman, immaculately clean. His hair was not cropped short in a soldier’s cut nor did he wear a proper hat. Instead, his black hair hung loose and long and moved with his white kaffiyeh. A rope of red silk secured his headgear. His arms were bare that summer day, the sleeves rolled to his biceps, and his forearm was circled with tattooed wreaths and trade-bracelets of silver beads and pewter charms and gleaming yellow brass. His horse was a good one, solid black, with long straight legs and jingle charms braided into his mane. I watched him with intent interest. Scouts were a breed apart, it was said. They were ranked as officers, lieutenants usually and frequently were nobly born, but they lived independent lives, outside the regular ranks of the military and often reported directly to the commander of an outpost. They were our first harbingers of any trouble, be it logjams on the river, eroding roads or unrest among the plainspeople.

A girl of twelve or thirteen on a chestnut gelding followed the scout. It was a smaller animal with a finely sculptured brow that spoke of the best nomadic stock. She rode astraddle as no proper Gernian girl would, and by that as much as by her garb I knew her for a mixed blood. It was not uncommon, though still deplored, for Gernian soldiers to take wives from among the plainspeople. It was less common for a scout to stoop so low. I stared at the girl in frank curiosity. My mother often said that the products of cross-unions were abominations before the good god, so I was surprised to see that such a long and ugly-sounding word described such a lovely creature. She was dressed in brightly layered skirts, one orange, one green, one yellow, that blossomed over the horse’s back and covered her knees, but not her calves and feet. She wore soft little boots of antelope skin, and silver charms twinkled on their laces. Loose white trousers showed beneath her bunched skirts. Her shorter kaffiyeh matched her father’s and displayed to advantage the long brown hair that hung down her back in dozens of fine braids. She had a high, round brow and calm grey eyes. Her white blouse bared her neck and arms, displaying the black torc she wore around her throat and a quantity of bracelets, some stacked above her elbows and others jingling at her wrist. She wore the woman’s wealth of her family proudly for all to see. Her naked arms were brown from the sun and as muscled as a boy’s. As she rode, she looked round boldly, very unlike my sisters’ modest manner and downcast eyes when in public.

Her stare met mine, and we exchanged looks of honest appraisal. She had probably never seen a noble’s soldier son, and I stood a bit straighter, well aware that I was finely turned out in my dark green trousers and crisp blouse and black boots, and especially so in the company of the ragged street-jay boys. I was not so young that the attention of a girl was not flattering. Looking back, perhaps it annoyed the others that she looked so intently at me, for they stared at her like hungry dogs studying a plump kitten.

She and the scout dismounted outside the same building that my father had entered. The scout had a clear, carrying voice, and we all heard him tell her that he would join her as soon as he’d delivered his report to the commander. He gave her some coins and told her she might go down the street to the bazaar and get some sweets or fresh caralin juice or ribbons for her hair, but not to go beyond the line of stalls there. ‘Yes, Papa. I will.’ She promised her father quickly, her eagerness to get to the market evident in her voice. The scout glanced over at my cluster of lads and scowled at us absent-mindedly, and then hurried up the steps into the command quarters.

His daughter was left alone in the street.

In such a circumstance, I know my sisters would have been terrified. My parents would never have left Elisi and little Yaril in a barracks town without an adult chaperone. I wondered if her father did not care for her. Then, as she strode smiling down the street, heading past the knot of boys and toward the vendors’ stores on the market square just outside the outpost gates, I saw that she was not frightened or cowed in the least. She walked with confidence and grace, intent on exploring the many delights of the bazaar. My gaze followed her.

‘Look at her, will you?’ one of the older boys hissed to his friend.

Raven grinned knowingly. ‘That hinny’s tamed. See that iron thing round her neck? Long as she wears that, her charms don’t work.’

I looked from one leering young face to the other, confused. ‘Her charms?’ I asked.

It was flattering when Raven deigned to notice me. ‘Little silver jingly things, woven in her hair, supposed to protect her. Plains magic. But someone tamed her. Put an iron collar on a plainswoman, and she can’t use her charms against you. She’s ripe for the picking, that hinny is.’

‘Picking what?’ I boldly asked. There was no hinny to be seen, only the girl walking past us. I was confused and resolved to get an explanation. I did not know at that time that my bold assumption of not only equality but superiority to these sons of common soldiers would be resented by the older boys. Raven brayed a laugh out, and then said to me earnestly, ‘Why, to picking out her friends, of course. You seen how she looked at you? She wants to be your friend. And you want her to be friends with us, right, ’cause we’re your friends, too. Whyn’t you just go out there and catch her by the hand and lead her back here to us?’

Raven’s voice was sugary, but his words fell somewhere between a compliment and a dare. As he spoke, he gestured to the other boys, and they all retreated more deeply into the alley between the buildings. I stared up at him for a moment longer. His cheek was downy, and the fine hair held the dust of the street. The corners of his mouth were caked with dust that had been trapped there by stray, sticky crumbs. His hair was shaggily cut, his clothing dirty. But he was older than I was, and he’d been playing with a knife, and thus I yearned to distinguish myself in his eyes.

The girl walked like a gazelle going down to water. She was intent on her quest, and yet both wary and aware of what was around her. She did not look at us, but I knew she had seen us. She probably knew we were talking about her. I darted out a few steps into the street to intercept her, and when she looked at me, I smiled at her. She smiled down at me. It was all the encouragement I needed. I hurried up to her, and she halted in the street.

‘Hello. My friends want you to come and meet them.’ Such an ingenuous way for me to greet her. I had no idea I was leading her into a vile trap.

I think she did. She looked past me at the loitering boys inside the alley mouth, and then back at me again. I hope she saw I was innocent of their scheme. She smiled again but her words dismissed me. ‘I don’t think so. I’m going to the market. Goodbye.’ Her voice was clear and unaccented, and obviously intended to reach my playmates’ ears.

They heard her words and saw how she strode off. One of my erstwhile companions gave a catcall and Raven laughed at me. I couldn’t stand it. I ran after her and seized her hand. ‘Please? Just come over and say hello.’

She did not react with alarm, or take her hand from mine. She considered me kindly for a moment and then offered, ‘You’re a friendly little cub, aren’t you? Why don’t you come to the market with me instead?’

Her invitation instantly attracted me more than the company of the boys. I loved going to market almost as much as my sisters did. Exotic goods and trinkets demanded to be handled and explored. Market food was always exciting; I loved plains food, the spicy root-paste rolled in terna seed, sweet and peppery meat sticks, and little buns of salty ember-bread, each with a lump of carrada in the middle. My gaze met her grey eyes and I found myself nodding and smiling. I forgot the boys and their stick-knife game. For the moment, I ignored the knowledge that not only Parth but also my father would disapprove of me wandering off with a half-breed plainsgirl to saunter through the market.

We had gone less than five paces when my earlier companions suddenly ringed us. They were smiling, but their grins were wolfish, not friendly. Raven stood directly in front of us, forcing us to stop. Carky, his cut foot tied with a rag, stood at Raven’s elbow. The girl’s fingers twitched in mine, and as clearly as if she had voiced it, I felt the little jolt of fear that shot through her. My half-formed honour came to the fore and I said importantly, ‘Please step out of our way. We are going to the market.’

Raven grinned. ‘Well, listen to him! We’re not in your way, colonel’s son. In fact, we’re here to guide you. There’s a short cut to the market. We’ll show you. Right down that alley.’

‘But I can see the market from here!’ I protested stupidly. The girl tried to take her hand from mine, but I held on tightly. I suddenly knew my duty. A gentleman always protected women and children. I instinctively knew that these fellows meant my companion some sort of harm. Innocent as I was, I did not know what they intended for her, or perhaps I would have been more sensibly frightened. Instead, I only grew more determined to guard her. ‘Step out of our way,’ I commanded them again.

But they were bunching closer, and unwillingly both the girl and I stepped back, trying to gain space. They came on and again we stepped back. We were being herded toward the alley mouth as surely as dogs herd sheep into a pen. I glanced over my shoulder at the boys behind me, and Carky laughed an ugly laugh. At the sound, the girl beside me halted. Despite my grip on her fingers, she drew her hand free of mine. The boys advanced another step on us. They suddenly loomed larger and uglier than they had when I had watched them play. I could smell them, the cheap food on their breath, their unwashed bodies. I glanced quickly around, seeking some adult who would intervene, but the sun was hot and this part of the street was deserted. People were either inside the cooler buildings, or at the market. Down the street, the lounging soldiers on the canteen porch were talking amongst themselves. Even if I shouted for help, I doubted that anyone would respond. We were very near the alley mouth; we could quickly be dragged out of sight. I summoned the last of my quavering authority. ‘My father will be very angry if you do not let us pass.’

TWO
Harbinger

I was twelve when I saw the messenger who brought the first tidings of plague from the east.

Strange to say, it left little impression on me at the time. It was a day like many other days. Sergeant Duril, my tutor for equestrian skills, had been putting me through drills with Sirlofty all morning. The gelding was my father’s pride and joy, and that summer was the first that I was given permission to practise manoeuvres on him. Sirlofty himself was a well-schooled cavalla horse, needing no drill in battle kicks or fancy dressage, but I was green to such things and learned as much from my mount as I did from Sergeant Duril. Any errors we made were most often blamed on my horsemanship and justifiably so. A horseman must be one with his mount, anticipating every move of his beast, and never clinging nor lurching in his saddle.

But that day’s drill was not kicks or leaps. It involved unsaddling and unbridling the tall black horse, then demonstrating that I could still mount and ride him without a scrap of harness on him. He was a tall, lean horse with straight legs like iron bars and a stride that made his gallop feel as if we were flying. Despite Sirlofty’s patience and willingness, my boy’s height made it a struggle for me to mount him from the ground, but Duril had insisted I practise it. Over and over and over again. ‘A horse soldier has got to be able to get on any horse that’s available to him, in any sort of circumstances, or he might as well admit he has the heart of a foot soldier. Do you want to walk down that hill and tell your da that his soldier son is going to enlist as a foot soldier rather than rise up to a commission in the cavalla? Because if you do, I’ll wait up here while you do it. Better that I not witness what he’d do to you.’

It was the usual rough chivvying I received from the man, and I flatter myself that I handled it better than most lads of my years would have. He had arrived at my father’s door some three years ago, seeking employment in his declining years, and my father had been only too relieved to hire him on. Duril replaced a succession of unsatisfactory tutors, and we had taken to one another almost immediately. Sergeant Duril had finished out his many long years of honourable military service, and it had seemed only natural to him that when he retired he would come to live on my father’s lands and serve Lord Burvelle as well as he had served Colonel Burvelle. I think he enjoyed taking on the practical training of Nevare Burvelle, Colonel Burvelle’s second boy, the soldier son born to follow his father’s example as a military officer.

The sergeant was a shrivelled little man, with a face as dark and wrinkled as jerky. His clothing was worn to the point of comfort, holding the shape of a man who was most often in the saddle. Even when they were clean, his garments were always the colour of dust. On his head, he wore a battered leather hat with a floppy brim and a hatband decorated with beads and animal fangs. His pale eyes always peered watchfully from under the brim of his hat. What hair he had left was a mixture of grey and brown. Half his left ear was missing and he had a nasty scar where it should have been. To make up for that lack he carried a Kidona ear in a pouch on his belt. I’d only seen it once, but it was unmistakably an ear. ‘Took his for trying to take mine. It was a barbaric thing to do, but I was young and I was angry, with blood running down the side of my neck when I did it. Later that evening, when the fighting was over I looked at what I’d done, and I was ashamed. Ashamed. But it was too late to put it back with his body and I couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I’ve kep’ it ever since to remind me of what war can do to a young man. And that’s why I’m showing it to you now,’ he had told me. ‘Not so you can run tell your little sister and have your lady ma complain to the colonel that I’m learning you wild ways, but so that you can think on that. Before we could teach the plainspeople to be civilized, we had to teach them they couldn’t beat us in a fight. And we had to do that without getting down on their level. But when a man is fighting for his life that’s a hard thing to remember. Especially when you’re a young man and out on your own, ’mongst savages. Some of our lads, good honest lads when they left home, well, they wound up little better than the plainspeople we fought against before we were through. A lot of them never went home. Not jus’ the ones who died, but the ones who couldn’t remember how to be civilized. They stayed out there, took plains wives, some of ’em, and became part of what we’d gone out there to tame. Remember that, young Nevare. Hold on to who you are when you’re a man grown and an officer like the Colonel.’

Sometimes he treated me like that, as if I were his own son, telling me stories of his days as a soldier and passing on the homespun wisdom that he hoped would see me through. But most days he treated me as something between a raw recruit and a rather dim hound. Yet I never doubted his fondness for me. He’d had three sons of his own, and raised them and sent them off to enlist years before he’d got to me. In the way of common soldiers and their get, he’d all but lost track of his own boys. From year to year he might receive a message from one or another of them. It didn’t bother him. It was what he had always expected his boys to do. The sons of common soldiers went for soldiers, just as the Writ tells us they should. ‘Let each son rise up and follow the way of his father.’

Of course it was different for me. I was the son of a noble. ‘Of those who bend the knee only to the King, let them have sons in plenitude. The first for an heir, the second to wear the sword, the third to serve as priest, the fourth to labour for beauty’s sake, the fifth to gather knowledge…’ and so on. I’d never bothered to memorize the rest of that passage. I had my place and I knew it. I was the second son, born to ‘wear the sword’ and lead men to war.

I’d lost count that day of how many times I’d dismounted and then mounted Sirlofty and ridden him in a circle around Duril, without a scrap of harness to help me. Probably as many times as I’d unsaddled and unbridled the horse, and then replaced the tack. My back and shoulders ached from lifting the saddle on and off of the gelding’s back, and my fingertips were near numb from making the cavalryman’s ‘keep fast’ charm over the cinch. I was just fastening the cinch yet again when Sergeant Duril suddenly commanded, ‘Follow me!’ With those words, he gave his mare a sharp nudge with his heels and she leapt forth with a will. I had no breath for cursing him as I finished tightening the strap, hastily did the ‘keep fast’ charm over it and then flung myself up and into the saddle.

Those who have not ridden the plains of the Midlands will speak of how flat and featureless they are, how they roll on endlessly forever. Perhaps they appear so to passengers on the riverboats that wend their way down the waterways that both divide and unite the plains. I had grown up on the Midlands, and knew well how deceptive their gentle rises and falls could be. So did Sergeant Duril. Ravines and sudden crevasses smiled with hidden mouths, waiting to devour the unwary rider. Even the gentle hollows were often deep enough to conceal mounted men or browsing deer. What the unschooled eye might interpret as scrub brush in the distance could prove to be a shoulder-high patch of sickle-berry, almost impenetrable to a man on horseback. Appearances were deceiving, the sergeant always warned me. He had often told me tales of how the plainspeople could use tricks of perspective in preparing an ambush, how they trained their horses to lie down, and how a howling horde of warriors would suddenly seem to spring up from the earth itself to attack a careless line of cavalrymen. Even from the vantage of tall Sirlofty’s back, Sergeant Duril and his mount had vanished from my view.

The gentle roll of prairie around me appeared deserted. Few real trees grew in Widevale, other than the ones which Father had planted. Those that did manage to sprout on their own were indications of a watercourse, perhaps seasonal, perhaps useful. But most of the flora of our region was sparsely leaved and dusty grey-green, holding its water in tight, leathery leaves or spiny palms. I did not hurry, but allowed myself to scan the full circle of horizon, seeking any trace of them. I saw none; I had only the dry dents of Chafer’s hoofprints in the hard soil to guide me. I set out after them. I leant down beside Sirlofty’s neck, tracking them and feeling proud of my ability to do so until I felt the sudden thud of a well-aimed stone hit me squarely in the back. I pulled in Sirlofty and sat up, groaning as I reached back to rub my new bruise. Sergeant Duril rode up from behind me, his slingshot still in his hand.

‘And you’re dead. We circled back. You were too busy following our sign, young Nevare, and not wary enough about your surroundings. That pebble could just as easily have been an arrow.’

I nodded wearily. There was no use in denying his words. Useless to complain that when I was grown, I could expect to have a full troop of horsemen with me, with some men to keep watch while others tracked. No. Better to endure the bruise and nod than to bring an hour of lecture down on myself as well. ‘Next time, I’ll remember,’ I told him.

