“If Altiokis has dragged all the men away in chains,” he continued quietly, “you can’t just have a strange man turn up in your household. Am I your long-lost brother? A gigolo you picked up in Kedwyr? A bodyguard?”
The porcelain doll shook her head. “We’ll have to pass you off as a slave,” she said, her voice low and husky, like a young boy’s. “They’re the only men whose coming into the city at this time of the year can well be accounted for. There won’t be any merchants or travelers in winter.”
She met the angry glitter in his eyes with cool reasonableness. “You know it’s true.”
“And in spite of the fact that you find it demeaning to be a woman’s slave,” Sheera added maliciously, “you haven’t really got any say in the matter, now, have you. Captain?” She glanced at the others. “Gilden Shorad is right,” she said. “A slave can pass pretty much unquestioned. I can get the ship’s smith to put a collar on you before we reach port.”
“What about Derroug Dru?” Amber Eyes asked doubtfully. “Altiokis’ new governor of the town,” she explained to Sun Wolf. “He’s been known to confiscate slaves.”
“What would he want with another slave?” Denga Rey the gladiator demanded, hooking her square, brown hands into the buckle of her sword belt.
Gilden Shorad frowned. “What would Sheera want with one, for that matter?” she asked, half to herself. Close to, Sun Wolf observed that she was older than he had at first thought—Starhawk’s age, twenty-seven or so. Older than any of the others except the witch Yirth, who, unlike them, had remained in the shadows by the door, watching them with those cool, jade eyes.
“He can’t simply turn up as a slave without any explanation for why you bought him,” the tiny woman clarified, tucking aside a strand of her ivory hair with deft little fingers.
“Would you need a groom?” Amber Eyes asked.
“My own groom would be suspicious if we got another one suddenly,” Sheera vetoed.
She looked so perplexed that Sun Wolf couldn’t resist turning the knife. “Not as easy as just hiring your killing done, is it? You married?”
A flush stained her strong cheekbones. “My husband is dead.”
He gave her a stripping glance and grunted. “Just as well. Kids?”
The flush deepened with her anger. “My daughter is six, my son, four.”
“Too young to need an arms master, then.”
Denga Rey added maliciously, “You don’t want anyone in that town to see you with a sword in your hand anyway, soldier. Old Derroug Dru suspects anybody who can so much as cut his meat at table without slitting his fingers. Besides, he’s got it in for big, buff fellows like you.”
“Wonderful,” the Wolf said without enthusiasm. “Leaving aside where this strike force of yours is going to practice, and where you’re going to get money for weapons...”
“We have money!” Sheera retorted, harried.
“I’ll be damned surprised if you’ll be able to find weapons for sale in a town that Altiokis has just added to his domains. How big is your town place? What did your late lamented do for a living?”
By the bullion stitching on her gloves, the poor bastard couldn’t have been worth less than jive thousand a year, he decided.
“He was a merchant,” she said, her breast heaving with the quickening of her anger. “Exports—this is one of his ships. And what business is it of yours—”
“It is my business, if I’m going to be risking what little is left of my life to teach you females to fight,” he snapped. “I want to make damned sure you don’t get gathered in and sent to the mines yourselves before I’m able to take my money and your poxy antidote and get the hell out of that scummy marsh you call a town. Is your place big enough to have gardens? An orangery, maybe?”
“We have an orangery,” Sheera said sullenly. “It’s across the grounds from the main house. It’s been shut up for years—boarded up. It was the first thing I thought of when I decided that we had to bring you to Mandrigyn. We could use it to practice in.”
He nodded. There were very few places where orange trees could be left outdoors year-round, yet groves of them were the fashion in all but the coldest of cities. Orangeries tended to be large, barn like buildings—inefficient for the purpose of wintering fruit trees for the most part, but just passable as training floors.
“Gardeners?” he asked.
“There were two of them, freedmen,” she said and added, a little defiantly, “They marched with Tarrin’s army to Iron Pass. Even though they had not been born in Mandrigyn, they thought enough of their city’s freedom to—”
“Stupid thing to do,” he cut her off and saw her eyes flash with rage. “There a place to live in this orangery of yours?”
In a voice stifled with anger, she said, “There is.”
“Good.” Tiredness was coming over him again, final and irresistible, as if argument and thought and struggle against what he knew would be his fate had drained him of the little strength he had. The wan sunlight, the faces of the women around him and their soft voices, seemed to be drifting farther and farther away, and he fought to hold them in focus. “You—what’s your name? Denga Rey—I’ll need you for my second-in-command. You fight during the winter?”
“In Mandrigyn?” she scoffed. “If it isn’t pouring sideways rain and hail, the ground’s not fit for anything but boat races. The last fights were three weeks ago.”
“I hope you were trounced to within an inch of your life,” he said dispassionately.
“Not a chance, soldier.” She put her hands on her strong hips, a glint of mockery in those dark eyes. “What I wonder is, who’s going to look after all those little trees so it looks as if there’s really a gardener doing the job? If Sheera buys one special, somebody’s going to get suspicious.”
Sun Wolf looked up at her bleakly. “I am,” he said. “I’m a warrior by trade, but gardening is my hobby.” His eyes returned to Sheera. “And I damned well better draw pay for it, too.”
For the first time, she smiled, the warm, bright smile of the hellcat girl she hadn’t been in years. He could see then why men had fought for her hand—as they must have done, to make her so poxy arrogant. “I’ll add it in,” she said, “to your ten thousand gold pieces.”
Sun Wolf sighed and closed his eyes, wondering if it would be wise to tell her what she could do with her ten thousand gold pieces. But when he opened them again, he found that it was dark, the afternoon long over, and the women gone.
5
They sailed into Mandrigyn Harbor in the vanguard of the storms, as if the boat drew the rain in its wake.
Throughout the forenoon, Sun Wolf had stood in the waist of the ship, watching the clouds that had followed them like a black and seething wall through the gray mazes of the islands draw steadily closer, and wondering whether, if the ship went to pieces on the rocky headlands that guarded the harbor itself, he’d be able to swim clear before he was pulped by the breakers. For a time, he indulged in hopes that it would be so and that, other than himself, the ship would go down with all hands and Sheera and her wildcats would never be heard from again. This thought cheered him until he remembered that, if the sea didn’t kill him, the anzid would.
As they passed through the narrow channel between the turret-guarded horns of the harbor, he turned his eyes from the dark, solitary shape of Yirth, standing, as she had stood on and off for die past three days, on the stern castle of the ship; he looked across the choppy gray waters of the harbor to where Mandrigyn lay spread like a jeweled collar upon its thousand islands.