He licked his lips, gave a sudden wild shout.
“Your men are dead.” Yaril patted his hand. “Only their ghosts to answer you. Call again if you want. Call all you want. Only the captives can hear you and they’re staked to the ground. Why have you destroyed Arth Slya?” She tightened her grip on his fist again, watched him struggling to hold back groans and fight off the feeling of helplessness the worm’s weight and her unlikely strength were waking in him. She eased the pressure a little. “Speak true and you will die quickly and easily. Lie or refuse to speak, then my brother’s venom will consume you bit by bit and the Souldrinker will see you stay awake for all of it.”
His dark eyes darted about, he was fighting a last battle with himself, desiring defiance but too intelligent to waste his strength hiding things that had to be common knowledge in the villages below. With a visible effort he relaxed. “All dead?”
“All. Slya watches over her children.”
“Easy they said. Round up the young and strong, no kids or dodderers…” The breath hissed through his stiff lips. “Nothing about no arsehole god getting her eggs in a twist. Your Kumaliyn’s skipped. Abanaskranjinga Emperor of the Tern uengs rules here now.”
“So. Why come like wolves? There were no soldiers in Arth Slya.”
“Why ask me? I do what I’m ordered. Good boy, pat ‘im on his fuckin head.”
“Why come like wolves?”
He sneered. “Old Krajink’s not about to let a little bunch of mud dawbers nest free, thinkin they can make it without him. Maybe other folk they get the idea they got rights. Mudfeet, mudheads stompin up trouble, just get chopped, but Krajink he’s got to pay us to do the choppin and he parts with silver bits like grasslion from his meat. Cheaper to stomp first. Don’t mess up trade or plantin and harvestin. Cheap way to get valuable slaves. Trust of Krajink to see that. He figures your Arth Slya artisans might as well be making their junk for him where he can keep an eye on them. Figures maybe he can make Durat a rep as big as your dawbers got.”
Brann took a step toward him. “Slaves,” she spat. “Half my folk dead so that… that… he can prance around claiming their work!”
He raised his thin arched brows, the sound of his voice insensibly seducing him into speaking further, turning this interrogation into something like a conversation. “So what’s new about that, bint? In old lardarse’s head we’re all his slaves. We hop when he pulls our strings. Don’t hop, get the chop. Why not? Do the same, us, to folk beneath us.”
Brann stared at him, not comprehending much of what he was saying. It was a world totally other than the one she’d grown up in. All she got from the speech was the ultimate responsibility of the Temueng emperor for the destruction of Arth Slya. “The Fair,” she said. “What happened to the Arth Slya folk at the Fair?”
“On their way, hint. On ship to Andurya Durat.”
Brann put her hands behind her back, clenched them into her fists, struggled to keep her voice steady. “Were any of them killed?”
“And get chopped for wasting prime meat? Uh-uh.” Brann closed her eyes. Her father and her brothers were alive. Captives, but alive.
“Bramble!” Yaril’s voice.
Jolted out of her daze, Brann came round the Temueng’s feet and stopped beside her. “What?”
“That all you wanted to know?”
– Yes… urn… yes.”
“Well?” Yaril gestured impatiently.
Brann rubbed her hands down the sides of her bloodied shirt, blood from her wounded arm, long dried. It was different somehow, looking into his eyes, listening to him talk, seeing his fear, seeing him as a person, knowing him. With all the harm he’d done her, she shrank from taking him; the revulsion she felt was almost more than she could overcome. She reached heavily toward him, saw the leap of fear in his eyes, saw it dulling to resignation. Her hand fell. “I can’t,” she wailed. “I…” An immense hot fury took hold of her, drowned her will, worked her arms, set her hands on his brow and mouth and drew his life in a rushing roar out of him.
Then he was dead and that thing went wheeling away. It wasn’t the children; as wobbly as her thinking was, she was able to understand that. Cautiously Yaril came closer, reached out. A spark snapped between them, then the strong small hands were closed on her arm, and Yaril was pressing against her, warm and alive, murmuring comfort to her. Another spark snapping, and Jaril was smoothing his hands along her shoulders, gently massaging her neck and shoulder muscles. They worked the shock out of her, gave her the support she needed until she was able to stand.