‘Good. But only good because this time it was just a little rock and so there will be a next time for you. With an arrow, that would have been your last time to forget. Come on. Pick up your rock before we go.’

He kneed Chafer again and left me. I dismounted and searched the ground around Sirlofty’s feet until I found the stone. Duril had been ‘killing’ me several times a month since I was nine years old. Picking up the stones had been my own idea at first; I think the first few times I was slain, I had taken to heart the concept that, had Duril truly been a hostile, my life would have ended in that moment. When Duril realized what I was doing, he began to take pains to find interesting stones to use in his sling. This time it was a river-worn piece of crude red jasper half the size of an egg. I slipped it into my pocket to add to my rock collection on the shelf in the schoolroom. Then I mounted and nudged Sirlofty to catch up with Chafer.

We rode on, stopping on a tall scarp that looked out over the lazily flowing Tefa River. From where we sat our mounts we could look down at my father’s cotton fields. There were four of them, counting the one that rested fallow this year. It was easy to tell which field was in its third year of cultivation and close to its end of agricultural usefulness. The plants there were stunted and scrubby. Prairie land seldom bore well for more than three years running. Next year, that field would lie fallow, in the hope of reviving it.

My father’s holdings, Widevale, were a direct grant to him from King Troven. They spanned both sides of the Tefa River and many acres beyond in all directions. The land on the north side of the river was reserved for his immediate family and closest servants. Here he had built his manor house and laid out his orchards and cotton fields and pasturage. Some day, the Burvelle estate and manor would be a well-known landmark like the ‘old Burvelle’ holdings near Old Thares. The house and grounds and even the trees were younger than I was.

My father’s ambition extended beyond having a fine manor house and agricultural holdings. On the south side of the river, my father had measured out generous tracts of land for the vassals he recruited from amongst the soldiers who had once served under his command. The town had become a much-needed retirement haven for foot soldiers and non-commissioned officers when they mustered out of the service. My father had intended that it be so. Without Burvelle’s Landing, or simply Burvelle as it was most often called, many of the old soldiers would have gone back west to the cities, to become charity cases or worse. My father often said that it was a shame that no system existed to utilize the skills of soldiers too old or too maimed to soldier on. Born to be a soldier and an officer, my father had assumed the mantle of lord when the king granted it, but he wore it with a military air. He still held himself responsible for the well-being of his men.

The ‘village’ his surveyors had laid out on the south bank of the river had the straight lines and the fortification points of a fortress. The dock and the small ferry that operated between the north and south banks of the river ran precisely on the hour. Even the six-day market there operated with a military precision, opening at dawn and closing at sundown. The streets had been engineered so that two wagons could pass one another, and a horse and team could turn round in any intersection. Straight roads like the spokes of a wheel led out of the village to the carefully measured allotments that each vassal earned by toiling four days a week on my father’s land. The village thrived and threatened soon to become a town, for the folk had the added benefit of the traffic along the river and on the river road that followed the shoreline. His old soldiers had brought their wives and families with them when they came to settle. Their sons would, of course, go off to become soldiers in their days. But the daughters stayed, and my mother was instrumental in bringing to the town young men skilled in needed trades who welcomed the idea of brides who came with small dowries of land. Burvelle Landing prospered.

Traffic between the eastern frontier and old Fort Renalx to the west of us was frequent along the river road. In winter, when the waters of the river ran high and strong, barges laden with immense, sap-heavy spond logs from the wild forests of the east moved west with the current, to return later laden with essential supplies for the forts. Teams of barge mules had worn a dusty trail on the south bank of the river. In summer, when the depleted river did not offer enough water to keep the barges from going aground, mule-drawn wagons replaced them. Our village had a reputation for honest taverns and good beer; the teamsters always stopped there for the night.

But today the seasonal traffic that crawled the road was not so convivial. The slow parade of men and wagons stretched out for half a mile. Dust hung in the wake of their passage. Armed men rode up and down the lines. Their distant shouts and the occasional crack of a whip were carried to us on the light wind from the river.

Three or four times each summer, the coffle trains would pass along the river road. They were not welcome to stop in the village. Not even the guards who moved the coffle along could take the ferry across to my father’s well-run town. Hours down the road, out of view of both my home and the village, there were six open-sided sheds, a fire pit and watering troughs set up for the coffle trains. My father was not without mercy, but he distributed it on his own terms.

My father had strictly forbidden my sisters to witness the passing of the penal trains, for the prisoners included rapists and perverts as well as debtors, pickpockets, whores, and petty thieves. There was no sense in exposing my sisters to such rabble, but on that day Sergeant Duril and I sat our horses for the better part of an hour, watching them wend their dusty way along the river road. He did not say that my father had wished me to witness that forced emigration to the east, but I suspected it was so. Soon enough, as a cavalry trooper, I’d have to deal with those whom King Troven had sentenced to be settlers on the lands around his eastern outposts. My father would not send me to that duty ignorant.

Two supply wagons led the penal coffle making its centipedian way toward us. Mounted men patrolled the length of the winding column of shackled prisoners. At the very end, choking their way through the hanging dust, teams of mules pulled three more wagons laden with the women and children that belonged to the convicts trudging their way toward a new life. When a trick of the wind carried the sounds of the prisoners to us, they sounded more animal than human. I knew that the men would be chained, day and night, until they reached one of the King’s far posts on the frontier. They’d be fed bread and water, and know a respite from their journey only on the Sixday of the good god.

‘I feel sorry for them,’ I said softly. The heat of the day, the chafing shackles, the dust; sometimes it seemed a miracle to me that any of the criminal conscripts survived their long march to the borderlands.

‘Do you?’ Sergeant Duril was disdainful of my soft sentiment. ‘I feel sorrier for the ones left behind in the city, to continue being scum the rest of their lives. Look at them, Nevare. The good god decrees for every man what he is to do. But those down there, they scoffed at their duty, and ignored the skills of their fathers. Now the King offers them a second chance. When they left Old Thares, they were prisoners and criminals. If they weren’t caught and hanged, they’d probably be killed by their fellows, or live out their lives like rats in a wall. But King Troven has sent them away from all that. They’ll walk a long hard way, to be sure, but it’s a new life that awaits them in the east. By the time they get there, they’ll have built some muscle and endurance. They’ll work on the King’s Road for a year or so, pushing it across the plains and then they’ll have earned the right to their freedom and two acres of land. Not bad wages for a couple of years of toil. King Troven’s given them all a new chance to be better than they were, to own land of their own and to live a clean life, to follow in their fathers’ trades as they should have done, with their old crimes forgotten. You feel sorry for them? What about the ones who refuse the King’s mercy, and end up with the chopping block taking their thieving hands off, or living in debtors’ prison with their wives and little ones alongside them? Those are the ones I pity, the ones too stupid to see the opportunity our king offers them. No. I don’t pity those men down there. They walk a hard road, and no mistake, but it’s a better road than the one they originally chose for themselves.’

I looked down at the ragged line of chained men and wondered how many truly felt it had been their own decision to choose this course. And what of the women and children in the wagons? Had they had any choice at all? I might have pondered longer if Duril had not distracted me with the terse word, ‘Messenger!’

I lifted my eyes and looked toward the east. The river snaked off into the distance, and the river road followed its winding course beside it. Passenger coaches, freight wagons and the post travelled that road. Ordinary mail travelled in wagons for the most part; letters to soldiers from their families and sweethearts in the west and their replies. But King Troven’s couriers travelled that road as well, bearing important dispatches between the far outposts and the capital in Old Thares. Part of my father’s duty to his king as a landed noble was to maintain a relay station and the change of horses for the messengers. Often the dispatch riders were invited up to my father’s manor for the evening after they had passed on their messages, for my father enjoyed being kept up to date on events at the frontier, and the messengers were glad of his generous hospitality in the harsh land. I hoped we would have company for the evening meal; it always enlivened the conversation.

Along the river road a man and horse were coming at a gallop. A thin line of dust hung in the still air behind them, and the horse was running heavily in a way that spoke more of spurs and quirt than willing effort. Even at our distance, I could see the billowing of the rider’s short yellow cape that marked him as the King’s courier, and notified every citizen of the duty to speed him on his way.

The watcher at the relay station below us had spotted the oncoming rider. I heard the clanging of the bell and in the next moment the inhabitants of the station sprang into action. One ran into the stable, to emerge almost immediately leading a long-legged horse wearing a tiny courier’s saddle. He held the fresh mount at the ready, while another man dashed out from the station bearing a waterskin and a packet of food for the rider. A fresh rider emerged, his face already swathed against the dust, his short bright yellow cape flapping in the river wind. He stood by his mount and waited for the message to be passed to him.

We watched as the messenger approached the station and then saw a frightening thing. The messenger only pulled in when his horse was abreast of the fresh mount. His feet never touched the ground as he lunged from one saddle to the next. He shouted something to the waiting men, leaned down to snatch up the packet of provisions and waterskin, and then set spurs to the new horse. In an instant he was gone, galloping down the centre of the road and through the penal coffle. Shackled men and mounted guards surged out of his way as he passed. There were angry shouts and cries as a section of the chained men were trampled by one of the mounted guards when they did not get out of the way quickly enough to avoid the horse. Heedless of the milling chaos in his wake, the courier was already dwindling to a tiny figure on the ribbon of road leading west. I stared after him for a moment, and then glanced back down at the relay station. A stableman was trying to lead the messenger’s horse, but the animal went suddenly down on his front knees, and then rolled onto his side in the dust. He lay there, kicking vaguely at the air.

‘His wind’s broke,’ Duril said sagely. ‘He’ll never carry a courier again. Poor beast will be lucky if he lives.’

‘I wonder what desperate message he bore, that he rode his horse to death and could not pass it on to a fresh rider.’ My mind was already full of possibilities. I visualized night attacks by the Specks on the Wildlands border towns, or fresh uprising amongst the Kidona.

‘King’s business,’ Sergeant Duril said tersely.

As we watched, we saw one of the men break free of the group, running toward the manor with something in his hand. A separate message for my father? He knew most of the commanders of the forts on the eastern boundary, and he was kept almost as well appraised of conditions on the frontier as the King himself. I saw curiosity light in the old sergeant’s eyes. Duril glanced at the sun and announced abruptly, ‘Time for you to go in to your books. We don’t want Master Quills-and-Ink to be looking at me nasty again, do we?’

And with that, he turned his horse’s head away from the river, the road, and the relay station and led me at an easy lope back to the trail that led down to my father’s manor house.

My boyhood home was set on a gentle rise of land that overlooked the river. In an indulgence of my mother, my father had planted scattered trees for two acres around it, poplar and oak and birch and alder. Water hauled up from the river irrigated the trees that both shaded the house and grounds and provided a windbreak from the constant wind. It was a little island of trees in the vast expanse of prairie all around us, green and shady and inviting. Sometimes I thought it looked small and isolated. At other times, it seemed like a green fortress of welcome in the windswept, arid lands. We rode toward it, the horses eager now for cool water and a good roll in the paddock.

As Sergeant Duril had predicted, my tutor was standing outside the manor awaiting us. Master Rissle’s arms were crossed on his narrow chest and he was trying to look forbidding. ‘Hope he don’t wallop ye too hard for being late, young Nevare. Looks like he could be cruel harsh, him so big and all,’ Duril said in quiet derision before we were in earshot of the man. I kept my face straight at his gentle gibe. He knew he should not mock my tutor, an earnest but scrawny young scholar come all the way from Old Thares to teach me penmanship and history and figuring and astronomy. Although Duril would not curb his own disrespectful tongue, he would freely cuff me for daring to smile at it. So I held my amusement inside as I dismounted. I called a farewell to Sergeant Duril as he led our mounts away, and he answered with a vague wave of his hand.

I longed to run and find my father, to discover what news had been so urgent, but I knew that if I did, I would only bring punishment down on myself. A good soldier did his duty, and waited for orders from above without speculating. If I ever hoped to command men, I must first learn to accept authority. I sighed and followed my tutor off to my lessons. The academics seemed more tedious than ever that day. I tried to apply myself, knowing that the foundation I built now would support my studies at the King’s Academy.

When the long afternoon of lessons were over and my tutor finally released me, I dressed for dinner and descended. We might live far from any cities or polite society on the plains, but my mother insisted that all of us observe the proprieties appropriate to my father’s station. Both my parents had been born into noble houses. As younger offspring, they had never expected to hold titles themselves, but their upbringing had left them with a keen awareness of what my father’s elevation to lordship required of them. Only later would I appreciate all the courtesy and manners that my mother had instilled in me, for those lessons enabled me to move more easily at the Academy than did many of my rustic counterparts.

Our family gathered in the sitting room until my father entered. Then he escorted my mother into the dining room and we children followed. I seated my younger sister Yaril while Rosse, my elder brother, held a chair for my elder sister Elisi. Vanze, the youngest at nine years old and my father’s priest son, said the blessing for all of us. Then my mother rang the tiny silver bell beside her place setting, and the servants began to bring in the food.

Our family was ‘new nobility’, my father elevated by the King himself to lordship for his valour in the wars against the plainspeople. For this reason, we had no dynasty of family servants. My mother was afraid of plainspeople and my father did not approve of them mingling with his daughters as servants in our household, so unlike many of the new nobility we had no servants from the conquered peoples. Instead, he offered house and grounds employment to the cream of his retired soldiers and their wives and daughters. This meant that most of the male servants in our household were elderly or crippled in some way that had left them unfit for military service. My mother would have preferred to hire servants from the cities in the west, but in this my father prevailed, saying that he felt a duty to provide for his men and give them a share of his own good fortune, for without them to lead to glory he never would have merited the King’s notice. So, my mother bowed her head to his will and did her best to school them in the proper ways of serving. She had taken it upon herself, in a few instances, to advertise in the western cities for suitable husbands from the serving classes for the soldiers’ daughters, and in this way we had acquired two young men who could properly wait a table, a valet for my father, and a butler.

I managed to contain my curiosity throughout most of the meal. My father spoke to my mother of his orchards and crops and she nodded gravely. She asked his permission to send to Old Thares for a proper tiring-maid for my sisters, now that they were both becoming young ladies. He replied that he would think about it, but I saw him looking at my sisters with a sudden awareness that Elisi was approaching marriageable age and would benefit from greater sophistication in her manners.

As he did at every evening meal, he asked each of his offspring in turn how we had employed our day. Rosse, my elder brother and the heir, had ridden down with our steward to visit the Bejawi settlement at the far north end of Widevale. The remnants of one branch of the formerly migratory people lived there at my father’s sufferance. When my father had first taken them in, the villagers had been mostly women, children and grandfathers too old to have fought in the Plains War. Now the children were young men and women, and my father wished to be sure they had useful tasks to occupy them and content them. There had been news from the Swick Reaches of an uprising of young warriors who had become discontented with settled ways. My father had no desire to see a similar restlessness in his nomads. He had recently gifted the Bejawi with a small herd of milk goats, and Rosse was pleased to report that the animals were thriving and providing both occupation and sustenance for the former hunters.

Elisi, my elder sister was next. She had mastered a difficult piece of music on her harp, and begun an embroidery of a Writ verse on a large hoop. She had also sent a letter to the Kassler sisters at Riverbend, inviting them to spend Midsummer week with us, planning a picnic, music, and fireworks in the evening of her sixteenth birthday. My father agreed that it sounded like a most pleasant holiday for Yaril and her and their friends.

Then it was my turn. I spoke first of my studies with my tutor, and then of my exercises with Duril. And then, almost as an afterthought, I mentioned that we had seen the messenger and cautiously added that I was very curious as to what could prompt such cruel haste. It was not quite a question, but it hung in the air, and I saw both Rosse and my mother hoping for an answer.

THREE
Dewara

The seasons turned and I grew. In the long summer of my twelfth year, it had taken all of Sirlofty’s patience and every bit of spring that my boyish legs possessed for me to fling myself onto his back from the ground. By the time I was fifteen, I could place my hands flat on my mount’s back and lever myself gracefully onto him without scrabbling my feet across him. It was a change that we both enjoyed.

