Blood.
First, they rape her. Then slash open her throat. Twice, possibly thrice. The bones of her spine, left naked to the day in the ruin of her flesh, gleam whitely in the sun.
Blood flows. Gathers sand. Makes mud of malnourished dust. Is transformed by the sun into nothingness.
Even blood, in the desert, cannot withstand the ceaseless heat.
It will take longer for the body, for flesh and bone are not so easily consumed. But the desert will win. Its victories are boundless.
They might have left her alive, to die of thirst. It was their mercy to kill her swiftly. Their laughter was her dirge. Their jest was to leave a sword within reach, but she lacked the strength to use it against herself.
As the sun sucks her dry, withering flesh on bone, she turns her head upon the sand and looks at me out of eyes I recognize.
"Take up the sword," she says.
I jerk, gasping out of sleep into trembling wakefulness, tasting sand in my mouth. Salt. And blood.
"It's time," she says.
Her breath, her death, is mine.
"Find me," she says, "and take up the sword."
Del felt me spasm into actual wakefulness. She turned toward me and sleepily inquired, "What is it?"
I offered no answer. I couldn't.
"Tiger?" She propped herself up on an elbow. "What is it?"
I stared up at the dark skies. Something was in me, something demanding I answer. I felt very distant. I felt very small. "It's time." Echoing the dream.
"Time?"
The words left my mouth without conscious volition. "To go home." To go home. To take up the sword.
After a moment she asked, "Are you all right? You don't sound like yourself."
I didn't feel like myself.
She placed a hand upon my chest, feeling my heart beat. "Tiger?"
"I just—I know. It's time." No more than that. It seemed sufficient.
Find me.
"Are you sure?"
Take up the sword.
"I'm sure."
"All right." She lay down again. "Then we'll go."
I could feel her tension. She didn't think it was a good idea. But that didn't matter. What mattered is that it was time.
ONE
having sailed at last from the island, we now were bound for Haziz, the South's port city. We had departed it months before, heading for Skandi; but that voyage was finished. Now we embarked on an even more dangerous journey: returning to the South, where I carried a death sentence on my head.
Meanwhile, Del and I passed the time by sparring. She didn't win the matches. Neither did I. The point wasn't to win, but to retrain my body and mind. Tension was in me, tension to do better, do more, be better.
"You're holding back," I accused, accustomed now—again– to the creak of wood and rigging, the crack of canvas.
Del opened her mouth to refute that; holding back in the circle was a thing she never did. But she shut her mouth and contemplated me, though her expression suggested she was weighing herself every bit as much.
"Well?" I challenged, planting bare feet more firmly against wood planking.
"Maybe," she said at length.
"If you truly believe I'm incapable—"
"I didn't say that!"
"then you should simply knock me out of the circle." We didn't really have a proper circle, because the captain had vociferously objected to me carving one into his deck, but our minds knew where the boundaries lay.
Del, who had set one end of the stick against the deck, now made it into a cane and leaned upon it idly with the free hand perched on her hip and elbow outthrust. "I don't think anyone could knock you out of the circle even if you were missing two hands."
Not a pretty picture. "Thanks." I grimaced. "I think."
Blue eyes opened wide. "That's a compliment!"
I supposed it was.
Now those eyes narrowed. "You are using a different grip."
"I said I would." I'd also said I'd have to. Circumstances demanded it.
She unbent and put out the arm. Her tone was brusque, commanding. "Close on my wrist."
I clamped one big hand around her wrist, feeling the knob of bone on the left side, the pronounced tendons on the underside. A strong woman, was Delilah.
Her pale brows knit. "There is a difference in the pressure."
"Of course there is." I was not altogether unhappy to be holding her wrist. "I have three fingers and a thumb, not four."
"Your grip will be weaker, here." She touched the outside edge of my palm. Nothing was wrong with that part of my hand. There simply wasn't a little finger extending from it any more. "If the sword grip turns in your hand, or is forced back at an angle toward the side of your hand . . ."
"I'll lose leverage. Control. Yes, I know that."
She was frowning now. She let her own stick fall to the deck. She studied my hand in earnest, taking it into both of hers. She had seen it before, of course; seen them both, and the knurled pinkish scar tissue covering the nub of severed bone. Del was not squeamish; she had patched me up numerous times, as well as herself. She regretted the loss of those fingers—hoolies, so did I!—but she did not quail from their lack. This time, in a methodical and matter-of-fact examination that did not lend itself to innuendo or implication, she studied every inch of my hand. She felt flesh, tendon, the narrow bones beneath both. I have big hands, wide hands, and the heels of them are callused hard with horn.
"What?" I asked finally, when she continued to frown.
"The scars," she said. "They're gone."
I have four deep grooves carved in my cheek, and a crater in the flesh over the ribs of my left side. I raised dubious brows.
"On your hands," Del clarified. "All the nicks are gone. And this knuckle here—" She tapped it.—"used to be knobbier than the others. It's not anymore."
I suppose I might have made some vulgar comment about Del's intimate knowledge of my body, but didn't. There was more at stake just now than verbal foreplay.
I had all manner of nicks and seams and divots in my body. We both did. Mine were from a childhood of slavery, an enforced visit to the mines of a Southron tanzeer by the name of Aladar, and the natural progression of lengthy—and dangerous—sword-dancer training and equally dangerous dances for real. The latter had marred Del in certain characteristic ways, too; she bore her own significant scar on her abdomen as a reminder of a dance years ago in the North, when we both nearly died, as well as various other blade-born blemishes.
I had spent weeks getting used to the stubs of the two missing fingers, though there were times I could have sworn I retained a full complement. Beyond that, I had paid no attention to either hand other than working very hard to strengthen them, as well as my wrists and forearms. It was the interior that mattered, not the exterior. The muscles, the strength, that controlled the hands and thus the grip. Not the exterior scars.
But Del was right. The knuckle, once permanently enlarged, looked of a size with the others again. And the nicks and blemishes I'd earned in forty years were gone. Even the discolored pits from working Aladar's mine had disappeared.
Wholly focused on retraining myself, I had not even noticed. I pulled the hand away, scowling blackly.
"It's not a bad thing," Del observed, though a trifle warily.
"Skandi," I muttered. "Meteiera." I looked harder at my hands.
"Did they work some magic on you?"
I transferred the scowl from hand to woman. "No, they didn't work any magic on me. They cut my fingers off!" Not to mention shaving and tattooing my skull and piercing my ears and eyebrows with silver rings. Most of the rings were gone now, thanks to Del's careful removal, though at her behest I had retained two in each earlobe. Don't ask me why. Del said she liked them.