Yaril stood beside her, holding her hand. “What was THAT?”
Brann moved her shoulders, flexed her fingers, the children’s hands comfortably human around them, even a little sweaty. “Don’t know. I think… I think it was Slya filling me.”
“Oh.” There was complete silence from both children for a few breaths, then calm and deliberately prosaic words from Yaril. “We better go turn your folks loose.”
As they walked through the trees, Jaril looked up at her. “What do we do after this, Bramble? Go back to the Valley with your folk?”
Brann stopped. “I thought… before I knew about Da… do you think we could get him loose too?” Jaril grinned. “Why not.”
Brann stopped in the shadows of some stunted alder bushes, an unseen hand restraining her, a wall of air keeping her back from her mother and the rest of Slya’s folk out in the clearing. No words, no warning, nothing tangible, but she was being told Arth Slya was no longer for her. She dropped to her knees, then swung her legs around so she was sitting with her hands clasped in her lap, looking into the camp clearing through a thin fan of finger-sized shoots and a lacy scatter of leaves. The children exchanged puzzled glances, squatted beside her without speaking.
UNCLE MIGEL was on his knees beside a stake, looking about. He scrubbed his hand across his mouth, fumbled on the ground by his knees, came up with a dirt clod, snapped it at a soldier lying rolled in his blanket. He grunted as the clod hit, splattering over the man and the ground around him. “Not sleeping,” he said. He put two fingers in his mouth, produced an ear-piercing whistle, waited. “Unh, looks to me like they’re all dead.”
“How?” Her mother’s voice.
“All?” Aunt Seansi kneeling beside her mother. “I’d say so, Mig, that whistle of yours is most likely waking folks in G rann sha. “
Wrapping thick-fingered hands about the stake, Migel rocked it back and forth, and with an exploding grunt, pulled it from the ground. He got to his feet, his ropemates coming up eagerly with him, all eight of them moving out and around the shakes to the line of bodies. Migel kicked a soldier out of his blanket, got his belt knife and cut himself loose. He sliced the loop of rope from his neck, then tossed the knife with casual skill so it stuck in the ground in front of Brann’s mother, who grabbed it with a heartfelt “Slya!” and began slicing her rope loose from the stake. When she was free, she passed the knife to Seansi and marched over to the pile of wood the soldiers had cut the night before, hauled sticks from it to an open space where she used the sparker she found on a soldier to get a fire started.
Brann watched the swirl of activity and noise in the clearing, warm with pride in the resilience of her people. Harrowed by the shock and violence of the invasion, bereft of hope, marched off to a fate not one of them could imagine, waking to find silent death come among them with no idea of how or when it struck, whether it would come on them later, not a one of them sat about glooming or complaining but each as soon as he or she was freed from the rope saw something to be done and did it. Time for fear and mourning later. Now was time for food in the belly and scalding hot tea to get the blood moving. Now was the time to get the mules and ponies out of their rope corral, now was the time for caching the loot from the Valley where they could find it later. In a hectic half hour the camp clearing was picked clean except for the bodies of the soldiers (the body of the pimush was added to the pile when they found it; they passed close by Brann and the children, but whatever kept her from entering the clearing kept them from-seeing her). Then they were mounting the mules and ponies and riding away, those that had no mounts trotting beside the others. After a short but heated argument, they left the pimush’s horse and gear behind. Her mother wouldn’t have the beast along, uncle Migel wanted to take it. Inar and Seansi and a dozen others talked him out of that, the beast was a high-bred racer too obviously not Valley-bred. Migel kept sputtering that anyone getting close enough to the Valley to spot the horse would be too damn close anyway. But the others countered that it only took one snooping outsider to get an eyeful of racer and report his presence to the Temuengs. If he wanted such a beast, then he should buy one the next Fair on. As they left the clearing, the Mountain chose to rumble a few breaths and go quiet, almost as if Slya were laughing-the soldiers dead, the people returning to rebuild their homes, and Brann aimed like an arrow at the Temueng Emperor.