There had been other changes as well. My scrawny, petulant tutor had been replaced twice over as my father’s requirements for my education had stiffened. I had two instructors now for my afternoon lessons, and I no longer dared to be tardy for them. One was a wizened old man with severely bound white locks and yellow teeth, who taught me tactics, logic, and to write and speak Varnian, the formal language of our ancient motherland, all with the liberal use of a very flexible cane that never seemed to leave his hand. I believe that Master Rorton’s diet consisted mostly of garlic and peppers and he nearly drove me mad by constantly standing at my shoulder watching every stroke of my pen as I hunched at my desk.

Master Leibsen was a hulking fellow from the far west who taught me both the theory and practice of my weapons. I could shoot straight now, both standing and mounted, with pistol and long gun. He taught me to measure powder as accurately by eye as most men could with a balance, and how to pour my own ball shot as well as maintain and repair my weapons. That was only lead ball, of course. The more expensive iron shot that had helped us defeat the plainspeople had to be turned out by a competent smith. My father saw no reason for me to be using it up on targets. From Master Leibsen I also learned boxing, wrestling, staves, fencing and, very privately after many entreaties on my part, to both throw and fight with knives. I relished my lessons with Leibsen as much as I detested the long afternoons with Master Rorton of the foul breath.

I had one other teacher in the spring of my sixteenth year. He did not last long and yet he was the most memorable of them. He stayed briefly, pitching his small tent in the shelter of a hollow near the river and never once approached the manor house. My mother would have been both terrified and offended if she had known of his presence, scarcely two miles away from her tender daughters. He was a plains savage and my father’s ancient enemy.

On the day I was to meet Dewara, I rode out innocently with my father and Sergeant Duril. Occasionally my father invited us on his morning rounds. I thought my ride that morning was such an outing. Usually it was a pleasant ride. We would move leisurely, lunch with one of his overseers, and halt at various cottages and tents to consult with the shepherds and the orchard workers. I took no more than I would usually carry on a pleasure ride. As the spring day was mild, I did not even take a heavy coat, but only my light jacket and my brimmed hat against the bright sunlight. The sort of country we lived in meant that only a fool set out on any ride unarmed. I carried no gun with me that day, but I did have a cavalry sword, worn yet serviceable, at my hip.

My father rode on one side of me, with Sergeant Duril on the other. It felt odd, as if they escorted me somewhere. The sergeant looked sullen. He was often taciturn, but his silence that day was weighted with suppressed disapproval. It was not often that he disagreed with my father about anything, and it filled me with both dread and intense curiosity.

Once we were well away from the house, my father told me that I would meet a Kidona plainsman that day. As he often did when we spoke of specific clans, my father discussed Kidona courtesy, and cautioned me that my meeting with Dewara was a matter for men, not to be discussed later with my mother or sisters, nor even mentioned in their hearing. On the rise above the plainsman’s camp, we halted and looked down upon a domed shelter made from humpdeer skins pegged to a wicker frame. The hides had been cured with the hair on so that they shed water. His three riding beasts were picketed nearby. They were the famous black-muzzled, round-bellied, striped-legged mounts that only the Kidona bred. Their manes stood up stiff and black as hearth brushes and their tails reminded me of a cow’s more than a horse’s. A short distance away, two Kidona women stood patiently next to a two-wheeled cart. A fourth animal shifted disconsolately between the shafts of the high-wheeled vehicle. The cart was empty.

A small smokeless fire burned in front of the tent. Dewara himself, arms folded on his chest, stood looking up at us. He did not notice us as we arrived; he was already standing, looking toward us, as we came into view. The man’s prescience made the hair on my arms stand up and I shivered.

‘Sergeant, you may wait here,’ my father said quietly.

Duril chewed at his upper lip, then spoke. ‘Sir, I’d rather be closer. In case I’m needed.’

My father looked at him directly. ‘Some things he cannot learn from me or from you. Some things can’t be taught to you by a friend; they can only be learned from an enemy.’

‘But, sir—’

‘Wait here, Sergeant,’ my father repeated, and that closed the subject. ‘Nevare, you will come with me.’ He lifted a hand, palm up, in greeting and the plainsman below returned the sign. Father stirred his horse to a leisurely walk and started down the rise to the Kidona’s camp. I glanced at Sergeant Duril, but he was staring past me, mouth set in a flat line. I gave him a nod anyway and then followed my father. At the bottom of the rise, we dismounted and dropped our horses’ reins, trusting our well-trained mounts to stand. ‘Come when I motion to you,’ my father said softly. ‘Until then, stand still by the horses. Keep your eyes on me.’

My father approached the plainsman solemnly, and the old enemies greeted one another with great respect. Privately, my father had cautioned me to treat the Kidona with the solemn deference I extended to any of my tutors. As a youth, I should bow my head to my left shoulder when I first greeted him, and never spit in his presence or show my back to him, for such were the courtesies of his people. As my father had bid me, I stood still and waited. I could almost feel Sergeant Duril’s stare on us, but I did not look back at him.

The two spoke to one another for a time. Their voices were lowered and they spoke in the trade language, so I caught little of what they said. I could tell only that they spoke of a bargain. At length my father gestured to me. I walked forward and remembered to bow my head to my left shoulder. Then I hesitated, wondering if I should offer to shake hands as well. Dewara did not offer his hand, and so I kept mine by my side. The plainsman did not smile but looked me over frankly as if I were a horse he might buy. I took the opportunity to appraise him as bluntly. I had never before seen a Kidona.

He was smaller and more wiry than the plainsmen I was familiar with. The Kidonas had been hunters, raiders and scavengers rather than herders. They had regarded all the other peoples of the plains as their rightful prey. The other plainsmen had dreaded their attacks. Of all our enemies, the Kidonas had been the most difficult to subdue. They were a hard-natured people. Once, after the Gernian horse troops had defeated the Rew tribe, the Kidona had swept in to raid the demoralized people and carry off what little was left to them. My father spoke of them with head-shaking awe at their savagery. Sergeant Duril still hated them.

During his raiding years, a Kidona man would eat only meat, and some filed their front teeth to points. Dewara had. He wore a cloak woven from narrow strips of light leather, perhaps from rabbits. Some of the strands had been dyed to form a pattern like hoofprints. He wore loose brown trousers and a long-sleeved white robe that came just past his hips. It was belted with a bright strip of beaded braiding. He was shod in low boots of soft grey leather. His head was uncovered, and his steel-grey hair stood out from his head in a short stiff brush that reminded me of a dog’s lifted hackles, or perhaps his horse’s mane. At his hip hung a short curved blade, the deadly bronze swanneck of his people, as much tool as weapon. The hilt was wrapped in fine braids of human hair in varying shades. When I first met him, I thought they were battle trophies. Later he would explain that such weapons were passed down from father to son, and that the braids of hair were the blessing of his ancestors passed down with the swanneck. Such a blade was sharp enough to be flourished in a battle charge, but sturdy enough to chop meat for the pot. It was a formidable weapon and a utilitarian tool, the finest weapon a Kidona could use without resorting to iron.

After perusing me in silence, Dewara gave his full attention back to my father. They bargained in fluent Jindobe, haggling over the fee the plainsman would charge to instruct me. It was the first time I understood that teaching me was what this encounter was about. My fledgling knowledge of the trade language meant that I had to listen carefully to understand their conversation. First, Dewara demanded guns for his people. My father refused him, but made it a compliment, saying that his warriors were still far too deadly with their swannecks, and that my father’s own people would turn on him if he offered the Kidonas distance weapons. That was perfectly true. My father did not mention that the King’s law forbade the selling of such weapons to any plainsmen. Dewara would have thought less of him if he had admitted bowing to any rule but his own. Curiously, he did not remind the Kidona that the use of iron would cripple his magic. Though I am certain the man needed no such reminder.

Instead of guns and powder, my father offered loom-woven blankets, bacon, and copper cooking pots. Dewara replied that the last time he had looked, he himself was not a woman to care about blankets and food and cooking. He was surprised that my father bothered about such things. And surely a respected warrior such as my father could obtain at least powder as he wished. My father shook his head. I kept silent. I knew that the law forbade selling gunpowder to any plainsmen. They finally came to an accommodation that involved one bale of the best western tobacco, a dozen skinning knives, and two sacks of lead ball suitable for slings. Despite his expressed disdain for such things, I saw that what really finalized the bartering was my father’s offer of a hogshead of salt and one of sugar. Many of the conquered plainspeople had acquired a taste for sugar, an item almost unknown in their diets before then. Added to the previous goods, they made a handsome fee. I risked a sideways glance at his women and found they were gleefully nudging one another and talking behind their splayed hands.

My father and Dewara finalized the agreement Kidona-style, by each tying a knot in a trade thong. Then Dewara turned to me and added a personal codicil to the contract in gruff Jindobe. ‘If you complain, I send you home to your mother’s house. If you refuse or disobey, I send you home to your mother’s house with a notch in your ear. If you flinch or hesitate, I send you home to your mother’s house with a notch in your nose. I teach you no more then, and I keep the tobacco, salt, sweet, knives and shot. To this, you must agree, stripling.’

My father was looking at me. He did not nod, but I read in his eyes that I should assent. ‘I agree,’ I told the plainsman. ‘I will not complain or disobey or refuse your orders. I will neither hesitate nor flinch.’

The warrior nodded. Then he slapped me hard in the face. I saw the blow coming. I could have dodged it or turned my head to lessen it. I had not expected it, and yet some instinct bade me accept the insult. My cheek stung and I felt blood start from the corner of my mouth. I said nothing as I straightened from the blow. I looked Dewara in the eye. Beyond him, I saw my father’s grim look. There were little glints in his eyes. I thought I read pride there as much as anger.

‘My son is neither a weakling nor a coward, Dewara. He is worthy of the teaching you will give him.’

‘We will see,’ Dewara said quietly. He looked at his women and barked something in Kidona. Then he turned back to my father. ‘They follow you, get my goods and go back to my home. Today.’

He was challenging my father to question his honour. Would Dewara keep his end of the bargain once he had his trade goods? My father managed to look mildly surprised. ‘Of course they will.’

‘I keep your son then.’ The look he gave me was a measuring one, more chilling than anything I had ever beheld. I’d endured my father’s stern discipline and Sergeant Duril’s physical challenges and chastisement. This look spoke of colder things. ‘Take his horse. Take his knife, and his long knife. You leave him here with me. I will teach him.’

I think that if I could have begged quarter of my father then without humiliating both of us in front of the plainsman, I would have. It was as if I stripped myself to nakedness as I took my sheath knife from my belt and handed it over to my father. I felt numb all over, and wondered what Dewara could teach me that was so important that my father would leave me weaponless in the hands of his old enemy. My father accepted my knife from me without comment. He had spoken of the Kidona ways of survival and understanding one’s enemy as being the greatest weapon that any soldier could have. But the cruelty of the Kidona was legendary, and I knew that Dewara himself still bore the scar of the iron ball that had penetrated his right shoulder. My father had shot him, manacled him with iron and then held him as prisoner and hostage during the final months of King Troven’s war with the Kidona. It was only due to the cavalry doctor’s effort that Dewara had survived both his wound and the poisoning of his blood that followed it. I wondered if he felt a debt of mercy or of vengeance toward my father.

I unbuckled the worn belt that supported the old cavalry sword. I bundled it around the sword to offer it to my father, but at the last moment Dewara leaned forward to seize it from my hands. It was all I could do to keep myself from snatching it back. My father stared at him, his eyes expressionless, as Dewara drew the blade from the sheath and ran his thumb along the flat of it. He gave a sniff of disdain. ‘This will do you no good where we go. Leave it here. Maybe, some day, you come back for it.’ He took a tight grip on the hilt and thrust the blade into the earth. When he let go of it, it stood there like a grave marker. He dropped the sheath beside it in the dust. A chill went up my spine.

My father did not touch me as he bade me farewell. His paternal gaze reassured me even as he told me, ‘Make me proud of you, son.’ Then he mounted Steelshanks and led Sirlofty away. He rode away along a gentler path than we had come by, out of consideration for the women who followed him in their high-wheeled cart. I was left standing beside the Kidona with no more than the clothes on my back. I wanted to gaze after them, to see if Sergeant Duril abandoned his watch post and followed them, but I dared not. For all the times I had resented the sergeant’s eagle-eyed supervision, that day I longed for a guardian to be looking down on me. Dewara held my gaze, measuring me with his steely grey eyes. After what seemed a long time, for the sound of departing hoofbeats and wheels had faded, he pursed his lips and spoke to me, ‘You ride good?’

He spoke broken Gernian. I replied in my equally awkward Jindobe, ‘My father taught me to ride.’

Dewara snorted disdainfully, and again spoke to me in Gernian. ‘Your father show you, sit on saddle. I teach you ride on taldi. Get on.’ He pointed at the three creatures. As if they knew we spoke of them, they all lifted their heads and gazed at us. Every single one laid its ears back in displeasure.

‘Which taldi?’ I asked in Jindobe.

‘You choose, soldier’s boy. I teach you to talk, too, I think.’ This last comment he delivered in the trade language. I wondered if I had gained any ground with him by trying to use the trade language. It was impossible to tell from his implacable face.

I chose the mare, thinking she would be the most tractable of the three beasts. She would not let me approach her until I seized her picket line and forced her to stand. The closer I got to them, the more obvious it became to me that these were not true horses, but some similar beast. The female did not whinny, but squealed in protest, a sound that did not seem horse-like at all to me. She bit me twice while I was mounting, once on the arm and once on my leg as I swung onto her. Her dull teeth didn’t break the skin but I knew the bruises would be deep and lasting. She snorted, plunged and then wheeled in the midst of my mounting her. With difficulty, I managed to get a seat on her. She turned her head to snap at me again and I moved my leg out of reach. As I did so, she wheeled again, and I felt sure she was deliberately trying to unseat me. I gripped her firmly with my legs and made no sound. She plunged twice more but I stayed on her. I tried to ignore her bad manners, for I did not know how Dewara would react to me disciplining one of his mounts.

‘Keeksha!’ Dewara exclaimed and she abruptly quieted. I did not relax. Her belly was round and her hide was slick. The only harness she wore was a hackamore. I had ridden bareback before, but not on a creature shaped like her.

Dewara gave a grudging nod. Then he said, ‘Her name is Keeksha. You tell her name before you get on, she knows obey you. You don’t tell name, she knows you are not allowed. All my horses are so. This way.’ He turned to one of the other taldi. ‘Dedem. Stand.’

The beast he spoke to put his ears forward and came to meet Dewara. The plainsman mounted the round-bellied stallion casually. ‘Follow,’ he said, and slapped his animal on the rump. Dedem surged forward, leaping out in an instant gallop. I stared in surprise, and then copied him, giving Keeksha a slap that set her into motion.

For a time, all I could do was cling to Keeksha’s mane. I jolted and flopped about on her back like a rag doll tied to a dog’s tail. Every time one of her hooves struck, my spine was jolted in a different direction. Twice I was sure I was going to hit the ground, but the mare knew her business better than I did. She seemed to shrug herself back under me. The second time she did it, I abruptly decided to trust her. I shifted my weight and my legs, swaying into her stride and suddenly we moved as one creature. She surged forward and I felt that we almost doubled our speed. Dewara had been dwindling in the distance, headed away from the river and into the wastelands that bordered my father’s holding. The land rose there, the rocky hillsides cut by steep-sided gullies prone to sudden flooding during storms. Wind and rain had carved that place. Spindly bushes with grey-green leaves grew from cracks in the rocks carpeted with dull purple lichen. The hooves of his mount cut into the dry earth and left dust hanging in the air for me to breathe. Dewara kept his horse at a dead run across country where I never would have risked Sirlofty. I followed him, sure that soon he must rein in his mount and let the animal breathe, but he did not.

My little mare steadily gained on them. As we entered rougher country, climbing toward the plateaus of the region, it was harder to keep them in constant view. Hollows and mounds rumpled the plain like a rucked blanket. I suspected he was deliberately trying to lose me, and set my teeth, resolved that he would not. I well knew that one misplaced step could break both our necks, but I made no effort to pull Keeksha in and although her sides heaved with her effort, she did not slow on her own but followed the stallion’s lead. Her rolling gait ate up the miles.

