"Tolnoxo..." He dusted his hands, rose from the last corpse, and strolled over to examine her progress. She was just tying strips around the pad on her second knee. His meticulous courtesy somehow made her more, not less, conscious of the fact that she was alone with a strange man. "No wonder. You are now less than thirty miles from the border of Jokona. That column covered nearly a hundred miles, these past two days."
"They were pushing. They were afraid." She glanced around the scene. Iridescent green flies were beginning to gather, an ugly buzzing in the damp shade. "Not afraid enough to stay home in the first place, unfortunately."
His lips twisted in a sour smile. "Perhaps next time their fear will have improved." He scratched his beard. It was not the reddish dark of his hair, but lighter, shot with gray. "Your first battle, Sera?"
"Of this sort, yes." She tied off the last strip and yanked the knot tight.
"Thank you for jostling the fellow with the crossbow. A timely blow, that."
He'd noticed? Five gods. She'd thought him fully occupied. "You are most welcome."
"You keep your wits about you, I see."
"I know." She glanced up at his surprised snort. She said unsteadily, "If you are too kind to me, I shall start to weep, and then we shall be undone."
He looked a little taken aback, but then nodded. "Cruel lady, to forbid me to be kind! So it shall be. We must ride now, to a safer place to lie up. Swiftly and with care, for I think yours were not the only stragglers and survivors. I hope we may meet with some of my own, first."
He frowned around. "I'll send them back to collect these, and their horses."
She glanced at the silent scene. The bodies lay sprawled; none of the weary horses had wandered far. The shrieking visions had faded altogether—she did not say, thank the gods—but the ravine still seemed to reverberate with woe. She couldn't wait to escape it.
He helped her to her feet; she nodded gratefully. With every minute of rest, her body seemed to be seizing up. Much more, and she wouldn't be able to walk or ride.
Or mount. His attempt to give her a leg up failed when she gasped with pain; then he simply took her about the waist and lifted her. She wasn't a tall woman, but neither was she the willow-whip she'd been at eighteen. Unfair—the man had to be as old as she was, but his strength was clearly unimpaired by whatever years had grayed his beard. Of course, patrolling these marches, he would be in constant training. He swung up on his own tall horse with easy grace. Ista thought the beautiful dark-dappled animal must be of the same breed as Liss's leggy bay, lean-muscled and bred to speed and endurance.
He led the way to the riverbed and turned upstream. She could see his own horse's prints in the gravel and sand, coming down, but, reassuringly, no others. After a few minutes' ride, the prints turned to—or rather, from—the thin woods lining the river. The two of them continued on beside the flowing water. Her tired horse's steps were short and stiff; only the presence of the other horse, she thought, kept it moving. Just like me.
She studied her rescuer in this better light. Like his horse and sword, the rest of his gear was of the finest quality, but forbore gaudy jeweled studs or metallic inlay. Not a poor officer, then, but serious about his business. To survive twenty years on this frontier, as his beard and the weathering of his face suggested he must have, a man had to be paying close attention to what he was doing.
That face drew her eyes. Not a boy's face, fresh and full-blooded like Ferda's or Foix's, nor an aging man's face, sagging like dy Ferrej's, but a face in the full strength of its maturity. Perfectly balanced on the apogee of its life. Pale, though, for all his obvious vigor. Perhaps the past winter in Caribastos had been unusually dreary.
A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter.
What of her and love, after all? At eighteen, she had been lifted up by Lord dy Lutez into the bright, easy, poisoned triumph of her high marriage to Roya Ias. It had spiraled down into the long, dark fog of her widowhood and the curse, blighting mind and heart both. The entire center of her life was a blackened waste, its long years not to be recovered nor replaced. She'd had neither the life nor the learning from it that other women her age could be assumed to possess.
For all the relentless idealism surrounding virginity, fidelity, and celibacy—for women—Ista had known plenty of ladies of rank in Ias's court who had taken lovers, openly or in secret. She had only the vaguest idea how they'd gone about it. Such carryings-on hadn't happened in the Dowager Provincara's minor court in Valenda, of course; the old lady had held neither tolerance for the nonsense nor, indeed, kept any such nonsensical young persons about her, with the sole exception of her embarrassing mad daughter Ista. In Ista's two trips to Cardegoss since the destruction of the curse, in the old Provincara's train for Iselle's coronation and to visit little Isara last autumn, she had fairly waded through courtiers, to be sure. But it had seemed to her that she'd read not desire, but merely avarice in their eyes. They'd wanted the royina's favors, not Ista's love. Not that Ista felt love. Ista felt nothing, on the whole, she decided.
The past three days of numb terror excepted, perhaps. Yet even that fear had seemed to lie on the other side of some sheet of glass, in her mind.
Still—she glanced sideways—he was a striking man. For an hour yet, she might still be modest Ista dy Ajelo, who could dream of love with a handsome officer. When the ride was done, the dream would be over.
"You are very silent, lady."
Ista cleared her throat. "My wits were wandering. I am stupid with fatigue, I expect." They had not reached safety yet, but when they did, she imagined she would fall like a tree. "You must have been up all night as well, preparing that most splendid reception."
He smiled at that, but said only, "I have little need of sleep, these days. I'll take some rest at noon."
His eyes, returning her study, disturbed her with their concentration. He looked as though she presented some deep quandary or puzzle to him. She looked away, discomfited, and so was first to spot the object floating down the stream.
"A body." She nodded toward it. "Is this the same river my Jokonan column was riding down, then?"
"Yes, it curves around here ..." He forced his horse out into the rippling water, belly deep, leaned over, and grabbed the corpse by the arm to drag it sloshing up on the sand. It was not clad in Daughter's blue, Ista saw with relief. Just another ill-fated young soldier, who would grow no older now.
The officer grimaced down at it. "Lead scout, it appears. I'm tempted to leave him to ride the river as courier down to Jokona. But there will doubtless be others, more voluble, to carry the news. There always are. He can be collected with the rest." He abandoned the sodden thing and clucked his horse onward. "Their column had to turn this way, to avoid both the stronghold of Oby and the screen of Castle Porifors. Which was originally designed to look south, not north, after all. Better they should have split up and crept past us in twos and threes; they'd have lost some that way, but not all. They were too tempted by the shortest route."
"And the surest, if they knew the river went to Jokona. They seemed to have trouble with their directions. I don't think this line of retreat was in their original plan."