Laughter. Loud laughter. The sound of applause. “Hah!” Neesha cried. “A-HAH! Didn’t inspect the circle, did you? Didn’t make sure nothing would hinder you. Didn’t do anything you should have done to prevent that, did you? Hah!”
I looked for it and found it. A stone, about a fourth the size of my fist. It had been hidden in the grass.
“You’re dead!” my son exulted. “You’re dead! The Sandtiger’s dead!”
I lofted the stone at him, which he promptly caught. “I’m so glad to provide entertainment for you.” I looked at Del, standing in the middle of the circle. Her expression was curiously blank. I’d seen that before. “Oh, go ahead and laugh, bascha. I know what it looked like.”
Del forbore to laugh, but she did grin. “And lo,” she said, “the Sandtiger is brought down by a stone. An inoffensive, innocent stone, just sunning itself in the grass. What a rude awakening for it, to be stepped on by the greatest sword-dancer in the South.”
I pressed myself to my feet, brushing grass from my dhoti. “I suppose this means I have cooking duty.”
Del smiled cheerfully “And clean-up duty.”
Swearing, I grabbed my sword out of the grass and marched myself toward the house. I overheard my son say, “That was beautiful.”
“That,” Del said, “was luck. But yes, luck can be beautiful when it tips in your direction.”
Later, after dinner, as twilight began its downward journey into the canyon, Del joined me outside on the bench beside our door. She handed me a mug.
It wasn’t ale. “You found the aqivi.”
“I did.” She sat close beside me, thigh against thigh, arm against arm. She’d never been fond of aqivi, saying it made me foolish. But now she said, “It has medicinal qualities.”
I grinned and drank.
“So, Umir wants you to open the book.”
I swallowed aqivi. I was accustomed to it again; and no, it did not make me foolish. Well, maybe too much of it, but I didn’t do that anymore. I mean, the last time, in the cantina, I went to bed, which is never foolish. Especially when you don’t take a wine-girl to that bed. That would be foolish, with Del at home. Also unnecessary. Maybe worse than foolish, in fact. Possibly dangerous where my head was concerned.
“Umir wants me to open the book.”
“But you used magic to lock it. To make it so he couldn’t open it, couldn’t use it.”
I sighed deeply. “So I did. At the time I considered it a very clever idea.”
“It was. But…”
“But?”
“You don’t have magic in you anymore, thank all the gods. Can you open it?”
“No.” I’d poured into my sword all the magic ioSkandi—with its stone spires and collection of lunatic mages—had awakened in my bones, and then I broke it. Left it. Far as I knew, Del’s sword and my sword both lay inside a collapsed chimney-like rock formation outside the first canyon where Mehmet and his aketni lived. I was empty of magic. Being so was what I very much preferred; it freed me to live many more years than ten. IoSkandic magic and madness killed a man too soon.
The first stars crept out of the deepening twilight. A glow on the high rim of the canyon promised moonrise. Before us, in the fire ring, embers glowed. The scent of roasted venison drifted into the air as the spit dripped leavings. I had never in my life known such peace as I did in this canyon, at our Beit al’Shahar. Once, I’d have denied any suggestion that I would settle, raise a family, stay put in one place. The long view I’d held promised me only sword-dancing interspersed with occasional caravan guarding, other temporary employment. I’d expected to die in the circle one day. It was what all of us did, eventually. Or got hurt badly enough that we had to stop dancing, a death in itself. Few of us died in bed.
“You’re of no use to Umir if you can’t open the book,” Del said quietly.
Dryly, I observed, “Well, that presupposes he manages to catch me first and learn that. I, of course, am counting on you to help prevent my capture.”
“I’m your bodyguard.”
“So you are.”
Del’s voice hardened. “He needs to be dead.”
I sighed, peering into my mug to see if an insect had drowned itself in the contents. I tipped the mug toward the firelight to capture some light. “You and Neesha. I have somehow surrounded myself with bloodthirsty people.”
“He keeps capturing you.”
“I’m not the only one,” I said, aggrieved. “He captured you, he captured Neesha.”
“Yes. And to prevent any more capturing, he needs to be dead.”
This was aggravating. “As I told Neesha, I am not going to just ride in there and lop off his head. He’s too well-guarded. I’d have to make my way through an army of sword-dancers to get anywhere near him. Head-lopping would be difficult. Hoolies, I might even get my head lopped off.”
Del said with some asperity, “Well, I’m not suggesting you do the head-lopping by yourself. There’s me. There’s Neesha. We could probably even borrow Alric.”
“For head-lopping?” I shook my head. “Lena would never let him go. And he listens to her.”
“More than you listen to me,” she observed. “But then, he’s a Northerner. Northern men are more respectful of women. They listen to their women.”
I ignored the provocation. I’d learned I could never win those debates. “Alric’s got to stay here to help Lena. They’ll have our daughter, remember.”
“Well, yes.” Del thought things over for a moment. “All right. Three of us. We’d have two who claim to be the greatest sword-dancer in the South, and—”
I interrupted. “Two? Who’s the one besides me? Abbu’s dead.”
“Me. I may be a Northerner, but I live in the South. And there’s Neesha. He’s doing well, Tiger. Someday he’ll be the greatest sword-dancer in the South.”
“Well, not yet!”
“I said ‘someday,’ did I not? But in the meantime, one of us should really kill Umir. He’s a thorn in our ointment.”
I laughed. “Such a kind, gentle woman, my bascha.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Tiger. That would be very boring.”
Chapter 6
NOT LONG AFTER DAWN, as morning mist lifted, I carried the littlest of us out of the house. Del and I had let Sula sleep in our bed with us for a bit, the night before. She was still sleepy, with mussed hair and a crease-line running down the right side of her face. I held her against my chest, and she set her head on my shoulder as I walked toward Alric’s and Lena’s.
“Will you be good?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“You have to be good,” I told her. “You’ll be a guest of the house. Guests must have manners.”
She lifted her head, rubbed the side of it with a fist, and met my eyes with her mother’s eyes, though blurry with sleep. Then she said something that was totally incomprehensible and laid her head back down against my shoulder. I just grinned and carried her onward.
Del walked up from the creek, carrying freshly filled botas. She placed them on a bench, by a door very like our own, and put out her arms. I passed to her the dead weight of our daughter, a dead weight that weighed hardly anything. You could blow her away like a dandelion.
In a low voice Del spoke to Sula in Northern, her lips very close to the tangled hair. She was clearly torn by the prospect of going back out into the world we’d known for so long, and leaving her daughter behind. But there was no place for Sula in this. We weren’t caravaners. We were sword-dancers and ran the risk, all three of us, at any time, of being killed.