We had been climbing, in the almost imperceptible way of the plains, and now emerged onto the plateau country. The flats gave way to tall outcroppings of red or white rock in the distance. Scattered trees, stunted and twisted by the constant wind and the erratic rains, offered clues to watercourses long dry. We passed disconnected towers of crumbling stone like rotted teeth in a skull’s jaw or the worn turrets of the wind’s castle. Hoodoos, my father called them. He’d told me that some of the plainspeople said they were chimneys for the underworld of their beliefs. Dewara rode on. I was parched with thirst and coated with dust when we finally topped a small rise and I saw Dewara and his taldi waiting for us. The plainsman stood beside his mount. I rode Keeksha down and halted before him. I was grateful to slide from her sweaty back. The mare moved three steps away from me, and then dropped to her knees. Horrified, I thought I had foundered the beast, but she merely rolled over onto her back and scratched herself luxuriously on the short, prickly grass that grew in the depression. I thought longingly of my waterskin, still slung on Sirlofty’s saddle. Useless to wish for it now.

If Dewara was surprised that I had caught up with him, he gave no sign of it. He said nothing at all until I cautiously asked, ‘What are we going to do now?’

‘We are here,’ was all he replied.

I glanced about and saw nothing to recommend ‘here’ over any other arid hollow in the plains. ‘Should I tend to the horses?’ I asked. I knew that if I had been riding Sirlofty, my father’s first admonition would be to look after my mount. ‘A horse soldier without his horse is an inexperienced foot soldier,’ he’d told me often enough. But Dewara just wet his lips with his tongue and then casually spat to one side. I recognized that he insulted me, but held myself silent.

‘Taldi were taldi long before men rode on them,’ he observed disdainfully. ‘Let them tend to themselves.’ His expression implied I was something of a weakling to have been concerned for them.

But the Kidona animals did seem well able to care for themselves. After her scratch, Keeksha heaved herself to her feet and joined Dedem in grazing on the coarse grass. Neither seemed any the worse for their long gallop. Had I put Sirlofty through a similar run, I would have walked him to cool him off and then rubbed him down thoroughly and given him water at careful intervals. The Kidona taldi seemed content with their rough forage and the grit they had rubbed into their wet coats. ‘The animals have no water. Neither do I,’ I told Dewara after a time.

‘They won’t die without it. Not today.’ He gave me a measuring look. ‘And neither will you, soldier’s boy.’ Coldly he added, ‘Don’t talk. You don’t need to talk. You are with me to listen.’

I started to speak again, but a brusque gesture from him quieted me. An instant later, I recalled his earlier warnings about what he would do if I disobeyed. I sealed my dry lips and, for lack of anywhere to perch, hunkered down on the bare earth. Dewara seemed to be listening intently. He bellied quietly up the side of our hollow, not so far that his head would show over the lip of it, and lay flat there. He closed his eyes and was so still that, except for his expression, I would have thought him sleeping. His intensity warned me to keep still in body as well as voice. After a time, he sat up slowly and turned to me. He gave me a very self-satisfied smile; the row of pointed white teeth in his mouth was a bit unnerving. ‘He is lost,’ he said.

‘Who?’ I asked, bewildered.

‘Your father’s man. Set to watch over you, I think.’ His smile was cruel. I think he waited for an expression of dismay from me.

Instead, I was puzzled. Sergeant Duril? Would my father have commanded him to watch over me? Would Duril have done it on his own? Some of my doubts must have shown on my face because Dewara’s look became more considering. He came to his feet and walked slowly down the sloping bank toward me. ‘You are mine now. The student pays best attention when his life depends on it. Is it so?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, feeling certain it was true. I wondered uneasily what he meant.

For a long time, it seemed he meant nothing at all. He hunkered down on his heels not far from me. The taldi grazed on the dry forage. The only sounds were the wind blowing over the plain and the occasional crunch of a hoof as the animals shifted and the ceaseless chirring of small insects. In the hollow, the air was still, as if the plain cupped us in the palm of its hand. Dewara seemed to be waiting, but I had no idea for what. I felt I had no choice save to emulate him and wait also. I folded my legs and sat on the hard ground, my face and eyelashes still thick with the fine dust from our ride, and tried to ignore my thirst. He stared at me. From time to time, I met his eyes, but mostly I studied the fine pebbles on the dirt in front of me or gazed at the surrounding terrain. The shadows grew shorter and then began to lengthen again. At last he stood, stretched and walked over to his mount. ‘Come,’ he said to me.

I followed him. The mare sidled away until I said, ‘Keeksha. Stand.’ Then she came to me and waited for me to mount. Dewara hadn’t waited for us, but at least this time he was walking Dedem instead of galloping away. For a time we trailed him, and then he irritably motioned me to move up and ride beside him. I thought he would want to talk, but that was not it. I suspect he simply didn’t like having someone at his back.

We rode on through the rest of the afternoon. I thought he was taking us to water or a better camping site, but when we halted, I saw nothing to recommend the spot. At least our previous stopping place had offered us shelter from the relentless wind. Here, outcroppings of reddish rock nudged up out of the scant soil. Released, the ponies dispiritedly went to browse on some leathery-leaved shrubs. They, too, seemed to think little of Dewara’s choice of a stopping place. I turned in a slow circle, surveying the surrounding terrain. Most of what I could see was very similar to what was right at my feet. Dewara had sat down, his back propped against one of the large rocks.

‘Should I gather brush for a fire?’ I asked him.

‘I have no need of a fire. And you have no need to talk.’

That was our evening’s conversation. He sat, his back against the rock, while the shadows lengthened and then night flowed slowly across the land. There was no moon that night and the distant stars sparkled ineffectually against the black sky. When it became apparent that Dewara was not moving from where he sat, I found a place where a ledge of rock jutted up from the sand. I scratched out a hollow in the sand beside it, a place big enough for me to lie with my back against the rock, mostly for the warmth that it would hold after the sun went down. I lay down, cushioned my head with my hat and crossed my arms on my chest. For a time I listened to the wind, the horses and the insects.

I woke twice in the night. The first time, I had dreamed of smoked meat so vividly that I could still smell it. The second time it was because I was shivering. I shouldered deeper into my hollow, for there was little else I could do. I wondered exactly what I was supposed to be learning, and then fell asleep again.

Before dawn, sleep vanished and I opened my eyes to lucid awareness. I was chilled, hungry and thirsty, yet none of those things had awakened me. Without moving my head, I shifted my eyes. Dewara had awakened and was standing, a blacker shadowing against the steel grey sky. As I watched, he took another stealthy step toward me. I lowered my eyelids, keeping them only a slit open, wondering if his sight was keen enough to know I was awake. Another step closer. The man could flow like a snake on a dune.

I weighed my options. If I lay still and feigned sleep, I would have the element of surprise on my side. If I lay still and feigned sleep, he would have the element of being above me with his feet under him and his swanneck at his hand. I mentally tested all my muscles, and then came to my feet. Dewara halted where he stood. His expression was guileless. I kept mine as smooth. I bowed my head to my left shoulder and greeted him with, ‘It’s nearly morning.’

My voice came out as a croak. I cleared my dry throat and added, ‘Will we find water today?’

He fluttered his hands, a plainsman’s equivalent of a shrug. ‘Who can say? That is with the spirits.’

It would have been a silent blasphemy and a coward’s choice to let his words stand alone. ‘The good god may have mercy on us,’ I replied.

‘Your good god lives up beyond the stars,’ he replied disdainfully. ‘My spirits are here, in the land.’

‘My good god watches over me and protects me from harm,’ I countered.

He gave me a withering glance. ‘Your good god must be very bored, soldier’s boy.’

I took a breath. I did not wish to argue theology with a savage. I decided that the insult was to me, for having a boring life, rather than to the good god. I could let it pass, if I chose to do so. I said nothing, and after a long pause Dewara cleared his throat. ‘There is no reason to stay here,’ he said. ‘It’s light enough to ride.’

I had seen no reason to be there at all, but again, I smothered my opinion. I had been riding since I was a small child, but I ached in unexpected muscles from his beast’s odd shape. Nevertheless, I dutifully mounted up and followed him, still wondering what it was this man was supposed to be teaching me. I worried that my father was getting a very poor exchange for his trade goods.

Dewara led and I rode beside him. By noon, my need for water had surpassed thirst and was venturing toward privation. My sturdy taldi followed Dewara’s gamely, but I knew that she, too, needed water. I had employed every trick that I knew to stave off my thirst. The smooth pebble in my mouth had become more annoying than helpful. I had picked it up when I had dismounted to strip the fleshy leaves from a mules-ear plant. I chewed the thick leaves to fibres, and then spat them out. They did little more than moisten my mouth. My lips and the inside of my nose were dry and cracking. My tongue felt like a piece of thick leather in my mouth. Dewara rode on without speaking to me or betraying any sign of thirst. Hunger returned to pester me, but thirst retained my attention. I watched anxiously for the water signs that Sergeant Duril had taught me – a line of trees, a depression where the plants were thick and greener than usual or animal tracks converging – but I saw only that the land was becoming more barren and even stonier.

There was little I could do other than follow Dewara and trust that he must have some end in mind. When shadows began to lengthen again with still no water in sight, I spoke up. My lips cracked as I formed my words. ‘Will we reach water soon?’

He glanced at me, and then made a show of looking all around us. ‘It does not seem so.’ He smiled at me, showing no effects from our water privation. Without words, we rode on. I could feel the little mare’s flagging energy, but she seemed as willing as ever. Evening had begun to ooze across the plains when Dewara reined his mount and looked around. ‘We’ll sleep here,’ he announced.

The location was worse than the previous one. There was not even a rock to sleep against, and only dry browse for the horses, no grass at all.

‘You’re daft!’ I croaked out before I recalled that I was to show this man respect. It was hard to recall anything just then except how thirsty I was.

He was already off his horse. He looked up at me, his face impassive. ‘You are to obey me, soldier’s boy. Your father said so.’

At the time it seemed that I had no choice except to do as he said. I dismounted from the tubby little mare and looked around. There was nothing to see. If this was some sort of test, I feared I was failing it. As he had the evening before, Dewara sat down cross-legged on the dry earth. He seemed perfectly content to sit there and watch evening turn to full night.

My head ached and I felt my stomach clench with the nausea of unanswered hunger. Well, it would go away soon enough, I told myself. I decided I would make my bed a bit more comfortable than it had been the night before. I picked a place that looked more sandy than stony, at a good distance from Dewara. I had not forgotten his sneaking approach that morning. With my hands, I dug a slight depression in the sand about the size of my body. Curled in it, I could trap my body warmth during the chill of night. I was picking the larger rocks out of the bottom when Dewara stood and stretched. He walked over to my hole and looked at it disdainfully. ‘Planning to lay your eggs soon? It’s a fine nest for a sage hen.’

Replying would have required moving my cracked lips, so I let his jibe pass. I could not understand how thirst and hunger affected me so strongly and left him untouched. As if in answer to my thought, he muttered, ‘Weakling.’ He turned and walked back to his post and squatted down again. Feeling childish, I curled into my hole and closed my gritty eyes. I said my evening prayers silently, asking the good god to grant me strength and help me to discern what my father thought this man could teach me. Perhaps this endurance of privation was how he wished to measure me. Or perhaps this old enemy of my father planned to break his bargain with my father and torment me to my death.

Perhaps my father had been wrong to trust him.

Perhaps I was a weakling and a traitor to my father to doubt his judgment. ‘Make me proud, son,’ he had said. I prayed again for strength and courage, and sought sleep.

In the dark of night, I came awake. I smelled sausages. No. I smelled smoked meat. Foolishness. Then I heard a very small sound: the gurgle of a waterskin. My mind was playing tricks on me. Then I heard it again, and the slosh as it was lowered from Dewara’s mouth. It occurred to me that his loose robes could easily conceal such things as a waterskin and a wallet of dried meat. My sticky eyelids clung together as I opened my eyes. There is nothing darker than full night on the Midlands. The stars were distant and uninterested. Dewara was completely invisible to me.

Sergeant Duril had often counselled me that thirst, hunger, and sleeplessness can lead to a man making poor decisions. He said I could add lust to that list when I was a few years closer to full manhood. So now I pondered and then pondered again. Was this a test of my perseverance and endurance? Or had my father been deceived by his old enemy? Should I obey Dewara even if he was leading me to my death? Should I trust my father’s judgment or my own? My father was older and wiser than I. But he was not here and I was. I was too weary and too thirsty to think coherently. Yet I must make the decision. Obey or disobey. Trust or distrust.

I closed my eyes. I prayed to the good god for guidance, but heard only the sweep of wind across the plains. I slept fitfully. I dreamed that my father said that if I were worthy to be his son, I could endure this. Then the dream changed, and Sergeant Duril was saying that he’d always known I was stupid, that even the youngest child knew better than to venture out on the plains without water and food. Idiots deserved to die. How many times had he told me that? If a man couldn’t figure out how to take care of himself, then let him get himself killed and get out of the way before he brought down his whole regiment. I wandered out of my dream to sleeplessness. I was in the control of a savage who disliked me. I had no food or water. I doubted that there was water within a day’s walk of here, or that I could walk a full day without water. Grimness settled on me. I decided to sleep on my decision.

In the creep of dawn, I arose from my hollow in the sand. I went to where Dewara slept. He did not sleep. His eyes were open and watching me. It hurt even to try to speak but I croaked out the words. ‘I know you have water. Please give me some.’

He sat up slowly. ‘No.’ His hand was already on the haft of his swanneck. I had no weapon at all. He grinned at me. ‘Why don’t you try to take it?’

I stood there, anger, hatred and fear fighting for control of me. I decided I wanted to live. ‘I’m not stupid,’ I said. I turned away from him and walked toward the taldi.

He called after me, ‘You say you are “not stupid”. Is that another way to say “coward”?’

The words were like a knife in my back. I tried to ignore them. ‘Keeksha. Stand.’ The mare came to me.

‘Sometimes a man has to fight for what he needs to live. He has to fight, no matter what the odds.’ Dewara stood up, pulling his swanneck from its sheath. The bronze blade was gold in the rising sun. His face darkened with anger. ‘Get away from my animal. I forbid you to touch her.’

I grasped the mane at the base of her neck and heaved myself onto her.

‘Your father said you would obey me. You said you would obey me. I said that if you disobeyed me, I would notch your ear.’

‘I am going to find water.’ I don’t know why I even said those words.

‘You are not a man of your word. Neither is your father. But I am!’ he shouted after me as I rode off. ‘Dedem. Stand!’ At that, I kicked Keeksha into a run. Deprivation had weakened her as much as it had me, but she seemed to share my mind. We fled. I heard Dedem’s strong hoofbeats behind us. ‘It can’t be helped,’ I thought to myself. I leaned into Keeksha’s gallop and hung on.

The stallion was bigger and hardier than the mare. They were gaining on us. I had two objectives: to get away from Dewara and to find water before the mare’s strength gave out. I knew I would need her to get home. To those ends, I urged her to speed, guiding her back the way we had come. My somewhat rattled assessment of the situation was that by going back the way we had come, I knew that water was only two days away. A man can survive four days without food or water. Sergeant Duril had told me so. Yet he had added, kindly, that such survival was made more unlikely by exposure and exertion, and that a man who trusted his judgment after two days without food and water was as likely to die of foolishness as deprivation. I knew the horse could not run for two days straight, nor could I ride for that long. Yet my thinking was badly disordered by the fact that I was fleeing for my life, a new experience for me, and defying my father’s authority as I did so. The one seemed equally as terrifying as the other.

I did not get far. I had only a small lead over the Kidona. Urge the mare as I might, Dewara gained steadily until he was riding beside us. I clung grimly to Keeksha’s back and mane, for there was little else I could do. I saw him draw his swanneck and slapped the mare frantically, but she had no more speed to give. The deadly curved blade swiped the air over my head. I risked a kick at him, hoping more to distract him than unseat him. I nearly unseated myself as well, and I felt the mare’s pace falter. The shining metal swept past me again, and such was Dewara’s skill that, true to his threat, I felt the harsh bite of the blade as it passed through my ear. The act dealt me a scalp wound as well, one that immediately began to pour blood down the side of my neck. I screamed as the blade sliced through my flesh, both in pain and in terror. The shameful memory of that girlish shriek has never left me. Pain and the warm seep of thick blood down my neck became one sensation, making it impossible for me to assess how badly I was injured. I could only cling tighter to Keeksha and ride hard. I knew I had no chance of survival. The next pass of Dewara’s swanneck would finish me.

Astonishingly, he let me go.

