“Even if you find Rasha—”
“When,” Del declared.
He looked at her. “What?”
“When we find Rasha.”
It annoyed Neesha. “When. If. It doesn’t matter. Once Rasha is home, it will be only my mother and sister on the farm.”
“Have they coin?” I asked.
Neesha shrugged. “Possibly. I’ll look tomorrow. But most of our coin eats grass and stands on four legs.”
“Hire help,” Del told him. “They need not be alone. Their crop is different from most and requires more labor, but the end is the same: it’s sold.”
I knew what was nagging at him. “Hired help frees you,” I said.
“Hired help,” he said, “is not the same as a son.”
“You’ll know,” Del told him. “When we bring Rasha and the horses home, you’ll know the answer.”
Neesha took the bota back, unstoppered it and drank deeply. He set it down again, then rose. “I have to go in,” he said. “I can’t stay out here, wondering whether my father will live or not. I have to be there with him.”
“If he rouses enough to be coherent, please let us know,” I said. “We need to know in which direction the raiders went when they left.”
He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “My mother can tell you, can’t she?”
The awkward moment had arrived. It was for Danika to decide whether to tell her son what had occurred, not us. I thought Del might answer, being a woman familiar with rape, but she didn’t. It was up to me.
“Well,” I said tentatively, “she’s got much on her mind. And she was tending your father; it might have been difficult for her to see.” Which I knew was a lame answer because any mother would run after a screaming daughter being carried away by raiders. But it was the only one I had.
He was too distracted to parse that out. He merely nodded and headed back to the house.
“He’ll know,” Del said. “She won’t have to tell him. When his mind is clear, he will realize what happened.”
I took up the bota. “Maybe so. But let’s hope it’s after we rescue his sister and the horses.” Because if he knew now, he would undoubtedly insist on accompanying us. And he would be so full of rage and revenge he could actually harm our efforts. There would be no patience in him to sort out the best way to take the raiders. He would simply get himself killed. And poor Danika would have no daughter, no son, and possibly no husband.
“Something else we must ask of her,” Del said, “though tomorrow will do. How many horses were stolen, and is there a way to know them as belonging to this farm?”
“Neesha can tell us the last,” I answered, “but he’s been gone too long to know how many. Hoolies, I hate to bother Danika again.”
“There is another thing she must be asked. Again, Neesha’s been gone too long and girls grow quickly. It must be Danika.”
“What must be asked?”
“Is there a way to know Rasha when we see her? Alive—or dead?”
“Hoolies, Del, that’s cold!”
“It needn’t be phrased that way to Danika, but it’s what is needful. And you know it, Tiger.”
So it was. And I hated it.
I woke up at some foul point of the middle of the night; foul because I hate it when I can’t sleep through until morning. And then I can’t go back to sleep right away, either. So I lay there staring up at the night sky, aware that Neesha’s bedding was still here, but he was not. I suspected he was in the house, sitting by his father.
Then I realized that Del’s breathing was not of someone asleep, either. “You awake?”
She didn’t sound in the least groggy. “I am.”
“Did I wake you?”
“Oh, no. I’m thinking.”
I rolled over onto hip and elbow to face her, even though I couldn’t see much of her face in the darkness except what the stars illuminated. “Thinking about what?”
“Thinking,” she said, “about how I’m going to kill the raiders.”
I stroked her arm, slid my hand down to draw designs on the back of her palm. “Well, you can’t have all of them. I want at least half.” I lifted her hand, threaded fingers into hers, kissed the back of it. “That’s three for me, three for you.”
“How many doesn’t matter,” Del said. “It’s how they will die.”
Since I knew very well it wasn’t always a decision we could make about how someone died—they usually had an opinion about it, too—I humored her. “How, then?”
When she spoke, her tone was incredibly casual considering what she actually said. “First, I will cut off the hands. Then the feet. And as he realizes what has been done to him, and that he is dying, I will cut off the head.”
Chapter 25
FOR A LONG MOMENT I was too stunned to speak. Even to move. Then a wave of fear swept through me. My scalp prickled. “Bascha…bascha, no. Please don’t do it.”
“Don’t do what? Kill the raiders?”
It was difficult to say. I had never expected this to come up. “Make yourself into what you used to be.”
She sat up, removing her hand from mine. I sat up as well. We faced one another in the starlight, physically close, but very far apart in certainty of mind.
Her eyes were hollows made of shadow. “I will do what needs to be done.”
“Del, please. You can’t do this to yourself.”
The stars were kind to her face. Always. Whatever she said, they were kind. “I will do what needs to be done.”
I wished very badly for daylight. For torchlight. A lantern. Hoolies, even a coal. Just to see her. Just to look into her eyes, to see Delilah. “You won’t need to butcher them, Del. Just kill them. That’s all that needs doing. Not a deliberate, step-by-step plan.”
She was silent.
And I knew that silence. “It’s not necessary, Del.”
“Oh, it is very necessary.”
I tried with great effort to keep my tone level. “This is not about you, Del. This is not what happened to you ten years ago. The circumstances are different, the people are different—”
The heat of her anger replaced icy self-control. “What is different about a young girl being kidnapped by raiders? About a man who was beaten nearly to death…about a girl’s mother who was raped repeatedly by multiple men. What is different, Tiger, from what I experienced?”
“Del—”
“No. No, Tiger. You can’t know. You’re a man.”
A man. It wasn’t me that mattered. It was my gender.
I couldn’t help being sharp. “Bascha, we fought that battle five years ago. Or began that battle five years ago, and finished it some while back. I’m not the same, you’re not the same, the circumstances are not the same. Don’t erase those five years. Don’t become what you were. How many times must I say it? This is not the same.”
“Tiger—”
I put it into words a Northerner trained on Staal-Ysta would understand. “This is not your song.”
She began to stand. Before she could, I grabbed an arm and pulled her down again.
All of her went stiff. “Let me go.” She tried to twist her arm out of my hand. “Let me go, Tiger.”
It would have been easy to be angry, to use that anger to underscore anything I might say. But I didn’t do it. “We have a daughter, Del. We have a life at Beit al’Shahar. We have friends there in Alric and Lena, in Mehmet and his aketni. We have a business partner in Fouad, who will cheat us whenever he can, thinking we don’t know. We have circles under the sun, watched over by a ruin of rocks where our blooding-blades lie broken: your Boreal, my Samiel. Hoolies, we own goats and chickens! Our daughter spends far more time dirty than she ever does clean. And we are happy there, Del. Contented. Certain of our course. Any songs we had, any songs we once sang in the circle—even me, who can’t sing to save his soul—are finished.”