It took a short time for me to realize that. Or perhaps a long time. I rode, my wound burning and my heart hammering so that I thought it would burst from my body. At any moment, I expected the swish of the blade and the quenching of light. The drumming of my own blood in my ears was such that at first I did not realize that his hoofbeats were fading. I ventured a glance to the side and then back. He was pulling his stallion in. As I fled, he sat, unmoving on his horse, watching me go. He laughed at me. I did not hear it, could not see his smile, and yet I knew it. He flourished his golden blade over his head and flapped his free arm derisively at me. The knowledge of his mockery seared me.

Shamed and bleeding, I fled like a kicked cur. I did not have the water in my body to weep, or I probably would have. My scalp wound bled thickly for a short time, and then crusted over with dust. I rode on. Keeksha’s pace slowed, and I lacked the will or energy to urge her to go faster. For a time, I tried to guide her, hoping to go back the way we had come, but we were already off course, and the little taldi was determined to have her own way. I gave in to her, excusing myself on the grounds that Sergeant Duril had often urged me to trust my horse when I had no better guide.

Afternoon found me slumping on Keeksha’s back, letting her pick her way where she would. Our pace was little more than an amble. I felt dizzy. The sky was a clear blue and the sun was bright and warm. My hunger that had abated for a time had returned, and with it a retching nausea very painful to my dry throat. I felt completely adrift. When I had followed Dewara, I had believed that there was some destination that we sought, and despite my doubts, I’d felt safer with him. Now I was as good as lost until nightfall and the stars came out. Worse, I was lost in my life. I’d disobeyed my father and Dewara. I’d put my inexperienced judgment above theirs, and if I died out here, I’d have only myself to blame. Perhaps it had been a test of endurance, and I’d fled it too soon. Perhaps if I’d tried to take the water from him, he would have been impressed with my courage and rewarded me with a drink. Perhaps my fleeing had earned me a coward’s death. My body would rot out here, insect and bird bait until my bones turned to sand. My father would be ashamed of me when Dewara told him how I had run away. I rode hopelessly on.

Midmorning of the next day, Keeksha found water. I claim no credit for helping her.

People who say our plains are arid are only partially correct. There is water, but for the most part it moves beneath the surface, and breaks through to the top only when the terrain forces it there. Keeksha found such a sike. The rocky watercourse she followed was dry as a bone that spring, but she kept with it until we reached a place where an outcropping of rock had forced the hidden flow up, to briefly break above ground as a marshy little pond, not much bigger than two box stalls. The sike stank of life, and was the virulent green of desperation. She walked into it and began drinking in the thick water.

I slid from her back, walked two steps from her and lay down on my belly in the muck. I put my face in the thin layer of water and sucked it up, straining it through my teeth. After I had drunk, I lay there still, my mouth open to the liquid, trying to soak my leather tongue and frayed lips back to a semblance of normalcy. Above me, Keeksha drank and then breathed and then drank some more. Finally I heard the heavy splashes of her hooves as she moved out of the shallow pond and to the cracked earth at the muddy edge of it. She began grazing greedily on the ring of grass that surrounded the sink. I envied her.

I stood slowly and wiped a scum of slime from my chin and then shook it from my hands. I could feel the water in my belly, and felt almost sickened by the sudden plenitude of it. I waded out of the muck and inspected our tiny sanctuary. The cut of the watercourse meant that we were below the windswept plain. I could hear the constant mutter of the never-still air above us. Our tiny hollow cupped silence. Then, as I stood still, the chorus of life slowly took up its song again. Insects spoke to one another. A dragonfly hovered over the water. The gore frogs that had gone into hiding during our splashing began to emerge once more. Bright as gobbets of spilled blood, they were blots of scarlet on the floating scum and stubby reeds of our pond. I knew a moment’s relief that they had gone into hiding at our arrival. They were toxic little creatures. When I was small, one of our dogs had died from picking a gore frog up in his mouth. Even to touch one caused a tingling on the skin.

I picked and ate some water plants that I recognized. They were something in my belly, but hunger growled around them. I found nothing that I could fashion into a vessel for carrying water. I dreaded the thought of the hunger and thirst I’d have to endure during my journey home, but not as deeply as I dreaded my confrontation with my father when I returned. I’d failed him. The thought made me return to the water’s edge. I washed the thick blood from my neck and ear. Notched. My ear would never be whole again. I’d carry the reminder of my broken promise to the end of my days. For the rest of my life, whenever anyone asked me about it, I’d have to admit that I’d disobeyed my father and gone back on my own word.

The mucky edges of the pond gave way to plates of roughly cracked earth that showed how the pond had shrunken since winter. I studied the tracks in them. When the ground had been moist, a little shrub-deer had visited the water. One blurry set of tracks could have been a big cat or the slopped prints of a wild dog. Beyond the cracked edge of the bare ground, dry grass stood in the skeletal shade of a dead sapling. I picked several double handfuls of the grass, and then approached Keeksha. She seemed apprehensive when I started rubbing the dust and sweat from her back and flanks, but soon decided she enjoyed it. It was not just that she’d found water for us. I did it to remind myself that the wisdom of my early training was to take good care of my mount. I should never have listened to Dewara about anything.

Afterwards, I made my bed among the grass tussocks, resolving to sleep the afternoon away, then awaken, drink as much water as I could hold, and then ride as the stars pointed me. I broke the dead sapling down, and broke the skinny branches away from it. It was a feeble weapon, but anything might come to water in the night. It was better than nothing. I placed it by my side as I lay down to sleep. As much as I dreaded confessing to my father, I also longed to be home again. I closed my eyes to the chirring of the insects and the peeping of the gore frogs.

FOUR
Crossing the Bridge

I opened my eyes. The dark had not yet thickened into the full blackness of a night on the plains. I remained motionless, pushing my senses to their limits to discover what had awakened me. Then I knew. The silence. I had dozed off to the relentless chorus of insects and frogs. Now they were still, concealing themselves from something.

My stick was still beneath my hand. I tightened my grip on it and rolled my eyes to find Keeksha. The mare stood, ears pitched forward, intently aware. I shifted my gaze to follow hers. There was nothing to see, and then there was. Dewara stood outlined against the darkening sky. I instantly rolled to my feet to face him, bringing my stick up into the guard position as if it were a proper pike instead of a brittle pole. The surge of hatred and fear that I felt surprised me. Dewara’s swanneck was sheathed at his side. I suspected it was still slick with my blood. I had only the stick, and I was suddenly painfully aware of my gangly fifteen years pitted against the mature and solidly muscled warrior.

He did not make a sound, but stalked slowly down the incline to my pond. I held myself ready, and felt suddenly very calm as I knew I would die here. He met my gaze as he advanced and then a slow smile bared his pointed teeth. ‘You learn the lesson I teach, I think,’ he said.

I kept my silence.

‘Nice ear notch,’ he said. ‘I marked you like a woman marks a goat.’ He laughed aloud. I hated him then with a hate that boiled my blood. He knew it, and didn’t care. He hunkered down as if I were no threat to him at all. He scratched his shoulder, and then reached inside his loose robe. He pulled out a packet and opened it, and shook out a stick. My nose told me it was smoked meat. He made a show of holding it up for me to see. My deprived belly growled loudly at the smell of it. He stuffed it into his mouth and chewed noisily, smacking his lips. ‘You hungry, soldier’s boy?’ He waved the packet of jerky at me.

‘Give me meat,’ I demanded. I had not known I would say the words and regretted them. I was powerless to force him to obey my command. My mouth had filled with saliva at the sight of the food, and I swallowed it almost painfully. Need for what he had swept through me and I suddenly knew that I was going to fight him for it. I would rather die fighting than starving and defeated, I decided. I began to move toward him in a slow but purposeful way, keeping my pathetic weapon at the ready. He marked my intent and smiled his carnivorous smile again. I saw that gentling of his muscles as he relaxed into his body and readied it for my onslaught. I kept one eye on his swanneck as I moved toward him.

I was within ten feet of him when he abruptly stood up straight. I had not seen him draw it, but his swanneck gleamed in his hand. ‘You want the meat? Come and take it, soldier’s boy,’ he taunted me.

I do not know which of us was more surprised when I charged at him with my stick. I tried to sweep his feet from under him, but the brittle sapling cracked off when it connected with his shin. He roared, more in anger than in pain, and a swipe of his swanneck chopped what remained of my stick into two useless pieces.

I threw the two pieces of stick at his head, missing with both of them. Then I charged him, hoping feebly that I could get inside the sweep of his swanneck and do some damage before he killed me. To my shock, he reversed his grip on his blade and rammed the short haft of it directly into my belly. The force of the blow lifted me off my feet and threw me backward. I lit on my back, my head striking the packed earth hard enough to blast light into my eyes. His strike had driven the air from my lungs. Pain radiated from the centre of my body.

I gasped for air and black spots swam at the edge of my vision. I sprawled on the sand, almost too frightened to be humiliated as I tried to pull air into my emptied lungs. He walked a few steps away from me, straightened his robes and sheathed his swanneck. All that he did with his back to me. I could not miss the meaning of that; I was too feeble an enemy to be considered a threat. When he turned back toward me, he laughed, as if we had shared some joke, and then pulled out a strip of the smoked meat. I had rolled to my side and was struggling to rise. He tossed the jerky at me, and it landed in the dirt beside me. ‘You learned the lesson. Eat, soldier’s boy. Tomorrow’s lessons will be more challenging for you.’

It was several more minutes before I could even sit up. Nothing that had happened to me before had ever hurt as bad as this. Compared to this, the bruises from Sergeant Duril’s rocks were a mother’s kisses. I knew there would be blood in my piss; I only hoped there was no serious damage inside me. Dewara was moving unconcernedly about my pond. He picked up a broken piece from my stick and stirred the water thoughtfully, perhaps to disperse the gore frogs.

I had never felt more defeated and humiliated in my life. I hated him passionately and hated my own ineffectualness even more. I stared at the meat in the dirt, wanting it desperately and shamed that I’d even think of taking food from my enemy. After a time, I picked up the jerky. I remembered Sergeant Duril telling me that in a dangerous situation, a man must do all he can to keep his strength up and his mind clear. Then I wondered if I was just making excuses for my weakness. I still feared a trick. I sniffed the jerky, wondering if I’d be able to smell poison. At the smell of it, my stomach lurched with hunger and I felt dizzy. I heard Dewara chuckle. Then he called across to me, ‘Better eat, soldier’s boy. Or did you learn the lesson too strong?’

‘I learned nothing from you,’ I snarled, and bit into the meat. It was too tough to rip a bite free. I had to chew it soft and then tear it off. I swallowed it in half-chewed bites that scraped down the inside of my throat. It was too soon gone. Never once had I taken my gaze from Dewara. It grated on me that he seemed to regard me with approval. He made a noise, a clicking of his teeth, and a moment later I heard the thud of his mount’s hooves. Dedem appeared at the lip of the hollow, and came down in haste. He waded out into the shallow water and began sucking noisily.

Dewara moved toward the other side of the small pond. I watched him kneel. He used his hands to smooth the coating of plantlets away from the water’s surface before he bent his head and drank. I hoped that he would suck up a frog.

Having drunk, he moved back onto drier ground and settled himself for the night that was now closing around us in earnest. I watched him, seething. His bland assumption that I was no danger to him, his mocking dismissal of how he had mistreated and maimed me affronted me beyond insult. I choked on the indignity of it. ‘Why did you follow me?’ I burst out at last, and hated that I sounded like a child.

He didn’t even open his eyes. ‘You had my taldi. And I told you. Kidonas keep their word. I must take you back safely to your mother’s house.’

‘I want no help from you,’ I hissed.

He leaned up on his elbows and looked at me. ‘Not even my Keeksha, that you ride? Not even the meat you just ate?’ He leaned back, scratched his chest and made the small sounds of a man settling for the night. ‘Eat your pride tomorrow, I think. You have lots. Very filling. Tomorrow we start to make you Kidona.’

‘Make me Kidona? I don’t want to be Kidona.’

He laughed briefly. ‘Of course you do. Every man wants to become the man who has bested him. Every youth with a thread of war in him wishes to be Kidona in his heart. Even those who do not know what Kidona is yearn for it, like a dream still to be dreamed. You wish to be Kidona. I will waken that dream in you. It is what your father wanted me to do, I think, even if he dared not say it.’

‘My father wishes me to be an officer and a gentleman in his majesty’s cavalla, follow the ancient traditions of knighthood and bring honour to my family name as the men of my line have always done, since ever we fought for the kings of Gernia. I am a soldier son of the Burvelle line. I desire only to do my duty to my king and my family.’

‘Tomorrow, we will make you Kidona.’

‘I will never be Kidona. I know what I am!’

‘So do I, soldier’s son. Sleep, now.’ He cleared his throat and coughed once. Then he fell silent. His breathing deepened and evened. He slept.

Full of fury, I walked up to him and stood over him for a time. He opened one eye, looked up at me, yawned elaborately and closed his eyes again. He did not even fear that I’d kill him in his sleep. He used my own honour as weapon against me. That stung like an insult, even though I never would have stooped to such a dastardly act. I stood over him, aching for him to make some sort of threatening move so that I could fling myself on him and try to throttle the life out of him. To attack a sleeping man who had just by-passed the opportunity to kill me while I sprawled at his feet was beyond dishonourable. Humiliated as I was, I would not and could not do it. I walked away from him.

I made my bed a good distance away from him and huddled in my nest of dry grass, feeling queasy still. I thought my anger and hatred would keep me awake, but I fell asleep surprisingly quickly. At fifteen, the body demands rest regardless of how sore the heart may be. Somehow I had completely forgotten my plans to ride in the darkness, letting the stars guide me home. Years later, I would begin to comprehend how neatly Dewara had put me under his control again. I would comprehend, and see how it was done to me, but I would never understand it.

The next morning, Dewara greeted the new day with enthusiasm and extended his good wishes and warm fellowship to me. He behaved as if all differences between us were settled. I was mystified. I ached still and a private inspection of my chest and belly showed me the deep bruise I bore. My slit ear still burned from my morning ablutions. I itched to carry on my feud with the man; I almost hoped Dewara would somehow abuse or challenge me so that I could fight him. But he was suddenly all good-natured jests and companionable conversation. When I reacted to his friendly overtures with suspicion, he praised me for my caution. When I maintained a surly silence, he praised my warrior’s quiet demeanour. No matter what I did to express my defiance of him, he found something in it to compliment. When I sat absolutely still, refusing to respond to him in any way, he commended my self-control, and said it was the wise warrior who conserved his energy until he understood his situation.

In every imaginable way, he was a different man from the one he had been the day before. I vacillated between being stunned by the change in his demeanour to being certain that his apparent sincerity was a mask for his contempt of me. His friendly behaviour made my hostility seem childish, even to myself. His affability made it difficult for me to maintain my antagonism toward him, especially as he endeavoured to include me in every one of his activities, beckoning me repeatedly to come closer while he explained his actions in detail. Nothing in my life experience had prepared me for something like this. I wondered if he were mad, and then wondered if I were.

A confused boy is easy to manipulate.

That morning, he offered me meat without my asking, and showed me how he used the water plants as a filter when he filled his long tubular waterskins. I think they were made of gut. He also caught several of the gore frogs, taking great care not to touch them with his bare hands. He carried them away from the sike to a large flat rock and marooned them there. The little red creatures swiftly baked flat and brown in the hot sun of the day. He made a packet from the tough, flat leaves of a swort bush and carefully stored the dried frogs in one of the inner pockets of his loose robe. I was beginning to realize that although I had believed we had both ridden away from his camp empty-handed, Dewara had actually been very well supplied for our sojourn. He had with him all we both needed to survive. To get it from him, he would force me to admit my dependency on him.

He was so cheerful and affable with me, it was bewildering for me to sustain my wariness, but I managed. He suddenly stepped into the role of instructor, as if he had finally decided he would teach me the things my father had wanted me to learn. When we mounted up that first morning by the pond, I thought we would go straight back to his camp on my father’s lands near the river. Instead, he led and I followed. We stopped at mid-day, and he gave me a small sling, showed me the Kidona style of using it and told me to practise with it. Then we left our taldi and moved into scrub brush along the edge of a ravine. He stunned the first prairie grouse we flushed and I raced up to wring its neck before it recovered. His second one, he broke the wing, and the bird led me a merry chase before I caught it. I could not hit a bird for the life of me until the late afternoon, when I actually killed one with my stone.

That night we had fire and cooked meat and shared his waterskin as if we were companions. I said little to him, but he had become suddenly garrulous. He told me a number of battle tales from his day as a warrior, back in the time when the Kidona raided their fellow plainsmen. They were full of blood and rape and pillaging, and he laughed aloud as he joyously recalled those ‘victories’. From those tales, he went on to ‘sky legends’ about the constellations. Most of his hero tales seemed to involve deceit, theft or wife stealing. I perceived that a successful thief was admired among the Kidona, while a clumsy one often paid with his life. It seemed an odd morality to me. I fell asleep as he told a story about seven lovely sisters and the trickster who seduced them in succession and had a child with each one of them while marrying none of them.

‘Shall I take you up?’ the tree woman asked me.

‘Help me! Please!’ I begged suddenly, no longer caring if she was friend or foe. She was my sole chance for survival. My eyes flew open. She had come closer but was still out of reach. She stood, looking down at me curiously. I could see the fronds of ferns growing from her mossy dress.

‘Please, what?’ she asked me, gently, implacably.

‘Please help me up!’ I gasped.

‘Please take you up?’ she asked, as if she had to be certain she had heard me correctly. ‘You wish to live, then? To cross the bridge and complete it?’

‘Please! Take me up!’ I all but shrieked the words. Blood was running down my wrists. The edge of the blade had found the joints in my fingers and was slicing through them. I feared I would faint from the pain even if my fingers did not detach.

She was implacable. ‘I must give you the choice. You can say you wish to die, rather than have your life taken up. If you so choose, so shall it be. But if you wish to be taken up to this life, then you must choose it clearly. The magic does not take anyone against his will. Do you choose the bridge?’ She knelt at the edge of the cliff, leaning over me but still out of my reach. I could smell her odour, old woman and humus mingled in a sickening richness.

‘I … choose … life!’ My heart was pounding in my ears. I could barely find breath to get the words out. I could claim that I did not know what I was saying, but a part of me did. The tree woman was not speaking of death and life as I knew it; those words conveyed something else when she spoke them. I suppose I could have dangled there longer, and demanded that she explain herself. I feared I made a coward’s choice, choosing my life at some hideous expense that I could not yet comprehend. At the time, with blackness at the edges of my vision, demanding the exact terms of her bargain did not seem an option. I would live first, and then do whatever I must to make it right.

In the vast distance, I heard Dewara shout. ‘Fool! Fool! She has you now! You’ve become hers! You’ve opened the way and condemned us all!’ The words came tiny but clear to my ears. I thought my fear was as fierce as it could get, but Dewara’s warning sent a fresh rush of dread surging through my body. To what had I agreed? What would the tree woman’s victory mean to me?

Yet there was no triumph in the tree woman’s voice, only acquiescence to my wish when she spoke. ‘As you have asked it, so shall it be. I take you up. Come and join us.’

I had expected that she would grasp my wrists and pull me up. Instead, she reached down and I felt her fingers touch the top of my head. My father always kept my hair cut short, no longer than the tops of my ears, as befitted a soldier son, but in my time with Dewara, it had grown out. She gripped me by the hair on the top of my head. Even then, she did not pull me up, but seemed to twine my hair in her fingers, as if getting a better grip on it.

Dimly, I became aware that Tree Woman was speaking in a raised voice. She ignored me, and sent her words over the abyss to Dewara. ‘Was this your weapon, Kidona man? This boy from the west? Ha. The magic has chosen him, and given him to me. I will use him well. Thank you for such a fine weapon, Kidona man!’

Then her voice went very soft. I think I only heard it in my mind. The words reached me as I struggled to keep my grip. She pulled relentlessly upward on my hair now, but it did not seem to lift me.

‘Grab my wrists!’ I begged her, but she did not heed me. She spoke calmly, giving me instructions. ‘To you, the magic will give a token. Guard it carefully and keep it by you. And from you, I take a token of my own. It will link us, soldier’s boy. What you speak, I will hear. I will taste the food you eat, and in turn I will fill you with my sustenance. All you are, I will share and learn.

‘To you I will give a great task; you will stop the spread of the intruders. You will turn back the tide of encroachers and destroyers from our lands. Of you I will make a tool to defeat those who would destroy us.’ As my mind reeled with pain and I attempted to understand, she lifted her voice again. ‘He serves my magic and me now, Kidona man. And you gave him to me! Go back and tell your leather-skinned folk that! You gave your weapon into my hand! And now I take it!’

Her words made no sense to me and I had no time to ponder them. My panic increased as I felt her grip tighten on my hair. She pulled suddenly upward and I felt my hair ripping out of my scalp. The pain shot down my spine. I twitched like a gaffed fish. Deep inside me, something important gave way and was dragged out of me, like a strand of thread drawn out of a piece of weaving.

Suddenly her face was so close to me that I could feel her breath on my lips. The only thing I could see were her grey green eyes as she said, ‘I have you now. You can let go.’

I did. I fell into blackness.

FIVE
The Return

Somewhere close by, my parents were arguing. My mother’s voice was very tight but she was not crying; that meant she was extremely angry. Her words were clipped, the corners sharp. ‘He is my son, too, Keft. It was … unkind of you to keep me uninformed.’ Obviously, she had rejected a much harsher word than ‘unkind’.

‘Selethe. Some things are not a woman’s concern.’ From the timbre of my father’s voice, I knew he was leaning forward in his chair. I imagined his hands braced on his thighs, elbows out, his shoulders hunched against her rebuke, his stare intent.

‘When it comes to Nevare, I am not merely a woman. I am his mother.’ I knew that my mother had crossed her arms across her bosom. I could almost see her, standing arrow straight, every hair in place, spots of colour high on her cheeks. ‘Everything that concerns my son is my concern.’

‘Where he is your son, that is so,’ my father agreed blandly. But then he added sternly, ‘But this concerned Nevare as a soldier son. And where he is a soldier, the boy is mine alone.’

I felt that I had passed through many dreams to reach this place and time. But this was not a dream. This was my old life. I had found my way home. The moment that realization came to me, the other dreams faded like mist in the sunlight. I forgot everything in my haste to rejoin my life. I tried to open my eyelids but they were stuck fast. The skin of my face felt thick and stiff. When I tried to move the muscles of my face, it hurt. I recognized the feeling, from many years ago. I had been badly sunburned and my mother had coated me entirely with agu jelly. I took a deeper breath and smelled the herb’s tang. Yes.

‘He’s waking up!’ My mother’s voice was full of hope and relief.

‘Selethe. It was just a twitch. Nerves. Reflexes. Stop tormenting yourself and go get some rest. He will either recover or he won’t, regardless of whether you wear yourself out by keeping watch at his bedside. Your vigil does neither of you any good, and it may become neglect of our other children. Go and busy yourself about the house. If he awakens, I will call you.’

There was no hope in my father’s voice. To the contrary, it was heavy with resignation. I felt he rebuked himself as well as her. I heard him settle back, and recognized the creak of the reading chair in my chamber at home. Was that where I was? At home? I tried to remember where I had thought I was, but could not summon a memory of it. Like a dream examined by daylight, it had faded away to nothing.

I heard the rustle of my mother’s skirts and her light footfalls as she walked quietly to the door. She opened it, and then paused there. In a lowered, husky voice, she asked, ‘Will not you at least tell me why? Why did you entrust our son to a savage, to a man who had reason to hate you personally as well as with the tenacity of his vicious race? Why put our Nevare in harm’s way deliberately?’

I heard my father breathe out threateningly through his nose. I waited, as he did, for her to leave. I knew he would not reply to her accusation. Strangely, I recall that I wondered more about why she did not leave than I did about how he might answer her questions. I suppose that I believed so firmly that he would not reply that I did not think any reply was possible.

Then he spoke. Quietly. I had heard the words before, but somehow there, in my mother’s house, they were more freighted with meaning. ‘There are some things that Nevare can’t learn from a friend. Some lessons a soldier can learn only from an enemy.’

‘What lesson? What thing of value could he have learned from that heathen, other than how to die pointlessly?’ My mother was perilously close to tears. I knew as well as she did that if she broke, if she sobbed, my father would banish her to her rooms until she had regained control of herself. He could never abide a woman’s tears. Her voice was tight as she said, ‘He is a good son to you, willing, obedient and honest. What could he learn from a savage like that Kidona?’

‘To distrust.’ My father spoke so softly that I could barely hear him. I could scarcely believe that he spoke at all. He cleared his voice and went on more strongly. ‘I do not know if you can understand this, Selethe. This once, I will try to explain it to you. Have you ever heard of Dernel’s Folly?’

‘No.’ She spoke softly. I was not surprised that she had never heard of Captain Dernel. He was not renowned but notorious among the military. He was widely blamed for our having lost the Battle of Tobale to the Landsingers. A messenger had brought him orders from his general, telling Dernel to lead a charge into what was clearly a suicidal situation. Dernel had the advantage of the high ground. He could see for himself that the situation had changed since the order had been issued from the rear. He even said so to the orderly he left behind in his tent. Yet he had chosen to be an obedient soldier. He had obeyed a stale order, and led 684 mounted men to their deaths. He had obeyed, even though he had recognized the folly of the order. Every cavalryman knew about Captain Dernel. His name had become a synonym for an officer who did not lead but merely obeyed orders from above.

‘Well. Never mind that tale. I will say only that I do not wish my son to follow in Dernel’s footsteps. Nevare is, just as you have said, a good son. An obedient son. He obeys me without question. He obeys Sergeant Duril. He obeys you. He obeys. It is an admirable trait in a son and a necessary one in a soldier. These last few years, I have waited and watched him as he grew, waiting for him to disobey, to question, to challenge me. I waited for a time when he would be tempted to follow his own will. More, I hoped for a time when he would put his own judgment ahead of mine or ahead of Sergeant Duril’s.’

‘You wanted him to defy you? But why?’ My mother was incredulous.

My father gave a short sigh. ‘I did not think you would understand it. Selethe, I want our son to be more than an obedient soldier. I want him to rise through the ranks as much by his own aptitude as by our ability to buy a commission for him. To be a good officer, he must be more than obedient. He must develop leadership. That means making his own decisions, finding his own way out of bad situations. He has to be able to evaluate conditions in the field, and know when to follow his own instincts.

‘So, I deliberately put him into a difficult situation. I knew that Dewara would teach him many skills. But I also knew that Dewara would eventually put Nevare in a situation in which Nevare would have to make his own decisions. He’d have to question authority, not just Dewara’s, but mine in putting him there. It was a desperate tactic, I know. But he had shown no propensity of his own to grow in that direction. I knew I would have to push him across that boundary between boyhood and manhood. I hoped he would learn when to ignore orders given from the safety of the rear by men who do not know the conditions at the front. To trust his own judgment. To know that every soldier is ultimately in command of himself. To lead. To lead first himself, so that eventually he might learn to lead others.’ I heard my father shift in my chair. He cleared his throat again. ‘To know that not even his own father always knows what is best for him.’

There was a very long silence. Then she spoke in a voice cold with outrage. ‘I see. You gave our son’s welfare into the keeping of a vicious savage, so that Nevare would learn that his father did not always know what was best for him. Well. I have learned that lesson tonight. It is a pity that Nevare did not learn that lesson much earlier.’

It was the cruellest thing I’d ever heard my mother say to my father. I had never even imagined they had such conversations as this.

‘Perhaps you are right. In which case, he would not have survived long as a soldier anyway.’ Never had I heard my father’s voice so cold. Yet there was sorrow in his words. Did I hear guilt there as well? I could not abide that my father perhaps felt guilt over what had befallen me. I tried to speak, failed, and then tried to shift my hands. I could not, but I could move them back and forth on my bedding. I felt my fingers scratch shallowly against the linens of my bed. That wasn’t enough. I drew a deeper breath, braced myself for a great effort, and lifted my right hand. I trembled with the effort, but I held it up.

I heard my mother gasp my name, but it was my father’s rough hand that gripped my bandaged fingers. I had not understood that even my hands were wrapped in lint bandages until I felt his fingers close around mine. ‘Nevare. Listen to me.’ He spoke very loudly and clearly, as if I stood at a far distance from him. ‘You’re home now. You’re safe. You’re going to be all right. Don’t try to do anything just now. Do you want water? Squeeze my hand if you want water.’

I managed a feeble compression and a short time later a cool glass was held to my mouth. My lips were swollen and stiff; I drank with difficulty, soaking the bandages on my chin and then was returned to my pillows, where I sank into a deep sleep once more.

Later I would learn that I had been returned to my mother’s house, with a fresh notch cut deeply into my ear beside the first one for my disobedience, just as Dewara had promised. But that was not all he had done to me as I lay helpless. The barking of the dogs alerted my father that someone approached his manor house in the slight coolness of the early dawn. The taldi mare had hauled me up to my father’s doorstep on a crude travois made of brushwood. My clothes were in tatters, and some parts of me scraped to meat, for the rough conveyance had not completely protected me from being dragged against the ground. The exposed parts of my body were burned past blistering by exposure to the sun. At first glance, my father thought I was dead.

Dewara sat his mount at a distance from the house. When my father and his men came out into the yard to see what the disturbance was, he lifted a long gun and shot Keeksha through the chest. As she screamed, sank to her knees and rolled to her side, he turned his taldi’s head and galloped away. No one followed him, for their first concern was to get my unresponsive body clear of her dying kicks. Other than my doubly-notched ear and the slaughtered taldi, Dewara left no message for my father. I was later to learn that he either never returned to the Kidona or that his people concealed him and refused to surrender him to Gernian justice. His possession of a firearm was, by itself, a hanging offence for one of his folk. That he showed it so blatantly still makes me wonder if it were an act of defiance or one that invited his own death at my father’s hands.

My injuries were numerous, though only one appeared life threatening. I was dehydrated and burnt from exposure to the summer sun, and rubbed raw from being dragged home. My freshly notched ear was oozing thick blood when my father received me. A patch of scalp the size of a coin was missing from the crown of my head. The doctor summoned by my father shook his head after examining me. ‘Whatever is wrong with him, other than the burns and gouges, is beyond my skill. Perhaps he took a sharp blow to the skull. That may be the reason for his coma. I cannot tell. We will have to wait. In the meantime, we will do what we can for his other injuries.’ And so he picked gravel and dirt from my wounds, suturing and binding as he went, until I looked like a mended rag doll.

I come from a thick-skinned and hardy folk, my father said. Healing was painful and slow, but once I awakened from my long unconsciousness, heal I did. My mother insisted that my body be kept well greased to keep air away from my burns. It did serve to keep my fingers from sticking together as the old skin sloughed off to reveal raw pink newness beneath, but lying on greased linen when every inch of my body’s surface stung was a sensation I have never forgotten. The pungent agu kept most infection at bay, but left a reek that lingered in my bedchamber for weeks afterward. The wound on my scalp healed over, but no hair grew there.

Talking was painful, and for two days my father spared me any questions. My family had feared for my life, and I was uncomfortably aware, despite my usually bandaged eyes, that for every hour of the day either my mother or one of my sisters sat vigil by my bedside. That this duty was not entrusted to a servant was a sign of the depth of my mother’s concern.

Elisi was keeping the watch one afternoon when my father arrived. He shooed her from the room and then sat down heavily in my reading chair. ‘Son?’ he asked me, and when I turned my head slightly toward the sound of his voice, ‘Would you like some water?’

‘Please,’ I whispered hoarsely.

I heard him pour water into the glass by my bedside. I lifted my hand and nudged aside the greasy poultice across my eyes. My entire face had been blistered from the sun and the healing skin itched. My father watched as I very carefully levered myself into a more upright position. It was awkward to take the glass from him with both my hands in their mittenish bandages, but I saw that he was pleased to see me doing things for myself. That made it worth it. I drank and he took the glass from me quickly as I tried to fumble it back onto the bedside table. Beside it was my only souvenir of the experience. Sergeant Duril had insisted on helping put me to bed. He’d saved one of the rocks they’d dug out of my flesh and set it aside for me. It wasn’t much of a rock; some sort of quartz, I suspected, flecked and streaked with other minerals, but his reminder that I had once more cheated death was oddly cheering to me. Duril, at least, expected that someday I would look back on this painful time and find some amusement in this trophy.

My father cleared his throat to draw my attention back to him. ‘So. Feeling a bit more yourself now?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Think you can talk?’

My lips felt like burnt sausages. ‘A little, sir.’

‘Very good.’ He leaned back in his chair and thought for a bit, and then leaned toward me again. ‘I don’t even know what to ask you, son. I think I’ll leave it to you to tell me. What happened out there?’

I tried licking my lips. It was a mistake. Ragged bits of skin rasped against my tongue. ‘Dewara taught me Kidona ways. Hunting. Riding. How they make fires, what they eat. Bleeding a horse for food. Using a sling to hunt birds.’

‘Why did he notch your ear?’

I tried to remember. Parts of my time with him had gone muzzy and vague. ‘He had food and water, and would not share. So … I left him, to go find water and food of my own. He told me I couldn’t leave and I went anyway. Because I thought he’d let me die of thirst if I didn’t.’

He nodded to himself, his eyes alight with interest. He didn’t rebuke me for disobeying Dewara. Did that mean he thought that I had learned the lesson he’d sought to teach me? Was what had befallen me worth that lesson? I felt a sudden spark of hatred toward him. Resolutely I quenched it and forced myself to hear his question. ‘And that was all? For that, he did this to you?’

‘No. No, that was just for the first time.’

‘So … you left him. But then you went back to him for food and water?’ Disappointment tinged his question as well as confusion.

‘No,’ I denied it quickly. ‘He came after me, sir. I didn’t crawl back to him and beg him to save me. When I rode away from him that first time, he followed me. He chased me on horseback and notched my ear with his swanneck as I fled. I didn’t go back to him and stand still for him to mark me like that. I’d have died first.’

I think the vehemence in my voice shocked him.

‘Well, no, of course you didn’t, Nevare. I know you wouldn’t do such a thing. But when he came after you …?’

‘I rode a day and a half, and then found water for myself. I knew then that I’d survive. I thought I’d just come home from there. But he came after me, and that night I fought him, and then we talked, and after that, he taught me things, about how the Kidona survive and how they do things.’ I took a deeper breath and suddenly felt very, very tired, as if I’d fenced for hours instead of just conversing for a few minutes. I told him that.

‘I know, Nevare, and soon I’ll let you rest. Just tell me why Dewara did this to you. Until I know, from you, I don’t know how to respond to what he has done.’ A frown furrowed his brow. ‘You do understand that what he has done to you is a great insult to me? I can’t ignore it. I’ve sent men to find him; he will answer to me. But before I pass judgment on him, I must know the full tale of what drove him to this affront. I’m a just man, Nevare. If something passed between you that drove him to this fury … if, even unintentionally, you offered him great insult, then you should tell me that, to be an honourable man.’ He shifted in his chair and then scraped it across the carpet to come a bit closer to my bedside. He lowered his voice, as if speaking a great confidence to me. ‘I fear I learned a greater lesson than you did from Dewara, and one that is just as hard. I trusted him, son. I knew he would be harsh with you; I knew he would not compromise the Kidona ways for you. He was my enemy, never my friend, and yet he was a trusted enemy to me, if those words can ever be spoken together in such a way. I trusted his honour as a warrior. He gave me his word that he would teach you just as he would teach a young Kidona warrior. Then … to do this to you … I erred in my judgment, Nevare. And you paid the price.’

I considered my words carefully. I’d already thought through my experience. If I ever told my father how close I’d come to ‘going native’, he’d never respect me again. I found as much of the truth as I thought he could accept. ‘Dewara kept his word, Father.’

‘He went past his word. To notch your ear … I had the doctor put a stitch in each, son. There will be scars, but less than Dewara intended. That I could have accepted, since you admitted you disobeyed him. In truth, I expected you to come home with a scar of some kind. A scar is no shame to a soldier. But to expose you deliberately to the sun when you were helpless, to leave you parched and burning … he said nothing of that, nor have I ever heard of it as a punishment applied to Kidona warriors in training. I think he struck you in the head. Do you have any recollection of that?’

When I shook my head, mutely, he nodded to himself. ‘Perhaps you would not recall it. Head injuries can erase part of a man’s memory. I judge that you must have been unconscious for some time, to burn as you did.’

My thoughts swirled around his earlier admission. I said it aloud, to make him hear it from me. ‘You knew I’d disobey him. You knew I’d come home at least with a notched ear if he caught me.’

He paused for some time. I don’t think he’d expected to have to admit that to me. ‘I knew that might be a consequence of your training.’ He drew back a bit and looked at me, his head tilted. ‘Do you think what you learned from him was a fair exchange for that?’

I thought for a bit. What had I learned from him? I still wasn’t sure. Some physical skills in riding and survival. But what had he done to my mind? Had he taught me something, shown me anything? Or only drugged and deluded and abused me? I didn’t know but I was certain that my father would be of no help to me in answering those questions. Best not to even raise them. Best to make it possible for him to let it all go. ‘Probably what I learned is worth a few scars. And as you’ve told me before, a soldier must expect scars from his career.’ I hoped he would ask no questions when I added, ‘Father. Please. Just let him go. I wish this to be the end of it. I disobeyed him. He notched my ear as he said he would. Let it end there.’

He stared at me, torn between bewilderment and relief. ‘You know I should not do that, son. This leaving you next to dead on our doorstep … If we allow a Kidona to do this to the soldier son of a noble family and take no action … well, then we invite other plainspeople to do the same, to other families. Dewara won’t understand tolerance or forgiveness. He will respect me only if I command that respect.’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose as he added wearily, ‘I should have considered that more deeply before I put you in his power. I fear I see what I’ve done too late. I may have created unrest amongst the Kidona. Having done that, I cannot deny it or step away from it and leave it to others to handle. No, son. I must know the whole tale, and then I must take action on it.’

During his speech, I had begun to scratch gently at the sodden blisters, long burst, on my left forearm. The grease and butter treatment had left me sloughing soggy bits of skin like a river fish at the end of his migration. The temptation to peel it free was as great as it was juvenile. I was nudging gently at an itchy patch, not quite scratching it, and thus avoiding meeting his eyes.

‘Nevare?’ he prompted me after I had let a moment pass.

I made the decision. I lied to my father. I was surprised at how easily the words fell from my lips.

‘He took me up to the plateaus. He was attempting to teach me a manoeuvre for crossing a chasm. It seemed unwise to me, unnecessarily dangerous and I refused to perform it. I was, perhaps, too outspoken. I told him it was stupid, and only a fool would do it. He tried to force me; I struck back at him. I think I hit him in the face.’ My father would know that was mortal insult to a Kidona. Dewara’s reaction would now seem plausible. I paused, and then decided that was story enough. ‘That’s the last thing I remember until I woke up here.’

My father sat very still. His silence radiated disappointment in me. I did not wish I had told him the truth, but I did wish I had found a better lie. I waited for him to think it through. The blame for what had happened to me had to fall on either Dewara or myself. I took it upon my shoulders, not because I felt I deserved it, but because even at that young age, I could see far-reaching repercussions if I did not. If Dewara had injured me without serious provocation, my father must be relentless in his pursuit and punishment of the warrior. If I had brought it on myself, then it would be possible for my father to be less vengeful in his hunt. I knew, too, the far-reaching implications of taking the blame on myself; that others must then wonder why my father did not pursue Dewara implacably. There would be a taint of doubt about me; what had I done to the Kidona to deserve such an insult and injury? If my father could tell his associates that I had brought it on myself by striking the Kidona in the face, then it became understandable. My father would be a bit ashamed of me that I had not ultimately triumphed in a physical battle with the warrior. But he could take a bit of fatherly pride in that I’d struck Dewara. Belatedly, I wished I could revise my lie for I had said I’d refused to cross a chasm, and that did make me sound a bit of a coward. But it couldn’t be changed now, so I pushed those thoughts aside. I was in pain and weary and often, during my convalescence, felt that my thoughts were not quite my own.

I did not, for even an instant, consider trying to explain my truth to my father. That was how I had come to think of it in the days of fitful wakefulness since it had occurred. My truth was that, in a dream, I had failed to follow Dewara’s command to kill the tree woman. I had disobeyed him, thinking I knew better. I hadn’t. He had warned me that she was a formidable enemy. I’d not struck when I had the opportunity to kill her. I would never know what would have happened if I had rushed forward the moment I first saw her and slain her. Now I would live with the consequences. I’d died in that dream place, and as a result, I’d nearly died in this world, too. I wondered if there were any way I could even discuss that ‘dream’ with my father. I doubted it. Ever since I had learned my father’s secret opinion of me, ever since I’d heard him express to my mother his reservations about my fitness to command, I’d felt an odd distance from him. He’d sent me out to be tested by a hostile stranger, with never a word of warning. Had he ever even considered that I might not come back from such a test? Or had that been an acceptable risk? Had he coldly judged that it would be better to lose me now as a son rather than risk disgrace from me when I was a soldier? I looked at him, and felt sick with anger and despair.

I quietly spoke the first words that came to me. ‘I don’t think I have anything else to tell you right now.’

He nodded sympathetically, deaf to the emotion of my words. ‘I’m sure you’re still very weary, son. Perhaps we’ll talk about this again another time.’

The tone of his words sounded as if he cared. Doubt swirled through me once again. Had I met at least part of his challenge? Did he think I had it in me to command men? Worse, I suddenly doubted my own future. Perhaps my father saw me more clearly than I could see myself. Perhaps I did lack the spark to be a good officer. I heard the door of my room close softly as if I were being shut off from the future I’d always assumed I would have.

I leaned back on my pillows. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. But even though I could force my body to relax, the thoughts in my mind only chased one another more swiftly. I felt they had worn a rut in my brain with their endless circling. During the days I lay in bed, strangely weak beyond my injuries, I had handled the memories over and over, trying to make sense of them.

But I couldn’t. Logic failed. If it had all been a dream, then I could blame none of it on the Kidona. Obviously, Dewara had drugged me, first with the smoke from the campfire, and then, if truly he had, when he put the dried frog in my mouth. But everything after that had been illusion, of course. It had all been my imagining; none of it had really happened. But why, then, had Dewara been so angry with me? For I was certain of that. He had been so angry that he would have killed me, if he had dared. Only his fear of my father had made him spare my life. But why would he have meted out punishment for an imaginary transgression that he couldn’t have known about? Unless it was possible that he truly had followed me into my dream; unless, in some peculiar way, we had entered some plainsfolk world and sojourned there.

That circle of illogic gave way to another conclusion. The dream I’d dreamed hadn’t been mine. I was convinced of that in a way I could not dispute with myself. It had been fantastic in a way that was foreign to my thinking. I would not have dreamed of such a peculiar bridge, or such a chasm. I would certainly not have dreamed of a fat old woman as the nemesis I must fight! A two-headed giant or an armoured knight of olden times should have guarded a river ford or bridge, if it had been my dream. Those were the challengers of my legends. And my own reaction had been wrong. I felt puzzled, as if I’d read a tale from a distant land and not understood the hero or the ending. I could not even decide why the dream seemed so important to me. I wanted it to fade as my other dreams did when I woke, but this one lingered with me for days.

As the dreary days of my convalescence passed, the dream merged with recollections of my days with Dewara until all of it seemed unreal. It was hard for me to put the events of those days in consecutive order. I could show Sergeant Duril the skills the Kidona had taught me, but I could not recall the precise sequence of learning them. They had become a part of me, something written into my nerves and bones along with breathing or coughing … I did not want to carry the Kidona into my life with me, yet I did. Something of him had seeped into my very blood, the way he accused my father’s iron shot of staying in his soul. Sometimes I would stand before my rock collection, staring at the coarse stone the doctor had dug out of my flesh, and try to decide how much of the experience had been real. The rock and my scars were the only physical evidence that I had that any of it had been real. Occasionally, I would touch the round bald spot on the crown of my head. I decided that I had been unconscious when Dewara struck me there, and my brain had incorporated the pain into my dream.

Only once did I try to speak of my dream journey to anyone. It was about six weeks after I had been returned to my father’s house. I was up and about again and well on my way to full recovery. A few places, such as my forearms and the tops of my cheeks were dappled pink for many months after the rest of my body had healed, but I had progressed to once more rising and breakfasting daily with my family. Yaril, my younger sister, seemed to have a very vivid dream life, and often bored or annoyed the rest of the family by insisting on giving long accounts of her illogical imaginings at the breakfast table. That morning, midway through one such rambling tale of being rescued from the jaws of ravenous sheep by a horde of birds, my father banished her, breakfastless, to the drawing room. ‘A woman who has nothing sensible to say should not bother speaking at all!’ he told her sternly as he sent her from the room.

After the rest of us were excused from the table, I sought her in the parlour, knowing that she was far more sensitive than her siblings, and wept over rebukes that Elisi or I would simply have shrugged off. My estimate of her temperament was correct. She was sitting on a settee, ostensibly working on some embroidery. Her head was bent and her eyes were red. She would not look up at me as I came in. I sat down next to her, held out the muffin I had filched from the table and said quietly, ‘Actually, I was quite looking forward to hearing what came next in your dream. Won’t you tell me?’

She took the muffin from me, thanking me with a look. She broke off a piece and ate it, and then said huskily. ‘No. It’s foolish, as father says. A waste of time for me to prattle about my dreams or for you to listen to them.’

I could not disagree with my father, not to my little sister. ‘Foolish, yes, but so are many things that amuse us. I think he feels the breakfast table is not the best place for stories of that sort. But I’d be happy to listen to them, when we have time together, like this.’

My younger sister had enormous grey eyes. They always reminded me of a soot-cat’s eyes. Her gaze was very solemn. ‘You are so kind to me, Nevare. I can tell when you are just being kind, however. I do not think you have the slightest interest in what I dream at night, or in what I do or think by day. You are only trying to be sure my feelings were not hurt when father dismissed me.’

She was absolutely correct about her dreams, but I tried to soften my practicality. ‘Actually, dreams do interest me, mostly because I have so few myself. You, on the other hand, seem to dream nearly every night.’

‘I’ve heard that we all dream, every night, but only some people can remember their dreams.’

I smiled at that. ‘And if everyone forgot all their dreams, how could anyone prove such a thing? No. When my head touches my pillow and I close my eyes, all is quiet in my mind until morning. Unlike you. You seem to fill your sleeping hours with all sorts of adventures and fancies.’

She glanced away from me. ‘Perhaps I adventure in my dreams because there is so little else in my life to distract me.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you’ve got such a hard life, little girl.’

‘No. I’ve hardly any sort of a life at all,’ she returned, almost bitterly. When I just looked at her, puzzled, she shook her head at me. A moment later she asked me, ‘Then you’ve never had a peculiar dream, Nevare? One that made you wake, heart racing, wondering which was more real, the dream world or this one?’

‘No,’ I said, and then added, ‘well, perhaps once.’

She focused those kitten eyes on me. ‘Really? What did you dream, Nevare?’ She leaned toward me, as if such things were truly important.

‘Well.’ As I pondered where to begin the telling of the dream, I felt a strange sensation. The scar on the top of my head burned, and from there, the hot pain shot down through me, once more running along my spine. I shut my eyes and I turned hastily away from Yaril. I felt faint. The reality of the pain brought my dream back in shattering detail. The smell of the tree woman was in my nostrils and my hands clutched the slicing blade again. I took a shuddering breath and tried to speak. At first, no sounds came out until I said, ‘It was a disturbing dream, Yaril. I do not think I will speak of it.’ The pain ceased as suddenly as it had begun. It still took me a moment to catch my breath and force my hands to open. I turned back toward Yaril; she was regarding me with alarm.

‘Whatever could you have dreamed, that would frighten a man so?’ she asked me.

Her childish naïveté that saw me, only a few years her senior, as a grown man, silenced me more effectively than the burst of pain had. For I deemed my sudden pain to be a sort of hallucination, a terrible re-experiencing of the dream that had been my downfall. Despite how badly that brief experience had rattled me, my sister had referred to me as a man, and I would not do or say anything to lessen her opinion of me at that moment. So I merely shook my head and added, ‘It would not be a fit topic to discuss in front of a lady anyway.’

Her eyes widened in surprise that her brother Nevare might have dreams not fit to discuss with a lady, but I also saw her pleasure that I had referred to her as a ‘lady’ rather than as a ‘child’. She sat back in her seat and said, ‘Well, if it is so, Nevare, then I will not ask you any more about it.’

Such innocents we both were then.

Days piled on days to become months, like dead leaves heaping atop one another to become loam. I set my dream experience aside and forgot it as much as I could. My burns healed, the stitched ear healed more slowly, and the notches became scars I lived with. I kept a small bald spot on the crown of my head, scar tissue where once healthy scalp had been. I moved on with my life and my lessons and training. I carried inside me, small and sharp, the knowledge that my father, despite his encouraging words to me, doubted me. His doubt became my own, a competitor that I could never quite conquer.

I made only one other concession to that experience. Late in the autumn, I told my father that I wished to go hunting alone, to test my prowess. He told me it was foolish, but I persevered in my stubborn request, and eventually he granted me six days to myself. I told him I would be hunting along the high banks of the river, and I did begin my journey in that direction. I first visited the spot where Dewara and his women had been camped when I first met him. The ashes and stones of a cookfire and the disturbances where he had pegged his tent were almost the only marks of his passage. The sheath of my old cavalry sword lay on the ground, the leather slowly rotting in the weather. Of the sword itself, there was no sign. Perhaps a passing traveller had discovered it. But it seemed unlikely that someone would come across a sword and its sheath, and carry off only the bare blade. I didn’t think so. I tossed the sheath back onto the ground and walked away from it. A man could not summon a weapon to come to him. Not in my world. I felt a touch of pain in the scar on my head. I rubbed at it, and then turned away from the campsite. I didn’t want to think about it just now.

I turned Sirlofty’s head inland. The prairie had changed with the season, but I allowed for that, and roughly calculated how long it would take Sirlofty’s gentle, long-legged lope to travel the distance the taldi mare had covered in that mad gallop. For the first two days, I rode steadily, pushing Sirlofty in the morning and taking it more gently in the afternoon. The autumn rains had made watering spots more plentiful than they had been when last I crossed this terrain. Tiny rivulets had resumed their task of shaping the plateaus and the gorges. I had expected this lonely journey to bring my memories back and let me put them to rest, but it only made the events of the spring stranger and more incomprehensible.

I found, eventually, the same spot where Dewara had built the final fire we had shared. I was certain of it. I came to it in early afternoon. I stood on the edge of the cliffs and looked out over the vista. The scorched rocks from that last fire were still there, tufts of grass sprouting up around them. I found the burned ends of the Kidona fire-bow I had made under Dewara’s tutelage and the leather cup of the sling he had given me to use. It looked to me as if everything he had given to me or had me make had been deliberately consigned to the flames. I thought about that for a time, and also about how he had shot the mare that I had ridden. Did it mean that I had somehow tainted Keeksha, made her unfit for use by a Kidona warrior? Dewara had left me no answers, and I knew that the ones I made up for myself would always remain theories.

Then, risking life and limb, I climbed down and along the face of the cliffs, looking for the entrance to the cave. I had thought it through and decided that there must be a cave down there, and a ledge, a place we had jumped down to and entered, and that there the frog had made me hallucinate. I was certain of that explanation.

I found nothing. I did not find a ledge that I could comfortably stand on, let alone the place I had jumped down to and the cave I had entered. They didn’t exist. I climbed back up and sat on the edge of the bluff, looking off to the distant river. All of it had been a dream, then, or a hallucination brought on by the fumes of whatever Dewara had burned on the fire. All of it, every bit of it. I made a fire on the site of our old one, with good flint and steel, and spent the night at the site, but did not sleep. Rolled in my blanket, I stared up at the night sky and wondered about the things that savages believed and if the good god had somehow given them a different truth than he had given us. Or did the good god reign over them at all? Did their old fading gods linger, and had I visited one of the worlds of those pagan deities? That thought sent a shiver up my spine in the dark. Were those dark and cruel worlds true places that existed, but a dream step away?

The good god can do all and anything, the Writ says. He can make a square circle and create justice from men’s tyranny and grow hope from withered seed in the desert. If he could do all those things for his people, did the old gods possess a similar power for theirs? Had I glimpsed a reality that was not meant for my kind?

A boy on the edge of manhood ponders such questions and so I did that night. My meditations were not conducive to sleep. The next morning, sleepless but unwearied, I rose with the sun. As the first light touched my campsite, the good god seemed to answer a prayer, for the light played briefly on a rough outcropping of stone. For a moment, the dawn sparkled on trapped flecks of mica, and then the angle changed, and it became only a dusty outcropping. I walked to it, crouched by it, and touched it, feeling its hard reality. This, I was sure, was the mother of the small stone I’d carried in my flesh. That cruel souvenir, at least, had definitely come from this world. I mounted Sirlofty and rode toward home.

The very next night, as if to reward me for my deception of my father, a rustling in the brush at the wet end of a gully where I had decided to camp proved to be a small plainsbuck. I brought him down with a single shot. I cut his throat to bleed him out, slit his hind legs between the tendon and the bone, and hoisted him up into a stunted tree. I gutted him as he hung there and propped the chest cavity open with a stick to let the meat cool. He wasn’t large and his rack was no more than a set of spikes, but he was sufficient excuse for my expedition.

I don’t think I was exceptionally surprised when Sergeant Duril rode into camp while I was cooking the liver. ‘Nothing better than fresh liver,’ he observed as he dismounted. I didn’t ask if he had been following me for long, or why he was there. Our hobbled horses grazed together and we shared the meat as the stars came out. Autumn was advanced enough that we welcomed the fire’s warmth.

We had been in our blankets for some time, silent and pretending to sleep when he asked me, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

I nearly said, ‘I can’t.’ That would have been the honest answer. And it would have led to all sorts of other questions and probing and worries. I would have had to lie to him. Duril wasn’t a man to lie to. So I simply said, ‘No, Sergeant. I don’t think I do.’

And that was what I learned from Dewara.

SIX
Sword and Pen

I have spoken to men who have suffered sudden severe injuries, or endured torture or extreme loss. They speak of those events distantly, as if they have set them out of their lives. So I attempted to do with my experience with Dewara. Having proved to myself that none of my encounter with the tree woman had even the most tenuous tie to reality, I moved on with my life. I resolutely left that nightmare vision behind, along with childish fears of hobgoblins under my bed or making wishes on falling stars.

It was more than the tree woman I attempted to vanquish from my thoughts. I also banished my father’s secret doubt of me from my ruminations. Dewara had been a test, to see if I could, when circumstance demanded it, question my father’s wisdom and resist the old plains warrior and become my own leader. I had only briefly defied Dewara before becoming submissive again to his guidance. I had never defied my father. But I had lied to him. I had lied to try to make him think I’d found the backbone to stand up to the Kidona. If I had thought that lie would buy me new respect from my father, it hadn’t. His attitude toward me had not changed at all that I could detect.

For a short time, I strove desperately to win his regard. I re-doubled my effort, not just at the fencing and cavalla techniques that I loved, but also on the academic studies that were my demons. My scores soared, and when he discussed the monthly reports of my progress, he praised me for my efforts. But the words were the same ones I had always heard from him. Having never suspected he doubted me, when obviously he had, I now found I could no longer believe in his praise. And when he rebuked me, I felt it doubly-hard, and in private my own disgust with myself magnified his disappointment in me.

Some part of me realized that I could never do anything that would guarantee my father’s approval. So I made a conscious decision to set those experiences aside. Spirit journeys to tree women and lying to my father did not fit with the day-to-day understanding of my existence, and so I discarded them. I think it is how most men get from one day to the next; they set aside all experiences that do not mesh with their perception of themselves.

How different would our perception of reality be if, instead, we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

Yet that was a thought that only came to me many years later. What remained of my sixteenth year demanded the full focus of my mind. My recovery from my injuries was followed by a growth spurt that astonished even my father. I ate like a starved beast at every meal. It all went to height and muscle. In my seventeenth year, I went through three pairs of boots and four jackets in eight months. My mother declared proudly to her friends that if I did not soon reach my man’s height and stop growing, she would have to hire a seamstress just to keep me decently clad.

Like almost all youths at that age, I and my own concerns seemed of the utmost importance to me. I scarcely noticed my younger brother being packed off for his first indoctrination into the priesthood, or my sister Yaril graduating to long skirts and pinned-up hair. I was too intent on whether or not I could ever make first touch on my fencing master, or improve my target scores with a long gun. I consider those years to be the most selfish of my life, and yet I think such selfishness and self-focus is necessary for a young man as deluged with lessons and information as I was.

Even the events of the greater world seldom touched me, so involved was I in my own learning and growing. The news that reached my ears was filtered through my vision of my future. I was aware that the King and the so-called Old Nobles wrestled for power and tax money. My father sometimes discussed politics with my elder brother Rosse after dinner, and even though I knew that politics were not the proper concern of a soldier, I listened. My father had a right to be heard in the Council of Lords, and he regularly dispatched messages that contained his views. He always sided with King Troven. The Old Nobles needed to lift their heads and see the King’s new vision of a realm that extended east across the plains rather than west to the sea. The Old Nobles would have cheerfully renewed our ancient strife with Landsing, all in the name of trying to win back the coastal provinces that we had lost to them. My father’s attitude was that the King’s way was wiser; all his New Nobles backed him in his eastward expansion. I gave little attention to the details of the strife. It might have to do with us, but all the debating and posturing occurred in the capital, Old Thares to the west. It was easy and fitting that, as a solider son, I nod my head and adopt my father’s opinion as my own.

I was more enthusiastic about news from the eastern borders. Tales of the Speck plague dominated. The awareness of plague had slowly permeated all our lives during the years I grew toward manhood. Yet, dreadful as the tales of decimation were, they remained stories of a distant disaster. Sometimes it reached in amongst us, as when old Percy came to my father, to ask for time to travel east to visit his sons’ graves. A soldier himself, both his boys had gone for troopers, and died of plague before they could sire sons to carry on Percy’s line and his calling. His daughter’s sons would be shoemakers like their father. He confided this to my father as if it grieved him. His personal loss made the ravages of the plague a bit more real to me. I had known Kifer and Rawly. They had been but four and five years older than I, and now they rested in distant graves near the border. But for the most part, the plague stayed where it belonged, confined to the military outposts and settlements in the foothills of the Barrier Mountains. It was but one of the many dangers of the border: snakes and poisonous insects, the erratic and irrational attacks by the Specks, the great cats and savagely aggressive humpdeer. Wariness of the disease surged in the hot summers when it flared up, consuming men like kindling. It ebbed only when the gentler days of winter arrived.

My eighteenth summer was filled with marching troops. Weekly we saw them moving past our holdings along the river road. These were solid ranks of replacements for men fallen to disease during the summer rather than the steady trickle of new soldiers off to their first assignments on the border. Westward bound funeral processions, black-draped wagons full of coffins drawn by sweating black horses, clopped and creaked past our homes on their mournful journey back to the civilized west, bearing the bodies of men from families sufficiently wealthy or noble to require that they be returned home for burial. Those we watched from a distance. My father made little noise about them, but my mother feared contagion and strictly forbade any of us to loiter along the river road when such sad processions were moving along it.

Each summer when the plague returned, wave after wave of it consumed our soldiers. My father estimated the mortality rate at between twenty-three and forty-six percent amongst able-bodied soldiers, given the information he had access to. Among the elderly, the women and the very young, the scythe of death swung even more efficiently, leaving few standing in its wake. It wasted a healthy man to skin and bone in a matter of days. Of those who survived, some recovered to lead nearly normal lives, though most were unfit for the heavy duty of a horse soldier. Some suffered an impaired sense of balance, a terrible loss for a cavalry man. The survivors that I met were unnaturally thin. The soldier sons of my father’s friends, they stopped in to visit and dine with us on their long journeys back to Old Thares. They ate and drank as any men did, and some even pushed themselves to consume more than a normal amount of victuals. Yet they could not seem to regain the strength and vitality they had once possessed. Broken bones and torn muscles seemed to befall them easily. It was a terrible thing to see young officers, once hale and hearty, now thin and listless and retiring from the military just when they should have been rising to command. They seemed weary beyond the stress of a long day in the saddle. They spoke of frontier towns full of widows and children, their common-soldier husbands fallen not to war but to plague.

Autumn came, and the wet winds of winter quenched the plague fires. The end of the year brought both my eighteenth birthday and the Dark Evening holiday. The latter was not much observed in our household. My father regarded Dark Evening as a pagan holiday, a superstitious holdover from the days of the old gods. Some still called it Dark Woman’s Night. The ways of the old gods said that a married woman could be unfaithful to her husband on that one night of the year and not be held accountable for it, for on the night of the Dark Woman, a woman must obey no will save her own. My mother and sisters did not hold with any such nonsense, of course, but I knew that they envied some of the other households in our area who still celebrated Dark Evening with masked balls and opulent feasts and gifts of pearl or opal jewellery wrapped in starry paper. In our home, the longest, darkest night of winter passed with little fanfare. My mother and sisters would set tiny boats afloat on our pond with candles on them, and my father always gave each of his women a small envelope containing a gift of money, but that was the extent of it.

I had always suspected that my birthday was so well celebrated simply because my father had forbidden a lavish Dark Evening in our household, and so my birthday became the mid-winter celebration by default. Often my mother gave a special dinner in my honour, and invited guests from neighbouring holdings. But that year, my eighteenth year, my birthday marked my entrance into manhood, and so the party was more solemn and restricted to our immediate family.

It made the occasion more formal and portentous. My father had brought Vanze home from his studies in the western monastery to preside. His voice had not even changed yet, but still he was so proud to hold the family book and wear his priest’s vest while he read aloud my verses from the Writ:

‘The second born son of every noble man shall be his father’s soldier son, born to serve. Into his hand he will take the sword, and with it he shall defend the people of his father. He shall be held accountable for his actions, for it is by his sword and his pen that his family may have glory or dwell in shame. In his youth let him serve the rightful king, and in his old age, let him return home, to defend the home of his father.’

As my brother spoke those words, I held up my father’s gifts to me for my family to see. In one hand I gripped my new cavalla sword, sheathed in gleaming black leather. In the other, I held aloft a leather-bound journal, with our family crest stamped on the front. One was my weapon, the other my accounting for my deeds. This second gift marked a significant moment for my entire family. It was not just that I had reached an age when I was expected to behave as a man; it also marked the passing of a family torch to me. My father was a New Noble, and the first to bear the title of Lord Burvelle of the East. That made me the first soldier son of this new line of nobility. For the first time in my life, the place of honour at the head of the table was mine. The book I held had come all the way from Old Thares, and my father’s crest had been imprinted on the cover by the King’s official press.

In that moment of silence, I looked down the long table at my family and considered my place in it. To my right was my father, and sitting just beyond him, my mother. To my left was my elder brother, Rosse, the heir who would inherit my father’s house and lands. Just beyond him stood my younger brother, Vanze, home to read the Holy Writ in my honour. Next to Vanze on one side of the table and next to my mother on the other side were my two sisters, elegant Elisi and kittenish Yaril. They would marry well, carrying off family wealth in the form of dowries but enriching the family with the social alliances they would bring. My father had done well for himself in the begetting of his children. He had fathered all the family that any man might hope for, and an extra daughter besides.

And I, Nevare, was the second son, the soldier son of the family. Today it became real to me. Always it had been so down the years of my bloodlines: the eldest son to inherit, the third son a gift to the good god, and the second son a soldier, to bring honour and fame to our family name. And to every nobly born soldier son on his eighteenth birthday was given such a journal as I now held in my hands, bound in good calfskin, the pages stitched firmly in place, the creamy sheets heavy and durable. My own words would hold me ‘accountable’ as the Writ said. This book and the serviceable pen kit that buckled inside it would travel everywhere I did, as surely as my sword did. The journal was made to open and lie flat, so that I could write easily in it whether at a desk or camped by a fireside. The pen kit held not only two sturdy pens and an ink supply and tips but also pencils with various weights and colours of leads for sketching terrain and flora and fauna. When this volume was filled, it would return to Widevale, to be placed on a shelf in the library as part of my family’s permanent record, alongside the journals that told of our crops and cattle and recorded births, marriages and deaths. The journal I held in my hands now would become the first volume in the first record of first soldier son to wear my father’s crest. When this book was filled and sent home, I would immediately begin my new entries in the next volume. I would be expected to record every significant event in my duty to king, country, and family.